Jos is a city of nearly one million people on a highland plateau in central Nigeria, sitting on the exact latitude where the Muslim north meets the Christian south. The British built it from nothing in the early 1900s to extract tin — and in doing so, assembled a population of Berom farmers, Hausa-Fulani laborers, Igbo traders, and European miners who had no shared history. When the tin economy collapsed in the 1980s and the foreigners left, the city they had manufactured spent the next three decades tearing itself apart. Since 2001, sectarian violence has killed at least 4,000 people in and around Jos. The colonial buildings are rotting. The neighborhoods are sorted by faith. The mines are toxic craters. Nigeria still calls Plateau State "the Home of Peace and Tourism."
The Dogo Nahawa Massacre and the Night Jos Became a Killing Ground
A 25-year-old student in the village of Dogo Nahawa, three miles south of Jos, woke to gunfire at 3:30 a.m. on March 7, 2010. Several hundred attackers had surrounded the village in the dark — heads wrapped in cloth, some wearing military camouflage. One group fired into the air to drive residents from their homes. A second group waited outside with machetes. The student ran out his back door but stopped when he realized the shooters were herding fleeing villagers toward the machete line. He climbed a mango tree. From the branches, he watched them work through the village for ninety minutes — killing, setting homes alight, moving methodically from house to house. Many women stayed inside, which is perhaps why so many of them died. Health officials later pulled the bodies of children from the wreckage, including a four-day-old infant. A plaque at the mass grave lists 354 names. A state official told journalists the real number was above 500.
The attackers spoke Hausa and Fulani. The dead were Berom Christians. Survivors said they recognized some of the voices — men who had once lived in the village before fleeing during earlier rounds of violence. "I heard them saying, 'The time has come, you will see,'" one witness told Human Rights Watch.
Dogo Nahawa was not the beginning. It was the third mass outbreak of sectarian violence in Jos in less than a decade — roughly 1,000 killed in 2001, at least 700 in 2008, and now this. Nor was it the end. A double car bombing at a Jos market in 2014 killed 118. The cycle has repeated so many times that at least sixteen judicial commissions of inquiry have been convened to investigate the causes. Not one has produced a meaningful prosecution.
The violence in Jos is not random, and it is not ancient. It has a precise origin: the British colonial economy that built the city in the first place. Jos exists because the British found tin in the plateau at the turn of the twentieth century and needed labor to dig it out. The mining operation pulled together Berom and Anaguta farmers from the highlands, Hausa-Fulani workers from the Islamic north, Igbo and Yoruba traders from the south, and European overseers from London and Liverpool. For six decades, the tin economy provided a shared material purpose that held this manufactured population together. When global tin prices collapsed in the 1980s and the international companies withdrew, what remained was a city full of people who had been assembled by extraction, governed by a colonial legal framework that divided them into "indigenes" and "settlers," and left with no economic glue. The ground beneath Jos had been hollowed out twice — first by the mines, then by the vacuum they left behind.
How British Tin Mining Built Jos from Nothing
The Jos Plateau Before the Mines — Berom Land and Resistance to Outsiders
The Jos Plateau rises 1,200 meters above sea level in central Nigeria — a grassy highland of granite boulders, undulating ridges, and temperate air that feels nothing like the humid lowlands surrounding it. The Berom, Anaguta, and Afizere peoples farmed this land for centuries, organized around clan-based communities and kinship governance. Their geographic isolation was also their protection. The Sokoto Caliphate's nineteenth-century jihad, which subjugated most of what is now northern Nigeria, never reached the plateau. The highland peoples fought off Fulani raiders and maintained political independence that the lowland populations did not.
The British arrived at the turn of the twentieth century. G. Nicolas and W. Laws, the first two mining engineers sent to survey the plateau's tin deposits, were both repelled by the local population. The Berom had fresh memories of the jihad-era attacks and treated foreign surveyors as the advance guard of another conquest. They were right. By 1903, the British West Africa Frontier Force had fought its way onto the plateau and incorporated the area into the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. The military conquest was not incidental to the mining — it was the prerequisite. The tin required control of the land, and control of the land required the suppression of the people who lived on it.
