MlC CHsA‘rEIGANT

(Hill ”Hill/Ill]! (UlllfllllllIIHIIHWII

93 01029 2229

ll

 

 

 

 

This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled
WOMEN, ECOLOGY AND ISLAM IN THE MAKING OF
MODERN HAUSA CULTURAL HISTORY
presented by

Mary Wren Bivins

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for ‘

Ph.D. degreein History

' ”fl/

 

 

/Major professor

Date April 8, 1991+

 

MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0- 12771

 

 

 

 

 

LIBRARY
Michigan State
University

 

 

 

 

PLACE ll RETURN BOX to romovo this checkout from your record.
'I’O AVOID FINES mum on or baton duo duo.

—'-=—q—j
DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

4225;? —_ _ ____I
if, —I— |
MIL— =l—l
AUH.UW][_ [—4

UAN172mz
Q7 28 11

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P

MSU II An Affirm-tin Action/Emmi Opportunity Intuition
W

 

 

m1

   

WOMEN, ECOLOGY AND ISLAM IN THE MAKING OF MODERN HAUSA
CULTURAL HISTORY

By

Mary Wren Bivins

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of History

1994

ABSTRACT

WOMEN ECOLOGY AND ISLAM
IN THE MAKING OF MODERN HAUSA CULTURAL HISTORY

by
Mary Wren Bivins

This dissertation is a study of Islamic Hausa women in the West African
Republics of Nigeria and Niger and the unique roles they played in shaping,
even at times defining, modern Hausa culture. The study begins in the last
decades of the nineteenth century, a point of time which emphasizes the
profound social, economic and ecological changes already affected in Hausaland
by the establishment and expansion of the Fulbe, Islamic Sokoto Caliphate
between 1806 and 1904 and dramatically highlights Hausa culture and gender
relations on the eve of colonial conquest. From 1899 to 1960, the Hausa people
were incorporated into two, often competing, colonial states, French Niger and
British Nigeria. During that time, Hausa people experienced intensified
demands to modernize their farming systems, social relations and personal lives
under the urging and, at times, coercive direction of two distinct colonial
regimes. This is the historical and political setting in which the dissertation

examines Hausa women and the emergence of modern Hausa culture

Beginning with evidence of fin de siecle Hausa culture, the dissertation
examines a diverse body of historical evidence and uses oral literature, material
culture and the life histories of Hausa informants to contextualize the documents
of the colonial regime in Hausa Niger. The language of gender relations in
Hausa folk stories and Hausa Islamic legal traditions and the material culture of
Hausa women found in the ethnographic collections of European museums are
given special attention as historical evidence.

The dissertation concludes that the blending of Hausa notions of gender,
ethnicity and Islam empowered Hausa women's participation in the economic
transformation of the nineteenth century Hausa landscape and the Hausa
response to European conquest. In the culture of fin de siecle Hausaland, gender
was an essential element in Hausa definitions of ethnicity and Islamic practices.
The historical connections between women, gender, ethnicity and Islam are
essential to understanding the influence of the past on the present in Hausa

culture and political movements.

For my daughters, Linda and Roberta Wren Bivins

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank those Hausa women who guided me through their world. I
particular, I note the extraordinary patience and wisdom of Saratu, Gude, Bango,
U'ma, Amina, all of Mahuta, and Aichatou, Hawa, Rachia and Maimuna of
Matamaye. In Niger I enjoyed the collegiality of I.R.S.H. and the kind assistance
of the staff of the National Archives and the personnel of the Prefecture, Zinder. I
especially appreciated the hospitality of the Kaba family, David Queen, Director
of the American Cultural Center, Cynthia Moore, Elizabeth Hall, Jill Jupiter and
Gabrielle Neuness. In Zinder, I enjoyed the friendship of Annerieke van Dorsten
and Peter deVries and in Berlin that of Dr. Til Forster and his family. The staff of
Berlin's Museum fiir Vtilkerkund was collegial and most supportive of my
research in their collections. Dr. Ann Dunbar has been an exceptionally
thoughtful colleague. I would also like to express my respect and gratitude for
the professional guidance of Dr. Harry Reed, Dr. Elizabeth Elderidge, and Dr.
David Dwyer. I am deeply grateful for the intellectual companionship and
encouragement given to me by Dr. Maureen Flanagan, Dr. Charles Radding, Dr.
William Hixson, Ms. Leena Seiglebaum, Ms. Susanna Miller and Ms. Roberta

Bivins and her sister, Ms. Linda Bivins.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1. Prologue and Introduction: Women, Ecology
and Islam in the Making of Modern Hausa History

Chapter 2. Daura and the Hausa Bakwai:
Gender in Hausa Myths of Origin

Chapter 3. Tatsuniyoyi: Gender in Hausa Narratives

Chapter 4. Iabarai: Gender and The Message of
Islamic Reform

Chapter 5. Travel Narratives: Landscapes,
Language and the Ecology of Hausaland

Chapter 6. Rapports de Tournee: From Damagaram
to Zinder in the Colony du Niger

Chapter 7. Conclusion: Gender and Modernity in Hausa Niger

iv

31

74

123

161

209

233

List of Tables

Table 1. Koranic Teachers and Students in the Cercle de Zinder 230
Table 2. Rapports de Tournee 237
List of Figures

Map. The Hausa States in West Africa vi

AoooH mwmm Scum Umuamvmv mmumum «mam: och “mowhm< uwwz

«no.0. .o 3...... 59:52 3
Q :38 .o 3?... Sofiaow mm

4\

At 323% K < « 3m0>

 

warz
otoN.
23.. 825 .3
“:35; N‘ ‘ \. cl 3 ’ <WD<I \

    
  

A “a a o \ I
\\ u flcfiuwv. I
x

Chapter 1: Prologue and Introduction

Voice Print of A Hausa Village

The zaure is cool. Its thick, oblique, clay walls and high, domed roof
encourage a breeze, refreshing two strangers waiting for the village head to
return home from inspecting his cotton field. The cotton harvest is at hand; the
maturing bolls require careful watching. The village head, an elderly man,
father of a family already four generations grown, must consider when the crop
will ripen and when the labor, male and female, of his large and prosperous
household will be needed to bring in their most valuable cash crop. It is
November, 1974, in a Hausa village in rural Nigeria.l

The village head's homestead is in the heart of the village, adjoining the
compound of his brother, reputably the wealthiest farmer in town. Across the
road is the homestead of another wealthy farmer. All are surrounded by the
homesteads of other long-established families and all are connected with one
another through ties of kinship and obligation; friendship and rivalry; memories
of the distant and not so distant past; shared expectations and private desires for
the future. One thing is certain: the people in this part of town belong here.
They are not new arrivals or transients. Family defines the architecture of the
compounds and determines how space within them is used. Family ties, past,
present and future determine the human geography of this village. Old families

control the center of the village's physical and social space; newcomers and

 

1. The zaure is the entrance room or foyer of Hausa homes. M. Bivins. Field
journals and photo documentation, Mahuta, Nigeria, Nov. 1974-June, 1976 and
Sept, 1978-]une, 1979.

strangers (except for the two now waiting for the village head) must request or
simply find a space for themselves on the margins of the village.

At first glance, it looks as if the village grows around itself and its old
families, rather like the shell of a snail. But this is not accurate; at the core of the
village, human relations of the most intimate nature are constantly changing.
And, ironically, the people who seem most settled and secure in their place in the
social and physical space of the village are, in reality, the very avatars of change
and the instability of human relationships. The mothers, wives and daughters of”T
this village, through their marriages, divorces, pregnancies and deaths,i
constantly force change and movement in emotional, societal and spatial terms.)
Marriage adds new women--and the children they bear-- to old families.
Marriage strengthens the ties among families and within the village as the
daughters of one household are established as wives and mothers in another.
Marriages also create ties in new directions when village girls marry into families
outside of the old networks, sometimes moving far from their homes and kin, but
never, unless they choose to do so, breaking off their family and community ties.
Where a son, if he hopes to farm or in most other ways use the resources of his
family to establish himself, is tied to the family farmland and, even when he
brings home his own bride, the family homestead, a daughter is very much a
creature of change and the family's link to outsiders, for better or worse. The two
strangers, however, are not aware of this: they see order, stability, prosperity.
They saw the village men working in the fields as they approached and now, in
the village head's zaure, they are well aware of the curious stares of its children.
They have not yet seen the village's adult women, though they hear their voices

and the sounds of their work from behind the compound walls.

Near the zaure's door, set in obviously public space, is the neighborhood's
well. It is not the most modern well in the village, nor is it located in the village's
most prominent public space. That designation would have to go to the
government-built, bore-hole well located in the large plaza in front of the village
mosque. But that well is unusable: its windmill-powered pump broken and not
likely to be repaired for want of parts as well as appropriate skills among the
village artisans. The strangers in the zaure are unaware of the well's fate nor do
they know that the impressive scale of the mosque's plaza has little daily
meaning to the village. There is no reason to gather thereexcept on Friday.

The well outside the village head's zaure is old, deeper than most village
wells, and accessible to anyone with a long rope, a bucket and the strength and
skill to draw water. Its proximity to the homesteads of wealthy families, let alone
the village head's own zaure, places it within a especially lively and interesting
social space: good water is not the only attraction of this well; good gossip and
its vivid social setting are just as important. This is a very public setting. Even
the strangers can see that: indeed, this morning they themselves are the well's
main attraction.

A girl, thirteen or fourteen years of age, bold, strong and confident in
herself, is hauling water for her household. She's on the marriage market and
carries herself with the bold swagger of a teenage girl who knows the power of
her appeal to the opposite sex. She's not well-dressed; not made up. She doesn't
have to be today. She's hauling water and her clothes are much less important
than her vigor, feminine strength and her freedom to be a part of the village's
public life. Her sexual presence in this public space is powerful and she knows

it. So, intuitively, do the strangers in the zaure.

The girl and the village head; the well and the cotton field; the zaure and
the homesteads surrounding it all affirm the vitality of this village, the families
who live in it and the culture which has shaped their most basic definitions of
themselves and their society. The visitors can see the evidence that clearly marks
the culture of this Nigerian village as Hausa. More significantly, they can hear it.

This village has no electricity. Battery-operated radios are still some- what
rare; motor vehicles even more so. Only motorcycles-«125 cc Kawasaki's and
Hondas, dirt bikes to kids in the U.S.--are relatively common, though they still
carry with them the aura of prestige previously attached to horses. They also
tend to be the prized possessions of the younger, adult men. A major road
between Sokoto and Lagos passes through the village, just as it has since the
1920's, but still has not been paved. While the economic jolt of Nigeria's oil boom
has certainly influenced the material culture of the village, the raucous sounds of
development, the sounds of machines replacing human labor in so many arenas
of life, even those of religious devotion and simple relaxation, have not yet
arrived. Instead, the sound print of the village is that of its human and animal
residents and the steady thud of pestles in mortars as women begin the day-long
task of preparing grain and seasonings for the evening meal.

The village in 1974 has a distinctively human voice and this sound more
than any other document or artifact links the village to its past. Human
conversations begin and end every day with ritual greetings. Conversations
describe activities on the farm and in the work spaces of the village artisans.
Voices discuss prices and markets and the implications of government price
supports for the village's agricultural exports. Jokes and insults are exchanged.

Voices praise Allah five times a day and curse destructive animals, recalcitrant
A.) .L ._ I ‘ \

children, selfish co-wives and uncooperative spouses far more often. Voices
discuss national politics and local intrigues. Husbands and wives; parents and
children; residents and the two strangers; chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, donkeys,
goats, sheep and the rare horse: the village hums with the sounds of rural life.
Coming in on the road through the fields, the strangers heard this collectivity of
human and animal discourse almost before they could distinguish one
homestead from the next. They will come to know that, except in public prayer,
thedaily voice of the village is profoundly feminine. Women work within the
village and the sounds of their labor penetrate the surrounding farmland. From
compound to compound comes the sound of women chatting, working, scolding,
praising, singing and shouting for joy. Only: sex. EFEWEEEEEEEEMEEE
unaccompanied by women's voices. _ Hausa women experience those events in
socially prescribed, even ritual, silence. ’ A i i A ‘9 fl -- H H A. A

The skill of the girl drawing water and the beat of the women's pestles
celebrates the knowledge of their ancestors as surely as the architecture of the
zaure or the daily calls to prayer. The feminine voice of work and daily
discourse in this Hausa village holds a vital key to understanding the history of
that knowledge. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine a body of
historical documentation created in similar Hausa settings during the nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries and retrieve, where possible, the feminine sound of

Hausa history.

Introduction: Women, Ecology and Islam

Among the different approaches valid for arriving at an
interpretation of baroque culture--whose results, precisely because
of its diversity, will always be incomplete-J have focused my
inquiry on the meaning and range of the characteristics making up
this culture, so that its nexus, with its social relations, will stand out
from those relations on which it depends and to whose slow
transformation it, in turn, contributes (Maravall 1986,3).

Throughout the nineteenth century, economic and political changes
stimulated social alternatives for rural, farming households as increasing
numbers of Hausa participated in the twin processes of urbanization and the
commercialization of agriculture. For rural families, improving markets for
agricultural products could encourage significant changes in rural lifestyles.
Among the most important was the adoption of more Islamically-correct forms
of Koranic education and marriage, especially wife seclusion (purdah, or, in
Hausa,aure kulle). These were highlypersonal changes which tended to
encourage rural participation in a developing Hausa Islamic popular culture. By
the middle of the twentieth century Hausa people found multiple ways to
express both the change and continuity which marks nineteenth and twentieth
century history within the Hausa social formation. The result would be the
creation of both a Hausa definition of modernity and a powerful Hausa national
identity within the post-colonial states of Niger and Nigeria.

The focus of this dissertation is the role of gender in the definition of
Hausa modernity, a role especially well-expressed in the history of nineteenth

and early twentieth century Hausa women and their encounters with

colonization. What needs to be explained is the way established elements of
Hausa culture were maintained and even, in some cases, enhanced in this period
by the appropriation of the symbols and technologies of modernization “first
associated with an African, Moslem conquest state, the Fulbe Sokoto Caliphate,
from 1806 to 1900, but more prominently affixed to the era of British and French
colonial rule from 1899 to 1960.2 Within the context of these three distinctive
manifestations of colonialism, the beginnings of a unique expression of Hausa
modernity and Hausa nationalism can be detected. Hausa people chose not to
become either "Fulbe" or "western", but rather to use the wealth generated by the
expansion of Hausa economic and political relations within the Sokoto Caliphate
and, latter, with the west to participate in a renaissance of Hausa culture.
Indeed, colonial economic relationships allowed some classes of Hausa society to
maintain and even expand their relations of power. Wealthy merchants
survived the turmoil of conquest and flourished in the Caliphate and in the
colonial states of Niger and Nigeria (Salifou 1971,1972; Lovejoy 1978 ; Shea 1975).
Today they and their families are, if anything, more powerful and more of a
cultural influence than ever before (Gregoire 1986). This is evidence not simply
of the resilience of conservative Hausa values and culture, but of the
fundamental independence of Hausa historical development from the
domination of colonial rule. The "colonial moment" was precisely that: a

moment in the long, unfolding of a uniquely Hausa historical structure.

 

2For the history of the Fulbe's victorious nineteenth century holy war (jihad)
against the kingdoms of the Hausaand their creation of an Islamic state, the
Sokoto Caliphate, an extensive historical literature exists.See,for example,
Junaidu 1956; East 1970:2; H.F.C.Smith 1961; Adeleye 1971; Last 1967; Usuman
1981; Low 1972; Johnston 1967; Hiskett 1973; Boyd 1989.

What I aim to achieve in this dissertation is an analysis of Hausa culture as
a historical structure. I want to show and to explain why there is a flourishing of
Hausa culture in the twentieth century which reaches a peak of stylistic
expression in the period from the end of World War Two to the 1960's and
continues in many ways to the present. I see expressions of Hausa culture in
such areas as architecture, textiles and clothing; language and the rise of a
modern Hausa literature. Expressions of a modern Hausa culture also signal
profound changes in social relations within rural families adjusting to the
expansion of wife seclusion (purdah) and the abolition of household slavery in the
twentieth century. Hausa culture at mid-century found multiple ways to express
both change and continuity within the Hausa social formation. The result would
be the creation of both a Hausa definition of modernity and a powerful Hausa
national identity. Because both France and Great Britain established colonial
regimes in Hausaphone regionsat the beginning of the twentieth century, we
have here an arresting case study of comparative colonial cultures and the rise of
a modern African national identity. 3

The differences in the colonial experience of Hausa populations on either
side of the international border can be especially articulated through an analysis
of the relationships between three primary icons of Hausa identity: the status of
Hausa women; the unique social construction of a Hausa ecology; and the
Islamification of Hausa popular culture. The logic for designating three elements

of Hausa society as cultural icons is based on the significant ways cultural

 

3The historiography of colonial conquest and rule in the Hausa regions of Niger
and Nigeria is extensive. For Niger, published sources include Abadie 1927;
Fuglestad 1983; Salifou 1971; Rash 1973; Séré de Rivieres 1965; Kanya-Forstner
1969.

inventions, modern myth making, and profound social, economic and ecological
change have intersected in the history of late nineteenth and twentieth century
Hausaland.

The history of Hausa women, in particular, presents an alternative reading
of modern Hausa history.4 While women were obscured in the process of
making a colonial culture, their status in Islamic Hausa popular culture has been
critically important to Hausa nationalism. European and Hausa views of the
ecology and geography of Hausaland are another fundamental, yet contrasting,
aspect of both colonial and nationalist definitions of Hausaland. Finally,
beginning with colonial policies towards Islam, the definition of Hausaland as an
Islamic state played a fundamental role in creating the beginnings of a modern
Hausa political identity during the colonial period, even when the Islamification
of Hausaland was far from complete. In short, this is a dissertation about the
myths and the realities of modern Hausa culture seen through the prisms of
gender, ecology and religion. Furthermore, the paradigm of gender offers such
valuable insights into the meaning of both Hausa modernity and Hausa

nationalism, that it serves as my medium for describing modern Hausa history.

Gender, Ecology and Hausa Economic History
The narrative of Hausa economic history has a curious intellectual
heritage, one which begins when Renaissance Europe began to examine the

accounts of Africa gathered by Moslem geographers. The unique ecological and

 

4This view informs the historical perspective of Coles and Mack in the
introduction to their collection of articles on twentieth century Hausa women
(1991, 3-26).

cultural characteristics of Hausaland were first presented to curious, literate and,
most likely, wealthy Europeans in the description of Hausa kingdoms published
in 1556 by the North African scholar, Leo Africanus. Africanus positioned four
Hausa kingdoms, Kano, Katsina, Zaria and Zamfara, between the medival West
African empires of Mali and Bornu already know, at least by reputation, to
Europe (Africanus 1556). The names of these four Hausa kingdoms, plus that of
a fifth, Gobir, would increasingly find their way onto the maps of Renaissance
Europe.S Since that time the observations of travelers and, in the twentieth
century, government officials and social scientists, have deeply influenced how
the Hausa landscape has been perceived by non-Hausa intellectuals, especially
economic historians. Thus, as an imagined landscape, Hausaland has existed for
outsiders as a place and a culture in the Central Sudan of West Africa since the
late sixteenth century (Hiskett 1965, 6:18-26; Sutton 1979, 20:179-201).

Whatever the ideological orientation, the modern historiography of Hausa
economic history shares a common heritage, based on earlier descriptions,
especially those of nineteenth century travelers, which have consistently
portrayed the land of the Hausa as having a dense and productive farming
population, rich natural resources, and extensive manufacturing and commercial
sectors. This is especially obvious in the travel narratives prepared by nineteenth
century European explorers who ventured into Hausaland, notably, Hugh
Clapperton and Dixon Denham (English, 1822-4), James Richardson (English,
1850-1), Heinrich Barth (German, traveling under British sponsorship, 1849-55),
and Paul Staudinger (German, 1885-6).

 

5This is easily observed in the libraries and drawing rooms of Italian palaces,
including the Vatican.

lO

Outsiders saw the cities and towns of the Hausa in terms of opportunities
for trade. Late nineteenth century Europeans cherished this image from earlier
accounts and carried it with them on their journeys into Hausaland. Their
curiosity and excitement is easy to detect in the travel narratives. In anticipation
of finally arriving in Kano, for example, Hugh Clapperton took special care with
his appearance, wearing his best Naval officer's uniform. (Denham and
Clapperton 1985, 237). Paul Staudinger expressed similar excitement on his
arrival in Zaria (Staudinger 1990, 210). While the descriptions of their own
journeys often belie the vision of plenty, the difficulties they regularly
experienced obtaining food, water and other essentials, as well as the sickness
they experienced, were either explained away or overlooked by themselves and
by their fascinated readers. European travelers simply remarked that the
problems they faced were a matter of the different needs (physical and mental) of
Europeans.

The representation of Hausaland as a region marked by a wealth of
natural resources and a vigorously productive population became an icon in the
expansionist reveries of both French and British imperialist by the end of the
nineteenth century and into the twentieth (Foureau 1902; Abadie 1927; Hardy
1922; F. Shaw 1906; Orr 1911; ED. Morell 1911; Rennell Rodd 1922; McPhee 1926;
Hogendorn 1979). This image of Hausaland, often scaled to replicate the
territorial boundaries, first, of the nineteenth century Sokoto Caliphate, then of
the British Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, proclaimed in 1900, ushered in some

of the pet theories of colonial conquest in the early twentieth century and, later,

11

served to demarcate the conceptual territory of Hausa economic history
(Staudinger 1990, 2:3; Fika 1978).5

While theoretically informed and meticulously-researched scholarship has
contributed to building a Hausa historiography in the past twenty years, the
writing of Hausa economic history has continued to be shaped by the old vision
of plenty. The empirical, generally liberal, and remarkably productive Anglo-
Nigerian interpretation of Hausa economic history has described an expanding
nineteenth century economy in rural and urban Hausaland, a Hausa economic
miracle stimulated and sustained by a relatively limited number of factors,
notably: the political integration of the central Hausa emirates into the Sokoto
Caliphate; commercial expansion, especially of long-distance trade; the
intensified use of slave labor in all sectors of the economy; urbanization, or, at
least the development of specific urban centers; rural and urban manufacturing,
most importantly in textile production, but also in leather tanning, iron smelting
and blacksmithing ( P. Hill 1972; Hogendorn 1975, 4:87-103, 1978; Jagger 1973;;
Shea 1976; Lovejoy 1970,1971, 1976; Baier 1980; M. Adamu 1978, 1976, 5:3-12). All
offer what can only be described as open acceptance of the expansion of slavery
in the nineteenth century, even as they document the violence of enslavement
and the public slave markets and the struggles of slaves to escape (Lovejoy

1986b, 1983, 1981 ; Lovejoy and Hogendorn 1979, 213-238; P. Hill 1976, 17:395-426;

 

6The colonial boundary between Hausa communities controlled by either the
French or the British seems to be honored in the modern historiography which
has strongly tended to emphasize differnces, especially in religious affairs, rather
than similarities among Hausa people in Niger and Nigeria. Francophone
historians have focused on Niger while even a historian of the stature of Nigeria's
Y.B. Usuman admitted not making use of French sources because he could not
translate French (USuman 1981, 221).

12

Hogendorn 1977, 6:369-383; Jagger 1973, 1:11-26; Tambo 1976, 2:187-217).78 From
this literature, a simplified model of economic development in nineteenth
century Hausaland emerges in which the successful integration of all these
factors of production and exchange resulted in the creation of a densely
populated, highly productive human landscape in which merchant capital,
slavery and some forms of wage labor played significant roles (Shea 1976).
Curiously, in many of the historical studies of the nineteenth century
Hausa economy, the economic landscape seems to have been populated only by
numerous, healthy, adult men; children, the elderly and women of any age are
not often acknowledged as active participants in the nineteenth century Hausa
economy. Little attention has been focused on the ecological impact of the large-
scale demographic consequences of both the Sokoto Jihad and the politics of the
Caliphate. For example, while the increasing use of slave labor has been
documented, historians have focused on examining the ideology of slavery, not
on the ecological consequences of the often significant population movements,
voluntary and not, which characterized the creation of slave estates in
Hausaland. Though clearly evident in the singularly descriptive narrative of the
biography of a Hausa woman produced by Mary Smith in the early 1950's and
also described in the work of anthropologists, gender and slavery were glossed
over by economic historians of either ideological persuasion until the 1980's

when articles based on oral testimony and the legal documentation of the end of

 

7 Throughout West Africa, especially in the Islamic states of the savanna,
historians have reported great difficulty in gathering oral testimony to study the
internal history of slavery (M. Klein 1989:209-217). The memory of the past seems
to haunt the present. Lovejoy and Hogendorn worked with elderly, rural
informants in a setting which was rather more open and relaxed than today.

13

concubinage in Kano seems to have generated a re-appraisal of this vital issue
(Lovejoy 1988, 29:245-66; Cristelow 1991:130-144; M. Smith 1964)! When fine-
grained studies of industries such as Shea's work on dyed textiles or Lovejoy's
on the kola trade fail to consider either gender or the environmental impact of
industrial expansion, the wealth of detail, especially that collected from elderly
informants, only stimulates interest in those issues and curiosity about why they
were not addressed.

If consideration of the ecological consequences of nineteenth century
economic changes has been neglected, this is not the case for studies of the
twentieth, especially those focused on the colonial period. Attention to the
ecological consequences of the capitalist transformation of Hausa social relations
under colonial rule has been featured by Marxist-informed scholars. In a much-
simplified Marxist model, the integration of Hausaland into the world capitalist
economy led to peripheralization and underdevelopment, especially in terms of
the deterioration of an economically productive, ecologically balanced, and
socially just pre-colonial Hausa social formation. Marxist understandings of
class analysis and the dynamics of economic forces underlie the work on
economic and environmental history produced by such scholars, a notably inter-
disciplinary band in Niger and Nigeria (Lubeck 1986; Shenton 1986; Shenton and
Freund 1978, 13:8-20; Shenton and Lennihan 1981, 9:47-70; Watts1983; Fuglestad
1983; Raynaut 1977, 2:160-171; Collion 1982).

 

8 Smith's "autobiography" of Baba was not analytical in its presentation of female
slavery, (M. Smith 1964). The Hausa text of Baba's autobiography has recently
been published, but I was not able to consult it for this dissertation (Smith 1993).

14

Shenton's study of the imposition of colonial economic structures on Kano
typifies the importance of the concept of underdevelopment as it has been
applied to the Hausa case (Shenton 1986). For Shenton, the pre-capitalist society
of metropolitan Kano was part of a distinct Hausa regional economy at 1900.
Conquered by the British in 1904, Kano next functioned as a component of a
capitalist colonial state irrevocably tied to the fluctuations of the world capitalist
system, a system which collapsed in the Great Depression of the 1930's. For
Michael Watts, the same forces of capitalist underdevelopment ushered in with
enhanced severity the famines which accompanied the periods of intense
drought suffered across Hausaland in the twentieth century (Watts 1983)
Fuglestad, looking strictly at the experience of colonial Niger, concludes that the
French conquest of Damagaram robbed Nigerien Hausa of their ability to
respond to ecological crisis (Fuglestad 1983:90-91). Drought, famine and
capitalism together undermined the quality of life of twentieth century Hausa in
Nigeria and Niger (Collion 1982; Watts 1983). The perceived positive benefits of
economic development to nineteenth century Hausaland serve the modern
historiography as a counterpuntal theme to the economic history of the colonial

rule. In Shenton's words:

As far as Northern Nigeria is concerned, Karl Marx's depiction of
colonialism as a hothouse for the development of capitalism is
especially apt. During the sixty-odd years of colonial rule the social
formation of Northern Nigeria was dramatically transformed.
Although this transformation was of a massive and decisive nature,
much of Northern Nigerian society continues to this day to leave
the casual and even the scholarly observer with the impression of
changelessness. Emirs still rule, peasants still till the soil with hoes.

15

Yet behind this superficial continuity, a world has changed.
(Shenton 1986:120)

In this view, the economic history of twentieth century Hausaland would
thus appear to satisfy all of the requirements needed to define it as a case study
of an ecological revolution.9 To achieve this objective, scholars such as Watts, a
geographer, adopted an especially interdisciplinary approach. In Silent Violence,
Watts lays the empirical foundation of his analysis of the politics of famine on the
descriptive research of European natural sciences, including his own perspective
as a geographer (Watts 1983). Doing this he is able to present a powerful image
of documented environmental change. The precision of the scientific data is
harnessed to the analytical force of his ideological paradigm. But, again, I point
to the narrow temporal parameters of this (and other) studies of twentieth
century Hausa economic history and suggest that environmental history belongs
in a deeper chronological frame.

Hausa economic history thus posits a puzzling anomaly for the nineteenth
century: large-scale economic change, unflawed by such problems as social
dislocation or environmental deterioration. Ironically, this model of the Hausa
economy parallels that which celebrates the Sokoto Jihad and the founding of the
Sokoto Caliphate as nothing less than a social revolution (Sulaiman 1982; Boyd
1989). In short, the major themes of nineteenth century Hausa economic history
unwittingly tend to reproduce a historical narrative composed only by the

winners, identifiable as an urban, multi-ethnic, Moslem, political elite, bolstered

 

9 The notion of ecological revolution is well-explicated in the historical studies
of the North American environment by Carolyn Merchant (C. Merchant 1989).
See also William Cronon's study of environmental change in colonial New
England, Changes in the Land (W. Cronon 1983).

16

by increasingly large-scale Hausa and non-Hausa commercial enterprises. Such
a combination came to dominate the interplay between politics and economic
development, especially in the major emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate, but also,
for special reasons, in Damagaram and its capital, Zinder.10 Though our working
knowledge of the details of Hausa economic life has increased, giving Hausaland
one of the more comprehensive historiographies on pre-colonial economic
history, we have not challenged the old vision of plenty, now, I would suggest,
enhanced by our own notions of progress." Even the work on the nineteenth
century environment, a literature which tends to describe the drought- and
famine-resistance strategies used by Hausa and other peoples of the Central
Sudan, seems, at times, analytically limited in its somewhat subservient
relationship to the "big theme" of politics, drought and famine in the post-
colonial states of Africa (Fuglestad 1974, 222:18-33; Baier and Lovejoy 1975, 4;551-
81; 1976,1:1-16).I2

The role of Hausa women in the economic miracle of nineteenth century
development has been marginalized in the historiography until very recently.
Gender theory has been weakly employed to explicate the link between
production and reproduction in much of the literature. The impact of ecological

conditions on nineteenth century women's' lives has also been ignored. There is

 

10 My thinking on this is influenced by my reading of James Scott, Weapons of the
Weak, especially chapters 1 and 5 (Scott 1987).

11 Only John Iliffe has considered the poor in Hausa history as part of a more
general study (Iliffe 1987).

12 The first generation of serious economic historians was in the field when the
1970's droughts were occurring. Many had also participated in the radical
student movements of the 1960's as well, an experience which, in some cases, also
contributed to the formation of their intellectual persona and their scholarly goals.

17

no mention, for example, of the extremely low birth-rates and women's
expressed anxieties about infertility noted by European travelers as early as
Richardson's mid-nineteenth century visit and an absolutely clear theme in the
tatsuniyoyi (Richardson 1853, 2). Even when their labor has been acknowledged,
as in studies of the textile crafts or domestic slaves (including concubines),
women remain under-represented in the ranks of nineteenth century Hausa
laboring classes.

Ironically, I make this criticism in spite of the fact that a significant body of
feminist scholarship has been created, especially by social scientists, in the past
twenty years. My criticism of this literature is based on the self-limiting
methodologies most frequently employed: this work describes twentieth century
Hausa women because it, of necessity is based on the life experiences of
twentieth century informants." In fact, it describes women generally reaching
adulthood after World War Two.

Historical evidence exists to re-animate the economic landscape of
nineteenth century Hausa. Hausa oral literature, including the folk stories called
tatsuniyoyi , gives us an internal perception of ecology while the accounts of
literate Hausa and European travelers provide historical narratives of ecological

change. " Linguistic evidence also offers a rich cultural matrix within which the

 

13 The scholarship of western feminists tends to incorporate a basic Marxist
formulation of Hausa society as well, though it makes the important point that
colonial rule enhanced the already present structures and powers of patriarchy
and oppression set in place by Islam.

14 While the literature on geography and imagination is expansive, three books
in particular encouraged me to look at the sources on Hausa history from this
perspective: Le Goff, Jacques. The Medieval Imagination. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press. 1988; Erickson, Carolly. The Medieval Vision, Essays in History
and Perception. New York: Oxford University Press. 1976; Greenblatt, Stephen.

18

interaction of Hausa with their environment can also be detected. 15 While this
dissertation is informed by the research of natural scientists and social scientists,
I here privilege the language and literature of Hausa and European observers of
nineteenth century Hausaland. I propose to use this evidence to examine issues
of gender in the nineteenth century Hausa economy and to link an ecological
model of Hausaland to the more defined economic model of growth and rural
development.

An ecological model, as I hope to show, calls for an integration of
observations of the diversity of the Hausa ecology to observations of the social
and technological diversity and innovation on the part of Hausa women and
men. What I mean by this is simple. The goods and services emphasized in
economic history were produced in a unique human and ecological landscape
from which women and their labor were not excluded. The diversity of the
environmental system stimulated the development of specialized and highly
local technology for agriculture, food and craft production. While the natural
environment shaped the mental construction of a Hausa world, the Hausa
imagination, including the imagination to innovate new ways to use the natural

resources of the plant and animal kingdoms, shaped and reshaped the natural

world." In short, I hope to be able to show that there was a distinctive, Hausa

 

Marvelous Possessions, The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press. 1991.

15Vansina effectively developes a methodology for using linguistic evidence of

culture and ecology, which he identifies as the collection and analysis of

comparative lexical data, in his most recent publications ( Vansina 1978, 1990).

This is the aproach I follow in a later chapter of this dissertation. See also Ehert

for a linguist's view of using language as historical evidence (Ehert 1968, 1982).

16 The archaeologist, J.E.G. Sutton wrote: "This emergence of Hausa as an ethnic

identity expanding from east to west across the Nigerian savanna has to be

19

farming culture it was hardly monolithic; rather, there was a significant element
of adaptability and resourcefulness in rural Hausaland which reflected the
society's interaction with the variety of ecological features found in its physical
environment. Furthermore, while gender was an integral element in the
construction of Hausa social reality, gender did not marginalize the labor and
value of women in the economy of nineteenth century rural Hausaland.

The study of gender in such places as Hausalandshows how the roles of
ordinary women, usually peasants, far from the sources of power in their own
societies, often provided the mortar which held traditional societies together
when confronted with the powerful forces of change of the twentieth century. To
paraphrase the title of Achebe' s masterpiece, when Europe confronted

Hausaland on its hearth, things did not fall apart, no matter what may have

20

transpired in the palace or the marketplace (Achebe 1964).17 The artifacts of
daily life conserved in oral literature, material culture the testimony of Hausa
women and men are historical evidence which undeniably reposition Hausa
women in the cultural and ecological landscape they helped shape and help us
to understand the strength of the Hausa response to social change in the colonial
period.

Through the sources I have used to write this dissertation we catch
glimpses of Hausa women: what they looked like and what they wore; how they

farmed and worked at crafts; how they cooked and cared for their families. We

 

viewed ecologically. It was more than a matter of gradual migration and
assimilation: it involved also Hausafication of the land, the conversion of bush
and woodlands into park land and open savanna, with a marked reduction of the
tsetse-infested areas, and the increasingly intensive exploitation of the land for
seasonal grain cultivation and a fair degree of cattle-keeping. Thus Hausaland,
which may have been quite sparsely inhabited in the early Iron Age, has during
the present millennium come to support denser populations than both the drier
Sahel to its north and also most of the 'middle belt' with longer rains but more
woodland to its south. More important than actual population density would
have been simply continuity across the plains. Being Hausa implied belonging to
a wider, more open and receptive system, rural indeed but not rustic, one in
which the countryside could support and interact with semi-urban centers where
markets gradually developed and political power was increasingly focused."
(Sutton 1979, 183-184).

17 Flora Nwapa's Efuru, published two years after Achebe'sThings Fall Apart,
beautifully exemplifies the significance of gender in the narratives of social
change produced by early post colonial African writers (Nwapa 1966). The
contrast is even more striking when one remembers that the two authors were
both Ibo and of the same generation, an especially telling comparison in a society
which is organized around the principle of age sets.

21

can reconstruct aspects of the social, economic and environmental world in
which they lived. Through these sources we can achieve some sense of the
intellectual and emotional textures of their lives. We have some sense of how
they ordered the world around them: named it, described it, gave it value and
placed it into categories of good and evil proper and improper. It is seldom that
they speak for themselves, and certainly the chief goal of researchers today
should be to expand as rapidly as possible the body of oral testimony collected
from and about Hausa women. In this task I do not exclude the testimony of
male informants, for whom women and marriage are a significant preoccupation
and with whom Hausa women have constructed the social reality of

contemporary Hausaland.

Chapter Outline

To strengthen my thesis in its historical context, I begin by showing how
women were critical to the intellectual currents of Hausaland before the
emergence of western scholarship. In chapters two, three and four of the
dissertation, I consider the evidence on women to be found in the oral and
written literature of Hausaland. I consider four kinds of oral evidence and the
contributions to the study of Hausa women each offer the historian. This
evidence includes state traditions, which I define as the oral and written
traditions of the political histories of the various Hausa states; folk stories
(tatsuniyoyi), in which I detect a dialogue between men and women about the
nature of gender relations in Hausaland; religious poetry in which an alternative,
Islamic conceptualization of gender relationships is proposed to Hausa society

by the scholars of the Sokoto Jihad and their intellectual heirs, including women

22

poets. Finally, the life histories of Hausa individuals, men and women, are
examined for evidence of how effectively the dialogue on gender relationships
found in literary sources is actualized in their lives. While some of these
individuals lived their lives entirely or in large part in the nineteenth century,
most were born after the turn of the century. Their accounts are used to detect
patterns of change in gender relationships and to relate these to the broader
chronology of social, political and economic change in twentieth century
Hausaland.

As cultural evidence, the internal historical narratives of Hausaland,
documents such as the Kano Chronicle,, for example, provide a Hausa
interpretation and internal justification for the emergence of a Hausa state system
and Islamic culture, especially in the emirates brought into the Sokoto Caliphate.
The oral and written literature, however, also offers evidence of contrasting
interpretations of the history of Islam in Hausaland in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. The use of women as historical metaphors helps to
decipher Hausa views of Islam in the time frame indicated and contributes to the
history of the Islamification of Hausa popular culture. 18 The role of women in
the creation of oral and written traditions of Hausa literature, especially as story
tellers in public and private spheres of Hausa life and as poets in the Islamic

intellectual traditions, was significant.

 

18I use popular culture to mean the language, material culture and ideology, of
the majority of "ordinary" Hausa people, just as the phrase is used to identify
American popular culture today. I recognize distinctions of class, gender and
age, but hold that there was, indeed, a distinctive, fin de siecle Hausa popular
culture, easily identified by urban dwelling Hausa and probably at least noted
(and copied, when possible) in rural Hausaland. This is certainly the case today.

23

The fifth chapter of the dissertation is a re-examination of Hausa economic
history which considers the significant influence of women in the evolution of
Hausaland's unique physical and cultural landscape during the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Working with linguistic evidence, oral literature and
travel narratives, I note that the Hausa perspective on economic matters does not
privilege the work of men. Rather, Hausa informants saw an economy utterly
dependent on the participation of all, even as work was shaped by strong notions
of gender roles.

In the final two chapters of the dissertation, I turn to the empirical data
from Niger to test my notion that establishing an understanding of the dialogue
of gender in Hausa society can open up new ways to interpret colonial evidence
like that found in the archives of Hausaphone Niger. This data documents the
virtual non-impact of French cultural hegemony on rural Hausa Niger. French
rule was hardly one of benign neglect because the evidence clearly points to the
way French taxation stripped rural people of resources they might otherwise
have invested into their own household economies. Yet the cultural impact of
the French was highly ambiguous. The heart of my argument is that Hausa
people in Niger modernized themselves: participation in the colonial
marketplace did not imply the acceptance of a western model of modernization.
Instead the socialization of wealth in rural Hausa Niger clearly points to the
creation of Hausa cultural expressions of modernity following an Islamic model.

Modernization becomes an expression of a Hausa popular Islamic culture.19 In

 

19Defining "popular Islamic culture" is a task both simple and complex. Last and
Brenner offer an approach to the problem in a Hausa and Fulfulde context which
is in accordance with my own views and usage of the concept throughout this
dissertation: "...Let us define popular Islam as what the 'people' do and believe,

24

the conclusion of the dissertation, I turn back to the relationship between
modernity and nationalism in the Hausa context.

To summarize the organization of this dissertation, I begin with an image
of gender relationships in Hausa culture from the dialogue between the sexes
found in literary evidence; then I use this image, a cultural model, in a dialogue
with colonial data, all the while building the argument that the process of
becoming modern was in the hands of Hausa themselves during the colonial

period.

