By Lasisi Olagunju

In his column last Saturday, my friend and brother, Farooq Kperogi, reminisced his previous piece on unusual Muslim names in Nigeria which do not “seem to have any links with the rest of the Muslim world.” He listed ‘Badamasi’ as one of them.

Kperogi said some readers of his column traced for him what they thought was the etymology of ‘Badamasi’ to an Arab poet “whose book advanced students in traditional Arabic schools” in Hausaland. He said his readers added that the book, “a Sufi poem, is used as a resource for Arabic vocabulary lessons and that over time, it became popularly known as Badamasi, named after its author.” Kperogi, however, held that he had “not found any scholarly corroboration for the claim that Badamasi is the name of an Arab poet.” Instead, he noted that “there is a late nineteenth-century Ilorin Muslim scholar and poet by the name of Badamasi whose poems are often utilized to enhance Arabic vocabulary and are a staple in the curriculum of traditional Islamic schools. But it’s not clear if he is the original bearer of the name.”

Both Kperogi and his readers may be right. But, even if they are right, the question still remains: How did the author(s) get the name and what does it mean?

A few months before the British invaded and conquered Kano in 1903, a young man wandered into that city with the panache of the literate. He gave his name simply as Abd Allah. As usual in those days, he came with no surname. Historians say he was found to have originated in a place called Ghadames (Ghadamis) in the far north of Africa. He was not alone in Kano; he had uncles who formed the Ghadames community of Arabs. But, because he was well-loved in Kano, he became popular and known as Abd Allah el-Ghadamisi (Abd Allah the Ghadamisi); the toponym, Ghadames (Ghadamis) had provided for him a surname – Ghadamisi, a citizen of Ghadamis.

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Because a man’s skill and competence will feed him even in a season of famine, Abd Allah soon found favour before God and man because his primary language was Arabic and he was literate in it. And, because he could read and write Arabic and had quickly amassed enormous competence in Hausa language, C. L. Temple, northern Nigeria’s Lieutenant Governor, employed him as an assistant. He spent some time with Temple, then moved to H. R. Palmer, another top colonial officer who was employed by the authorities to do rural tax assessment. It was Palmer who got Abd Allah to write his memoirs. That book, ‘Your Humble Servant: The Memoirs of Abd Allah Al-Ghadamisi’. There is a 1996 seminal article on it authored by Muhammad Sani Umar and John Hunwick. Because, sometimes an author gets more famous than his work, al-Ghadamisi’s name appears to have overwhelmed the book’s title.

We read former President Ibrahim Babangida in his autobiography (page 2) crediting his father’s name, Badamasi, to the title of a book. He wrote: “As I understand it, my grandfather named my father ‘Badamasi’ after a particular religious book that he consulted regularly. My grandfather was so fond of the book that he decided to name his second child after it, and that was how the name ‘Badamasi’ came into our lineage!” Could he be referring to Abd Allah Al-Ghadamisi’s memoirs?

Sheikh Adam Abdullah el-Ilory (1917-1992) was the founder of the Markaz, Agege, Lagos. He was a highly regarded Islamic scholar and historian, and for that, he got decorated home and abroad. John Hunwick, British academic, author and Africanist, in his ‘The Arabic Literary Tradition of Nigeria’ published in 1997, described Sheikh Adam as “the greatest (Arabic/ Islamic scholar) that Nigeria has produced in the twentieth century.” Adam was educated far and wide and, he, significantly, was at Al-Azhar University, Cairo. He wrote books on Astronomy and Philosophy, on Yoruba origin and history; Islamic history and jurisprudence, Arabic language and its history, etc, etc and delivered hundreds of very seminal lectures.

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In one of his lectures that I uploaded on my Facebook wall on 22 March, 2024, Sheikh Adam traced the history of Islam in Hausaland to a group of itinerant clerics and merchants from Ancient Mali. The cleric added that “with the Malians were the Ghadamisi”, the people of Ghadames, a town built on an oasis in northwestern Libya. Geographers locate that place today near the Tunisian and Algerian borders. For centuries, the town was very popular as a centre for Trans Saharan Trade, particularly, the Arab flank of the Slave Trade.

The Sheikh Adam story is better told in his very words but he spoke in Yoruba; I try some translation (and transliteration) here: “The Ghadamisi. They are a tribe, a whole city. Àwon olórúko president wa ní Nigeria nìyen (they are our president’s namesakes). That is where he (Babangida) got his name, Badamasi. Some pronounce that name as Bidimos. They use Badamasi in Hausaland; we use Gbadamosi in Yorubaland. Bidimosi (Badmus, Bidmus) is a recent variant…It is not as popular as Ghadamisi. With the Ghadamisi were the Wangara. The Wangara brought Islam to Hausaland.” The period he spoke of was around the 14th century.

Sheikh Adam linked the Wangara with the Ghadamisi. You would want to ask what brought together those two disparate tribes. The Malian city of Gao was a major hub for trade and cultural exchange in those distant days. History told us that the “westernmost of the three central routes of the trans Saharan trade was the Ghadames Road, which ran from the Niger River at Gao north to Ghat and Ghadames before terminating at Tripoli.” That route provided the common course for the lives of the Wongara and the people of Ghadames in their joint journey of trade and faith to West Africa. It is in The Kano Chronicles that “during the reign of Yaji, the King of Kano from 1349 to 1385, the Wangarawa came from Melle (Mali) bringing the religion of Islam.” The Wangarawa came as clerics, marabouts and scholars.

Kperogi thinks Hausa’s ‘Badamasi’ was “Yorubized to ‘Gbadamosi’ and later anglicized to ‘Badmus’ in Yoruba land.” If he reads me here, and if he agrees with Sheikh Adam that ‘Ghadames/ Ghadamisi’ is the root of ‘Gbadamosi/Badamasi’, I hope he will rethink this conclusion. I say so because between ‘Badamasi’ and ‘Gbadamosi’, the one with the ‘Gb’ sound sounds closer to ‘Ghadamisi’, their root.