The Gwoza Hills are the most northwesterly extension of the Mandara mountains. They are up to 1400m high and are populated by ten major groups of which only 4 still live up in the hills practicing traditional terrace farming. From south to north these are the Gvoko (15,000), the Dghweëe (20,000), the Chikiëe (3,000) and the Guduf (30,000). The Chinene (300) and Zelidva (30,000) have abandoned the mountains and have completely settled in the plains around the northern and eastern foothills. The same applies to the Lamang (15,000) at the west, and the Glavda (30,000) at the east of the mountains but both descended much earlier and are considered today as groups of the plains.
Slightly to the northeast of the Gwoza Hills, in and around Kirawa, we find the Wandala or Mandara (19,000), forming the oldest settlement of the Wandala sultanate. The relationship between the Wandala and the Kanuri, the Borno empire, goes back a long time. One early source is the chronicles of Ibn Furtu, the Grand Imam of Borno, who reports that Sultan Idris Alauma sent his troops to the town of Kirawa in 1576 in order to depose the usurper and then pagan ruler of Wandala (Lange 1987:76f). As vassals of the Borno empire the Wandala engaged in slave hunting for centuries to come in which members of the foothill groups, mainly the Glavda and Lamang, often became their foot soldiers.
This exploitative relationship ended with the establishment of the colonial powers at the beginning of the 20th century. However, some slave raiding continued until the late 1920s. This was not by the Wandala but by Hamman Yaji, a Fulºe District head in Madagali. Hamman Yaji raided the Gwoza Hills during and after World War I which led to his arrest by the British in 1927 under the pretext that he was adhering to fundamentalist groups who planned to threaten British supremacy in the region. The peoples of the Gwoza Hills tell a different story. They insist that a resistance movement in the mountains led to Hamman Yaji’s arrest. They claim that it was successful because the Wandala and Kanuri helped them in the following way. The Shehu of Dikwa and the Shehu of Yerwa (meaning Maiduguri) supported their delegation which went, in the second half of the 1920s, via Kirawa and Dikwa to Maiduguri where they successfully launched an official complaint to the British governor. Montagnards believe that this action stopped Hamman Yaji. After his arrest a Kanuri from Dikwa, named Jantama, became district head of Gwoza. Jantama paved the way for the Gwoza people to have a relationship with the Kanuri based on mutual respect and freedom of residence.
The relationship between the Kanuri and the population of the Gwoza Hills remained positive. The Kanuri often referred to them as ”their Kerdiy” (pagan) or ”their Jarima Jato” (a Fulºe district head after Jantama). The Gwoza people say that the Kanuri considered them as honest and hard working people whom they welcomed by providing them with shelter. People from the Gwoza Hills see it as a positively defined patron-client relationship and today they continue to work for the Kanuri by cutting fire wood, distributing water or working as butchers for them. The montagnards of the Gwoza Hills still remember the support they received from the Kanuri during the time of Hamman Yaji and claim that the Kanuri always defended them against pagan groups of the plains when settling on their lands.
There are not many words Gwoza people have adopted from the Kanuri language. The most important Kanuri word is kerdiy, meaning pagan in Kanuri, which refers back to post-colonial times of slavery. Kerdiy is a derogatory term referring to the historical fact that the people of the Gwoza Hills were once subjected to enslavement. The term is first mentioned by Denham, Clapperton and Oudney (1826).
Other Kanuri words adopted by languages of the Gwoza Hills are:
bama tima useless (when referring to a person)
krana kranu means reading in Kanuri (is used in the Gwoza Hills to refer to the act of reading words from the Koran to cause misfortune).
tata bla son of the soil (was used in the past to refer to an indigenous
person)
tata kriºi puppy (is used to refer to a misbehaving small child)
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