Conclusion

Hausa women were not absent from the intellectual traditions which
served the Hausa people before the advent of Western scholarship. The question
of women's rights and obligations as wives was a central one in the Islamic
tradition of scholarship of Hausaland. Indeed, the very origins of Islam in
Hausaland is related in popular culture through the metaphor of male-female

relationships. When asked by early European linguists and ethnographers to

 

in contrast to that the learned class of 'ulama do and believe. One implication of
this definition is that popular Islam is constituted by the religious practices of the
illiterate. Another implication is that popular Islam is somehow doctrinally
aberrant and beyond the control and without the approval of the 'ulama class.
Finally, it follows that in West Africa popular forms of Islamic religious practice
cannot be expressed in Arabic, since they are formulations of non-Arabic-
speaking individuals and groups...competent literacy in Arabic is the major
factor in West Africa which separates establishment from popular Islam. No one
who is illiterate in Arabic is considered a member of the 'ulama class no matter
what his other credentials, and the religious teaching of any such person is
consequently a form of popular Islam...(this definition reveals) the significance of
language in the propagation of what is called popular Islam in Africa, and it is
also valuable in reminding us that Islam cannot be defined simply in terms of the
viewpoint of the 'ulama (Last and Brenner 1985:442-3)

25

provide samples of folk literature, Hausa informants told stories about the
relationships of women and men. Clearly, women were vividly present as
subjects and creators in Hausa intellectual traditions.

The removal of women from the intellectual traditions of Hausa society
began with the Sokoto Jihad and was completed in the colonial era of the
twentieth century, nourished by the political policies of the two colonial regimes
and the sexism of European scholarly traditions. The absence of women in the
history of Hausaland constructed by Europeans and European-educated Africans
in the post-colonial period, however, also reflects the preoccupation of scholars
with such themes as the Islamic politics of the Sokoto Caliphate or, more
generally, Islamic state building in the central Sudan; the economics of the
marketplace, especially long-distance trade and the economic dynamics of
colonial capitalism; slavery as a mode of production, though with faint
recognition of the significance of female slaves; the politics of the colonial states
of Niger and Nigeria; and environmental change and drought in the twentieth
century. The removal of Hausa women from the Hausa past appears to be an
especially powerful metaphor of colonial conquest and intellectual hegemony,
whether carried out by the Fulbe of the Sokoto Caliphate or the French and
English emissaries of western imperialism.

Nothing can be more fundamental to the decolonization of the history and
culture of the Hausa than the rejection of any tradition of sexual discrimination
in historical writing and the reincorporation of women into a new assessment of
Hausa history, but the task is complicated by the sources available for Hausa
history. Hausa women, though belonging to one of West Africa's largest and

best known ethnic groups, are nevertheless elusive in the archival records of the

26

Republics of Niger and Nigeria, their modern homelands. On the whole, Hausa
women lived inconspicuous lives, neither rebelling under colonial rule nor
participating vigorously in the political movements of the independence period.
Their lack of a dramatic political presence has contributed to the enigma of
Hausa modernity and nationalism. Finding them within the historical evidence
of Hausa culture requires the use of alternative sources, which, of course, require
alternative methodologies. In short, the nature of archival and published sources
for Hausaland limits the availability of written primary documentation for Hausa
women. Historians of women and gender in the Hausa context must cultivate a
range of non-textual sources. For the purposes of this study, those sources
include artifacts of Hausa material culture, oral literature and oral testimony and
the Hausa language itself. The process of developing a history of Hausa women
from an unusual set of sources which has guided my thinking on the broader
issue of nationalism in modern Hausa history. Thus each section of the
dissertation includes a discussion of the unique strengths and weaknesses of the

evidence I used to write it.

27

Chapter 2: Daura and the Hausa Bakwai: Gender in Hausa Myths of Origin

Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a
lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion (Barthes 1972:129).

From the nineteenth century into the first decades of the colonial era,
European visitors to Hausaland collected variations of a myth which claimed to
describe the origin of the Hausa states. Many included a Hausa queen, Daura,
and stated that the city, now in modern Nigeria, which shares her name was the
oldest of the Hausa kingdoms. In the myth, the Hausa kingdoms were known
collectively as the Hausa Bakwai and the Hausa Banza, metaphorical devices said
to stand for the seven (bakwai) legitimate Hausa states and other, illegitimate
(banza) Hausa states. The Hausa kingdoms and their neighbors were variously
grouped into these two categories.

The metaphor of legitimate and bastard siblings sprang from the central
motif of the myth: that the founders of the Hausa city states were either the
children or the grandchildren of Daura herself and a foreign hero, coming from
the east, who rescued the people of Daura from the tyranny of a snake which
lived in the town's well. The hero was often called Bayajidda (or a variation of
that name) and he fathered the sons of three women: a Bornu princess, a
concubine and Daura. Thus, an elaborate representation of a polygamous
marriage described the origin of Hausaland while sibling relationships stood in
for the politics of Hausa state craft.

In a succession of historical writings since the early nineteenth century,

the Daura myth has been used by Islamic reformers, colonial administrators and

28

 

Western-trained historians to represent the internal configuration of the earliest
Hausa state system. In the twentieth century the myth was incorporated into the
national history of the Hausa in the northern province of Nigeria. It has since
been used to enhance a modern ethnic identity within the matrix of Nigerian
politics in the 1960's and to legitimize special ethnic ties between Hausa
communities in the post-colonial states of Niger and Nigeria. 2"

Western-trained scholars also have found the myth intellectually
attractive, either as a convenient introduction to the political history of
Hausaland or as a potentially valuable historical source. Modern historians, in
fact, have so burdened the myth of Daura with meaning that it has a special
relevance to the historical identity of Hausaland in the Western intellectual
tradition (Fika 1978: 3-4; M.G. Smith 1978: 52-57). 21

This myth has been interpreted in the twentieth century to symbolize not
only that Hausa culture sprang from the ennoblement of the local stock by an
outsider from the Islamic east, but also to represent Islam's power to effect the
transformation of Hausa society from matrilineal to patrilineal descent and the
removal of Hausa women from the sphere of public power (Johnston 1966;

Callaway 1987:3-13;Walwyn 1923). While the first statement is largely discredited

 

20As, for example, those expressed by the Prefect of Niger's predominantly Hausa
Division of Zinder to the Nigerian Emir of Daura on the occasion of a ceremony
honoring the Emir's relief efforts to supply Zinder with food aide during the
droughts of 1984-86.

21When doing this, authors tended to employ an idealized version of the Daura
myth, assuming, without going through the meticulous process of establishing
texts, that a generalized telling of the myth was methodologically permissible.
For this reason, I do not try to locate a prototype of the Daura myth in this
chapter, though I recognize that this deviates from established methodologies for
using myth as historical evidence.

29

as yet another expression of the "hamitic hypothesis", the second has received
fresh recognition by scholars who seek to examine the historical roots of the
status of modern Hausa women. At times, such work has been hostile to Islam
and sought in pre-Islamic Hausa history a more politically empowered
representation of women's status (Callaway 1987: 3-13).

This chapter examines the Daura myth within the intellectual traditions
which created each available text, seeking out the meaning of gender as well as
the political implications in each telling of the myth. Beginning with the story as
it was told in the Sokoto Caliphate in the first half of the nineteenth century
indicates the myth's practical political value within the context of the Sokoto's
relationships with the newly-conquered Hausa, and also present it in the form by
which it was first transmitted to Europeans. Not until the early decades of the
twentieth century would another significant variation of the Daura myth come to
the attention of Europeans as texts influenced by the political relationships
between the Hausa kingdom of Kano and the Kanuri empire of Bornu, located to
the east of Hausaland were collected.22 The texts from eastern Hausa sources
also reveal aspects of the Hausa's cultural familiarity with the Islamic world,
especially during the period of Ottoman hegemony in Egypt and the Middle East
from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries. Finally, a unique and
highly divergent telling of the myth, narrated by a Kano-educated Islamic

scholar in the early years of the twentieth century, shifts the legend out of either

 

22For the history of the Kanuri people and the Bornu Empire see Cohen (1967,
1974) and Brenner (1973). How Bornu‘s altercations with Kano influenced the
construction of Hausa historical sources is discussed by Last (1979).

30

the equally Islamic Sokoto and Bornu intellectual traditions and reasserts its
fundamental relationship to pre-Islamic Hausa oral literature.23

The second goal of the chapter is to show how the Daura myth has come
to function within the context of modern Hausa political history. The publication
history of the myth demonstrates the process by which colonial intellectuals
acquired Hausa history and created a standardized account of Daura's story to
serve as a metaphore of the Hausa past. While the colonial tradition of Daura is
one in which the meaning of gender in Hausa history has been seriously
distorted, understanding the Daura myth as an artifact of colonial culture is a
lesson in understanding the hegemony of Western scholarly traditions.“

The received colonial tradition of the Daura myth has continued to
function in the post-colonial historiography of Hausaland and reflects the
modern invention of Hausa national traditions, traditions in which the status of
women is of fundamental importance. The Daura myth in this way serves as an
example of the function of myths in the modern political history of Hausaland
and directly corresponds to other forms of myth making practiced by the colonial
regimes as they extended colonial hegemony over the Hausa emirates in the

twentieth century.

 

23Thomas Hodgkin's matchless anthology, Nigerian Perspectives, including the

author's introductory essay on the sources for Nigerian history, is a thoughtful

and elegantly written introduction to the Hausa and their neighbors for non-

specialist readers (Hodgkin 1960).

24 To make my purpose absolutely clear, I seek to explore the historical
implications of diversity in the telling of the myth. For the meaning of political
myths, I draw on the work of Roland Barthes and John Berger (Barthes 1972;
Sontag 1982, 93-149, 251-95; J. Berger 1979, 1982,1985, 1987).

31

Daura and the Hausa Bakwai in the Sokoto Traditions

The first external attempt to establish a standardized account of the
history of the Hausa is found in a document created by the leaders of the
nineteenth century Fulbe conquest state of Sokoto. In the Infakul al'Maisur,
Mohammed Bello, Caliph of Sokoto, places the history of the Hausa into the
context of wider historical developments in the Central Sudan. While he records
that portion of the Daura myth which claims the children of Bawo established the
Hausa Bakwai, neither Daura nor her husband, Bayajidda, is mentioned. Instead,
Bawo, the ancestor of all Hausa, is labeled a Bornu slave who fled the wrath of
his ruler by escaping to the west, that is, to the land of the Hausa (Imam 1954;
Whitting 1957; Sidi Sayudi, trans. 1974).

From portions of Bello's manuscript which were collected, translated from
Arabic into English and published in 1826 by Denham and Clapperton, the first
Europeans to visit Sokoto, nineteenth century Europeans gained their initial
impression of Hausa history (Denham and Clapperton 1985, 2:398-404).25.
Europeans were introduced to the tradition that the Hausa states of Katsina,
Kano, Zaria, Daura, Rano and "Yareem" were founded by the descendants of a
slave, Bawo, owned by a sultan of Bornu. The Hausaphone people of Gobir,
however, were described as the freeborn descendants of Egyptian Copts. While

the text published by Clapperton and Denham makes no mention of the Hausa

 

25 Denham and Hugh Clapperton, who traveled to Hausaland and the Sokoto
Caliphate between 1822 and 1824 are the first of the European travelers whose
published accounts will be examined in this and succeeding chapters. Heinrich

Barth would come next, traveling throughout Bornu and Hausaland between
1849 and 1855

32

Bakwai, it does include an account of the military conquests of Amina, Princess of
Zaria. Finally, this early European account of the text confuses Bello's attribution
of his own sources for Hausa history, claiming that he acquired his account from
his friend, Mohammed El-bakery, son of sultan Mohammed El-ad-dal of Bornu,
though no such historical personage existed. In fact, Bello's sources included
three West African scholars whose names may have been confused by Denham
and Clapperton's translator: Shaykh al-Shuyukh al-Bakri, Abu Bakr al-Barikum
and Al-Imam Mohammed b. al-Hajj 'Abd al-Rahman al-Barnawi (Bivar and
Hiskett 1962, 1:117-118).

Bello's discussion of the slave origins of the Hausa and the Hausa Bakwai
was current in the Central Sudan in the 1855 when the explorer, Heinrich Barth,
studied the Infakul al 'Maisur while residing in one of the Hausa emirates, Katsina.
Though Barth recorded Bello's account as the received tradition of Hausa history
he was aware that it was taken from a document created by the leaders of a
conquest state and critiqued Bello's fashioning of political history from what was

possibly an earlier, indigenous Hausa myth of origin in some length:

Sultan Bello's statement, that the Hausa people originated from a
Bornu slave, deserves little credit. It is to be considered as merely
expressive of his contempt for the effeminate manners of the Hausa
people in his time. But their language, though it has a few words in
common with the Kanuri, is evidently quite distant from it, as well in
its vocabulary as in its grammar. What Bello says may be correct in a
certain sense with regard to the population of Kano, which, indeed
seems to consist, for the greater part, of Bornu elements, though in
course of time the people have adopted the Hausa language; and this
may be the case, also, with other provinces, the original population
having been more nearly related to the Manga-Bornu stock. The
name 'Bawu', which occurs in the mythical genealogy of the Hausa

33

 

people as that of the ancestor of most of the Hausa states, can hardly
be supposed to be a mere personification representing the state of
slavery in which the nation formerly existed; the name for slave in
the Hausa language is bawa, not bawu. It is, however, remarkable
that this personage is said to be the son of Karbagari, whose name
evidently implies 'the taking of a town', and might be derived from
the capture of the town of Biram, which is universally represented as
the oldest seat of the Hausa people, a tradition which is attested by a
peculiar usage even at the present day. This town of Biral is situated
between Kano and Khadeja, and is often called 'Biram-ta-ghabbes', in
order to distinguish it from a more westerly town of the same name.
Biral, the personification of this town , is said to have been, by his
grandson, Bawu (the son of Karbagari), the progenitor of six other
Hausa states (likewise personified), viz. Katsena and Zegzeg, who
are represented as twins; Kano and Rano, another pair of twins;
Gober and Daura; However, it seems almost universally
acknowledged that, of all these children, Daura was the eldest."
(Barth 1857: vol. I, 471-472).

Barth's account gives us a better understanding of his own mode of
inquiry than that of Bello. His discussion of Bello's presentation of the myth,
while alert to the prominence of kinship, too readily dispatches the significance
of slavery. Unknown to Barth, the absence of Bayajidda in Bello's account of
Hausa origins curiously deviates from variations of the story collected later in the
nineteenth and into the twentieth century. In those accounts of the Hausa Bakwai,
both Bawo and Karbagari are the sons of Bayajidda, never Biral. In accounts
which include this theme at all, Bawo, Karbagari and Biral are always
represented as half-brothers: Bawo the son of Daura and Bayajidda; Karbagari
the son of a concubine and Bayajidda; Biral, the son of Bayajidda and his first

wife, a Bornu princess, whom he left in Biram-ta-Gabas. Bello's complete

34

omission of Bayajidda and the substitution of Biral as the progenitor of the Hausa
founding fathers is a singular variation from the standard telling of the myth.
Barth, trained as a geographer, tries to use the Hausa Bakwai to model a

geography of Hausaland. He savors the evidence that Biram-ta-Gabas may be
the oldest Hausa city and relates this to his own observations of Hausa and
Kanuri settlement patterns. Once again, however, his limited knowledge of
Hausa local traditions does not allow him to appreciate the process of selection
and rejection among local traditions of origin which preceded Bello's own
acceptance of Biram-ta-Gabas, not Daura, as the oldest Hausa city. Finally,
though he carefully reports the evidence, Barth clearly is unable to comprehend
the value of imagining the founders of the Hausa as three sets of twins. Again,
he was unaware that the twin motif was consistently found in other versions of
the myth, some of which also add the names of the three mothers. This suggest
that the element of kinship in the myth was more significant than that of
geography at the time of Bello's research into the origins of the Hausa and since
then. Clearly, relationships between the founders of the Hausa states has
generally been, assumed to be the significance of the Daura myth. Unlike Barth's
desire to associate history with geography, the indigenous tradition of Hausa
history focused on social, perhaps political, relationships, not physical
boundaries.

Gender is significant by its absence from Bello's telling of the myth. Daura
herself is an obscure figure, represented only in her role as Bawo's mother. Even
at that, the mothers of the three sets of twins who personify the Hausa Bakwai
separate her by one significant generation from the dominate image of the myth:

the relationships between the Hausa kingdoms. For Bello and, presumably, the

35

Sokoto political elite in general, the master metaphor of sibling relationships and
the recognition of seven Hausa provinces may have prefigured the unifying
political structure of the Caliphate. Bello was himself one of the chief architects
of the Caliphate and it is not surprising that he should adopt the myth of the
Hausa Bakwai, almost, one might say, as an aide to legitimizing the unifying
character of the Fulbe administration of the Hausa emirates (Last 1968; Adeleye
1971). Genealogy, and the political connections understood in the metaphor of
the Hausa siblings, here replaces gender as the motivation behind this telling of
the myth, thus strengthening its applicability to the legitimization of the
Caliphate's administrative reorganization of the Hausa city states.

The myth may also have appealed to Bello because of its structural
similarities to Islamic representations of lines of scholarly authority, or asalin.“ In
fact, this was a uniquely important aspect of the concept of authority as taught by
the Islamic brotherhoods, two of which, the Quadirrya and the Tyjanniya, were
especially important in nineteenth century Sokoto (Brenner 1984; Last 1968;
Paden 1973, 82). The modern Hausa translation of Bello‘s work does, indeed, use
the word asalin to describe the section on Bawo and the Hausa Bakwai and it is
possible that Bello used the myth to create a fictive asalin for the Hausa (Sidi
Sayudi 1974: 2). If this is true, then Bello also included a subtle, but potentially
significant, racism by choosing to represent the founder of the Hausa "clan" as a
slave. Establishing slave status in the male line clearly fits Islamic legal concepts
of the inheritance of slave status ( B. Lewis 1988; 1990).

Bello's model for developing an Islamic state in Hausaland was dependent

on slavery as a social and religious concept and slave labor was an economic

 

26I use the Hausa spelling.

36

necessity. Certainly, there was economic as well as political utility in creating a
historical image of the Hausa as slaves. This would allow the Sokoto Caliphate
to enhance its own economic growth by enslaving Hausa captives for use in the
Caliphate and export to North African and Middle Eastern slave markets.
Sokoto's dependence on slaves is well-documented elsewhere (Lovejoy 1981: 201-
43; 1979: 1267-92). Here, I only present the possibility that the earliest definition
of the Hausa Bakwai know to European scholars was part of a political myth
created to allow the enslavement of Hausa captives within the legal and cultural
practices of Islam.

Whether the myth of the Hausa Bakwai allowed Bello to construct Hausa
history as an asalin of slaves is, however, less significant in the intellectual
history of the myth than its acceptance by him as an authentic representation of
pre-Caliphate Hausa political history. It is as if Bello used the genealogical
element of Hausa myths of origin both to encapsulate all historical time before
the coming of the Caliphate to the Hausa and as an intellectual device for
enhancing the Caliphate's political hegemony over the newly conquered
kingdoms. Perhaps Bello's reading of the sibling metaphor was meant to
obliterate the local knowledge and local identities, contained in unique local
traditions and myths of origin, as an aide to establishing a Hausa identity based
on loyalty to a wider, Hausa community, now incorporated into the Caliphate.
With Bello's account, the myth of Bawo and his descendants is pushed sideways,
making way for a fresh signification of those elements retained in the new
formulation of the older myth. Mohammed Bello was only the first conqueror of
Hausaland to find such political utility in the myth of Bawo, which, by the time
of Heinrich Barth had become the myth of the Hausa Bakwai .

37

 

Heinrich Barth's commentary on Bello's account of the Hausa Bakwai
suggests that the Sokoto Caliphate significantly encouraged the spread of this
myth of Hausa origins and in doing so enhanced its acceptability as historical
truth. Through the accounts of explorers and a growing body of published
materials on the Hausa language, nineteenth century Europeans learned about
the Hausa Bakwai from the Sokoto Caliphate. In the process, the concept, never
one concretely expressed in Hausa by actual, geographic borders, began to take

shape of a historically identifiable Hausaland in the European imagination.

Kano and Bornu: Daura and the Hero From the East

A potent reworking of Hausa myths of origin, including that of Daura,
Bawo and the Hausa Bakwai, seems to have taken place on Hausaland's eastern
frontier, which was shared with the Kanuri empire of Bornu. Never a clearly
defined border, whether in terms of language, culture or politics, the distinction
between the lands of the Bornu state and those of the important Hausa kingdom
of Kano, seem to have been an especially contentious issue in the sixteenth
century. Murray Last and others have pointed to the troubled political
relationships between Kano and its powerful eastern neighbor to argue that the
myth of Daura, Bayajidda and the Hausa Bakwai dates from and expresses the
political upheaval inherent in Kano's attempts to separate itself from Bornu and,
according to last, establish itself as an independant caliphate (Hallam 1966, 1:47-
66; Last 1983, 67-91; M.G. Smith 1978, 58-59). For Last, it was a myth created to
justify a new interpretation of the political geography of the Hausa-Bornu

borders (Last 1983, 67-91). For the first generation of colonial administrators and

38

scholars, the Bornu influenced version of the Daura myth would take on a
unique role in political and intellectual empire building.

Last argues that evidence in the Kano Chronicle, a historical text written in
Kano and based on a compilation of oral traditions about the political history of
that Hausa kingdom, suggests Kano attempted to establish a caliphate form of
political organization among the Hausa kingdoms during the sixteenth century.
In doing so, Kano was, in effect, revolting against the political authority of Bornu,
established since the mid-fifteenth century and partially expressed through the
annual payment of tribute from the Hausa kingdoms to Bornu (Last 1983, 67-91).
The significance of Daura, emphasized as the oldest Hausa kingdom, Bayajidda's
association with the court and court politics of Bornu, his marriage to a Bornu
princess and fathering her child (a son who founded Biram-ta—Gabbas, the far
eastern Hausa town which was recognized as the oldest Hausa settlement in
other accounts of the origins of the Hausa), all point towards Last's conclusion:
that this eastern version of the origins of the Hausa was a reworking of Hausa
myths to undermine the political hegemony of Bornu at a time of great political
crisis. Within this explication of the myth, the significance of Daura rests on the
tradition that it was at Daura where the Hausa kingdoms took on a distinct
political identity, separate from that of Bornu, yet related, once again, through
genealogy and dynastic marital diplomacy.

In the nineteenth century, as Heinrich Barth observed, the linguistic and
cultural boundary between Bornu and Hausaland ran just to the east of Kano.
On this northeastern Hausa frontier the small Hausa kingdom of Daura was a
fief of Bornu until the rise of the Sultanate of Damagaram in the mid-nineteenth

century (Dunbar 1970; Salifou 1971). In descriptions of Damagaram and its

39

capital city, Zinder, the oasis town of Myrria, east of Zinder, was frequently
noted as the last Hausa town. Myrria was, in fact, a member of a confederation
of small kingdoms, the Sossibaki states, which defined themselves as Hausa by
the eighteenth century and claimed Kano antecedents in their own political
traditions (Brouin 1938: 469-479). Thus, while Kano has often been represented
as the "heart" of Hausaland and Kano emirate has been seen as being one of the
"core" emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate, the eastern part of Hausaland was
deeply penetrated by the languages and culture of Bornu.27 The Daura myth
reflects the very real blurring of ethnic definitions in this part of the Hausa
linguistic and cultural frontier, a frontier which no geopolitical border would
have effectively expressed even as late as the nineteenth century (Richardson
1853).

The unique geopolitical position of eastern Hausa regions has cultural and
intellectual implications for the myth of Daura.28 Texts of the myth collected in
the east are, in fact, oriented towards Bornu. Such texts generally begin not with
Daura or Hausa history, but with Bornu and the arrival of a renegade prince
from Baghdad and his troops. To neutralize the newcomer's potential for
mounting a successful military junta, the King of Bornu marries him to his
daughter. This move only forestalls the ultimate rivalry between the newcomer
and the King. The newcomer flees to the west with his pregnant, royal wife and

his horse. He leaves her behind in a city to give birth to their son and goes on

 

27The use of language such as core and periphery in describing the emirates of
the Sokoto Caliphate was introduced by economic historians, notably P. Lovejoy
(1976, 3:341-68).

28Hausaland's position in the early political history of the Central Sudan, the
developments of its kingdoms and its relationships to the great powers around it
is summarized by A. Smith (1971, 1: 158-201; 1970, 3:329-46).

4O

 

until he arrives in the town of the Queen, Daura. There he kills a snake living in
the town's well which has prevented people from drawing water. In gratitude,
Daura offers the stranger half of her town, but this he rejects in favor of marrying
her. She agrees, but will not sleep with him, providing him with a slave girl
instead. After the slave girl gives birth to a son, whom she names Karbigari,
"Town-seizer," Daura sleeps with her husband, becomes pregnant and bears a
son, Bawo, "Return our town" (Edgar 1911, 1: 222-225, 229-230; Rattray 1913, 1: 2-
35; Palmer 1928, 3:132-134; Imam 1954; Hallam 1966, 7:42-60; Hogben and Kirk-
Greene 1966; Niamey: CRRDTO/ H 1970; Zaria: Northern Nigerian Publishing
Co, 1970; 1973, 133-142;).

The texts within this tradition refine the metaphors of genealogy and
kinship to lay out a clear definition of a Hausa state system. No detail of
diplomacy is untouched: Bawo becomes the father of the chief Hausa kingdoms,
but through his two half brothers claims ties to both Bornu and to the collectivity
of non-Hausa kingdoms with which the Hausa states maintained political and,
probably, economic relationships. Texts from this tradition are numerous,
prominent and, today, credited with authenticity by no less an authority than the
Emir of Daura himself (M.G. Smith 1978, 53). The acceptance and repetition of
the Daura-Bayajidda telling of the myth of Hausa origins within the Western
historiography adds another degree of authenticity to the myth (Hogben and
Kirk-Greene 1966, 145-54; Hallam 1966, 7:42-60; Fika 1978, 3-4; M.G. Smith 1964,
339-357, 1978, 52-59; Calloway 1987, 3-6). Indeed, some scholars do not question
the Daura/Bayajidda text and use it as evidence of Bornu's power over
Hausaland in the past, especially during the sixteenth century (Palmer 1928,
3:143-154; M.G. Smith 1964, 339-357, 1978, 56).

41

Setting aside for the moment the problems of establishing a prototypical
telling of the Daura/ Bayajidda story, the variety of versions with this motif offer
insights into the relationship of Hausa oral literature to other traditions of Islamic
story telling. First, linguistic and literary devices found in the eastern
representation of Daura and Bayajidda appear to reflect the cultural boundary
between Bornu and Hausaland. Political titles used in these stories, for example,
are from Bornu, not Hausaland, and are in Kanuri, the language of the Bornu
court. References to Bornu and a geogaphic orientation towards the east, that is,
towards Bornu and and even beyond to the Islamic heartland of such places as
Yemen and Baghdad, are common. Such texts also contain the strongest
component of literary motifs commonly identified with the literature of the
Islamic Middle East and North Africa, cultures and regions to which West Africa
was connected by trade and religion from the fifteenth century. These elements
include metaphorical devices, motifs and a particular representation of religious
frontiers, all of which suggest the influence of a broader tradition of Islamic
storytelling. Given Bornu's close ties to the Ottoman Empire, it seems reasonable
to see the literate classes of Bornu, especially within the context of court society,
serving as cultural brokers for interested Moslems to the west, that is, in the
capital cities of Hausaland. Certainly, the influence of Islamic poetry from North
Africa and the Middle East in general has been well-established (Hiskett 1975, 21-
63; 1968).

What I am calling the eastern texts (because of their close identification
with kingdoms in eastern Hausaland) contain significantly more of an emphasis
on gender relationships than Bello presented in his account of the origins of the

Hausa. Detailed descriptions of Daura herself are lacking, nor is there evidence

42

that African storytellers ornamented their descriptions of her with details drawn
from the fantastic folklore of Middle Eastern harem life. 21’ The eastern telling of
the myth, however, is richly embroidered with engendered images. The most
important of the Islamic metaphors found in the eastern Hausa Daura texts and
the central device of the Daura/Bayajidda myth is a fundamental and universal
representation of gender relations: marriage.“

The marriage between the Hausa queen, Daura, and Bayajidda, the hero
form the East, most clearly places this version of the tradition into the popular
literary heritage of Islam. The image of marriage between Moslems and non-
Moslems is an important theme in Islamic literature, one often used to describe
religious relationships on the frontiers of Islam (Metlitzki 1977). This image can
be traced back to medieval Armenia where a cycle of legends focusing on the
marriage of a renegade Moslem prince to a non-Moslem princess established the
Islamic frontier for medieval Moslem scholars. It also became an important story
motif imported into the literature of Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Metlitzki
1977, 117-177). It is found in the Arabian Nights, manuscript copies of which
circulated in both Bornu and Hausaland by the eighteenth century, thanks to the
commercial and cultural links between West Africa and the Islamic world of
North Africa and Egypt(Hiskett 1968:25-6). Literate West African Moslems

certainly had access to the Middle Eastern Islamic literary traditions by the 16th

 

29Even a casual reading of the classic Thousand and one Nights confirms this
observation: Daura is an African heroine and lives in Hausa society (Zipes 1991).
30Callaway has also tried to analyze the implications of gender in the Daura
myth, though from a somewhat different perspective (Callaway 1987, 3-6) A.E.V.
Walwyn, who contributed a Daura queen list to Palmer , was the first European to
suggest that the myth described the replacement of a matrilineal system of rule by
an Islamically-corrected patrilineal one (1928, 3:145-6).

43

century when Last argues that the Daura/ Bayajidda/ Hausa Bakwai myth was
created (Last 1983; Bivar and Hiskett 1962).

In the case of Daura, Moslem storytellers would appear to have used this
same tradition to create an image of the non-Islamic status of Hausaland vis a vis
Bornu. Thus, the Daura legend may represent the application of a pan-Islamic
metaphor for Moslem-non-Moslem relationships in which Bornu became the
Islamic heartland and Hausaland the frontier; Bayajidda the renegade Moslem
prince and Daura the infidel princess who accepts Islam. As in medieval
Armenia, through them would come not only the true faith, but also good
Islamic government as their descendants set out to establish new kingdoms, the
so called Hausa Bakwai . Once again, the prestige of Kano as the locus of the new,
Islamic state is enhanced by this telling of the myth of Daura.

To arrive at this interpretation, however, a curious transformation of
Bornu oral (and perhaps written) traditions must have taken place with the
invention of the Kano version of the Daura myth in the sixteenth century.
According to Hallam, who took up suggestions made by Palmer early in the
twentieth century and proceeded to examine the renegade hero motif in Bornu
folk traditions, the Hausa hero, Bayajidda, is prefigured in a cycle of myths about
a warrior prince of Baghdad, Abu Yazid (Palmer 1928, 146-163; Hallam 1966,
7:42-60). The text presented by Hallam is strictly focused on Bornu and includes
only the mention that Abu Yazid traveled on to the west and into Hausa
territory. Furthermore, Hallam's discussion of the Bornu texts makes it clear that
even in Bornu Abu Yazid remained a mythic figure, not definitively anchored in
historical time until his legendary status was affixed to the chronicle of the

Masbarma family, who traditionally held the office of vizier to the kings of Bornu

44

(Palmer 1928, 146-163; Hallam 1966, 7:42-60; M.G. Smith 1978, 55-56).“ The
Masbarma chronicle places Abu Yazid's arrival in the early sixteenth century.
Ironically, by continuing to exploit elements found in the Bornu telling of
the Daura/Bayajidda myth to buttress a conquest model of both Islamification
and social change in general among the Hausa, Western scholars validate the
authenticity of the myth as history in much the same way as their Fulbe
predecessors. Nevertheless, the application of the image of marriage to
Hausaland via the Daura myth compliments Last's interpretation of the myth of
the Hausa Bakwai. While the significance of Bornu to Hausaland as an important
source of Islamic learning, including secular literature, remains intact, through
Daura and the Hausa Bakwai , Kano becomes Islam's true political expression.
Other motifs in the eastern Hausa texts of the Daura myth continue to
reflect the influence of secular narratives from the Middle Eastern cultural center
of the Islamic world. Much, for example, has been made by Hausa storytellers
and Western commentators of Bayajidda's horse. In some versions of the myth,
the hero, whether he is designated as Bayajidda or as a son or even a courtier of
the king of Bornu, is forced to flee the king's wrath after breeding a mare to the
king's favorite stallion and rearing a colt which challenges the stallion. While
western commentators have debated over whether or not Bayajidda's horse
represents the coming of horses to Hausaland, it is far more interesting to point
out that the story of the mare, the stallion and the colt is a common element of
the texts know to have come directly from Hausa storytellers (Ferguson 1973,

134; Niamey: CRRDTO/HH 1970). The importance of the hero's horse is a motif

 

31Though Smith’ makes a mighty effort to give historical substance, even
chronology, to legends of Abu Yazid, I remain unconvinced (M. Smith 1978).

45

found in other stories of Moslem princes fleeing to the edge of Islamic empires to
escape political repression. (Metlitzki 1977:136-159). It seems also to reflect the
popularity of the wonder horse in Middle Eastern folk narratives, a motif which
could easily have been imported into Hausa oral literature. Horses, in fact,
continue to be significant elements of the marvelous in the tatsuniyoyi of Nigerien
Hausa (Stephens 1981, 1:137-177).32

The elements of Islamic story telling incorporated into a Bornu tradition
and then exported to Hausaland are tantalizing evidence of the continuing
significance of Bornu as a source of Islamic culture for their western neighbors.
These elements of pan-Islamic folklore suggests other reasons why the Bornu
version of the Daura legend may have been exceptionally current in eastern
Hausaland, especially Kano and Daura itself in the late nineteenth century. One
of these is the role of Bornu as the source of Koranic teachers and scholars in
Hausaland. A version of the Daura myth, collected between 1907 and 1911 by
the English colonial officer, R.S. Rattray, from a Kano-born Hausa malam
residing in Ghana suggests how a close relationship between the Bayajidda-
focused texts of the myth and the communities of educated malams resident in
Kano might have operated (Rattray 1913, 1:2-35). This text may be seen as
evidence of how popular literature and religious education mixed in the political
culture of Hausa cities like Kano and in the far-flung communities of the Hausa

trading diaspora (Adamu 1978; Cohen 1969).

 

32 The Kantché text is an especially good example of this. Since Kantché has had
a reputation for breeding fine horses since the 1950's, one suspects that local

enthusiasm for horses in general partially accounts for the attention paid to
Bayajidda's horse (CRDTO/NO. 2 1970).

46

Ratteray's version of the myth is a curiously truncated telling of Daura's
history, which, in fact, was grafted on to a detailed account of the history of Islam
in Hausaland. Neither Daura nor the Hausa Bakwai is the real focus of Rattery's
informant, for whom the myth seems, instead, to serve as a kind of prologue to
the more important narrative of the history of Islamic educators, the
communities of malams, in Kano (Rattray 1913, 1: 2-5). While it opens with a
brief account of Bayajidda, Rattray's text quickly becomes a folk history of
Islamic education and educators, mixed with elements from the Kano Chronicle
(Rattray 1913, 1:6-35).

Rattray's text seems to relate the Bayajidda element of the legend to the
special importance of the intellectual role played by the Bornu clerical
community in Kano from the seventeenth century to the Sokoto Jihad in the
nineteenth. Rattray's informant used the myth of Daura as a vehicle for
encapsulating a complex intersection of religious, ethnic and political identities.
His narrative reiterates the sanctity and established claims to religious monopoly
of the Bornu clerical community in Kano during the early decades of the
twentieth century, perhaps using the occasion to bolster the malams' claims to
religious authority to the new political power brokers through their perceived
representative, Rattray himself. That this was, indeed, a relevant motive for
Rattray's informant to turn a colonial official's request for stories about the
origins of the Hausa into a digression on the history of malams in Hausaland
becomes even more plausible when the political setting of the informant's
expatriate Hausa community is considered.

Rattray worked with Malam Shaihu while he was stationed in Yegi, a

commercial town on the Volta River in modern Ghana. The town was on the

47

Hausa / Ashanti trade route and Malam Shaihu was a member of the large Hausa
community, or zongo, in residence there. Elsewhere in the vicinity of Yegi, Hausa
communities had manipulated their relationships with German and English
colonial officials in the chaotic years of the'1890's to gain important commercial
concessions vis-a-vis local (non-Moslem) political authorities. One notorious case
involved the Hausa zongo at Keta Krachi in what became, first part of the German
colony of Togo and, after World War I, the British colony of Gold Coast
(Ferguson 1973, 14-27).

In Kete, the resident German administrator, Adam Mischlich, settled the
zongo's dispute over who would be its Imam by championing the claim of a
popular Koranic teacher and respected scholar, one al Hajj 'Umar: 'Umar, was
the same Imam Imoru who went on to be Mischlich's chief Hausa informant.33
The apparent importance of the Bayajidda/Daura tradition which so impressed
its early English collectors may in fact reflect their dependence on the Kano
Hausa malams who served them as informants, translators and scribes.“

Rattray's text also suggests yet another aspect of the myth-making
potentials of the Islamic revival experienced throughout Hausaland in the
nineteenth century. European visitors to the Central Sudan witnessed the great
awakening of Islamic missionary activity in eastern Hausaland. James
Richardson, for example, traveling with Heinrich Barth in the 1850's, notes with

disdain the flood of Bornu preachers in Damagaram and Zinder. Though his

 

33 The British conquest of Kumasi in 1896 opened the city to Hausa traders for
the first time. Mishlisch's Hausa informant, Imam Imoru was a resident of Kete
Krachi from 1896 until his death there in 1934 (Ferguson 1973, 25-26).

34 The similarity between Malam Shaihu's use of Daura and Bayajidda is, of
course, quite striking the Masbarma's appropriation of Abu Yazid.

48

visit to the city coincided with the dry season when Moslem scholars and
preachers traditionally traveled to distant centers of learning to study and to find
communities able to support them through alms, it is clear that clerical activity
was significant in northeast Hausaland (Richardson 1853, 2:211).

Overshadowed by the dramatic events of the Sokoto Jihad, the more
prosaic activities of itinerant Moslem scholars nevertheless reached deep into the
rural Hausa countryside. Such scholars established a tradition of rural Islamic
education and popular acceptance of Sufi brotherhoods which would become
vital to the Islamification of Hausa popular culture in the twentieth century.

Richardson's informants told him that Islam had arrived in the northern
Hausa region of Damagaram only in the nineteenth century, carried by
proselytizing clerics from Bornu (Richardson 1853, 2:211). Richardson goes on to
give an account of the Islamification of the city of Zinder in which the first
Islamic ruler of Damagaram not only commanded people to accept Islam, but
also forced them to close up the well from which the town had been supplied
with water, a well closely associated with animist religious practices. From that
time on, according to Richardson's informants, there was not enough water in
Zinder, and people suspected that the forced acceptance of Islam resulted in the
coming of drought. This story was set in the time when the king was also forcing
people to stop religious ceremonies associated with trees, in other words, a time
when the people were being forced away from the public worship of nature
spirits (Richardson 1853,2z211). The myth of Daura echoes some of the elements
of Zinder's forced conversion to Islam: the repeated importance of a well and a
community's need for water; the parallel actions of the snake in Daura and the

king in Zinder. Yet the myth of Daura ultimately superseded such local legends.

49

Daura, Bayajidda and their children demanded that local identities be replaced
by what might be called proto-nationalism.

I am suggesting that the availability of Bayajidda-focused versions of the
Daura legend to English and French colonial officers in the early decades of the
twentieth century was a product of multiple and complex manipulations of what
may have been a local myth. These include the efforts of Kano to assert its
hegemony over neighboring kingdoms in the sixteenth century; the later needs of
the communities of Hausa malams throughout West Africa to consolidate their
professional status in the early days of imperial rule. What is most genuine
about the Daura myth is the role its eastern variations played in transmitting
pan-Islamic literary motifs to an African culture on the borders of the Islamic
world.

The Daura legend needs to be seen, as the marriage theme so strongly
suggests, as a metaphor of religious conversion on the Islamic frontier rather
than a metaphor for the transfer of Hausa political organization from a
matrilineal to a patrilineal form and the forced withdrawal of women from
Hausa dynastic politics. It is important to note, however, that patrilineality is as
much a part of the social baggage of Islam as is the heritage of Islamic literature.
The social setting of nineteenth century Hausaland may well have been one in
which the rules of kinship were being redefined along with the acceptance and
popularization of a new religion and a new political identity. With this in mind,
it must be noted that Daura herself chose to give up her magical power, to sleep
with her husband and to bear an heir to protect the authority of her own line

from the usurpation of power by an outsider.

