Hamman Yaji, a Jihadist, inflicted the following terror on the indigenous Montagnard people of a small territory, Madagali, in northeastern Adamawa state of Nigeria (1912-27):
“On one raid Hamman Yaji’s soldiers cut off the heads of the dead pagans in front of [the palace], threw them into a hole in the ground, set them alight and cooked their food over the flames. Another time they forced the wives of the dead men to come forward and collect their husband’s heads in a calabash… One witness told me how he had seen children have a coil of wire hammered through their ears and jaws by the soldiers, while another related how, when Hamman Yaji learned of the great significance attached to the Sakur -a sub clan of Montagnard burial rites, he ordered his troops to cut up the bodies of the dead so that they could not be given a decent burial” (J.H Vaughan and Anthony H.M. Kirk-Green, The Diary of Hammam Yaji: A Chronicle of a West of West African Muslim ruler (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1995) pp 13-14.
