Decolonising the Hajj: The pilgrimage from Nigeria to Mecca under empire and independence

By Matthew M. Heaton

Muslims from the region that is now Nigeria have been undertaking the Hajj for hundreds of years. But the process of completing the pilgrimage changed dramatically in the twentieth century as state governments became heavily involved in its organization and management. Under British colonial rule, a minimalist approach to pilgrimage control facilitated the journeys of many thousands of mostly overland pilgrims. Decolonization produced new political contexts, with nationalist politicians taking a more proactive approach to pilgrimage management for both domestic and international reasons. The Hajj, which had previously been a life-altering journey undertaken slowly and incrementally over years, became a shorter, safer, trip characterized by round trip plane rides. In examining the transformation of the Nigerian Hajj, this book demonstrates how the Hajj became ever more intertwined with Nigerian politics and governance as the country moved from empire to independence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526162595

Book preview

Decolonising the Hajj

STUDIES IN IMPERIALISM

When the Studies in Imperialism series was founded almost forty years ago, its central assumption was that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With around two hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern. The series has been a proud home to monographs and edited volumes covering a huge range of topics, including gender, migration, decolonisation, environment, religion, monarchy, family, politics, law, education, culture, and museums. It has focused on many colonised areas and a variety of colonising powers, including Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, and all four nations of the British Empire. Studies in Imperialism always seeks to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

Founding editor: Emeritus Professor John MacKenzie

Series editors

Andrew Thompson, Professor of Global and Imperial History, Nuffield College, Oxford

Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Sussex

Editorial board

Robert Bickers, University of Bristol

Christopher L. Brown, Columbia University

Pratik Chakrabarti, University of Houston

Elizabeth Elbourne, McGill University

Bronwen Everill, University of Cambridge

Kate Fullagar, Australian Catholic University

Chandrika Kaul, University of St Andrews

Dane Kennedy, George Washington University

Shino Konishi, Australian Catholic University

Philippa Levine, University of Texas at Austin

Kirsten McKenzie, University of Sydney

Tinashe Nyamunda, University of Pretoria

Dexnell Peters, University of the West Indies

Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge

Angela Wanhalla, University of Otago

Stuart Ward, University of Copenhagen

Decolonising the Hajj

The pilgrimage from Nigeria

to Mecca under empire and

independence

Matthew M. Heaton

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Matthew M. Heaton 2023

The right of Matthew M. Heaton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 15261 6260 1 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

For Shelia Cavins Heaton and Scott Heaton

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Colonising and decolonising the pilgrimage to Mecca from Nigeria

Part I: Colonising the Hajj

1Colonial ideology and the Nigerian pilgrimage, 1907–26

2Power, patronage, and privilege: the 1921 Hajj of Muhammadu Dikko, Emir of Katsina

3Regulating the overland route: Sudanese reforms and the Nigerian Pilgrimage Scheme, 1926–45

Part II: Decolonising the Hajj

4Sir Alhaji Ahmadu Bello and the politics of pilgrimage in Northern Nigeria, 1954–63

5Corruption, commerce, and control: the business of pilgrimage administration

6Cracks in the road: citizenship, nationality, and the rise of the air Hajj

Conclusion: Legacies of colonisation and decolonisation on the Nigerian Hajj

Bibliography

Index

List of figures

0.1Map of overland pilgrimage routes – by Ethan T. Nash and Toyin Falola, adapted from Miran, Jonathan. ‘Stealing the way to Mecca: West African pilgrims and illicit Red Sea passages, 1920s–50s,’ Journal of African History 56 (2015): 389–408

1.1Pilgrim ship at Suakin, 1905 – Sudan Archive, University of Durham, UK

3.1Pilgrims waiting to board a train at Wad Medani, ca. 1925 – Sudan Archive, University of Durham, UK

3.2Map of Red Sea ports – by Ethan T. Nash and Toyin Falola, adapted from Jonathan, ‘Stealing the way’