The Tin Rush and the Railway That Opened the Plateau
Commercial mining began around 1905, and the operation scaled fast. The Jos Plateau held the only tin field in the world where tin and columbite — a rare mineral critical for aerospace and electronics — could be mined simultaneously. Early extraction relied on panning and sluicing; within two decades, mechanized dredging and open-pit mining had reshaped the landscape into a moonscape of flooded craters and stripped earth.
The completion of the Zaria–Bukuru railway in 1914 connected the plateau to the ports at Lagos and Port Harcourt and triggered what locals called the "Tin Rush." Two banks — the Bank of British West Africa and Barclays — opened in 1917, and the population surged. Hausa-Fulani laborers arrived from the north. Igbo traders came from the southeast. Yoruba merchants moved in from the southwest. European mining executives, Lebanese middlemen, and Indian shopkeepers filled out the commercial class. The British issued mining leases under the legal fiction that the Protectorate government owned all land in Northern Nigeria — an arrangement that allowed colonial companies to evict Berom farmers from their own fields, sometimes while their crops were still growing.
Jos was not a city that grew from the needs of its inhabitants. It was a city imposed on a landscape to serve the needs of an empire's metallurgical supply chain.
Peak Tin and the Colonial City at Its Height
Production peaked in 1943 at 15,842 tons, extracted by more than 80,000 African laborers working in conditions the colonial administration preferred not to document in detail. The 320-square-kilometer mining zone held tin, columbite, wolfram, kaolin, zircon, and uranium. Nigeria ranked among the world's top tin exporters, and Jos was the industry's beating heart.
The tin money built the infrastructure of a colonial town: administrative buildings with broad verandas and high ceilings, churches, a railway station, and in 1938, the Hill Station Hotel — one of Nigeria's first luxury hotels, perched on a hill at 10 Tundun Wada Road. Queen Elizabeth II stayed there in 1956 during her Nigerian tour. The hotel's temperate gardens and cocktail parties made Jos a holiday destination for British officers and expatriate managers who found the plateau's cool air a relief from the heat of Lagos and Kaduna.
In 1952, the British archaeologist Bernard Fagg founded the Jos Museum — the first public museum in West Africa. Its collection of Nok terracotta sculptures, dating from 500 BCE to 200 CE, represented one of Africa's earliest known artistic traditions. The Museum of Traditional Nigerian Architecture, or MOTNA, displayed life-size replicas of buildings from every region of the country: the walls of Kano, the mosque of Zaria, a Tiv village compound. The museum was a monument to the idea that Jos was a place where Nigeria's diversity could coexist under one roof.
The illusion held for as long as the tin flowed.
The Collapse of Tin and the Invention of the "Settler"
When the Global Tin Market Died
Independence came in 1960. In 1972, the Nigerian government nationalized the mining industry. Neither event killed the tin economy — global market forces did. Synthetic substitutes eroded demand through the 1970s. When international tin prices crashed in the mid-1980s, the multinational companies that had built Jos pulled out. The European managers left. The Lebanese middlemen left. The banks that the Tin Rush had opened consolidated and moved on.
What remained were the craters. Environmental officials in Plateau State have estimated that 1,100 tin and columbite mines were abandoned after the boom, posing health risks to as many as two million people. The open pits filled with water, creating artificial lakes that drown children and breed mosquitoes. Radioactive mine tailings — a byproduct of columbite extraction — contaminate soil and groundwater across the Jos, Barkin Ladi, Bukuru, and Riyom districts. The landscape the British left behind is not merely scarred; it is toxic.
