'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 may or may not have used the term jihad (in this instance, meaning a disposition towards holy war) to describe the state of local Muslim discontent with a perceived southern, Christian Nigerian disrespect for Shari'a law. It seems clear from published reports and interviews with participants given directly after the 'war' that the immediate American judgment of Osama bin Laden's guilt was used by these mallams as an example of Christian hypocrisy and wrongful power in the world. There were certainly specific remarks in the sermons aimed at how such Christian hypocrisy was currently manifesting itself even in Kano, historically one of the most Muslim of Nigerian cities.

According to most of the Nigerian media, northern and southern, the march that took place on Saturday, the 13th, following people's overnight consideration of the sermons, was meant to be a peaceful assembly – more along the lines of a demonstration of support for the Muslims' Afghani brothers-in-religion than the beginning of jihad itself in the city. However, a quarrel of some sort between Hausa Muslims and Igbo Christians near the Sabon Gari Market, and the rumour that Muslims were fleeing from the Sabon Gari quarter in fear of their lives, energized the 'yan daba marchers and brought them into the vicinity of Sabon Gari, carrying weapons. There they were met by youthful, male inhabitants of the quarter who, having heard of the proximity of 'yan daba, had picked up their own weaponry and were prepared to fight. By the evening of the 13th, a number of churches and mosques, along with places of business, media houses, private residences and automobiles, were charred ruins; over one hundred people were officially considered to be dead or missing; hundreds more were being treated for their wounds or were hiding in Sabon Gari police stations and the nearby army barracks.

In the next couple of days, Nigerian President Olasegun Obasanjo, speaking from Paris, where he had gone on a diplomatic trip, would declare, 'I don't worry' about the violence and would return at his leisure to tour Sabon Gari on foot and ringed by bodyguards: not because he was also generally 'unworried' about the mood of his constituents, but because his bulletproofed vehicle had a flat tyre. In Sabon Gari Obasanjo talked with looted businessmen, religious leaders and refugees from the 'war'. He would also find himself on at least one occasion surrounded by a large and indignant Igbo-speaking group who chanted, 'Give us Biafra!' and other, anti-federal government slogans. Directly replicating some of the North American discourse around 9/11, Nigerian media would dub those people who sheltered others of a different ethnicity during the riots the 'heroes of October 13th', while the 'yan daba were stigmatized as homegrown 'terrorists' in the largely Christian south while being represented mainly as 'undesirable elements', 'street hooligans', or 'unemployed youths' in the Muslim north. Northern media also explicitly included the Christian inhabitants of Sabon Gari in their discussion of hooliganism, sometimes passing over any suggestion that Muslims had initiated the violence. Southern media initially heaped blame on both camps but soon came to a more defensive posture and identified most of the 'terrorists' with a particular religion, Islam, and most of the 'heroes' with another, Christianity.

During the time that has passed since both 11 September and 13 October 2001, these initial discursive tropes have grown even more complicated as different segments of the Nigerian population have reacted to the outcome of the US invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent war with Iraq. There are also deepening tensions between northern and southern Nigeria over the continued implementation of Shari'a law in northern states and a growing concern over how Nigeria as a nation should position itself towards the US and that country's supposed enemies, the majority of whom appear to be Muslim. A country largely made up of people who, today, associate themselves with reformist versions of both Islam and Christianity, and who maintain close ties with co-religionists across the world (Marshall-Fratani 2001), Nigeria's multiple understandings of the 'war on terrorism' offer us a particularly salient example of the ways that '9/11' has, indeed, become a part of what the Nigerian editorialist above calls 'our collective memory', while also raising the problem of why an event as telling of global temperature as the 'Kano War' and its aftermaths should be largely ignored – or dismissed as more 'ethnic tension' on a continent infamous, among Western nations, for that easy-to-apply but ultimately empty sobriquet.

