Usman dan Fodio's Preaching Spreads

1800

Across the Hausa cities of what is now northern Nigeria, a Fulani scholar named Usman dan Fodio preached a stricter, reforming Islam, gathering students and enemies in equal measure. His sermons against corrupt emirs were laying the kindling for a jihad that would forge the vast Sokoto Caliphate. By 1808 his followers had overthrown the Hausa kings and established the largest state in nineteenth-century West Africa.