Imagine living in Kano in the late 1970s and being told that the wristwatch on your arm was not merely a watch.
It was a sign of a corrupt society.
The bicycle that carried you through the crowded streets was not simply transport.
It represented a way of life that should be rejected.
A car was more than a vehicle. A radio was more than a machine. Even the accumulation of money could become a religious problem.
These were among the ideas associated with the followers of Muhammadu Marwa, the controversial preacher better known as Maitatsine, whose movement would eventually plunge Kano into one of the bloodiest religious conflicts in Nigeria’s history.
The strange prohibitions were real, but they were only the visible part of a much larger argument. Maitatsine was challenging established Muslim authorities, Western influence, modern consumption and aspects of the rapidly changing society around him.
His followers were not simply being told what objects they could or could not use.
They were being taught how to live differently from everyone else.
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The Preacher Who Came From Cameroon
Muhammadu Marwa was born in northern Cameroon and eventually moved to Kano, where he established himself as a Qur’anic preacher.
By the 1960s and 1970s, his influence was growing among sections of Kano’s urban poor and among migrants and Qur’anic students known as almajirai.
He was an unusual and increasingly controversial religious figure.
Marwa challenged established Muslim scholars and rejected the authority of religious sources beyond the Qur’an. He criticised practices he considered innovations and attacked the lifestyles of wealthy and politically powerful people.
His nickname, Maitatsine, is commonly translated from Hausa as “the one who damns”, reflecting his reputation for cursing or condemning those who rejected his teachings.
As his following grew, so did his confrontation with the religious establishment and the authorities.
But one of the most striking features of his message was his attitude towards the material world.
Why Would Anyone Reject a Watch?
The wristwatch was one of the objects associated with Maitatsine’s rejection of modern urban life.
This sounds peculiar until the object is placed in its historical setting.
A watch was a manufactured modern item. For Maitatsine, modern manufactured goods could represent a society increasingly influenced by Western values and consumption.
He was particularly critical of wealthy people who displayed their prosperity through the possession of such goods.
His followers were therefore encouraged to reject watches, bicycles and cars.
The issue was not that these objects were physically dangerous.
They were symbols.
The person wearing a watch could be seen as participating in the modern lifestyle Maitatsine believed was corrupting Muslim society.
The bicycle carried a similar meaning.
Instead of simply being a cheap and practical means of transportation, it became associated with the modern urban culture the movement rejected.
The same applied to the automobile, an even more obvious symbol of wealth and status.
Cars Represented More Than Transport
In Kano, a car could say something about its owner’s position in society.
Cars were expensive possessions. They were associated with people who had money, political connections or successful businesses.
Maitatsine’s criticism of cars therefore fitted neatly into his broader attack on wealth and privilege.
His followers were encouraged to avoid excessive material possessions and to have only enough money for their immediate needs.
This created a striking contrast with the behaviour of the wealthy elite whom Maitatsine condemned.
The rich displayed the products of modern prosperity.
His followers were expected to demonstrate their religious commitment by refusing them.
Poverty could therefore acquire a new meaning.
Instead of being merely a condition of economic hardship, it could be presented as evidence of spiritual discipline.
Radios Were Also Part of the Problem
Then there was the radio.
By the 1970s, radio had become an important part of everyday life in Nigeria. It carried news, entertainment, political announcements and religious programmes into homes and communities.
Yet Maitatsine’s movement rejected the radio as another symbol of modern Western influence.
This was significant because radio was not merely a consumer object. It was also a powerful instrument of communication.
Other Muslim scholars could use modern media to spread their teachings.
Maitatsine’s followers, by contrast, were being encouraged to distance themselves from the modern systems through which the wider society communicated.
That separation strengthened the movement’s identity.
The further its followers stood apart from ordinary society, the easier it became to regard themselves as a purified community surrounded by people who had gone astray.
The Rejection Went Further Than Technology
The story becomes even more unusual when the objects are considered alongside Maitatsine’s wider teachings.
His movement rejected not only particular modern possessions but also forms of knowledge and religious authority that Maitatsine considered illegitimate.
He strongly rejected the use of sources other than the Qur’an as religious authority. His teachings also challenged established Sunni interpretations and practices.
Some scholarly accounts describe his followers as rejecting Western style clothing and modern medicine, while other accounts record opposition to formal schooling and to reading books other than the Qur’an.
This was therefore not simply an anti technology campaign.
It was a broader rejection of the cultural and religious order around them.
Maitatsine was asking a much more fundamental question:
What should a Muslim accept from a changing modern world, and what should a Muslim reject?
His answer was far more radical than that of most Muslim scholars around him.
Even Money Had a Limit
Perhaps the most revealing rule concerned money.
Maitatsine criticised excessive wealth and instructed followers to possess only enough money to meet their immediate needs.
This was particularly powerful in a city where economic inequality was increasingly visible.
Kano was changing.
People were moving into the city. Trade was expanding. New forms of employment and commerce were developing. Political and economic elites were becoming more visibly wealthy, while many people at the bottom of society continued to struggle.
Maitatsine’s message turned that inequality into a religious argument.
He could portray wealthy people’s consumption as evidence of moral corruption.
His followers’ material deprivation, by contrast, could be presented as evidence of their commitment to a purer form of Islam.
