'TERROR AGAINST TERROR': 9/11 OR 'KANO WAR' IN THE NIGERIAN ELECTRONIC PRESS?

Misty L. Bastian

DATES IN (AND OUT OF) OUR COLLECTIVE MEMORY

There are deep continuities with the past, despite the claim that September 11 represented a major historical rupture both because the United States was attacked and because it announced merely the beginning of a campaign of terrorism that fundamentally threatens global well-being.

(Lutz 2002: 731)

September 11, 2001 is now a date in our collective memory, but who knows tomorrow?

(from a Nigerian editorial commemorating 9/11, 2001; Anonymous 2002)

As most media-connected people in the world know, on 11 September 2001, in the commercial heart of one of the most powerful of global centres, New York City, two commandeered jetliners crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Just over 2,000 people died as the towers collapsed, while more thousands barely escaped and hundreds were injured as they ran away from the site of the devastation. At roughly the same time, almost 200 military and civilian workers at the Pentagon in Washington, DC also lost their lives when a third commercial jet dived into the side of their well-fortified building. Yet more people died on a fourth flight that crashed during what we are now told was a struggle between passengers and hijackers over rural Pennsylvania. Almost simultaneously powerful members of the US government and North American media pundits proclaimed these tragic events an 'Attack on America' and began to speculate about the identity or identities of those responsible, who were denounced as terrorists and madmen.

Before night fell on 11 September, people in the US were being assured that this was the day that 'everything changed'. By 12 September plans were clearly underway not only to attempt to rescue whoever was alive in what remained of the three destroyed buildings but also to move towards a more militarized or, depending on one's ideological stance, a more secure 'homeland'. Throughout the North American media during the weeks following what became known simply as '9/11', working-class men in dangerous jobs were lionized – not insignificantly the very class of men who would a short time later be expected to make up the bulk of the newly marshalled fighting force for the country – and women of all classes, but particularly those of the Euro-American middle class, were portrayed as suffering but stoic wives (now widows) and mothers of the 'heroes of September 11th'.

Attention in the US, never very international in its scope, became fixed on internal damage and the moralizing rhetoric of retribution against those perceived as 'against us'. This discourse of alterity quickly fastened itself onto the Muslim world in general and to one 'terrorist mastermind' in particular, the wealthy Saudi militant Osama bin Laden. Again, as the world is all too well aware, the US began a campaign 'to crush bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization' – which manifested itself in the subsequent, officially undeclared but nonetheless brutal war in Afghanistan. Finally, the Taliban regime of Afghanistan was officially ousted from power, but the whereabouts and ultimate fates of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, bin Laden and several of his key lieutenants remain a mystery over two years later.

As fewer people in the world know – because, even when it was covered in the global press, it was as a strictly 'local' event – on 13 October 2001, in the commercial heart of the northern region of one of the United States' allies and peripheral trading partners, Kano, Nigeria, hundreds of 'yan daba (ethnically Hausa) Muslims marched through the streets around the city's Sabon Gari (foreign quarter), singing the praises of Allah, holding up posters decorated with the image of Osama bin Laden and, according to some reports, brandishing machetes. This, in turn, led to violent confrontations between the bands of 'yan daba and their young, southern Nigerian Christian counterparts (mostly Igbo but including a smattering of Yoruba-speaking youth) who came out of Sabon Gari to 'defend' their territory. Shops were looted and burned, as were local offices of national media houses, and mosques as well as churches were wrecked. Both the police and the armed forces stationed in Kano were called out to deal with the rioters. These official, government-sanctioned 'peacekeepers' felt no compunction about using live ammunition against people they found on the streets, although they later claimed that they tried tear gas first and found it ineffectual (Musa 2001a). The violence was not completely quelled until the 14th, or thereabouts, and scattered incidents of trouble between inhabitants of Sabon Gari and other sections of Kano continued well into the next year.

A couple of years after what some Nigerians called the 'Kano War', the death toll from the incident remains in dispute but has been placed unofficially at around 200. Nigerians are sceptical about that number, however, since they are aware of the federal government's desire to downplay what occurred in Kano that weekend – particularly as it followed hard on the heels of another, even deadlier moment of urban unrest in Jos (a city to the south of Kano with a large population of both Christians and Muslims). To many southern Nigerians, the events of 13 October, alongside the pre-9/11 carnage in Jos, represent yet another example of what they like to call 'Muslim extremism' in the northern states. Because of the supposedly local character of the events, then, it is necessary to give a more detailed description of the 'Kano War' (or 'Kano Riots') than I have above of the events that have been abbreviated in global discourse simply as '9/11'. In the following description, I will attempt to demonstrate how the supposedly local was necessarily entangled with the global from its beginning.

THE 'KANO WAR': HOMEGROWN HEROES OR HOMEGROWN TERRORISTS?

On Friday, 12 October 2001, after Jama'at prayers in Kano, the one-month anniversary of the fall of New York's 'twin towers' was commemorated by a series of rousing sermons from Hausa Shi'ite scholars, some of whom...