4.1Ahmadu Bello on Hajj, 1963 – Renne, Elisha P. ‘Photography, Hajj things, and spatial connections between Mecca and Northern Nigeria.’ Photography and Culture 8, no. 3 (2015): 269–95 (courtesy of Arewa House archive, Kaduna)

7.1Nigerian women on air Hajj, 2014 – Premium Times, Nigeria, available at www.premiumtimesng.com/news/top-news/168749-adamawa-condemns-states-pilgrims-for-holding-aircraft-hostage.html

Acknowledgements

Many people and institutions provided invaluable assistance in the research and writing of this book, which took place over many years. The archival work began in Nigeria in 2004–5, while I was still a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. I would like to thank the Department of History and the John L. Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies at UT for research grants that, while primarily provided to further my dissertation research on a different project, indirectly sowed the seeds for this one as well. Thanks also go to Saheed Aderinto, my host in Ibadan in those early days, as well as my good friend Demola Babalola, may he rest in peace. I am also grateful to Toyin Falola, my PhD supervisor and long-term collaborator, whose support and encouragement I have always greatly appreciated.

Research continued after my appointment as an assistant professor in the History Department at Virginia Tech. Grants from the VT College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences supported fieldwork in Kaduna, London, and Khartoum between 2009 and 2014. Hauwa Yusuf and family graciously hosted me in Kaduna, and Olayemi Akinwumi provided important assistance with a variety of logistical issues. I am extremely grateful to Badreldin Elhag Musa for assisting me to gain access to the National Records Office and introducing me to various people and places in Khartoum. Thanks also to Justin Willis for introducing us.

The bulk of the book is based on archival research conducted in various places. I am immensely indebted to the staff at the Nigerian National Archives in Ibadan, and in particular to ‘Mr Mike’, who I hope is enjoying his well-earned retirement. Ibrahim Abdu provided similar assistance at the Nigerian National Archives’ Kaduna branch, for which I am grateful. Shu’aibu Shehu Aliyu helped me on more than one occasion to locate materials at the Arewa House archives, and also engaged me in a scintillating discussion about Nigerians in Sudan in the lobby of the Acropole Hotel in Khartoum that I will never forget. Thanks also to staff at the National Records Office, Khartoum, the Sudan Archive at the University of Durham, the India Office Archives at the British Library, and the National Archives of the United Kingdom at Kew for assistance in locating relevant materials.

Friends and colleagues have also assisted me in numerous ways for which I am grateful. Mukhtar Umar Bunza provided me with valuable materials from Sokoto state, and Jonathan Reynolds graciously dug up and shared some old personal notes that were of great help. John Legg tracked down a rare volume for me at George Mason University Special Collections, and Elisha Renne introduced me to Muhammed Musa, who assisted me to locate a photograph of Sir Alhaji Ahmadu Bello on Hajj of reproducible quality. Thanks also to Bill Ochsenwald for our conversations, and to John Slight for his reading of this manuscript and other things pilgrimage related that I have produced over the years.

Presentations of material that evolved into this book were made at the African Studies Association annual meeting in 2012 and 2013, at the National History Center’s International Seminar on Decolonization plenary conference in 2016, and at the Toyin Falola @65: African Knowledges and Alternative Futures conference at the University of Ibadan in 2018. Thanks also to Christian Jennings for inviting me to speak about the Nigerian Hajj at Washington & Lee University in 2012.

I owe thanks to all the individuals and institutions that provided me with the images in the book. Thanks to Arewa House, Jaafar Jaafar of the Daily Nigerian newspaper, and Francis Gotto at Durham University Libraries for providing images. Thanks also to Ethan T. Nash and Toyin Falola for creating the maps in this volume. I would also like to express my appreciation to Emma Brennan, Meredith Carroll, and the Studies in Imperialism series editors at Manchester University Press for their care and attention shepherding this book through publication.