50

Daura and the Diversity of Hausa Culture

There is, however, more to the Daura legend than its connection with the
notion of the Hausa Bakwai or its use by the leadership of the Sokoto jihad and
others in their reconstruction of pre-Islamic Hausa history. Variant texts of the
Daura legend link it to the local traditions of distinct Hausaphone regions,
within and without the Caliphate. Such variations are evidence of the
persistence of local traditions maintained throughout the nineteenth century in
spite of political, economic and social pressures towards a more homogeneous
and Islamic Hausa culture.

Concurrent with the official version of Hausa history recounted by
Heinrich Barth from Sultan Bello's Infaku al Maisurt is the alternative account of
Dorugu, a young native of the region of Daura and Barth's servant. Captured
and enslaved by the forces of Sarkin Damagaram as a child, Dorugu was
purchased and set free by Barth's companion, Richard Overweg. When Overweg
died, Barth himself kept Dorugu as a servant and eventually took him to EurOpe.
Dorugu met Barth's father and then went on with him to London where he was
introduced to the Hausa linguist and missionary, J.W. Schon. Dorugu's
collaboration with Schon began in 1856, when Schon reckoned him to be about 16
or 17 years old, and continued for many years. The results were a steady stream
of publications of Hausa language materials, which concluded in 1886 with the
publication of Magana Hausa, a collection of stories, sketches, letters and proverbs
in Hausa with an English translation (Schon 1885).

It was in Magana Hausa that Dorugu related a story which included the
same general plot, characters and motifs as the "official" Daura legend, but lacked

any reference to the Hausa Bakwai, Bayajidda, or even Daura herself (Schon 1885,

51

144-146; 96-97). As told by Dorugu, a stranger came to a town and stayed with
an old woman. Seeking water for himself and his horse, he was told by his
hostess that no one could draw water from the well in the evening because of a
snake in the well. The stranger, nevertheless, went to the well for water.
Encountering the snake, he killed it by cutting off its head with his sword. He
returned to the home of the old woman with water and the head of the snake.
This he used to prove to the king of the town that he was, indeed, the true killer
of the snake and to collect his reward, a gift of half of the town.

The language Dorugu uses throughout the story is a significant reminder
of his own peasant (talakawa) origins. The hero is simply a man (wont mutum),
the snake, a snake living in the well (macizi and macizin rua,a water snake). The
people of the town can not take water from the well in the evening because the
snake takes hold of their buckets at that time of day and people are afraid to
bother it. There is no confusion about the animal the stranger rides: it is his
horse (dokina). A women coming to the well for water in the morning discovers
the body, "full of stripes" as Schon translates Dorugu's description, of the dead
snake. Most importantly, the ruler of the town is called sariki, a form of the
Hausa word Sarki, king, not inna, saruniya, magaram, or magira, titles commonly
given to women rulers in Hausa dialects (Schon 1888, 144-146). He rewards the
hero by dividing the town in half and giving him an equal portion to rule. The
hero takes the reward. There is no mention of a queen or a royal marriage or
children. There is no mention of the Hausa Bakwai. Stripped of the
accouterments of myth, Dorugu's narrative of the stranger and the snake in the
well is merely a story, a piece of "urban folklore", perhaps, to the narrator, even a

rumor current during his childhood. Daura, Bayajidda, Bawo and the Hausa

52

Bakwai, those essential elements which turn the story into myth in other versions,
are absent, never mentioned by either Dorugu or Schon in connection with this
story, even though Schon himself already knew about the Hausa Bakwai, at least
as a geographical representation.

Dorugu's story belongs to his personal history, which in turn reflects the
history of his class and position in Hausa society as the child of peasant farmers.
It is likely that he heard it as a child, either in the setting of his own family and
village or in the households, probably among other Hausa slaves, in Kano and
Kukawa into which he was sold. He places his characters and plot into a setting
immediately recognizable to his Hausa audience. The surprise and initial fear of
the. woman going to the well for water the morning after the stranger has
beheaded the snake, for example, a lively image of an activity utterly common to
any Hausa person. The details of his telling of the story remind us of the vitality
of local folk traditions from which a myth, such as that of Daura and the Hausa
Bakwai, emerges.

Other Hausa local traditions have contributed variations of the myth of
Hausa origins, each suggesting the specific social and historical realities of
distinctive Hausa communities. Texts collected by Adam Mischlisch in Ghana
from Iman Imoru present a rich account of the Queen and the local traditions of
origin from which the myth itself was composed (Mischlisch 1949, Hausa and
German text; Fergeson 1973). An extraordinary compilation of the Daura myth,
the image of Daura herself in Imoru's text links his sources to Hausa
communities which escaped incorporation into the Sokoto Caliphate and the
intensification of Islamic culture which then occurred. Imoru's depth of

scholarship and love of poetry and language clearly influenced the variety of

53

Hausa myths of origin he related to Mischlish. His language is fresh, lively, filled
with details and imagery which would captivate an audience. Imoru's text, in
short, does two important things: it links Daura herself to certain women's
political roles and his style reminds us of the entertainment value of the myth as
performance art. ‘

Responding to Mischlish's requests, Imoru presented a number of
variations on the myth of Daura and the origins of the Hausa, combining them
into a complex, artistically developed master narrative. He begins with the story
of two hunters, brothers, who make a settlement in the wilderness near Bornu
with their wives and followers. The settlement, named Gabi, prospers. Daura is
introduced as the daughter of the youngest brother, born at Gabi, named Fatima,
nicknamed Dauratu (Ferguson 1973, 133).

Imoru is especially concerned to link his Daura to the origin of the Hausa
language. In his telling of the myth, she does not speak until her mother dies;
then her language is unintelligible and called "haza kalamu Hausa" in Arabic.
Imoru translates this to mean "this is foolish talk," and to emphasize that Daura's
language was distinct from Arabic, Kanuri or Tamasheq. While her family could
not understand her, she could understand them. As she matures and takes on a
leadership role in her community, other people come to know her language.
Imoru emphasizes that her followers were noted for the distinctiveness of their
language when ever they left their own community (Ferguson 1973, 133-34).

Imoru's description of Daura is rich in detail. As she is growing up, she

becomes a hunter, like her parents:

54

Daura learned how to shoot and she was an excellent archer like
her parents. She tied a leather loincloth around her waist and wore
the other cloths and trappings of a huntsman (Fergeson 1973, 134).

She succeeded her parents:

Dauratu inherited their paraphernalia and she knew all the magic
associated with shooting. She became a very successful hunter and
people came to depend on Fatima Dauratu (Fergeson 1973, 134).

Thus, Imoru introduces us to a Daura who is the daughter of immigrants,
new settlers in a wilderness rich in wildlife; a woman who originates a new
language and achieves a leadership role in her community by inheriting the
hunting rituals of her family and providing well for her followers (Fergeson 1973,
134).

Daura in this context is a heroine cut from the same cultural cloth as yet
another famous Sahelian woman, Sogolon, the mother of Sundiata, the founder
of Mali. Like Sogolon, Daura is physically unusual: she dresses in the masculine
garb of a hunter. Sogolan also shares a close link with hunters and the magic of
hunting. Both Women were prsented in oral traditions as leaders of courage and
moral authority. And both women were allowed to remain in their respective
intellectual traditions even after the Islamification of the cultures in which they
were positioned (Niane 1968; Hale 1990; Johnson 1992).

When Imoru introduces the male figure who will eventually become
Daura's husband and the father of the Hausa, he does not make use of the
Bayajidda motif; there is no hero from the east, no killing of a snake in a well.

Instead, he supplies a motif taken, again, from Islamic, perhaps specifically

55

North African, folklore (Hiskett 1968, 25-6). Daura's husband-to-be is described
as the Murima, or stable slave, of the King of Bornu. In a conspiracy with one of
the King's sons, he has allowed the prince's mare to be impregnated by the King's
stallion, much against the orders of the King}5 When the resulting foal leads to
the uncovering of the plot, the King becomes angry with his son and threatens to
kill the Murima, who runs for his life and ends up in Daura's town.

The Murima wants to marry Daura, but once again in a situation

reminiscent of Sogolon, Daura admits that she can not sleep with any man:

No man sleeps with me because I have magic which can be
contaminated (Ferguson 1973, 134).

Between them they arrange a marriage in which the Murima would sleep only
with a concubine presented to him by Daura. The concubine becomes pregnant
and with the birth of her son creates an antagonistic relationship with Daura.

In describing Daura's choice to give up her religiously-mandated celibacy
to sleep this her husband and bear children, Imoru emphasizes psychological
and emotional motives. Daura was simply jealous of the arrogant concubine and
her son. Imoru's text gives a marvelous description of the Queen at this critical

moment in his narrative.

Kusoto's mother despised her owner, Daura, intensely and
eventually when Daura spoke to her she replied 'wo.’ Well, this
continued until one day when Daura became furious and untied
her leather loincloth and threw it away. She removed all the men's
clothing from her body, including the charms and armlets. She

 

35 This is, of course, also part of the Rattary version of the story.

56

removed her archer's thumb ring and abandoned hunting and the
magic associated with it. Daura washed herself with soap, combed
her hair and plaited it, rubbing in indigo which had been prepared
beforehand. Then she applied henna to her hands and feet, and
rubbed on different kinds of perfume. She wrapped women's body -
cloths around herself and hung beads around her neck. She put on
an anklet and a bangle, and applied eye makeup around her eyes.
Then she drank kalgo to redden her lips, and stained her teeth with
tobacco blossoms. That day she became a very beautiful woman.
She went to her husband and he slept with her. They had
intercourse, she became pregnant, and gave birth to a boy. The
murima named him Fatoma in the Baribari language which means
'head of the house' in the Hausa language, but Daura preferred to
call him Bawo, meaning 'there is no wo' (Ferguson 1973, 135).

In the next section of his narrative Imoru turns his attention away from the
human emotions and dimensions of the myth and lays out a kind of linguistic
geography of the Hausa people. In his explication of who the Hausa are and
where Hausaland exists, Imoru uses the agency of Daura's sons and grandsons to
establish the Hausa language as the defining characteristic of "Hausaland."
Hausaland is where the descendants of Daura established communities speaking
her unique language: Hausaland is to Imoru a linguistic community based on a
myth of common ancestry (Ferguson 1973, 141).

Let me summarize the features of Imoru's narrative which make it a
unique telling of the Hausa myth of origins. First, he mixes elements of a variety
of myths, including the horse motif from Middle Eastern Islamic folk traditions,

the Murima from Bornu traditions and the hunter motif of many local Hausa

57

myths of origin-‘5‘" Second, he gives the myth human agency by focusing on
Daura, her actions and her emotions. Thirdly, he defines the community of
Hausa linguistically. Finally, he does not give the myth either a political or a
religions signification. Because of this, Imoru's text places Daura into an
ambivalent cultural context: Is she Moslem or is she animist? While one of her
names, Fatima, is Islamic, her nickname, Dauratu is not. She chooses her own
fate and becomes pregnant. And yet, she does not give up her authority: when
the Murima returns to Bornu, she does not allow him to take their sons with him.
The whole fate of the Hausa nation depends on her actions. Neither Islam nor
patriarchy dislodge Imoru's heroine from her role as authority.

Imoru's account of Daura indicates the limits of Islamic reform in
Hausaland in the nineteenth century. The sheer diversity of myths about the
origins of the Hausa which Imoru was able to tell Adam Mischlish reasserts the
importance of the local knowledge and local traditions which lie below the
political veneer created by more recent manipulations of the Hausa myth of
origin. As Y.B. Usuman argues in the case of the Hausa emirate of Katsina,
political changes of the sort which could have created new political roles for
either men or women or both took place within the context of social
transformations and were not simply the outcome of invasions and conquests,
either by warriors, priests, or merchants, or the political officers of colonial states
(Y .B.Usuman 1976).

Imoru's Daura serves to remind us that Hausaland was more than the

region conquered by both the Jihad and the British and corrects our vision of

 

36In the twentieth century, Hausaphone communities in the Republic of Niger
maintained such myths of origin. See Echard for Aderawa myths of origin which
include groups of hunters and migrants (1975, 109-165).

58

social change in Hausaland by forcing us to recognize the differential impact of

those conquests.

Daura and the Dq‘inition of Colonial Hausaland

When does the Daura myth come to represent all of Hausaland? Why
does this myth take hold in twentieth century Hausa culture when there were
other more, local traditions and myths of origin, like that of the well in Zinder
and those used by Imoru to compose his narrative? The publication history of
Bornu-influenced versions of the Daura myth offers a chronology of the myth's
incorporation into a modern Hausa political and national identity. This is a
uniquely Anglo-Nigerian contribution to Hausa historiography. Furthermore,
this aspect of the Daura myth clearly demonstrates the impact of what Anderson
calls print capitalism on the creation of a Hausa national myth under the impetus
of colonial rule (Anderson 1991).

The political significance of Bornu, especially in the central and eastern
regions of Hausaland, is detected in many of the variations of the story collected
in the first decades of the twentieth century by English colonial officials in
Katsina, Sokoto and Kano. For modern scholars, those seeking a gloss of the
legend to introduce studies of Hausa culture and history, the most influential
telling of the Daura myth belongs to this Anglo-Nigerian tradition and begins
with the variations translated by HR. Palmer and published in English in his
Sudanese Memoirs 1928.

The texts of the Daura myth published by Palmer included the girgam of
Daura Emirate, the mythical portion of the Daura state chronicle. Within this

explication of the myth, the prominence of Daura rests on the tradition that it

59

was from Daura that the Hausa emirates set out on the annual tributary visit to
Bornu. Almost more important than the texts themselves was the commentary of
A.E.V. Walwyn, included with the girgam. It was in the commentary, not the
texts, that Europeans first made the connection between the coming of Islam and
the subjugation of Hausa women. In his commentary, Walwyn, not Palmer
himself, first links the coming of Bayajidda to the end of matriarchy in Hausa
culture.” It is, in fact, from Walwyn's speculations that all recent scholars have
drawn the inference that the myth of Daura is a metaphor for the subjugation of
Hausa women sometime in the past.

Marriages between the ruling families of smaller Hausa kingdoms and the
important Emirates were and have remained an essential part of Hausa court
politics. There is an uncanny similarity between the representation of gender and
marriage in the Daura myth as a state tradition with this actual role of marriage
in the diplomacy of Bornu as found in the diwans published by Palmer. Diwans
are charters which established the political claims of aristocratic Bornu families,
claims generally made and protected through the female line. Royal marriages
were essential elements in the political strategies of Bornu and we know from
evidence in the Kano Chronicle that royal marriages were equally important in the
Hausa kingdoms (Palmer 1928). This is echoed, of course, in the central motif of
the myth of Daura. And yet, it is striking that the importance of marriages is not
directly acknowledged in the available collections of Hausa state traditions

(Edgar 1911, 1).

 

37 Walwyn was an early British D0. in Hadejia Emirate. I have found no
further information.

60

One must ask some important questions. Is it accurate to see warfare as
being so important in the emergence of states and state systems in Hausaland?
The lack of information on the history and politics of Hausa dynastic marriages
in the past reflects engendered, parallel streams of Hausa intellectual traditions
and the role of gender in the creation of collective memory. Women preserve the
traditions of dynastic alliances and in this way contribute to the creation of state
traditions and political oral history, but women informants generally were not
among those consulted by European officials in Hausaland. The colonial
historians' reliance on male informants and other elements of European sexism
do not permit us to study dynastic marriages from the published sources of the
early colonial period. 38 While it is significant to note that in the diwans of Bornu
and the Kano Chronicle the mothers of each king are named, Europeans
overlooked the importance of marriage in the diplomacy of state. Only their
fascination with Bayajidda and Daura allowed one possible expression of a much
more important political practice to remain in the published historical record.
That the Daura myth may have bridged a kind of cognitive break between
literature and the real politik of dynastic marriages is, in fact, suggested by the
Hausa title of the myth, recorded in Edgar as Labarin Asalin Sarautal Hausa, or,
"The Genealogy of the Hausa Ruling Class." (Edgar 1911, 1:224-27).

Palmer's telling of the Daura myth was included in Hogben's
Muhammaden Emirates of Northern Nigeria, a compilation of state traditions in
British ruled-Hausaland, first published in 1931 and revised and in 1966 as The

Emirates of Northern Nigeria. This editorial decision assured that the Daura legend

 

38Edgar's Litafl na Tatsuniyoyi na Hausa exemplifies this weakness, though the
three volumes of this incomparable collection of African oral literature provide
deep insights into gender in late nineteenth century Hausaland (Edgar 1911-13).

61

based primarily on Palmer's published accounts, would reach the widest possible
audience and gain the greatest authority among scholars and the public alike. In
contrast, unique local traditions of origin which give a more diverse and distinct
impression of Hausa communities (even those in Nigeria) reached only a very
limited audience.” '

Nigerian Hausa scholars themselves have actively encouraged the
acceptance of Palmer's published text of the myth as the official account. It is
added to the published Hausa translation of Sultan Bello's In Pakul al'Maisur as a
kind of prologue and included in the Chronicle of Abuja, published in Hausa and
English. The Emir of Daura himself confirmed the strength of the Bornu-
influenced variations of the Daura myth when he approved of just such a version
of the legend collected by M.G. Smith in the 1960's (M.G. Smith 1978, 53).

The variation of the legend collected in 1972 from Sarkin Makada Ibira of
Kantché, a prominent specialist in Hausa oral history living in a Nigerien canton
evolved for an important nineteenth century Hausa fiefdom located between
Daura and Damagaram, is another example of how the Daura myth has been
used as a prologue to the specific, local political traditions. The Kantché text
serves to show how Hausa distinguish between types of historical traditions. In
the Kantché text, the original episode of Daura and Bayajidda is exquisitely
ornamented with details about Daura, Bayajidda and the concubine mother of

Karbagari, elements which clearly remind us that the telling of history is a

 

39 This is most clearly the case of Frank Edgar's Litafi na Tatsuniyoyi na Hausa, a
three volume collection of Hausa oral traditions published in very limited
numbers in Ireland between 191 and 1913. Neil Skinner's masterful translation of
all three volumes of this work into English finally makes these traditions more
readily available.

62

performance art in an oral culture such as Hausaland's. The function of the myth
is here to set the historical stage with carefully wrought accounts of the action
and the actors, drawing as much from the contemporary setting of the actual
story telling event as from the body of the historical tradition.‘0 Psychological
motivation, for example, is attributed to Daura and the concubine which reflect
the tensions between Hausa co-wives in tradition and reality and, of course,
echoes the Imoru text. Daura, Bayajidda and the Hausa Bakwai, however, are
overshadowed by the dynastic traditions of Kantché, historically a part of the
kingdom of Daura, and its struggles with the expanding Sultanate of
Damagaram, was never included among either the Hausa Bakwai or Banza
(Dunbar 1971).

From the perspective of how Hausa keepers of oral traditions themselves
have used the Daura myth, it is not the least surprising that modern scholars of
Hausaland, Hausa and non-Hausa alike, frequently begin their analysis of Hausa
cultural history with a retelling of this now standardized account of Daura and
the origins of the Hausa people. The Anglo-Nigerian intellectual tradition is
especially prone to this and is consistent in presenting a civilizing Moslem hero
from the east and, by casting pre-Islamic history Hausaland in the image of the
subjugated Queen Daura, beginning the history of Hausaland with her
descendants, the hero's grandchildren. With the popularization, especially
through the Hausa publications of the Northern Nigerian Publishing Company,

of the Anglo-Nigerian text, the canon of the myth of Daura and, more

 

40The technique is well demonstrated in the myth of Sundiata, the founder of the

Empire of Mali, popularized as part of Mali's expression of modern, political
nationalism (Niane 1965).

63

significantly for political analysis of pre-Caliphate Hausaland, the myth of the
Hausa Bakwai, was set ( Zaria: Translation Bureau 1933, reprinted ed., Zaria:
Northern Nigerian Publishing Co, 1970; Imam 1954). In this way Hausa history
became a part of the intellectual regalia of the colonial government of Nigeria
and was then incorporated into the intellectual mythology of the Anglo-Nigerian
Hausa elite.“ The process of encoding and engulfing Hausa history begun by
Bello was completed by the Englishuat least in Nigerian2

It is important not to loose sight of the fact that the legend itself belonged
to a folk tradition before it was appropriated by modern political elites. The
irony of Dorugu's account, stripped as it is of any reference to either Daura or the
Hausa Bakwai, confronts us with the need to be sensitive to what the variations of
the legend might tell us about class, gender and local knowledge in pre-colonial
Hausaland:3 Imam Imoru, Makada Ibra of Kantché and Sarkin Daura himself,
remind us that it is, in the end, an entertaining story, not to be told as one might
tell the history of a specific political event, but as one might tell a story in a
specific community. What is crucial to understand is that the community to

whom the story would have meaning and stir feelings of shared identity is the

 

41Paden shows how another nineteenth century historical question, whether or
not Sultan Muhammad Bello accepted the Tyjaniyya brotherhood in the last year
of his life, has been capitalized on by modern Nigerian politicians to support the
idea of "'a northern religious community' composed of both Tyjaniyya and
Qadiriyya (brotherhoods)" (Paden 1973, 82).

42Literacy in Hausa was not encouraged in Niger and Hausa Nigeriens still
depend on the vitality of the Hausa press in Nigeria for literature of all sorts,
including primers.

43Without discussing the Daura myth, Fugelstad considers the implications of

other myths of origin from northwestern (i.e. Nigerien) Hausa communities,
using the ethnographic work of French scholars (Fugelstad 1978b, 3:319-339).

64

product of modern Hausa history and the process of creating an "imagined"

national Hausa community.“

Conclusion: Daura and Colonial Myth-Making

Comparing the evolution of the Daura legend within the Sokoto and the
Bornu traditions, it becomes clear that the application of this metaphor to all of
Hausaland took place in three stages. First, from the eastern perspective of
Bornu and Kano, Daura and the Hausa Bakwai describes political and cultural
hegemony based on the reality of sixteenth century politics on the Hausa / Bornu
frontier as well as a nineteenth century re-application of the myth within the
religious setting of the Islamic brotherhoods in Kano and, perhaps, throughout
all of eastern Hausaland. Second, if, as Last argues, the myth of the Hausa Bakwai
was invented to legitimate the possibility of creating a sixteenth century Kano
caliphate, then Sokoto reinvented the myth to introduce and legitimate the
notion of the Hausa Bakwai/Banza to promote the Sokoto bid for political unity
and enhance the ideological base for the Caliphate. The Hausa Bakwai was
adopted, in short, as a political metaphor by the Sokoto elite because the original
myth was already embedded in the ideology of Kano, the central, most powerful
and wealthy Hausa emirate. For Sokoto the myth of the Hausa Bakwai enhanced
and perhaps reinforced the Caliphate's political restructuring of the Hausa
kingdoms. The myth could also serve as a statement of the Sokoto reformers'
own religious claims: the eastern hero would now represent reformed Islam and

be more firmly rOoted in the Caliphate rather than in Bornu. Only in Bornu and

 

44For a comparative perspective on this issue see Kemper 1991; White 1987;
Anderson 1990.

65

Daura itself would the full story of Bayajidda remain, and that is where Palmer
found at least one of the versions of the Daura legend.

Finally, there is the colonial tradition within modern Hausa studies which
finds value in linking the history of Hausaland with that of the Islamic Middle
East through the acceptance of the Daura myth as an authentic expression of pre-
Islamic Hausa history.45 This last reworking of the myth deserves a closer look
because it is thoroughly embedded in the colonial moment of modern Hausa
history, an intellectual ornament of British colonial rule. Within the context of
colonial Nigeria, we can clearly relate the official myth of Daura and Bayajidda to
other manifestations of British manipulation and utilization of Hausa culture to
enhance colonial hegemony.

In the selection and careful grooming of a myth in which a stranger from
the Middle East brings the accouterments of a "higher civilization" to the Hausa,
the Anglo-Nigerian adoption of the Bornu version of the myth of Daura and
Bayajidda constantly, if not always consciously, reaffirms the legitimacy of the
colonial conquest. The core of this telling of the myth, validates a conquest
model of social change and "development", an essential step in the colonization
of the mind. A

We here begin a kind of historical analysis which leads us to examine the
colonial conquest as a cultural event. Other manifestations of the culture of

colonial conquest, what Hobsbawm and Ranger identify as the invention of

 

4 5Edward Said defined a similar intellectual process in the Middle East as
orientalism and established the criteria for considering other cases of western
intellectual imperialism (Said 1979) African writers have followed his line of
analysis to examine the intellectual history and implications of the "invention of
Africa" by western scholars (Ngugi wa'Thionge 1989; Mudimbu 1990; Appiah
1993).

66

tradition, are abundant and highly suggestive of the European mentalité in the
first decades of colonial rule (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson 1990,1991;
White 1987; Kemper 1991). In the military territory of Zinder, for example,
Hausa chiefs were sent postcards with a message in Arabic about the patriotic
symbolism of the French flag. Colonial officers gave lessons on the same topic to
groups of Hausa notables. Hausa malams were also actively recruited to be a
part of the French colonial Islamic establishment.“ In this way the French in
Hausaland reinvented themselves as the upholders of Islamic orthodoxy, an
orthodoxy, however, solidly based on a relatively select nucleus of Islamic clerics
in Senegal (O'Brien 1967). In the military territory of Niger and also in Chad,
attempts to establish control over Islamic religious leaders were initiated by the
fear that Moslem insurgents could overwhelm France's tenuous hold over the
eastern regions of its vast West African empire. French dependence on their
relationships with Islamic leaders in Senegal as a model for policy towards Islam
in Hausaland, however, was based on a simplistic image of Islamic homogeneity
throughout West Africa. Nothing could have been a less accurate image of the
state of Islam in Hausaland at the time .47

The British in northern Nigeria also fastened onto an Islamic image of
Hausaland and actively campaigned to acquire for their own administration the

power they believed resided within the Islamic political identity of the Caliphate.

 

46Cercle de Zinder. Correspondence No. 359A.1, 8 / 6/ 1916, Lt.Col. Mourir to
the Commander, Cercle de Zinder.

47This section is based on documents found at the Prefecture, Zinder. These
documents somehow were missed when the recordes of colonial Zinder were
sent to the National Archives in Niamay. I was unable to cross-check these
materials with those I had examined (on microfilm) in France because my notes
from that work were stolen in Niamey.

67

To the British, especially the first generation of colonial administers,
political hegemony resided in the Islamic institutions of the Sokoto Caliphate and
the associated Hausa emirates. In coming to this conclusion, the British not only
fell victim to the mystique of the Caliphate, but demonstrated as well their own
capacity for myth making within the colonial context.

The invention of an Islamic tradition for Hausaland was based on several
different kinds of facts and observations. The Islamic content of the elite Hausa
literary traditions was one such observation. As an intellectual myth, Palmer's
published texts of the Daura girgam, serves as a good example. The intellectual
acquisition of Hausa culture went beyond the activity of collecting literary
evidence. The British took what they knew of Islamic "traditions" in other parts
of their late nineteenth century global empire, steeped this in a strong infusion of
orientalism, applied it to the Hausa emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate and
invented visible expressions of their own political power.

Two events demonstrate the way political myth joined with political
action to invent traditions for the British colonial state in the Hausa context The
first in the ceremony created to install a hand-picked British candidate as Sultan
of Sokoto in 1921. The second was the ceremonial presentation of Hausaland,
especially Kano, to the Crown Prince of Great Britain in 1926. On both occasions,
the British carefully arranged the details of public events to fit what can only be
called a romantic, theatrical and orientalist definition of the Hausa emirates. In
their manipulation of such public displays, however, the British were clear in
conveying the message that the pomp and ceremony of the Emirs was at their
disposal: such carnivals of power were essential symbols of the very real

physical force behind the local British administration 05.]. Arnett, Rhodes House,

68

MSS.Afr. 5952: 2/3/ 1930; J.H. Carrow, Rhodes House, MSS. Afr. 5.1443: 12-13;
J.A. Paterson, Rhodes House, MSS.Afr. r. 194; Ward Price, 1925).

One need only to compare the role of marriages in West African oral
traditions to stimulate questions about the absence of women in Hausa state
traditions, such as Daura and the Kano chronicle. In Hausaland the high culture
of the nineteenth century post-jihad Islamic elite not only created an intellectual
tradition which was hostile to women, but in accordance with reforms within the
political system began a process of limiting women's political lives which would
be confirmed absolutely by the European conquest. The official roles of women
in emirate structures came to an end only with the political reorganization of the
Hausa emirates by the British and the French. In this respect the sexism of late
nineteenth century European culture was imported into Hausaland and found a
rich intellectually well-prepared seedbed among Islamic elites. In the scramble
for power in the first decades of the colonial era, even royal women, women who
had been able to achieve power during the caliphate period, lost ground (Mack
1988, 47-77). When it is compared with Smith's studies of structural change in
the Emirates of Zaria and Daura after the British conquest, Imoru's text suggests
that the British and the French in Damagaram were in fact responsible for the
final removal of women from political offices.

The representation of women in the myth of Daura and Bayajidda guides
the historian into a maze of questions surrounding the very definition of
Hausaland. The themes and characters in these traditions indicate the multiple
interpretations and manipulations of political history which have contributed to
the body of oral literature available to the historian today. Some of these come

from outside Hausaland and offer tantalizing testimony on the blending of

69

Islamic and pre-Islamic traditions and motifs into the 19th century Hausa culture
represented in the body of oral traditions collected at that time by European
scholars.

The construction of a state tradition may represent a political discourse
between competing local factions, or as in the case of Daura, competing regional
powers or religious factions: myth may document a shift in political focus.
Variations in the Daura myth demonstrate how a local political tradition was
modified to reflect a broader political identity. As long as the story was used as a
framework for recounting the local dynastic history, as, in the traditions from
Kantche, it described a very local definition of community and politics. Once the
story incorporated details and elements representing powerful outside forces, as
in either Imam Imoru's account or that of Rattray's informant, it became a
discourse on how the local community refocused itself outwards without losing

its local identity.

70

Chapter 3: Tatsuniyoyi: Gender in Hausa Narratives

There are three sorts of men and three sorts of women, and if the
right sort isn't paired off with his fellow their marriage won't last
(Skinner 1977, 3:326-27).

The dialogue between the sexes found in Hausa folk stories, or tatsuniyoyi,
articulates nineteenth century views on the most fundamental social and
economic relationship at all levels of Hausa society: the relationship between
men and women in courtship and marriage.’=18 From this dialogue emerges not
only a sense of gender relations in the nineteenth century, but a detailed image ~
of the diversity of fin de siecle Hausa society. In a later chapter, the linguistic
evidence in the tatsuniyoyi will sharpen our image of women at work in the
economic landscape of nineteenth century Hausaland. In this chapter, however, I
propose looking more carefully at those tatsuniyoyi in which Hausa women and
men narrate their opinions and social expectations of themselves and of one

another.

 

48Tatsuniya is the singular form of the noun tatsuniyoyi, which translates as
stories. In the Hausa classification of their oral literature, tatsuniyoyi often refers
to what Skinner calls "fables and tales of fancy"(Skinner 1969, xxiii). As oral
literature, tatsuniyoyi may be distinguished from labaraii, oral testimony such as
local gossip, rumors, or local news, as in the greeting, "Ina labarai?" or "What's the
news?"(Bargery 1933, 706). Riddles and word games are also considered
tatsuniyoyi. The word may also mean a star, as in the Hausa for comets, tatsuniya
mai-wutsiya, a star with a tail. It is worth noting that in Edgar's collection of
Hausa oral literature, the boundaries between tatsuniyoyi and labarai are not
sharpely defined. Did the act of writing down such accounts affect informants'
classification of their own work?

71

While one of the earliest British collectors of Hausa tatsuniyoyi used the
stories to illustrate Hausa marital relationships, the feminine persona woven into
these narratives has been given scant consideration (Tremearne 1914).49

Tatsuniyoyi celebrate the often fantastic adventures of teen-age heroines
and introduce wives beleaguered with the problems of unfair husbands and
greedy co-wives. Some wives in the tatsuniyoyi flaunt the authority of their
husbands and assert their own sexuality. Such stories create dynamic images of
Hausa women and represent the dialogue between men and women over the
meaning of gender in courtship, marriage and family relations in Hausa society.
The tatsuniyoyi document the tension within courtship and marriage between
women who must be economically self-sustaining and the Moslem injunction
that wives also obey their husbands, who may require them to practice purdah or
in other ways influence their economic opportunities. In the tatsuniyoyi,
however, girls and women often triumph over the obstacles placed in their way
and achieve personal success, generally in terms of power over people and
material wealth. Though satire and comedy are relished in the telling of
tatsuniyoyi, the economic and social value of women is not trivialized. The
stories show a society in which gender may ignite conflict, but generally was not
used to marginalize the economic contribution of anyone.

The voices of the women who created and performed many of the
tatsuniyoyi included in the major collections of Hausa oral literature have been
muted, even, one might say, obscured, by the very process which preserved the
literature itself, but their perspective as not been entirely lost. Through the

characters and plots of the stories and in the details of Hausa life with which

 

49The work of C. Stephens is a welcome change (Stephens 1991, 1981).

72

storytellers enlivened their art, the world of Hausa women can still be detected.
The published tatsuniyoyi are simply echoes of the human voice of Hausa
villages, towns and cities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries};0

The date when the tatsuniyoyi were written down establishes a temporal
reference point for studying gender relations in early modern Hausa culture. 51.
Collected before either World War I or the interwar period in which colonial
administrations were effectively settled on the Hausa landscape, the tatsuniyoyi
represent the popular repertoire of late nineteenth century storytellers and reflect
the tastes of their Hausa audiences. In the case of Schon's Magana Hausa, the
stories narrated by Dorugu are based on his childhood in the first half of the
nineteenth century (Schon 1885). As examples of Hausa literature, written and
oral, only the poetry which has survived, often through the agency of the same
Europeans who created the collections of tatsuniyoyi, can compete with the
tatsuniyoyi as historical evidence of nineteenth century Hausa popular culture
and taste. When, for example, Hausa tatsuniyoyi are examined for the inclusion
of either Western or Islamic details in the social settings they depict, the sources
and direction of external cultural influences are suggested. In this way the
stories modify our understanding of the pace of cultural and social change in
Hausaland, whether with regard to the content of popular Islamic culture in the
late nineteenth century or the spread of European cultural influences during the

early decades of colonial rule. The tatsuniyoyi offer the historian a form of

 

50M. B. Duffil makes a similar argument in his fascinating study of Hausa poems
as sources for social and economic history (Duffill 1986, 13:35-88; 1989, 16:97-153
511 have used only collections of Hausa oral literature from the nineteenth and
first early twentieth century (unless, as in the case of Stephens' stories, collected

in 1979, I am presenting a point of comparison).

73

cultural expression in which the measure of the "colonial impact" on Hausa
culture may be taken, whether in terms of the Islamic reforms of the Sokoto
Caliphate or the modernizing impulses of twentieth century colonial regimes.

As representatives of non-elite Hausa culture, the tatsuniyoyi are an
especially valid source of evidence for writing a more inclusive, even a more
authentic, history of modern Hausa culture. There are two reasons why this
argument is important. The first is obvious: the writing of modern Hausa
history has been dominated by the culture of literacy. The tatsuniyoyi represent
the vastly more pervasive and inclusive oral culture of nineteenth century Hausa.
As sources of evidence, the tatsuniyoyi encourage a more balanced description of
Hausa cultural history, especially when added to the Islamic texts upon which so
much of nineteenth century Hausa history has depended.

The second reason the stories are important as sources of cultural history
is that the narrative tradition of the tatsuniyoyi most clearly represents the
discourse of gender in the distinct popular culture of fin de siecle Hausaland. The
tatsuniyoyi I use in this chapter were committed to a written form before their
value as evidence of nineteenth century oral culture was lost through influences
from the West. Neither English nor French loan words are evident in the stories.
Even money is still described in terms of coweries, the indigenous Hausa
currency banned after the colonial conquest of the Hausa. Thus, the abundance
of tatsuniyoyi in which courtship and marriage are the central themes leads to
one, obvious conclusion: nineteenth century Hausa audiences were eager
consumers of stories about women and men and the circumstances of love and
marriage. Furthermore, in the tatsuniyoyi we can distinguish intellectual

traditions in which women actively participated as creators, performers and

74

audience. Women exercised artistic control and established standards of taste in
the oral literature of the tatsuniyoyi . In this way, the tatsuniyoyi restore women to
Hausa history and modify our understanding of the pace of social change in
Hausaland with regard to the establishment of either an Islamic or a European
cultural model, especially within the realm of gender.

The tatsuniyoyi seldom distinguish between male and female storytellers,
nor was information about the social settings of the stories or the social
conventions which controlled performance collected. For this information, we
have only the careful work of recent scholars of Hause literature (Skinner 1968,
1969, 1977a, 1977b; Mack 1981, 1983, 1986; Stephens 1981, 1991; Pilaszewcz 1974,
1985). Nevertheless, Hausa notions of gender in literature and narrative are
encoded in the sources upon which this chapter is based. Those rules
determined the kinds of narrative performed by women and the social settings in
which women practiced their art of storytelling. Thus, the published collections
of tatsuniyoyi of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggest the
existence of Hausa intellectual and artistic traditions in which women
participated as subjects, authors and performers. Just as the sound of daily life in
the village was dominated by the voices and work rhythms of women, so too are
many of the narratives found in collections of Hausa tatsuniyoyi. Unself-
consciously preserved by the scribes who prepared the manuscript versions of
the tatsuniyoyi, such evidence is essential to revitalizing the oral culture of the
Hausa past. Above all else, the tatsuniyoyi are unique in preserving a feminine

perspective on nineteenth century Hausa culture.

75

The Sources

As with the sources for the myth of Daura, the documents I use in this
chapter are once again examples of the cultural acquisitiveness of Europeans in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This literature, however, presents special
problems having to do with how it was obtained and transmitted from the past
into the present, from an oral to a print culture, from Hausa into European
languages, and from the women who participated in its creation and
performance to the men who captured it in print.

The major collections of nineteenth century oral literature were generally
the products of collaboration between literate men: British, French and German
scholars, missionaries, and colonial officials and the Hausa malams they
employed to prepare manuscript copies in Hausa of folk literature. This was the
method used to prepare two of the major collections of Hausa literature
assembled and published by British colonial officers, Frank Edgar's Litafi na
Tatsuniyoyi na Hausa and RS. Rattray's Hausa Folk-Lore (Edgar 1911-1913; Rattray
1913). The German missionary and Hausa scholar, Adam Mischlisch, also
employed an educated Hausa Koranic scholar, Imam Imoru, when he was living
in Kete Krachi (in modern Ghana) (Mischlish 1903-09, 1906, 1929, 1942). Imam
Imoru's own brother had worked as an informant for another German, Adolf
Krause( Krause, 1928; Hiskett 1975). Rudolf Prietze used the services of a literate
Hausa pilgrim and praise singer in Tunis in 1907 (Prietze 1926). In what would
become the French Colony of Niger, M. Landerloin, the linguist accompanying
the 1906 French research expedition, Mission Tilho, apparently with the

assistance of Hausa translators, collected historical accounts (labarai) and

76

linguistic material for the preparation of a Hausa-French dictionary (Landerloin
and Tilho 1909; Tilho 1911).

Two other British Hausa specialists working in those parts of the Sokoto
Caliphate incorporated into the British Nigeria, A.J.N. Tremearne and Roland
Fletcher, themselves transcribed Hausa stories and accounts narrated by a
diverse group of less well-educated informants. Tremearne even collected
tatsuniyoyi from a woman, Asetu,"a policeman's wife", as well as from his
personal servants and several Hausa soldiers in his military unit. While
Tremearne was told that the best storytellers were women and children, he
observed that they were too ill at ease with him to work well as informants
(Tremearne 1913z5).

Schon's collaboration with Hausa informants was unusual: from Dorugu
and other Hausa-speakers who somehow ended up in Europe or else met English
missionaries in Sierra Leone or on the Niger River, he collected stories and
personal narratives in Hausa from the first half of the nineteenth century.
Published in Magana Hausa in 1885, Dorugu's tatsuniyoyi prose narratives in
Hausa offer a unique perspective on Heinrich Barth's own travel account and a
Hausa's views of late Victorian England (Schon 1885, 98-101).

Rattray speaks for his fellows on why they chose to use literate, Hausa
malams to collect examples of Hausa "folk-lore" when he writes that such

informants:

...possessed all the literary skill which a knowledge of Arabic and of
the Arabic script involves, none the less, he remains thoroughly in
touch with his own people, a Hausa of the Hausa. In his hands,
therefore, the traditional lore loses nothing of its authentic form

77

and flavor, In short, the chance of literary manipulation may be
ruled out." (Rattray 1924, 1:vi-vii)

However, in describing how his scribe, Malam Saihu, prepared the texts,
Rattray also discloses the problem which concerns modern scholars of this (and
other) African oral literature: literate malams used Arabic, the language of
literacy, not Hausa. Even when writing religious poetry in vernacular languages,
such as Fulfulde and Hausa, Arabic script (ajami) and metre was used. Malam
Shaihu did not know English when he worked for Rattray from 1907 to 1911, but
he and other malams were confronted with the problems of reducing an oral
literature to a written medium, for which they had no literary models other than

those of the dominant "culture of literacy", Arabic. Rattray comments:

Much of the work contained in the present volumes involved, first,

a translation from Arabic into Hausa, secondly, a transliteration of
the Hausa writing, and thirdly, a translation into English from the
Hausa (Rattray 1924, 1:vi-vii).

