Looking for the legal: Land, law, and colonialism in Kano Emirate, Nigeria

This dissertation is a historical ethnography of competing modes of legality in Northern Nigeria, considering specifically how they operated to create and constrain people's productive relationships in agriculture. It combines a historical investigation of Northern Nigeria's legal system and land policies with an ethnographic investigation of the landholding practices of Hausa-speakers in the town of Ungogo, near the city of Kano. The question of what counted as the law was never entirely straightforward. Even during precolonial times Islamic law was neither monolithic nor universal, and commoners tended to avoid forums in which outsiders could intervene in their affairs. In questions of land, the Maliki law of inheritance and Islamic constitutional principles were frequently ignored.; In the Sokoto Caliphate controlling land had not been the prime means of economic exploitation. According to constitutional principle, the Sultan of Sokoto did indeed own all lands conquered in the jihad, but this category of ownership did not correspond to its apparent English counterpart. Despite this, English notions of English property structured the domain of "traditional" land tenure that emerged in Northern Nigeria. Some paradoxes stemming from differences between English and Hausa ideas of property were obvious to all, but colonial policies misunderstood the subtle connections between how commoners gained the right to farm and what made the state able to tax them. In one sense the strategy worked: taxes were collected. But to the extent that the government's policies were successful, it was not because they had operated as planned. The legal system was pervasive but neither systematic nor coherent. People paid taxes, but not always peacefully and not out of a sense of obligation inherited from the timeless past. This history thus poses the problem of how a government can so drastically misunderstand its subjects, not notice it had done so, but nevertheless achieve its administrative goals. It presents a case in which various normative codes can claim the mantle of "law" and suggests ways around considering such competition either functional or subversive, dominating or counter-hegemonic. It suggests attention to law's interior contradictions illuminates the structure of the political economy as a whole.