THE TRUE ETHNICITY OF THE PEOPLE OF BIDA BY ALIYU MANTAFIEN

The true ethnicity of the people of Bida is
virtually undecipherable. The present people
of Bida are not Fulani, Nupe, Yoruba, Igala,
Hausa, Igbira, Kanuri, Arab, etc, etc – they are
all these various people combined in one.
Bida is a melting pot, to borrow an
American epithet, of all these people from all
parts of ancient Nigeria and beyond.
In the beginning the population of Bida was
hundred percent Bini. But that was in those
days when Bida was a small, walled, Bini
village much the same as the neighbouring
villages of Doko, Gaba, Zhima, Kuchi,Mantafien,Edozhigi etc. That
was in the days before the Dendo dynasts
came and transformed Bida into the capital
city of their emirate.
Bida used to be the throne-town of the
kings of the Binis whose royal title was
‘Binida’ or, simply, ‘Bida’. It was said that the
village used to have its proper name which
is now lost to history because it came to be
identified as the ‘Town of the King’ or
‘Binida’ or ‘Bida’. This is much the same way
that the name ‘Medina’, ‘The City of the
Prophet’, came to overshadow the original
name ‘Yathrib’.
In any case the population of Bida was
entirely made up of Bini in those pre-Dendo
dynastic days.