Yan Tatsine

The Yan Tatsine was a militant Quranist[1][2] movement founded by the controversial Nigerian leader Maitatsine that first appeared around the early 1970s.

By December 1980, continued Yan Tatsine attacks on other religious figures and police forced the Nigerian army to become involved.

The European Economic Community also criticized it and Pope John Paul II called it ""a grave, incredible drama producing the largest single, and worst human exodus in the 20th century".

British politician Michael Foot sent a letter to the Nigerian High Commissioner in London, saying ""an act of heartlessness, and a failure of common humanity".

[7] French media such as the Jeune Afrique ran a front-page story "La Honte (The Shame)", saying the situation was "an act of barbarism unparalleled in the world" while Ghana newspaper Ghanaian Times said it was an "electoral gimmick" by the National Party of Nigeria-controlled government to deflect attention from its failures so it could win the 1983 election and also said the illegal alien expulsion was "create mass hysteria by infiltrating Sudan-trained mercenaries into Ghana to subvert the Ghanaian Government".

Bomb-making tools and explosives, AK-47 rifles with several rounds of ammunition were recovered from the leader's home, according to the police, along with a number of swords, daggers and gunpowder.

"[22] Because the group was intensely suspicious of outsiders, and because their uprisings in the 1970s gave rise to many rumors and apocryphal stories, little reliable knowledge exists of the movement.