Farooq Kperogi: New insights into “Badamasi,” “Gbadamosi,” and IBB’s paternal heritage

Former President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida’s autobiography triggered questions about the onomastic etymology of “Badamasi,” his former last name, which appears to share historical and semantic kinship with the Yoruba “Gbadamosi.” It also activated interest in his paternal heritage about which he has been strategically coy, which I captured in my last column.

Because I know that the best system of inquiry for facts is necessarily question-oriented, self-critical, and cumulative, I shared a perspective I had heard about the provenance of Badamasi but expressed doubts about its reliability and historical accuracy and invited further reflections from others.

Saturday Tribune editor Lasisi Olagunju took up the challenge and, relying on insights from the late Sheikh Adam Abdullah El-Ilory, proposed that Badamasi originated from Ghadames (sometimes spelled Ghadamis), a historic Berber town in what is now Libya.

The town’s citizens are called Ghadamisi. It’s in line with the Middle Eastern practice of adding “i” to the end of the names of villages, towns, cities, and countries to form demonyms. Bukhari (which we domesticated as Buhari in Nigeria), for instance, means a native of the town of Bukhara, now in Uzbekistan, a West Asian nation that used to be a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Olagunju also referenced a fawningly Anglophilic, pro-colonial autobiography written in Arabic by a certain Abd Allah el-Ghadamisi, who arrived in Kano in 1903, titled, “Your Humble Servant: The Memoirs of Abd Allah Al-Ghadamisi.” He wondered whether this might be the book IBB mentioned as his grandfather’s favorite and that inspired him to name his son after its author.

He then suggested that the Yoruba Gbadamosi is more faithful to what he thinks is the original form of the name than the Hausa Badamasi since the voiced labial-velar plosive “gb” found in many Niger Congo languages, including Yoruba, is closer to the voiced uvular fricative “gh” in Arabic.

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Well, Olagunju’s proposition appears to suffer a factual collapse when it is burdened with the weight of historical, chronological, and even sociolinguistic evidence.

First, anyone who reads Professor Razaq ʿDeremi Abubakre’s 2017 book chapter titled “Stefan Reichmuth’s Wanderings in Arabicized and Islamized Yorubaland” will come across an Ilorin Muslim scholar and poet by the name of Badamasi “from Ile Saura, Agbaji, Balogun Ajikobi Ward, who was one of the first people to produce Yoruba poetry in Arabic script (p.373).” He died around 1891.

This suggests that even Yoruba Muslims have borne the name Badamasi since at least the 1800s, years before Abd Allah el-Ghadamisi appeared in Kano.

Second, it is unlikely that Abd Allah el-Ghadamisi’s autobiography is the book IBB’s grandfather was fond of and that students of Arabic in Hausaland read for pedagogical and spiritual nourishment because the commentary on the book by Muhammad S. Umar and John O. Hunwick, which Olagunju references, describes the book as betraying “imperfect knowledge of written Arabic” and full of “simple errors of Arabic grammar.”

Such a book can’t be a model that Islamic scholars venerate and teach. In any case, it wasn’t a piece of Islamic scholarship. The memoirs, Umar and Hunwick point out, “construct a discourse that portrays colonialism positively through a particularly laudatory proclamation of the good deeds of colonial authorities….”

Third, Olagunju’s claim that “Because, sometimes an author gets more famous than his work, al-Ghadamisi’s name appears to have overwhelmed the book’s title” doesn’t seem to be true. Only one copy of Abd Allah el-Ghadamisi’s book has survived, according to Umar and Hunwick.

Fourth, although traders and Islamic scholars from Ghadames have lived in Hausa land since at least the 16th century, sociolinguistic evidence suggests that it is implausible for Hausa speakers to domesticate the Arabic phoneme “gh” to “b.”

When Hausa speakers borrow Arabic words with the phoneme “gh,” which doesn’t occur naturally in Hausa, they adapt it to “g” (and occasionally to “k”) but never “b.” So, it’s socio-linguistically improbable that Ghadamisi would ever become Badamasi to Hausa speakers. It would most likely be Gadamisi.

