This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Between December 1980 and 1985, the Cameroonian born preacher Muhammadu Marwa, known as Maitatsine, and his followers, the Yan Tatsine, led a series of five armed uprisings in northern Nigerian cities. Marwa preached a starkly heterodox reading of Islam, rejecting the authority of the Hadith and the mainstream ulama, denouncing the ownership of watches, bicycles, radios and other manufactured goods as un-Islamic, and, by some accounts, claiming a form of prophetic status for himself. His following was drawn heavily from Kano's poorest residents, including migrant laborers with little stake in the city's formal economy.
Confrontation with Kano authorities in December 1980 escalated into open fighting between the sect and Nigerian police and army units, in which Marwa himself died of wounds. Further risings followed at Bulumkutu near Maiduguri and Rigasa near Kaduna in 1982, at Jimeta near Yola in 1984, and at Gombe in 1985, each suppressed by federal security forces after days of urban combat, led after Marwa's death by his surviving followers. No international body treated the risings as a matter for its own determination; the Nigerian federal government addressed them internally, through its own 1981 tribunal of inquiry rather than any international process.