'Islam Does Not Belong to Them': Ethnic and Religious Identities among Male Igbo Converts in...

International African Institute

'Islam Does Not Belong to Them': Ethnic and Religious Identities among Male Igbo Converts inHausalandAuthor(s): Douglas AnthonySource: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 70, No. 3 (2000), pp. 422-441Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1161068 .

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Africa 70 (3), 2000

'ISLAM DOES NOT BELONG TO THEM': ETHNIC AND RELIGIOUS IDEN'IT'IES AMONG MALE

IGBO CONVERTS IN HAUSALAND

Douglas Anthony

There is under way a realignment of ethnicity and religion in the lives of converts to Islam born as members of Nigeria's Igbo ethnic group. As Doi argued over a decade ago, obstacles to the cohabitation of Igbo and Muslim identities through Nigeria have decreased markedly since the civil war of 1967-70 (Doi, 1984: 178). This is particularly visible among Igbos living in predominantly Hausa parts of northern Nigeria. In the past, for Igbos living in these areas, conversion from Christianity to Islam usually started a process of changing one's ethnic affiliation to Hausa, a process Adamu has called 'Hausanisation' (Adamu, 1978). On the other hand, there are now Igbo Muslims who assert membership of both Igbo and Muslim worlds, to whom Hausanisation does not appeal. These converts actively challenge the view, so widely embraced in Nigeria, that Igbo and Muslim identities are mutually exclusive.

The 25 October 1993 edition of the Nigerian news magazine Citizen carried a cover story on 'Igbo Muslims' (Akoshile and Ummuna, 1993).1 Its focus was the inroads Islam has made in the overwhelmingly Christian Igbo homeland. Alhaji Suleiman Onyeama, chairman of the Jama'atul Nasril Islamiyya (Society for the Victory of Islam) of Enugu State, claimed there were between 6,000 and 10,000 Muslims in the state (Akoshile and Ummuna, 1993: 18).2 If, as most readers of the article likely inferred, his tally was of Enugu State citizens, virtually all of whom were Igbo, his number was probably optimistic. Nonetheless, even the generous estimate of 10,000 represented a tiny fraction of the state's population, which Nigeria's 1991 census put at 3.1 million.

While the Citizen article's argument that the number of Igbos professing Islam is growing was almost certainly true, it highlighted the practically axiomatic association many Nigerians make of Islam with northern Nigeria, and particularly with the Hausa ethnic group. This association has survived the gradual spread of Islam in Yorubaland and other parts of Nigeria's south and Middle Belt since the creation of the

DOUGLAS ANTHONY is assistant professor of history at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Among others, the article recounts the story of Sheikh Ibrahim Niass Nwagui of Anofia- Afikpo, the central figure in Simon Ottenberg's 1971 article and a key figure in Doi's (1984) chapter on Islam in Igboland. Not surprisingly, compared with the accounts by Ottenberg, who identified the sheikh as Alhaji Ibrahim, and Doi, the Citizen account of the sheikh's life is quite colourful and differs on several points of fact. His central role in the propagation of Islam in the Afikpo area, however, is uncontested.

2 Regarding Alh. Onyeama see also Doi (1984: 175). In 1993 Enugu was the most populous of the four predominantly Igbo-speaking states; a fifth state, Delta, also had a large Igbo- speaking population.



IGBO MUSLIMS IN KANO

Sokoto Caliphate in the nineteenth century, and the more recent efforts of groups like Jama'atul Nasril Islam (Falola, 1998: 105). It also persists despite the existence of a substantial Christian minority in the north, including a small number of Hausa Christians. The reaction of the Hausa community in the predominantly Igbo city of Onitsha to a May 1997 bomb blast outside the city's Friday Mosque provides. a recent example of how many Nigerians conflate religious and ethnic identities. The Abuja Mirror reported that Alhaji Ibrahim Turaki, a leader in the Onitsha Hausa community, blamed the blast on anti-government pro- democracy groups and described it as an attempt to incite Muslims against Christians. In downplaying the prospect of additional violence, however, his frame of reference shifted to ethnic labels when he promised continued good relations between Hausas and Igbos.3

FALSE DICHOTOMIES: IGBO MUSLIMS IN NIGERIA

The reflexive linkage between ethnicity and religious affiliation presents a powerful challenge to Igbo Muslims. In many ways it echoes Dean Gilliland's 1970 interview with a Tiv informant who reflected: "'Anyone who does salla [Islamic prayer] is considered a Hausa man-he is no longer accepted as a Tiv"' (Gilliland, 1986: 63).4 On the other hand, the title of this article, 'Islam does not belong to them', originates in a comment an Igbo Muslim made to me as he argued that, although most Igbos link Islam and Hausa ethnicity, in his eyes the religion was 'for everyone, not just the Hausas'.

The backdrop for any study of Igbo populations in northern Nigeria is British colonial rule. Colonial policies limited the presence of mission schools in the far north, where Islam was strongest, even as it promoted them in the southern and central sections of the country. During the colonial era, which ended in 1960, migration from southern Nigeria to the country's Northern Region followed the penetration of colonial administration and the concomitant commercial infrastructure that linked the north with the seaports of southern Nigeria. Arriving by road and rail as traders and entrepreneurs, and as clerks, skilled workers and professionals in public services, parastatals and commercial firms, Igbos had become by the 1950s the southern ethnic group with the largest population in the Northern Region. This happened, in large part, because the region, and especially the far north, had not produced enough Western-educated individuals to meet its manpower needs. On the other hand, many of the skilled individuals in the mostly Igbo Eastern Region left in order to find the work for which they had trained. The resulting Igbo presence in northern Nigeria is part of what some

3 Abuja Mirror, 21-7 May 1997, http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~n.today/mcover7.htm.

4 Salla is the Hausa variant of the Arabic salat. The Tiv, whose home region in Nigeria's Middle Belt placed them within the boundaries of colonial Nigeria's Northern Region, are among the largest non-Hausa groups in northern Nigeria. Most Tiv are Christian.

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scholars have labelled Nigeria's 'Igbo diaspora' (Onwubu, 1975). As Nigeria moved toward independence, and its party politics became increasingly ethnicised, relations between Igbo and Hausa were often strained, as evidenced by major outbreaks of violence between Igbos and Hausas in the northern cities of Jos in 1945 and Kano in 1953 (Nnoli, 1978).