Small-scale artisanal miners still work the old pits, extracting whatever tin the machines missed. Karimah Ashadu's 2021 documentary Plateau follows these workers as they scrape the colonial leftovers from the earth. "What we do now is just remine the mines the whites left behind," one miner explains. A landowner who leases his land to prospectors describes the occasional jackpot — a young man who found enough tin to buy a house and send his children to school. The colonial past surfaces in their stories without prompting: their parents worked for the mining companies and earned just enough for food, never sharing in the profits that were shipped to London.
Indigene vs. Settler — The Colonial Framework That Outlived the Colony
The British did not only leave behind craters. They left behind a legal architecture that would prove far more destructive.
Nigeria's constitution distinguishes between "indigenes" — members of ethnic groups considered native to a particular area — and "settlers," meaning everyone else. Indigene status determines access to government jobs, educational scholarships, land allocation, and political office. The distinction was a colonial invention: British administrators in Northern Nigeria were the first to formalize the categories of "native" and "stranger" as tools of indirect rule. Independent Nigeria adopted and codified the framework without revision.
In Jos, the indigene-settler line mapped almost perfectly onto the religious divide. The Berom, Anaguta, and Afizere — the plateau's original inhabitants — were overwhelmingly Christian. The Hausa-Fulani, who had migrated to Jos for tin-mining work and trading opportunities beginning in the early 1900s, were overwhelmingly Muslim. Many Hausa-Fulani families had lived in Jos for three or four generations. Under Nigerian law, they were still settlers.
The fuse was lit in 1991, when General Ibrahim Babangida's military government created Jos North Local Government Area — a new administrative unit whose boundaries placed the Hausa-Fulani community in numerical majority within the city center for the first time. The Berom perceived this as a deliberate federal maneuver to hand their ancestral territory to the settlers. The Hausa-Fulani saw it as overdue recognition. The first elected chairman of Jos North LGA was Samaila Mohammed, a Hausa-Fulani Muslim. His election shook the indigenous establishment.
Tensions escalated through the 1990s — skirmishes in 1994, 1997, and 1998. In 1999, the newly elected Christian chairman of Jos North placed an embargo on issuing indigene certificates to Hausa residents. The document was not symbolic. Without an indigene certificate, a person could not apply for most government positions, qualify for educational quotas, or hold senior administrative posts. Hausa families who had lived in Jos for a century were formally locked out of the civic infrastructure.
"If a solution could be found to the conflict over indigene rights," a Muslim elder in Jos told researchers, "95 per cent of the potential for violent conflict in Plateau State would be removed."
The solution was never found.
The Years of Blood — How Sectarian Violence Reshaped Jos
The September 2001 Riots and the First Thousand Dead
The spark, in retrospect, seems impossibly small. In September 2001, the federal government appointed Alhaji Muktar Mohammed, a Hausa-Fulani Muslim, as local coordinator of a poverty alleviation program. Christian leaders objected — the position, they argued, should have gone to an indigene. Tensions were already raw from the indigene certificate embargo. On September 7, according to one account, a Christian woman attempted to walk through a roadside mosque during Friday prayers and was asked to wait. She refused. The confrontation escalated. Within hours, neighborhoods that had been multiethnic for decades were burning.
The violence lasted ten days. Christians and Muslims attacked each other with machetes, set homes and places of worship on fire, and dumped bodies in the streets. The military eventually restored order. Approximately 1,000 people were dead. At least 50,000 were displaced. A mass burial had to be arranged because there were too many corpses for individual graves.
The 2001 riots fundamentally altered Jos's urban geography. Residents who had lived in mixed neighborhoods for years began relocating to areas dominated by their own ethnic and religious group. The sorting was not systematic or mandated — it was survival instinct. A Berom family in a Muslim-majority street moved to a Berom neighborhood. A Hausa family in a Christian area did the same. With each move, the invisible partition through the center of Jos hardened into something approaching a physical boundary.
The 2008 Riots, the 2010 Massacres, and the Cycle That Cannot Be Broken
The pattern repeated. In November 2008, violence erupted over disputed local government elections. At least 300 people were killed in two days of rioting, and the residential sorting accelerated.