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Now, what might be the root of Badamasi? Someone on Facebook by the name of M.Y. Kabara (I wonder if he is a progeny of the famous Nasiru Kabara family in Kano who died in my final year at Bayero University) pointed me to Arabic sources that seem to definitively show that the name Badamasi owes its presence in (northern) Nigerian Muslim onomastic universe to an Egyptian poet by the name of Muhammad bin Ahmed bin Ismail bin Ahmed Al-Sharaf Al-Badmasi Al-Masri. (Miṣr is the Arabic name for Egypt).

He was born in 1808 AH (equivalent to around 1405) in the small village of Badamas and died in Mecca at the age of 40. He was famous for a book of Arabic poetry he wrote in praise of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) titled “al-Qasīdatul Mukhmasah,” which is very popular with Sufi Muslims and Arabic students in (northern) Nigeria.

I am certain that it’s the book IBB’s grandfather loved so much that he named his son after it—like many people in the North did and still do.

Kabara pointed out to me that because “every quintet in Arabic poetry can be called ‘mukhmasah,’” the book of poetry has come to be known by the name of its author to differentiate it from similar works.

According to Dr. Ihab El-Sherbini, author of the book “Stories of Mansoura’s Streets,” Badamas, the poet’s hometown, used to be called “Potamos,” which means “river,” but that Copts (descendants of ancient Egyptians who are now mostly Christians that are associated with the Coptic Church) called it Badamos. After the Arab conquest of Egypt in the 7th century, Badamos evolved to Badamas.

Over time, the Badamas village ceased to be territorially independent. It’s now a neighborhood of the Egyptian city of Mansoura.

Based on this new knowledge, I am prepared to suggest that Gbadamosi and Badamasi are mere onomatological false friends, that is, they are names that sound alike but that are actually different and descended from different sources.

I suspect that the Yoruba Gbadamosi traces descent from Ghadamisi, most probably from Abdallāh b. Abī Bakr al-Ghadāmisī, a 17th-century Arabic poet and Islamic scholar born in Timbuktu who wrote the famous Manāhij al-Sālikīn fī Manāfiʿ al-Qurʾān al-Karīm (“Paths of the Seekers to the Benefits of the Noble Qur’an”) that is popular with West African Sufis.

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Curiously, the resolution of the etymology of IBB’s middle name coextends with new hints I’ve encountered about the probable ethnic identity of his paternal ancestry.

The village of Kumurya in Kano where IBB told a biographer his paternal roots are located was founded by the Agalawa, a historical trading community in Hausaland, originally of Tuareg (Berber) stock who migrated into the Kano region in the 18th century.

Though now fully assimilated as a sub-group of the Hausa people, the Agalawa trace their ancestry to nomadic Tuareg origins in the southern Sahara. I owe this insight to Rabiu Isah Hassan who first pointed it out to me on Facebook and provoked me to read further.

In his 2005 book titled “Ecology and Ethnography of Muslim Trade in West Africa,” Paul E. Lovejoy points out that early Agalawa immigrants in Hausaland occupied a lowly social status because “Most had been enslaved from Sudanese populations (p. 16).” They were derisively called “Bugaje” (is the famous Dr. Usman Bugaje of Agalawa origins?) as a collective plural and “Buzu” as a singular form.

Over time, they acculturated, dominated commerce, became prominent in Islamic scholarship, and have now become indistinguishable from the native Hausa population, except that they tend to have a lighter complexion than Hausa people, which causes many people to mistake them for Fulani.

Is IBB aware of this history of his paternal ancestry but chose to conceal it for fear of exoticizing and alienating himself, especially in the eyes of southerners who tend to delegitimize people’s Nigerian origins when they find out that the ancestral origins of (mostly northerners) people can be traced to spaces outside what is now Nigeria?

No northerner would question the legitimacy of anyone’s “Nigerianness” because of the accident of the location of their distant ancestral roots. It’s a consequence of the originary syncretism of modern northern identity. We are all mixed with all sorts of stemma from a vast array of places because we were never an insular, landlocked people.

