Survivors relive Maitatsine violence 45 years after
Forty-five years ago, Kano woke up like any other day: traders preparing for business, children running errands, women lighting fires for breakfast. But by nightfall, the city had become a war zone.
Gunshots echoed through residential neighbourhoods. Smoke rose from burning police vehicles. Bodies lay on streets that had only hours earlier been filled with commerce and conversation.
According to the New Nigerian, the then northern Nigeria’s most authoritative newspaper, four police units were deployed that day to the Shahuci playground, near the Kano Central Mosque, to arrest followers of an extremist preacher, Muhammadu Marwa, popularly known as Maitatsine, for preaching without a permit. What the police encountered instead was a carefully laid ambush.
The police officers were attacked “from all directions” by men wielding machetes, bows and arrows, swords, clubs, daggers and other dangerous weapons, the paper reported. The officers were overwhelmed. Vehicles were torched. Reinforcements could not move freely.
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Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo, a Hausa-language newspaper, documented the immediate collapse of normal life: nine police vehicles burnt, four officers killed, hospitals inaccessible and Kano virtually deserted for days.
That first night alone claimed close to 100 lives, most of them civilians. The violence would last 11 days. By its end, an estimated 4,000 people were dead. But numbers cannot explain what Kano endured. Only the survivors can.
‘We thought Maitatsine was a good man’
For a 62-year-old Hajiya Aishatu Adamu, known as Hajiya Atine, Maitatsine was once just a neighbour.
He narrated: “We lived behind his house. He had a school. We all believed he was teaching the Qur’an. Our husband respected him so much that whenever he wanted to give zakat, Maitatsine was the first person he gave to.
“But slowly, everything changed. They began to harass us. Sometimes they blocked the road. Sometimes they stopped us from entering or leaving our homes. They would even stop people from going to the mosque. Fear crept in quietly, then settled permanently. If you reported them you were the one arrested.”
Emir Sanusi once rejected Maitatsine
Maitatsine’s ascent in Kano did not go entirely unnoticed in its early years. Historical records indicate that traditional authority initially moved against him.
Emir Muhammadu Sanusi I, the then Emir of Kano, banished Muhammadu Marwa from Kano in the late 1950s following repeated complaints from Islamic scholars and community leaders over his extremist sermons. Marwa openly condemned established Islamic authorities, declared dissenting Muslim unbelievers and rejected religious consensus; actions considered dangerous in a city with deep Islamic traditions.
However, after Sanusi I was deposed in 1963, Maitatsine returned quietly to Kano, taking advantage of political transition and weak enforcement mechanisms.
He resettled in Koki, where he rebuilt his movement with greater intensity. What began again as small study circles gradually transformed into a hardened cult-like following, drawing in marginalised youths and the almajirai, disillusioned by poverty, neglect and social exclusion.
By the 1970s, Maitatsine’s ideology had expanded unchecked, setting the stage for the December 1980 uprising which is regarded as one of the bloodiest episodes of urban violence in Nigeria’s history.
Warning signs were ignored
By the 1970s, residents of Koki began noticing troubling changes. Baba Habibu, now over 100 years old, was already a respected elder in Koki when he began noticing troubling signs around Maitatsine’s compound. He recalled how strange movements became routine in the neighbourhood: people arriving at night and during the day, often armed.
He recalled: “We were seeing people brought in with weapons, sometimes at night, sometimes in the daytime. We did not know what they were planning, but we knew it was dangerous.”
As complaints mounted, Habibu and other elders approached government officials, reporting that Maitatsine had even built a structure directly on a drainage path, blocking the community’s waterway. When Habibu confronted him, Maitatsine reportedly laughed and said, “Who will stop me?” At that moment, Habibu said it was clear that the preacher no longer feared the community or the authorities.
Instead of stopping Maitatsine, Habibu alleged that the state turned against those who raised the alarm. He recounted how security agents arrested him and four other elders who had lodged the complaint to the then deputy governor of Kano, Bibi Faruk.
“The police came with Maitatsine and told me to follow them. They said I would understand when we got to Jakara Police Station,” he said.
Habibu said was detained alongside others who had dared to speak up, while efforts to secure bail were deliberately frustrated. He said it took political pressure from the state legislature before their release was ordered. “We were the ones warning them, yet we were the ones arrested,” he said.
Kano was not their first choice – Community elder
Perhaps most chilling was what Habibu later learned from one of Maitatsine’s disciples during a casual conversation before the violence exploded. According to him, the follower revealed that Kano was not their original destination. Habibu said: “He told me they planned to settle in Maiduguri, but they were advised that if they conquered Maiduguri, they wouldn’t have conquered Nigeria, but if they conquered Kano, they would have conquered Nigeria.”
When Habibu asked if that meant war against the government, the disciple answered “Yes.” Looking back, Habibu said the conversation confirmed that the uprising was not spontaneous but calculated. “What happened later was not an accident. They had a plan and Kano was chosen,” he said.