The difficulties of the colonial period persisted in independent Nigeria. The military's overthrow of the First Republic in 1966 was the first in a series of political cataclysms that year, including organised violence against Igbo civilians in the north in May and again in September. Religious tension, though not an immediate cause of either wave of violence, contributed in various ways to local expressions of discontent in Muslim areas. Religious polarisation deepened during the war to the extent that much of the propaganda Biafra aimed at governments and potential supporters in the West vilified Islam, in the process setting aside the fact that Nigeria's head of state and a large portion of its fighting force were northern Christians.

If handled carefully, this persistent dichotomy-in Falola's words 'two virtual nations within one-an Islamic north and a Christian south' (1998: 38)-can be a useful starting point in understanding interactions between (and even within) Nigeria's various groups. This article, for example, borrows a description of Hausa ethnicity that foregrounds the practice of Islam precisely because it is difficult to overstate the importance of Islam and Islamic cultural elements in Hausa society, and in Hausa society's relationship with other predominantly Muslim groups in the north. That description is, however, like the dichotomy itself, in the strictest sense false. Each negates grey areas that reflect the complexity of Nigeria's social, economic and political fabric. In the case of Hausa society, in addition to the Muslim majority, there are small but important minorities of Christians and practitioners of traditional religion who are Hausa by any measure that sets aside essentialisms of religion.

ASSIMILATION AND ASSERTION

Slippage between ethnic and religious affiliations is nothing new in Nigeria, where the Caliphate and the British each ushered in periods of pervasive religious change, ripples of which persist to the present day. And, in any case, ethnic labels are rarely, if ever, constant across time and changing situations. For these reasons the two most troublesome terms used in this article are 'Igbo' and 'Hausa'. Both have distinct histories, and meanings that have changed with time. Each can be used differently, depending on who speaks it, and to what end they apply it. Nonetheless, despite the fluidity of the labels, and the ability of many individuals to manage how they are perceived, in the language of everyday interaction ethnic affiliation is profoundly meaningful-and in moments of crisis can mean the difference between life and death.

The people I refer to as Igbos or 'Hausanised Igbos' either do or did regard their ethnic affiliation as Igbo. And, as is the case with most

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Igbos, they also claim or claimed membership of various subgroups based on genealogy and geography. As large-scale migration from Igboland to other parts of Nigeria occurred during the colonial period, the organisations that migrants created around their village, town and, ultimately, Igbo identities have played a major role in defining what it means to be Igbo. Audrey Smock (1971) and more recently Dmitri van den Bersselaar (1998) have written about the importance of migration, indirect rule, and party politics for gradual acceptance of Igbo group identity. Van den Bersselaar, like a number of earlier scholars, has emphasised the role of Christian missionaries in helping to spread awareness of Igbo ethnicity, in large part through attempts to standardise the Igbo language (van den Bersselaar, 1997; Ekechi, 1989; Isichei, 1976; Afigbo, 1981).

Hausa ethnic identity has also been responsive to internal and external forces. In the last two centuries external factors include the rise of the Sokoto Caliphate to encompass Hausaland, and the subsequent division of Hausaland between Britain's Nigeria colony and Niger, a colony of France (Miles, 1994). Most important of the internal forces has been Hausa society's assimilative tendency, which has resulted, almost literally, in continuous infusions of new blood. In Hiskett's words:

The Hausa nation has been built up, over many generations, of different peoples of many different bloodlines who have migrated to Hausaland and joined the original stock. What unites them is a common language and, to an ever increasing extent over the course of their history, common adherence to Islam. [Hiskett, 1984: 68]

Internal and external forces overlapped in the pattern of assimilation that followed the introduction of a Fulani aristocracy to the conquered Hausa states during the creation of the Caliphate. This has led some scholars, most notably Paden, to write of a composite Hausa-Fulani society, or to distinguish between the two groups (Paden, 1973). The Fulani of Usman dan Fodio's jihad, however, were neither the earliest nor the most recent to become part of Hausa society (Salamone, 1975). For these reasons:

It is impossible to give a simple definition of a Hausa person because different criteria were, and still are, used by different people at different times and places to define who was or should be defined as Hausa. To decide who was Hausa and who was not, some people used purely historical claims to Hausa ethnicity, others used cultural traits, and social values as their yardstick, while still others used religion plus language. [Adamu, 1978: 3]

In present-day Nigeria even the words 'Hausa' can be applied conversationally to very different effects. For example, in the vocabulary of many southern Nigerians the term in its least precise application can refer to any Muslim northerner, including non-Hausa speakers. (Similarly 'Igbo', or its derogatory Hausa analogue 'Inyamiri' sometimes becomes a generic term for non-Muslim southerners.) In a

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different context 'Hausa' identifies a Hausa speaker, particularly a native speaker, even one who claims non-Hausa ancestry. And, in its most restrictive sense, the term distinguishes someone claiming 'pure' Hausa ancestry from someone with Fulani, Beriberi (Kanuri), Tuareg or other ancestry, but who may in fact speak Hausa as their first language, and who may be culturally indistinguishable from the 'pure' Hausa. More than anything, however, the extent to which finer distinctions frequently yield to more inclusive definitions serves to underline the degree to which extensive intermarriage has contributed to a Hausa identity with linguistic and cultural assimilation at its core. Igbo and Hausa informants, for example, freely used the word 'Hausa' in English, Hausa and, I was told, Igbo to describe individuals who had assimilated.

It is at this level that I cease to interrogate Hausa identity, for it is at this level that my informants, Igbo and Hausa, engage with it. Paden concluded that 'In practice, Hausa ethnicity as an overarching identity has been based on language and religion and, to some extent, on cultural style'. Hausa ethnicity, then, is 'affiliational', and individuals can 'by an act of will' behave in ways that allow them to claim to be Hausa (Paden, 1973: 378, 380). His description articulates well with the present subject matter, since language, religion and cultural style are things one can acquire and refine through association, emulation and study, and will normally pass to subsequent generations.

