APCJ_1528_Win2010_00i_122_4 12/30/10 3:22 PM Page 21 Beyond the Ethno-Religious Theory of the Jos Conflict 21 against the indigenous Plateau people. Both outlooks underscore an identity crisis in Nigerian citizenship, which Ogoh Alubo has explored: Citizenship in Nigeria, to be sure, has been foisted on the agenda of political discourse mostly because recent experiences show many cases of violence against Nigerians who are citizens of particular spaces within Nigeria’s territory. Central to the discrimination is space within Nigeria’s territory. Central to the discrimination is identity politics and how different forms of identity are being manufactured to define and redefine the targets for the violence. Some times, it is religion, a contest between the Christians and Muslims but more often, it is ethnicity. . . . Both sets of identity refer to some relationship to the land; not a return to the feudalism of yore but claims over who arrives in a particular location first.9 The issue of who arrived first applies across Nigeria. Luke Uka Uche, in an exposition on the country’s major tribes, provides insight into the settlement pattern that has contributed in part to tensions today. He notes how Usman Dan Fodio, a Fulani, in the early nineteenth century waged Islamic holy war (jihad) to conquer and Islamize most of the areas in today’s northern Nigeria, including parts of Yorubaland (Kwara) that border on the north. Noteworthy also are the Islamized Hausa areas, where inhabitants before the infiltration of the Fulanis in the thirteenth century were nonMuslims and where the ‘weaving of religion with the political structure ha[s] had a tremendous social influence of detaching [Hausas] from people of other ethnic groups’.10 One of the important factors aiding the success of the jihad in most parts of the north was the predominance of savannah. Joseph Anene and Godfrey Brown underscore this point in their explanation for why Islam did not penetrate the Igbo area of Nigeria. They note, ‘The Igbo ethnic group. . . is located in the Eastern thick forest portion of Nigeria. It is often said that the thickness of their vegetation and its impenetrability by outsiders afforded them a natural protection to beat off a large-scale invasion from outside’.11 Uche appears to concur, stating that ‘this shielded the Igbos from being routed during the Jihad, and perhaps, from subsequent conversion to Islam’.12 In attempting to debunk the popular perception of the political north as educationally backward, he also makes the point that if detached from bias and prejudice, one recognizes that the Hausa-Fulanis were the first group to attain literacy in Nigeria—as a result of Islamic influence. He points to Basil Davidson’s assessment that the north produced one of the oldest and highest advanced civilizations in Africa and the world during the Iron Age.13 This civilization peaked around 900 B.C.–A.D. 200 and is known as Nok culture, for its location in the Nok region.14 9. Ibid. 10. Luke Uka Uche, Mass Media, People and Politics in Nigeria (New Delhi, Concept Publishing Company, 1989), 7–11. 11. Joseph C. Anene and Godfrey Brown, Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Ibadan, University of Ibadan Press, 1966), 281, as cited in Uche, Mass Media, People and Politics in Nigeria, 14. 12. Uche, Mass Media, People and Politics in Nigeria, 14. 13. Basil Davidson, The Lost Cities of Africa (Boston, Little Brown and Co., 1959), 58, cited in Uche, Mass Media, People and Politics, 10. 14. Ibid. Its people excelled at making fine terracotta figurine portrait heads around the plateau region.