Many of Kano’s prominent merchant dynasties, for example, have Agalawa roots, a famous example being the family of Alhaji Alhassan Dantata, who was West Africa’s richest man in the early 20th century. Since Aliko Dangote’s mother is from the Dantata family, it means he is at least half Agalawa. He himself might even be ancestrally Agalawa.

What’s there to conceal about this, especially because our heritage—ethnicity, linguistic group, even religious traditions—is merely incidental to us. We didn’t choose it, so there is no basis to be proud or ashamed of it.

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based Professor of journalism.

Farooq Kperogi: New insights into “Badamasi,” “Gbadamosi,” and IBB’s paternal heritage

Shameful letter on Tinubu’s slavish Assembly

Tunde Odesola

(Published in The PUNCH, on Friday, March 7, 2025)

Dear Uncle Ahmed,

Kowtowing is when a kowtower bows before wealth, power and influence. But, Your Excellency, when I refer to you as ‘Uncle Ahmed’, I’m not on a bootlicking mission. I call you ‘Uncle’ because we were neighbours in the same hood, where you and I tenanted in the early 1990s. That was when you were a nobody in Nigeria’s political space. That was when you rented a three-bedroomed flat at No 18, Coker Street, in the Orile Agege community of Lagos State. That was when you were unsure of the future politics held for you. Uncle Ahmed, if I were writing this letter in Yoruba, it wouldn’t be out of place to call you Bòdá Àdúgbò or Ègbón Àdúgbò aka Area Bro.

Ègbón Ahmed, 72 is your official age. I believe that because I know you don’t lie. But, I call you Bòdá Adugbo because of the age difference between us; I, having been born in the second half of the 1960s. My parents raised me to respect responsible elders.

Your Excellency, I put pen to paper because of the recent chain of events at your Lagos State House of Assembly. Ègbón Bola, the way you administer the City of Aquatic Splendor appears like Lagos was bequeathed to you at birth. But you know it wasn’t. In metaphoric Yoruba, you arrived in Lagos with blood in your eyes, hunting for success. Your toiling met with preparedness, and boom, you became senator, governor…, and then went imperial.

Yes, you can say you fought many nasty wars, such is the way of Nigerian politics; it’s dog eat dog. Ègbón, post-war trauma shouldn’t make you hallucinate and take up the role of God.

Uncle Bola, as your former neighbour and fellow tenant, I think it’s right to let you know how Nigerians are looking in your direction over the reign of terror being unleashed at your junkyard, the Lagos State House of Assembly. Nigerians are looking in your direction because they know you’re the National Leader of the ruling All Progressives Congress and also the State Leader of the party in Lagos. Lagosians know that as the national and state leader of the APC, the recent removal and reinstatement of Lagos Speakers, like women wear and remove menstrual pads, cannot happen without your knowledge and approval.

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I call the LSHA your junkyard because you watch without guilty conscience, since more than 20 years ago, how each legislative tenure sings the anthem, “On Your Mandate We Shall Stand,” instead of singing the national anthem, while you smile like Idi Amin, with your hand on your small chest.

Your Excellency, many Nigerians believe you’re not a good leader. But I believe you rank higher than the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. They believe you’re the wicked person who straps his baby to the back when going to the bathroom. But I do not believe so. The Yoruba capture such a wicked person in these words, “Ìkà ènìyàn tó ń pon omo re ilé ìwè.”

In their wisdom, the Yoruba believe it’s only a wicked person who straps their child to the back while going to the bathroom because no neighbour is prepared to look after the baby while the wicked person bathes.

Asiwaju, I know you’re not wicked. I know you’re not the one strapping Mudasiru Obasa to your back. Obasa only possesses an irresistible charm that hypnotises his fellow lawmakers to accept him as their Speaker by fire, force and thunder.

Ègbón Àdúgbò, I need to tell you that as a result of the madness going on in the Lagos Assembly, a lot of Lagosians are waiting for you at the next elections, vowing to disgrace you yet again like they resoundingly demystified you in the 2023 presidential election. They say that in 2027, you and your undemocratic party would be roundly defeated in Lagos again.