Finally, I must thank family and friends who have helped see me through the long process of completing this project. You are too many to name, but you know who you are. To my wife and best friend, Ann, thanks for your love, support, and patience. I could not do much of anything without it. I know there are others whom I am failing to mention, and I will regret it when I remember them after it is too late to recognise them here. Please forgive this indiscretion, and know that I appreciate you all.

Introduction: Colonising and decolonising the pilgrimage to Mecca from Nigeria

On 14 June 1958, the Nigerian newspaper The Nigerian Citizen ran on its front page the story of a flight of destitute Nigerian pilgrims repatriated from Jeddah to Kano. One of the pilgrims on the flight was Hajia Rakia, a woman from the town of Danbatta, in Kano province, who had left Nigeria in 1925 with her husband to undertake the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. She and her husband had travelled overland east, making the ‘long and arduous journey on foot, alone, carrying their scanty possessions and precious store of water on donkey back.’¹ They made it as far as Sila, in Chad, where they stayed for a year before travelling further east to El Fasher, Sudan, where they remained another year, recuperating and saving money for the next stage of the journey. They then moved on to Khartoum, then to Suakin, on the Red Sea coast, where they hired a dhow to take them to Jeddah, the port city of Saudi Arabia, roughly forty miles west of Mecca. They completed their Hajj and returned to Khartoum, where her husband took a job as a teacher. They had children and settled down in Sudan for the next thirty years.

But then Hajia Rakia’s story took a turn. In 1956 she decided to make another trip to Mecca, this time on her own. Upon completing her second Hajj, Hajia Rakia returned to Jeddah, where she heard about a plane repatriating destitute northern Nigerians. Hajia Rakia jumped at the chance to make the last leg of the journey by air. However, she seemed to have misunderstood the terms of the repatriation, thinking the plane was taking her back to Khartoum, when in fact it flew her back to Kano, the city she had left nearly thirty years earlier. ‘Now this rather pathetic old lady finds herself in Kano and has not yet realised she has returned to her native land without her husband and family who, she believes, are only a short distance away,’ The Nigerian Citizen lamented.

Juxtaposed to Hajia Rakia’s sad tale in the newspaper was the story of Alhaji Umar Mohammed Usman, who had embarked on the pilgrimage from his hometown of Bichi, northwest of Kano, in 1945. Alhaji Umar joined up with a band of nomads at Fort Lamy, Chad, on a twelve-month trek to the Red Sea coast, where he worked as a farmer for a number of years, saving the funds needed to complete his journey. He finally was able to save the fare to cross the Red Sea and, ‘with almost the last of his hard-won capital, paid the six shillings demanded of him by a lorry driver to carry him to Mecca.’ After completing the rites of the pilgrimage, Alhaji Umar returned to Jeddah, where ‘through the friendship and generosity of his Nigerian compatriots – themselves hard put to it to exist – he was able to live until repatriated’ on the same flight as Hajia Rakia.²

In many ways, the stories of Hajia Rakia and Alhaji Umar are unremarkable: they performed the Hajj the way most Nigerians did at the time, over the course of many months and years, travelling overland with minimal resources. Even their decision to remain in Sudan for extended periods was quite common. Hundreds of thousands of Nigerians migrated east during the first half of the twentieth century en route to Mecca, taking advantage of employment opportunities in Sudan to finance their outward and return voyages. By the time this story appeared in The Nigerian Citizen in 1958, it was estimated that over 400,000 people of Nigerian descent were living in Sudan,³ most working as agricultural labourers as what Yamba has called ‘permanent pilgrims,’ always ostensibly in the process of completing the Hajj, but remaining so long in Sudan as to put down roots, build communities, and raise children and grandchildren who knew no other home.⁴ Most northern Nigerians would have been quite familiar with stories like these in the 1950s: the trials and tribulations of the overland route, the years of working along the way to finance the voyage, and the poverty and insecurity that many pilgrims experienced in Saudi Arabia.

