The Adamawa Emirate was the largest of the semi-autonomous states within the Sokoto Caliphate, one of the last remaining caliphates in the world alongside the Ottoman Empire. Its Fulani rulers governed a vast territory that overlapped with German colonial claims in what was then called Kamerun. By 1890, Adamawa was weakened by internal conflict -- a Mahdist movement had developed within the emirate, challenging its own leadership -- but the Fulani remained defiant about ceding land. Germany had its own problems to resolve first. Until 1898, the colonial Schutztruppe were still fighting the Bafut Wars in central and northwestern Kamerun, struggling to pacify chiefdoms that had no intention of submitting. Only after those campaigns wound down could Germany turn its attention northeast, toward the Sahel, the Adamawa Plateau, and the distant shore of Lake Chad.

The first major push began in January 1899, when Captain Oltwig von Kamptz led the Schutztruppe north from Douala to subdue the Tibati Sultanate in southern Adamawa. The German pretext was ending the Islamic slave trade. Tibati resisted fiercely, and the Bulu people on Adamawa's southern border rose up as well, their warriors marching to the coast and destroying the Catholic mission at Kribi. Only after two years of fighting, with reinforced troop numbers, was the Tibati Sultan captured and his palace taken by storm. The conquest of the Adamawa Plateau itself followed in 1901. Lieutenant Hans Dominik was initially ordered to negotiate with Emir Zubeiru, but another German officer stormed the city of Ngaoundere on 20 August, ignoring his governor's diplomatic orders. The British, seeing opportunity, sent Colonel Thomas Morland from Nigeria to seize Yola -- the emir's own capital. Zubeiru fled. Dominik's forces fought northwest, linking with other German units before crossing the Benue River and taking Garoua. At Rei Buba, Lieutenant Radke led just 47 men against a much larger Fulani force, nearly losing the battle before a final bayonet charge carried the day.

Zubeiru refused to accept defeat. He traveled to Sokoto, raised a large force of Fulani cavalry and infantry, and appealed to the Mahdist movement for support, calling for jihad against the German invaders. Despite having intelligence about the emir's plans, the Germans initially hoped to use Zubeiru as a puppet ruler who could help them win over the remaining emirates. Instead, Zubeiru attacked Garoua with his assembled army in November 1901. The assault failed. His force suffered some 300 dead, and the survivors fled toward Maroua, where Dominik's Schutztruppe pursued and defeated them again. Zubeiru escaped into the Mandara Mountains with his remaining followers. Dominik responded to anyone who had aided the emir's flight with brutal efficiency -- the local Fulani ruler Bakari Yadji was executed for helping Zubeiru escape, and his son Hamman was installed as a compliant replacement. By May 1902, a German expedition had reached the southern shores of Lake Chad. Zubeiru himself was killed later in 1903 by tribal rivals in British Nigeria, but the political landscape he had known was already gone. Germany and Britain officially partitioned the region that year, and the Sokoto Caliphate was formally dissolved.

A fragile peace held until the summer of 1907, when two men recently returned from the Hajj ignited a Mahdist uprising. Mal Alhadji, inspired by the Koranic theologian Liman Arabu, began preaching the coming of the Mahdi near Maroua, gathering followers from both the Fulani and the Shuwa Arabs. He installed himself at Goudoum-Goudoum and called for the expulsion of the German Christians. Simultaneously, Goni Waday launched a parallel revolt from Ngaoundere, delivering fiery sermons in the city's mosques. Alhadji moved north, burning villages he considered complicit with the Europeans. His force attacked the German camp at Malam-Petel in early July but was driven back by gunfire and heavy losses. The Germans captured Alhadji at Doumru, turned him over to the local ruler of Maroua, and he was publicly beheaded in the marketplace. Waday fared no better. Expelled from Ngaoundere by its ruler -- who feared German retaliation -- Waday led his followers north toward Garoua. On 18 July 1907, at Guebake, the Schutztruppe ambushed them. Waday was killed by machine-gun fire. The Germans then rounded up every Fulani leader who had supported him and hanged them in Garoua. Because both revolt leaders had recently returned from pilgrimages to Mecca, the Germans imposed restrictions requiring prior authorization for any future Hajj.

Germany's hard-won control of northern Kamerun would last barely a decade. When World War I reached Africa, French colonial troops and the British West African Frontier Force dismantled the German colony entirely in the Kamerun campaign. The emirates the Germans had conquered, the rulers they had installed, the borders they had drawn -- all were rearranged once more. For the Fulani, the Hausa, the Mahdists, and the many other peoples of the Adamawa Plateau, the wars of 1899 to 1907 were not the beginning or the end of disruption. They were one chapter in a longer story of outside powers imposing their will on a landscape that had its own political traditions, its own conflicts, and its own reasons for resistance.