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Published in:
2022 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
7. Power, Politics, and Pilgrimage: The Hajj and Colonial Ideology in Nigeria, 1903–1927
Author : Matthew M. Heaton
Published in: The Political Economy of Colonialism and Nation-Building in Nigeria
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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Abstract
This chapter examines the motivations behind the institution of colonial governmental regulation of the overland pilgrimage from Nigeria to Mecca in the early twentieth century. It argues that pilgrimage control in Nigeria, while initially undesirable to colonial officials, ultimately came about as a result of concerns that an unregulated pilgrimage posed significant threats to the political imperatives of indirect rule in northern Nigeria. In so doing, colonial officials in Nigeria, alongside the British Empire and other world governments, were constructing a new political order in which the religious obligation of the hajj became understood as something that state governments had the right and duty to regulate, and which was to be undertaken by subjects of those states. In making this case, this chapter contributes to a growing literature on the history of governmental control over the transnational processes of the hajj both in Africa and the wider world.