Sabon Gari in Ibadan

The Hausa word Sabon Gari, “new town”, now names Hausa quarters in towns all over Nigeria, and its model is the one in Ibadan, usually shortened to Sabo. Salamone’s account of its history runs as follows. The first Hausa settlement stood on the Abeokuta road, then moved to a site the Hausa called Kasuwar Sarki, “the emir’s market”. After the First World War the Yoruba rulers moved the Hausa and other “strangers” to an unoccupied area near the army barracks, which was then bush and a dumping ground. The Hausa accepted the responsibility of ruling it and named it Sabon Gari.

A community needed a leader. With the support of the new Olubadan, the Hausa appointed a head, the Sarkin Hausawa (also called Sarkin Sabo), who guaranteed order in the quarter and was allowed to settle its problems without interference by the Yoruba, while supporting the Olubadan’s political interests. The first holder was Mallam Audu Maikandiri, who was asked to step down because he was not a Nigerian citizen. A successor, Alhaji Bature dan Makama, chose Alhaji Audu Dunguru as his Waziri. Later, when dan Makama’s son resigned, Dunguru himself took the office, and he is credited with working out the terms of Hausa–Yoruba cooperation in Ibadan. Legal disputes in the quarter were handled under Islamic law, with the Waziri as the chief mediator (see the chapter on Society).

Abner Cohen’s classic study, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa (1969), explains why this system lasted. Ibadan lies in the tsetse-fly belt, so cattle for its meat market must be brought from the north and are sold on credit. This requires a trusted network of Hausa landlords, brokers and herders. In Cohen’s account, the landlord is the key figure of the quarter, and ethnicity, or being visibly Hausa, was a tool for holding a trading monopoly together. In Salamone’s 1990 fieldwork there were still thirty landlords, as in Cohen’s earlier count, but the population of Sabo had grown from about 5,400 to about 10,000.