The movement therefore offered its poorest members something more significant than a list of forbidden objects.
It offered them dignity within their poverty.
Why the Message Found Followers
This is where the story moves beyond the strange objects.
Maitatsine did not attract followers simply because he told them not to wear watches or ride bicycles.
His message connected with people living through serious social and economic difficulties.
Among those who joined his movement were poor migrants and almajirai, young Qur’anic students whose lives could be extremely precarious.
Many of these young men existed on the margins of the formal economy.
Maitatsine’s teaching gave their circumstances a religious interpretation.
The established elite were wealthy because they had embraced a corrupt system.
The modern consumer was spiritually compromised.
The poor believer who rejected those things could instead regard himself as morally superior.
That was a powerful message in a society experiencing rapid change.
Yan Awaki Became the Centre of the Conflict
By the late 1970s, Maitatsine and many of his followers had become concentrated around Yan Awaki in Kano.
The community was increasingly separate from the surrounding population.
The movement’s presence generated disputes with neighbours and authorities, including conflicts over property and the group’s growing resistance to outside control.
The community was becoming more than a congregation gathered around a preacher.
It was becoming an enclave with its own social rules and strong internal loyalty.
That isolation made the movement increasingly difficult for the authorities to manage.
And the more hostile the relationship became between the group and the wider society, the more the ordinary objects of modern life could serve as markers of identity.
A watch could distinguish an outsider from a follower.
So could a bicycle.
So could a car.
The objects helped draw the boundary between “us” and “them”.
From Religious Rejection to Open Conflict
The tension eventually moved far beyond disagreements about religion and modern life.
Throughout 1980, conflict between Maitatsine’s followers, their opponents and the authorities intensified.
By December, Kano became the centre of a violent uprising.
The Nigerian Army was eventually deployed against the movement.
Maitatsine was wounded during the fighting and died shortly afterwards.
The violence was devastating.
Elizabeth Isichei’s scholarly study of the Maitatsine risings records 4,177 deaths in the Kano uprising of December 1980, including Maitatsine himself.
The fighting did not end with his death.
Other Maitatsine uprisings followed in northern Nigeria, including conflicts around Bulumkutu and Maiduguri in 1982, Yola in 1984 and Gombe in 1985.
The movement had outlived its founder.
The Strange Part Is Not Really the Watch
It is easy to remember Maitatsine because of the strange objects associated with his teachings.
A preacher telling followers to reject watches, bicycles, cars and radios sounds almost unbelievable from a modern perspective.
But concentrating on the objects alone misses the reason they mattered.
Maitatsine was reacting to a society undergoing enormous change.
Modern goods were becoming more visible.
Urban life was expanding.
Wealth was becoming increasingly conspicuous.
Religious authority was being contested.
Poor migrants were struggling to find their place in rapidly changing cities.
And political power was becoming increasingly centralised.
Against this background, rejecting modern objects became a way of rejecting the society that produced and celebrated them.
Maitatsine Was Not Simply “Against Technology”
The popular version of the story can make Maitatsine sound like a man who believed every modern invention was inherently evil.
The historical record is more complicated.
His movement’s rejection of watches, bicycles, cars and radios was part of a much broader religious and social programme.
He opposed what he regarded as non Qur’anic innovations and challenged established Islamic authorities.
He criticised Western influence and the consumption habits of wealthy Nigerians.
He also encouraged followers to separate themselves from a society he considered morally compromised.
The technology was therefore symbolic.
The deeper conflict was about religious authority, social inequality, identity and modernity.
Why the Story Still Matters
The Maitatsine movement belongs to the history of northern Nigeria in the late twentieth century, but the questions surrounding it did not disappear with the death of its founder.
How should religious communities respond when society changes rapidly?
What happens when young and economically marginalised people lose confidence in established institutions?
Can poverty become a source of political or religious identity?
And what happens when ordinary objects become symbols of an entire way of life?
In Maitatsine’s Kano, a watch could represent modernity. A car could represent privilege. A radio could represent the outside world.
The objects themselves were harmless.
The struggle was over what they represented.
That is why the strangest part of the Maitatsine story is not that his followers were told to reject watches, bicycles or cars.
It is that ordinary objects became part of a much larger battle over who had the right to define how Muslims should live in a rapidly changing Nigeria.
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Author’s Note
The story of the Maitatsine followers’ restrictions is ultimately not about strange rules concerning watches, bicycles, cars or radios. Those objects became symbols of a much deeper rejection of Western influence, excessive wealth, established religious authority and the rapidly changing social order of northern Nigeria. Understanding that wider struggle explains why a movement that began around a controversial preacher in Kano could grow into a powerful community and eventually become involved in some of the most devastating religious violence Nigeria had experienced at the time.
References
Elizabeth Isichei, “The Maitatsine Risings in Nigeria 1980 to 1985: A Revolt of the Disinherited,” Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1987.
Mervyn Hiskett, “The Maitatsine Riots in Kano, 1980: An Assessment,” Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1987.
Roman Loimeier, “Boko Haram: The Development of a Militant Religious Movement in Nigeria,” Africa Spectrum, Vol. 47, No. 2 to 3, 2012.
Ousmane Kane, Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria: A Study of the Society for the Removal of Innovation and Reinstatement of Tradition, Brill, 2003.