Aside from religious poetry written or translated into Hausa, early European
scholars of Hausa believed that there were no written examples of Hausa
literature such as the tatsuniyoyi. Even labarai, a Hausa prose form which
included historical accounts, such as the Kano Chonicle, were written in Arabic,
with some Hausa introduced into the texts (Palmer 1928, 3:92-131; Last 1980,
7:161-78).

At the present, Hausa scholars agree that, linguistically, the published
collections of tatsuniyoyi reflect their origins in spoken Hausa and, when reading

them, it does seem plausible that the malams transcribed what they heard or

78

remembered of live performances (Skinner 1968, xiii). However, the question of
whether or not prose forms found in Arabic literature influenced the
development of the early collections of tatsuniyoyi deserves some consideration.

Arabic poetry did, indeed, influence the structure of poetry in Hausa
(Hiskett 1975). The motifs, characters and settings of some of the tatsuniyoyi also
suggest that even non-religious (secular) forms of Arabic literature served as
models for the creation of an acceptable written form of Hausa prose. This was
clearly the case for at least some of the malams employed in the task of preparing
the published collections or even, perhaps, to their own sources of oral literature
their own informants. Hiskett, for example, notes that written copies of popular
epics circulated from North Africa into Hausaland by the eighteenth century, but
fails to consider their possible influence on the tatsuniyoyi (Hiskett 1968:25-6). I
shall return to this topic later in the chapter.

For Europeans, the Hausa collections were made to provide linguistic and
literary evidence of Hausa culture for a non-Hausa audience. The early
collections of tatsuniyoyi and colonial support for producing more Hausa
literature led directly to the establishment of the Translation Bureau in Kano 1926
and this event, in turn, laid the basis for Nigeria's energetic Hausa language
press (Skinner 1968:136). . Through various organizational changes and a move
to Zaria, the Hausa press in Nigeria stimulated the writing of westernized forms
of Hausa prose and signaled the beginning of the print revolution in Hausa
culture (B. Anderson 1991).

It is difficult to deduce the aims of the Hausa malams involved in creating
the early collections of tatsuniyoyi, though simple coercion, monetary rewards

and intellectual interest are all possible motives. Very sketchy evidence of the

79

later activities of two prominent Hausa informants does not encourage an
optimistic view of the personal relationships which existed between them and
the Europeans for whom they worked. Dorugu seems to have been embittered
by his collaboration with Schon in England: He would not communicate with
other English missionaries when they sought him out after his return to West
Africa (Schon 1885, 265-9). He makes it clear in Magana Hausa that his own

interest in Hausa literature was purely monetary:

Today I have brought you plenty of news; do you like it, you lover
of Hausa words? Do you find new words? When you find new
words you jump for joy; if I should find a sovereign I should jump
for joy. Because sovereigns are of use, words are of no use. I am
tired of talking; I go to lie down; I go to sleep. If I talk all night you
will write all night. Sleep well, you lover of Hausa. Tomorrow,
early in the morning, if I receive much money I will tell you many
stories. Sleep well. I have not another word in my head to tell you
(Schon 1885:101, 64).52

Imam Imoru, Adam Mischlish's informant, went on to write one of the
most popular anti-European poems in Hausa (Fergeson 1973, 27-31; Hiskett
1975). On the other hand Bargerey's long collaboration with Alhaji Mahrnadu
Koki was apparently cordial and collegial, as was Malam Tafida's with Walter
Miller and Rupert Emerson (Skinner 1977; Hiskett 1975; Miller 1938; Bivins, 1974-
76). The intimacy of Flegel's account of Mai Gashin Baki's life, even including

details about the Maidugu's wives and marriages, suggests that the two men

 

52 Indeed, Isabelle Vischer, who visited Dorugu on his deathbed in Kano in 1912,
reported that he had kept a sizable horde of English coins, including, of course,
sovereigns, and assorted tinned foods (unopened) along with articles of clothing
given to him from the Europeans he had known in his room (I. Vischer 1914:42-5).

8O

may have become friends, though self-interest on both their parts was most
certainly a factor in their relationship. Friendship seems also to have been a part
of Hugh Clapperton's relationship with Gidado, Wazirin Sokoto under Sultan
Bello (Denham and Clapperton 1985, 298, 325-30). Perhaps we may simply
conclude that the collaboration between Europeans and Hausa which produced
these collections and the majority of nineteenth century knowledge about
Hausaland and the Hausa was complicated by individual personalities and the

underlying power relationship of conqueror versus conquered.

Performance in a Nineteenth Century Social Context

In a Hausa village, language and the performance of oral art, often
accompanied by music or, as in the case of poetry, sung, played the socializing
role often ascribed to the plastic arts in other African cultures. Though masked
figures danced in non-Moslem Hausa ceremonies as the dado, or even the [an
Dodo criticized by Shehu Usman dan Fodio, only in the bori spirit possession cults
did costumed figures, oral literature and manifestations of social regulation (i.e.

of spirits) come together in a Hausa performance arts“

The tatsuniyoyi, however, seemed to have bridged the gap between oral
and sculptural art: the stories served as scripts for popular theatrical
entertainments using puppets. Rodd describes such a performance given in

1922:

 

53Perhaps, as Skinner suggests, a representation of the dead, but in the nineteenth
century tatsuniyoyi, a goblin or an ogre, most frequently found in wells and other
bodies of water. ( Skinner, N. 1977: 58).

81

A strolling player came one day to give a Punch and Judy show for
the delectation of the village people, who were in part Hausa, in
part sedentary Fulani, and in part nomadic cattle-owning Fulani.
The old traditional play had been modernized, and although it was
full of topical illusions to the Nigeria of 1922, enough of the past
remained to show the reputation and moral ascendancy which the
Taureg enjoyed in the Southland. The showman's apparatus was
simple: divesting himself of his indigo robe, he arranged it on the
ground over three sticks and crouched hidden beneath its folds. He
had four dolls in all and worked them like those in our Punch and
Judy shows in England. In the place of the squeaky voice of the
Anglo-Saxon artist he used bird whistle to conceal his words; the
modulations of tone and inflexion in the dialogues and
conversations between the puppets were remarkable. The Taureg
doll is the villain of the piece: his body is of blue rags, most
unorthodoxly crowned with a white turban and armed with a huge
sword and shield. Divested of the latter and crowned with a red
turban, the same doll in the course of the play becomes the
"dogari," or native policeman of the Hausaland Emirs. The King of
the Bush is a Fulani man, impersonated by a puppet made largely
of orange cretonne with huge hair crest and bow and arrow. He
suspects his wife, made of the same material but ornamented with
coweries before and behind, of having relations with the Taureg.
She soothes and pets and sings to her suspicious husband, playing
music on drums and calabash cymbals. Her mellifluous tones
finally persuade him to go out a-hunting in the bush. Needless to
say, in Act 11 she flirts outrageously with the attractive Man of the
Open Lands, but is surprised by her husband in flagrante delicto,
most realistically performed, whereupon, in the next act, a
tremendous fight ensues. The King of the Bush, discarding his bow
and arrow, fights with an axe, the Taureg with his sword. The
latter is victorious and kills the King of the Bush. The wife calls in
the 'dogari' to avenge her husband and to please her Southland
audience. In Act V the Taureg is haled off before the British
Political Officer, presented in Khaki cloth with a black basin-shaped
hat like a Chinese coolie and the face of a complete idiot. In the
ensuing dialogue the fettered Taureg scores off the unfortunate

82

white man continuously, but as all plays must end happily, he is
condemned to death (Rodd 1926, 55-6).

Music and song accompanied every public event except burials.
Language itself was essential to the flow of everyday life. Proverbs and the
ability to use them was a respected part of daily as well as formal speech, such as
cases at law. The ability to "play with words" (karin magana) was a valuable asset
for either sex during courtship.“ The performance of stories was an important
form of public and private entertainment which still has not been entirely
replaced in Hausa society. The variety of oral art forms collected at the
beginning of the twentieth century is evidence of the importance and value
placed on oral culture by Hausa in the nineteenth century. Learning Hausa well
still remains the single most important requirement for acceptance in a Hausa
social setting. r

The social spaces within which storytelling was practiced reflected the
daily realities of Hausa life, especially in villages and towns (Skinner 1969, xvi-

xvii).“ The demographic composition of individual families and the division of

 

54 As can be seen in the tatsuniyoyi. See Skinner for stories in which this skill is
displayed by the protagonists (Skinner 1977,2).

551 found that people assumed that as my own skills in Hausa improved, so
would my social skills: I would become a proper Hausa woman when I spoke
proper Hausa.

56 While I have not been able to find a thorough description of storytelling
sessions in the nineteenth century, the work of Mary Smith and her husband, the
anthropologist, Michael Smith, does include comments on storytelling events in
Hausa village contexts in the late 1940's. The Smith's observations associate the
variety of Hausa oral art forms with the diversity of public and private social
events in which storytelling played an important entertainment role. As the
forms of oral literature observed by the Smith's correlate with the forms of oral
literature included in the collections of nineteenth century oral literature, I feel

83

household labor could encourage informal storytelling events. A household, for
example, might included young children to be socialized and entertained as well
as older children, especially girls, actively engaged in the cultural practices of
courtship, and adults who enjoyed practicing the arts of storytelling.
Grandparents were especially free of the social prohibitions implied by the
Hausa notion of kunya (shame, which required degrees of avoidance behavior) in
their relationships with children and often entertained them with stories and
word games (Stephens 1981).

Throughout the Hausa life cycle patterns of male and female friendships
also set up occasions when conversation evolved into storytelling sessions. Some
tatsuniyoyi, for example, seem to be especially developed to educate children.
For Hausa men, the settings and practices of Islamic education at all levels
encouraged discussions, conversation, word play and storytelling as a pedagogic
device, though not without cultivating a particular moral slant on Hausa life, in
particular gender relations. Hausa girls, on the other hand, were actively
engaged in a rich youth culture of songs, dances games, folk lore and storytelling
which carried them through childhood, courtship, their first marriage and, in
villages and urban neighborhoods, into adulthood (M. Smith 1964; Bivins 1974-
76, 1988; Stephens 1981; Schildkrout1979, 1981). Linguistic evidence of girls'
unique childhood culture is substantial and well-documented in early Hausa
dictionaries (Bargery 1935). Baba of Karo's delightful account of her own late
nineteenth century small-town girlhood includes songs, dances, games and

stories (M. Smith 1964, ).

 

we are reasonably safe in assuming that social telling events in the late nineteenth
century would have been essentially the same as those mentioned by the Smith's.

84

Hausa commercial life was an eminently social activity, one in which the
marketplace and the trading caravan offered considerable scope and
encouragement for the practice and refinement of the oral arts. European
knowledge of nineteenth century Hausaland is, of course, a product of the
culture of commerce and caravan life: oral testimony, historical fragments,
folklore and myth transmitted through the travelers' accounts.

Hausa political organization, especially the existence of various forms and
levels of court society offered patronage and critical audiences for specialists,
female and male, in Hause oral performance. The Kano Chronicle, for example,
includes praise songs (kirai) composed in Hausa from the eighteenth century.
One includes refrains which document the existence of female praise singers
(zabiya) at the Sultan of Kano's court Hiskett (Skinner 1969, 1:319; M. Bivins 1974-
76, 1988; Mack 1981). Clapperton describes the praise songs he heard in the court
of Sarkin Katagum and how the meaning of his own journey to Hausaland was
put into an African literary mode: it was said that he wished "...only to see the
world." (Clapperton 1985, 210-12)

Hausa society, however, was not one dominated by public festivals.
Certainly the activities of the marketplace, the mosque and the courts of the local
saruta (ruling or aristocratic elite) encouraged, on special occasions,-exuberant
public festivities in larger towns and cities, but the celebrations marking family
events, especially weddings and births, determined and defined (and continue to
do so) the public display of cultural and social values in Hausa society. The
anomaly of where the ritual life of Hausa society was fully expressed has serious
implications for the relationship of gender to the symbols and expression of

power. Hausa views on life rituals and ceremony, space and language all

85

influenced one another in the events of marriage and childbirth. Such
ceremonies were marked by a dual manifestations of the individual's unique
position in Hausa society, one representing the public, masculine and (at least
symbolically) empowered space of the Moslem community while the other
celebrated the vital connective tissue of kinship within the femine realm of the
family. On such occasions the performance of tatsuniyoyi put into language and
narrative the tension between nineteenth century Hausa women and men which
was openly manipulated in the celebrations of Hausa life.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Hausa cultural and social values
were also expressed in an architectural vocabulary which heightened the
distinctions between the public space of the court and the mosque and the
private space of the home. Especially in urban Hausa society, the division of
social space into spheres of public versus private activities was reinforced by
Islamic practices and increasingly accompanied the division of space into spheres
of masculine and feminine precedence ( Moughtin 1978; Prussin 1990). While the
courts and the mosque were clearly public spaces in which the primacy of
masculine activities was enhanced, the inner courtyard(s) of the home, whether
large or small, was the privileged space of feminine activities and the location of
family celebrations. On such occasions, gender ruled over the performance of
tatsuniyoyi within those spaces just as gender ruled over the definition of private
versus public, feminine versus masculine space. Only, significantly, the
marketplace was defined as gender-neutral space: again women as economic
actors were not automatically marginalized from the arena of trade, though

factors of age and class shaped their participation in the public work space.

86

Because urban Hausa domestic architecture also adopted Islamic
designations of gender and social space, the significance of gender to the
performance of tatsuniyoyi was further emphasized. Gender determined the
definition of private versus public space in relation to the family celebrations
which provided the festive setting for the performance of several forms of oral
art, including tatsuniyoyi. Women guests gathered .for the celebrations
surrounding marriages and childbirth within the gida, having passed through the
public space of the zaure, or entrance room, and entered the privates space of the
inner courtyard of the household's women. There they would enjoy themselves
exchanging family and neighborhood news (hira), playing word games, (karin
magana), teasing one another, singing songs from childhood, drumming on
calabashes and telling tatsuniyoyi. Cooking and eating together, often enjoying
special dishes and foods, was also central to the activities of a celebration. Biki,
the Hausa word for celebrations, in fact, is translated as a feast. Lively
entertainment and the exchange of food were the keynotes of any family
celebration; both acknowledge the social and cultural power of women.

The men of the household entertained other men in or just outside of the
zaure, an entrance hall often elegantly decorated in the urban homes of the
wealthy (Barth 1985,3). Informally, as a part of the daily routine of prayer, work
and meals, men used the public space of their zaure to meet and converse with
their friends. Travelers were given shelter in the zaure, even in cases where a
woman was the head of the household and, therefore, the owner of the zaure
(Barth 1985, 3). It was also in the zaure that the telling of labari, oral history or
oral testimony, by men was appropriate. The religious instruction of children or

adults (except women) could also take place in the public space of the zaure. For

87

a celebration, praise singers or drummers, hired for the event performed in or
just outside the zaure, that is, in the public setting of masculine and juvenile
society. Even today, researchers continue to find that space, time and the gender
and age of informants control the performances or testimony Hausa informants
are willing to share with outsiders (Stephens 1981 ; Mack; A.A. Nasr 1980).

The physical settings for women telling stories could have included
entertaining visitors within a woman's personal living quarters (her daki, a room
or a hut within the gida in which she resided), but this was also influenced by the
age, kinship relationships and social status of the hostess as well as the sex of her
audience. More than any other single factor the gender of participants shaped
the structure and language of storytelling events. As already mentioned, this
was because the gender, family relationship and age of individuals were
fundamental factors in the intricate system of social behavior designated in
Hausa as kunya versus wasa (Stephens 1981). Kunya refers to the ritual shame
Hausa women and men were expected to feel with regards to certain social
relationships (that of a mother and her first born child, for example, or a wife
towards her father-in-law.) Kunya is also the word used by Hausa to describe
appropriatly modest behavior, often in situations where sexuality is at least
covertly acknowledged to be an important factor of social status, especially in the
case of young women. Wase is used to indicate all kinds of play, including
dance, singing, children's games and modern theater productions. At a deeper
level of social reality, wasa refers to social relationships marked by joking
relationships. Kunya and wasa are the essential concepts structuring the

relationships between Hausa women and men. Kunya and wasa are embedded in

88

the gender discourse of the tatsuniyoyi, even in stories which scoff at such notions
of a social code.

Informal family entertainments, held in or just outside a woman's room
certainly would have included children and other women and, depending on the
size, location and economic resources of the household, adult men as well. The
social distance prescribed for men and women was less formally observed in
small, farming communities, and among the poor, as were also the notions of
gender-appropriate work within and without the household. Koranic schools
meeting at night took children out of this storytelling setting and added another,
an Islamic, element to their socialization.

Baba, an elderly, small-town, Moslem Hausa woman born in the late
nineteenth century whose life history was recorded by an English woman, Mary
Smith, in the 1950's, does not describe any single, noted storyteller of either sex,
but her childhood was full of songs and conversations in public and private
spaces (M. Smith 1964) In particular, during Baba's fin de seicle childhood, it was
the setting of courtship which encouraged the arts of conversation and

storytelling.

Women in the Tatsuniyoyi: Storytelling and Social Reproduction

The tatsuniyoyi depict women in relationships with their parents and
siblings, husbands and lovers, co-wives and children. In this way, the early
collections of tatsuniyoyi present popular views of gender in family relationships
which were common in the first decade of this century. Because of this the
tatsuniyoyi are especially useful sources for studying Hausa perceptions of

gender relations on the eve of the colonial conquest. Ethnographic descriptions

89

of gender, outside of the short accounts of courtship and marriage found in the
collections of folk literature which include the tatsuniyoyi I am using here, were
not produced until later in the colonial era when the work of European
anthropologists began in earnest in both Nigeria and Niger's Hausa regions. 50
little was known about the workings of Hausa marriages that as late as the
nineteen thirties, British colonial administrators would express surprise on
discovering that Hausa wives were generally the first person from whom their
husbands would seek a loan to make farm improvements (Giles 1937:21-30). The
only View of gender in nineteenth century Hausa families we have comes from
the evidence in the tatsuniyoyi. Co-incidentally, the tatsuniyoyi also provide us
with the only internal Hausa view of the work and status of slave women in
Hausa households ( Edgar 1911-13, 2:391-3 ).

When gender is important in developing the theme of a story about
kinship, there is generally an underlying assumption about the tension or
loyalties of the characters which was based on a kinship relationship. For
example, mothers support their daughters and daughters reward their mothers
when they gain wealth. Often this expression of loyalty is especially marked by
designating the mother as the despised wife, her daughter the unfavored child
(Schon 1885; Edgar 1911-13, 2:123-129, 285-90, 194-96).

While favored daughters or the daughters of favored wives are often a
theme in the tatsuniyoyi, sons are generally treated more or less as equals. When
it appears, the theme of competition between brothers is most likely to be
composed into stories which send brothers out into the world to make their
fortunes, a common theme in world folk stories (Edgar, 1911-13, 1:304-6). In the

Hausa case, there does not seem to be a powerful emphasis on hostile

9O

competition between brothers. This, of course, is both modeled on and tends to
reinforce the Hausa institution of gandu, a form of family farming in which
brothers join one another to farm together. Furthermore, Hausa kinglists show
that authority was transferred through the brothers (including first cousins who
were only fictive brothers) of a generation before it was passed to the sons of the
next generation Edgar 1911-13, 22386-7). This is not to say that brothers do not
quarrel and compete with one another, but the tatsuniyoyi certainly seem to have
reinforce a model of brotherly co-operation cherished by Hausa men and now
enshrined in the social science literature on Hausa farming households (Buntjer
1970; Norman 1967, 1976,1979). Finally, as any reading of the tatsuniyoyi quickly
confirms, a masculine narrative voice continually reaffirms the duplicity of
women and advises men to expect the worst from wives and lovers (Edgar 1911-
13, 1:306-7, 1:314-5, 315-6, 316-8, 339-41; 2:404-5; 3:341-44,).

Sibling relationships display other aspects of the construction of gender
relationships in any society and the tatsuniyoyi offer evidence of engendered
notions of sibling behavior in narratives featuring brothers and sisters. Full
sisters, for example, are generally helpful and loyal to one another, but compete
with their half-sisters or step-sisters (Edgar 1911-13, 2:123-9, 188-193). Brothers
and sisters are also shown as loyal to one another, but when conflict is
introduced into stories about brothers and sisters, incest becomes the critical
issue. When a jealous brother abuses and abandons his defenseless sister, he
meets with a gruesome fate because he unwittingly marries his sister and

commits suicide when their relationship is revealed (Edgar).‘57 Idetect the

 

57For another incest story (incest between a mother and her son, initiated by the
mother) see Edgar 1911-13, 3:376-8. Th son is given his own daughter in a
marriage of alms.

91

possibility that incest narratives in the tatsuniyoyi may represent a folk response
to the attempts of the Sokoto reformers to impose definitions of correct degrees
of kinship in marriage as defined in Islamic law (shari'a ). Certainly, as I will
describe in the next chapter, the issue was fundamental to documents on Islamic
marriage found in the early collections of Hausa tdtsemiyoyi.
include an unusual, even suptenatural child, "Auta", the baby of the family, who
displays destructive, outrageous, socially unacceptable behavior (Edgar 1911-13).
Testing the bonds of kinship, generally the loyalty of his sister, Auta always
becomes the hero of the tatsuniya, rescuing his sister or their family with unusual
displays of cunning. The similarity of this motif to the classic descriptions of the
child Sundiata is once again a reminder of the deep West African cultural roots of
Hausa culture (Skinner 1968; Hale, 1991).

Friendship in the Tatsuniyoyi

Hausa men and women formed life-long friendships in real life and in the
tatsuniyoyi. Such friendships begin in the culture of courtship and in the
nineteenth century included sexual play, tsrance, among boys and girls
considered sexually and intellectually mature enough to control themselves
(Edgar 1911-13, 1:309-10, 350, 351-2; 32166-8, 262, 284, 367,). Tsrance channeled the
sexuality of young people before marriage, allowing couples to engage in sexual
activities (short of intercourse), as long as the girl did not become pregnant. The
culture of courtship provided a period of lively and surprisingly independent
social and sexual experience before the challenges of adulthood were assumed in

marriage.

92

The best source for understanding the culture of friendship in the late
nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century is the detailed life history of
Baba, the Hausa women mentioned above (M. Smith 1964). Friends from
childhood shaped her personal world, influencing her decisions about marriage
and comforting her in her inability to bear a child, throughout her life.
Tatsuniyoyi about the friendships of boys and girls during the period of active
courtship present a kind of prologue to the discourse of gender which would
accompany adulthood. Thus, competition, jealousy, loyalty and virtue work as
motivation in stories about young friends, just as they do in stories about gender
in the adult world of marriage (Edgar 1911-13, 2:123-9, 171, 388-90; 3:128, 166,
262, 284, 188-93, 270-2). Girls, according to Baba of Karo's account of her own
childhood, formed life-long friendships and equally strong antagonisms. In the
tatsuniyoyi about girlfriends, jealousy is a very common and potentially
dangerous problem, especially among girls of marriageable age (In Hausa, called
yam mata or budurwa) (Edgar 1911-13, 3:270-2, 3:188-93). On the other hand, just
as Baba made deep friendships with some of her girlfriends, so, too, do girls in
the tatsuniyoyi. The great loyalty expected in some same-sex friendships is
especially well-developed in a set of parallel stories about female and male
friends. In both version of this story, friends, whether two girls or two boys,
help one another through life (Schon, 1885; Edgar 1911-13, 2:142-147).

Courtship and Marriage: The Dialogue of Gender in the Tatsuniyoyi
In the tatsuniyoyi, gender may becomes the motive for a treachery during
courtship and marriage. In real life serious conflicts arose between Hausa

women and men and the fictional narratives about courtship and marriage found

93

in the tatsuniyoyi document how men and women identified and resolved points
of gender conflict. My goal here is to outline the shape of disagreement between
male and female characters in such stories in order to consider the meaning of
gender to nineteenth century women and men. My reason for using tatsuniyoyi
as evidence is that the definition and resolution of gender conflict in stories about
courtship and marriage is one of the few ways we can reconstruct a history of
nineteenth century gender relationships (Taggert 1990).

All of the collections of Hausa tatsuniyoyi from the nineteenth century
include stories about the problems of courtship and marriage. However, it is in
Edgar's Litafi na Tatsuniyoyi na Hausa that the litany of disasters which can come
between the sexes in their intimate dealings with one another is most thoroughly
explored (Edgar 1911-13, 32278-9).

Two problems confront historians using the tatsuniyoyi as sources for a
cultural history of gender. First, especially in the case of Edgar's tatsuniyoyi, we
have virtually no way to identify by gender the tellers of the stories I will
presently examine. This problem of identifying my sources is compounded by
the fact that all of the stories come, in effect, second hand through the agency of
the scribes writing them down. Folklorists, working with storytellers in the mid-
twentieth century, however, consistently report that the telling of tatsuniyoyi,
especially stories like those I am concerned with here, is the provenance of
women narrators (Stephens 1981). I have found no evidence to the contrary
either for the twentieth century or for the nineteenth. Furthermore, gender
conflict as presented in the tatsuniyoyi is quickly and clearly identified with one
or the other of the sexes: the narratives are hardly neutral in presenting the

depredations of one sex over the other.

94

Another issue, however, may actually have affected the transmission of
these stories in more subtle, more concealed ways. Consider this possibility. The
tatsuniyoyi were filtered through the moral perspective of men who were,
especially in the case of Edgar and Burdon's Sokoto malams, educated Moslems,
possibly from within the clerical circles surrounding the courts of emirs and
other notables. In a parallel case of priestly scribes writing narratives about
gender roles, the French medievalist, George Duby, has shown how the
biographies of noble women were rewritten to fit into the politicizes and deeply
misogynist views of tenth century Catholicism. The lives of respected and
devout women were written in such a way as to virtually negate their roles as
wives and mothers, emphasizing only their tendency to withdraw from the
active sexuality of Christian marriage and enter a state of celibacy, often as
cloistered lay women and always as the exemplary patronesses of a monastic
order (Duby 1983, 130-8).

The Sokoto reformers are know to have propagated an ascetic and
mystical interpretation of Islamic values which is clearly evident in the views
towards women expressed in religious poetry from the first half of the nineteenth
century (Robinson 1896; Last 1967; Boyd 1989;Hiskett1968, 1975). The similarity
of views on women and sexuality between the Sokoto pietists and Duby's
medieval monastics is disquieting. My concern is that Edgar's malams may have
manipulated some narratives to play up Islamic notions of moral behavior, that is
to fit the tatsuniyoyi into the established interpretations of the hadiths. Examples
of tatsuniyoyi which might be evidence of such manipulation include narratives
in which an Islamic moral has been appended to a dilemma, especially when this

can be confirmed with other variants of the story (or story fragment) in which a

95

Moslem moral is lacking. Because such stories seem to invite discussion and
debate, they may have been invented as a teaching device in the Islamic schools
of Hausaland. Narratives which pointedly include an Islamic moral to
encourage conflict resolution at the very least suggest this scenario for, in effect,
adapting the Hausa tatsuniyoyi to an Islamic educational purpose (Edgar 1911-13,
1:129, 133, 34; 2:12; 3:58). I must add that other evidence has raised in my mind
the suspicion that even manuscript copies of tatsuniyoyi might have existed and
circulated among the literati of fin de siecle Hausaland.“

In Edgar's collection of tatsuniyoyi, narratives of gender conflict are
presented in a variety of Hausa social contexts, yet all are within the realm of
courtship and marriage. The narratives address a basic set of questions to set up
the dynamics of gender conflict in marriage. Who is being abused? By whom
are they abused? How do they solve their problem? Do they have any allies,
human or non-human? What characteristics of the heroine of hero of the
tatsuniya allow them to triumph in the end? Do they "live happily ever after" in
the troublesome relationship? How is marital happiness defined in the
tatsuniyoyi? From the perspective of either women or men, who makes an ideal

spouse?

 

58The possibility of a written tradition of tatsuniyoyi deserves further scholarly
attention. I find it very difficult to believe, the Song of Bagauda to the contrary,
that the stories found in Edgar's third volume are not the product of an active and
literate tradition. Even the language of these narratives suggests the possibility of
being the prototype of "malamanci". There is, for example, greater similarity with
the narrative and language of Magana Jarici, a prose work composed in Hausa by
a Christianized Hausa who, in fact, was a child of the Emir of Zaria's household,
sent to Walter Miller to be educated ( M. Bivins, Wusasa, 1975. Personal
communication with R. Ademola and M. Tafida). Prietze also seems to have
found an informant who produced tatsuniyoyi of this sort (Prietz ).

96

From a masculine point of view, even the most virtuous wife could be
tempted by the gifts of a lover to overcome the boundaries of marriage and even
of purdah to enjoy herself (Tremearne 1914; Edgar 1911-13, 2:130-23z366-7; Skinner
1968-77). Class was no protection against a wife's betrayal. Hunters' wives were
notorious adulteresses and the wives of wealthy traders or even aristocrats were
at the very least vulnerable to predatory men (Edgar 1911-13, 3:373-5, 395-7).
Kings' wives might even hid a boy in the women's quarters to meet their sexual
needs (Edgar 1911-13). A king's daughter defies even the strictest form of
purdah to take a lover (Edgar 191-13,2:272-6, 277-9). The man who moves his
household out of the town to protect the chastity of his wives is regularly
mocked in tatsuniyoyi which frolic in the details of how he is cuckolded (Edgar
1911-13,3,395-7). Even if a woman was sexually faithful to her husband, she
could still destroy him, eating up his wealth just as disguised animal brides
(joined by their relatives) regularly ate their husbands crops or livestock (Edgar
1911-13, 1,81; 2,40; Skinner 1969, 1:222-3). A bad wife treatened a man's wealth
and self-respect.

In reality, Hausa women then as now, could indeed use their sexuality to free
themselves from the constraints of marriage and the home, especially if that
home was in a rural setting. Prostitution did not carry the burden of moral
ostracism attached to it in Western cultures, nor was it accepted without some
social reservations: karuwa are regularly portrayed as personifying female greed
and deceit in the tatsuniyoyi. Nor was prostitution an exclusively female
practice: tatsuniyoyi describe men practicing karuwanci, (prostitution), dressing as

women to gain access to the secluded women of aristocratic households (and

97

getting into some very difficult situations with outraged husbands) (Edgar 1911-
13, 3:377)!"

Any Hausa woman was free to use prostitution as a means to support
herself, either for short term need or as a long term profession. In the twentieth
century, social scientists continued to find evidence of women using their
sexuality as a means of access to an independent life (Pittin 1983, 1979; Raynaut
1977; Barkow 1971; Broustra 1978; Coles 1983; Saunders 1978). Baba used the
euphemism of someone, whether male or female, going out into the world to
describe those who sought to escape the controls of Hausa society and their own
families by running away. In the case of women, she clearly implies that
prostitution, karuwanci, allowed such women an escape. Yet, in describing the
adventures of a particularly troublesome kinswoman, she also makes it clear that
the woman could always rely on family ties when she chose to use them (M.
Smith 1964). By the end of the nineteenth century, Hausa zongos in cities all over
West Africa gave such women shelter with relatively few restrictions, unless they
chose to re-enter, through marriage, the social world of married housewives
(Cohen 1969, 51-70; Adamu, 1978; M. Smith 1964 ).

In his translation of Edgar's tatsuniyoyi, Skinner groups stories highly

critical of women into a genre he calls "Moralising Tales" and notes that though

 

59Transvestitism is not uncommon in Hausa society or in the tatsuniyoyi.
Linguistically, Hausa also describes a very wide range of sexual practices and
behavior, including several forms of lesbian sexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality,
pediphilism and hermaphrodism. Male karuwanci was the only non-heterosexual
activity I found in the collections of tatsuniyoyi I have examined. I fully expect
one would also find others in manuscripts collected, but not used by the early
collectors. Tremearne, for example, published his randier selections in a
professional journal, not in his books (Tremearne 1914).

98

most stories in Hausa compounds are told by the women, and the
grandmothers in particular--witness the constant emphasis on the
details of foods and other household activities-4n general, in these
Moralising stories, we are enjoined not to trust women. There are
one or two where women are shown in a favorable light (usually
the men show up unfavorably in these), but these are very much in
the minority (Skinner 1969, 1:215).

It seems possible that the source of these stories was a setting in which
men told stories to other men. Several possibilities suggest themselves: all-male
work groups in which storytelling along with other forms of oral entertainment
would have been practiced to ease the boredom of repetitive work; conversation
over meals, which men take separately form women; entertainment from the
prostitutes' compound.

Allowing that men told anti-woman stories to one another re-introduces
my earlier concern with locating the narratives of the tatsuniyoyi in a Hausa
perception of public and private space. Whether told by women or by men, the
tone of tatsuniyoyi hostile to women certainly suggest to me that such stories
were the products of public, masculine storytelling events, that is, social settings
in which the primary audience was males (Falassi 1980; Taggert 1986). Such was
the entertainment provide by the karuwai,, the prostitutes or courtesans found
living in special compounds in small towns and cities throughout nineteenth
century Hausaland.

A male perspective on gender conflict in courtship and marriage is also
expressed in many other tatsuniyoyi which are not marked by extreme
expressions of hostility. Instead, in these, more common stories, men accept

women with fatalism and use cunning to negotiate the social pitfalls of courtship

99

and marriage. 60 A popular expression of men's cynicism towards their dealings
with women is found in stories built around the folk saying that "women like

lies . In the narratives of such tatsuniyoyi , men mock women who are so
interested in the outward appearance of suitors that they will blindly accept what
they see as what is real. Class is sometimesian element in narratives built on this
premise to enhance the power of the moral. For example, an extremely poor and
low-status man, a calabash-mender, succeeds in marrying the daughter of a
chief, possibly even a member of the Fulbe aristocracy of the Sokoto Caliphate,
by pretending to be very wealthy. His imagined wealth is in livestock, as also is
her bride wealth. Her arrogance, then, may be seen as a characteristic of
aristocratic Fulani girls, thus introducing an element of class bias into the
calabash-mender's successful ruse. It isn't just that women like to be lied to, but
that some one as poor as a calabash-mender could fool someone as rich as the
daughter of a Fulbe ruler, and that everyone in their town would know the trick
before she herself discovered it (through her son's encounter with the gossip in
the market of the town). This tatsuniya is interesting for the way that it shows
how the girl used her father's wealth to rebuild that which she thought her
husband had lost by marrying her. We know from Flegel's informant that poor
men did indeed marry aristocratic women to enhance their entrepreneurial
ventures with fresh capital and good connections to powerful relatives (Flegel
1983 ; Edgar 1911-13, 1:1308-9; Skinner 1968, 1:215-21).

In a variation of this tatsuniya, a poor man attaches himself to a rich man

in a town where he is a stanger. He borrows the accouterments of a wealthy

 

60The third volume of Edgar's Tats uniyoyiis the primary source for the stories
used in this section.

100

man, fine clothes, a horse, kola, and honey, and goes courting the daughter of
another wealthy man. In the course of the tatsuniya, a clearly male view on the
expense of courtship and marriage is expressed:
How will you find a wife, without any money? For you know, for
someone to go seeking a wife without money is like someone who

goes hunting a gazelle without a dog. Has he a hope of catching
her? (Skinner 1969,1:222-3).

Though this story is less elaborate than the first, nor does it include
aristocratic characters, the emphasis on material wealth, however, remains.
Tatsuniyoyi like this suggest a male viewpoint on the increasingly elaborate,
expensive culture of courtship which seems to have evolved among well-to-do
Moslems in the towns and cities of fin de siecle Hausaland (M. Smith 1964).

The lore of courtship and marriage created by men goes much deeper than
religion. For example, the stories of animal wives (usually gazelles) directly
comment on the moral economy of courtship and marriage ceremonies and
customs which demand that the bridegroom and his family transfer considerable
wealth as a family to the family of the bride before they secure the bride herself.
Much of that wealth was in the form of food for feasting at the actual time of the
wedding. Such wealth could not be returned to the groom and his family if the
marriage failed-~a very common occurrence in Hausa marriage. The moral
economy of marriage in Hausa society at all levels would seem to strongly favor,
at least when the marriage is made, the girl and her family. A masculine voice in
the tatsuniyoyi protested this state of affairs in the tatsuniyoyi (Schon 1885;
Tremearne 1913, 1914; Edgar 1911-13; Skinner 1969).

101

Courtship and Marriage: A Feminine Point of View

Courtship was a moment in a girl's life when, through her own initiative,
she could obtain wealth, as well as a husband. In developing this motif, the
tatsuniyoyi display a distinctly different understanding of female agency from
that often found in European folk stories. European heroines win the hero first,
they enjoy status, wealth and power, thanks to their husband's position. Hausa
heroines win wealth, achieve status and gain power over people and towns, then
marry the hero, who might play no other role in the narrative than be the
available son of a king. The message is clear in story after story: a Hausa
woman needs control over her own resources of people, livestock, goods, towns
and the personal power that comes with such wealth to insure stability and
success in her marriage. Some of the stories, such as ones featuring adventurous,
brave girls, offer evidence of how girls and women imagined successful women.

The motif of girls who win wealth through their own agency was
remarkably popular. One story, for example, recorded by Schon and Edgar, was
also told to Stephens in 1978 (Schon 1885, 117-124; Edgar 1913, 3:52; Stephens
1981, 3:1043-1070). Featuring adventurous heroines, the tatsuniya told of two
wives and their daughters, each of whom made an extraordinary journey into the
supernatural on a quest to reach "the waters of Medina." The first variant of the
story was told by Dorugu and published in Magana Hausa. Other variants were
published in Edgar's Litafi while Stephens' examples of the story was told to her
in 1979 by Hausa informants in Niger. This is an extraordinarily well-
documented and long lived tatsuniya with a remarkably stable narrative. In fact,
one of Stephens' informant was corrected by her audience when she left out

essential elements of the plot.

102

Here is the basic story (Edgar 1911-13, 3:123-8). Two wives are married to
a man, one is favored the other not. Both have daughters who are just reaching
the age of seeking a husband. The daughter of the unfavored wife urinates on
her father's prayer mat (or is accused of doing so by the favorite wife) and is told
by her mother to take the mat to the "waters of Medina" and wash it. She does
so, embarking on an endlessly long journey on which she encounters a bizarre
host of non-human beings, all of whom offer her food, which she politely
declines, before telling her to pass on to the distant "waters of Medina." When
she finally reaches the water, she meets and is courteous to a strange old woman,
who rewards her kindness by giving her three eggs and careful instructions on
when to smash them. The girl washes the mat and returns home, all the while
following the old woman's advice. As she smashes the eggs one by one, wealth
in people, livestock and material possessions pour out of the eggs and follow her.
She returns home in triumph, wealthy in goods and people she has achieved by
her own good character.

Of course, the daughter of the favored wife is hustled off on the same
journey and encounters the same series of beings. She, being a rude, greedy and
spoiled girl, eats any and all food presented to her, and is quarrelsome with the
old woman. Nevertheless, she, too, is give three magical eggs. Disregarding the
old woman's instructions, she smashes the eggs when she should not smash
them and is rewarded by a parade of misshapen creatures: leprous beggars,
crippled livestock: just the opposite of the wealth rewarded to her half-sister.
When she reaches home, her mother is appalled (Edgar 1911-13, 3:52; Skinner
1977, 2: 392-97).

103

At the time Dorugu was working with Schon in London, the basic story of
the girls included the Islamic elements of the "waters of Medina" and their
father's prayer mat. I suspect that the girls' journey was at some level symbolic
of the performance of the pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca which all Moslems
are enjoined to make, if possible. In the nineteenth century, Hausa pilgrims were
increasingly making the Haj, but the journey took at the very least four years to
complete. In many cases, people never returned (Work 1986).

The late nineteenth century variant published by Edgar has virtually the
same narrative, but with critical differences: the girl is an orphan; she urinates on
a hide used for sleeping and she is sent to wash it in "Ruwan Bagaje”, that is, the
black water. ( Edgar 1913, 3:52; Skinner 1977, 2: 392-97). Such details as the use of
a sleeping hide, not a blanket, and calling the magical waters ”Ruwan Bagaje”, a
name with no Islamic content, suggests the story's roots in a pre-Islamic Hausa
past. In Stephens' lively and extravagantly detailed variants of the story, the girl
is again an orphan and she is sent to wash either a soiled sleeping hide or a
mortar in the "waters of Bagaji" or the "waters of Bagazam." Stephens' heroine is
rewarded not only in livestock and people, but also in heavy road building
equipment, airplanes, cars, trucks, bags of cement and ships. All these details
were added by a storyteller in Birnin 'Konni at the time when that city was at the
head of a major road-building project.