IGBOS AND ISLAM IN KANO

The largest city in Hausaland, for centuries Kano has been a major centre of Islamic education and culture, and the major West African hub for Muslim long-distance traders. During the colonial period it became the home of the Northern Region's largest and most dynamic Igbo community, and has remained poised on the cutting edge of relations between Igbo and Hausa. British colonial policies, however, restricted contact between the groups by creating a separate quarter for non-Muslim Africans. These policies concentrated Kano's population of southerners, at first mostly Yoruba, but later predominantly Igbo, in Sabon Gari, literally Hausa for 'new town' but frequently translated as 'strangers' quarters'. Part of a larger administrative unit called Waje, or 'outside', Sabon Gari was beyond the walls of Birnin Kano, the old, walled city where residence had been historically restricted to Muslims. The non-Muslim denizens of Waje were not subject to the Islamic law that applied within the city, and answered to different courts and local administrators. Christian churches and public drinking establishments, neither of which were tolerated within the city, were allowed in Sabon Gari. The physical separation between Waje and the walled city also contributed to a system where, for many Igbos and Hausas, contact with members of the other group was limited to transactions in the Sabon Gari market, or the banks, commercial houses, government offices and workshops where Igbos tended to work. With the end of colonial rule, and the rapid expansion of greater Kano, the line between

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the old city and 'outside' areas like Sabon Gari has become less rigid, though the general pattern of segregation persists. Igbos in Kano, as elsewhere, remain overwhelmingly Christian, and mostly Catholic. Conversion to Islam, though more common than during the colonial period, remains something of an oddity.

Generally speaking, Kano's Igbo-bom Muslim men fall on a continuum, and gravitate towards the ends. At one pole of this continuum are those who, in language, religion, life style and ultimately personal identification and ethnic affiliation, assimilate to the norms of the Hausa community. They tend to take Hausa spouses and have Hausa-speaking children who are, by all indications, culturally Hausa. It is impossible to determine exact numbers because most do not advertise their origins. Further, the city's Hausanised Igbos have little contact with one another, since, by virtue of choosing to live as Hausas, they do not participate in networks based on their Igbo origins. At the other end of the continuum are those who cling tightly to their Igbo ethnic identity after their conversion, and self-consciously blend Islam and Igbo ethnicity. Rather than conflate being a Muslim with being Hausa, these younger Muslims, post-war converts, emphasise the universality of Islam. In that sense they are of the same stock as the Igbo Muslims of the Citizen article. Their numbers are also difficult to determine, in part because many are transitory. An organisation, the Kano State Igbo Muslim Community, provides a social and educational framework that many take advantage of but many more do not.

There were probably between 100 and 200 men of Igbo origin who had converted to Islam living in greater metropolitan Kano in the mid- 1990s. This number does not take into account those living in the towns and villages of Kano State, who probably number in the dozens, and perhaps hundreds. More important, because of widespread wife seclusion, it is difficult to speculate on the number and status of women of Igbo origin who have become Muslims, though there is no reason to believe the number to be as large as the number of men.5 The modalities of conducting research-even of living-in an Islamic environment make it very difficult for a male researcher to gather even the most superficial data on women. Among the male converts, however, a number of patterns emerge. Following three brief case studies of Hausanised Igbos, I shift to the other end of the continuum and examine three Igbos who have maintained that identification after their conversion.

5 I base this statement on the relatively limited contact Hausa men had with Igbo women prior to the civil war, largely a result of the efforts of the Ibo Union to regulate the movement and activities of women. In contrast, an Igbo man who converted to Islam and assimilated could, after some time, reasonably expect to receive assistance in locating a Muslim wife, most likely Hausa. There are also cases of Igbo women who married Hausa men who lived in the south; again, however, these women remained inaccessible to me.

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IGBOS BECOMING HAUSA: THREE CASES

The three case studies that follow illuminate the process through which Igbo men have acquired Hausa ethnic identity. Though the details of their situations differ somewhat, there are commonalities which are generally consistent with anecdotal evidence of other Hausanised Igbos. I have noted eight such similarities. First of all, the three men were born in Igboland (in this case, all in the early 1930s). Second, all of them converted from Christianity to Islam after contact with Hausa Muslims. Third, each replaced all or part of his birth name with an Arabic one. One did so as a child, another as a teenager and the third as an adult. Neither of the two men I interviewed (Alhaji Sani Nababa and Muhammad Anyanwu) would disclose the 'Christian' names they had abandoned. Fourth, each of them chose to reside within the walled city, as Hausa-speakers, living as their neighbours did. Fifth, each in one way or another curtailed or severed connections with their relations in the east and with other Igbos in Kano. Sixth, neighbours and Muslim friends shielded each of them from the violence of the 1966 disturbances and each escaped the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70.6 Seventh, each of the three married Hausa wives who gave birth to children who were or are being raised as Hausas. This is of particular significance, since, as Adamu has written, Hausa culture encourages Hausa men 'to marry freely both within the Hausa community and outside it . . . Conversely, it has discouraged the Hausa people from giving their daughters in marriage to non-Hausa people who have not acquired an appreciable degree of Hausanization' (Adamu, 1978: 5). It is a measure of their Hausanisation that they were not only allowed to marry, but were assisted in marrying, Hausa women. Finally, each of them is or was known to some or most of their neighbours as having Igbo origins, yet in each case those origins are almost certain to be qualified with the phrase Ya zama Bahaushe ('He became a Hausa').

Alhaji Sani Nababa The most complete and perhaps least complicated example of Hausanisation is that of Alhaji Sani Nababa. Of the three cases presented here, Alhaji Sani is the most thoroughly Hausanised in as much as he, of the three, has the most tenuous links with his former Igbo identity, though his case is as much a reflection of circumstance as his own actions. Born in 1933 in Umuahia, he served as a steward for Umaru, a Hausa member of the Nigerian Police Force stationed there during the Second World War, where he guarded Axis prisoners. In Umuahia, Umaru and the boy's father became friends, and when Umaru was reassigned to Kano in 1944 he asked to take the boy along.

6 It is worth noting that not all Igbo converts remained. One man, remembered by his Christian name of Matthew and his Muslim name of Mato, left the Challawa waterworks, where he had worked for twenty years, for Igboland, taking his Igbo wife with him. On the other hand a co-worker and fellow convert, Obi, remained with his Hausanised Fulani wife.

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His parents agreed, on the condition that Umaru send him to primary school. The following year, living in Kano with Umaru, he converted to Islam, with the approval of his family in Umuahia. In 1947 Umaru retired from the police force, left the Bompai police barracks, and moved into the Aikawa ward of the old city. Umaru started trading in Sabon Gari market, where he employed the boy now called Sani. This brought Sani's formal education to an end after two years.

Alhaji Sani still lives in Aikawa ward, and as late as 1994 traded provisions in the Fagge district, near Sabon Gari market. He married the first of his three Hausa wives in 1954 and by 1994 had thirty-five children and fifty-one grandchildren, most of whom lived inside the old city. Since moving to Kano he had made only one trip home, in 1960. During the 1966 disturbances and the civil war he remained in Kano. He said he was not endangered by his Igbo roots because he had become accepted as fully Hausa, and felt little connection with Igboland.

