By the early 1830s the Hausa kingdom of Gobir — the very state from which Shehu Usman dan Fodio had launched the jihad in 1804 — had become the most persistent rebel against the Sokoto Caliphate. Under Sarkin Gobir Ali, Gobir allied with the Tuareg of the Aïr massif and with the displaced Hausa dynasties of Katsina and Zamfara (the so-called Maradi confederation), and from the new Hausa capital at Tsibiri waged a guerrilla war along Sokoto's northern frontier.
In early 1836 Sultan Muhammad Bello — son of Shehu Usman dan Fodio and the principal architect of the Caliphate's eastern emirates — mobilised a coalition army drawn from Sokoto, Gwandu, Kano, Katsina, Zaria and Bauchi. The two forces met on 9 March 1836 at Gawakuke, a plain in what is now Goronyo Local Government Area of Sokoto State. Sokoto's cavalry, organised under the flag of jihad, broke the Gobir-Tuareg lines; Sarkin Gobir Ali was killed in the field and the Maradi army scattered northward.
Gawakuke was the last great pitched battle of the Caliphate's consolidation. It established the territorial settlement that Lord Lugard would inherit and re-impose in 1903: thirty emirates under the Sultan of Sokoto, with the Hausa rump states confined to what is today the Republic of Niger. Muhammad Bello died eighteen months later in October 1837; his tomb at Wurno remains a site of pilgrimage. The battle entered the Caliphate's own historiography through Bello's Infaq al-Maysur and through the Arabic chronicles of the Sokoto court.