Aliko Dangote’s great grand father – a victim of the caliphate tyranny.

Alhassan Dantata was an Agalawa merchant in Kano, victim of the caliphate tyranny and great-grandfather of Aliko Dangote feels more at home in Yorubaland than his ancestral home in Kano.

He rarely spends the night in Kano. This is most likely due to the hardship his ancestors faced after the Sokoto Jihad. He hails from the famous Agalawa merchants of Kano. They used to be the nobility before the Jihad. The Agalawa merchants were the middlemen who traded with merchants in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. After the fall of Kano to the Sokoto caliphate. The new overlords stripped the Agalawas of their lands and wealth. They confiscated their properties and forced many of them into slavery.

One of the persecuted merchants at the time was the Dantata family. The famous Alhassan Dantata at some point was forced to become a slave by the new overlords. His family had to part with vast fortunes to buy his freedom. They fled to Ghana and had to start all over again. The new overlords forced the natives to live in slave camps and work as vassals to the emirs and Fulani nobility. Over 50% of the Hausa natives were slaves in their ancestral homes.

The largest concentrations were in Sokoto, Yola Kano, Zaria, katsina, and Ilorin emirates. There was no part of Africa that had slave plantations like the Sokoto caliphate. A German explorer called Heinrich Barth who travelled to many parts of the North in the 1850’s observed ‘slavery exists on an immense scale in the Hausa lands. There are many private individuals who have more than a thousand slaves. Yola had so many slaves that the emir Mohammed Lowel built a slave village in Rumde to contain slaves.

These slaves were used for farm labor. Every year Mohammed Lowel enforced a yearly tribute of five thousand slaves from his subjects. ( Barths Travels in Nigeria) Alhassan Dantata was invited back to Hausa land after the British took over. England assured him of his safety. With protection from the crown, he started his business empire again in the North. When the first bank was set up in the North ( BBWA). He deposited the highest silver coins.

Transported to the bank on camels. The Agalawas were Muslims. This did not stop an emirate built on so-called Islamic foundations from bringing untold hardship on them. Regardless that they were fellow Muslims. This should let every deep thinker understand that religion is just a tool for the ethnic conquest of alien expansionists. The previous Alaafin at Oyo was a Muslim. To imagine him waiting on Sokoto before he observes Ramadan is an insult to the Yoruba people. The same seat at Sokoto sacked his ancestor’s estate at Katunga after the great warrior king Oluewu fell in battle at the Eleduwe war of 1835 and forced his great grandfather(Alaafin Atiba) to relocate the capital to the current place at Ago-Oja The west never forgets.

Ebiri Gbonka