Though historically rooted in Hausa tatsuniyoyi or at least a century, the
story of the girls also shows precisely how a narrative acquires and acculturates
foreign elements to a basically Hausa text. In the case of Dorugu's narrative, the
emphasis on elements of the Islamic pilgrimage may have reflected an activity

then catching the imagination of Hausa audiences (or at least of Dorugu himself).

104

Certainly, Stephens' narrators were enthralled by the technology of road-
building in modern Niger (Stephens 1981,22). For my purposes this tatsuniya is
valuable for the evidence it offers for a tradition of stories highlighting girls who
actively secure wealth and status for themselves (with nary a husband in sight)
has been maintained in the tatsuniyoyi for well over a century.

Men were not often portrayed as irredeemably treacherous in narratives
which present women's views on marriage. On the other hand, husbands who
were miserly, counting even the spoonfuls of tuwo dished out by their wives,
were not to be tolerated: women were urged to leave stingy men ( Edgar 1911-
13, 1:138; Skinner 1968:9-12; Skinner 1969,1:310-11). Husbands who unfairly
preferred one wife to another were also stock characters, in effect, showing
women's response to tatsuniyoyi which condemned jealous wives (Edgar 1911-13
3:194-6). Sometimes husbands who played favorites even failed to supply the
despised wife and her children, especially daughters, with the bare necessitities
of life. Interestingly, this problem often introduced tatsuniyoyi in which the
daughter of the least favored wife wins wealth and status, thereby providing her
mother with sweet revenge over her rival (Edgar 1911-13, 3:123-28).

When women wanted to show the most extreme dangers of marriage, they
told stories about girls who marry seemingly handsome, wealthy men who are
really disguised goblins. Sometimes girls end up in such marriages through the
schemes of jealous girlfriends or step-mothers who trick them into perilous
settings always outside of the security of their town. Other times, foolish girls
marry a disguised bridegroom simply because they themselves choose unwisely
from among their suitors. When they find themselves in such a marriage, they

also discover that they are threatened with annihilation: their bridegroom wants

105

to eat them. One such girl, Dijje, in a tatsuniyoyi popular throughout the
nineteenth and into the twentieth century, survives such a harrowing experience
when her disguised bridegroom turns into a snake goblin who sucks her blood
(Schon 1885; Edgar 1911; Skinner 1978; Stephens 1981). Dijje's plight seems to
play not only with the image of an especially bad marriage choice, but also with
the use of the Hausa verb, ci, to eat, a common euphemism for sexual intercourse.

In the tatsuniyoyi, a bride threatened by her husband with loosing her life
seems to replicate the threat to a husband posed by the loss of his wealth in crops
or animals through the agency of his animal bride. In both scenarios, a bad
spouse is portrayed as the ultimate danger to women and men. Given the social
and economic implications of marriage to the well-being and status of either sex,
the tatsuniyoyi do not over state the anxieties of choosing a spouse.

Finally, the tatsuniyoyi voice an Islamic interpretation of a good marriage
in the story of a woman who goes to a malam seeking advise on how to rule her
husband. The malam tells her that he will be able to give her an answer if she
can pay him in milk from a wild cow. Through patience and kindness (and good
food), the woman is able to tame the cow and milk it. When she returns to the
malam to seek the answer to her question, he tells her to use the same methods of
patience and kindness which tamed the wild cow on her husband (Edgar 1911-
13, 1:34, 2:12, 3:58). While this tatsuniya seems to be the epitome of the advice
given to wives through the poetry and lessons of the Sokoto reformers, we would
miss an important point about the position of women in marriage if we failed to
notice that, in the end, the wife's desire to control the resources of her marital

household was sanctioned by the malam's advice: as she milked the cow and

106

secured the wealth of the animal's milk, so could she "milk" her husband to

exercise authority over his wealth, and the resources of their family.

Romance in A Secular Tradition of Hausa Islamic Prose

As I will show in the next chapter, the rhetoric of nineteenth century
Islamic religious poetry makes frequent use of the image of women and female
sexuality as a metaphor for the lures of this world and the rewards of the next.
Yet, in the most culturally Islamic of the tatsuniyoyi, those stories set in Moslem
court society and in which a decidedly Islamic secularism prevails, the message
that women can not be trusted is uncommon. Instead, this is precisely the
category of tatsuniyoyi in which female heroines are most thoroughly developed.
In their articulation of a kind of Hausa orientalism, these tatsuniyoyi, however,
raise questions on the source of the secular Islamic motifs in Hausa prose. This,
of course, returns us to the use of pan-Islamic images in the myth of Daura.

What distinguishes orientalist tatsuniyoyi from others found in the
collections of Edgar, Rattray and Tremearne is their setting in urban and court
society and the elaboration of their narratives, especially those which feature
teenage heroines. Women in such tatsuniyoyi are portrayed in a more stylized,
"romantic" way ( Edgar 1911-13; Skinner 1977:3z213). Their inclusion in
collections of Hausa "folk-lore", especially in the second volume of Edgar's Litafi,
may have been encouraged by the fact that European collectors employed literate
Hausa malams to write down stories, though that still does not account for their
presence in the repertoire of such informants.

However, in Edgar's case his own literary inclinations raise something of a

mystery about secular romances in the tatsuniyoyi. In 1924, Edgar published

107

under his own name a Hausa translation of the popular Arabic romance, The
Thousand and One Nights, or, in Hausa, Dare Dubu da Daya. Two thousand copies
of his book were published by Gaskiya Corporation of Zaria and sold through
the Church Missionary Society (C.M.S.) book shops in Nigeria. What interests
me is the literary style of the book and how very similar it is to that of the
romances published in the third volume of Litafi na Tatsuniyoyi na Hausa.
Furthermore, the popular Magana Jarici, another such romance in Hausa co-
authored and published by Malam Tafida of Zaria and Rupert East, the director
of the Literature Bureau, was also written in this style. My question is whether
fiction written in the style of these tatsuniyoyi was the product of literate Hausa
malams composing entertaining stories for the leisured and secluded children of
the aristocracy or if they are a collaboration (as we know is true of Magana Jarici)
between Europeans like Burdon, Edgar, and East, with their Hausa colleagues.
Further study, including close textual analysis of the tatsuniyoyi in Edgar's
second volume, the elaborate Hausa texts published by Rudolf Prietze and Dare
Dubu da Daya is necessary (Prietze, 1904).

The source of the tatsuniyoyi in Edgar's second volume would be
especially important to determine. If the stories are, as they are purported to be,
examples of Hausa oral literature, an inquiry into the routes by which Islamic
secular literature came to influence Hausa tatsuinoyi becomes significant to the
study of the Islamification of Hausa literature in general." Hiskett and others
have emphasized the religious nature of the Hausa verse which use Arabic

meter and styles, even though secular Arabic verse was part of the literary

 

61Edgar makes no claim that they are anything else, and I can find no other
commentaries on this particular genre of tatsuniyoyi.

108

traditions which influenced Hausa poets of the Sokoto Caliphate (Hiskett 1968,
1975). Allowing for the possibility that the tatsuniyoyi I am interested in here
represent a Hausa incorporation of secular themes imported from Arabic
literature, another perspective on the Islamification of nineteenth century Hausa
culture is presented. ‘

The tatsuniyoyi collected and published by Rudolf Prietze suggests both
the source for secular Islamic images in Hausa narratives and the means of
dissemination into the popular culture of urban Hausaland. The tatsuniyoyi
collected by Prietze in North Africa and Cairo at the turn of the century are cut
from the same imaginative fabric as Edgar's Hausa romances. Prietze's
informant was a Hausa "mendicant and praise-singer", exactly the class of person
trained to learn and recite complex, lengthy ballads and religious verse in Hausa
as a way to earn a pious living. Another, later, example of this kind of informant
was the blind Zaria Hausa woman who recited the Song of Baugauda, taught to
her to be her livelihood by a malam (Hiskett 1964-65). The Song of Bagauda
seems to be the only Hausa example of an epic verse form popular in North
African Islamic literature, but, according to Hiskett, not found in Hausa (Hiskett
1968:25-6).

The themes which Hiskett says are common to such North African epics,
such as the Biblical story of Joseph being thrown into the well by his brothers, the
deceitful anti-heroine of the Arabian Nights, Zulaika, and love stories in general,
are found in the tatsuniyoyi (Hiskett 1968:24-32). Deeply embedded in the prose
narratives of the tatsuniyoyi, though blatantly obvious to the reformist poets of
the Sokoto Jihad, who considered them to be worthless (wakokin banza or

worthless songs, referring the manner of recitation used in telling tatsuniyoyi),

109

Islamic romances developed in Hausa. Even the problem of why secular Islamic
verse might be presented in the prose narrative in the tatsuniyoyi is easy to
explain when we recall that the limited number of Arabic verse forms used by
Hausa poets were all associated with religious themes. Only the tatsuniyoyi
provided a model into which secular Islamic literature could be assimilated to
Hausa literary traditions.

When Hiskett observes that, "what lines of communication may link the
community to the story-tellers of Cairo market place at any time after the
fourteenth century" to offer an explanation for the incorporation of myths of
origin from Yemen found in so many West African Islamic communities
(including, of course Daura), he is also reflecting on the sources of secular Islamic
romance in Hausa tatsuniyoyi (Hiskett 1968:28, 35-6). Prietze, out of all the early
European collectors of Hausa, stumbled onto an informant at this source, in the
Hausa quarter of Cairo, and that is why the tatsuniyoyi he published and the
romances found in Edgar are so strikingly similar, and yet distinct from other
tatsuniyoyi.

I would suggest that such stories gained popularity among secluded,
urban and wealthy women and girls: rather the Hausa version of popular
romances and their audiences in nineteenth century North America, England and
France. Their very length and complexity in plot and character, as well as the
settings and social rank of the characters, hints at the tastes of a leisured,
moderately well-educated female audience. Internal evidence also suggests that
they were told for girls and young men in the context of an elite courtship style.

As with other tatsuniyoyi, courtship and marriage are central themes.

110

Young wives of kings are often faced with problems over their husbands
other wives and concubines. Co-wives are not the only problem and in fact one
common formula describes a king who demands that his young wife bear him a
child--even though he refuses to sleep with her. The bride has to prove her
fidelity to her royal husband, and yet get pregnant (Edgar).52 Often there seems
to have been a kind of trial which the girl must overcome before the marriage
"took". In real life, it was customary that new brides were allowed a period of
time to adjust to the new marriage and the new household before they were
required to carry their share of the work load. Pregnancy was also a critical test

in real life and in the tatsuniyoyi.

Pornography: Softening the edge of gender conflict or sharpening the knives of
discontent?

Narratives about gender conflict in marriage, especially when adultery is
the issue, often use graphic sexual language, but the tatsuniyoyi also include
stories which indicate the existence of a Hausa tradition of pornography. By this
I mean stories in which a particularly graphic representation of sex or sexual
organs is essential to the story: there would be no point to telling the story
without the pornographic imagery. For example, I see a difference between such
stories and those about adultery in which a woman has sex with a lover in full
view of her husband. Stories about adultery are primarily focused on the act of

infidelity from which a moral conclusion is abstracted. Overtly, that conclusion

 

62Taggart includes texts which show how this Islamic motif was translated into
one of the most popular of all Spanish folk stories, the story of the innocent,
slandered maiden (T aggart 1990:41-58). The similarity with Shakespeare's
Othello and Desdemona is uncanny.

111

may reinforce the male view that it is useless to expect loyalty or sexual fidelity
from women (Edgar 1911-13). Sometimes, however, a masculine moral is
subverted by a clearly feminine twist in the plot which celebrates the women's
ability to outwit her husband, especially if he was excessively jealous (Tremearne
1914, 69:137-9). In another tatsuniya, also a satire on a husband's extreme
jealousy, a young cad named Bididi seduces a very jealous man's wife when she
brings him tuwo to eat, as commanded by her husband. The dialogue explicitly
mimics sexual ecstasy and the husband's embarrassed response. I see these
stories as farce in which sexual innuendo is a critical element in amusing the
audience. Told in the course of an evening's entertainment among prostitutes
and their clients, such stories added to the seductive atmosphere needed to
ensure successful business for the women involved. Mack, for example, shows
how popular women praise singers (zabiyoyi) use pornography and even
misogynist themes in there performances in Kano in the 1970-80's (Mack 1983:15-
46). Hiskett, using a late nineteenth century Hausa poem form Burdon's
collection, shows the presence and linguistic stability of obscenity in Hausa verse
(Hiskett 1975:6-9, 156-9).

Overt obscenity enhanced the nugget of moral wisdom found in this kind
of tatsuniyoyi and added to the amusement of the storyteller's audience at the
same time (Stephens 1981). Furthermore, in the social manipulation of obscene
narratives, any slight of women was met with a cutting satirical response:
popular interpretation to the contrary, men did not dominate the tatsuniyoyi
(Tremearne 1913; Edgar 1911-13, 3:398, 3:162, 3,163).

As a commentary on gender in Hausa society, pornographic tatsuniyoyi

indicate the tension between women and men over sexual identities which could

112

not be contained by Islamic institutions of marriage. In particular, these stories
underscore the personal liberty allowed women and men during courtship.
There were many times during their lives when Hausa adults slipped between
the moral cracks of correct marital behavior and were at liberty to exercise their
own will in sexual activities. The attenuated marriage ceremonies of previously
married women are another indicator of the attitude I am trying to describe.

There is, however, another element in Hausa pornography, found in
stories which seem to function only as the vehicles for extremely fanciful,
outrageous, depictions of human sexuality, especially of human sex organs. In
Edgar's collection, the organ most often portrayed in such stories is the penis and
it is always of gigantic proportions. There is a story about a man who is given a
magic wish by a guinea fowl and, at this wife's request, asks for a bigger penis.
He overestimates his wife's notions of how big is big (Edgar 1911-13, 3:98)..
Another man had such a big penis that he had to tie it up out of his way and can
not even induce a prostitute to sleep with him (Skinner 1969, 1:361-63). In
another tatsuniya, set during a time of famine, a husband (whose penis had
shrunken into the cavity of his emaciated body) tells his gullible wife that he
traded it for food: she is devastated by such a bargain and bewails her fate to the
neighbors (Edgar 1911-13, 3:163; Skinner 1969, 1:372-3).

Humor, ridicule, verbal abuse is the point of this kind of Hausa
pornography and I would like to suggest that today its most common setting in
groups exclusively composed of ordinary women is at least as important to
understanding gender in Hausa culture as its presence in the compounds of
prostitutes (Bivins 1974-76; 1988). The stories and storytellers offer their

audience a profane and account of gender relationships in which men were

113

officially dominant. When women tell pornography they scoff at the established
order of masculine power, whether that power was vested in the figure of a
husband or that of a king. All men could be cuckolds. Conversely, all women
could wage at least verbal warfare against the force of male power in their own
lives, scoffing men with pornography. For two groups of women today, the
performance and enjoyment of pornography with an anti-male bias may be
especially revealing of the personal response to the power of Islamic reform in
Hausa marriage customs in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. These
women are young wives and post-menopausal widows and divorcees
(Bivinsl974-76,1988; Schildkrout 1986:131-52).

The sexual knowledge all ordinary, nineteenth century Hausa gained
through tsrance as a normal part of growing up, formed the vocabulary of such
bawdy humor and ensured that all listeners caught each and every double
entendre. I do not mean that pornography is evidence that tsrance, as a practice,
was sanctioned by all parents. Obviously, by the end of the nineteenth century,
Moslem Hausa parents, such as Baba's, were not wildly enthusiastic about this
activity (M. Smith 1964). Nor do I mean to suggest that pornography was not
used by men as well as women as a weapon in the war of words between them
over issues of power, whether sexual, economic or social.

What is to be appreciated in those fragments of nineteenth century Hausa
pornography preserved in the tatsuniyoyi is the sense of the intimacy of gender
conflict, and the struggle of women against silence. Pornography used by
women expressed defiance through ridicule. The same goes for men when
commoners seduce the secluded and socially inaccessible wives or daughters of

the political elite. Stories such as these make up a common pattern in the

114

tatsuniyoyi which, as I have argued in this chapter, were essentially a women's
literary tradition. That is, this is not pornography which reinforces the
subjugation of female sexuality to masculine power, as in the way Berger sees the
Western tradition of pornographic representations of women: women are not
simply sexual objects nor are men only sexual voyeurs (Berger 1987:45-64). .
Rather, the mocking, satirical voice of Hausa pornography, whether in the
tatsuniyoyi or in the profane songs of professional praise singers, expresses
dissent and even full-fledged rejection of Islamically-correct, elite notions of
gender, sexuality and class. In this way, the tatsuniyoyi, especially in the case of
pornographic texts, counter-balanced the asceticism of the Sokoto reformers and,
I would argue, worked to Hausify their message in just that arena common to all
Hausa: gender and the dialogue between the sexes over the shape of courtship,

marriage and heterosexual sexuality.

Conclusion

What overall lessons did the stories tell nineteenth century audiences
about gender and power in courtship and marriage? First, and stated most
frequently in stories with either a feminine or a masculine orientation, the
conjugal bond was not permanent. A corollary of that observation was that
family ties with parental kin were lifetime resources of support, whether material
or emotional. Finally, both men and women needed good character and
initiative to succeed in life and success was most assuredly associated with
wealth in power over people, goods and space as represented as towns.

The fears women had of men were very concretely linked to marriage,

though some stories hint that courting boys would not protect their girlfriends.

115

Neither boys nor girls were given especially sterling characters during courtship:
neither were to be trusted, though some could be very loyal indeed (Edgar).

Men's fears of women as expressed in the tatsuniyoyi were less concrete in
economic terms, but explicitly stated moral expectations and masculine fatalism
when such expectations were not met. In economic terms, men did face the
problem of wives who "eat up" their property, especially as expressed in the
stories of animal brides who, quite literally, eat their husbands' wealth, whether
that wealth is in crops or in livestock. However, as expressed in the tatsuniyoyi,
men feared women's sexual infidelity and used women's sexuality as the
fundamental reason for saying that women could not be trusted, indeed, could
not be kept in a state of moral rectitude.

To study gender in the context of Hausa tatsuniyoyi is to begin to
understand the past as Hausa people themselves lived it because the past, at all
levels of Hausa society, for all classes, was deeply and fundamentally ordered by
the relationships of women and men: to gender as a way to construct power at
the deepest and most fundamental level of Hausa social formation. Shehu
Usuman dan Fodio and the reformist scholars of the Sokoto Jihad understood
this signification of gender and women's central role in social formations. As I
will show in the next chapter, the reform literature of the Jihad and the Caliphate
would urge changes in the status of women and the meaning of gender in Islamic
thought.

Hausa women had no real expectations of sexual fidelity from husbands:
this is not presented as an issue in the feminine view of marriage. They could,
however, find good cause to fear the economic or social unfairness and cruelty or

neglect from husbands. They could be jealous of co-wives and their children, to

116

the point of causing evil to befall their rivals. They could fear witchcraft,
especially from co-wives, sometimes even in collusion with husbands. Women
also seem to have used the Hausa goblin, the dodo, to create narratives in which
women were able to outwit such creatures, even if they had the misfortune of
being married to a dodo, a goblin. Stephens understood this to mean women had
especially close ties to the supernatural forces of nature and mediated between
human culture and the natural world. I see it as a commentary on living in a
bad, even dangerous, marriage and a prescriptive for taking action.

The women represented in such collections as Edgar's, Rattray's and
Tremearne's are creatures of Hausa popular culture on the eve of the twentieth
century and its manifestations of a European definition of modernity: colonial
rule, technological change, economic reorientation, social transformation and, by
some accounts, cultural chaosWomen were not always presented in an
especially positive light: the meaning of gender was approached from
viewpoints other than that of women in the tatsuniyoyi. Nevertheless, Hausa
women did have a voice in the culture and traditions of the tatsuniyoyi. As in the
state traditions discussed in the preceding chapter, distinctive perspectives and
intellectual traditions have operated within Hausa culture to create the discourse
on gender found in these folk stories.

Modern scholars of Hausa literature have pointed out the frank hostility,
often with orthodox, Islamic messages, towards women found in many Hausa
tatsuniyoyi. The alternative, feminine (if not feminist in the Western sense of the
word) voice has been given less recognition, though it is assertive, even
dominant in the tatsuniyoyi themselves. This feminine perspective within the

body of Hausa tatsuniyoyi documents the competing views on the meaning of

117

gender which co-existed in fin de siecle Hausa society. The rules for telling
tatsuniyoyi shapes the information about gender which can be discerned in this
literature of dissent.

In short, an alternative, feminine perspective within the body of Hausa
folk stories suggest that competing views on the meaning of gender co-existed in
nineteenth century Hausaland.“ The rules for the telling of narratives in each of
these distinctive intellectual traditions shapes the information about gender
which can be discerned in the various forms of nineteenth century Hausa oral
literature.

With the exception of Hausa Islamic verse, all examples of popular Hausa
literature were oral and not set down in writing until one outsider or another
made the request. The outsiders were European males who valued literacy and
their chief informants were on the whole, literate Hausa males. Yet the vast bulk
of the Hausa folk stories transcribed in this manner represented an oral, female
culture, the culture of the inner family and the storytelling woman and girls.
Even stories outside this tradition, stories which came from an opposing
tradition established around the public space of masculine society, were often
transplanted from the oral literature of women, courtship and marriage.

The topic of this chapter has been the representation of women and the
dialogue between the sexes found in Hausa tatsuniyoyi. In the course of

pursuing these topics I have shown how Hausa women contributed to the

 

63Studies of gender in European folk narratives offer insights into this topic
(Dubisch 1986; Falassi 1980;Taggert1990;Seremetakis 1991).
64The commentary on the "Song of Bagauda" is an excellent introduction to this

topic. See also Mack, especially for the performances of the zabiya, female praise
singers (Mack 1981,1983).

118

creation of a genuine and distinctive intellectual tradition. In the tatsuniyoyi
collected by Europeans at the turn of the century which represents Hausa
popular culture and in Hausa Islamic verse, the form in which an Islamic ideal of
womanhood was presented to the Hausa people, men and women have debated
the meaning of gender in Hausa culture and set the stage for Hausa culture as we
observe it today.

Finally, representations of wealth are fundamental to "happy endings" in
the tatsuniyoyi, whether from a male or female point of view. These images give
us an interesting sense of the Hausa good life in nineteenth century terms.
Wealth came in possessing people, towns and goods, livestock being in the latter
category. Success is most frequently rewarded with being given a town and its
people. The parallel with what was actually going on in the period when the
Sokoto Jihad led to significant political changes and economic growth, especially
expressed in the development of Hausa towns, is uncanny. In particular, we can
compare this theme in the tatsuniyoyi with the actuality of Sultan Bello's
domestic policies. It is safe to assume that the emphasis on winning wealth in
the form of towns as well as the constant refrain that town life was the best way
to live are a measure of the profound importance of urbanization in nineteenth
century Hausaland.

Such images of success and wealth identify nineteenth century Hausa
values in social and economic terms. The good life was the life of the town,
where a man could pursue trade as well as the conversation and social life of the
mosque and the palace and a woman, too, could find opportunities for wealth,

status and personal power.

119

Chapter 4: Gender and the Message of Islamic Reform

Woman by her very nature brings us face to face with what
sociolinguists today consider to be a fundamental truth: Language
is an instrument of domination and judgment. The sexes are joined
in battle over a common fief: linguistic expression (Regnier-Bohler
1992, 2:427-482).

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the religious wars initiated
in northwestern Hausaland by the Fulbe cleric, Shehu Usuman dan Fodio,
culminated in the successful establishment of an Islamic state across the most
densely populated and economically diverse regions of central Hausaland (Last
1967; Adeleye 1971 ; Hiskett 1973). A process of reforming the Islamic content of
popular Hausa culture was set in motion by the scholars of the Sokoto Caliphate
which grew out of Usuman dan Fodio's community. Judging by the variety and
availability of texts devoted to the regulation and reform of Hausa marriage
customs, the Islamification of gender relations, especially in marriage, was of
singular importance to the Sokoto reformers. In poetry, proverbs, tatsuniyoyi,
labarai, legal commentary and even the scraps of local hearsay and gossip about
memorable marriage cases passed on into the early collections of Hausa
literature, the relationships between men and women came under careful
scrutiny. The legal and literary heritage of the Sokoto Caliphate testifies to the
fact that this reform movement set out to propagate the acceptance of correct
Islamic marriage practices among ordinary Hausa (and Fulbe) people. No longer
was Islam to be the religion of the political, ecclesiastical and commercial elites of

urban Hausaland. The social revolution urged by the reformers required a

120

redefinition of the most fundamental expression of Islam and gender in Hausa
society: marriage.

In oral literature and legal commentary, sometimes, as in the case of
Islamic poetry, based on written texts committed to memory and recited in
public, the leaders of the Sokoto Jihad and their followers set out the main
features of the reform message.M Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, his children and his
followers wrote about the rights and obligations of women and men in marriage
as well as more general issues of religious instruction. Shari ’a law, based on
North African precepts, especially as they were presented in the sixteenth
century texts and letters of al-Maghili, detailed the rules of proper gender
relationships and the transfer of property in marriage, annulment and divorce.
By the late nineteenth century, religious commentary even outlined intimate
sexual practices defined as Islamic and said to be based on the Hadiths ( Edgar
Skinner 1977, 3:320, 325-6, 326, 327-8). Gender and marriage were significant
issues, examined and re-examined throughout the corpus of nineteenth century
Hausa Islamic literature. And yet, the definition of a good Moslem woman
remains a contentious issue in twentieth century debates over gender relations
and the status of women in Nigeria and Niger (Cole and Mack 1991; Calloway
1987, 85-130).

It was, however, the ways in which the message of Islamic reform was
presented in stories, proverbs and other forms of popular oral literature that the

reformers' ideal of gender in marriage was conveyed to non-literate, rural Hausa

 

64The commentary on the "Song of Bagauda" is an excellent introduction to this
topic. See also Mack, especially for the performances of the zabiya, female praise
singers (Mack 1981,1983).

121

people. Furthermore, it is in the same literary sources that a measure of the
cultural struggle generated by the reforms may be discerned. In this chapter I
would like to compare the dialogue between the sexes I have already argued to
be present in the oral culture of the tatsuniyoyi with the discourse on women and
gender found in the literary traditions of the Sokoto reformers. My point is not
to critique the Islamic content of the reform literature-I am no specialist in
Islamic law-but to use it in an attempt to examine from another source the
impact of Islamic reform notions on women and gender in the popular culture of
fin de siecle Hausaland. Finally, I use evidence from the life histories of
nineteenth century women and men and accounts of the culture of courtship and
marriage to point out that the acceptance of Islamic principles in gender
relations, especially in courtship and marriage, continued to be deeply influenced

by Hausa custom throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.

Literacy , Oral Education and the Purpose of the Sokoto Iihad

The Sokoto Jihad was an event in which literacy played a crucial role.
Following an approach to Islamic reform rooted in the practices of Fulbe clerics
by the end of‘the eighteenth century, Shehu Usuman dan Fodio encouraged
literacy in Fulfulde and Hausa, deliberately eliminating one of the primary
barriers to the popularization of Islam among the masses of rural Hausa: the
necessity of achieving some degree of literacy in Arabic to become an educated
Moslem ( Brenner and Last 1985; Hiskett 1975, 18).

Islamic education in Hausaland underwent a profound reorientation
beginning with the Sokoto Jihad in the nineteenth century and continuing into

the present. As Brenner's description of Islamic education in the Tijanniya

122

tradition demonstrates, teacher / scholars such as Usuman dan Fodio, his family
and followers and the generations of Moslem scholars who would follow their
role model relied on the spoken word to transmit the written culture of Islam
(Brenner 1984, 76). Fulfulde played a central role in the mission of Islamic
education practiced by the Toroodbe leadership of Sokoto who argued that,
along with Arabic, it was one of the "languages of religious explanation" (Brenner
and Last 1985: 433-5).

While he is especially concerned with documenting the use of Fulfulde in
Islamic education, Brenner argues that at least one method of "the oral
transmission of the written word" existed in Hausaland by the late eighteenth
century. Noting Usuman dan Fodio's objections to the "sectarian tendencies" of
some Koranic teachers, Brenner concludes that the Kabbe, a Fulfulde poem
created to teach the mysteries of Tyjanniya sufism, was an established
educational device in some Fulbe Moslem communities (Brenner 1984:79-86).

With the use of Fulfulde as a model, it was not suprising that Sokoto's
religious scholars and teachers would also write poetry in Hausa as a vehicle for
instructing the people of the newly established Sokoto Caliphate. Translations of
the Shehu's poetry into Hausa were made and two are to be found in Robinson's
1896 collection of Hausa Islamic verse, Specimens of Hausa Literature (Robinson
1896). Robinson's sampling of Jihad religious verse includes references to the

position of women in Moslem society:

Farm-work is not becoming for a wife, you know; she is free, you
may not put her to hoe grass (as a slave)...A woman that is married
gives up going to three places: the market, a public feast and the
place of drawing water...If thou hast not a boy to take her pitcher, do

123

thou endeavour to escort her to the water in the evening...If she
desires to go to their houses, let her ask her husband; grant her
permission provided she go in the evening...Let her take a cloth as a
covering for her body, let her crouch thus with arms folded until the
conversation is ended...When she replies let her lower her voice in
speaking; let her not be heard calling fowls, speaking with wide-
opened mouth...You know that no part of a woman's body ought to
be seen when she goes out, except the soles of her feet and her
eyes...The married woman who goes out with head uncovered, on
the day of the resurrection the fire shall burn her; The Married
woman who goes out with head uncovered, on the day of the
resurrection shall be covered with a blanket of fire...If a woman be in
love with two men, they shall suffer loss in the next world; on the
day of the resurrection they shall rise in the form of dogs...(Robinson
1896, 6).

Hausa Islamic verse was a fundamental tool of nineteenth century Muslim
education. In inspirational poetry, the reformist scholars of the Sheik's
community selected images of good and evil from the great body of Islamic
religious and folk literature and particularized those images to Hausa audiences
(Hiskett 1975, 50-1). Nana Asma'u, the daughter of Shehu Usuman, for example,
was an active teacher of women and children and depended on oral methods of
instruction. She regularly composed religious poetry in Fulfulde and Hausa with
the clear purpose of educating the faithful who were not fluent in Arabic (Boyd
1989). Her vernacular poetry was especially prepared to be recited in Hausa and
Fulfulde by the women teachers (the 'yan taru) she organized to promote Islamic
ideals in their own, rural Hausa communities (Boyd 1989, 49-53; Boyd and Last
1985). There is little information, aside from the observations of European

travelers, of extemporaneous, public preaching, but here again, inspirational

124

poetry recited in the vernacular played an important role in the oral inculcation
of Islamic practices and beliefs (Richardson 197-, 22178-296).

Religious composition in Hausa and Fulfulde ranged from formal and
learned exegesis of Islamic texts (tafsid and hadith), to the day to day use of
Islamically-inspired proverbs, parables and'tatsuniyoyi. Again, the significance of
the orality of Islamic education at this time among Hausa speaking populations
is that it forged a link between the more elitist forms of Islamic education, which
depended on literacy in Arabic, and ordinary people who depended on the oral
instruction of Muslim preachers and teachers. Shehu dan Fodio and other
Muslim teachers correctly identified the significance of mass education to the
production and reproduction of an Islamic community in the Central Sudan (
Sow 1966; Last 1968; Paden 1973; Gummi 1980; Hiskett 1973,1975, 1980; Brenner
1984; Brenner and Last 1985; Boyd 1989; Boyd and Last 1985).

Marriage as a Theme in the Poetry of the Jihad

The choice of poetry as a vehicle for popular education fit into the
established traditions of Hausa oral literature (Hiskett 1975, 1-19; I.Y.Yahaya
1981:139-156; Z. Kofoworola 1981:290-308). Poetry as popular entertainment and
social commentary was well-established in nineteenth century Hausa society.
This was an important medium for the popularization of the reform message of
the Sokoto Jihad.

The poems make it clear that their authors intended to foster Islam at the
broadest and least elite levels of Hausa society. Thus, one of the most important
themes in the poems is the reformation of women and the redefinition of the

good wife. Shehu dan Fodio initiated the discussion of marital relations at least

125

as early as 1789, beginning with a poem on those Hausa and Fulbe customs
which undermined Islamic marriages (Boyd 1989, 163-64). Married himself at the
age of twenty, he found the upbringing of his bride, Maimuna, who was also his
cross-cousin, to be less than Islamically correct: Maimuna was unhappy to find
herself in a household which practiced purdah. Thus, Usuman dan Fodio's
mission to bring enlightenment to the marriage practices of his community began
in his own home and the complexities of polygamous, Islamically-correct
marriage: he had nine wives in his lifetime who bore him 23 children. Criticism
of the status of women was part of his critique of the Hausa sultanates, found in
the Kitab-Al-Parq, a work which shows his dependence on late-Abbasid theories
of Islamic law. (Hiskett 1960, 578). Summarizing the relationship of the Shehu's

political goals to his conceptualization of Islamic law, Hiskett writes:

The Shehu recognized the significance of the imamate as a concept
capable of unifying the divided kingdoms of Hausaland, and in
consequence was able to propound a theory of government which
succeeded, for a time, in realizing most of his aims. Since the
Shari 'a is an ideal system it can never be completely translated into
practice. Nevertheless it is clear from Clapperton and Barth that in
the half-century following the jihad the Fulani emirates did
constitute a loosely knit feudal empire over which Sokoto exercised
political and moral authority. The individual emirs were largely
autonomous within their provinces, but paid tribute to Sokoto, and
certainly referred to Sokoto in matters of administration and
religion. Thus the concept of a central imamate from which
authority should stem, became a reality." (Hiskett 1960, 579)

What interests me here is that the Shehu's grand plan of creating an

Islamic society in Hausaland depended, as his poetry on gender relations in

126

marriage emphatically demonstrates, on getting ordinary people, including his
own, sometimes reluctant, wives to live their own lives in accordance to the
Shari ’a. Thus, his list of the failures of Hausa governments returns again and
again to issues having to do with women and their roles in society and politics.

He found, for example, the Hausa sultans guilty of:

...taking what women they wish without marriage
contract...devouring the alms of women who are subject to their
authority...(placing)many women in their houses, until the number
of women of some of them amounts to one thousand or more...puts
the affairs of his women into the hands of the oldest one, and every
one (of the others) is like a slave-woman under her."(Hiskett 1960,

567).

The Hausa sultanates continued to include what may have been bori in
their official ceremonies, for women, free and enslaved, attached to the courts of
the sultans "continued to celebrate the yearly jan dado festival" (Hiskett 1960, 568,
573). Finally, at the level of Shari 'a interpretations of public manifestations of
gender roles and behavior, women were not allowed to be veiled nor was
adultery punished correctly (by stoning, if the individuals were married, and
whipping if single); instead, fines were levied (Hiskett 1960, 568-69)!5 The Shehu
also objected to the sumptuous display of wealth seen in extravagant clothing
and lavish wall decorations in the palaces and court music (Hiskett 1960, 569).
Ironically, while Clapperton's descriptions of the court of Bello describe its
simplicity, Barth's comments on the architecture of urban Fulbe culture and the

courts of the Fulbe emirs documents the failure of this element of the Shehu's

 

65Was this a matter of sumptuary laws protecting the ceremonial clothing of
aristocratic women? More work needs to be done on this issue.

127

campaign of cultural reform.(Denham and Clapperton 1985, 2:294,333-34; Barth
1985; Prussin 1989).

The Shehu explained the workings of the Shari 'a in the configuration of
gender in marriage through poetry preserved in manuscript copies in the private
libraries of scholars in Sokoto, but disseminated throughout Hausaland, then as
now, through manuscript copies and public recitations. Boyd's publication of
these poems in translation provides a detailed image of Islamic marriage as the
Shehu interpreted the Shari'a. For example, the Shehu's criticisms of husbands

include:

they fail to dress, house and feed their wives adequately, they show
favoritism between one wife and another and make unwise and
hasty marriages without due thought...They revile their wives...and
beat them excessively...they do not educate them and if they
divorce them they spread malicious tales about them thereby
ruining their chances of remarriage...others refuse to divorce
unhappy wives...all theses things are evidence of ignorance. (Boyd
1989, 3).

Boyd continues her translation with an especially revealing description of
the Shehu's model of gender relationships in a Moslem marriage:

Some women are in trouble...because their husbands think of
nothing but sex...some men eat huge meals away from home
without caring to know if their wives have enough to eat...they are
hot-tempered and when angry refuse to speak to their
wives...others never joke happily with them nor do they share their
sexual attentions equally amongst them...they sit stroking their
beards in contentment outside homes which are little better than
hovels...they are hard by nature and fault-finding by
disposition...they confine their wives too closely...they neither
educate them themselves nor allow them to benefit from being

128

educated by others...A woman should protect her honor and stay at
home...and show a pleasant and gracious manner to her
husband...giving him due respect...accepting any reversal of his
fortunes with equanimity...it is compulsory to feed and clothe such
a woman and given her dowry (sadaki). A wife who goes out
(without good reason) loses her right to her dowry and cannot
claim food and clothing from her hu'sband...Womenfolk take heed!
Do not do communal farm work and do not assist in
herding...cover yourselves up and spin the thread you need to
clothe yourself with...if you go on visits to the tombs of pious saints
do not have arguments...and if you have to go to the well to draw
water, do not misbehave...if you meet on social occasions do not
engage in back-biting gossip...the best think is to let the men-folk go
to the market, but if circumstances compel you to go you must
dress in a restrained manner, covering yourself up from head to
toe...there is no reason why a wife should not (because of custom)
utter the name of her husband or be considered ill-mannered for
doing so, nor should she avoid taking her meals with him..." (Boyd
1989, 5-6).

Comments about the women of the Shehu's family elaborate on this model
of gender relations. Nana Asma'u herself described the character of five women
in her extended family who had reputations for piety and Islamic scholarship in
her poem, Sonnore Gidado (Boyd 1989z4). In other poems she praised women who
cared for widows and orphans; instructed others in the principles of the faith;
worked to serve the community; prayed five times daily, gave alms, fasted at
Ramadam and performed the Hajj when possible. The women she admired were
peace makers in their homes, compassionate, hard working and pious.

In her poetry on women, Asma'u elaborated on the image of a good
Moslem wife drawn by her father from the literature and explication of the

Shari'a texts and the traditions of sufism to which he and his community

129

ascribed. She, as had her father, seems to have placed great value on the role of
the good wife as a buffer against non-Islamic practices in the home and in the
community of the faithful. From Asma'u's poetry, it is clear that for the Shehu,
his immediate family and the community of devoted followers built around
them, the propagation of an Islamic model .of gender relations in the family, and
especially in their own families, was an essential element of establishing a
Moslem community in Hausaland. m

As the Jihad began to achieve military and political success, the women of
the community would be directly confronted with the significance of their
personal role in the propagation of the Shari 'a: female captives would be
integrated into their own homes and marriages as concubines, slaves and even as

wives. Boyd succinctly summarizes the challenges this posed:

The invasion of the wives' domain by alien women who bore the
children of their master and shared his love, presented a three-fold
challenge. First, the wives had to accommodate the newcomers
emotionally, exercising tact and patience. Second, they had to
strive to keep the homogeneity of the Jama'a intact by educating the
concubines and requiring from them religious conformity. Third,
they had to ensure that the minds and hearts of the half-Gobir
children, often recognizable by their physique and facial features,
were free from any knowledge of bori, tasfi (magic) and the spirits
which were supposed to dwell in caves and trees." (Boyd 1989, 15)

 

66 This is an important element of Islamic reforms throughout the Islamic world.
For an important, early twentieth century example form India, see Metcalf, B.
Perfecting Women: Maulana Asfaf'ali Thanawi's Bihishti Zewar. 1990. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

130

As women like Asma'u surely knew, the Prophet himself had forced a
similar mission of peaceful jihad on the women of his own family by taking as
concubines a Christian and two Jewish women. (Boyd 1989, 15)

Dan Fodio urged that women be educated in the basics of Islam. He and
other poets sanctioned and themselves practiced the seclusion of wives not, as
westerners often conclude, to deny women their liberty, but to better secure their
rights to instruction in Islam, protection from the evils of the world and access to
the means of salvation.“7 There was also an essential need to define the status of
free Hausa women more distinctly in order to bring the legal practices of the
Hausa communities incorporated into the Sokoto Caliphate into line with more
orthodox legal traditions as well as to protect Moslem women from the very real
threat of kidnapping and enslavement.‘*..ln a society where household slavery
was well-established and in which concubinage was an important institution,
especially among the elites, it was, indeed, very important to identify the status
and rights of free women. One of the most important was her right to remain at
home and not to engage in farming, water carrying or firewood gathering.
Instead, women were consistently urged to take care of their needs by spinning
cotton thread. The important economic ramifications of this change will be
described in a later chapter.