Malam Muhammad Anyanwu A more instructive example is that of Muhammad Anyanwu, known to many as Tijani Bako.7 Born an Igbo, in 1994 he was serving as muezzin of the Jalli mosque in Yakasai ward of the old city. He has made no attempt to hide his Igbo heritage, which is widely known throughout Yakasai. Like Alhaji Sani, Anyanwu was also born in Umuahia. In 1950 he travelled to Kano as a teenager, accompanying his older brother, who sold yams in the Sabon Gari market. There Anyanwu came into contact with Muslims. He sought out and was directed to an Islamic teacher, the malam of the Jalli mosque. Within four months of his arrival in Kano, Anyanwu converted. His teacher gave him the name Muhammad and later oversaw his initiation into the Tijaniyya brotherhood. Upon his conversion Anyanwu moved from Sabon Gari to Yakasai, where he rented a living space near the mosque. With the help of his landlord, a friend of the malam, he began purchasing millet (gero) and guinea corn (dawa) in outlying villages to sell in city markets. In the 1970s he took a position with the Kano State goverment as a night security guard, a job he still held in 1994. Paden provided a framework for understanding the basis of Anyanwu's successful 'conversion' to Hausa ethnicity when he wrote:

7 As well as being a common proper name 'Bako' is Hausa for stranger or guest; Tijani Bako, then, can signify a member of the Tijaniyya who has origins outside Kano. In addition to Muhammad Anyanwu and 'Tijani Bako', as a long-time resident of Yakasai ward he is also sometimes called Muhammad Yakasai or Tijani Yakasai. On one occasion, to distinguish him from another Malam Tijani, an old man referred to him as Tijani Inyamiri. 'Inyamiri' is a Hausa reference to an Igbo person that many Igbos find offensive; the word itself derives from the Igbo expression 'bring water' and probably originates with the construction of railway lines in the 1920s and 1930s. The Citizen article makes reference to Sheikh Ibrahim Niass Nwagui as being 'fondly called' 'Sheikh Ibrahim Igbo' by persons unspecified.

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The rise of the southern Nigerian (primarily Ibo) community in Kano gave major impetus to the amalgamation of Hausa-Fulani identity. This we-they distinction was based on religious, cultural, linguistic, and economic factors. The Ibo community in Kano was different from the Hausa-Fulani with respect to these criteria. [1973: 379]

By converting to Islam, living a Hausa life style among Hausa (for Paden, Hausa-Fulani) people with whom he communicated in the Hausa language, and by earning his living in a manner consistent with local norms, Muhammad Anyanwu categorically escaped these criteria of outsider status.

During the civil disturbances of May 1966 Hausa friends and neighbours assured him that, as a Muslim, he was in no personal danger. Nonetheless he decided to leave the north. He sought the assistance of his landlord, who made the first of several contacts that led to Anyanwu being sent to Lagos. There he spent seven months in quarters attached to the official Lagos residence of Hassan Usman Katsina, at the time the military governor of Nigeria's northern provinces, and son of the Emir of Katsina. As the political situation deteriorated, Anyanwu requested the governor's assistance in leaving Nigeria. With Katsina's intervention, but through channels not entirely clear to Anyanwu, passage was arranged for him to Kaolack, Senegal, the home of Sheikh Ibrahim Niass, and international headquarters of the Tijaniyya. Anyanwu spent five years in Kaolack studying under Sheikh Niass, and lived much of the time in the grounds of Kaolack's central mosque. With the help of the Nigerian embassy in Senegal he secured employment in the docks in Dakar. During his time in Senegal he reinforced his Hausa life style by associating primarily with members of Kaolack's sizable Kano Hausa community, and by avoiding contact with the Igbo traders and refugees living in and around Dakar.

The war ended in 1970, and Anyanwu returned to Kano in 1971. There his former landlord facilitated his first marriage, to a Hausa woman who died childless in 1987. His second wife, a Hausanised Fulani, gave birth in 1994 to a son, Muhammad Auwalu Tijani. According to his father, the boy's first language was to be Hausa, his mother's first language and his parents' common tongue. There were no plans for him to learn Igbo or to have any contact with the Anyanwu lineage in Umuahia. In addition to Hausa, the boy, according to his father, will study English and Arabic, a very normal linguistic mix for a Kano Hausa child. When asked what the child's ethnicity was, Anyanwu responded simply with 'Hausa.' Prior to his extended stay at the barracks in 1966, Anyanwu paid a three-week visit to his family home at Umuahia, his last visit to the east to date. His conversion fuelled a rift between him and his family that has not healed. As of 1994 the only contact he had had since that visit was notification by his brother in 1992 that their father had died.

In 1991 a Hausa friend introduced Anyanwu to Alhaji Sani Nababa. According to Anyanwu, at their first meeting they spoke in both Igbo and Hausa; on his subsequent visits to Alhaji Sani's store they

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conversed in Hausa, in which they both have greater fluency, and which better suits the Hausa life style both embrace. Other than Alhaji Sani, Anyanwu said he personally knew only two other Muslims with Igbo roots, both of whom resided in Sabon Gari in 1994, and that he had no regular contact with either.8

Malam Ibrahim Kafenta Unlike Muhammad Anyanwu's rapid conversion to Islam, Ibrahim Kafenta lived among Muslims in the walled city for a decade before becoming a Muslim and fully assimilating. During that decade he gradually accepted many of the trappings of Hausa identity. At the same time, however, he retained his Igbo ethnicity in his own eyes and in the eyes of the Hausa around him. He moved to Kano from Igboland around 1960 and did not convert until after the civil war ended in 1970. He found work as a carpenter, from which his second name derives. He became head carpenter and site manager for Alhaji Sharif Bappa, a prominent Kano contractor and himself a Hausanised Kanuri. From the early 1960s until the conclusion of the civil war Malam Kafenta, as his Hausa-speaking co-workers and neighbours called him long before he converted, lived at Unguwar Gini, inside the walled city. He and his wife were, until 1966, the only non-relations who lived in the compound of Alhaji Sharif and his family. He was open about his Christianity, though he did not attend services regularly.

Living as he did among Muslims, he abided by Islamic dietary restrictions, and adopted many of the habits and behaviours of his neighbours, including the liberal use of common Hausa and Arabic expressions that implicitly recognises the omnipotence of Allah.9 Most interesting among his borrowings, however, is his modification of Christian prayer to include elements he found around him. He sometimes used a prayer mat like his neighbours, and prayed in a manner that incorporated their postures and gestures. This was not unique to Kafenta; the description of his emulation of Islamic prayer echoes that of other Igbo Christians who lived or worked in the old city in the pre-civil war period, many in the quarters for railway workers in Nassarawa ward. Hausa neighbours say that adopting the postures was an important way to demonstrate good will toward the Muslims around them.

