Background
Kaduna City is the capital of the state of that name, located on the river of the same name. The city was founded by the British in 1913 and in 1917 became the capital of northern Nigeria. In 1967 the north was split into six states and Kaduna became the capital of the North-Central state, later changed to Kaduna State. The current boundaries date from 1991. The state is home to a number of universities and other institutions of higher education, notably Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, in the northern part of the state.
In Kaduna City itself are the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna Polytechnic and the newly established Kaduna State University. Kaduna is a trade centre and transportation hub, as well as being on the main road from the Nigerian capital Abuja to the north. It has an oil refinery and a number of other factories, producing textiles, machinery, steel and aluminium.
The language of general communication is Hausa, spoken as a native language by the roughly 50% of the population who are from that ethnic group, most of whom are also Muslims. Most of the rest of the population is Christian, who come both from local tribes and from the south of Nigeria. As of September 2009, the population of Kaduna state was around 6 million and that of the city about a quarter of that. The poverty rate in Kaduna State, according to the state government’s statistics lies at around 70% and
only 52% of urban dwellers have access to drinking water (see http://www.kadunastate.gov.ng/news_20096.html).
For further information see http://www.kadunastate.gov.ng.
For a map of Kaduna state see http://tourismkaduna.org/kaduna_geography.php.
The riots
Kaduna state has been the scene of multiple sectarian riots for several decades. The most violent of these occurred in 2000 and 2002, the first over the introduction of sharia into the state’s criminal law and the second as a result of a newspaper article on the subject of the Miss World pageant, due to be held in Nigeria.
In early 2000 tensions arose over the proposed introduction of sharia law into criminal law in the state, as had happened in several other states starting with Zamfara. On the 21st of February the Christian Association of Nigeria sponsored a march to government house to show their opposition to this move. This march had been preceded by some weeks of relatively peaceful demonstrations of support for the measure on the part of Muslims. Exactly what happened is unclear but at some point during the march violence broke out when Muslim boys along the way either attacked the marchers or were attacked by them. Feelings were running so high that fights broke out and spread from place to place like wildfire. It is said this was significantly and deliberately encouraged by radio broadcasts that suggested that Christians were being killed in one neighbourhood and Muslims in another.
This was all that was needed to bring large numbers of men out on the streets in support of their co-religionists. In many of the city’s neighbourhoods minorities were forced to flee as members of the other religion broke into their houses and started killing and looting. While many died others managed to save themselves by taking refuge in the local army barracks and still others were hidden away at great risk to themselves by members of the majority religion. The riots continued for some days during which time few people other than the fighters ventured on to the streets. People barricaded themselves into their homes and subsisted on whatever food they happened to have around since there was no way of procuring provisions. Those caught by the riots away from home hid as best they could and waited until nightfall before trying to sneak home but even that was difficult since the night was lit up by fires as the fighting continued. It is said that the Christians were largely unarmed so they collected sticks and stones to fight with, while some of the Muslims had guns and ammunition. A quantitative survey carried out a couple of years ago under the auspices of the citizenship Development Research Centre showed that some people did take the radio and other rumours seriously and as a result went out on the rampage themselves, while many others of both religions claim instead to have stayed home to pray for peace. Still others said they only fought to protect their own but did not take the quarrel to their neighbours.
Meanwhile, neither the army nor the police intervened since the government made no move to ask them to do so. Indeed, it has been suggested the police may even have been complicit in the fighting, weighing in on the side of their co-religionists. The army barracks became the main place of refuge for large numbers of both sides, a place of truce. Muslims fled from the southern part of the city and took refuge with family members in the north while the Christians did the same the other way round. When the dust cleared thousands of homes had been abandoned and many destroyed.
The exact death toll will never be known but it has been estimated by Human Rights Watch that as many as 2,000 may have been killed, many thousands more injured, and millions of pounds worth of damage were caused to property.
