Boko Haram, coupeurs de route and slave-raiding: identities and violence in a Central African borderland

Summary

To this point, most analyses of Boko Haram have stressed its origins in Salafi/Wahhabi radicalism in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State in northeastern Nigeria. Equally important to the development of this organisation, however, has been its utilisation of frontier zones in the Lake Chad Basin, as refuges and areas for the development of political and military power. In this paper, I will argue that aspects of Boko Haram activities can be profitably understood through the deep-time examination of frontier phenomena in this region, phenomena that stretch back into the period of predatory state formation in the early-/mid-second millennium AD. These include particularly the slave raiding that played so central a role in the formation of regional cultural landscapes, but also the banditry – a closely related phenomenon, but involving non-state-sanctioned violence – that is equally attested in early historical sources. Igor Kopytoff’s ‘internal frontier’ model saw such interstices between states as laboratories for the creation of new social and political forms. The horrific violence being played out in northeastern Nigeria today vividly illustrates the kinds of social disruptions that accompanied those processes in the last prehistoric period.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interrogating Identity: The Fluidity of Social Boundaries in African Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage