On 11th December 2025, Abubakar Sokoto Mohammed passed away. He was a graduate assistant at Ahmadu Bello University's Department of Sociology, appointed in 1976 after a petition by Dr Patrick Wilmot prevented the dismissal of four radical candidates, including Sokoto, Ntiem Kungwai, SA Nkom and Richard Umaru. Known as Sokoto, he was a committed intellectual dedicated to social justice, equality and Nigerian unity, opposing ethno-religious bigotry and advocating for Pan-Africanism. He remained on the faculty despite efforts to remove him, becoming a key figure in the tradition of radical scholarship at the university. His major work, The Satiru Revolt of Peasants and Slavs in the Sokoto Caliphate, examined the 1906 uprising against feudal and colonial oppression, detailing how the colonial regime burned every house in Satiru and killed residents, forbidding its rebuilding. Sokoto taught at Ahmadu Bello University and later at Usmanu Dan Fodiyo University. He contributed to journalism through roles at Crystal Magazine, Sokoto State Broadcasting Corporation and the Path newspaper. He participated in and served as directing staff at the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies in Kuru. A central member of the socialist Zaria Group, he trained younger comrades and maintained political networks. Days before his death, he delivered a Zoom presentation on Fanon for a centenary conference in Jos, shortly after a medical procedure.
Abubakar Sokoto Mohammed spent decades resisting efforts to remove him from academia while remaining deeply embedded in institutions partly shaped by the same state power he critiqued. He delivered a lecture from a hospital bed for a Fanon event, underscoring a lifelong alignment with revolutionary thought even in physical decline. His work exposed colonial eradication of Satiru, yet he operated within universities that often silence such histories. For those committed to structural critique in Nigeria, his life poses a quiet challenge: how to persist without being absorbed.
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