Most of those who fled have been too frightened to return. Abandoning their homes they settled in areas where their co-religionists predominated. This has been particularly prejudicial to the Christians, since Kaduna south is considerably less developed than the north, far from the commercial and administrative centre, with few roads, schools, medical facilities or other services. It is unclear how much this is simply due to the area having been previously little settled or how much to the greater political weight of the Muslims. The Christians claim that most of the seats on the city council go to Muslims. It is also true that Christians in Kaduna are significantly disadvantaged by the so-called indigeneity laws, which discriminate against any group not government certified as indigenous to that area. While in the past in Kaduna, the northern Christian tribes also counted as indigenous, this concept seems now to have changed, at least in Kaduna city, with the result that Christian youth find it difficult if not impossible to obtain an indigeneity certificate even when their parents hold one. This gives them problems with university entry and scholarships and makes them ineligible to compete for lucrative positions with the state government.
In the current situation mono-religious communities have largely become the norm in Kaduna, forcing many, and again particularly the Christians, to spend inordinate amounts of time and money travelling to their workplaces. Nevertheless, feelings of insecurity are so great that this is seen as preferable to remaining as they were.
The Miss World riots occurred in November, 2002 after a newspaper article published in ThisDay that mentioned the name of the Prophet in connection with the Miss World Beauty Contest due to be held in Abuja a few days later was seen by many Muslims as blasphemous. The article did not immediately spark off riots; it took several days for these to start, suggesting that they were deliberately fomented and they again took the form of sectarian violence. Some 250 people were killed over a period of around three days. The security forces exacerbated the situation by participating in the violence themselves.
In both these events religion acted as a catalyst for the violence rather than being its true cause. It is a fact that in Nigeria the north-south political divide established by the colonial power continues to this day to pit Muslim northerners against Christian southerners, and elites use violence in their competition for state goods. For neither of these episodes, nor for the multiple other episodes to have affected Kaduna state and the rest of the country over the last years, has anyone been held to account, and this facilitates the continued use of violence for political ends.
Sources
Gofwen, Rotgak (2004) Religious conflicts in northern Nigeria and nation building, Kaduna: Human Rights Monitor.
Davis, Mike (2006) Planet of slums, Verso
HRW (2003) The “Miss World Riots”: Continued Impunity for Killings in Kaduna (б July), Human Rights Watch, 15-13 (A) http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/nigeria0703/nigeria0703.pdf
Kaduna City is the capital of the state of that name, located on the river of the same name. The city was founded by the British in 1913 and in 1917 became the capital of northern Nigeria. In 1967 the north was split into six states and Kaduna became the capital of the North-Central state, later changed to Kaduna State. The current boundaries date from 1991. The state is home to a number of universities and other institutions of higher education, notably Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, in the northern part of the state. In Kaduna City itself are the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna Polytechnic and the newly established Kaduna State University. Kaduna is a trade centre and transportation hub, as well as being on the main road from the Nigerian capital Abuja to the north. It has an oil refinery and a number of other factories, producing textiles, machinery, steel and aluminium.
The language of general communication is Hausa, spoken as a native language by the roughly 50% of the population who are from that ethnic group, most of whom are also Muslims. Most of the rest of the population is Christian, who come both from local tribes and from the south of Nigeria. As of September 2009, the population of Kaduna state was around 6 million and that of the city about a quarter of that. The poverty rate in Kaduna State, according to the state government’s statistics lies at around 70% and
only 52% of urban dwellers have access to drinking water (see http://www.kadunastate.gov.ng/news_20096.html).
For further information see http://www.kadunastate.gov.ng.
For a map of Kaduna state see http://tourismkaduna.org/kaduna_geography.php.
The riots
Kaduna state has been the scene of multiple sectarian riots for several decades. The most violent of these occurred in 2000 and 2002, the first over the introduction of sharia into the state’s criminal law and the second as a result of a newspaper article on the subject of the Miss World pageant, due to be held in Nigeria.
In early 2000 tensions arose over the proposed introduction of sharia law into criminal law in the state, as had happened in several other states starting with Zamfara. On the 21st of February the Christian Association of Nigeria sponsored a march to government house to show their opposition to this move. This march had been preceded by some weeks of relatively peaceful demonstrations of support for the measure on the part of Muslims. Exactly what happened is unclear but at some point during the march violence broke out when Muslim boys along the way either attacked the marchers or were attacked by them. Feelings were running so high that fights broke out and spread from place to place like wildfire. It is said this was significantly and deliberately encouraged by radio broadcasts that suggested that Christians were being killed in one neighbourhood and Muslims in another.