Kafenta remained in Alhaji Sharif s employ during the May and October disturbances of 1966. A member of the Sharif household recalled him saying in October that he felt safer remaining than leaving for the east to join his Igbo wife, with whom he had no children. He spent his leisure time in the family compound and moved around in

8 Similarly, while Alhaji Sani said in 1994 that he was aware of about fifty Igbos, some non-

Muslims, renting residential accommodation inside the old city, he said he had very little personal contact with them.

9 These include the Arabic Insha Allah ('if Allah wills it'), and Hausa expressions like mun gode Allah ('we thank Allah') and in Allah yarda ('if Allah agrees').

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Alhaji Sharifs company. He was known throughout the neighbourhood and was not molested. The location of the compound on the fringe of a Native Authority Police barracks and Kafenta's association with members of the police gave him an additional element of security, despite the fact that units of the national Nigerian Police Force were more effective than the locally recruited NA police in quelling anti-Igbo disturbances. Following the October violence, during which soldiers and organised mobs of young Hausas killed several hundred Igbos, it was some two months before Kafenta felt free to move about the city. By that time the overwhelming majority of northern Nigeria's Igbo population had long since fled to the south-east, though newspapers carried occasional reports of Igbos who had been found hiding being turned over to the authorities for transportation south. Though Kafenta would dress in Hausa clothing and spoke fluent Hausa, his accent betrayed his origins. As a result of the October disturbances Alhaji Sharif took into his compound another two of his three Igbo employees; the third, a clerk, fled after the October disturbances and returned after the war. The two who remained were younger than Kafenta, in their 20s, and spoke little Hausa. While Nigeria and Biafra fought, Kafenta and at least one of the other Igbos were responsible for recruiting Hausa labourers for Alhaji Sharif. One of the two younger Igbos, a mason and bricklayer remembered by his given name of Gabriel, and also as Garba, the name his Hausa co-workers used for him, converted to Islam about three years after the war ended. He had left Unguwar Gini for the heterogeneous Brigade section of greater Kano by the time he converted.

Soon after the war, Kafenta converted to Islam and accepted the name Ibrahim. He later developed a close association with the Tijaniyya, which has a strong presence in Unguwar Gini. Following his conversion, he married the first of his two Hausa wives, with whom he lived for a time in a five-room house Alhaji Sharif owned, near the School of Arabic Studies, and a short walk from the emir's palace. He later built his own house in Hotoro, a predominantly Hausa area outside the walled city, where he died in 1994. His sixteen children grew up in Kano, as Hausa Muslims, though two of them spent a period of time with relatives in Igboland and acquired a knowledge of the Igbo language before returning to Kano. None of the others has paid extended visits to Igboland or speaks the language.

KANO'S IGBO MUSLIM COMMUNITY

Doi argues that the loss of the civil war contributed to a climate of increasing receptivity to Islam among the Igbo. First, he says, it changed the relationship between the defeated former Biafrans and victorious Nigeria, which Biafran propaganda had painted in largely Islamic colours.

After the civil war, when the task of rehabilitation and reconstruction began, the people of the area who were misguided by false propaganda in the name

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of religion could now understand the situation better. They could realise that it was not a religious war, and that the Muslims did not want to 'exterminate' them, nor was Islam based on any such inhuman ideology. [Doi, 1984: 174]

His second argument is also persuasive. With the dislocations, economic uncertainties and breakdown in community institutions that followed the war, some Igbos responded with an unprecedented receptivity to change. I would add that the same factors-especially the breakdown in the town union system and the preoccupation with economic recovery-created opportunities for experimentation and life style change among individuals who otherwise would have felt they had too much to lose by so doing. The end of the deeply divisive and religiously charged politics of the First Republic undoubtedly removed another obstacle. Finally, the experience of life in Biafra added new layers of meaning to Igbo identity, perhaps in the process pushing religious affiliation toward the margins enough for beliefs outside the Igbo mainstream to penetrate more deeply than before.

In Kano the clearest representation of assault on the barriers between being Igbo and being Muslim is the existence and operation of the Igbo Muslim Community. The Igbo Muslim Community (IMC) was formed in 1990 around a core of ten members; in 1994 active members numbered approximately thirty men. Of those members, only one, a Bayero University student born in Jos, was born to Muslim parents. In 1994 monthly meetings were held in a rented room in Dakata, an ethnically heterogeneous industrial section of greater Kano with a heavily working-class population. At the time, most members lived there, or in Brigade and Zango, areas with similar demographics. Six members lived inside the walled city, including recently settled areas like Kabuga and Gadan Kaya, which, though largely Hausa, had substantial non-Hausa populations. At least two members lived in the densely settled core areas where Hausa influence is strongest. Interestingly, none lived in Sabon Gari. Four of the association's members were married to non-Igbos: one to a Fulani from Yola and three to Hausa women from Kano, though in one case the Hausa wife was co-wife to an Igbo first wife. About two-thirds of the members had Igbo wives and the remainder were bachelors. In 1994 the IMC did not include women in its meetings or other activities, or count the wives of male members as active members, though their affiliation with the IMC was automatic. One exception was the participation in 1998 of Hajiya Amina, the widow of a former member, in a television broadcast the union organised. Unlike Igbo town unions, there were no unmarried women members.

Many of the association's members speak only a little Hausa, and only a handful have any Arabic. It is therefore not surprising that the question of language has proven central to the activities of the organisation. Throughout most of 1992 the IMC held classes in basic Islamic knowledge for new converts at the Fagge central mosque. The classes, conducted in a mixture of English and Igbo, introduced approximately twenty students, all Igbo and all male, to the history and

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practice of Islam. A deteriorating economy and persistent fuel shortages that made transport expensive contributed to the abandonment of plans to repeat the programme in 1995. The question of language manifested itself in a more dramatic fashion in 1994. In August that year a delegation of twenty IMC members paid a formal visit to Emir Ado Bayero to request the palace's permission and assistance in building a Friday mosque where Igbo and English would be used. Their case was simple. For Kano's non-Hausa-speaking Muslims, Igbo or otherwise, the overwhelming predominance of the Hausa language in Kano's mosques presents a hardship. As recently as 1998 there had been no response from the palace, though at the time of their audience the Emir had encouraged them to work to propagate Islam in the south-east. In conjunction with similar groups in Sokoto and Kaduna, IMC members have also worked on an Igbo translation of the Qur'an. On the other hand, the IMC's formal contact with Islamic organisations in Igboland has been limited to occasional communication with the chief imams of the Enugu and Owerri mosques.

