POISON ARROW:
THE SOKOTO CALIPHATE, NIGERIA, 1903

Brevet-Major Francis Charles March, Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment
All Saints, Maidstone, Kent


The Background

It would be easy to assume that Boko Haram's activities in Northern Nigeria are a recent phenomenon, but that would not be an accurate perception. Look back to the start of the last century and you will find British troops fighting Muslims in the region – not surprising given that the area had been under Islamic rule for the previous hundred years.

The Islamic state known variously as, depending upon one’s source, the Sokoto Caliphate (after its capital city) or the Fulani Empire or Federation (after the dominant ethnic group) was established by conquest in 1804, and over the next thirty years it consolidated and expanded until it covered most of present Northern Nigeria and Niger. Sokoto itself was founded as the capital in 1809, and is now situated in the north-west corner of Nigeria. The Sultan resided there, ruling over an empire comprised of thirty separate emirates which, whilst being relatively autonomous, all owed allegiance to him. Occasionally this rather flexible arrangement created problems, especially when exacerbated by tribal tensions, but nevertheless the state existed as a strong entity until the close of the nineteenth century, when it came under increased pressure from the territorial and economic ambitions of Britain, France and Germany.

 By 1902 Frederick Lugard, British High Commissioner for the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, and a classic Empire-builder, had decided it was time to move against the caliphate. The Colonial Office in London was opposed to such action, but Lugard pressed on, aware that France in particular had designs on the region, and justified also by the knowledge that much of the Caliphate’s wealth was based on slavery, and also by a stated need to revenge the murder of a Captain Maloney, whose killer had fled to the city of Kano. Under the command of Brigadier George Kemball seven hundred men of the West African Frontier Force marched north, with twenty-four British officers, supported by Maxim machine guns and field artillery.

The Conflict

The force’s first target was the important emirate of Kano, 250 miles south-east of Sokoto. They encountered resistance at a walled town named Bebedji, but overcame the mud-wall defences with cannon-fire, and moved on to take Kano in January 1903. The Emir of Kano, who had been in Sokoto when the attack came, was arrested as he tried to return. Refusing to acknowledge British authority he was exiled to Lokoja, the British capital of Northern Nigeria, where he died in 1927. This was to be the British strategy:  if an Emir agreed to recognise British influence he kept his position; if he did not he was replaced by a more compliant successor.

 In the middle of March Kemball’s force arrived at Sokoto, and demanded that the Sultan, Mohammad Attahiru I, surrender the city to them. Attahiru refused and, rather than wait for his capital to be assaulted, ordered his army to attack. Attahiru may have believed that superior numbers would overwhelm the British force, but his men’s spears and arrows could not match the Maxim guns. Captain Frank Crozier summarized the fight – “Up they come, right to the bayonet points! The Maxims belch forth – Rat tat tat – that’s fine”. Crozier also records that the victorious troops, including the officers, then went around the battlefield shooting any wounded they found. Back in London Winston Churchill was to fulminate against such barbarity, although that did not mean the city was handed back to the Sultan.

 The British now had control of the cities, but not of the countryside. Indeed most of the people of Sokoto abandoned the city, to such an extent that an estimated population of one hundred thousand before the invasion had been reduced to ten thousand by 1906. Attahiru now moved around the hinterland, gathering supporters as he went. His progress began to unsettle the British, with the Resident of Kano, Featherstone Cargill, writing that his march around the country was “approaching the proportions of a jihad”.

 In fact there are doubts about Attahiru’s intentions. One theory is that he initially planned a hijra, a migration away from the invaders, looking to settle new lands to the east. However, the French presence in Chad blocked such a move, and moreover he found some of the towns en-route effectively siding with the British and turning him away. With followers leaving him as the purpose of the wanderings became unclear he may have been wavering towards submission when he turned south towards Burmi, about 150 miles south-east of Kano, on the Gangola River.

 Burmi, under the leadership of an Imam named Musa, was populated by adherents of a Muslim sect who had often opposed the Sultan, but who were even more firmly against submission to the Christian British. On May 13th they had already inflicted a defeat on a small British force under Captain W. D. Sword which had been searching for Attahiru. It is probable that news of that engagement had reached the Sultan, and so he arrived to join his forces to those of the town, and awaited the inevitable British response to Sword’s defeat.

The force sent to avenge Sword’s humiliation consisted of five hundred men of the Northern Nigeria Regiment, along with sixty mounted infantry, two Maxim guns, and two field guns, all under the command of Major Francis Charles Marsh.

The Man

 Marsh was then 37, unmarried, the eldest of the ten children of a Royal Engineer’s Lieutenant-Colonel, Jeremy Taylor Marsh, and his wife Rachel, and four of his five brothers were also in the army (the other was in the legal profession). The Marshes were an Anglo-Irish family prominent in military, legal and religious circles, but by 1881, when Jeremy was forty, he had settled his family in Pembroke Place, Kensington, where they were to stay for the next thirty years. Francis Charles, having already seen service in West Africa and South Africa, including the Siege of Mafeking, was a brevet-Major in the Queen’s Own Royal West Kents when he was seconded to the Northern Nigeria Regiment, a career officer seeking further advancement.

