On the morning of 14 February 1906, a small village called Satiru about 15 km south of Sokoto rose against the new colonial administration. A *Mahdist* preacher named Dan Makafo (also recorded as Saibu Dan Makafo) had proclaimed that the British were the army of the Antichrist (*Dajjal*) foretold in eschatology, and that the Mahdi was at hand. Several hundred followers — peasants, runaway slaves and the dispossessed talakawa of the Sokoto countryside — burned the Native Authority offices and killed the resident district officer.
The colonial response was disproportionate to a point still discussed in the historiography of the conquest of the North. Resident H.R. Palmer at Sokoto telegraphed for reinforcements. Frederick Lugard, High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria, dispatched the West African Frontier Force from Zaria under Major Frederick Goodwin. On 10 March 1906, the WAFF column, reinforced by 2,000 Sokoto cavalry supplied by the Sultan Attahiru II (the successor installed by Lugard in 1903), attacked Satiru. The village was annihilated. The casualty estimates vary: British dispatches admit to roughly 2,000 villagers killed; later Nigerian historians, drawing on Sokoto oral testimony, place the number nearer 3,000. Survivors — women, children, the wounded — were sold into slavery by the Sokoto cavalry; the village site was sown with salt and declared *haram* for resettlement.
The Satiru massacre is recorded for two reasons. First, it is the largest single colonial atrocity in northern Nigeria between the Kano–Sokoto expedition of 1903 and the Aba Women's War of 1929. Second, it cemented the Caliphate–British alliance under which the Sokoto aristocracy retained its lands, its slaves (formally abolished only in 1936) and its judicial authority in exchange for collaborating in the suppression of Mahdist and millenarian revolts against the colonial state. The model of *indirect rule* — under which the British paid the emirs to govern the talakawa for them — was sealed in the smoke of Satiru.
The massacre is barely taught in Nigerian schools. The Sokoto authorities have, for a century, declined to mark the site. The historiographic recovery — beginning with **Murray Last's 1967 *Sokoto Caliphate* and consolidated by R.A. Adeleye and Paul Lovejoy** — has established what happened, who ordered it, who profited and who paid.