THE LAST EMBRACE BEFORE THEY LEFT

A centuries-old bond shatters, leaving only the memories of a shared life between Hausa and Yoruba in the Kano old town.

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What I cannot forget, or perhaps what my heart refuses to let fade, is one quiet morning when I saw Maman Yusufa step into our house in the early morning. It was unusual. You could tell from her eyes that her soul was unsettled. There was something turbulent moving in her mind. Yet even in that quiet emotional chaos, she had not forgotten to arrange her scarf across her shoulders. That scarf was her dignity. I had always seen her with it since I started becoming aware of my surroundings.

Some memories do not simply stay with you. They live inside you. They settle deep like a strong root in the depths of the earth, holding a gigantic tree whose branches extend into the sky. That is how the morning of Maman Yusufa’s visit sits in my chest. 

When she stepped in, she called my mother by a familiar nickname she had given her: “Uwar Biyu (the mother of twins).” The title carried warmth, respect, and the intimacy of women who raised each other’s children. But that morning, it conveyed something else.

She never came so early. When there was urgency, she would simply raise her voice from her side of the compound wall and we would be sent to do whatever she requested.  That wall marked our separation but also symbolised our connection. She would call on my siblings or me to collect sweets or spices or to help her with something when her children weren’t around.

That morning, she came by herself.

The town was restless. Rumours were spreading fast. Violence was stirring in Sabon Gari. At first, it felt distant, but fear has a way of arriving before the danger it anticipates. And that fear had already reached Maman Yusufa and other Yoruba families in my neighbourhood. 

When she entered our house, she spoke gently, careful with her words as if they might betray her fear if she let them slip too quickly. “I want to sell you my small cupboard,” she said. “It is too fine for the market. You will make better use of it.” She explained that she needed some money. I can’t remember how much it cost to complete her fare.

I did not see when the money changed hands. But I remember the cupboard. Smooth, beautiful, and brown. It stayed with us for years, long after the story behind it had become a memory, outliving the world that birthed it.

Maman Yusufa took the money and stepped out of the house. That was her final farewell. I can still see the look on my mother’s face; a tender hope that life would grant them another meeting. But those were the days before phones, before the comfort of saved numbers, before Facebook or WhatsApp or anything that could hold two people together across distance. All they had was hope, thin and trembling. But the reunion they imagined never came.

This is not just a story of Maman Yusufa. It’s a story of how an old world quietly fractured. A story of how a centuries-long coexistence between Hausa and Yoruba families in Kano unravelled under the weight of fear, rumour, and violence between 1999 and 2004. What began with the Sagamu crisis and spread through retaliatory clashes in Lagos and Kano eventually reached the intimate spaces of compounds like ours, transforming neighbours into anxious strangers and turning dawn visits into farewells.

A CHAIN OF TREMORS

The conflicts between the Hausa and Yoruba in Kano, Ogun, and Lagos did not begin with fire. They began with whispers and rumours, with the suspicion that comes from a single misunderstanding repeated too many times. Long before the violence erupted, there were small fractures. But it only takes one spark in a dry forest for a wildfire. What unfolded between 1999 and 2004 was not a single rupture but a chain of tremors, each feeding the next, until an old fabric finally tore. 

To understand why Yoruba communities left Kano in such numbers that newspapers could speak of an “exodus,” one must return to Sagamu in July 1999, when a burial ritual spiralled into violence. It started as a clash over Oro rites. But within hours, it became an ethnic convulsion. Hausa traders were attacked, homes burned, and dozens killed. 

The reprisals came swiftly. Hausa youths, particularly thugs, mobilised. Yoruba-owned shops, kiosks, and vehicles were torched along Zoo Road, Singa, Sabon Gari and the dense commercial arteries of the metropolis. Reports from the period note that by the time security forces restored order, scores lay dead, hundreds were injured, and entire blocks of Yoruba businesses had turned to ash, twisted metal, and burnt walls.

Even then, many Yoruba families stayed. Intermarriages, decades of commerce, and shared urban routines had woven bonds that did not snap easily. But distrust settled and life was never the same. You could only trust a few neighbours, and Maman Yusufa had my mother as one of them. But over the next few years, that tension would be stirred again and again.

In Lagos, 1999 and 2000 brought their own grim theatre: OPC-Hausa clashes in Agege, Ketu, Mile 12, and Idi-Araba. Archived papers chronicled it with a kind of stunned rhythm. Markets burned. Traders fled with children on their backs. In some neighbourhoods, Yoruba and Hausa communities fought pitched battles with machetes, dane guns, and petrol bombs. The casualties ran into the dozens; the displaced into the thousands. 

These Lagos crises were not geographically connected to Kano, but emotionally, they were part of the same unravelling. Reports of a Hausa trader stabbed in Agege reverberated in Sabon Gari. Stories of Yoruba mechanics attacked near Fagge echoed in Ojodu and Shomolu. Nigeria’s two great migratory peoples found themselves mirroring their worst fears of each other.

The violence in Kano resurfaced repeatedly. In 2001, following renewed Lagos clashes, tensions in Kano surged again. The police contained most of it, but not the migration that began beneath the surface. Families quietly sent wives and children to Abeokuta, Ibadan, Akure, and Lagos “until things calm down”.

Then came May 2004, when a dispute erupted in Yelwa, Plateau State. Hundreds were killed, churches were razed, and mosques were burned, triggering nationwide anger. In Kano, protests against the Yelwa killings were hijacked by rioters who attacked Christians and southern minorities. Yoruba and Igbo residents were dragged from buses, shops looted, houses marked and set ablaze. Contemporary reports estimated at least thirty deaths in Kano alone, though community leaders insisted the toll was higher. The then Inspector General of Police visited the city; so did governors from the Southwest, urging calm. But calm no longer meant safety. The newspaper headlines told a clearer truth: “Yoruba, Igbo Flee Kano.” “Still Fleeing.” “Thousands Leave.”

