He beckons to a mallam, which is what Lagosians call the Hausa Muslim gatekeepers.

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Locals said these men were unpopular outsiders who didn't speak the prevailing Hausa language.

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One set of bookshelves was lined with dictionaries of Yoruba, Latvian, Basque, Hausa, and more than three dozen other languages.

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One doctor's leg was broken and another doctor was slapped, the president of the resident doctors, Dr Yahaya Muhammed, told the BBC's Hausa service.

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Maina Ma'aji Lawan, a senator for the area, told the BBC Hausa service that more than 4, 000 houses had been burnt and more than 200 people had died.

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There the row was between the Muslim Hausa majority and the Christian minority over the appointment of a new Hausa emir for the town, and which community's cultural tradition should predominate.

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He told the BBC's Hausa service that the group was happy for Mr Gaddafi to continue as mediator and that it was willing to have face-to-face talks with the government of Niger.

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Two weeks later, he came home gaunt, smelling of beer, crying, saying he was sorry, that he had pawned the jewelry to the Hausa traders in Enugu, and that all the money was gone.

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The BBC's Will Ross, in Lagos, says the Jukun ethnic group is in dispute with the Muslim Hausa Fulani group over who the original inhabitants of the town are, and so who has the right to own land.

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Dan Fodio, an ethnic Fulani Islamic scholar, rose up against the Hausa rulers of what is now northern Nigeria and Niger and created an empire which stretched from modern-day Burkina Faso to Cameroon, becoming one of Africa's largest pre-colonial states.

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