January 2010 brought a fresh cycle. Fighting in Jos spread to surrounding villages, and on January 19, armed Christian mobs from the Berom ethnic group attacked Muslim residents of the settlement of Kuru Karama, killing 174 people — including 36 women and 56 children. Satellite images released by Human Rights Watch showed the near-complete destruction of the village.
Six weeks later came Dogo Nahawa. Then, in May 2014, a double car bombing at a Jos market — attributed to Boko Haram — killed at least 118 people. In previous years, an attack of that scale would almost certainly have triggered sectarian reprisals. This time, religious leaders on both sides managed to keep the gangs off the streets. "Our youths, these days, are listening," said Rwang Dalyop Dantong, a Berom youth leader. The restraint was genuine. It was also fragile.
Armed Mobs and the Geography of a Divided City
Academic research on the Jos violence has mapped a distinctive spatial pattern. Armed mobs tend to originate in segregated "strongholds" — neighborhoods dominated by a single ethnic or religious group, such as the Christian area of Angwan Rukuba or the Muslim settlements of Dilimi and Gangare. From these strongholds, fighters march into the "frontiers" — mixed neighborhoods sandwiched between rival territories — and turn them into battlegrounds. The researchers' term for these areas echoes the language of military conflict: contested zones, buffer interfaces, theaters of operation.
The mixed neighborhood of Nasarawa Gwong became one of Jos's fiercest frontiers. Located between a Christian stronghold to the north and Muslim strongholds to the south, it drew armed mobs from both sides during every major outbreak. Fighters moved through narrow alleys inaccessible to military vehicles, rendering the security forces largely irrelevant. The pattern resembles the sectarian geography of Belfast during the Troubles — and the comparison is not academic. Researchers have explicitly invoked Belfast's "buffer interfaces" to explain how Jos's urban landscape channels and concentrates violence.
Each round of killing drove more residents out of mixed areas and deeper into the safety of their own group. Each round made the next one more likely.
A City Cut in Two — What Jos Looks Like Now
The Religious Fault Line Running Through the Heart of Jos
Jos today is, by some assessments, the most religiously segregated city in Nigeria. The division is not theoretical — it is physical, administrative, and daily. Jos North is Muslim-majority. Jos South is Christian-majority. Markets, schools, hospitals, and residential blocks are sorted along lines that did not exist a generation ago.
Sani Mudi, a Muslim leader in Jos, described the reality to AFP reporters from the window of the central mosque in Jos North. The mosque, flanked by a crumbling market, has evolved into something far beyond a place of worship. Young men come not only to pray but to seek help with identification papers, proof-of-residence documents, and government services that the Christian-controlled state administration does not provide to the Muslim population. The mosque has become a de facto city hall for a community excluded from the official one. "We have all the same obligations to the state. We have to pay tax," Mudi said. "But we are excluded at all levels."
The exclusion runs both ways. Christians in Muslim-majority northern Nigerian states face equivalent restrictions — denied indigene status, locked out of political appointments, subjected to Sharia provisions they did not vote for. The indigene-settler framework that the British invented and Nigeria codified is not a Jos-specific pathology. It is a national one. Jos is simply the place where the framework has produced the most spectacular violence, because Jos sits on the exact line where the two Nigerias — Muslim north, Christian south — collide.
A brittle peace holds. Military patrols maintain order. Interfaith dialogue programs, backed by Western donors, have produced some genuine goodwill. Berom and Hausa leaders who lost family in the violence have sat in the same room and spoken about forgiveness. In Dogo Nahawa, peacebuilders like Simtong, a community organizer, and Maimuna, a social worker who lost her half-brother in the 2010 massacre, run trauma-healing workshops for widows and orphans. "We have a long way to go," Simtong told Peace Insight, "but every step we take brings us closer to a future where our children can grow up in peace."
