The Transformation of Katsina (1400-1883)

This study is concerned with the nature of the historical process which over a period of five hundred years, (c.1400-1883), produced the successive political systems to which the inhabitants of an area of the West African Sudan which has come to be known as ‘Katsina’ belonged. This area is now a part of the savannah and the Sahel regions of Nigeria and the Republic of Niger.

The study was primarily to discover whether this process was essentially composed of the movements and conflicts of the racial, tribal and ethnic units and groups and their armies. For this is the conventional and still widely held view of the historical development of the people of the area and indeed of the whole of the Africa continent. It is doubts about this view and concern about its contemporary political significance that led to this study.