What readers in 1958 might not have been expecting was the direct repatriation of pilgrims from Jeddah to Kano. While a repatriation fund for destitute Nigerian pilgrims had existed since the 1920s, it had typically covered only the cost of a one-way steamer ticket from Jeddah to Suakin, the main Red Sea port in Sudan. As British colonial subjects, Nigerian pilgrims were only ‘repatriated’ as far as the nearest British colonial territory, from which they were free to make decisions about their next steps, as Hajia Rakia and her husband had done in the late 1920s. Under that system, Hajia Rakia would not have been separated from her family, and Alhaji Umar might have settled down permanently to farm in Sudan, as so many thousands before him had. The effort to repatriate Nigerian pilgrims all the way to Nigeria by air was a new phenomenon, a product of the changing political landscape both in Nigeria and much of the world in the 1950s, as governments of decolonising and newly independent states throughout the Muslim world took control of the administration of pilgrimage affairs from European colonial powers.

The story in The Nigerian Citizen about Hajia Rakia and Alhaji Umar therefore presented to readers both a cautionary tale and an endorsement of greater governmental involvement in the organisation and logistics of the Nigerian Hajj that were coming into being in the late 1950s, as Nigeria gradually decolonised from British rule. While Hajia Rakia’s unintentional return to Nigeria illustrated how the changing dynamics of pilgrimage management could have serious consequences for uniformed and unprepared pilgrims, the repatriation flight on which she and Alhaji Umar travelled to Kano also represented the good work that the Nigerian government, and in particular the government of the Northern Region under the leadership of Sir Alhaji Ahmadu Bello and his Northern People’s Congress (NPC) political party, was doing for Nigerian Muslims under new indigenous leadership. Indeed, The Nigerian Citizen made sure to emphasise the role of government in looking out for the welfare of repatriated pilgrims, concluding the piece by noting that ‘the Northern Regional Government is meeting each influx of returned pilgrims, feeding them, checking their health and, as quickly as possible, repatriating them to their homes.’⁵ The message was clear: the years of pilgrims fending for themselves under colonial negligence were coming to an end, and the NPC government was taking steps to help destitute pilgrims complete their pilgrimages safely and efficiently.

The Nigerian Citizen was effectively a mouthpiece of the Northern Regional government, founded in 1948 with the express purpose of providing a specifically northern perspective and analysis to counter southern-dominated narratives pushed by other English-language papers. This article can therefore be seen as part of a public relations push by Bello and the NPC to promote its pilgrimage policies and to win the support of Nigeria’s Muslim population, the vast majority of which lived in Nigeria’s Northern Region, for greater government involvement in the management of the pilgrimage, and in particular the role of air travel in that management. Within a few years after Hajia Rakia and Alhaji Umar’s return, the Nigerian government would effectively close the overland route that they and many thousands of pilgrims like them had travelled on from northern Nigeria to the Red Sea for generations. As of 1963, new fees and convoluted bureaucratic processes made the overland pilgrimage virtually impossible for most Nigerians to undertake legally. The goal of this policy shift was to push pilgrims to travel by air, which the government of Nigeria, sovereign and independent since 1 October 1960, had determined to be a faster, safer, more easily managed, and, ultimately, less diplomatically fraught option. In the space of roughly a decade, the Hajj from Nigeria was transformed from a long, potentially dangerous, and weakly supervised journey requiring anywhere from several months to a lifetime into a highly organised sojourn lasting no more than a few weeks.