While the poetry of the Jihad's leaders articulates a model of the good wife
and Islamically correct gender relations in the Moslem community, the task of

redefining gender relations in Hausaland required more active promotion and

 

67 Modern Hausa reformers have been especially adamant in defining the rights
of Hausa women to Islamic education (B. Yusuf 1991:90-106; B. Calloway
1991:145-159).

68Useful introductions to the rights of Moslem women in classical Islamic
thought is provided in Musallam (1983) and B. Lewis (1988).

131

reform to reach the most basic levels of Hausa society and among people of
minimal literacy (Said 1987:75-90). To establish the rule of Islamic law and
practices, reformers engaged the minutia of family life, especially of courtship,
marriage, annulment, child custody and the transfer of wealth in marriage
ceremonies. This agenda of social reform required not only the readjustment of
Hausa marriage customs to fit the very specific and contractual model of Islamic
marriage held by the reforms, but also cut to the heart of economic relationships

in rural and urban Hausa families.

Gender, Islamic Law and the Culture of Courtship

Surviving texts of the oral culture of Islamic jurisprudence offer
compelling evidence of how legal reformers struggled to achieve marital
relationships that were recognizably Islamic within the Hausa milieu. The law
had to be inserted into Hausa popular culture and that probably encouraged the
popularity of several genre of oral literature: dilemma stories, stories about law
cases, proverbs with an Islamic twist. In this way Islamic knowledge was
indigenized to a much broader West African cultural tradition of social
regulation based on an oral culture of customary law. The biggest threat to
establishing Islamic gender relations and marriages may well have come from
what I have already begun to describe as the culture of courtship.

To be successful in bringing Hausa marriage practices into line with the
classical definition of political inequality in gender relationships, it was
imperative for reformers to intensify popular perceptions of gender differences:
men and women would have to be different and unequal in their natural ability

to participate in the political life of the community of Islam. Let me also

132

emphasize that this in no way should be read to imply a spiritual or religious
inequality between men and women--and in the summing up spiritual status was
infinitely more important that political status or even wealth in the context of
Islamic belief in nineteenth century Hausaland--a matter of eternal life or eternal
death in the eyes of the Sokoto theologians. Popular oral traditions, however,
would not put too fine a point of the distinctions between men and women and
in the tatsuniyoyi there is ample evidence that a definite streak of misogyny
existed, though it is significantly absent in Dorugu's accounts (Schon 1886). As
we shall see, the cultural practices of courtship, vigorously defined and
encouraged by girls and women in the newly emerging town life of late
nineteenth century Hausaland, would be the major threat to Islamic marriage.

Evidence of how the problem of the Islamification of Hausa customary
law and the Hausafication of Islamic law was defined and tackled in popular
culture also survives in the collections of Hausa oral literature, notably Edgar's
(Edgar 1911-13). Islamic or at least Islamicized views of gender relationships are
detected in the tatsuniyoyi, the labarai , the proverbs and the explications of Islamic
practices found throughout Edgar's collection.

Along with such Hausa cultural texts, Edgar added a Hausa translation of
the Risala, the classic North African legal treatise of the Malikite school, found in
the third volume of Litafi na Tatsuniyoyi na Hausa (Edgar 1911-13,3). Selections
from this translation and other orthodox pronouncements on Moslem courtship
and marriage practices, including precise discussions of incest, were published in
Hausa in the 1940's by the colonial press and widely distributed in Nigeria
through bookstores and in Hausa markets( 1940). Perhaps no other texts offer a

more suitable expression of the print revolution in the Hausa communities of

133

Nigeria and Niger, reaching, as these cheap pamphlets did, into the schoolrooms
of children, the zaure's of teaching malams and the adult literacy classes of the
rural Hausa heartland(M. Bivins 1974-76, 78-79, 87-88). Such publications
contributed to the body of orthodox Islamic knowledge available to literate
Hausa, especially in Nigeria, from their initial publication to the present.“

The Hausa text on marriage included in Edgar and re-published by
Abraham, Labarin Amrem Musulmi da Rabaswa da Mayaswa, remains the most
detailed, formal Hausa account of Islamic marriage practices (Abraham 1949)..
Labaran Amrem Musulmi is especially useful in establishing the legal context into
which reformers placed gender relationships. A prominent postion is given to
the question of incest in marriages between people who are in some degree
related to one another. Ironically, the concern with defining incest (as, for
example, between cousins of various sorts and degrees) suggests the practical
problems of finding suitable spouses in very small and rural Hausa communities.
In such a place, especially one in which marriages played extremely important
economic and social roles for families, but were nevertheless very unstable, how
could the selection of an appropriate spouse be carried out with regards to
prohibitions on incest? Even the tatsuniyoyi include stories about incest, whether
willfully committed or not.

What is interesting about this material on marriage is that none of it was
presented in a feminine voice: women were not composing for women, but men

are creating a legal culture for women. Nana Asma'u's poetry, for example, is

 

69Rural markets continue to attract traveling booksellers who specialize
irreligious texts. In this way even a publication such as A.M. Gummi's
controversial Tarjamar ma 'anonin al'kur’ani mai girma (Beirut 1982), a Hausa
translation of the Holy Koran, is reaching rural people in Nigeria and Niger.

134

surprisingly silent on gender issues other than the religious duties of women.
Her father and others, in fact, are more firm in their admonitions to men on their
duties to their wives. Her purpose seems to have been only to demonstrate the
workings of a basic, Islamic cultural identity, not to elaborate a feminist reading
of Islamic beliefs, law and custom. Rather like a catechist, her intention seems
only to communicate the outlines of faith and pious ritual to women. Thus, her
life and work personifies both the spiritual egalitarianism of Islamic faith and its
temporal inequalities for women and men.

In contrast to the way the rights of freeborn Moslem women were
discussed in the classical texts of the Middle East, the Hausa texts are rather
limited in the issues presented. The sexual rights of women are not fully
described: men are simply enjoined to give equal attention to each of their wives
in families where purdah was practiced. Educated men counseled other men on
how to regulate their relationships with women in Islamically-correct ways.
Gender in these texts is not simply a social relationship, it is an issue of great
legal implications. Such discussions of gender offer unique insights into the very
real problems of establishing an Islamic community on the far frontiers of the
Islamic world. On the one hand Islamic law does come from a masculine cultural
and intellectual tradition, but throughout the Islamic world significant
disagreements over how women were to be treated did exist. From the
perspective of legal practices, there was no way that the dominance of men over
women in Islam could be denied, but it could be softened to be less restrictive
and offensive to women concerned with their legal status and rights within their
own communities. Bernard Lewis summarized the problem posed by gender to

Islam:

135

But if Islamic usage rejects privilege, it admits--in certain situations
it even imposes--inequality. Three inequalities in particular were
established and regulated by law and developed through centuries
of usage--the unequal status of master and slave, of man and
women, of Muslim and non-Muslim. These are, of course three
different kinds of classification, which may overlap or intersect, and
the practical effect of belonging to one or other of these categories
varied greatly from time to time and from place to place. In
principle, equality of status, and with it the right to participate at
whatever level in the exercise of power, belonged only to those who
were free, male and Muslim, while those who lacked any of these
qualifications, the slave, the woman, and the unbeliever, were
excluded. (Lewis 1988, 64-65).

Less orthodox Islamic interpretations of appropriate social and sexual
relationships between men and women are also found in the .published
collections of tatsuniyoyi. Some described acceptable sexual practices while
others detailed the Moslem rituals related to marriage, sex and childbirth, such as
the baths prescribed for new mothers and the rituals of naming ceremonies
(Edgar 1911-13, 3:318-328, 222-223). The details of Moslem marriages were
outlined, though men also were advised not to pick a wife during a festival when
everyone looked their best, practical advice from a Hausa point of view (Edgar
1911-1913, 1:251-4,.3:225-8; Abraham 1940:142-50) Non-Islamic local practices
were also described, perhaps to give the European collectors an understanding of
the diversity of so-called Hausa Islamic popular culture, especially to gain their
support for furthering the cause of orthodox reform. Edgar's malams described
how the men of Kwangwama were fined by the king if they impregnated a
virgin; how their baby boys were circumcised at birth while infant girls were

betrothed at that time, but adding that the girls would later have some say on

136

whether or not the marriage was carried out (Edgar 1911-1913, 3:231). The
account of Kwangwama also included a description of the ceremonial presence
of virgins and little girls at religious festivals overseen by malams, a practice
which would have been scandalously un-Islamic (Edgar 1913, 3 240, 310-11). The
kirari of Hausa women and a list of the blasphemous women who destroyed their
companions offered a final, and harsh, characterization of Hausa women in

general:

Kada ka yarda doki, kada ka yarda da mace kada ka yarda da dare,
kada ka yarda da gulbi, kada kayarda da daji (Abraham 1940:144)

That is, loosely translated: "Don't trust a horse, a woman, the dark, a
swamp or the wilderness." This was addressed to men.

Tatsuniyoyi were part of an oral tradition in which women, as I have
argued in the previous chapter, used pornographic imagery in narratives to, at
the very least, scoff the forms of masculine domination projected in other genre
of Hausa oral literature. The Sokoto reformers clearly heard this message in the
secular narratives of storytellers and praise singers. Shehu Usman dan Fodio
condemned the overtly sexual content of tatsuniyoyi and the profane verse
recitations of praise singers, male and female. Reform poets composed religious
works for the moral edification of ordinary Hausa, especially women whose,
song traditions were condemned as "worthless". But, I would contend that by
the late nineteenth century, Islamic reformers recognized a need to incorporate
sexuality into an acceptable, outwardly Islamic definition of heterosexual sex and

gender roles in marriage.

137

Sexuality was an accepted part of daily Hausa life and profoundly
influenced the successful implimentation of Islamic family institutions. In the
Hausa setting even Islamic specialists found ways to use the hadiths to sanction
the practical knowledge of sex in marriage. The following example is taken form

Edgar's work:

"There are three sorts of men and three sorts of women, and it the
right sort isn't paired off with his fellow, their marriage won't last.
They are: the highly sexed man...the man of medium of sexual
inclinations...and the man that is lightly sexed. The man "of bone"
is so called because of his extreme virility. If he gets and erection,
he will be wild until he can find somewhere to put it. Whereas the
man "of spleen", he gets the opportunity, he welcomes it, and uses
it when he gets it. But if he doesn't, he is able to wait until the
chance comes. But the man "of flesh", if he has to do with a woman
who is herself highly sexed, or if they marry, they will quickly
separate, for his lack of zeal. As for the three sorts of women, first
she with an excessively developed clitoris; if she doesn't get a man
"of bone" as a husband, the marriage won't last. The woman of
medium sexual desire, (whose clitoris) is neither much exposed nor
deeply set in, the husband for her is a man of "spleen". But if she
doesn't get one, marrying rather a man "of bone", the marriage
won't last. Nor will it, if she marries a man "of flesh". As for a
woman of little sexuality, whose clitoris is set in deeply, unless she
gets for a husband a man "of flesh", her marriage won't last, that is
to a man of "bone." Nor will it to a man "of spleen". No, the only
man for her is a man "of flesh". If she marries him, the marriage
will succeed. Nor does a woman want a man like a rooster, who
ejaculates very quickly and then gets up. No, she doesn't like that.
Nor again, does a woman like a man "of bone", who goes on and on
at it for a long time, without getting off. A woman likes a man to be
moderate, not too hasty, nor too protracted. Nor again, do women
like a man to sleep with them night after night without paying
them attention. They like copulation every night, even if only once.

138

However old a woman is, she will never dislike sexual relations,
though a man may grow tired and leave a woman. But if a woman
says that she doesn't want a man to sleep with her, even it they go
to the judge's compound, the judge will not put her to the oath, for
she is not speaking the truth. It is, in fact, the man who has rejected
her. All this is most certainly not a fable, but it is veritably so and
the truth. And if anyone denies it, let him read the words of
wisdom, let him look in the Book of Hadiths, and he will see it.
That's all. This with peace ( Edgar 1911; translation from Skinner
1969, 3:326-7).

Of course, this selection also appears to show that clitorodectomy was not
an indigenous Hausa practice, even in devout Moslem circles. In fact, the two
nineteenth century accounts of clitorodectomy in Hausa both come from
informants in the zongo of Kete Krachi. Mischlisch gives the account in Hausa,
but adds, in German, that the Hausa did not practice female circumcision,
though other African groups in Kete Krachi did. The Hausa account also
includes details which do not fit into the know patterns (and symbolism) of
Hausa socio-religious practices (Mischlisch 1942,121-5). Rattray's informant,
Malam Shaibu, insisted that the faithful Moslems in Kano practiced female
circumcision even when Islam was corrupted among the Hausa elite of the city.
However, he, too, was a member of the Kete Krachi Hausa community and
chances are very good, indeed, that the text he prepared for Rattray was
influenced by the same sources as that given to Mischlisch. In fact, they are
virtually identical texts (Rattray 1926, 2:200-2). Baba of Karo's explanation that

the clitoris of infant girls was clipped only if it seemed excessively long (the same

139

logic of Hausa uvulectomies, also carried out on infants of both sexes)
corresponds to the explanations of my own informants (M. Smith, 1964).70
Ultimately, of course, the successful reform of Hausa gender relations
would have unpredictable social and economic consequences for ordinary people
which would go well beyond the realm of spiritual salvation. It is essential to
accept, however, the reformers' insistence that for the individual woman or man
there was no separation of spiritual life from the demands of daily life. Out of
such a context of religious belief, twentieth century Hausa would draw on an
especially well-articulated model of the good Hausa woman. Tafewa Balewa
used this model in shaping the character of the mother in his very popular Hausa
novel of slavery, Shehu Umar(Balewa 1960). I would like to suggest that
wherever Abraham's selections form the Risala failed to enlighten, Shehu Umar
propagated an identification of the good, Islamic Hausa woman. As further
literary evidence of the popularization of an ideal Moslem Hausa marriage,
consider the extremely un-Islamic marriage presented in the popular Hausa play,
Uwar Galma (M. Sada n.d.). The gender relations in the Hausa marriage which is

the theme of this play seems to have been constructed, point by point, in contrast

 

70As a woman and the mother of two girls of an age to be included in the
preliminary stages of Hausa courtship culture, I was never asked about
clitorodectomy in Mahuta. This was not done out of shyness on the part of my
women informants (neighbors and friends as well), who asked my any question
they wanted answered and included me in those activities, night time visiting,
hira sessions and the singing and dancing which accompanied work bees to
pound floors for one another. On one occasion, a woman and some girls visiting
me used my daughters' dolls to demonstrate sexual positions and ask about what
I knew and did. On the whole the open discussion of sex among Hausa women I
knew in Nigeria and Niger was frequently well beyond the norm for women of
my own Catholic and middleclass American upbringing. Mack's poems
demonstrate a similar frankness.

140

to the ideals expressed by Islamic authorities, as expressed from the poetry of
Usuman dan Fodio to Shehu Umar. The play, in its jaded portrayal of Hausa
marriage, demonstrates how embedded an Islamic model of marriage had
become in popular Hausa culture by the mid-twentieth century. How was that
acceptance fostered in the less than orthodox sources of the oral culture of

courtship and marriage?

Reforming the Culture of Courtship and Marriage

In the previous chapter I showed that the tatsuniyoyi were literary artifacts
of a culture in which courtship and marriage were of fundamental importance to
individuals and to the social reproduction of the basic institutions of Hausa
society, marriage and the family household. Class differences could allow for
differences in the ways and means individuals utilized to elaborate a basic model
in which men and women found suitable marriage partners and, I argued, more
importantly, the wealth in terms of power over people, towns, and possessions,
to establish Hausa families. I marked differences from models of marriage found
in European folk stories and I noted that Hausa tatsuniyoyi do not assume that a
stable, monogamous marriage is a "happy ending." Polygamy, concubinage and
divorce were accepted as the norm, while the notion of the conjugal relationship
leading to life-long stability was simply not projected in the tatsuniyoyi.

In this chapter I began by describing how the Sokoto Jihad encouraged the
use of women as negative literary images and, at the same time, called for the
reform of marriage and women's status. The position of women, I concluded,
was fundamental to the mission of creating an Islamic society, in the Sokoto

Caliphate. In addition, I suggested that the final success of the Sokoto mission to

141

reform gender relations in Hausa society was significantly advanced by the
introduction of the western technology of printing and cheap, mass publication,
especially in Nigeria. 71

In this section I would like to turn directly to an examination of evidence
which I believe affirms my argument that while reforming women and marriage
were fundamental to creating an Islamic Hausa society, neither were easily
attained in the context of the nineteenth century Hausa social formation. Rather,
it would appear that the very same economic, social and political sources of
security and wealth which stimulated the formation of Moslem marriages and
the acceptance of Islamic family law also were used by women and girls to
secure access to new sources of personal power and wealth through the
articulation of an extremely female-centered culture of courtship and first
marriage.

The historical sources I examine here are rather more diverse than any I
have yet used. They include: the biographies of nineteenth century men and
women; and the accounts of courtship and marriage customs collected by
Europeans from Hausa informants either at the turn of the century or
commenting on customs of the past (Flegel 1985; Edgar 1911-13; Tremearne
1913,1914; Fletcher 1912; Hassan and Na'iba 1952; M. Smith 1964). Linguistic
evidence completes the repertoire of my sources (Schon 1869, 1886; Landerloin
and Tilho 1909; Bargery 1934; Abraham; 1946; Mischlisch 1906; Koelle 1968;
Lukas 1937; Cyffer and Hutchison 1990).

 

71No formal support of literacy and literature in Hausa was given in Niger by the
French.

142

As documented in the tatsuniyoyi, in linguistic evidence of sexual practices
and in the life histories of nineteenth and early twentieth century Hausa,
courting girls and boys were allowed a significant degree of sexual freedom. The
customs of courtship allowed girls and boys to become sexually active with little
adult interference or social approbation. The virginity of the girls was to be
maintained, but even pregnancy seems not to have been severely punished.

The linguistic prevalence of a sexual vocabulary built on the Hausa word,
tsrance (intense sexual play), sheds light on Hausa attitudes towards sex in
courtship and in marriage. By all accounts, whether found in early explorations
of Hausa folk customs or in the actions of characters in the tatsuniyoyi, tsrance
was accepted and practiced throughout the Hausaphone regions of the
nineteenth century.” Linguistically, the word is Hausa and it is found in all of
the dictionaries based on nineteenth century Hausa dialects.

The custom of allowing tsrance among unmarried girls and boys gave
girls tremendous power and control over their own sexuality. However, it is
interesting to note that the age of girls' first marriages was younger in Moslem
households by the 1940's and, if Baba's memory of her own girlfriends is to be
trusted, by the end of the nineteenth century as well. Early marriage was
certainly a way for Hausa attitudes towards premarital sexuality, which were not
those sanctioned by the reformers of the Sokoto Caliphate, could be Islamicized.
In a comparative perspective, it seems that Islamic scholars and leaders have

frequently sought the means to circumscribe and legitimize human sexuality. In

 

72This is a fine example of the bizarre predilections of early anthropology: of
course Hausa would engage in sex play and have a vocabulary to describe what
they were up to. Only the anthropologists were suprised.

143

the end, it would be in the containment of female sexuality through early
marriage and the parallel (if not equal) restriction of masculine sexuality, once
again through socially and spiritually acceptable forms of marriage, that popular
Islamic culture would get the message of the reformers across in Hausaland.

However, even in the case of early. marriages for girls, popular Islamic
notions of gender should have undermined the social acceptability of tsrance and
make premarital sexual experience more shameful for a first-time bride. While
Baba suggests that devout parents were less than happy with tsrance, she
confirms the suspicion that they were, essentially, unable to prevent their
daughters and sons from active participation in the culture of courtship in which
tsrance played such an important role. Tatsuniyoyi repeat this theme. In the
story of the malam's daughter and the chief's daughter who are locked up in a
hut to keep them from boys, the king's daughter still finds a way to take on a
boyfriend and get pregnant (Edgar 1911-13; Skinner 1977, 3:). The more
restrained notion of appropriate behavior for more orthodox Moslem Hausa
women found in the work of the Sokoto reformers also might have underscored
the male fear of female sexuality so often evoked in the stories about willful,
independent, courting girls and their abuse of boys.

Islamic law also intervened in the issues of wealth exchange in courtship
and marriage customs, though I would argue from the evidence of marriage
accounts from nineteenth and early twentieth century informants, that in this
arena it is best to think of the indigenization of Islamic practices. Linguistic
examples also demonstrate the phenomena I want to signify here.

The cultural negotiations involved in the process of accepting Islamic

definitions of gender relations in courtship and marriage are nicely exemplified

144

in parallel linguistic shifts in Hausa. Linguistic evidence suggests a pattern of
Islamic influence on the Hausa vocabulary for courtship and marriage which
may have been influenced by the cultural boundaries of the late Sokoto
Caliphate. The Hausa name for virgin girls is a good place to start.

In Hausa the noun, budurwa, has been translated into Arabic and
European languages as the cultural equivalent of "virgin". Budurwa was made to
carry the full legal content associated with the notion of female virginity 5 Islamic
legal texts were translated into Hausa after the arrival of the British and, of great
importance for Hausa popular culture, the print revolution of the Hausa
language press.

The word's Hausa entomology, however, "those who do burda", is a
reference to the way girls, when their breasts started to fill out and they reached
the age or menarche, would draw their banti up between their legs and tuck it
securely into its waistband. When asked for an explanation, Hausa informants
commented that this was to keep them from "spoiling themselves" with the boys
they took as tsrance partners. For girls who had little privacy and carried
responsibilities to work for their families, "doing burda" probably also referred to
practical ways of taking care of the monthly problem of menstrual blood.”

By the time it reached the European dictionaries of Hausa, an Islamic gloss
of budurwa had been added and the word was given a derivation from the
Arabic, batul and the Hebrew, bethula, virgin (Abraham 1962, 113). Budurwa, a
perfectly useful Hausa word on its own right and one conveying a pragmatic,

observable fact in the life of young girls, came to be associated with a far

 

73There does not seem to have been a formal practice of secluding women and
girls during their periods.

145

different conceptualization, both cultural and legal, of virginity and the virgin
bride.

language negotiated the cultural space between Islamic law and Hausa popular
culture and, most certainly, between women and men in other ways. Two verbs
in Hausa were used to describe the public contraction of marriage, arma/amre
and aure. These verbs were not used interchangeably in the early published
Hausa texts and dictionaries and seem to reflect the geography of local dialects.
Today this is still true in spoken Hausa. Among Nigerien Hausa, arma/amre
remains in common use in contexts in which aure would be used in Nigeria,
even in Katsina and Sokoto. Schon, working with Dorugu, who was from
Damagaram, includes arma/amre as meaning marriage, but does not give aure or
any phrases relating to marriage built on aure (Schon 1886). Landerloin, who
traveled with the Mission Tilho through Damagaram in 1907, gives arma/amre
and includes other words from the vocabulary of the marriage celebration based
on arma/amre (Landerloin and Tilho 1909, 9-11). In his definition of one such
word, amare or amaria, he adds that any woman married without the blessing of a
malam could not use the title amaria (bride), but only that of farka, or concubine
(Landerloin and Tilho 1909z9). Abraham uses farka to mean adultery and farkashi
to mean paramours (Abraham 1962:255-6). In Bargery,farka is directly related to
illegitimate sexual relations, being translated as fornication or adultery in
northern Hausa dialects (Bargery 1934:307). It could be used to mean kwartanci,
commonly translated as prostitution, as practiced by either sex, and it could be
used as a curse, dan farka, being translated as "bastard" (Bargery 1934:307).
Mischlish, working with Hausa informants in Kete Krachi, Ghana, gives a

detailed explication of amra as marriage and amarya as a bride (Mischlisch

146

1906:16). While he also includes aura to mean "the giving of a woman" (with two
different tones used in the pronunciation), he does not include phrases about
marriage based on the use of aure. .

While Bargery includes both arma/amre and words based on them as
meaning marriage and the celebration of marriage, he simply indicates that they
are interchangeable with aure. In fact, Bargery and his malams listed twenty-
eight words or phrases based on either verbal form, including amarya, bride in
every Hausa dialect, and, capitalizing on the possessiveness of a new husband or
an infant, amarya jego, bride of the infant (Bargery 1934:44-45). The
interchangeable amar da kai/aurad da kai, a woman who chooses her own
husband, seems to simplify the relationship between the two words, to suggest
that dialect choices are responsible for differences in usage, yet both words seem
to carry unique significations in specific sociolinguistic settings. Words and
phrases built on aure, are marked by greater legal precision than those based on
arma/amre. Such words, for example, describe a variety of contractual marriages
found in Islamic law. This pattern of usage appears to have increased between
the publication of Bargery's massive Hausa dictionary in 1934 and the second
edition of Abraham's equally comprehensive work in 1962. In Abraham we
discover that the linguistic complex surrounding aure is considerably more
developed than that found earlier in Bargary (Abraham 1962:44-45).

At first, it looks as if arma/amre was used in Hausa communities outside of
the main stream of Hausa Islamic culture, presumably as found in the Sokoto
Caliphate. Assuming this, one might conclude that au re represents the
Islamificaton of at least the vocabulary of Hausa marriage. In addition, both

Bargary and Abraham believed aure was based on the Arabic word 'aurat, which

147

Abraham defines as "pudenda," to make the case for considering aure an Arabic
loan meaning marriage is complete--from the point of view of lexical expansion.
The publication dates of the dictionaries seem to suggest a rough chronology for
such an interpretation, beginning, as they do with the vocabulary provided to
Schon by young, uneducated Doruga and ending with the scholarly malams of
Mischlish, Bargery and Abraham. However, more is happening than the visible
change in vocabulary (Ehret 1981, 2:153-182).

First, as Landerloin and Tilho point out, the differences between arma/amre
and aure were, indeed, influenced by dialects. A consonant shift found in
northern and western dialects (Daura, Damagaram, Sokoto, Katsina) allows m to
become on or u in some settings. Landerloin and Tilho give the example of
damre, to tie, becoming daure and the shift detected in amre to aure works on the
same principle. Further evidence is in the way the phrase damren amre, found in
Schon and Landerloin, becomes dauren aure in Bargery and Abraham. The
dialect difference shows up in the tatsuniyoyi and accounts of Hausa customs as
well. Dorugu consistently uses am re rather than aure, for example, but Rattray's
informant uses aure as does Imam Imoru. Perhaps the most interesting example,
for my purpose here, is the use of aure in the document on marriage prepared in
the Sokoto dialect by Edgar's informant: the informant felt compelled to point
out that aure meant amre. This strongly suggests that the literate, Islamically-
educated elite was well-aware of the regional variations in the language of
marriage and believed that clarification of the printed text was necessary to make
the message clear across Hausaland. It is not idle speculation to suggest that the
Sokoto malam knew that the course of Islamic reform was still incomplete fin de

siecle Hausaland. Though such informants themselves used the legally preferred

148

verb form of aure, rather than arma/amre, they, nevertheless, still used the
vocabulary built on arma/amre.

Had the Islamic reformation failed to wrest complete linguistic control of
gender in marriage and courtship from the dominion of Hausa women and girls?
It certainly looks that way, for the most resistant vocabulary is precisely that
relating to marriage and built on the older Hausa form, arma/amre: there is no
Hausa equivalent for amarya, bride, or amarci, the state of being a bride, derived
from aure. . In short, just as the variations of the myth of Daura and Bayajidda
have been reinterpreted to fit into specific political settings, the assumption that
an Arabic loan word, aure, has replaced an earlier Hausa word for marriage
marks a similar mythical passage towards the Islamification of Hausa culture
through linguistic drift. 7‘

To summarize, in the Hausa language there seems to be evidence that by
the late nineteenth century an elaborate language and culture of courtship and
marriage, especially for virgins, was thoroughly in place. Women, especially
virgins marrying for the first time, controlled in varying degrees the institutions,
including tsrance, of courtship and the ritual exchanges of wealth involved in
courtship and marriagei-‘On the other hand, evidence from the life histories of
nineteenth century informants readily confirms the instability of marriages and

the volatility of Hausa gender relations so often described in the tatsuniyoyi.

 

74The idea of Islamification as a slow process of cultural "drift" was used by
Letzion to describe the Islam in pre-colonial Ghana (Letzion 1968).
75French ethnographers working in Hausa Niger have given greater attention to
this matter than their colleagues in Nigeria. This is at least, in part, a measure of
the intellectual boundaries dividing French and English social scientists in Africa
and, indeed, in Europe as well (Nicolas 1974; Raynaut 1977; M. Maus 1966 ).

149

Class was an extremely important variable in how much a girl or woman
was able to use popularly accepted courtship strategies: girls from wealthy
families probably had more leverage over their parents and their suitors than less
well-off girls. The very image of the poor man's daughter in "The Song of
Poverty and Wealth", a nineteenth century poem, emphasizes her lack of
marriage opportunities, her lack of personal power in the situation where girls
and women did have some legal basis for exercising their own free wills (Duffill
1989). On the other hand, as if to make the same point by noting aberrant
scenarios, courtship stories in which fickle girls come to no good are readily
found throughout the tatsuniyoyi. Certainly, it is not unreasonable to see in such
narratives a masculine interpretation on a girl's power over the critical event in
male as well as female lives.

The descriptions of courtship and marriage gleaned from accounts such as
Baba's, Imoru's and Mai Gashin Baki and his wives also demonstrate a culture of
courtship and marriage in which at least some Hausa girls were empowered to
exercise considerable control over the choice of spouses and the exchange of
wealth, especially at the time of their first marriages. This is further supported
by the autonomy of some of the women we glimpse in the travelers' accounts,
especially those who were wealthy traders in their own right. Finally, the
emphasis in the tatsuniyoyi on girls who acquire wealth through their own
adventures and initiative before they find suitable husbands (goblins and other
supernatural spouses do not seem to count) parallels this feminine
understanding of power in the culture of courtship and marriage.

Nineteenth century Hausa women and men were equally preoccupied

with courtship and marriage. Men's accounts, whether in popular oral fiction or

150

as the reproduction of texts for outsiders, differ only in the degree of detailed
information on courtship and marriage gifts they provide. No male account, for
example, can match, detail, for detail, that of Baba of Karo. Hausa women
informants, young and old, from all classes in rural as well as urban settings,
continue to outmatch male informants in their display of knowledge of the
culture of courtship and marriage ( Bivins 1974-6, 1978-9, 1987-8). Their accounts
hold the key to understanding the exchange of wealth which marked marriages
and, through marriage and gender, a Hausa definition of a "moral economy."
Even today, teenage Hausa women hold considerable power over the material
culture of marriage in rural Niger (Bivins 1974-6,1978-9, 1987-8; E. Arnold 1989).
Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the Hausa
culture of courtship and marriage proved to be a contentious opponent to Islamic
reform. The activities which were part of this culture, tsrance, girls' social and
economic activities, especially dancing, praise songs, the social setting of
flirtation and teenage romance conspired against the control of authority,
whether parental or societal. While Hiskett noted how the secular traditions of
verse, praise songs, and dancing were attacked by the Sokoto reformers from the
very start of the jihad movement, Baba of Karo remembered that as late as the
last decade of the nineteenth century the songs, dances, economic activities and
liberty of girls on the verge of marriage had not been fully contained by Islam.
Some devout, male informants still refuse to narrate what they consider to be the

worthless and sinful texts of such secular pastimes (Nasr 1980).

151

Chronological evidence of the expansion of Koranic education

While we cannot at this time date the transformation of the status of wives
with great specificity, data on the expansion of Islamic education in Zinder
suggests that the broad pOpularization of an Islamic definition of the good wife
is a 20th century phenomena. I will make the argument that this was one of the
consequences of the growth of Koranic schools in Zinder in the 1930's and
through to the 1960's. I will use the information on the Koranic schools to
describe this process and link the Islamification of the status of wives with the
increasing Islamification of child rearing practices. This evidence seems to
indicate that the spread of Islamic education was the most important vehicle of
Islamic concepts of gender, women and family law in Hausaland. This, of
course, deflects from the accepted role of Moslem merchant communities.

Baier's study of North African merchants strongly suggests that the North
African community was too small, too concentrated in the most urban areas of
Hausaland, and too aloof from the talakawa to have played a role in the
Islamification of the talakawa. Hausa merchants involved with the transsaharan
trade would have been exposed to the North African traders and there is
evidence that the North Africans provided a model for consumption and a
mercantile culture. But was their influence strong enough to establish Islamic
ideals of female behavior and family life? Not even the wedding jewelry
imported into Zinder seems to have been adopted by Hausa women (Bivins

1987-8). 76

 

76North African-style jewelry was listed among goods arriving in Zinder via the
trans-Saharan trade in 1912. I suspect that it was aimed at the resident North
African community and not Hausa consumers.

152

Finally, the acceptance of the Sokoto reform message in popular literature,
oral and written, seems to mark an important reorientation within northern
Hausa Islamic traditions away from those of Bornu to Sokoto. While the contrast
between the northern Hausa communities, such as Damagaram and Daura, and
the central Hausa emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate has generally been
represented as one embodying the retention of "traditional," non-Islamic Hausa
culture on the part of the former and the acceptance of "genuinely" Islamic
practices in the latter, I think the contrast is overdrawn and perhaps ahistorical
for the nineteenth century. A distinct national identity was beginning to emerge
within Hausaland based on Islam, but not, ironically, on either Arabic or
Fulfulde or either a pastoral or urban social model. It seem that while the Fulbe
elite of the Caliphate transformed themselves when they accepted the urban
model of the good Islamic society, they also adopted Hausa language and many
Hausa customs. On the other hand, for the Hausa population, whether in or
outside of the Caliphate, already living in relatively stable settlements allowed
for the intensification of a Hausa Islamic popular culture without the dislocation
of adapting a new form of social organization. As late as the 1960's, demographic
data which related town size to the religious composition of the population
would show the continuation of a classically Moslem pattern of conversion:
people adhering to Islam lived in towns while "fetishists", either Hausa
Maguzawa or nomadic Bororo Fulbe, did not (Nicolas 1975).

Out of the Sokoto Jihad's efforts to establish dar es salam in Hausaland
would emerge the notion of an Islamic national identity based on the Hausa
language and the uniquely urban culture of Hausa towns, not either the language

or the culture of the Fulfulbe themselves. I wonder if what has really taken place

153

is not more a reflection of the acceptance of a model of Islam, Islamic values and
Islamic education, specially propagated in the sufi brotherhoods and in
Hausaland especially the Tyjanniya. This seems to be a model which is inclusive,
not elitist, and culturally adaptive.

There can be no argument that Islamic popular culture was a product of
nineteenth and twentieth century changes, some economic, some political and
some religious, all of which allowed for a vigorous growth in the acceptance of a
more standardized form of Islamic marriage and courtship. But I think that it is
really important to recognize that Hausa Islamic culture shows a pattern of
cultural exchanges sometimes working to Islamicize Hausa practices and
sometimes working to Hausify Islam. An obvious example of what I mean is the
culture of the so-called Hausa-Fulani aristocracy (Mack 1991:3-26, 109-29).

While the contrast between the northern Hausa states and the central
Hausa states of the Sokoto Caliphate has generally been summarized as the
result of the boundaries of the Sokoto Caliphate, the link between the spread of
Islamic education and principles in the caliphate to changes in gender were
complex, slow and erratically shaped. In the twentieth century, urban areas of
Damagaram would share a common Islamic culture, increasingly focused on the
city of Kano as a center of religious education and scholarship. This culture
would be far more alike than the colonial boundaries and the language of the

colonial politics of Niger and Nigeria assumed."

 

77Ironically, even in Zinder, Hausa informants call the Second World War the
war against the Germans, yet Niger was and remained until 1942 a part of Vichy
France and an alley of the Germans (Bivins 1987-8).

154

Conclusion

What I have tried to show with this examination of the culture of courtship and
marriage in fin de siecle Hausaland is that the process of conversion was neither a
linear or chronologically ordered event. Economic conditions more often found
in urban areas than in extremely rural regions seem to be of fundamental
importance to conversion. Furthermore, Islam seems to have been added to an
emerging national identity already expressed in the Hausa language (Hiskett
1975, 27-42). Surviving texts of the oral culture of Islamic jurisprudence offer
compelling evidence of how legal reformers struggled to achieve gender
relationships that were recognizably Islamic within the vastly more compelling
Hausa cultural milieu. The law had to be inserted into Hausa popular culture
and that encouraged the popularity of several genre of Hausa oral literature.

The actual marriage ceremony for virgin girls was surprisingly stable and
reasonably in conformation with the general precepts of Islamic marriage in
Hausa town life by the late nineteenth century. However, aspects of courtship
still showed local variations which seem to hark back to much older and
dubiously Islamic cultural traditions. Boys and girls continued to organize
themselves into social groups with leaders chosen from among one another and
characterized by the relatively similar age (chronologically and socially) of the
members. The activities of the groups revolved around defining a space within
the context of daily Hausa life (and adult supervision) in which to enjoy the
excitement and relative freedom of being too young to marry, but old enough to
flirt. Nineteenth century Hausa teenagers, especially in villages and towns,
created their own, unique youth culture. Girls and boys developed friendships

with one another and enjoyed relaxed sexual relationships (tsrance) with their

155

intimate friends. These relationships are abundantly described in the tatsuniyoyi
and generated a separate and vivid vocabulary of sexuality in courtship: Bargery
and Abraham are especially rich in words and phrases built around the
meanings and practices of tsrance.(Bargery 1934; Abraham 1949; Fergeson 1973;
M. Smith 1964; Skinner 19684977)?“ Even the much more supervised aristocratic
girls appear to have had their version of youthful freedom including, probably,
tsrance, though in at least the idealized society of the tatsuniyoyi, girls and boys of
good families were "just talking" (Skinner 1968-1977, 3).

From labarai in the collections of tatsuniyoyi and from ethnographic
narratives collected in the first half of the twentieth century, it seems that Hausa
views on the significance of virginity at first marriage remained inconsistent,
even after nearly one hundred years of Islamic reform. The loss of virginity was
not generally punished by Islamic methods, that is, as Shehu Usuman dan Fodio
had complained, girls were not stoned or whipped, as fornication and adultery
were punished under Islamic law. Instead, a girl might have suffered public

embarrassments of various sorts; she might even have been returned to her

 

78Though western anthropologists, especially the Smith's make teenage sexuality
appear to be something of and organized social event in their treatment of tsrance,
I think they were either too easily shocked or took Margaret Mead too seriously.

79Critics of colonial economic policies noted the important relationship between
local agricultural knowledge and bio-diversity and criticized the ways cash
cropping forced or, at the very least, encouraged Hausa to breakdown accepted
classifications of land and patterns of land use and bring even marginally
productive land into production for cash crops. The process of grading and
standardizing commercial crops also stimulated a declining use of a variety of
seeds as farmers were told or, again, encouraged to use only specific cultivers.
The best example of this would come in the twentieth century when the British
Cotton Growers Association would aggressively distribute an American variety
of short staple cotton seed for the exclusive use of farmers interested in selling
their cotton to its buying agents.

156

parents, though the delicate family negotiations on which marriages were
arranged would have been abused by such an action. On the other hand, there
were ways a bridegroom could respond to his bride's lack of virginity which
were less socially traumatic, either for her, or for their families. He could
surreptitiously kill a fowl and spill its blood on the marriage bed to fake his
bride's defloration. He could make a shambles of her trousseau and publicly
embarrass her and her parents. However, once the display of injured male pride
was over, the new couple were free to settle down and live at peace with one
another (Abraham 1940, Edgar 1911; Hassan and Shaibu 1952).

This is not to underestimate the social value of a virginity, especially in a
cultural and legal setting in which considerable prestige and wealth was invested
in the ideal of the virgin bride and the moral economy of her first marriage. In
the language of marriage, there are, indeed, linguistic references to the
significance of virginity and female sexuality: kai, head, is a common euphemism
for virginity while a woman who makes her own marriage choice was said to
have made an amar da kai, or she had married off her own "head". Such a woman
clearly controlled her sexuality and valued her innate power to use it as social,
economic or even political capital. That Hausa slang would honor female
empowerment precisely in the institution over which men, by Islamic law,
exercised supreme authority. underscores the weapons women could mobilize
under the rules of engagement in the culture of Hausa courtship and marriage.

When does the reform message begin to take hold in Hausaland? By the
time that Burdon and Edgar were collecting texts of Hausa literature in northern
Nigeria, the Islamic message was being transmitted into Hausa popular culture

through tatsuniyoyi . Women were ridiculed in misanthropic, moralizing stories;

157

women and used as symbols of the sinful world, impossible to reform. In other
words, because the tatsuniyoyi of the late nineteenth century do indeed present
such a view of women, it is safe to assume that the Islamic message of the
reformers was reaching some Hausa audiences.

