It points out that while the British colonized Muslim northern Nigeria indirectly through the region’s pre-existing centralized feudal traditional and administrative institutions, it colonized non-Muslim northern Nigeria even more indirectly through “native aliens,” that is, Hausa-Fulani Muslims whom British colonialists placed atop their self-created African civilizational hierarchy. “This resulted in a subcolonial bureaucracy driven at the grass roots by thousands of Hausa chiefs, scribes, tax agents, and their own Hausa-Fulani agents, who initiated much of the colonial agenda in these Middle Belt districts” (p. 2).
Thus, the Hausa-Fulani became “subcolonials,” or proxy colonialists, who in turn appointed “lesser chiefs, aides, tax collectors, scribes, and enforcers” mostly from among their kind but sometimes from among the “natives” in order to prepare the Middle Belt for the kind of indirect colonial rule that was successful in the Muslim north. The motive force for this arrangement stemmed from the colonial construction of the people of the Middle Belt as benighted cultural inferiors who needed the civilizational tutelage of their Hausa-Fulani cultural superiors preparatory to British indirect colonial rule. This invidious social differentiation wasn’t a simple case of the divide-and-rule tactic for which (British) colonialists were infamous. On the contrary, the book argues, the policy of “proxy colonialism” was driven by the “pursuit of sameness in the crucible of preparatory proxy rule” (p. 8).
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