Nigeria, March 24 -- 22.5 kilometres south-west of Sokoto, there used to exist a community called Satiru. In March 1906, it was extinguished from the face of the earth. Three years earlier, in July 1903, the British had massacred Muhammadu Attahiru, the 11th Sultan of Sokoto, together with over 1,000 of his followers, decapitating him in Burmi (near Bajoga in present day Gombe State, north-east Nigeria) and then displayed photographs of "the beheaded Sultan of Sokoto throughout Northern Nigeria."

Many among the faithful in the region at the time regarded Frederick Lugard and his lot as infidels. The fate of Sultan Attahiru inspired, as Lugard would later complain in his 1906 annual report, "a series of local ebullitions in favour of some...