The decision to leave was rarely dramatic. It happened in the soft hours before dawn, as women folded their clothes into sacks, or as a mechanic quietly loaded spare parts into the back of a bus headed for the West. It was the slow conclusion reached by people who had once believed that commerce and neighbourliness were strong enough to hold a city together.

A HISTORY INTERRUPTED

There are cities whose histories are written in stone, and there are others whose histories live in the quiet breath of their people. Kano was the latter. 

For more than five centuries, Hausa and Yoruba families lived in the heart of Kano like two branches sprouting from the same tree. In the old quarters of Jakara, especially Ayagi, life breathed on coexistence. There was even “Sarkin Yarabawa,” the Yoruba king in Kano, a symbol that royal authority itself bowed before the insistence of shared life. There’s also “Sarkin Ayagi”, and it’s still under the custody of Yoruba descendants. People still respect them. The royal residence was renovated in 2024 by a local government chairman, even though it carries the ghost of its former self. 

Historians say Ayagi was never originally Hausa. Farooq Kperogi, a Nigerian scholar, reminded us that the name was a corrupted borrowing from the Nupe word “Eyagi”, which means the marked face, a word the Nupe of Tudun Nufawa (Nupe Hill) brought with them. The Yoruba bore such marks too, so the name clung to them, passed from one tongue to another until it became a fully Hausa word. Out of Eyagi grew Unguwar Ayagi (Ayagi quarters), an entire neighbourhood named after the people who lived within it. Ironically, the name survived even when the people did not.

Although I was not born in Ayagi, the breath of its history reached us where we lived in Aikawa. A trekkable distance separated us. Yoruba families extended from Ayagi into the maze of Jakara (Makwarari, Muskwani, Gyaranya, Tudun Makera, Mazankwarai, etc.), places where the aroma of amala mixed with the scent of tuwon shinkafa, where children learned early that difference was another form of abundance.

I grew up with Yoruba neighbours, some whose names I still remember — Iya Rabi, Maman Kabiru, Olamide, Adejumo, Zubaida — and others whose names I feel but cannot recall. Zubaida, who was older than me, was particularly brilliant. I still remember her fluent Hausa accent. So perfect. So clean. So amazing. I also remember a technician who repaired fridges. I don’t recall his name, but I can see his face in my mind. There were TV, radio and electronics repairers in the ancient Kurmi market. Lots of pharmacies used to be owned by Yorubas in Jakara. There was also a popular Maman Luku who sold bread in the same place. 

We celebrated each other’s weddings. We attended the same naming ceremonies. During Sallah, they visited us; during Christmas, we watched some of them go to church in beautiful colours. Our mothers exchanged spices, our fathers traded goods in the markets, and we children, unburdened by inherited fears, wove friendships and played cards and football together.  

To live as neighbours then was to live as kin — not by blood, but by nearness and by the simple miracle of kindness.

But history has its seasons, and sometimes the season that arrives is one of rupture. The violence that erupted in the early 2000s — fed by the embers of Sagamu, stoked by retaliatory clashes in Lagos and Kano — tore through decades of coexistence. What began as distant news became whispers in compounds, then tension in the markets, then fear in the night. One household left. Then another.

By the time peace returned, the Yoruba presence had thinned. Some families left with hurried steps, others departed quietly. They left behind empty rooms, fading chalk marks on walls, and a history. When I walk through those streets now, something invisible has vanished. It is not merely the people but the pulse that once connected us.

Before the conflict, our lives were intertwined. We ate in each other’s homes. We celebrated each other’s festivals. Our mothers prayed for one another’s children. We mourned together. We rejoiced together. The walls between our houses stood, but trust flowed through them like wind through open windows.

After the conflict, the walls remained, but the windows were shut.

Festivals feel muted now. Weddings seem less vibrant, as if a drum somewhere were missing. Children grow up hearing stories of coexistence instead of breathing it as we once did. A generation that lived in harmony now carries its fading photograph. No statistic can measure this loss. There is no graph for absence. There is no data point for the silence that follows the departure of a people. The soul of a neighbourhood does not appear in census records.

Today, I cannot point to where the Yoruba families of my childhood went. Only once, many years later, did one of them return: a Yoruba woman who had been our neighbour. She came to greet my mother. The embrace between them was long and full of the unspoken weight of years.

HAUNTING DEPARTURE

What does it take to rebuild a shared life once fear has rearranged its architecture?

I ask myself this every time I return to those memories. Kano was never like this. The view that the state is an enclave of conservatives who don’t like to mix with the other is erroneous. We were cosmopolitan and full of people from different parts of the world: the Arabs in Dandalin Turawa, the Nupes in Tudun Nufawa, the Kanuris in Zangon Bare-Bari, the Igbos in Sabon Gari. Kano was a melting pot. 

Imam Ghazali, an Islamic philosopher, wrote that humans destroy with remarkable speed the things that took years of tenderness to build. And he was right. The separation that came after the Sagamu violence and the subsequent Kano clashes did not just remove people from our streets. It removed pieces of our emotional architecture.

It has been more than two decades, yet the pain breathes quietly beneath the skin of the city.

Sometimes, I find myself staring at the renovated buildings that used to house Yoruba neighbours as survivors of a world that no longer exists. And I imagine that somewhere, perhaps in Ibadan or Abeokuta or Lagos, there is a woman who remembers us too. 

The true cost of the conflict is not the number of houses burned. It is not the number of people displaced. It is not even the number of lives lost.

The true cost is the distance created between people who once lived as one.