THE HISTORIES OF AN ENLIGHTEN RULERBITEMYA SAMBO SONYONGA GARBOSA II GARA DONGA. REIGNED (1931-1982).

Chiefs are busy people, so a colonial chief finding time to write the history of his own people is unusual, and more remarkable when the history he wrote sheds light on an anarchic period of the nineteenth century about which few testimonies were recorded. The chief’s initial research predated his accession and was augmented over more than three decades as otherdemands allowed and his enthusiasm dictated, a pattern of attention which accounts for theoccasionally recursive character of the finally published text to which episodes were added when there was a moment to do so Later a supplementary volume was indeed added to fulfil the author’s wish on completing the first. Garbosa II, the regnal name of Malam Muhamman Bitemya Sambo, the seventh Gara Donga, was the author in Hausa of two volumes: The History and Customs of the Chamba (Labarun Chambawa da Al’amurransu) and, later, The Family Trees of the Garas Donga (Salsalar Sarakunan Donga), which were completed in 1956 and published together shortly thereafter.In what follows, The History and The Family Trees.Garbosa tells us, with the precision characteristic of a diarist for the significant dates of his life,that it was on 21 August 1923 that he began research for the first of these books by seeking permission to speak to the elders from the then Gara, Garbasa II, his paternal cousin and classificatory brother, who had become the sixth Gara Donga two years earlier in 1921. The names of Garbosa’s most important informants, some of whom might still be recognizable to people in Donga, are provided in his introduction and in a single reference later. Supposing, like Livom, that others of Garbosa’s informants had been in their seventies or eighties in the early 1920s, then they would have had first-hand experience of the events of their childhood from the middle to the early second half of the nineteenth century and as adults witnessed events from, say, the 1870s onwards. Garbosa II

who as chief is also one of the protagonists of his own narrative: Muhamman Bitemya Sambo was born in 1902, the seventeenth son (in his listing of them) of the fourth Gara Donga, Sonyonga Garbosa I (reigned 1892-1911), and grandson of Nubumga Donzomga, the second Gara Donga, titled Garbasa I, after whom Donga was named in circumstances. His mother was Aminatu Bagalambiya, a relative of warriors given by the Emir of Bauchi to Nubumga Donzomga . Although his father and mother

were both Muslims, He was educated by the presbyterian Sudan United Mission

(henceforth SUM), for which a mission house had initially been built beside the Donga

marketplace in 1907, where the first ‘regularly organised Church was brought into being’ in

June 1917 (Maxwell 1954: 65-66, 125-26).

3 The future Garbosa II was shaped by the cuttingedge developments of the early twentieth century in West Africa: European conquest and colonialism, the First World War and the invasion of German Kamerun, and mission education; and he grew into adulthood during the heyday of British indirect rule in central Nigeria in which he played a part, witnessing the technological innovations of the time. When Capt. F.H. Ruxton’s submitted his 1908 Muri Annual Report Christian education was in its infancy Bitemya Sambo’s formal education began, he writes, at the age of eight or nine, in 1910-11, so just a couple of years after Ruxton’s jaundiced report and perhaps not accidentally coinciding with his father’s death in 1911. The boy had been entrusted to relatives. By this time, at the age of thirteen, Garbosa was able to ‘read a few books’, then: At the beginning of 1918, the young Malam Sambo accompanied the Rev. C.L. Whitman

and his wife to Lokoja, Baro and Minna on their way to the USA on leave. After a couple of

adventures trading kola nuts and buffalo hides, he next attended the ETC (Itisi in its Hausaized

 run by the SUM to train as a teacher. Whitman then sent him to the Lucy Memorial

School in Wukari (which commemorated Lucy Eveline Kumm, the wife of the pioneer of the SUM, Dr H. Karl W. Kumm, who had died soon after arriving in Nigeria. Once qualified as a teacher, people addressed him as Malam Sambo. The young man’s personal qualities gained him trust widely: from the missionaries (Malam Sambo’s baptism in the River Donga had taken place on 29 December 1920, four years after his traditional circumcision),

from British colonial officials, and from his own people.The future Garbosa II continued to grasp opportunities presented to him to see more of Nigeria. After accompanying Miss Rimmer in 1923, he undertook further trading trips in Nigeria with his brothers in 1925, on return from which Captain Warren, then the Assistant District Officer, paid him and his younger brother Malam Umaru Bodinga Sonyonga, also become a teacher, to conduct a survey of Donga country and write it up in the then District administrative centre of Ibi. He must have acquitted himself well: when in 1926 the government anthropologist C.K.Meek visited Donga, Malam Sambo was paid to write out the seasonal round of events in Donga, and Meek was sufficiently impressed to ask for him to continue to help him in Wukari with his work on the Jukun. Garbosa relates that the SUM missionary and later chronicler of its history, J. Lowry Maxwell, took him to Wukari on his motorcycle on 8 January 1927, where

Meek enlisted him as an assistant on 18 January 1927; together they journeyed as far as Yola in Adamawa via Jalingo, the capital of the Muri Emirate, and on to the Bachama chiefdom of Numan, which was the Danish SUM’s regional headquarters. Six months spent in Adamawa took Malam Sambo as far south of Yola as the Verre Hills (but apparently not the short distance further south to visit the Chamba living there). Returning, he and Meek reached Kaduna Junction on 10 September 1927, where Malam Sambo was released from service at his own request and travelled home after seeing the cities of Kano and Zaria and bidding farewell to Meek in Kaduna. Meek had apparently taken a shine to the younger man who, for his part, wrote that he learned much from their nightly discussions. Their researches were published in 1931 by Meek in the two-volumes of Tribal Studies in Northern Nigeria, which included chapters on the Verre and Chamba (predominantly those of Donga), and in the Jukun monograph A Sudanese Kingdom.

The future Garbosa’s work for the colonial government resumed on return from his

travels with Meek. Meeting up with Captain Best, he started work at Ibi and was sent back to Donga where he completed another (apparently second) survey, again with his brother Umaru Bodinga Sonyonga. On 5 June 1928 (as Garbosa scrupulously notes), R.M. (Rupert) East, the Provincial Superintendent of Education, took him to open Wukari Elementary School, where he was subsequently joined by Malam Umaru Bodinga Sonyonga, who was shortly sent in 1930 to open Takum Elementary School. Then, on 15 November 1930, Donga Elementary School was opened under his younger brother, Malam Atiku Garkumyebiya Sonyonga, who had previously succeeded Malam Umaru Bodinga Sonyonga as District

Scribe. The introduction of education was a family affair: based in Wukari, Malam Sambo

oversaw the schools in Donga and Takum run by the two brothers who had been his constant

companions. As he would later sum up:

To be continued.