Also, they allege that plans were underway by your party, in collusion with the Independent National Electoral Commission, to subvert the Bimodal Accreditation System (BIVAS) and the INEC Result Viewing (I-REV) portal, rendering the two technologies useless in Igbo-dominated areas of Lagos in 2027, but I said, “Ah, rara o; Uncle Bola doesn’t rig o;” he’s a democrat.

Tongues are wagging over the brigandage that occurred when your boy, Obasa, forcefully took control of the House and sat with just four lawmakers while the then-substantive Speaker, Mojisola Meranda, had 35 lawmakers solidly behind her. Ègbón Tinubu, isn’t it a shame that all these tyrannical events are happening under your leadership? Baba Folasade, wasn’t it your defiance against military dictatorship that endeared you to the hearts of Lagosians? Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha unbared their fangs, fired their bullets and cracked heads with their boots. But you, Emeritus Governor, with your smile and agbada, you bury your fangs and talons in the jugular of the Lagos House of Assembly. You’re worse than Babangida and Abacha combined!

By the way, Your Excellency, permit me to humbly ask if you know the meaning of ‘Emeritus’? All of your lackeys in Lagos call you ‘Emeritus Governor’. Do you all know that emeritus means retired? If you’re truly a retired governor, why don’t you hands off Lagos and face the bigger task of governing Nigeria?

You call yourself a democrat, yet you allow them to sing that stupid and idiotic song, “On Your Mandate We Shall Stand’? So, Bobo Chicago’s mandate is more powerful than the mandate the 20 million Lagos population gave to the lawmakers? I know you schooled in America, though you presented a controversial university certificate, but is this the type of democracy practised in America? Where’s honour in your politics, bòdá?

Ègbón Alameda, I’m utterly sorry I didn’t greet you when I started my letter. The uproar generated by the show of shame ongoing at the Lagos State Assembly is enough to make an omolúàbí disrespect elders, who stand by and watch while the head of the baby at the mother’s back tilts dangerously in the market square.

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E kú three days, sir. How’s the family? How’s aunty Remi, your jewel of inestimable value, co-investor and co-beneficiary in Nigeria’s political vineyard? How’re the children of your proletariat beginnings, Folasade and Seyi? And the children of your bourgeoisie years, Zainab, Habibat and Olayinka?

It’s delightsome to see that despite her young age, Folasade is the godmother of nonagenarian, octogenarian, septuagenarian and younger marketwomen and men in the whole of Nigeria while your son, Seyi, aka Ola Daddy, is the godfather of Nigeria’s Young Urban Professionals, otherwise known as Yuppies. As for you, the Owner of Lagos, it’s written in the sky, ‘BAT is the god of all godfathers and the king of all kingmakers’. Asiwaju, I twale 100%!! It’s not easy to put Nigeria in your pocket: e kú isé takun takun.

Bobo Chicago, some plain stupid people describe your fixing family members in positions of power and privilege as passing gluttony down the family line, but I call it fatherly love. I remind such people that many of the children of Nigeria’s monied men of yesteryears are tearing at one another’s throats today over inheritance. The children of the late MKO Abiola and those of the late Chief Rotimi Williams (SAN) are yet at daggers drawn.

The Lion of Bourdillon, when you eventually go to the place where the elderly go, Folasade and her siblings won’t need to fight over inheritance because you’ve placed in their hands golden spoons, long and costly enough to eat at billionaires’ tables anywhere in the world.

As for Aunty Remi, she won’t have any financial worries because she should rank high on the list of Nigeria’s wealthiest women – being the wife of BAT and having worked in the Nigerian Senate aka the nation’s second largest Mint, where President Godswill Akpabio, the alleged serial sexual harasser, is currently battling allegations of sexual harassment and abuse of office by Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan of Kogi State.

Ègbón, Nigeria has had eight Senate Presidents since 1999 – Evan Enwerem, Chuba Okadigbo, Pius Ayim, Adolphus Wabara; Ken Nnamani, David Mark, Bukola Saraki and Ahmed Lawan. None of them was slapped for alleged sexual assault. None of them resembled ‘Dauda de Sexy Guy’ in looks and actions.