This was all that was needed to bring large numbers of men out on the streets in support of their co-religionists. In many of the city’s neighbourhoods minorities were forced to flee as members of the other religion broke into their houses and started killing and looting. While many died others managed to save themselves by taking refuge in the local army barracks and still others were hidden away at great risk to themselves by members of the majority religion. The riots continued for some days during which time few people other than the fighters ventured on to the streets. People barricaded themselves into their homes and subsisted on whatever food they happened to have around since there was no way of procuring provisions. Those caught by the riots away from home hid as best they could and waited until nightfall before trying to sneak home but even that was difficult since the night was lit up by fires as the fighting continued. It is said that the Christians were largely unarmed so they collected sticks and stones to fight with, while some of the Muslims had guns and ammunition. A quantitative survey carried out a couple of years ago under the auspices of the citizenship Development Research Centre showed that some people did take the radio and other rumours seriously and as a result went out on the rampage themselves, while many others of both religions claim instead to have stayed home to pray for peace. Still others said they only fought to protect their own but did not take the quarrel to their neighbours.
Meanwhile, neither the army nor the police intervened since the government made no move to ask them to do so. Indeed, it has been suggested the police may even have been complicit in the fighting, weighing in on the side of their co-religionists. The army barracks became the main place of refuge for large numbers of both sides, a place of truce. Muslims fled from the southern part of the city and took refuge with family members in the north while the Christians did the same the other way round. When the dust cleared thousands of homes had been abandoned and many destroyed.
The exact death toll will never be known but it has been estimated by Human Rights Watch that as many as 2,000 may have been killed, many thousands more injured, and millions of pounds worth of damage were caused to property.
Most of those who fled have been too frightened to return. Abandoning their homes they settled in areas where their co-religionists predominated. This has been particularly prejudicial to the Christians, since Kaduna south is considerably less developed than the north, far from the commercial and administrative centre, with few roads, schools, medical facilities or other services. It is unclear how much this is simply due to the area having been previously little settled or how much to the greater political weight of the Muslims. The Christians claim that most of the seats on the city council go to Muslims. It is also true that Christians in Kaduna are significantly disadvantaged by the so-called indigeneity laws, which discriminate against any group not government certified as indigenous to that area. While in the past in Kaduna, the northern Christian tribes also counted as indigenous, this concept seems now to have changed, at least in Kaduna city, with the result that Christian youth find it difficult if not impossible to obtain an indigeneity certificate even when their parents hold one. This gives them problems with university entry and scholarships and makes them ineligible to compete for lucrative positions with the state government.
In the current situation mono-religious communities have largely become the norm in Kaduna, forcing many, and again particularly the Christians, to spend inordinate amounts of time and money travelling to their workplaces. Nevertheless, feelings of insecurity are so great that this is seen as preferable to remaining as they were.
The Miss World riots occurred in November, 2002 after a newspaper article published in ThisDay that mentioned the name of the Prophet in connection with the Miss World Beauty Contest due to be held in Abuja a few days later was seen by many Muslims as blasphemous. The article did not immediately spark off riots; it took several days for these to start, suggesting that they were deliberately fomented and they again took the form of sectarian violence. Some 250 people were killed over a period of around three days. The security forces exacerbated the situation by participating in the violence themselves.
In both these events religion acted as a catalyst for the violence rather than being its true cause. It is a fact that in Nigeria the north-south political divide established by the colonial power continues to this day to pit Muslim northerners against Christian southerners, and elites use violence in their competition for state goods. For neither of these episodes, nor for the multiple other episodes to have affected Kaduna state and the rest of the country over the last years, has anyone been held to account, and this facilitates the continued use of violence for political ends.
Sources
Gofwen, Rotgak (2004) Religious conflicts in northern Nigeria and nation building, Kaduna: Human Rights Monitor.
Davis, Mike (2006) Planet of slums, Verso
HRW (2003) The “Miss World Riots”: Continued Impunity for Killings in Kaduna (б July), Human Rights Watch, 15-13 (A) http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/nigeria0703/nigeria0703.pdf
