Nationalizing the Nigerian Hajj: Politics, Citizenship, and Emotions (1950–1965)

Undertaking the hajj has long provoked intense emotions for Nigerian Muslims. Yet the historiography of Nigerian hajj policy has rarely considered the importance of emotion, instead generally focusing on the enduring use of regulatory means introduced by British colonial authorities, such as passports and quarantine. Tracing the presence of emotions in the hajj archive reveals how the initial postcolonial hajj in fact differed from that of the colonial period, and suggests why the post-colonial state proved more adept at controlling the mobility of its Muslim citizens. Nigerian politicians, unlike their colonial predecessors, expressed concern for the emotional well-being of pilgrims and enacted policies to address it, and I argue that by doing so they engendered new expectations and affective relationships between the post-colonial state and its Muslim citizens. While pilgrims continued to rely on kin networks to finance their hajj, this shift also occasioned a novel source of financing: the patronage of political elites.