The structural causes — the constitutional indigene framework, the zero-sum competition for political appointments, the demographic anxieties of a minority population watching a majority grow — remain unresolved. At least sixteen commissions of inquiry have investigated the Jos crisis. Their reports have identified the same root causes, recommended the same constitutional reforms, and been shelved by the same governments. "Judicial commissions are where genuine legal and social controversies go to die," one Nigerian human rights lawyer told the United States Institute of Peace.
The Colonial Ruins and the Crumbling Museum
The physical infrastructure the British built with tin money is decaying at a pace that matches the social fabric.
The Hill Station Hotel, established in 1938 as a luxury retreat for colonial mining executives, sits in the center of Jos with 170 rooms, 40 of which have been out of service since a fire. The multi-level stone steps leading from the conference center to the main wing are crumbling. The fixtures are obsolete. The gardens that once hosted Queen Elizabeth II's cocktail reception in 1956 are overgrown. A customer review noted that the hotel "feels like it was wrapped up in a time machine and delivered straight from 1959." The hotel's neighborhood in Jos is still named after it — Hill Station Junction — and the name is so embedded that anyone who does not know it cannot claim to know the city. The fame endures. The building does not.
The Jos Museum, founded by Bernard Fagg in 1952, was once recognized as one of the finest in West Africa. Its Nok terracotta collection — sculptures dating to 500 BCE — represents some of the earliest figurative art in sub-Saharan Africa. The museum's annual government allocation in 2019 was ₦158 million, a figure that has done nothing to prevent the institution's decline. MOTNA's life-size architectural replicas — the Kano walls, the Zaria mosque — have crumbled into mounds of sand. Over 100 hectares of museum land have been sold to private developers, who use the space for event centers and restaurants. In 1987, thieves stole several valuable artifacts; a stolen bronze head from Ifẹ resurfaced in London thirty years later. Santos Ayuba Larab, a senior lecturer at the University of Jos, offered a blunt diagnosis: "We have allowed religion to kill our history."
Artisanal Miners in the Craters the British Left Behind
Outside the city, on the scarred tableland where multinational mining companies once operated fleets of dredgers, artisanal miners work the colonial pits by hand. The landscape is a topography of extraction: flooded craters, stripped hillsides, eroded gullies, and water-filled shafts that drop without warning into the earth. The 320-square-kilometer mining zone that once positioned Nigeria as one of the world's top six tin producers is now an environmental hazard zone. Radioactive tailings from columbite processing contaminate the soil. Children play near open pits that have no fencing, no signage, and no government oversight.
The miners extract what little the machines missed and sell it to middlemen who ship it to processing facilities elsewhere. A lucky find — a vein of cassiterite that the colonial dredgers overlooked — can pay for a house. Most days pay for food. The work is dangerous, unregulated, and punishingly physical, and it takes place in the exact holes that British companies dug, profited from, and abandoned without remediation.
The parallel between the hollowed-out ground and the hollowed-out city above it is not a metaphor. It is the same process, operating on two different substrates. The British extracted the tin and left the craters. They assembled the population and left the legal framework. Both legacies are toxic, and neither has been cleaned up.
The Legacy of Tin City — What Jos Reveals About Colonial Extraction
Sixteen Commissions of Inquiry and Zero Accountability
The Nigerian state's response to Jos has followed a pattern so consistent it functions as its own form of violence. An outbreak occurs. The federal or state government convenes a judicial commission of inquiry. The commission interviews survivors, documents atrocities, identifies perpetrators by name, and produces a report recommending prosecution and constitutional reform. The government shelves the report. The recommendations are never implemented. The next outbreak occurs, and the cycle repeats.
After the 2001 riots alone, five separate commissions were announced. The Justice Bola Ajibola Commission documented intelligence failures so severe — including a civilian informant's written warning about planned arson and weapons caches, which police ignored — that it concluded the police commissioner was guilty of "at best, gross negligence and at worst, sheer incompetence." The commission found circumstantial evidence suggesting possible deliberate facilitation of the attacks. No one was prosecuted.