Like almost all the active members of the Kano IMC, each of the three men discussed below became interested in and converted to Islam after the civil war. Two converted in Kano, the third in Lagos. All have Igbo wives, two of whom converted under the influence of their husbands, the third of her own accord prior to marriage. All three are raising their children as Igbo-speakers with connections to kin and community in Igboland.

Malam Abdullahi Okere Abdullahi Okere was born in 1950 in Egbele Obube, in Igboland. As a teenager he left the Catholic Church for the Anglican after reading in the Bible that 'the worship of idols was forbidden'. He remained an Anglican until the conclusion of the civil war, during which he fought for Biafra. He then joined a Cherubim and Seraphim church in Owerri, only to leave dissatisfied with 'inconsistencies between doctrine and the practices of other members'. In 1972, while he continued to struggle with religious questions, he took a job in Lagos as an accounts clerk in the federal Ministry of Finance. There, for the first time, he found himself regularly in the presence of Muslims. Two subsequent events led him to abandon his long-standing and, he said, unfounded distrust and hatred of Muslims.

First, while alone in his sleeping room, and 'for no reason', he began to shout, in English, 'My name is Abdullah.' Soon after, he dreamed that he 'was supposed to become a Muslim.'10 This led him to find a teacher in Lagos, a southern Muslim, who converted him in 1973. That same week, in response to his questions of how to learn more about his new religion, other Muslims suggested he visit the renowned cleric Sheikh Abubakar Mahmud Gumi in Kaduna. For a year he studied

10 For a discussion of the significance of dreams in Islam in Africa see Fisher (1979).

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with the sheikh twice a day, living in the grounds of the sheikh's home. Sheikh Gumi provided him with a room and board, and Okere raised spending money by opening an evening school for adults teaching basic literacy in English.

Sheikh Gumi urged him not to return to Lagos, arguing that as a southerner well grounded in both Christianity and Islam his talents should be cultivated with further study. The sheikh, a central personality in the Jama'atul Nasril Islam and a founder of the fundamentalist 'Yan Izala society, arranged a scholarship for Okere at Jama'at al-Da'wah al-Islamiyya in Libya, where he travelled in 1974. He remained there, in Bengazi, for two and a half years, studying Islam in English. Then, on a scholarship from the Libyan Ministry of Education, he moved to the science faculty at Al-Fattah University, where, again studying in English, he took a bachelor's degree in animal husbandry in 1981. For several months during his time as a student he preached Islam on Libyan television in an English-language broadcast directed at foreigners. After receiving his degree, he worked for the Libyan Ministry of Agriculture as a farm manager for three years, which gave him the chance to save money. During his stay in Libya he was also able to visit several European and North African countries, though he was not able to make the hajj.

In 1984 Okere returned to Nigeria. He performed the year of National Youth Service required of university graduates before returning to his home village of Egbele Obube and took a job as a teacher. The sole Muslim in the village, he used the money he had saved in Libya to buy land on which he built a small mosque and set about proselytising. He was able to use the prestige that his travels and financial resources conferred to insinuate himself into local politics. This further raised his local profile, and by 1990 he had fifteen converts. Perhaps surprisingly, he was elected chairman of the village's national union, the Egbele Obube Improvement Society.

In 1991 Okere took a job teaching in a secondary school in Kano. By chance both the school and Okere's rented living space were a few hundred metres from the IMC meeting centre in Dakata. His wife, an Igbo Christian at the time of their marriage who has since converted, remained in Egbele Obube with their two children, where she oversaw the proselytising efforts associated with the mosque. Okere served a term as secretary of the IMC, and in 1992 was one of the teachers who led the group's classes for recent converts. His close connection with his home community continued, and in 1993 he assumed the presidency of the Kano chapter of the Egbele Obube town union. While very few Igbo-identified Muslims participate in their town unions, Okere's social and economic standing at home appears to have insulated him from the ridicule and marginalisation other Igbo Muslims say they face in union meetings. These difficulties reflect the fact that unions, like the communities they represent, are composed almost entirely of Chris- tians, and the meetings usually contain Christian opening and closing prayers and blessing of food. More important, they also feature the ceremonial and social consumption of alcohol.

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Okere, who does not speak Hausa, was ambivalent about the phenomenon of Igbo Hausanisation. On one hand, he echoed stories I heard from several of the ward heads in the old city about Igbo traders who, both before and after the civil war, nominally converted to Islam in order to facilitate their trading activities but later recanted." The 'stain of hypocrisy' left by these 'pretenders', he said, contributes to the decision by some Igbos converts to Hausanise and thereby avoid association with less ingenuous Igbo converts.12 For him, however, the decision to Hausanise or remain Igbo was an individual one. 'They are my people. I will not segregate or condemn them.'

Malam Ali Chuks Ali Muhammad Chuks came to Kano in 1973, a participant in the large-scale Igbo migration to Kano and other northern cities that followed the civil war. Born in Ikeduru in 1945, he completed primary school before moving to Port Harcourt to work. He remained there until the crises of 1966-67. He fought in the Biafran army, and after the war's end he returned to his village. The harshness of life in the post- war east motivated him to try the north. Like many first-time migrants in the years after the war, he sought assistance from a relative who had lived in Kano before the war, and who had been able to reclaim property he had left there in 1966. With the help of his relative, he found work with a European construction firm and earned promotion to foreman. After working as an independent contractor in 1978-79, he took a job in 1980 as a security guard at Bayero University, a federal institution. That year, in Bayero's heavily Islamic atmosphere, and with the help of a Muslim friend from the southern city of Calabar, he converted.

Until 1978 Chuks lived in Sabon Gari; that year he moved to a recently settled area at Kabuga, just inside the city wall, opposite the university grounds. His wife, whom he married in 1979 and who joined him in Kano in1980, also converted. Like Abdullahi Okere, he would not reveal the given name he used prior to conversion. 'That man is gone,' he said. After his conversion he became known as Malam Ali. His conversion strained his relationship with his family and also caused him to stop attending the meetings of his town union in Kano.