This book recounts the transformation of the Hajj from Nigeria over the course of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the effects of British colonial rule and decolonisation on the organisation and administration of the pilgrimage. In so doing, it incorporates Nigeria into broader historical understanding of what Eric Tagliacozzo and Shawkat M. Toorawa have called ‘the most important annual event in the world involving the transnational movement of human beings.’⁶ The chapters that follow make two overarching and related arguments about Nigeria’s relationship to this major global event. First, while European colonialism no doubt affected the dynamics of the West African pilgrimage in the twentieth century, British efforts to manage the pilgrim traffic from Nigeria did little to affect the ways and means by which pilgrims completed the pilgrimage. While it has been stated and restated that British colonial rule in Nigeria attempted to suppress the pilgrimage,⁷ this is not really the case. Quite the contrary: British authorities saw the pilgrimage as a phenomenon they did not have the resources or incentive to prevent Muslim Nigerian subjects from performing. Controlled facilitation of the pilgrimage became the default approach of the colonial regime. In so doing, British authorities in Nigeria and Sudan largely worked within the existing structures of the overland route, adapting them to meet British political and economic interests while bringing Nigeria into basic compliance with international pilgrimage controls. While British officials hoped that regulating the pilgrimage would protect pilgrims from some of the more distressing and dangerous aspects of the overland voyage, humanitarian interests were not their sole, or even primary, concern. Maintaining power, influence, and stability were always at the forefront of British efforts. Nevertheless, even with the goal of implementing a minimally effective regulatory system for pilgrim traffic across the savannahs, the British did little to organise the pilgrimage bureaucratically from Nigeria. Sudan became the reservoir for Nigerian pilgrims, and most efforts to manage the influx of Nigerian pilgrims fell to Sudanese authorities, with the tradeoff that Sudan presumably benefitted from the labour of Nigerian pilgrims while they resided in the territory.

Recognising that British colonial authorities in Nigeria managed the pilgrimage with an exceedingly light hand is important for understanding the significance of the second argument: that the most significant transformation to the pilgrimage tradition from Nigeria came not as a result of the imposition of British colonialism but from the political and diplomatic context of decolonisation. The colonial apparatus that facilitated the flow of pilgrims across colonial borders without significant constraints became the problem of a nationalist regime no longer able to argue for the free movement of people across what were becoming firmer and more heavily policed national borders in the 1950s. As governments were increasingly held responsible for the movement and actions of their own citizens, the relatively unregulated overland route became increasingly infeasible. The nationalist leadership of Nigeria, particularly in the Northern Region, found itself taking more and more responsibility for organising the pilgrimage both as a means of demonstrating the value of indigenous leadership domestically and as a means of responding to international pressures to prevent the outflow of poor Nigerians likely to become destitute charges in other sovereign states. It was not so much the logic of colonialism that brought a modern, bureaucratic regulatory framework to the Nigerian pilgrimage as it was the logic of a post-colonial world order.

Recounting these effects of British colonialism and decolonisation on the Nigerian pilgrimage to Mecca contributes both to our historical understanding of the Hajj as a global phenomenon and to the role of transnational factors in our understanding of twentieth-century Nigerian history. Arguing that European colonial oversight was minimally disruptive to the itinerant pilgrimage tradition and that decolonisation marks a more significant context for explicating the development of the contemporary Hajj as we know it today subverts existing historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth-century pilgrimage, which overwhelmingly focuses on European colonial influences and generally ignores the effects of decolonisation entirely. At the same time, drawing greater attention to decolonisation puts non-European Muslims at the forefront of the historical transformation of the Hajj in ways that have been generally disregarded by historians. Some historians have argued that Muslim colonial subjects were instrumental in carrying out reforms to the pilgrimage instituted by European colonial governments,⁸ others that pilgrims themselves retained agency by adapting or resisting those reforms in various ways.⁹ While these perspectives are valuable, and fit well within conventional interpretive frameworks of post-colonial historiography, they present non-Europeans mostly as reactive. As a result, it becomes easier to see contemporary dynamics in the Hajj as the direct legacy of colonial powers, with independent states simply taking over from colonial ones. However, by focusing directly on the changes wrought by Nigerian nationalist officials in the context of decolonisation and early independence, we are able to see more clearly the extent to which government regulation of the pilgrimage was a project most significantly conceptualised and implemented not by the British colonial apparatus, but by the Nigerian nationalist one. Seeing these transformations through the lens of a transnational phenomenon like the pilgrimage to Mecca has implications for how we view the effects of decolonisation not just on the emergence of independent nation-states, but on the larger geopolitical structures of post-colonial globalisation more generally.

