Muhammadu Marwa, a Cameroonian-born preacher who arrived in Kano c.1962 and acquired the nickname 'Maitatsine' (Hausa: 'the one who damns') from his serial denunciation of the Western state, the radio, the wristwatch, the bicycle and the established ulama as objects of jahiliyya (pre-Islamic ignorance), built up a following of an estimated 10,000 'Yan Tatsine — predominantly almajirai (begging Qur'anic students), urban migrants, retrenched workers and former herders displaced by the late-1970s Sahel droughts — concentrated in Kano's Yan Awaki quarter.
On 18 December 1980 a clash at the Yan Tatsine mosque between his followers and Kano State Police escalated into eleven days of street fighting. The federal government of Shehu Shagari deployed the 3rd Armoured Division under Brigadier Abdullahi Mohammed. By 29 December 1980 the official Aniagolu Commission count was 4,177 dead — Marwa among them — and several hundred wounded; unofficial estimates ran to 8,000. Yan Awaki was levelled.
The Yan Tatsine remnants regrouped under Marwa's deputies and produced successive outbreaks: Bulumkutu (Maiduguri) October 1982 (3,000 dead), Rigasa (Kaduna) October 1982 (400 dead), Jimeta (Yola) February 1984 (1,000 dead) and Pantami (Bauchi) April 1985 (100+ dead). In each case the Federal response was identical — military assault, kill the leader, kill the followers, no inquest into the underlying conditions.
The Maitatsine outbreaks were the first major manifestation of weaponised millenarian Islamic dissent in northern Nigeria. They were rooted in the same political economy — Almajiri destitution, rapid Saharan-edge urbanisation, the collapse of the traditional authority of the ulama, the absence of any state response to mass poverty — that produced the 1989 Anti-SAP riots, the 2002 emergence of Mohammed Yusuf's Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad at Maiduguri, and the Boko Haram insurgency from 2009. The Yan Tatsine were Boko Haram's institutional ancestors.