It all began about Fifteen years ago, at a conference organized by the then Centre for the Study of Nigerian Languages, B.U.Kano, when Danmasanin Kano, Alhaji Maitama Sule challenged anybody with a dissenting view that the Hausa people did not originate from Ethiopia to come out for a debate. None took the gauntlet, despite the murmurs and hissings.
It was that challenge that spurred me into action. I love history, I so much love the past that I sometimes refused to acknowledge the present and future as a necessary ingredients of my whole-self. Consequently, since then I have been all out to disprove that theory or amplify it.
The other angle to the question was thrown at me by my child, my sparring partner in our ‘local’ intellectual interactions. He said to me when I bought my ticket to the US and got my BTA at an exorbitant rate, for a research visit to the Genographic Project office, Washington DC; ‘but Sir, after all the research and findings, and you are able to establish your origin and by extension that of your ethnic group the Hausa or Hausa/Fulani, then what?
I was ready for that, because so many people kept asking similar ones in the last one decade. If you are able to prove that Bayajidda died nearly 70 years before he reached Hausaland, of what significance is that? If you are able to trace the remotest settlements of the Hausa people to present day Israel and Palestine, so what? If you manage to get your facts right that the Hausa people were pagans, ‘arna’ before becoming anything else, then what?
I said to him what I have been saying to myself for so many years, ‘for one not to know what took place before one was born is for that person to remain for ever a child’. In that same manner, for one not to know his ancestry… It Is just like he was never born….. dead…. That is why I am doing this. It gives me pleasure. It satisfies my curiosity. It educates my soul and above all it will open whole lots of windows and opportunities for myself, family and my students.
The deed is done!
- Prof Malumfashi teaches at Kaduna State University (KASU)