The Action

 On July 27th, at 11 a.m., the attack began with a shelling of the walls, followed by an advance on the main gates. The town’s defences had been prepared well, with barricaded gates, double ditches, and the evacuation of women and children, leaving inside an estimated ten thousand men, the majority “armed with bows, and many of the arrows poisoned; some using throwing spears, and others ‘dane’ guns [antique firearms]”.

 As they neared the gates the troops, already unnerved by the sound of pounding drums, came under fire from a hail of arrows on three sides. The attack faltered, and Marsh had to take action. According to the explorer Boyd Alexander, writing a few years later, “Major Marsh, who had been directing operations from the square, realising the critical position, went down at once to the fighting line to head the assault, but he had no sooner come within the line of fire than he was struck in the thigh by a poisoned arrow, and died within twenty minutes”. The poison was probably one known as onaye, from the genus strophanthus, which is quick-acting, paralysing the heart muscles.

Despite Marsh’s death the British penetrated the defences and, after a day of hand-to-hand fighting amidst the town’s mud huts, and aided by the Maxim guns, they eventually prevailed, with eighty killed or wounded, against over one thousand enemy dead. There are two versions of Attahiru’s fate. One has him dying fighting in a last-ditch stand against the walls of the mosque; the other has him praying in the mosque and then walking out, Gordon of Khartoum-like, to calmly meet his fate. Whichever, his corpse, once identified, was decapitated, and photos of head and corpse were circulated, to prove to surviving supporters that he was dead, and to deter future opposition.

Afterwards

 Following Attahiru’s death the British appointed his successor, conveniently also called Muhammad Attahiru, who accepted British supervision under an appointed District Officer. He retained the trappings of position, and local powers, but lost all political influence. However, British expectations that opposition to their rule had now been quashed was to prove rather optimistic, and they would be called upon to fight again in the coming years.

 Of Marsh’s four army brothers, three saw service in the Great War (one died in 1907). Lieutenant-Colonel Jeremy Taylor Marsh, of the Logistics Train of the 1st Australian Division, was the only Australian Commanding Officer to command the same unit throughout the war. Captain Gilbert Howe Maxwell Marsh, of the 41st Dogras of the Indian Army, was killed on November 1st, 1914, and his grave can be visited in Bethune Cemetery. This is in marked contrast to his elder brother’s. Boyd Alexander was told Major Marsh had been buried under a fig tree, half a mile to the south-west of Burmi, “on the road to Tanga’, so he went to find it. He couldn’t.

One little postscript. Major Marsh's youngest sister was nineteen when he was killed attempting to bring Nigeria under British rule. She died in 1968, and so was still alive in 1960 when the British left. I wonder how she felt, whether she asked herself if it had been worth it.

TO THE GLORY OF GOD  AND IN MEMORY OF  FRANCIS CHARLES MARSH,  BREVET MAJOR,  THE QUEENS OWN ROYAL WEST KENT REGIMENT, ELDEST SON OF COLONEL J.T. MARSH, R.E., WHO WHILE IN COMMAND OF A FORCE AT BURMI, NORTHERN NIGERIA, WAS KILLED IN ACTION ON 27TH JULY 1903 WHEN GALLANTLY LEADING HIS MEN IN AN ATTACK AGAINST A STOCKADE. HE ALSO SERVED IN THE OPERATIONS ON THE NIGER IN 1897-98, INCLUDING THE EXPEDITION TO ILLAH, AND IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN CAMPAIGN OF 1899-1902, TAKING PART IN THE DEFENCE OF MAFEKING AND AFTERWARDS COMMANDING THE PROTECTORATE REGT. IN THE OPERATIONS IN THE TRANSVAAL. FOR THESE SERVICES HE WAS THREE TIMES MENTIONED IN DESPATCHES AND PROMOTED TO BREVET MAJORITY. THIS TABLET IS ERECTED BY HIS BROTHER OFFICERS AND OTHER FRIENDS WITH WHOM HE SERVED IN MAFEKING

Sources
Photos
Caliph Muhammadu Attahiru, the Sultan of Sokoto - Wikimedia Commons, from Government of the Defunct protectorate of Northern Nigeria
The Horse Way and All Saints Church, maidstone, viewed from the River Medway - Clem Rutter
Frederick Lugard (1858-1945) - Wikimedia Commons, by Elliott & Fry, http://via.lib.harvard.edu


Military
http://archive.org/stream/fromnigernile01alex/fromnigernile01alex_djvu.txt - this is an online edition of an account by Lieutenant Boyd Alexander of The Rifle Brigade, 'From The Niger to the Nile' (1907)
http://www.dawodu.com/omoigui55.htm
http://jajuwa.com/blog/?page_id=923 - article by H. A.S. Johnston, 'History of the Defeat of Sultan Attahiru in Burmi' (1967)
http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/sierra/sokotocaliphate1903.htmhttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/nov/03/post571 - an article, Death of a Sultan,  by Richard Gott (2006)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammadu_Attahiru_I
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoto_Caliphate
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/5016220

'The Scramble for Africa', Thomas Pakenham, (Weidenfeld & Nicholas, 1991)
'Class Book of Modern Geography', (George Philip & Son Ltd. circa 1907)
'To Win The Battle:The 1st Australian Division in the Great war 1914-18', Robert Stevenson, (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Genealogy
www. ancestry.co.uk

ⓒ Jon Dewhirst, February 2014