The International Crisis Group's assessment is blunt: the Jos crisis is the result of the Nigerian state's failure to amend its constitution to replace indigene status with residency-based citizenship. The reform is not conceptually complex. Other Nigerian states have quietly dropped the most discriminatory provisions. Plateau State has not, because the political incentives run in the opposite direction — for both sides, the indigene-settler distinction is a tool of mobilization, patronage, and control. Dismantling it would require elites to surrender the very instrument that keeps them in power.
Visiting Jos — The Atlas Entry
Jos sits on the Jos Plateau in central Nigeria, roughly 300 kilometers northeast of Abuja by road. The drive climbs through steep, winding bends and mountainous terrain before opening onto the highland tableland. The city's elevation — approximately 1,200 meters — gives it a temperate climate unlike anywhere else in Nigeria: cool mornings, mild afternoons, and none of the suffocating humidity of Lagos or the Saharan heat of Kano. Plateau State's old tourism slogan — "the Home of Peace and Tourism" — was not invented as irony, though it reads that way now.
The Jos Museum and what remains of MOTNA are worth visiting for the Nok terracotta alone, though the grounds reflect decades of neglect. The Shere Hills to the east offer panoramic views of the plateau. Riyom Rock, a dramatic pile of boulders balanced on top of one another, is visible from the Jos–Akwanga road. The Hill Station Hotel still operates, mostly as a venue for conferences and events, trading on a name that carries more weight than its current facilities.
The city is functional, busy, and commercial. Jos is not a ruin or a memorial. It is a working state capital with a university, hospitals, markets, and a population approaching one million. The violence is not constant — it erupts in cycles, separated by years of tense coexistence. Most residents, most of the time, live ordinary urban lives. The divide is visible in the geography of neighborhoods and the composition of markets, not in checkpoints or walls. A visitor may not see it at all unless they know where to look.
The ethical dimension of standing in Jos is different from standing at a memorial or a ruin. This is not a place that has finished its story. The structural causes of the violence — the indigene-settler framework, the unresolved constitutional questions, the demographic pressures of a growing population on contested land — remain intact. The commissions of inquiry have identified the problems. The solutions are known. The political will to implement them does not exist. Jos waits, as it has waited for a quarter century, for the next spark or the reform that never comes — whichever arrives first.
Frequently Asked Questions About Jos, Nigeria
What caused the religious violence in Jos, Nigeria?
The violence in Jos stems from a constitutional framework that divides Nigerian citizens into "indigenes" and "settlers." In Jos, the predominantly Christian Berom, Anaguta, and Afizere peoples hold indigene status, while the predominantly Muslim Hausa-Fulani — many of whom have lived in the city for over a century — are classified as settlers. Settler status restricts access to government jobs, scholarships, land, and political office. The British colonial administration originally created this distinction, and independent Nigeria codified it. When the tin mining economy that had held the city's diverse population together collapsed in the 1980s, competition over indigene privileges became the dominant fault line. Major outbreaks of violence occurred in 2001, 2008, and 2010, killing thousands and displacing tens of thousands more.
How many people have been killed in the Jos crisis?
Estimates vary because official casualty figures are contested and politicized by both sides. The 2001 riots killed approximately 1,000 people in ten days. The 2008 violence killed at least 300. The January 2010 riots and the March 2010 Dogo Nahawa massacre together killed several hundred more — the plaque at the Dogo Nahawa mass grave lists 354 names, though state officials estimated over 500 dead in that attack alone. A 2011 report by the Geneva Declaration estimated that at least 4,000 and possibly as many as 7,000 people had been killed in and around Jos since 2001. A 2014 double car bombing at a Jos market killed an additional 118.
What was the Dogo Nahawa massacre?