After occasional meetings with other Igbo Muslims, sometimes facilitated by Hausa or other non-Igbos, Malam Ali and nine other Igbo converts formed the IMC. He was elected the group's first president and still held the position in 1998. Working at the university and living in a predominantly Hausa area at the time of his conversion, he adopted Hausa habits of dress. He maintained them until 1994, when protracted

11 For a discussion of economic incentives for conversion among non-Muslim Hausa see Last (1979).

12 An example of this is the case of Chief Arthur Nzeribe, whose much-publicised conversion was scheduled to take place at the Emir's palace in Kano on 19 December 1989, Nzeribe never appeared.

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discussions in IMC meetings led him and several other members to change their mode of dress slightly, away from conscious emulation of Hausa styles and toward the similar but distinct types of gown preferred by southern Muslims. They also embraced other styles of dress associated with Igbos generally, though this does not appear to have extended to Western dress. He pointed out that many Igbos are suspicious of Hausa proselytisers for fear that they are 'trying to make them Hausa. I will show them that Islam is the religion of God and not the religion of the Hausa. I will speak to them in my language.'

In 1995 the IMC took a major step toward getting its message out when Kano City Television (CTV) agreed to broadcast a weekly programme by the group. The arrangement followed the February beheading of an Igbo, Gideon Akaluka, who lived in the old city by a mob of Shi'ite Muslims for defiling a copy of the Qu'ran. Malam Ali said that the incident had shocked the IMC and motivated them to approach broadcasters. The half-hour programme, which Malam Ali hosted, is aired on Monday evenings at eight. On the air Malam Ali and other IMC members, including, once, Hajiya Amina, discussed topics such as Islamic views on marriage, the religious obligations of a Muslim, and Bible-based arguments for Islam as the true religion. The programme was in English and Igbo, with members who spoke English translating the comments of those who did not. Malam Ali became something of a local celebrity because of the programmes. However, the high cost of incidental expenses, notably transport, led to the suspension of the broadcasts after a few months. He has continued to host a radio programme on CTV's FM sister station, for thirty minutes at 1.00 p.m. on Fridays. Kano's affiliate of the national NTA network has also approached the group about putting on a regular programme.

Early in 1997 the IMC was able to build a small mosque just outside the wall, in Kabuga. At that time Malam Ali, who had left his position at Bayero University, was earning his living by supplying sand and laterite to construction sites. The owner of the truck he used, a Hausa, offered to rent Malam Ali accommodation when the house he had been renting was sold. He also offered the IMC office space in the same building, and, more important, gave them money to build a small mosque near by. Though the IMC eventually gave up the office space because of money problems, the mosque remains active. Though there are no Friday services, IMC members preach there in English and Igbo, and have attracted a modest following. For the time being, the fortunes of the IMC and of Malam Ali appear to be closely tied.

Malam Yunusa Ukatu Yunusa Ukatu was born in Nnewi in 1965. He came to Kano as an apprentice electrician in 1982, only to return east the following year. He returned to Kano in 1987, living, as before, in Sabon Gari but operating a small store inside the walled city. Discussions with Hausa Muslims who lived near the shop led him to convert in 1988. Though he spoke little Hausa, he moved into the Jakara ward of the old city, adjacent to Kurmi market, the city's oldest. In 1994 he was operating a small store

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near his house for an overwhelmingly Hausa clientele. Ukatu said at the time that only two of the approximately forty electrical supply shops operated by Igbos in the old city, many of them along Sabon Titi, a major thoroughfare, were run by converts.

Unlike most other Igbo converts, his family supported him in his decision to embrace Islam. They did so, he said, because under the influence of Islam 'I calmed down from my wild days.' He maintained close ties with his family at home, though none has followed him in conversion. In 1994 he was an inactive member of his town union, and contributed funds to its development activities, though he did not attend the meetings of the Kano branch, which he said are unIslamic.

According to a number of Igbo Muslim men, those who convert before marrying face the problem that there is only a relatively small and highly dispersed pool of Igbo Muslim women. This is particularly true among migrants, historically disproportionately male, who have tended to rely on home connections to facilitate marriage. If, as seems likely, Igbo men convert at a higher rate than women, the disparity is clear. Informal networks facilitate a large share of the contacts migrants make. Interestingly, in Ukatu's case, the intermediaries were Hausa rather than Igbo. He was married in September 1994 to an Igbo woman from a town near his own home town. When her family alienated her for converting, she associated herself closely with Hausa Muslims in Jos. Through a series of unsolicited Hausa-to-Hausa contacts between Kano and Jos the two eventually met.

CONCLUSION

The most basic conclusion to draw from the available data is that, with the passage of time and changes in the national political and social environment, it has become less hazardous for Igbo men to identify themselves simultaneously as Muslims and Igbos than it was a generation ago. There is no evidence to support the idea that the assimilation of Igbos to Hausa identity is a thing of the past, though it is clear that present-day Igbo converts have access to a broader array of support networks than was the case before the civil war. Tension between Igbo and Muslim identities remain, but pressure on converts to sever links with home and family, and their sense of being Igbo, have diminished. While some converts remain reluctant to engage with the organisations so central to the community life of Igbo migrants, others have. In 1998, for example, Alhaji Abdullahi Ezeobinwa was reportedly a member of the eze cabinet of Kano's largest Igbo organisation, the Igbo Community Association (ICA), which brings together the various town unions represented in Kano. The cabinet is composed of members who hold chieftaincy titles, and performs a number of administrative and advisory functions for the ICA. Alhaji Ezeobinwas was not, however, a member of the IMC. On the other hand, as the marriage of Yunusa Ukatu demonstrates, it is also clear that, even for Igbos who resist Hausanisation, Hausa-based networks can play an important role. Likewise, Abdullahi Okere's important association with

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Sheikh Gumi developed because of the intervention of non-Igbo Muslims, and Malam Ali's efforts to build an Igbo-speaking mosque depended on Hausa connections. The 1997-98 experience of convert Haruna Ofunke provides another example of articulation between Igbo and Hausa networks. After deciding to relocate to Kano, and curious about the support networks accessible to him there, an Igbo contact in Onitsha suggested he approach the emir upon his arrival. The palace directed him to the Fagge ward head, who in turn sent him to Eze 0. T. Nnadi, the 'traditional' ruler of Kano's Igbos. The eze, who is not a Muslim, referred him to Alhaji Ezeobinwa, who in turn directed him to the IMC, whose broadcasts Ofunke had by then seen. In 1998 Ofunke was living in the same house as Malam Ali and was active in the IMC.