The overland pilgrimage tradition in pre-colonial Nigerian history

While this book is most concerned with the twentieth-century political and geopolitical implications of the pilgrimage to Mecca from Nigeria and not the religious experiences of Nigerian Muslims per se, it is important to recognise the profound meaning of the Hajj and its pre-colonial history in the Nigerian region to understand why its management by colonial and national governments has been so complex.

One of the Five Pillars of Islam, the Hajj is required of all Muslims once in a lifetime if they are able to make the journey. The Hajj takes place during Dhu al-Hijja, the final month of the Islamic calendar, and involves the completion of several rites in and around Mecca, including the donning of sacral garb (ihram), circumambulation of the Ka’ba (tawaf), hurrying between the hills of Safa and Marwa in homage to Hagar’s frantic search for water (sa’y), cutting one’s hair (halq), and culminating in the Standing at Arafat on the ninth day of the month. In addition, pilgrims engage in the ritual stoning of Satan, represented by several stone columns between Mina and Mecca, and make an animal sacrifice, either in person or by proxy.¹⁰ The rituals are interpreted from the account of the Prophet Muhammad’s Hajj in 632 ce, but the Hajj is in essence a commemoration of the story of Abraham and its perpetual lessons: through the Hajj rituals, pilgrims are encouraged to abstract from worldly concerns, commune with God, and leave the Holy Land purified in spirit. Once the pilgrimage is completed, individual pilgrims often attach the honorific Hajji (f. Hajja) to their name, as the benefits of the Hajj extend for the rest of one’s life. Pilgrims may also undertake the ‘umra, or lesser Hajj, which involves completing the rituals minus the Standing at Arafat at another time of year, but performance of the Hajj during the pilgrimage season at least once is the standard expectation for satisfying the Qur’anic command.

With such a central place in Islamic belief and practice, the history of the Hajj is both broad and deep, and has garnered significant attention from a variety of disciplines. A number of scholars of Islam have examined the early history of the Hajj through religious texts and other archaeological and documentary evidence within the Middle East.¹¹ The history of the religious meaning of the Hajj and how it has been interpreted over time in various parts of the Islamic world has developed out of this emphasis on the pilgrimage as primarily an act of faith shared by Muslims from a variety of different theological and intellectual traditions.¹² But scholars of the Hajj have also examined its more temporal and material aspects. The pilgrimage has brought people from around the world together in the same place for centuries, leading to the development of global exchange of a wide variety of goods from many different cultures, as well as a large market for religious paraphernalia related to the pilgrimage itself.¹³ Memoirs of the Hajj have been a means of distributing first-hand accounts of the pilgrimage for hundreds of years and continue to be regularly published.¹⁴ But by far the most studied aspect of the Hajj has been the politics of pilgrimage over time and space, as states, religious communities, and economic actors have vied for control over the regulation of all aspects of the pilgrimage: religious matters, governmental oversight, and logistical arrangements chief among them.