Blood in the streets of Kano
Kano was collapsing. Dalhatu Muhammad, popularly known as Alkali, was among the first men arrested after a dispute involving Maitatsine’s son, Tijjani, who later died.
“I was at my place of work when they came and took me. The one who stabbed him was Maitarsine’s disciple. They killed him immediately,” he said.
Maitatsine interrogated Alkali personally. “He asked me who killed his son. Then he said that because elders contributed money and his son was killed, he would take revenge on everyone,” Alkali said.
Maitatsine listed names – respected neighbours, traders, elders, among them the then famous merchants, Alhaji Tijjani Yawale and Nasiru Ahali.
“I warned all of them. Some fled. Others did not take it seriously. Many, including Yawale, paid with their lives,” Alkali said.
A neighbourhood turned prison
As Maitatsine’s followers grew in number and confidence, the entire streets in Koki became a no-go area. Men were abducted. Families were separated.
Hajiya Atine recounted: “One day, they came to our gate and poured sand across the road. They planted a stick with a red cloth. That was it. No entry; no exit. Our house became their headquarters.”
She said when her husband attempted to return home to his wives and children, he was stopped and forced to abandon his car. He climbed over a wall to reach them.
“That was the last day he ever went outside. Even cooking and pouring out dirty water became dangerous. If they knew we were inside, we would be finished.” she said.
She added that after days of silence, the family decided to flee.
She said: “I carried my baby; I even carried bedding. We thought the danger had passed, but it had not.
“So you were inside all along?’ “They kept asking him, with surprise on their faces. He said yes and they said he must follow them to seek permission from Maitatsine to leave. They said there was war in Kano and Maitatsine had captured the city. That was the last time the women saw him.”
Hajiya Atine said women were lined up and marched through houses that had been violently broken into and merged with Maitatsine’s compound.
“Less than four hours after we arrived, he came out with our husband’s cap, his wristwatch and cloths.”
She said Maitatsine asked where the man’s wives were.
“When we said we were here, he said, ‘I have killed him. The women broke down in tears. He shouted at us to stop crying. They were pushed into a dark upstairs room. There was no light. We were packed tightly. There were many women and children.
“Our only work was cooking. They looted people’s food and brought it to us to prepare. We were not allowed to pray because they did not pray,” she said.
“Gunshots were fired deliberately close to them. “Sometimes bullets passed near our feet. There was teargas. My eyesight was damaged because of darkness and fear. Another woman lost her hearing. My co-wife became partially paralysed,” she added.
She said sexual violence was constant during the crisis.
“One of my co-wives was very beautiful. Another was Nasiru Ahali’s wife, who was breastfeeding. Maitatsine said he wanted to sleep with them and they refused. He beat them mercilessly. That became the routine for the week we spent in his captivity.”
When the state lost control
As police resistance collapsed, the Kano State Government appealed to the federal authorities. Soldiers were deployed; armoured vehicles rolled in. Helicopters flew low Maitatsine’s residence to confirm reports that women and children were being used as shields.
“He would leave with a knife and return, saying he had slaughtered someone. His wives would wash the blood from the knife like washing a slate. We watched as he drank it,” Hajiya Atine said.
When the assault began, Maitatsine sent his followers out in waves.
“They were killed one after another. The walls collapsed. Soldiers told us to lie down so that bullets would not hit us. We ran through corpses,” she recounted.
The women and children were eventually rescued and sheltered near Kurmi market.
“Some could no longer hear. Others like me could no longer see properly without medicated glasses. My co-wives got partial paralysis and haven’t recovered till date.” she said.
Hajiya Atine said for survivors, the war never ended. She said: “We lost our husbands; we lost our homes. We lost our livelihoods. Government’s promises followed – compensation, education for children, rehabilitation, but none of it came.
However, 45 years later, Kano has rebuilt its streets. Markets are busy again. Life has returned. But for those who lived through Maitatsine, the memories remain sharp.
“We survived, but something inside us never healed,” Hajiya Atine said.
B/Haram, ISWAP replicas of Maitatsine – Security analyst
Maitatsine was fatally wounded. His followers carried his body through Koki, Jakara-Goron Dutse and buried him secretly in Rijiyar Zaki before the authorities exhumed it to confirm his identity.
However, a security analyst, Dr Yahuza Getso, said the mistake Nigeria made was thinking that the problem had ended with the killing of Maitatsine
“Killing Maitatsine did not kill his ideology. What Boko Haram and ISWAP do today is what Maitatsine did – same brutality, same rejection of the society, same recruitment of abandoned youths,” he said.
According to him, the tragedy of Maitatsine was compounded by government’s failure to act on early intelligence, noting that he had personally raised the alarm over the unchecked flow of arms in northern Nigeria in Kebbi, Niger and Zamfara, as far back as 2001.
“These weapons did not appear overnight. They were already circulating. We documented them. We reported them. The state ignored the warnings,” he said.
He argued that the failure to intercept those arms created the conditions that allowed extremist movements to re-emerge in more organised and lethal forms, transforming what began as isolated radical groups into sustained insurgencies that continue to destabilise northern Nigeria today.