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Prof. Usman Barka

Historian & Linguist

Prof. Usman Barka

b. 1955  ·  Uba, Borno  ·  Marghi West

Prof. Barka spent two decades assembling the archival and oral record that became the standard history of the Marghi people.

He argued, against the grain of colonial ethnography, that Marghi political organisation was a confederacy of equals rather than a chain of subject villages.

Legacy

  • —Standard-reference history of the Marghi
  • —Recovered and published pre-colonial council records
  • —Mentor to a generation of northeast Nigerian historians