1 - Moving East, Facing West: Islam as an Intercultural Mediator in Urban Planning in the Sokoto Empire

Summary

When I arrived in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon to conduct my dissertation field research in 2000, I was told that the palace of the Fulbe ruler, or laamii1o, had been built when the city was founded in 1830 as the capital of an emirate in the Sokoto Empire. The palace is currently located on the eastern side of the historical city facing west toward the qibla wall of the central mosque (see figure 1). I was surprised to discover later that the palace had originally been founded to the west of the mosque, in a position more central to the urban plan. It was moved to its current location only in the late nineteenth century.

While local sources claimed that the palace was moved solely in order to construct a larger and more magnificent establishment, I suggest that the relocation of the palace represents nothing less than the renegotiation and recoding of conceptual space both within Fulbe culture, as well as with respect to other cultural constituencies of the Sokoto Empire. I begin by investigating the plan and orientation of commonplace nomadic pastoral Fulbe residences, as constructed in eastern Fulbe cultures. This is followed by a comparison of eastern and western nomadic pastoral Fulbe associations with the cardinal directions in order to understand their links to the natural environment. I then examine the implications of nomadic pastoral Fulbe culture for the palaces of sedentary rulers in the Sokoto Empire, established by Usumanu dan Fodio in an early-nineteenth-century jihad to renew and expand the faith of Islam in the region. This material is compared to the ideal orientation and urban location of the palace in the pre-jihad Hausa and Kanuri cultures, both of which were extremely influential in the Sokoto Empire. It is then shown that the Fulbe found a reflection of their understanding of conceptual space in an early Islamic model of urban planning. The Islamic credentials of this model seem to have justified the reorganization of urban space to other constituencies such as the Hausa and Kanuri. Finally, I discuss the movement of the palace of Ngaoundéré in part as a reflection of the urban plans of capital cities throughout the Sokoto Empire, and in part to inscribe Ngaoundéré with a Fulbe understanding of conceptual space through reframing along the lines of an early Islamic model.