In Hausaland, as we shall see in latter chapters, the message of religious
reform, once introduced, would, indeed, affect fundamental perceptions of
gender, but not until the world of daily life prepared the economic foundations
for the implementation of the reformers' ideals at the level of ordinary, rural
families. The Islamification of rural Hausaland would be significantly different

from that of the highly urban centers of the Sokoto Caliphate

158

Chapter 5: Language, Gender and the Ecology of Hausaland

Abu ukku ne yau cikin duniya, da su kasa ke ciran girma.
Na fari noma na biyu ilmi, a bautar Jalla mai girma.

Noma ne rayuwar kowa, sarauniyar ayyuka noma.

Mutum bai kyalkyalin fuska, sai cikinsa da haifuwar noma.
Mai kudi ba zai yi gidaje ba, sai da kingin haifuwar noma.
Malami ba za ya koyar ba, sai cikinsa da haifuwar noma.
Mai koyo ba shi gane wa, sai cikinsa da haifuwar noma.
Ma'ikaci ba shi yin aiki, sai ya dau kyankyassan noma.
(Hiskett 19752254)

The Hausa interpreted their landscape as an ecology in which to seek
sustenance for physical and spiritual survival through such cultural practices as
agriculture and cuisine, religion and medicine. Linguistically, Hausa is sensitive
to the unique characteristics of the environment and the very descriptiveness of
the Hausa vocabulary for soils, plants, animals, birds, insects, trees and sources
of water is evidence of an old and detailed cultural construction of a distinctive
Hausa landscape.

Hausa describes a complex categorization of soils and includes a
specialized vocabulary for the agricultural technology needed to work different
kinds of fields and to cultivate the specific varieties of domesticated plants know
and used by the Hausa. The diversity of words naming and describing
cultivated and wild plants regularly used by the Hausa is further evidence of the
linguistic bridge between culture, technology and environment.

Linguistic evidence also shows that Hausa people created a material

culture with a cuisine, crafts, such as weaving, ceramics, iron-working and

159

smithing and basketry within their natural setting. In this way, the language of
technology serves to link the natural environment in all its variety to the cultural
inventiveness of Hausa society. A similar message is carried in the language of
Hausa cuisine, while even the simplest Hausa dwelling marks the adaptation of
Hausa culture to environment. In short, culture and ecology were closely
interdependent elements in the natural history of Hausaland.

In this chapter, I write about the relationship of Hausa culture to the
Hausa landscape from two perspectives. First, using Hausa sources, including
language and material culture, I define Hausaland as that geographic space in
which the natural environment has been worked in an identifiably Hausa way.
Language is the key to my definition, for I am looking for a cultural process
thoroughly described in the Hausa language itself. Thus, loan words relating to
either the environment or to its cultural exploitation will require explanation.

My second perspective is taken from the descriptive travel narratives of
nineteenth century European visitors to Hausaland. With this evidence I
examine the Hausafication of new landscapes as part of the extension of the geo-
political boundaries of the Sokoto Caliphate. I caution, however, that the notion
of the Caliphate's boundaries, whether in the nineteenth century or today,
inadequately describes the cultural and physical space of a linguistically defined
Hausaland.

Finally, the thread that runs so true through both linguistic and narrative
constructions of the Hausa landscape is that of gender. In the cultural practices
of nineteenth and twentieth century Hausaland, women often played a pivotal
role in the transformation of natural objects, such as the ingredients of food or

the fibers of textiles, into the objects of Hausa material culture. Their assertive

160

presence in the production and reproduction of the Hausa social formation is

abundantly described in the sources I use in this chapter.

Language, Culture and Landscape

The effective exploitation of an environment such as the Central Sudan
requires the development of an appropriate farming culture. This includes the
identification and nurturing of suitable plants and crops through the adoption of
a variety of cultivation technologies. Successful farming cultures depend on
human observation and innovation for the selection of plant varieties and their
cultivation. Language documents such technological developments, not only in
the naming of specialized hoes and other agricultural tools, but also in speech
which describes how such tools are physically manipulated.

Hausa includes language which describes the properties of soils and the
methods of field preparation, including types of fallowing and the application of
fertilizers. Hausa also includes a complex of language surrounding the
technology of irrigation and the digging of wells. However, the technological
base of Hausa agriculture was a variety of hoes with specialized functions, all
produced by Hausa blacksmiths from iron ore collected and processed in specific
locations throughout Hausaland. These tools were adapted to particular soil
types as well as to specific tasks, such as ridging the fields in preparations for
planting crops like cotton and sweet potatoes.

The technology for processing agricultural produce, dominated,
controlled and, in terms of the creation of a household, owned by women, was
somewhat less specialized. Wooden mortars and grinding stones were used for a

variety of tasks and continue to be essential to the preparation of Hausa cuisine.

161

Grain, for example, required the application of a sequence of special process
before it could be made suitable for cooking. Cooking also required the selection,
adaptation and sequential application of a variety of techniques, depending on
the nature of the dish to be prepared. All were marked by unique linguistic
expressions in nineteenth century Hausa and in this arena of speech and culture,
women were utterly supreme: cuisine was their domain. The extensiveness of
the lexicon of food and food preparation suggest the power which resided in the
role of uwar gida, the mother of the household, the housewife.

Women's skills, labor and technology processed other natural products of
the Hausa landscape. Women, for example, controlled the cultural
transformation of cotton from boll to thread. Cleaning, carding and spinning
cotton required a number of specialized tools from the metal rods used in
ginning to the construction of the clay spindles for spinning thread. Nineteenth
century Europeans noted the commanding role of women and girls in the
production of cotton tread when they described the scale and significance of
textile production to the wealth and general prosperity of Hausaland. For the
Islamic reformers, as Shehu dan Fodio urged, spinning was essential to creating
the economic motivation and practical means of support for purdah.

All kinds of crops, including peppers pumpkins, tomatoes, baobab leaves,
grain and meat were sun-dried for preservation and storage. Hot, spicy peppers
and salt were used in Hausa cuisine not only for taste, but also as preservatives,
effectively slowing and masking the deterioration of cooked foods in hot climate
of the Hausa plains. Vegetable oils for cooking and illumination were processed,
again, by women, from the kernels of the kedanya tree and from peanuts. With

the exception of spinning cotton thread and butchering animals other than

162

poultry, the processing of agricultural produce was the work of Hausa woman.
Thus, the depth of linguistic evidence readily demonstrates the vital significance
to the role of women in the techno-cultural process so vital to the success of
Hausa agriculture and the transformation of a natural ecology into a human
landscape. '

Crop storage was a critical problem for all farmers and, again, as with the
invention of a cuisine, it required technical innovation to intervene with the
natural cycles of food production. Hausa farmers stored grains, beans and
peanuts in granaries made of clay or guinea corn stalks woven together like
baskets. Clapperton's description of the granaries he saw in the 1820's applied to
the early twentieth century when the use of photography began to provide visual
documentation of Hausa cultural history. Smaller storage containers were made
of pottery, basketry, and calabashes. Adequate technologies of drought
resistance and food security surely contributed to the success of the Hausa
farming culture. Not even the value of balancing the elements of nature's food
chain were neglected: Hausa kept domestic cats to keep down rats and the
tatsuniyoyi seem to mark the transfer of that particular technology to urban Fulbe
society through the agency of Hausa traders in the nineteenth century (Edgar
1911)

In short, the bio-diversity of the Hausa environment stimulated linguistic,
spiritual, medical and technological innovation, all reflected in the Hausa

language itself.” Furthermore, the fundamental core of words which describe the

 

79Critics of colonial economic policies noted the important relationship between
local agricultural knowledge and bio-diversity and criticized the ways cash
cropping forced or, at the very least, encouraged Hausa to breakdown accepted
classifications of land and patterns of land use and bring even marginally

163

diverse features of the Hausa environment are very rarely loan words.” The
language of environment and technology demonstrates the close relationship
between the evolution of the Hausa landscape and the evolution of the Hausa
language and culture. The role of women in this process is marked by the depth
and sheer descriptiveness of those vocabularies created to describe their work,

especially with regard to cuisine and textile production.

A Linguistic Definition of Hausaland

The diversity of linguistic references to ecological conditions, to plants,
animals, water and soil, strongly suggests the antiquity of Hausa-speaking
farming communities in the regions presently accepted as Hausaland in Nigeria
and Niger. Historical linguistics has not yet solved the problems of "where" the
Hausa came from, but whatever the ultimate solution to the puzzle of Hausa
origins, the wide distribution of Hausa or culturally Hausa farming communities
certainly shows that Hausa farmers have long been pioneers, "risk-takers",
establishing Hausa farming communities throughout the Central Sudan well

before the nineteenth century. The language marks the extension of a kind of

 

productive land into production for cash crops. The process of grading and
standardizing commercial crops also stimulated a declining use of a variety of
seeds as farmers were told or, again, encouraged to use only specific cultivers.
The best example of this would come in the twentieth century when the British
Cotton Growers Association would aggressively distribute an American variety
of short staple cotton seed for the exclusive use of farmers interested in selling
their cotton to its buying agents.

80While I have just begun to examine linguistic evidence, I can not agree with the
notion that Kanuri contributed a significant number of words to the Hausa
vocabulary of the natural world. I base this observation on the construction of
comparative lexical tables I am in the process of developing (Cyffer and
Hutchison 1990; Vansina 1990, 1978).

164

Hausa agricultural hegemony in new regions during the course of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.

Hausa culture came to encompass several ecological frontiers and this,
too, is marked by linguistic constructions. Taking the present distribution of
Hausa speakers as a base, but carefully-noting the most recent patterns of
internal migration observed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we can
envision a linguistically defined Hausaland located in the Central Sudan and
encompassing two major environmental zones: Sahelian to the north with semi-
arid, open plains sharing an impermanent border with the Sahara Desert; and, in
the south, a savanna region, marked by granite inselbergs, a greater diversity of
trees, heavier clay soils and significantly more stable patterns of rainfall
(Mortimore 1970; A. Smith 1971; M. Watts 1983:90-1; Fuglestad 1983:115-6, 1987;
Olofin 1989, 2-16). This last ecological setting, generally described as derived
savanna by modern geographers, shares a boundary created by human use
bordering on the densely forested regions of Nigeria.

Underlying the farming cultures of both of these regions is another
vocabulary, that of hunting, fishing and gathering practices so widely shared in
the dialects of Hausa as to suggests great cultural antiquity and continuity.
Language, archaeology and Hausa oral literature point towards a deep culture
and technology of hunters. This is particularly evident in the linguistic and
ethnographic descriptions of Hausaphone communities, not assimilated into the
mainstream of nineteenth century Hausa culture. These include, for example,
that of the hilly southern regions of Hausaland, the Gwari of the Hausa
tatsuniyoyi and their dialect, Gwandara, as well as the Aderawa of the northern

Hausa plains (Matsushita 1972; Caron 1991).

165

The fundamental form of Hausa farming culture seems to be based on the
cultivation of millet. Linguistically, this is expressed through the variety of
millets with Hausa names: thirty-four are given in Bargery. Millet diseases and
literary allusions to the germination and growth of millet reflect an acute
awareness of the natural history of the plant. The variety of millet cultivars
shows a pattern of botanical experimentation and specialization which surely
marks the antiquity of an enduring Hausa cultural presence within the linguistic
boundaries of Hausaland.

The tools suited for millet cultivation reflect both a process of
technological adaptation and the participation of women. While Hausa today
prohibit the use of the heavy, deep-tilling galma hoe to men, especially in the
ridging of fields for the cultivation of yams, no such view excludes women from
accessing the technology of farming millet. Indeed, while modern Hausa women
are enjoined not to farm, the tools and technology of millet cultivation do not
exclude women and women continue to grow millet depending on either social
or personal circumstances.

Linguistically, the relationship between millet cultivation and Hausa
agricultural culture seems to have been fundamental. Not only do the dialects of
Hausa found in the millet-based zone show the botanical, agricultural and social
patterns of the cultural dependence on this crop, but in describing millet and its
cultivation, all are more similar to, than different from, one another. In a
comparison of the Hausa dialects of the northern and northwestern sahelian
frontier, Aderawa and Mawri, for example, and those of the southern forest
frontier, such as Gwandara, differences in the language of millet, its cultivation

and uses as food, are minor. Perhaps expertise in developing the cultivation of

166

this crop in all its varieties was the technological reason behind the growth and
expansion of a distinctively Hausa farming culture. Certainly, the knowledge
and technology which supported the cultivation of millet also transferred to the
cultivation of other grain crops, including maize, upland (dry cultivation) rice,
guinea corn and sesame. I

Other cultural and linguistic evidence magnifies the significance of such
prosaic observations. The first food a Hausa child takes beyond her mother's
milk is likely to be kunu, a gruel made of millet. The rich and descriptive
collection of culinary expressions based on millet indicates the virtuosity of this
grain in Hausa cuisine. Millet was often the food of choice for the human, animal
and supernatural characters of the tatsuniyoyi. Food made from millet played
significant private and public roles in the practices of Hausa marriage and millet
was a food of choice for members of the Hausa spirit world; the grain was
embedded in the liturgy and practices of bori. Millet was celebrated in Hausa
proverbs, kirai and karin magana. The absolute dominance of millet as a
cultivated crop throughout Hausaland was reported by all nineteenth century
travelers.

On the northern, Sahelian border of a linguistically imagined Hausaland,
grain farming gave way to pastoralism of various sorts, but, with few exceptions,
dominated by the Taureg. Over time, a kind of Hausa farming frontier,
demarcated by the founding and abandonment of farming villages in the fragile
ecological zone shaped by the vagaries of the Sahara co-existed with the seasonal
migrations of the pastoralists. Varieties of gero and dawa were cultivated with

careful regard to their water and soil requirements and the length of growing

167

season each needed. At least one variety of edible, wild grain, karingiya or kram-
kram, was collected and processed for food.

All together, the Hausa cultivated six species of grain, including millet,
gero, sorghum, dawa, maize, masara, and rice, shinkafa. Linguistically, the
cultivation of grain, especially millet, appears to be the most ancient pattern of
Hausa agriculture. Furthermore, through Hausa's connection to the Afro-Asiatic
language family, millet cultivation connects the Hausa to the most ancient
complex of African grain cultivation in the Horn of Africa (Philips 1989, 39-58).

In the south, where Hausa cultivators shaped another ecological frontier,
greater rainfall, denser and more varied forests and different communities of
wild plants allowed the domestication of various tuberous crops and a different,
more diverse, configuration of grains in the crop mixture. Especially noted by
European travelers as they entered the regions dominated by the Hausa kingdom
of Zaria (Zazzau), a wetter, somewhat cooler, environment allowed a longer
growing season, to which Hausa communities responded by growing more
varieties of dawa than seen in the northern crop complex. Millet, gero, continued
to be a significant food crop, all varieties especially favored for firm and some
preferred for fermented beverages (gig/a, a kind of beer). Cowpeas, wake, and
peanuts, geyda, were intercropped with sourghum, dawa. Yam varieties, doya and
mukoni being among the more popular, were distinctive from one another in how
they were cultivated, stored, cooked, tasted and were marketed. Another,
cassava, rogo, imported from South America into West Africa by the Portuguese
in the sixteenth century, was grown throughout Hausaland, especially as a
protection against drought-related famine. Corn, or maize, was widely

distributed, but its Hausa name, geron masara, or Egyptian millet, hints that it

168

may have been an introduction from Ottoman Egypt into African communities
with strong ties of religion and commerce to Islamic North Africa, especially
Cairo and probably Khartoum. Certainly, it was much more commonly observed
in the western regions of Bornu than in Hausaland by early nineteenth century
travelers (Denham and Clapperton 1985).. Staudinger, traveling north from
Lagos to Hausaland, rarely mentions it, nor is it today especially enjoyed as tuwo
in the regions of Zaria and southern Katsina. (Staudinger 1896; Bivins 1974-76).

The dialects of Zaria, the Hausa city and emirate most strategically located
within this southern biosphere, also indicate the use of wild plants, especially as
seasonal additions to the basic diet of tuwo, firm and yams. An extensive Hausa
pharmac0poeia equally depended on the rich diversity of wild flora and fauna of
the southern Hausa regions. Presently, such medical products are exchanged for
plant substances, animal parts and soils found only in the northern Hausa zone
in the periodic markets of Hausa Niger (Nicolas 1975). While the traditional
medicines of the Hausa remain physically associated with specific ecological
settings, the wide distribution of medicinal substances and the knowledge of
how to interpret their properties offers a significant commentary on the
homogeneity of a Hausa system of natural science and medicine (Wall; Darrah;
Bivins 1974-76 and 1988).

Plants, such as tobacco, indigo and the great variety of cotton cultigens,
were cultivated for industrial purposes. While different crop mixtures
substantially enhanced the viability and food security of Hausa families and
communities by adding to the array of food crops and cuisine, industrial crops
may well have been used by farmers to achieve the same goal. Such crops could

be converted into sources of income with which to purchase needed food

169

 

supplies by farmers with limited access to either the land or labor needed to be
self-sufficient in food. It is no surprise, given what would have been optimal
ecological conditions for establishing and maintaining secure stocks of food
through agricultural diversity and a variety of marketing strategies, that the
central savanna region of Hausaland was more densely populated and
supported a Hausa process of urbanization which, by the nineteenth century,
outpaced the northern Hausa zone, and, from Denham, Clapperton and Barth's
observations, that of Bornu as well. The central regions of nineteenth century
Hausaland, in fact, developed an especially close relationship between
agricultural production, rural manufacturing and urban growth (Shea 1976, 1983,
9-115; Kreidte 1981).

The settlement of the Central Sudan by Hausa-speaking farmers created a
landscape into which livestock, including cattle, could be introduced by the
Fulbe, especially after the population increases suggested by the political history
of the Hausa Bakwai in the sixteenth century. Given the romanticism attached to
the nomadic lives of the Fulbe by popular ethnography, it may seem ironic to
argue that the Fulbe presence in Hausaland was enhanced by increasingly dense
populations of Hausa farmers, but the Fulbe simply could not raise cattle in a
complete social and ecological wilderness. Pressed by both human needs, for
grain and other supplies as well as for markets for dairy products, and the very
health and security of their livestock, Fulbe did, indeed, require a uniquely
shaped human landscape to enjoy the most complete and culturally satisfying
expression of their own way of life (Hopen 1958, Stenning 1959, Reisman 1978).

Hausa farming culture allowed the successful integration of nomadic

livestock specialists into an essentially agricultural domain by decreasing the

170

wilderness growth in which the encephalitis-bearing tsetse fly flourished, by
encouraging the provision of salt in a network of rural markets readily accessible
to pastoralists and by exchanging rights to dry season pasturage on stubble fields
for the sake of the natural fertilization of livestock manure. The interaction
between Hausa and Fulbe was a dynamic-social and ecological process. Barth
and Staudinger give especially good accounts of how the Fulbe / Hausa
combination of pastoralism and farming worked in the nineteenth century to
create the twentieth century Hausa landscape.

Pastoralism completed the Hausa farming system in the northern Hausa
region and in this way set the Hausa of what would become the Republic of
Niger apart from Hausa communities in the more southern regions where
ecological factors inhibited the rearing of livestock, and encouraged a pattern of
ethnic specialization and greater separation between Hausa people and livestock
rearing. On the other hand, Nigerien Hausa would exploit their special
relationship with animal husbandry to forge strong economic links with the
colonial economy of Nigeria, marketing livestock to feed the burgeoning cities of
the south (A. Cohen 1968; Baier 1980; Fuglestad 1983; ANN / Zinder). The ability
of Nigerien Hausa to provide livestock for the Nigerian market substantially
contributed to the colonial economy of Niger, while strengthening the integration
of the Nigeriens into the colonial economy of Nigeria, especially that of
metropolitan Kano.

As a final comment on the history of Hausa exploitation of their ecological
settings, the antiquity of extensive iron-working sites, especially in the region of
Kano, where early iron working sites have been studied, offer rather conclusive

evidence of significant ecological change (Seiber 1992). In 1906 British colonial

171

officers in Sokoto would begin to limit local iron production for fear of the
environmental impact of deforestation. A similar concern was expressed in the
rapports de tournee of French officials in Hausa Zinder (ANN / Zinder 1931-43).
Their interest in deforestation reflects more than the meddling of outsiders in the
affairs of colonized people: iron working,.along with the furnaces used in salt
production around the saline lakes of eastern Damagaram, severely taxed the
forest resources of the regions in which they were established. As is well-know
in the case of other iron-working African cultures, effective use of one natural
resource could mean abuse of another. Iron smelting required charcoal and
large-scale charcoal production throughout the ancient world was accompanied
by deforestation and environmental deterioration."1 Nineteenth century
observers could see the effects of increased urban consumption of firewood in
the regions around the Hausa towns and cities. How much more so would have
been the environmental pressure caused by the need for wood of Hausa iron
workers. The increasing archaeological evidence of both the antiquity and the
extensiveness of Hausa iron works is sobering evidence of the degree to which
the "park land" appearance of the Hausa savanna was the work of human agency
and shifts the problem of the human accountability for desertification deeper into
the past."2

In short, the ecology of the Central Sudan was one in which Hausa society

had already lived for a very long time and in which the technologies of farming,

 

81Meroe is an especially apt model for what may also have occurred in some
Hausa regions where iron smelting was significant, as, for example the area
around Kano.

82An extensive literature on this problem dates from the drought years of the
seventies and eighties.

172

 

cooking, herding, fishing, hunting, gathering and, at the very least, those of salt
making, pottery, iron smelting and blacksmithing, were established well before
the nineteenth century. Women, as the specialists of the hearth, were
fundamentally involved in shaping this human landscape: linguistic evidence
fully documents the ecological diversity of Hausa cuisine and the technologies of
crop storage and processing which support it.

Denham, Clapperton, and Barth frequently mentioned the population
movements stimulated by the Sokoto Jihad: They described migrating Fulbe and
defeated Hausa villages sold into slavery; The ruins of settlements destroyed by
war contrasted with the new towns of the emerging Fulbe political elite in their
accounts. Indeed, the insecurity of rural life in the wake of continued warfare
and slave raiding was elemental to Dorugu's life history and framed the
childhood of Baba of Karo. Staudinger vividly describes the changes worked on
the Hausa landscape as he observed the intense, late nineteenth century
immigration of Hausa farmers and Fulbe pastoralists into the savanna south of
Zaria. Another prominent example, especially important to this dissertation, was
the relocation of enslaved, ethnically Hausa populations onto slave estates in the
region around Zinder as ecological conditions, especially the rainfall pattern in
the second half of the nineteenth century, permitted a northern push of the

Hausa farming frontier in Damagaram (Salifou 1971 ; Dunbar 1970; 1977, 155-
771'"

 

83I will describe this process more fully in the chapters on Zinder. However, my
reasons for coming to this conclusion include observations of extensive slave-
raiding by the Sultans of Damagaram into neighboring, even technically affiliated,
Hausa communities, especially Kantché. I suspect that these forced removals of
Hausa-speaking people significantly altered the linguistic balance in favor of
Hausa over Kanuri in Damagaram after the 1850's.

173

 

The most recent scientific assessment of desertification in the Sahel
confirms the flexibility of the desert's farming frontier, not from decade to
decade, century to century, but from year to year, farming season to farming
season. Linguistically, Hausa describes the bio-diversity of the Central Sudan
and a human society able to respond with appropriate technology to this kind of
highly unpredictable natural environment.

The farming culture of the Hausa allowed them to negotiate an existence
from the micro environments of the space between desert and forest. Nineteenth
century observations would seem to show that the Hausa may even have
replaced the Kanuri within parts of the savanna realm they both shared. By the
time of Clapperton's visit in 1821-26, at least some of the plants which, by their
Kanuri-based Hausa names, would seem to have reached Hausa agriculturists
through Bornu were not available in Bornu, but were grown in and imported
from Hausa regions to the west. This was especially the case of certain specialty
crops, such as indigo and tobacco. No conclusions based on linguistic evidence
are possible now, but the pattern of agricultural exchange between Hausa and
Kanuri communities observed in the early nineteenth century strongly suggests
that environmental change influenced what language tells us about the relative
effectiveness of Hausa agricultural culture: Hausa speakers now farm where

Kanuri people lived and were described by European travelers.“ It is quite

intriguing, for example, that the word by which Hausa people called Kanuri

 

84Much more work needs to be done on the relationship between Hausa and
Kanuri, especially along the lies of technological and cultural borrowings. I am
not convinced that the work already done on the historical linguistic analysis of
Hausa will remain unchallenged, though I feel compelled to report the current
findings here.

174

people was "Beriberi". In Kanuri the word means one who hires out to do
agricultural work on a day to day basis (Koelle 1854). Does this in some way
indicate the possibility that Kanuri migrants adapted themselves to Hausa
farming communities by working as paid labor? From the travelers accounts the
political breakdown of the Bornu state in the early nineteenth century may also
have been shaped by environmental deterioration. Clapperton, for example,
described fields of corn, geron Massara, where only some varieties of millet can be
cultivated today. Did Kanuri farmers over-plant corn, a crop know for its high
yield, but also notorious for its negative effect on soils, and destroy the ability of
their land to withstand the high temperatures, intense winds and extreme aridity
of the sahelian dry season?“5 Was there a Kanuriland dust bowl which sent

people west into Hausaland as migrant farmers?

The Imagined Landscape of the Tatsuniyoyi

The Hausa see a spiritual and cultural landscape surrounding them as
well as one of physical characteristics, dimensions and objects. Like folk cultures
all over the world, special features of the landscape were incorporated into the
folklore of the Hausa pe0ple. This aspect of Hausafying nature is well marked in
the tatsuniyoyi, which are set into a physical landscape shaped by Hausa opinions
of their own daily surroundings. Characters work at tasks familiar to Hausa in a
natural environment recognizably that of Hausaland in all its diversity. Heroines
and heroes have family relationships equally familiar to Hausa. They work with

Hausa tools, cultivate Hausa farms, cook Hausa food and define outsiders by

 

85Notice the way corn roots leave the soil vulnerable to erosion.

175

their inability to speak proper Hausa. Hausa values shape the narratives of the
tatsuniyoyi, whether such narratives are acted out by humans, spirits or animals.

In what ways do the stories give us evidence of the physical landscape?
To begin with, Hausa live as married couples, as families governed by a father or
a husband, in small villages with village chiefs; towns governed by titled
members of the emirate aristocracy; and in cities ruled over by kings with palaces
and retinues of courtiers, slaves, wives and children.

The patterns of settlement and government recorded in the tatsuniyoyi
precisely mirror the linguistic construction of Hausa social organization. Only in
stories of hunters and their wives are humans, living alone in the wilderness, not
considered atypical. Even the non-human worlds of spirits and animals are
organized into families and towns. Indeed, animals, when they want to improve
themselves, change into humans and go to towns, generally to marry humans.
Though many are the stories in which a journey is called for, the tatsuniyoyi make
it absolutely clear that the preferred Hausa pattern of residence and society was
one of villages, towns and cities.

Sharply contrasting to the town as the appropriate residence for humans is
the wilderness(daji) in which humans invariably face threats from both natural
and supernatural agents. Children, especially girls, when necessary, are able to
enlist the assistance of the spiritual and animal residents of the bush. We are
reminded that Hausa clans did in fact still have animal totems in the nineteenth
century and, that the logic of Hausa medicine was based on negotiation between
the worlds of human natural and supernatural agency. Animals were named,

described and used as characters in Hausa oral literature. Animals and plants

176

had kirari, songs which noted their special characteristics, including references to
their usefulness to humans.

The landscape described in the early collections of tatsuniyoyi was still
marked by open, uncultivated space. Hausaland was not short of wood and
characters were often sent into the daji to collect firewood. Girls and boys also
went off into the daji to collect wild fruit and other natural substances, including
ingredients for medicine. Men and their wives took up land to farm in the daji
and there encountered a variety of anthropomorphic animals, including the
ubiquitous buffoon, the hyena. Some Hausa even farmed together with animals
in the tatsuniyoyi.

Hunger stalked the Hausa whether in the imaginary environment of the
tatsuniyoyi or in the reality of their fickle environment. The Hausa language
graphically describes illness, disease and disaster, for humans, crops and
animals. Famines of recent decades have their own kirari while hunger is the
Hausa poet's most graphic image of povertyHausa also linked themselves to
their environment through the cultural practices of medicine. Hausa medicine
was based on a system of knowledge which intimately relates the properties of
nature and natural phenomena to human and animal illness. Nothing that
walks, flies, swims or slithers across Hausaland was without a medical or
magical use or meaning. Plants and plant materials were equally significant.
Hausa attributed special qualities to earth and minerals and exploited these in
medicines. White clay, for example, is still eaten by pregnant and nursing
women, though never by men: the whiteness of the clay prefigures mother's
milk. The same sort of clay along with specific leaves are used as medicine for

teething babies. Nicolas identified plant and animal substances used for medical

177

purposes in Maradi in the 1960's (Nicolas 1975). Medical practices unite human
society to the spiritual world through the natural environment of Hausaland and
in this way, the Hausa perceive theirs as an infinitely bountiful, intricately
diverse, natural and supernatural landscape."6

Bari completed the metaphors and‘the logic of how Hausa associated
themselves, as humans, to both the natural world and the spiritual world.
Furthermore, through the definition of spirits representing outside forces, such as
Islam in the nineteenth century, the Fulbe of the Sokoto Caliphate and the
Europeans of the twentieth century, bori seems to have served as an important
way for Hausa to intrepretate the appearance of strangers on their cultural
horizon. Together, Hausa medicine and bori show how Hausa assimilated
difference, whether as men looking at women, women looking at men or Hausa
looking at the world and its human, animal and spirit denizens beyond the
named, knowable world of their own culture and society."7 Encoded in Hausa
beliefs about health care during pregnancy, for example, is yet another example
of what I mean here. Pregnant women abhor viewing a strange, living creature,
as, for example, a white woman, for fear that their unborn child will take on the
features of that creature. Strangers to be feared still include white people.

(Nicolas 1975; Stephens 1981)

 

86Paul Stoller has best developed this line of thought with regards to a Sahelian
society, the Hausa's western neighbors and inheritors of the Songhay Empire, the
Djerma of Niger.
371 am reminded of how Chinese immigrants to the United States in the
nineteenth century constructed a world of ghosts to understand the white world
in which they found themselves. See Hong Kingston, 1976.

178

Distance and Geography

The evidence of a Hausa conception of geography found in the tatsuniyoyi
is subtle and suggestive of the cognitive maps common in nineteenth century
Hausa thought. What the Hausa cared to know about distance and geography
was generally related to religion or commerce. The story of how the girls
traveled to the waters of Medina to wash out the soiled mat is a good example.
Long distance was and could only be measured in the time a journey could take
and in the repetitiveness of long-distance travel. Dorugu, telling this tatsuniya to
Schon, marks the passage of time as a measure of distance, repeating after every
encounter the heroine makes on the road to Medina the phrase, she was traveling
, she was traveling, (Schon 1886:153-162). When Dorugu measures distance in
time, specifically as nights of sleep, in describing his travels with Barth, he
meticulously notes the number of nights spent between places on the journey,
precisely as had all those informants who provided travel itineraries to
Europeans before him.

The accounts of pilgrims from Hausaland to Mecca are even more
emblematic of the cognitive relationship between distance and time. Even after
motored vehicles began to make the trip, the journey commonly took four years,
years in which Hausa pilgrims settled down to farm patches of millet along the
way. Some simply never returned. Such pilgrims were, literally, operating in a
geography of time and space in which normal measurements of both were
suspended: the distance and the duration of a journey were beyond the realm of
normal experience and were easily assimilated into the world of imagination
(Bivins 1987-88). Whether as a pilgrim or a merchant, great distances were

traveled one step at a time and measured by months, even years, not miles.

179

In the tatsuniyoyi, and thus, in Hausa popular culture, distance was also
conceptualized in purely fantastic images: the wonder of an old woman who
could stretch one leg to Bornu and one to Mecca; the amazing towns and
societies of birds and fish and even supernatural creatures such as human-eating
dado; the trees with spirits and, not infrequently, compassion for mortal travelers.
All the improbable sights and amazing landscapes which Hausa heroes and
heroines encountered on long journeys established in Hausa terms a notion of
distance and travel imbued with fantasy. In this way Hausa sources interpret
distance and geography in imaginative narratives and contribute to the genre of
wondrous travel literature found throughout the world. Odysseus, Sinbad, even
Ibn Khaldun, Marco Polo and Fa Shien shared the wonderment of travel to
distant places found in Hausa tatsuniyoyi (Erickson 1976; Lewis 1982, 135-84).
The wanderings of the young Sundiata and the spiritual journey of life celebrated
in Yoruba ritual and art contextual Hausa notions of time, distance and journeys
in distinctively West African folkways (Niane 1960; Thompson 1984). However,
journeys in the tatsuniyoyi have one uniquely Hausa characteristic: our travelers
are girls.

Hausa people by the nineteenth century were identified by the major
towns of Hausaland and given characteristics supposedly representative of the
people of that town. Imam Imoru's narrative history of the Hausa people
associates the great towns of the Hausa Bakwai and Banzai with specific" gifts" of

commerce or land or technology as their heritage.

180

Traveling The Hausa Landscape

Within the European sources for nineteenth century Hausa history, the
travel account is unique in offering images of Hausa people and their ecological
settings. Nineteenth century travelers left particularly well-crafted narratives of
their visits to the Central Sudan in the early to late nineteenth century. Those I
have selected to examine in this section were composed by Europeans intensely
fascinated with Africa and Hausaland: Hugh Clapperton and Richard Denham
(1822-24), Heinrich Barth (1851-55), James Richardson (1853-54), and Paul
Staudinger (1888-86). Together they offer evidence of the ecological, economic
and historical evolution of the Hausa landscape over the course of the nineteenth
century.

The travelers' observations are especially useful in constructing a rough
chronological guide to the changes worked upon Hausaland by certain events
inscribed in the language, the tatsuniyoyi, the narratives prepared by Hausa
informants for Europeans and the material culture of nineteenth century Hausa.
In particular the travelers' accounts allow us to examine: the diversity of micro
environments within the Hausaphone regions of the Central Sudan; the food
resources and technology of Hausa cuisine and women's' dominance in the
realm of food; the differential pace of urbanization across Hausaland; and,
finally, differences between rural and urban Hausa culture. Perhaps more than
anything else, however, the travel narratives force twentieth century readers to
recognize the paramount importance of the natural world to the workings of
human society in Hausaland: not even the travelers could escape the weather

and its rule over food, health and the most basic conditions of daily life.

181

Travel narratives document a special relationship between ecology,
technology and gender, one that places women's' control over the resources and
technologies of food in a primary relationship of negotiating the space between
environment and culture; between social reproduction and ecological survival.
The special relationship between women, food and ecology is one of the
strongest examples of the importance of gender in Hausa economic history
because it offers profoundly persuasive evidence that women's work was not
marginalized by the social, economic and political transformations of nineteenth
century Hausaland. A second, and equally compelling example of this argument
is gleaned from the travelers' observations of women's non-agricultural work in
textile production and trade. In this section, I use the travelers' observations of
gender, ecology and work to affirm the image drawn from literary and linguistic
evidence that women were extraordinarily active in the creation of the Hausa

cultural landscape.

The Sources

Travel narratives present interesting problems as historical sources. There
is, for example, the simple question of where visitors placed themselves in the
vastness of the regions they sought to call "Hausaland". Nineteenth century
European travelers rarely stepped off the major caravan routes linking the
important urban centers of the Central Sudan to the commercial nexus of North
Africa and its Mediterranean port cities. They maintained the belief, not all
together naive, but sometimes with disastrous consequences, that Hausa cities
were already a part of their own world, connected by networks of diplomacy and

trade. Counting on such connections, Richardson found himself virtually

182

stranded in Zinder because founds were not safely transferred to him from
Tripoli. Barth had similar problems and as late as 1896 when Staudinger traveled
to Hausaland from Lagos and could count on the very well-developed trading
networks of the lower Niger River, financial problems were still a major source of
worry (Richardson, 1853; Barth 1965; Staudinger 1990).

Travelers were utterly dependent on their guides and interpreters in
choosing their exact routes and, at times, this was a source of frustration on both
sides. Clapperton was prevented from traveling down the Kwara River to the
Atlantic coast in part, he believed, because of the machinations of North African
traders at Bello's court who were (justifiably) fearful that English commercial
competition on the lower river would interfere with their Hausa markets. All of
the travelers believed that their journeys were delayed or rerouted by politically
or financially motivated opponents. Until the relations of power between
Africans and Europeans was transformed by the colonial conquest of Hausaland,
European travelers were dependent and at times culturally awkward guests in
the Central Sudan.

Travel narratives are by nature highly impressionistic and the
observations of our travelers are no exceptions. Several factors were especially
influential in determining what they saw and how they reported it. First,
travelers were generally confined to re-tracing one another's paths and all, but
Staudinger, tended to focus on the east-west route linking the cities of the Hausa
to those of Bornu and, ultimately, North Africa. Consequently, there is relatively
more evidence on a rather narrow and northern, east to west, ecological strip of
Hausaland. For example, the temperature recordings and rainfall patterns noted

by Clapperton between Kuka and Sokoto show little variation, even though the

183

micro environments he observed bore testimony to striking, but highly localized,
differences in soils, water resources, vegetation, and population densities.

Second, travelers were confined to a social space mediated by their guides
and interpreters, even when they themselves sometimes had useful language
skills. North African merchants who were experienced in dealing with Christian
Europeans were essential intermediaries for both earlier travelers and their
Moslem, African hosts. Staudinger's visit late in the nineteenth century was
shaped by Afro-European trading relationships and traders on the Niger and
Benue Rivers. The personal contacts made by a traveler, apparently were
available to others as well: Barth was introduced to Clapperton's guides and
chief informant; Staudinger was essentially required by Flegel to employ Flegel's
own guide-informant, Maidugu Mai Gashin Baki; Isabelle Vischer, the first
European woman to live in Kano, was introduced to Dorugu and describes his
death, apparently of old age, in Kano (I. Vischer, n.d.:42-45). Certainly the
narratives document the rise of what one might call an industry shaped to
escorting European travelers across Hausaland, one which foretells the coming of
colonial rulers and tourists alike.

Finally, until the arrival of Isabelle Vischer in Kano, all of our travelers
were men, a profoundly important social distinction in the etiquette of cultures
as polarized by gender as those of the Central Sudan. The individual
personalities of each traveler clearly asserted itself in their relationships with the
African women they met. Hugh Clapperton delights in observing the activities
and appearances of the women he meets on the road or in the markets and easily
falls into the joking and flirting which marked public exchanges between men

and women. Amazingly, he offers no information about one of the most

184

important women of her day, Nana Asma'u, the daughter of Usuman dan Fodio
and the full sister of the then reigning second Caliph of Sokoto, Sultan Bello.
Even though he felt himself to have had a close, personal friendship with
Asma'u's husband, Bello's friend and Waziri, Gidado. Clapperton never
mentions Nana Asma'u or describes anyone who might have been her.
Clapperton offers an intimate portrait of Gidado's grief at the death of his
youngest son, but says nothing of the child's mother, again, Nana Asma'u.
Clapperton even describes the visits paid to him by the women of Gidado's
household; Nana Asma'u remains anonymous throughout his account. Her
status, his gender and the proprieties of a devout Muslim household remained
an impenetrable barrier to Clapperton and to the other European men who wrote
about nineteenth century Hausaland.

Each account reflects the particular interests and personality of the
individual travelers themselves. They see neither the people they meet nor the
landscapes through which they travel in one way, nor do they present
themselves to others in one way. Clapperton's temperament and personality are
rather less masked by a sense of literary conventions for the writing of travel
narratives. We learn about his appreciation for the beauty of Fulbe women by
his delight in the girl selling nana: ( " as neat and spruce as a Cheshire dairy
maid".) and something of his sense of personal pride and identity by the way he
dresses in his best naval uniform to enter Kano for the first time. Trained as a
naval officer and included in the mission to Central Africa for his skills as a
navigator, Clapperton's narrative lacks the intellectual language which later

became a feature of traveler's account.” A man raised himself in an England not

 

88For a comparative perspective on travel writing, see Bishop 1989.

185

yet completely transformed by industrialization, he alone was able to accurately
describe Hausa weaving technology. Clapperton's England simply was not as
technologically distanced from Hausaland as would be the cultures of
Richardson, Barth and Staudinger.

Barth's published travel account was carefully re-written and shaped to
his European and scholarly public: the persona he presents is a very public
image and lacks the humanity of Clapperton. Without Richardson's comments,
for example, we would never know that Taureg and Hausa women, whom he
described in an impersonal, ethnographic style, were fascinated by Barth and at
times overwhelmed him with attention. On the other hand, his descriptions of
the landscapes through which he travels seem to be charged with both the
emotions of German Romanticism and the dispassionate, methodical observation
of nineteenth century German scientific scholarship. The language he used in his
notebooks and transferred to the maps accompanying his published accounts.
His descriptions abound with "richly timbered" valleys and "fine hilly country"
sometimes "full of cattle" or "intersected by low rocky ledges of granite and
adorned with fine tamarinds." Such idyllic places he contrasted to scenes of
wilderness, to "snow white" basins of "salt and natron", "naked, rocky and hilly"
districts, "gravely barren plain with scarcely any dense forests." He notes the
deep sand, the wilderness, with traces of wild animals and the deserted towns,
abandoned villages which marked the progress of the Fulbe Jihad in some
regions of Hausaland.