My research on the Kano Igbo community in general in the years following the civil war points to an Igbo population profoundly less organised during the 1970s and early 1980s than it had been before the war. Before the war Kano's branch of the Ibo Union, the forerunner of the ICA, was the centre of Igbo community life. As one Hausa informant in Panshekara, near Kano, told me, cutting ties with one's town union-and by extension the Ibo Union-was for many Hausas the surest sign of an Igbo's intention to live as a Hausa. On the other hand, during the decade that followed the war, personal rehabilitation and community reconstruction overrode most other concerns, and individuals found themselves able to associate and conduct their affairs in ways that might have earned them censure by their town unions before the war. In such a climate, seeds of religious change that might otherwise have withered were able to germinate and flower.

The other half of the Igbo Muslim story remains almost completely untouched. One wonders how the continuum of assimilation and assertion manifests itself among women of Igbo origin. In addition to those who marry Hausa men in Kano, few though they probably are, there are almost certainly women who convert after marrying Hausa men who travel to Igboland or elsewhere, and others who, like the wife of Yunusa Okatu, convert outside marriage. Where male converts in Kano have the Igbo Muslim Community, female converts to Islam do not appear to have a formal organisation. Nevertheless, they are almost certainly participants in networks that link them with each other, with Muslim men and with non-Igbo Muslim women. These and other questions await the attention of someone able to operate on the other side of the gender divide.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research for this article was conducted as part of a larger study of Kano Igbo community, and was supported by Social Science Research Council and Fulbright-Hays fellowships, and by Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster PA.

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REFERENCES

Adamu, Mahdi. 1978. The Hausa Factor in West African History. New York: Longman.

Afigbo, A. E. 1981. Ropes of Sand: studies in Igbo history and culture. London: Longman.

Akoshile, M., and Ummuna, I. 1993. 'Igbo Muslims: their trials and triumphs', Citizen 4 (40), 10-19.

Doi, A. 1984. Islam in Nigeria. Zaria: Gaskiya Corporation. Ekechi, Felix. 1989. Tradition and Transformation in Eastern Nigeria: a

sociopolitical history of Owerri and its hinterland, 1902-47. Kent OH: Kent State University Press.

Falola, Toyin. 1998. Violence in Nigeria. Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press.

Fisher, Humphrey. 1979. 'Dreams and conversion in black Africa', in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam. New York: Holmes & Meier.

Gilliland, Dean. 1986. African Religion Meets Islam. New York: University Press of America.

Hiskett, Mervyn. 1984. The Development of Islam in West Africa. London: Longman.

Isichei, Elizabeth. 1976. A History of the Igbo People. New York: St Martin's Press.

Last, D. M. 1979. 'Some economic aspects of conversion in Hausaland (Nigeria)', in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam. New York: Holmes & Meier.

Miles, William. 1994. Hausaland Divided: colonialism and independence in Nigeria and Niger. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Nnoli, Okwudiba. 1978. Ethnic Politics in Nigeria. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Press.

Onwubu, Chukwuemeka. 1975. 'Ethnic identity, political integration and national development: the Igbo diaspora in Nigeria', Journal of Moder African Studies 13 (4), 399-413.

Ottenberg, Simon. 1971. 'A Moslem Ibo village', Cahiers d'etudes africaines 11 (2), 231.

Paden, John. 1973. Religion and Political Culture in Kano. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Salamone, Frank. 1975. 'Becoming Hausa: ethnic identity change and its implications for the study of ethnic pluralism and stratification', Africa 45 (4), 410-23.

Smock, Audrey. 1971. Ibo Politics: the role of ethnic unions in eastern Nigeria. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Van den Bersselaar, Dmitri. 1997. 'Creating "Union Ibo": missionaries and the Igbo language', Africa 67 (2), 273-95.

-1998. 'In Search of Igbo Identity: language, culture and politics in Nigeria, 1900-66.' PhD thesis, Leiden.

INTERVIEWS

Kano: Alhaji Dauda Adamu (Yakasai ward head), 8 September 1994; Muhammad Anyanwu, 14 and 15 September 1994; Alhaji Aminu Sharif Bappa, 29 September and 1 October 1994, 10 July 1998; Alhaji Bala Bello (Unguwar Gini ward head), 22 August 1994; Malam Ali Chuks, 15 November 1993, 14 January and 14 September 1994;

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Malam Ali Chuks and Haruna Ofunke, 6 July 1998; Malam Yusuf Umaru Dala (Dala ward head), 20 July 1994; Alhaji Usman Shehu Kazaure, 4 September' 1994; Alhaji Adamu Baba Muhammad (Nassarawa ward head) and Malam Ibrahim Kuji, 24 August 1994; Alhaji Sani Nababa, 1 October 1994; Abdullah Okere, 15 and 30 September 1994; Alhaji Abbas Sanusi (Wamban Kano, senior counsellor to the Emir of Kano), 1 September 1994; Yunusa Okatu, 14 February 1994.

Panshekara: Alhaji Garba Tsoho, Alhaji 'Likita' Nahiru Ringim, Alhaji Balla Isiyaku and Alhaji Musa Garko, 5 June 1994.

ABSTRACT

Before the civil war, conversion to Islam for Igbo men resident in the predominantly Hausa city of Kano in northern Nigeria usually meant becoming Hausa. More recent converts, however, have retained their Igbo identity and created an organisation, the Igbo Muslim Community. Three case studies from the first group detail the process and criteria of becoming Hausa, including immersion in Hausa economic and social networks; three case studies from the second group demonstrate that, while Hausa-centred networks remain important, converts have worked to construct new, Igbo- centred support structures. The watershed in the changing relationship between religious and ethnic affiliation for Igbo converts is the end of the war in 1970 and resultant changes in Igbo perceptions of Muslims, and changes in Igbo community structures.

RESUME

Avant la guerre civile, se convertir a l'Islam signifiait habituellement devenir Haoussa pour les hommes Ibo residant a Kano, ville a majorite Haoussa du Nord du Nigeria. Des convertis ont cependant recemment conserve leur identite Ibo et cree une organisation intitulee Ibo Muslim Community (Communaute musulmane Ibo). Trois etudes de cas concernant le premier groupe decrivent en detail le processus et les criteres d'adoption de l'identite Haoussa, y compris l'immersion dans les reseaux economiques et sociaux Haoussa; trois etudes de cas portant sur le second groupe montrent que, bien que les reseaux Haoussa demeurent importants, les convertis ont oeuvre pour creer de nouvelles structures de soutien aux Ibo. Le tournant d6cisif du changement de rapport entre l'affiliation religieuse et ethnique des convertis Ibo est la fin de la guerre en 1970, et avec elle le changement d'idee que se font les Ibo des musulmans et l'evolution des structures communautaires Ibo.

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