The Dogo Nahawa massacre occurred in the early hours of March 7, 2010, when several hundred armed attackers surrounded the predominantly Christian Berom village of Dogo Nahawa, roughly five kilometers south of Jos. The attackers used guns to drive residents from their homes and killed fleeing villagers with machetes. The dead included scores of women and children, among them a four-day-old infant. A mass grave at Dogo Nahawa lists 354 victims by name. The attack was part of a broader cycle of sectarian reprisals between Christian and Muslim communities in Plateau State that had been escalating since 2001.
Why was Jos called "Tin City" and what happened to the mines?
Jos earned the nickname "Tin City" because the British colonial government built the city around massive tin and columbite deposits discovered on the Jos Plateau around 1902. By the 1940s, Nigeria was among the world's top tin exporters, with production peaking at nearly 16,000 tons in 1943. The mining industry employed over 80,000 African laborers and attracted multinational companies, European managers, and migrant workers from across Nigeria. After independence in 1960, the government nationalized the industry in 1972, and global tin prices crashed in the mid-1980s. International companies withdrew, leaving behind approximately 1,100 abandoned mines. Today, artisanal miners rework the old colonial pits by hand, and the abandoned sites pose serious environmental and health risks to an estimated two million people.
Is Jos safe to visit?
Jos is a functioning state capital with a university, hospitals, markets, and a population of roughly 900,000. The city is not in a state of constant violence — outbreaks of sectarian conflict have been episodic, separated by periods of tense but genuine calm. Military patrols and interfaith dialogue initiatives have contributed to relative stability in recent years. The city's temperate highland climate, the Jos Museum and its Nok terracotta collection, and the surrounding Shere Hills remain genuine attractions. Travelers should monitor current security advisories, avoid areas known for sectarian tension — particularly neighborhoods along the religious divide between Jos North and Jos South — and be aware that the underlying causes of the conflict remain unresolved.
What is the indigene-settler conflict in Nigeria?
Nigeria's constitution grants preferential rights to "indigenes" — members of ethnic groups considered native to a particular state or local government area. Indigene status determines access to government employment, educational scholarships, land allocation, and political appointments. Those classified as "settlers" — even if their families have lived in an area for generations — are excluded from these privileges. The distinction was first formalized by British colonial administrators and has never been reformed. In Jos, the indigene-settler divide maps almost exactly onto the religious divide: Christian groups hold indigene status, while the Muslim Hausa-Fulani community is classified as settlers. This framework is widely recognized as a primary driver of the Jos crisis, and the International Crisis Group has called for its replacement with a residency-based citizenship model.
Sources
* Capital and Labour in the Nigerian Tin Mines - Bill Freund (1981)
* A Deadly Cycle: Ethno-Religious Conflict in Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria - Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development (2011)
* Curbing Violence in Nigeria (I): The Jos Crisis - International Crisis Group, Africa Report No. 196 (2012)
* Rethinking Nigeria's Indigene-Settler Conflicts - Aaron Sayne, United States Institute of Peace, Special Report No. 311 (2012)
* "They Do Not Own This Place": Government Discrimination Against "Non-Indigenes" in Nigeria - Human Rights Watch (2006)
* Nigeria: Revenge in the Name of Religion - Human Rights Watch (2005)
* Nigeria: Investigate Massacre, Step Up Patrols - Human Rights Watch (2010)
* Jonah Jang and the Jasawa: Ethno-Religious Conflict in Jos, Nigeria - Philip Ostien, Muslim-Christian Relations in Africa (2009)
* The Emergence and Development of Ethnic Strongholds and Frontiers of Collective Violence in Jos, Nigeria - African Studies Review, Vol. 62, No. 4 (2019)
* Routing Ethnic Violence in a Divided City: Walking in the Footsteps of Armed Mobs in Jos, Nigeria - Journal of Modern African Studies (2018)
* Tin Mining and Peasant Impoverishment in Jos Division 1900-1950 - Dan'azumi Bukar, Ahmadu Bello University (Master's thesis)
* Plateau - Karimah Ashadu (documentary film, 2021-22)
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