The sections below will therefore explore how Nigerian reactions to 'the global war against terrorism' and '9/11' blended into local media representations of the 'Kano War' or 'Kano Riots' of 13 October 2001, then explicate how these representations continue to be significant for Nigerian print media discussion of the country's political economy and religious life. I am particularly interested in how an historical event in the supposed metropole was incorporated into everyday discourse and made familiar to African people with global ties and interests, even though those ties and interests are rarely recognized in the metropole itself. The chapter will therefore focus on how global media sources reverberate – and certain events leave indelible impressions – within local media, helping to shape even the internal, political discourses of what Mbembe (2001) calls the 'postcolony'. I will also consider how terms like 'terrorism' have different valences in different locations and, indeed, how global wars become – in the understanding of people in places like Nigeria – very much subsumed into local ones. The next section will look specifically at how northern and southern Nigerian editorial reactions to the 'Kano War' offer an important insight into the penetration and reshaping of '9/11' tropes in a place where reformist religious struggles are not abstract but can become a matter of life and death on any day, not simply on two days in September and October of 2001.

REPORTING THE 'KANO WAR' IN A CLIMATE OF '9/11'

[The Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alhaji Sule Lamido] 'came and was arrogantly speaking Hausa to announce to us why the government was in support of the strike [on the Taliban government of Afghanistan]; he was not persuasive, he was not diplomatic about it, he did not try to educate the people that it was a fight against terrorists. So most commoners immediately saw it as an attack against Islam. I think that was partly the reason why the otherwise peaceful demonstration [of 13 October 2001] degenerated into violence.'

(Anonymous 'Hausa respondent', talking about the Kano disturbances to This Day newspaper reporters, quoted in Momodu and Musa 2001)

[Dr Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, President-General of the Supreme Council for Shari'a in Nigeria] should realize that with the terrorism unleashed on civilisation on September 11, 2001, nobody is safe anywhere in the world. Making ridiculous claims to distract the world from the business of extirpating terrorism is now his personal delusion. Datti Ahmed must be the lone educated Moslem defending bin Laden. And nowhere else in the Moslem world had demonstrations for Afghanistan led to loss of lives except in Kano. But according to Datti Ahmed 'in Kano, Kaduna, Zamfara and other places, bin Laden is celebrated as a quintessential mujaheedin'. ... It is regrettable that Datti Ahmed has chosen to fan the embers of disunity by making inflammatory statements at a critical point[.] Nigeria is in need of national reconciliation and democratic strengthening. Democracy allows the freedom of expression but this right ought to carry along a high sense of responsibility with it.

(Anonymous editorialist for the southern newspaper The Comet, n.d., but clearly written after 13 October 2001)

In the two quotations above – one from an 'on the street' interview with a Hausa-speaking man in Kano a few days after the disturbances and the other an unbridled opinion piece written by a southern Nigerian sometime around the same period – competing paradigms for the causes and consequences of the 'war' are already under construction. These paradigms are hybrid, not monolithic impositions from global media or geopolitics. As such they require careful contextualization, not a snap moral judgment that might suggest that one of the speakers is unabashedly for the US 'war on terrorism', while the other is against it. For instance, while each uses the term 'terrorism' or 'terrorist', and means by that English usage to conjure up all the horror of violent, politically charged acts against innocent persons, neither is using the notion exactly as might an ordinary person in the US.

Both speakers appear to be old enough to have lived through a period that could be described as 'state terrorism' during the late 1980s and 1990s, under the regime of the late General Sani Abacha.

They also both, in all probability, regularly apply the term 'terrorism' – as do many speakers of Nigerian English today – to the continuing tyranny of armed thugs who kill and maim honest citydwellers, opposition politicians and would-be voters trying to register for local and national elections. While the regularity in use of the term may now be greater than ever before in Nigerian public discourse, it is hardly a recent, alien, or abstract concept to most anglophones in the country.

These urban, literate Nigerians were not newly awakened to what Slavoj Zizek (2002: 15) describes, quoting the internationally popular film The Matrix, as 'the desert of the real', even by such a spectacular, global media event as '9/11'. Some understanding of the world certainly did change for Nigerians on 11 September 2001 – in that they were as startled as the rest of world to see the carnage in New York and generally were as sympathetic as any of the US' allies to the horrors of that event – but what changed for Nigerians was emphatically not their comprehension that real terror and violence could be visited upon any unsuspecting person, at any time. This twenty-first-century North American terror was already an old, twentieth-century acquaintance of people who had directly experienced colonialism, neocolonialism, one of the most brutal civil wars of the last hundred years, the militarization of every aspect of the national culture since independence and an insatiable kleptocracy that was nurtured by it all.