By the way, Asiwaju, I know you would be curious to know what the first largest Mint company is in Nigeria. It’s the Presidency, sir. Followed by the Senate. The third is the House of Reps, followed by the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Company Limited.

Ègbón mí, let me whisper to you some tete-a-tete truths like sincere siblings do. Please, move closer, sir. Please, don’t you ever contemplate writing your autobiography like General Killer, who lives on a hilltop, did o. Baba Sade, if you do so pénrén, you will receive from Nigerians the type of verbal bashing which deafened the ears of the squirrel. Ha! Writing an autobiography would open the old-wound questions of your age, school, birthplace, parentage, wealth and more.

Bòdá Bola, you don’t need all that trouble. After serving Nigeria with all your heart, you just go home and rest. May Allah protect your investments.

Thanks for being the one and only BAT.

Your former neighbour,

Baba-T.

———/////———/////————

Email: [email protected]

Facebook: @Tunde Odesola

X: @Tunde_Odesola

Shameful letter on Tinubu’s slavish Assembly

Farooq Kperogi : Identity questions in IBB’s autobiography

The autobiography of former self-styled “President” Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida has already been parsed for its self-serving mendacity, moral spinelessness, maddening insensitivity, self-glorification, and cowardly posthumous smears of dead colleagues.

I won’t revisit those points here. As someone who has a scholarly interest in—and is actually working on a book on—the rhetoric of collective identity construction in Nigeria, I was drawn to IBB’s self-definition of his identity in his autobiography.

It was Gimba Kakanda, SA to the Vice President and former newspaper columnist, who first quickened my appetite about this in his February 19 Facebook update.

Kakanda had read an advance copy of IBB’s autobiography and wrote this intriguing summation of it: “It’s a journey that begins with his origins, as the son of a Gbagyi woman, and leads up to the June 12 questions—the answers to which you’ll have to read to discover for yourself.”

In a February 15, 2020, column titled “True Ethnic Origins of Nigeria’s Past Presidents and Heads of State,” I had observed that “IBB’s ethnic identity is surprisingly a magnet for controversy and speculation. He has been called Gbagyi (whom Hausa people call Gwari), Nupe, and even Yoruba from Ogbomoso or Osogbo. But he told journalists and his biographers at different times that his immediate ancestors were Hausas from Kano who migrated to what is now Niger State.”

I was curious if IBB admitted that his maternal filiation was Gbagyi (or Gwari). He actually did. But while he is very specific about his maternal line of descent, he was vague about the ethnic identity of his paternal ancestry.

This is how he describes his paternal ancestry, beginning from his grandfather: “Snippets of details I heard suggested that earlier on, he was a bit of a wanderer, migrating from Sokoto to Kano and Kontagora and settling in Wushishi.”

Contrast this with the specificity with which he describes his maternal heritage: “Apparently, [my grandfather] met his future wife, a young Gwari girl called Halima, in Wushishi, and since his future parents-in-law would only allow him to marry daughter if he agreed to make his home in Wushishi, he readily complied with their condition before settling down in Wushishi and marrying his pretty wife, Halima.”

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In yet another description of his Gwari maternal descent, he is informatively direct and specific: “But before he left, my father met and married a beautiful light-skinned Gwari girl, Inna Aishatu, who would become my mother.”

His paternal grandmother was a pretty Gwari woman, and his own mother was a “beautiful light-skinned Gwari girl.” Why did he have a need to call attention to their pulchritude and complexion?

Why did he withhold such details about his grandfather and his father? Sokoto, which he says is the apparent root of his paternal ancestry, was populated by both the Fulani and the Hausa in the “later part of the 19th century” when his grandfather left it for Kano and later Wushishi.

Although interethnic marriage between the Hausa and the Fulani began to intensify at this time, people still identified their heritage through their fathers. Ethnic identities or labels weren’t hyphenated. Was his father Hausa or Fulani?

Did he, perhaps, obliquely answer that question by gratuitously calling attention to the light skin of his Gwari mother in order to let it be known that his own light complexion is inherited from his mother since the Fulani are stereotypically light-skinned?

