What Crime Did I Commit?
(A Lament of the Ordinary Hausa Man)

What Crime Did I Commit?
(A Lament of the Ordinary Hausa Man)

What crime did I commit
Was it merely that God made me Hausa?
Patient by nature, resigned to fate,
Willing to endure what others would resist?

They come for me, even into my own home—
The Fulani,
Into my mother’s room, under my wife’s bed,
Right in the heart of my ancestral land.
They drag me out, they end my life.
And the elders?
They say I am the one to blame.
My killers are rewarded
Paid in gold under the name of “peace”.
And that is where the story ends.
No justice. No reckoning.

On the roads through Mangu,
They ambush me,
And with blood on their hands,
All the world does is tweet.

In Edo, I am hunted;
In Yoruba land, I am slain;
In Igbo land, I am butchered—
All without a single wrong on my record.
Not one crime.

And when it comes to power,
Did we Hausas seize the throne?
No.
We, too, were ruled by the colonizer.
We, too, tasted subjugation.
Yet now, I choose the lowliest trade,
Just to clothe my shame and survive—
Still, I am not spared.

So I ask
What have I done to Nigeria?
Why does my back carry the weight of crimes
I never saw, never sanctioned, never committed?

Is it because power slips through my fingers,
While they speak of a Hausa-Fulani bond
That I, the Hausa man, never forged?

Others Fooulani commit the sins.
But it is I
The voiceless, landless, broken Hausa man
Who is made to bleed for it.