There is ample evidence that Mecca was a site of pilgrimage well before the founding of Islam in the seventh century ce, but it has been through the spread of Islam that the Hajj has become a global event. In the early centuries of the Hajj, land routes connected Mecca to other major cities in the Middle East: routes from Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and San’a were the most travelled. As Islam spread, new routes developed that connected to these cities that funnelled pilgrims into the Hijaz. Throughout most of its history, the vast majority of pilgrims from outside of the Arabian Peninsula travelled to Mecca by land, following the Qu’ran’s assertion that pilgrims should come ‘on foot, on every lean camel, and by every distant path.’¹⁵ This began to change significantly only in the nineteenth century ce as more pilgrims began to travel by sea: South and Southeast Asian pilgrims in particular came in increasing numbers on steamship across the Indian Ocean, while pilgrims who once would have taken the Baghdad or Damascus routes instead boarded steamers in the eastern Mediterranean. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, pilgrims from the north and west could now travel all the way to the port of Jeddah, just ninety kilometres west of Mecca, by sea. By 1873, a majority of pilgrims travelling into the Hijaz from outside of the Middle East were travelling by sea rather than the historical overland routes.¹⁶ In the mid-twentieth century, the dynamics of pilgrimage travel shifted again. In the 1950s, larger numbers of pilgrims began to take advantage of commercial air travel to complete their pilgrimages more quickly and efficiently. By the 1970s, about half of all pilgrims flew to Saudi Arabia. In 1994, 79 per cent of all pilgrims travelling from outside of Saudi Arabia arrived by air; by 2013, the number had risen to 94 per cent.¹⁷ The overall size of the pilgrimage has also risen over the centuries, with exponential growth in the annual pilgrim population in the second half of the twentieth century. By the 1950s, total annual averages were about 150,000. This rose to 300,000 in the 1960s; 700,000 in the 1970s; over one million in 1990s, and approximately 1.8 million in the twenty-first century.¹⁸

Nigerian participation in the Hajj has been constant throughout the twentieth century, although it is difficult to pinpoint exact numbers of Nigerian pilgrims before the 1960s for a number of reasons. First, British colonial officials at migration checkpoints often did not distinguish overland pilgrims by region of origin. We know, for example, that 5,983 total pilgrims left Sudan at Suakin in 1909, but nothing else about their backgrounds. By 1929, officials at Suakin were separating out West African pilgrims from the total, so we know that 2,338 out of the 3,866 total pilgrims leaving Suakin that year were West African, but nothing more specific.¹⁹ The same kind of difficulty exists in records of pilgrims entering Sudan at El Geneina, which are available from the late 1930s. It is widely assumed that the vast majority of West African pilgrims originated in Nigeria, however. Yet other factors also complicate enumerating the numbers of Nigerian pilgrims on the overland routes at any given time. First, official records only account for travellers who passed through official checkpoints, not the many thousands who crossed borders on unregulated routes. This applies both to pilgrims leaving Nigeria and to Red Sea crossings, where many thousands of Nigerians bypassed British controls at Suakin by travelling east through Ethiopia to cross at Massawa (see Chapter 3). Jonathan Miran has estimated that approximately 1,500 to 3,000 West Africans a year made this ‘illicit’ crossing in the period from the 1920s to 1950s.²⁰ Finally, it was always somewhat difficult for colonial officials to distinguish pilgrims from other itinerants, who may have been travelling for other reasons. Many individuals embarked as pilgrims and gave up their goal at some point en route; others may have started mainly seeking work in Sudan but decided to complete the pilgrimage at some later point. By the mid-1950s, it was estimated that approximately 15,000 Nigerians were embarking on pilgrimage each year, with a somewhat smaller number actually completing the Hajj.²¹ But in the years after independence, Nigerian participation in the Hajj spiked dramatically. Because the transition to the air Hajj also made counting pilgrims more efficient, we have somewhat more accurate numbers of Nigerians completing the Hajj since the 1960s. Nigeria’s pilgrim contingent peaked at a little over 100,000 a year between 1975 and 1980, before falling to below 30,000 in the late 1980s, where it remained, on average, for the rest of the twentieth century.²² Even these numbers are undercounts, however, as they include only the Nigerians who arranged their pilgrimages through official government channels. Many thousands of Nigerians pursued what came to be known as the ‘international’ Hajj, engaging private companies to make their travel and other logistical arrangements, while smaller numbers continued to take their chances on the overland routes despite the legal and security risks it entailed.

The pilgrimage to Mecca from sub-Saharan West Africa is historically linked with the spread of Islam into the region via trans-Saharan trade routes. It is generally agreed that Islam first arrived in West Africa at its