Well, IBB told a biographer that his great grandfather hailed from the village of Kumuria [Kumurya?] in Kano State from where he went to Sokoto. But in his autobiography, he only mentions his grandfather migrating from Sokoto to Kano and later to Wushishi. Is this intentional, strategic paternal ancestral ambiguity?

We see evidence of identitarian anxieties in IBB’s life after he left his Niger cultural cocoon. Up until age 23 when he returned from India as a Second Lieutenant, his name was Ibrahim Badamasi, Badamasi being his father’s first name.

“However,” he writes, “before I settled down to work at the First Brigade, a particular incident led me to add ‘Babangida’ to my name. During official engagements that led to my deployment to Kaduna, officers who confused the Yoruba name, Gbadamosi, with my last name, ‘Badamasi,’ repeatedly asked me whether I was Yoruba. That question had come up a few times during my enlisting interview for the military. Since that question persisted (and since I knew I wasn’t Yoruba!), I decided to take on my father’s other name as my last name.”

Three things jumped out at me after reading this part of the book. First, I find it intriguing that he had no hesitation telling us about his mother’s and paternal grandmother’s ethnic identity and even disclaiming a Yoruba identity that he knew would constrain him but chose to conceal his paternal ethnic identity.

Second, IBB didn’t mention Babangida as his father’s other name when the reader first encounters him in the book. He identifies his father as Muhammad Badamasi, not Babangida Badamasi. Maybe this oversight is attributable to sloppy (ghost) writing.

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Third, Gbadamosi is not, strictly speaking, a Yoruba name. It’s the Yoruba domestication of Badamasi, which is understood to be a Muslim name in Nigeria. Many people in northwest Nigeria, where he says his paternal roots sprouted from, bear the name.

When I wrote about unusual Muslim names in Nigeria that don’t seem to have any links with the rest of the Muslim world, among which is “Badamasi,” readers who are familiar with the etymology of Badamasi told me that the name (which was probably originally some variant of Badmasi) belongs to an Arabic poet whose book advanced students in traditional Arabic schools, called makarantun soro in Hausa land, study.

The book, a Sufi poem, is used as a resource for Arabic vocabulary lessons. Over time, it became popularly known as Badamasi, named after its author.

I haven’t found any scholarly corroboration for the claim that Badamasi is the name of an Arab poet, but 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.

Badamasi was Yorubized to Gbadamosi and later anglicized to Badmus in Yoruba land.

Curiously, Muslim names, which should transcend, even neutralize, ethnicity, at least on the surface, can become the carriers of the weight of ethnicity in Nigeria. There are notions of “Yoruba Muslim names” not just because of their peculiar Yoruba domestication but because of their higher than usual frequency among Yoruba Muslims.

For example, many northern Muslims and Yoruba Muslims have concluded, without a shred of evidence, that House of Representatives Speaker Tajudeen Abbas is a Zaria man of Yoruba ancestry because “Tajudeen” occurs more frequently among Yoruba Muslims than it does among Hausa-speaking Muslims.

But Tajudeen Abbas is a Zaria prince. A Yoruba editor friend of mine pushed back when I said the Speaker was at least paternally Fulani by asking which Fulani or Hausa man I knew who bore the name Tajudeen.

I mentioned Tajudeen Dantata. I then asked if he thought the Dantata family was Yoruba because they named one of their progenies Tajudeen. That ended the conversation.

Dr. Raji Bello, a Fulani man from Yola, also talks about how he is often mistaken for a Yoruba man because people assume that Raji is an exclusively Yoruba Muslim name even though it’s a Muslim name commonly born by South Asian and West African Muslims.

Dr. Bello resisted the type of urge that IBB succumbed to. He once said he was advised by an elder in Zaria to change his name to Rabiu. But he was named after one of his ancestors, a prominent nineteenth-century Muslim scholar in what is now Adamawa by the name of Modibbo Raji.

Finally, IBB described his father as a “messenger/interpreter” in the colonial district office but didn’t say what he interpreted. Since he had no Western education and didn’t speak English, did he translate Gbagyi, his mother’s language, to Hausa or vice versa?

Well, I am not done reading the book.

Farooq Kperogi : Identity questions in IBB’s autobiography

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of journalism.