The reader of Barth's travel books is also captivated by the strange
transformation of Hausaland which takes place in the engravings accompanying

his text: Barth's "very rugged country with granitic rocks in perpendicular strata"

186

and "dismal and dreary gravely plain with isolated granitic peaks, few or no
animals," "Very violent tropical storm with heavy showers of rain" become scenes
of Nature's chaotic power, while his "beautiful valley, with forests of fine trees
and pastures of tropical appearance" are transformed into Europeanized visions
of a Hausa Eden. What did he really see? What did he enhance, with language
or through the visual aide of the engravings? Making use of Barth's maps, it is
impossible to escape the language of German Romanticism influencing his views
of the African landscapes he passes through and the people he meets. Only with
the arrival of the camera in the early years of the colonial administrations in
Niger and Nigeria, would the reading public of Europe begin to acquire more
accurate visual knowledge of Hausa and Hausaland. Often the evidence of such
early photographic images would be jarringly out of place with the language of
the texts.°9

Some idea of how carefully Barth constructed his narrative and shaped it
for publication is gleaned from Richardson's account of essentially the same
journey.°°..Richardson died in Damagaram on the road from Zinder to Kuka and
his account was not rewritten before it was published. While it is a rough guide

only to the northern frontier of Hausaland, especially the regions between

 

89Examples of early photographic images of Hausaland and the Hausa are found
in Tilho 1909; ED. Morel 1911; Rodd 1926; C.K. Meek 1925; Abadie 1927
Photographs in the collections of Rhodes House, Oxford, were also visually
informative for my research. Discussion of the use of photographs in African
history include Killingray and Roberts 1989, 16:197-208; Geary 1988, 1986, 13:98-
116; Roberts 1988, 29:301-11

90A recent German edition of Barth's classic work further enhances our
understanding of how the traveler worked by including photo copies of excerpts
from his handwritten journals. Barth wrote these journals in English. Barth,
Heinrich. Die Grasse Reife: Forschungen und Abenteur in Nard- und Zentralafrika;
1849-1855. Stuttgart; Wien: Thienemann, Edition Erdmann, 1986.

187

Damagaram and Zinder, in some ways his account provides a reality check to
Barth's. Richardson, sick and reaching the end of a rigorously Christian life, was
critical and unyielding in his relationships with those Hausa (and Taureg) he
met. He seems to have been a man whose ethnocentrism would not allow him to
establish a socially comfortable relationship .with Black Africa.

Staudinger, writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century and after
the Berlin West Africa Conference, shows all the marks of a new genre of
"modern" travel writer. Gone is the German Romantic, in his work replaced by
and energetic middle-class young man out to have an adventure, yet still under
the guise of scientific research, in his case, as an entomologist, in the service of
his nation, Germany. Aside from the narrative of the journey itself, he prepared
essays on such topics as the geography, climate plants and animals of Hausaland,
as well as historical and ethnographic accounts of Hausa people, to accompany
his published narrative. His grasp of Hausa was utilitarian at best. He
depended on guides and interpreters much more completely than had the earlier
travelers, though a close reading of Barth makes it very clear that a kind of
specialty of understanding the spoken Hausa of Europeans had already
developed by the time of his travels.

It was easier for Staudinger to make the journey, physically and
psychologically, because Africans and Europeans alike had settled into
established formulas of cultural exchange. In particular, the Islamic leaders and
people of Hausaland were more tolerant to the Christians and the extreme
reactions to their religious identity described by the earlier travelers are not
found in his account. Finally, in simple terms of the relative ease of traveling to

Hausaland later in the nineteenth century, Staudinger was able to see more in

188

less time than his predecessors and sometimes he reads more like Henry Adams
on the Grand Tour in EurOpe than the image he treasured for himself: the lone
European facing the wilds of Africa and the exotic mysteries of the Africans.

These European travelers describe an African landscape shaped by the
flow of people and animals along trade routes. Their's is a specialized view of
Hausaland and one which tended to privilege accounts of urbanization,
commerce and the diplomacy and politics of the kingdoms and states through
which they passed. On the other hand, one might also think of the trade routes
as providing points of access for rural Hausa people to the news, culture and
innovations of urban Hausaland and beyond. Again, the travelers unwittingly
give us access to the knowledge and opinions of rather ordinary rural and urban
Hausa people as they record the ways such people respond to them: what
questions they asked, the fears, or prejudices they exhibited, especially, in the
case of Denham, Clapperton, Richardson and Barth, towards Christians. The
language of address and manners people used or invented on the spot to interact
with such outsiders and what they knew of other places, other times, and other
people were essential to the mental construction of inter cultural discourse
between themselves and the strangers from Europe. Much as port cities have
been described as social settings in which change and innovation are encouraged
by inter cultural trade, so were the caravan routes stretching from village to
village between the larger towns and cities. In nineteenth century Hausaland,
Curtin's intercommunicating zone was clearly a series of stops, a traveler's
itinerary of names, along a road (P. Curtin 1990).

Time and space thus share a narrow, linear quality in the travelers'

accounts of nineteenth century Hausa society. In this way the very structure of

189

'.

the travel narratives helped to create a standardized model of the ecology and
economy of Hausaland. While descriptions of the natural environment were
essential to the composition of the travelers' accounts, only a sample of the
ecological variety of Hausaland was observed and recorded. Bio-diversity went
the way of unique, regional Hausa dialects and local culture: travelers simply
saw too little and, in some cases, they and their readers assumed too much.
Ultimately, this weakness in European descriptions of Hausaland would become
even more pronounced in the differences between French and English
descriptions of their Hausa possessions in Nigeria and Niger and the colonial
development policies which would be built upon them. In the travelers' accounts
an important step towards objectifying Hausa people and creating the notion of
one, rather homogeneous "Hausaland" was taken. 9‘ Both colonial administrations

and Hausa nationalists would build on this idealization.

Women, Ecology and Food In the Travel Narratives

The ecological diversity of Hausaland imposed itself on travelers through
their stomachs. Throughout the nineteenth century Europeans did not transport
huge quantities of preserved food with them on their journeys, but trusted on
procuring food from the communities through which they passed. They quickly
became aware of the dominant role women played in the preparation and sale of
food. Their accounts make frequent reference to the activities of women food

sellers, whether in the larger towns and settlements or in the most rural settings.

 

911 draw on Benedict Anderson's provocative revision of his classic work on
colonialism and nationalism, Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. (1991.), especially Chapter 10. See also Bishop 1989.

190

Their preoccupation with food was based on their own ignorance of the customs
of food preparation: they hired men or boys to work for them, but did not hire
women to accompany them as cooks. Left to his own cooking, Barth found tuwo
hard to prepare and lamented the culinary fate of the European traveler "...who
has no female slave or partner to look after his meals" (Barth 1965 1:297). In
contrast, an Arab merchant with whom he traveled for a distance east of Kano,
was accompanied by his concubine and her female slaves, who provided
excellent and carefully served food: "...the barbarian and the civilized European
seemed to have changed places" (Barth 1965, 1:529-30, 533). African merchants,
especially the prominent madugai, or caravan leaders, always took along a wife or
concubine to supervise the daily provision of food for the caravan and the master
and the activities of slave women who did the actual work. Not until the
twentieth century when colonial officials would travel with a personal staff
which included male cooks did Europeans find a solution to coping with the
problems of daily meals on the march in a more or less Hausa way. It was,
however, not a Hausa solution to the problem: Europeans did not hire women
cooks; stewards were the accepted model on the road and in their settled
establishments. ’2

Hungry travelers pay attention to food, to what is available and to who
provides it. Travelers like Barth recorded the availability of different food as a
guide for others following his foot steps, or this, at least, was the pretense which

disguised his almost obsessive concern with food. Other travelers carefully

 

92See Olive McLoed's trip with the Talbots' in 1906 and Tremearne's comments on
hiring staff. Isabelle Vischer, living in Kano in 1914, did employ women as her
household help.

191

recorded similar remarks and their observations read like a guide to the micro
environments of Hausa cuisine. As late as Staudinger's 1896 visit, when
intraregional marketing of food, especially grain, was known to have developed,
it is remarkable to see how dependent all, but the largest, cities were on local
food products and local supplies. Clapperton, Richardson and Barth, traveling
earlier in the nineteenth century, offer commentaries which significantly enhance
a very local view of the development of the economy of the Sokoto Caliphate,
especially the rise of the towns and walled cities in the nineteenth century. More
than anything else, the travelers make it amply clear that women controlled this
aspect of society's interaction with the Hausa ecology.

Barth found that food supplies were at times erratic, especially in the
northern-most regions of the Central Sudan Approaching Agadez from the
north, for example, he had hoped to purchase Taureg cheese, but none was
available. Millet was very scarce and though offered for sale, could only be
purchased in small quantities. (Barth 1965, 1:249, 266) He observed irrigated
gardens north of the city. (Barth 1965, 1:265) Later in his journey, he found
evidence in the cuisine of endemic hunger. Two kinds of food for sale used wild
ingredients: kram-kram or karengia, a wild member of the millet family with the
irritating characteristic of sticking to clothing, was used to prepare a dish similar
to fura (uzak) and something which Barth called a "ready-cooked pudding"(
Barth, vol. 1:532; Bargery 1934, 526). Both are foods used in time of famine and
late in the dry season by Hausa. The pudding, made from the material around
the seeds in the pod of the dorawa can cause a bloated feeling and diarrhea.
Today it is poor people's food and in Matamaye was brought to market be the

women from the smallest hamlets at the end of the dry season when food is very

192

scarce and expensive (Bivins 1987-8). Hunger may have been an underlying
cause of another social practice Barth noted: in the region north of Agadez he
found that women practiced prostitution with travelers, even in hamlets (Barth
1965, 1:249).

Once securely within the cultural sphere of Hausa women, Barth had no
trouble purchasing meals of such Hausa staple dishes as tuwo and fura (Barth
1965,1:445-6). As with Clapperton, Barth found that fura was offered for sale to
travelers by women from Katsina to Kano and to the east of Kano until the
linguistic border of Kanuriland (Barth 1965,1:331). It is possible, though hard to
prove from the available texts, that the production of fura traveled with the Fulbe
into these eastern Hausa lands as the territory of the Sokoto Caliphate was
enlarged by military and cultural conquest. I detect a transfer of the cuisine of
fura served with sour milk from Fulbe women to Hausa women between
Clapperton's visit and Barth's. While Clapperton seemed to purchase this dish
from women he identified as Fulbe, Barth was less inclined to make that ethnic
identity and, indeed, considered fura da nano something of a Hausa national dish.
Staudinger makes a similar comment when he finally reaches the borders of the
Sokoto Caliphate and encounters Hausa-Fulbe settlements.

Urban areas had greater variety of food: rice and couscous was made
from "Indian-corn" in Agadez (Barth 1965, 1:317) and a dish of "roasted fowl and
dates" as well as fresh limes and papayas were to be found in Katsina.” The food

in Kano market, though expensive, was the "best in Negroland". (Barth 1965, I:

 

93Barth, 1965,1:463. Moroccan tagines are often based on roast chicken and dried
fruit. Roden 1974,188-193. North African-style dishes, including breads, are still
prepared in the homes of wealthy Tubu merchants in Zinder.

193

522-3). Ample supplies of milk were also available in the Kano area. While
Barth loved it, he realistically observed that milk was "capable of destroying a
weak stomach entirely" (Barth 1965, I: 534).

Barth does not seem to have been treated to foods made of wheat, though
he saw irrigated beds of wheat and onions growing around Kano in January,
1853 (Barth 1965, 1:485) He saw sesame fields too, but, again, does not mention
eating the little cakes made from pounded sesame and sweetened with honey
(Barth 1965, I: 488). As far east of Kano as Gummel, Barth enjoyed and
appreciated the "Hausa custom of a little market held by the women on the road
side..."(Barth 1965, I: 536).

Staudinger traveled to Zaria, Kano and Sokoto from Lokoja and his
account is especially useful because he passed through the progression of
ecological zones created by the differences in rain and the bio-diversity of the
micro environments and plant communities which distinguish the West African
ecology. Staudinger was also a young man with a prodigious appetite: he seems
to have been always hungry and paid a lot of attention to where his next snack
was coming from.

Staudinger was the only of our travelers to describe the most southern
regions of the Sokoto Caliphate, an area of hills, rain and relatively dense forests,
especially south of Zaria. There he observed the immigration of Hausa and
Fulbe pioneers and the process of cultural assimilation which would increasingly
influence the indigenous, people of the region to conform to a Hausa notion of
culture in dress, cuisine, housing, farming, religion and, so important from a

Hausa perspective on ethnicity, language.

194

.-

A few days north of Lokoja in August, 1896, Staudinger described the

luxuriant vegetation of this region:

Tall rain forest trees draped with lianas, lush woodland plants,
dense undergrowth, and especially that characteristic
representative, the bamboo palm tree form the rich variety of
tropical vegetation... (Staudinger 1990, 106)

Yet, and inspite of the apparent wealth of plant life, food was difficult to
buy because the travelers did not have very small currency needed and because
supplies were limited: two chickens, some cassava and yams were all he and his
people could procure (Staudinger 1990, 107). Sherifia, the wealthy woman trader
traveling in his caravan, however, did not have similar problems, probably
because she carried with her adequate food supplies and women slaves to cook.
She sent Staudinger rice with palm oil, while dawa for his horses was given to
him as a gift by the king.

This would appear to have been a region as yet relatively undiscovered by
either Hausa or Fulbe migrants from the central emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate.
Signs of either ethnic group were limited, nor was there much evidence that the
tiny communities through which Staudinger's caravan passed were effectively
integrated into the market and caravan circuit of Hausaland. Staudinger
reported that "The people were Afo not Hausa." (Staudinger 1990, 108-9) and
complained about the "Legions of insects, among them blood-thirsty
mosquitoes..." He observed guinea fowl eggs on a sort of alter outside of the
village and noted the village men smoking pipes and wearing only pelts
(Staudinger 1990, 109). The only signs of commercial agriculture he described

were: "extensive banana plantations" (Staudinger 1990, 110) He was, however,

195

 

finally, able to buy fura from "an old pagan woman", though it was not served
with milk. The reader is given the impression that he was relieved when the
local cuisine finally began to bear some resemblance to that which had been
reported by Europeans before him: "These (fura) are a national dish of the Hausa,
known as far as the oasis of Asbin and even in Bornu." He found the fura to be
"slightly sour peppery things made of dawa or gera quite good..." (Staudinger
1990,111). Increasingly he was given gera for his horses while peanuts were
provided for the people to eat. As he travels northward, he begins to find
women selling roasted peanuts. "From now onwards these often formed our
only refreshment during the day (Staudinger 1990 113)."

When Staudinger entered an area into which Hausa pioneers had begun to
open up an environment for Fulbe and their cattle, his food problems decreased.
Supplies of fura da nano were offered for sale. Later, he was given film and yams
as gifts. Finally, he saw the humped Fulbe cattle, grazing freely around the
villages and fields. One cattle owner graciously gave him fresh milk, a gesture of

greeting among the Fulbe even today. The scene he described was idyllic:

The cattle were mostly white or grayish white and looked fine and
healthy. In some of the herds outside of Keffi...I noticed some
animals with black and brown coloring (Staudinger 1990,118-9).

In terms of the variety, abundance and availability of cooked foods offered
for sale to travelers, Keffi was where Staudinger crossed an unmarked, but
absolutely clear cultural boundary into Hausaland. Almost miraculously, yams
become plentiful in Keffi and oxen were slaughtered, though the meat was not

made available to Staudinger and his servants (Staudinger 1990, 120-1). The

196

cultural boundary was also seen in the availability of prepared food for sale and
by the marked evidence of Hausa women's dominance of cooked food
production and marketing. In the daily market, women dominated the retail food
trade, but women also engaged in active house trade, early evidence of what
Polly Hill would observe in Batagarawa, near Katsina, and label "honeycomb"

markets:

Besides the market there is a thriving house-to-house trade in various
foods such as fura and koko, a thin gruel which we later quite liked
and drank...There are often women sitting along the roadside selling
cooked yams, groundnuts, and other articles of trade; little balls of
dye fro redwood or pounded antimony for eye make-up were often
on sale there. (Staudinger 1990,130).

The commerce in food, however, was a phenomena of town life in this

region. In a hamlet beyond Keffi, September 4, 1886 4, he writes:

As for the victuals, the supply was pitifully inadequate in this
hamlet. The women had only a few groundnuts and a little fura for
sale, so we bought a little of what there was to pacify our rumbling
stomachs (Staudinger 1990, 135).

This was food scarcity in the midst of an especially luxuriant setting:

The valley was lusciously green and for the first time in a
long while I saw some fan palms, especially the lovely giginya
palm...Not only the flora, but also the fauna seemed to become more
varied and luxurious;" (Staudinger 1990, 135)

Whenever Staudinger found himself in areas where the combination of
Hausa and Fulbe settlers had already led to an increased pattern of settlement, he

also found food surpluses and generous gifts of food: presents of unhusked rice,

197

chickens and a sheep were given to him. Wisely, he sent these gifts to the ever
resourceful Sherifia, who, in turn, gave the food stuffs to of her slaves to cook
(Staudinger 1990,142). In such communities, the contrast between the food
resources of the towns and those of the countryside was stunningly obvious to
Staudinger: it was a matter of adequate diet versus endemic hunger and he read
the signs in the people themselves. Commenting on "pagan" women who
brought coco yams to sell to him, Staudinger contrasted their appearance, which
seemed to indicate some degree of malnutrition ( he notes their bowed legs and
general thinness) with the pretty Hausa women (Staudinger 1990,143).
Comments on women's control of food supplies, preparation and sale,
regular as they are in the travel accounts, make two points clear. Women were
heavily invested in the preparation of provisions for travelers and women food
sellers were the most frequently observed economic role of nineteenth century
Hausa women, whether in towns or in rural areas. South of Katsina, on the busy

road to Kano, Barth observed this phenomena:

After a march of three miles we passed a well, where the women
from a neighboring village were offering for sale the common
vegetables of the country, such as gawaza or yams, dankali or sweet
potatoes, kuka, the leaves of the (baobab)tree, dadawa or the vegetable
cakes...ground-nuts, beans, and sour milk (Barth 1965, I: 481).

. The foods which women offered for sale to travelers chronicles the availability
of food stuffs over the course of the year and throughout the ecological zones of
Hausaland. Retailing prepared food to travelers was an opportunity for women

in communities of all sizes, but women living in towns may have had an

advantage in acquiring the food stuffs, investment capital, time and even labor

198

needed to take advantage of the market opportunities provided by travelers.“
Traveling in the most densely populated emirates of Hausaland, Barth could
count on the markets of women food seller even in the most rural of settings.

The preparation of food for sale was an important economic activity for
Hausa women. Their dominance in theiretail food business suggests their
control over both the raw materials and technology of food preparation. Of
equal significance, the availability of prepared food for sale to travelers clearly
distinguished those regions in which the Hausa farming culture was established
and, especially, in the case of fura da nano, in which Fulbe cattle keepers also had
settled. One might go so far as to conclude that where our travelers enjoyed fura
da nano, there the political and cultural hegemony of the Sokoto Caliphate was
truly established. With this pattern of farming and exchange in place, town life
seems not to have been too far behind.

The ecology described by the travelers was the work of generations of
Hausa, farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering the substance of their daily lives
and material culture from the physical resources around them. What language,
literature and observations show of the Hausa landscape represents a very fluid
and dynamic relationship between human society and the natural environment.
In fact, only in the immediate environs of the old urban areas, the karakara, or
close-settled zone of modern geographers, did the travelers observe fields which
showed evidence of long term use and farming techniques adapted to

maintaining the fertility of farm land over long periods of time and dense human

 

94A1] of these factors influence women's participation and degrees of success in
the marketing of prepared foods today. See Schildkrout 1982, 1981, 1979;
Simmons 1975; Pittin 1979, 1984, 1987; Hill 1969, 1972; Bivins 1974-6, 1987-8.

199

settlement patterns. Imam Imoru was himself keenly aware of the rarity of such
highly developed and exploited land: he reported that only the land of Kano was

completely settled and had no wilderness:

The land of Kano has been blessedwith prosperity. It is a highly
populated land with more people than Katsina. There is no
wilderness and the land is well laid out: Birnin Kano is in the middle
and the land encircles it on the east and west, south and north
(Ferguson 1973,144)"s

 

In general, just as the boundaries and the bounty of nature and the natural
world changed from season to season and year to year, so did the vast majority
of human fields and settlements. The travelers' accounts and the tatsuniyoyi
consistently capture this aspect of Hausa social reality with their emphasis on
change and the temporary quality of human relationships and the natural world.

Europeans were especially concerned with gathering geographical
information about Hausaland: they wanted to locate the Hausa in time and
space on a global scale. They gathered itineraries, took star readings and made
navigational records. All of this energetic, yet surprisingly amateurish, scientific
activity culminated in the publication of the massively detailed scientific studies
of the late nineteenth century which were ushered in by the rise of formal
empire. As we shall see, for the French in Hausa Niger, the documentation of the
Mission Tilho was an excellent example of this passion for measurement,

investigation, and classification of the Hausa world (T ilho 1909).

 

95Modern geographers describe Hausaland as a derived landscape (Mortimore
1965) -

200

The European passion for scientific geography sharply contrasted with the
notions of geography which governed thought in Hausaland. There was a
profound orientation of daily life, as clearly seen in the conceptualization and use
of space in Hausa architecture, towards the eastern centers of Islam, but this did
not necessarily translate into a European “notion of the science of geography.
When Sultan Bello prepared a map of the Central Sudan for Hugh Clapperton in
1824, he represented the geopolitical boundaries of the Hausa emirates as
idealized circles around the points designated as the capital cities of the emirates.
His map also designated caravan resting places and routes. Most curiously, the
map shows the Kwara (Niger) River turning east to connect with the Nile, the
classic Islamic notion of the relationship between the two rivers, even though
Bello himself described how the Kwara entered the Atlantic to the west. This
alone is a stunning piece of evidence on the cultural shaping and transmission of
geographical knowledge in Hausaland: Bello's identification with Islamic
learning was so powerful that it over-rode his own knowledge based on
observation and experience. Thus we find an example of the difference between
Islamic and Western European notions of knowledge in the work of this African

intellectual.

Conclusion The Nineteenth Century Hausa Landscape

Based on the evidence of the tatsuniyoyi, oral testimony, and the travelers'
accounts, these conclusions can be made: Hausaland worked as a social
formation because it included diverse ecological regions united by a locally

diverse, but nevertheless shared culture, perhaps best expressed in the Hausa

201

language itself.” Nineteenth century travelers observed the ways that Hausa
farmers linked the unique resources of micro environments to the development
of local and long-distance trade and the marketing of food.

The Hausa did not need the impetus of Western capitalism to place an
economic value on their natural environment. The substance of material culture
alone would be ample evidence of how the Hausa integrated their vision of the
good life with the properties of the natural world around them. Hausa farming
culture further articulates the dynamic relationship between social reproduction
and ecology. The nineteenth century was one of economic expansion and
exploitation influenced by intraregional economic exchange, but clearly
incorporated into Hausa understandings of the utility of their natural
environment. Even with the growth of such markets, two fundamental
characteristics of Hausa culture were maintained: production for local
consumption and for market exchange remained firmly based on the local
ecology and the value of women's economic activities was also maintained.

While geopolitical power could be conceived in terms of a sarkin kasa, it is
difficult to find informants even today who think of themselves as living in a
kasar Hausa, or Hausaland. I have had informants tell me about kasar mu, that is,
"our land" in reference to the local setting of a village or town; about kasar Maska
or kasar Katsina, to describe towns with recognized (from a local perspective)
hinterlands; to Damagaram to mean the city of Zinder and its immediate
hinterland. All of these kinds of references lead me to suspect that for my rural

Hausa informants, towns were more clearly conceptualized as social and

 

96This is an issue considered by Scott 1987:138-240, 1990; Merchant 1989, and
Gramschi 1985:194-5.

202

geographic entities than were the territories of such political units a states and
kingdoms.”

Distance and geography were generally conceptualized by urban,
Islamicized sophisticates in reference to caravan routes. To answer a specific
question of where a place was, a Hausa might think of how one got to the place;
which paths one took; which rivers were forded; and which towns one passed
through. Thus, the itineraries given to the early European travelers were
appropriate ways to define geography from a Hausa point of view as well as that
of the travelers' themselves. Cartographic representations of Hausaland
produced by early European travelers such as Denham, Clapperton and Barth
thus give the illusion of geographic knowledge of Hausaland when, in fact they
show only that very narrow stretch of space through which travelers passed. It
was left to the reader's imagination to conclude that descriptions shown on the

maps could be applied to all of Hausaland.”

 

97People in Matamaye and Zinder thought it quite odd that I would refer to a
kasar Hausa. The phrase, in fact, has been popularized by Anglo-Nigerian scholars
only in the past twenty years. A. Smith used it for the first time in his own
important work in his article, "Some considerations relating to the formation of
states in Hausaland"(1971), and again in his "The Early States of the Central
Sudan" (1971) In the Arabic of North Africa, kasr meant a fortress or fortified
town, as Barth notes. Last uses this meaning of the word in his discussion of early
Kano history. I find myself inclined to accept my informants association of kasar
with the birni as a reflection of the Arabic meaning of kasr and a much more
authentically Hausa usage of kasar than what modern historians have come to
accept, as intellectually satisfying as kasar Hausa may be.

98Since the colonial period, Hausaland has been linguistically constructed by
social scientists to mean only that part of the actual region in which Hausa is the
dominant culture and language, which coincides with, first, the Sokoto Caliphate
and, second, the Republic of Nigeria. Staudinger certainly does this and I am
astonished at how many modern cartographic representations of Hausaland only
show modern Hausaphone Nigeria.

203

The increasing pace of nineteenth century urbanization, the Hausa towns
and cities described by travelers and Hausa alike, their growth and the parallel
growth of their metropolitan hinterlands, the specific regions over which a city
exercised sometimes extraordinary economic, political and cultural influence,
further shaped the relations of production in Hausaland. Damagaram, especially

the southern parts of Damagaram, would in the nineteenth century assert an
independent political identity while at the same time becoming more closely
integrated into the metropolitan economy of the Kano. Thus, factors of economic
development in the nineteenth century would become especially important role
in the modernization of Hausa society in Zinder. The documentation from the
Cercle de Zinder will show this in some detail and I will make the argument that
Damagaram maintained a north-south economic and cultural orientation- even
after the arrival of the French and the English when French policy would press
for an east-west orientation, with a special emphasis on connecting the Colony

du Niger to the Niger River and on to Dakar. 9"

 

99Chad lost its military and political significance after W.W.I. Niger's first
colonial capital, Zinder, lost out to Niamey, strategically located on the Niger

River in 1926. The Algeria link never offered serious competition to the
Nigeria / Kano link.

204

Historians, archeologists and Hausa themselves agree that Hausaland
today is an antique landscape, shaped by human intervention.100 Based on the
evidence I have discussed in this chapter, an ecological history of Hausaland
would locate the development of Hausa culture within the long centuries of
human interaction with the environmental diversity of the Central Sudan. But, I
would like to strike a cautionary note: the possession of the technology to use
natural resources also carried with it the temptation to over-use those same
resources.

By the nineteenth century Hausa agriculturists and craft workers used all
of the natural resources of the micro environments of the Central Sudan in which
Hausaphone communities could be found. Furthermore, the active Hausification
of the northern and southern frontiers of Hausaland was well engaged in the
process of environmental change. Hausa communities and farming practices had
created a host environment into which increased numbers of cattle, goats and
sheep could be introduced by Fulbe migrants taking advantage of the political
opening up of the Hausa regions to them after the Sokoto Jihad. This, of course,
was the very basis of the economic vitality of Hausaland described by European
visitors.

It is possible, however, and, I fear probable, that the very success of the
Hausa and Fulbe to exploit their physical environment in the nineteenth century

also imperiled the ability of the land to renew itself through the cycle of the

 

100 A. Smith 1971, 3:152-195; Sutton 1979, 20:179-201; Fuglestad 1978, 3:319-339;
Y.B. Usman 1978; Watts 1986. Frequently cited earlier sources include Palmer
1928, Urvoy 1936 and Mauny 1961.

101 Fuglestad gives a succinct account of these missions (Fuglestad 1987:39-78).
See also Séré de Rivieres (1965).

205

seasons and the complex interactions of plant and animal communities.
Drought, soil erosion and deforestation, water pollution, and, in the early
twentieth century, increasingly wide-spread epidemics of human, plant and
animal disease all point to underlying conditions of environmental stress and
fundamental abuse of Hausaland's natural resources.

The failure to see the Hausa landscape as an intricate mosaic of micro-
environments and the subsequent disregard for the fragility of this landscape has
directly contributed to the environmental degradation of the Hausa regions of
Niger and Nigeria so powerfully expressed since the droughts of the 1970's. The
failure to see and to understand how Hausa society itself integrated the
environment and nature into a particularly flexible and effective culture of
environmental exploitation through farming and animal husbandry ultimately
contributed to the failure of development planning to give thoughtful
consideration to protecting the environment.

The persistence of hunger and poverty as motifs in Hausa tatsuniyoyi and
poetry forces us to acknowledge the darker side of economic development. In
the narratives of the travelers, I read signs of profound ecological change along
with the evidence of economic growth and rural as well as urban development.
By exploiting every environmental niche offered in the regions of Hausa
settlement, and thus leaving no margin of safety in untapped reserves, the Hausa
themselves were courting ecological disaster.

Did Hausa themselves perceive the intrinsic value of their landscape? The
poem quoted at the beginning of this chapter, though it was composed by

Shekarau Sa'du to praise the populist stance of the Hausa nationalist party, the

206

Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) founded in Nigeria in 1949 gives one Hausa

response to this question:

In Praise of Farming
There are three things in the world today,
From them the country acquires honor.
I begin with farming, second is knowledge,
And then worship of God Almighty.
Farming is the life of everyone,
The queen of all work is farming
A man does not have a shining face
Unless there is in his belly what farming bears,
The wealthy man will not build houses,
Except with the remainder of what farming bears,
The student does not understand
Unless his belly is full of what farming bears,
The worker does not work
Unless he picks up what farming hatches.

207

Chapter 6: Rapports de Tournee: From Damagaram
to Zinder in the Colony du Niger

Few things bring (the grammar of colonial ideologies) into more
visible relief than three institutions of power which, although
invented before the mid-nineteenth century, changed their form and
function as the colonized zones entered the age of mechanical
reproduction. These three institutions were the census, the map, and
the museum: together, they profoundly shaped the way in which the
colonial state imagined its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry.
(B. Anderson 1990:163-4).

The setting within which the peasants of Sedaka today conduct their
lives is, only in small part, their own creation (J. Scott 1987:48).

Knowledge is power
(Motto, School of Oriental and African Studies, London)

A dramatic shift takes place in how Europeans describe Hausaland and its
people after 1901. As an intellectual parallel to the political move from informal
to formal empire, from the language and narrative of sponsored, but nevertheless
unofficial, expeditions to that of official military and scientific missions, the
narrative voice of French colonial documents tends to depersonalize the
European observer as it attempts to objectify the Hausa observed. The
documentation of the military missions sent by the French in the late 1890's to
probe their newly delimited African territory in what would become (in 1922) the
Colony of Niger belongs in this intellectual context. For Hausaland, French
missions included those of Monteil (1890-2), Cazémajou (1897-8) Voulet-
Chanoine (1899), Foureau-Lamy (1899), Joalland-Meynier (1899), and that of the
first Commandant of the Third Military Territory of Niger, Lt. Col. Péroz (1900)

208

(Monteil 1894?; Foreau 1902,1905; Joalland 1930; Meynier 1947; Moll 1902).101
However, from the documents of the French takeover of Damagaram, it is clear
that some French acknowledged another aspect of conquest in the relationship
between the authority to rule and the ability to know, as accurately as possible,
what it was one ruled. How else to explain; for example, the meticulous accounts
of scientific investigations carried out in newly acquired African territories? The
observations, collections and calculations of the teams of scientists sent out with
French missions into the Central Sudan created an illusion of intellectual control,,
of conquest, over Africa's previously unknowable geography, ecology and
cultures. Though only an illusion, such documentation lent solidity to the
enterprise of empire-building in the garrisons and residencies of newly-arrived
colonial representatives and, perhaps more importantly for the grand masters of
the imperial game, among French constituencies as well. In this way the
language of nineteenth century scientific investigation was incorporated into the
narrative of colonial conquest.

The Sultanate of Damagaram, which by 1900, encompassed the richest and
most populous Hausa region north of the Sokoto Caliphate, became the vassal of
the French by right of conquest. Damagaram was forfeited, in fact, in revenge for
the death at Zinder of Cazémajou and on other French officer in 1899 at the
instigation of the Sarkin Damagaram, Ahmad II, who was himself killed as he
fled the disastrous encounter with French forces at Tirmini, just west of Zinder

(July 30, 1899) (Dunbar 1970; Fugelstad 1987).102 Once having claimed the

 

101 Fuglestad gives a succinct account of these missions (Fuglestad 1987:39-78).
See also Séré de Rivieres (1965).

102 This summarizes the legal claims of conquest in the treaty made between
Damagaram and France, January 25, 1901 (Appendix VI, Dunbar 1970:263-265.)

209

prerogatives of conquest, the French set out to learn what, precisely, they had
acquired—and not only in terms of territory. This was a dual process of exploring
the physical dimensions and natural, including human, resources, of Damagaram
and, more important to the command in Zinder, learning what powers to tax and
control those resources they had assumed from the Sultanate.

Any discussion of how the French set up a colonial administration in their
portion of Hausaland must begin here because neither the policies of colonial
rule nor the Hausa response can be understood if the powerful influence of the
previous Hausa political culture is not acknowledged.1“3This is especially so in
the case of Hausa recruited into positions of authority (village heads, canton
chiefs) which mirrored the political organization of the Sultanate. The French
treaty with Damagaram acknowledged this reality, and carefully listed the '
"territoires dependant de la ville Damagaram (Zinder)." The list of territories so
claimed for France wisely included the names of the title holders or chiefs who
ruled them within the structure of the sultanate (Dunbar 1970:263-65). As the
French initiated a transfer of the taxable wealth of Damagaram from the
Sultanate to the Cercle de Zinder, they continued to exploit their understanding
of tax obligations under their predecessors. In a very real sense, the new regime
continued to operate under Hausa political rules well into the 1930's.

A close reading of the extensive documentation on abusive chiefs shows

how the cultural space between Hausa notions of political rights and

 

103Summaries of the colonial political history of the Hausa in the Republic of
Niger are found in Fuglestad 1983; Abadie 1927; Bonardi 1960; David 1964;
Hamani 1975; Dunbar 1970; Séré de Riviéres 1965; Salifou 1971. See Baier 1980
for a general economic history of Hausa Niger with a special focus on the trans-
Saharan trade.

210

responsibilities and French perceptions of the obligations of good government
were negotiated.

With the acquisition of Damagaram the French were established in one of
Africa's most unique physical environments, today know as the Sahel, a
reference evocative of drought, famine and desperate poverty.104 There was
simply no denying the overriding importance, to French and Hausa alike, of such
issues as weather and water; the earliest French observations of Zinder noted the
city's extremely precarious water supply (Abadie 1927; Chappelle 1987:39).
Foreau, after enduring an especially grueling passage from Agadez to Zinder,
was convinced that Heinrich Barth had seen a far more fertile, productive and
well-watered landscape on his journey Hausaland (Foreau 1902:467-568).105
While the French set out to control the people and natural resources of
Hausaland, the nature of those resources, including, it must be added, their very
scarcity, powerfully influenced the application of even the most carefully worked
out philosophy of colonial rule. Whether we look at the colonial administration
set up in the 1920's and 1930's from the perspective of rural Hausa village life, or
as an encounter between the French and the Sahelian ecology of Damagaram, the
problems of making a living in this environment posed a threat to the incoming
regime about which they were extraordinarily ignorant and, as we shall see in

the descriptions of the great famine of 1914, perhaps insensitive.

 

104 Whether in terms of gross national produce or per capita income, The
Republic of Niger is ranked in the lowest echelons, one of the ten poorest nations
in the world.

105The Mission Saharienne under Foreau and Lamy was poorly prepared for the
journey to Hausaland, nor was it readily accommodated by people on its route,
who were well apprised of French military advances to the west and south The
passage to Zinder, however, was carried out during the month of Ramadan,
which may have influenced the voyagers' welcome(Foreau 1902:211, 215).

211

Earlier travelers may well have been protected from a full realization of
the problems of meeting basic needs for water and food by the way the caravan
routes attracted local resources for sale, but the new regime in Zinder was
quickly disabused of any illusions about the productivity of Damagaram's
Sahelian environment. Sometimes the problems of procuring and distributing
comestibles became a burlesque of the daily worries of the Hausa talakawa.. In
1916, a row over the distribution of fresh vegetables from the gardens at Myrria
(assumed from the Sultan's household to that of the Commandant), took five
months to be negotiated. Junior officers posted outside of Zinder complained
that they had received only one cabbage, "gros comme le poing", in months
(Letterbook, Zinder, 3/ 29/ 1916 to 8 / 25/ 1916, 1916). Certainly from the reports
and observation of early colonial officials in Zinder, environmental conditions
shaped colonial rule in Hausaland in far more pragmatic ways than emanations,
political, economic, social or cultural, from the metropole.106 ..However, by 1926
the local initiative of the French in Zinder would be increasingly challenged by
the stabilization of a centralized colonial policy and administration throughout
the new Colony of Niger, especially in regard to rural taxation. How Hausa
people exploited their physical environment before the colonial takeover was the
theme of the last chapter. That same question in the context of the colonial state-
weak though it was in the Hausa regions of Zinder until the nineteen forties,
motivated important elements of colonial record-keeping and the application of
colonial technologies of knowledge in the documents of the first four decades of

the French Cercle de Zinder.

 

106 Which appears to have been Dakar rather than Paris.

212

The Ofi‘icial Voice of Colonial Zinder: the Narratives of Conquest and Administration
Already established in Algeria, directly north across the Sahara from
Damagaram, the French on arrival in Zinder transformed the paper conquest of
the Central Sudan, accomplished in the diplomatic circles of Europe, to the
military conquest of the Hausa Damagaram . Even in its earliest manifestations,
the relationship between the Hausa and the French was already multifaceted.
Expeditions sent into Damagaram in the late nineteenth century had not been
reluctant to advertise their military nature. Montiel's account of his journey
through the Hausa regions of the Sokoto Caliphate in 1890-2 failed to capture the
spirit of investigation or to include close accounts of either the Hausa people or
their landscape found in the nineteenth century travel narratives: his objectives
were far more clearly linked to the politics of European rivalries in the region,
especially between the French and the English (Monteil 1890-2, n.d.). Though
Ferdnand Foreau, a co-leader of the M issian Saharienne, attempted to re-establish
the scientific traditions of Barth, Staudinger and Nactigal, his own account of
traveling in Hausaland firmly acknowledged an imperial objective: to extend
and solidify, by diplomatic or military means, French hegemony in the regions
between the Niger River and Lake Chad and from Lake Chad to central Africa
(Foreau 1902,I; 1905,11). Nevertheless, the published accounts of the Mission
Saharienne produced by Foreau are a distinctive step towards the kind of
measured observation and categorization of colonial cultures and colonized
places Anderson calls the "grammar of colonial ideologies" as expressed in his
notion of "three institutions of (colonial) power ": the census, the map and the

museum (Anderson 1990:163-4).

213

For the Central Sudan, including Damagaram, the best example of the
emergence of a distinctive colonial culture of investigation and scientific
observation are the volumes of information published by the scientists with the
Mission Tilho (1906).”7 As a scientific expedition, the Mission Tilho differed from
earlier journeys into Hausaland by scientifically-minded travelers such as Barth
and Staudinger in matters of scale and objectives. Created to demarcate the
boundary negotiated between the French in Niger and the British in Nigeria in
1906, the Mission Tilho included a number of scientists with specialized interests:
a geographer, a cartographer, a linguist, who also collected ethnological and
historical accounts, a doctor, a malacologist and someone with a mastery of
photography all trekked along in this massive spectacle of French purpose in the
Central Sudan (Tilho 1911,2:V-VIII). The expedition collected specimen of fish,
shells, plants, human physiology (measurements and photographs), language
and oral history to be catalogued and described by the scientific community back
home in France.108 The number of people in general, including porters, servants
and the military escort must have alerted, even alarmed, rural people along the
Mission's route. The scientific objectives seem almost obscured by the details of
mounting such an expedition and it must be remembered that this was a period
when dramatic, large scale European (and American, to include Commander
Perry's assault on the North Pole in) expeditions were very much en vogue.

The actual objectives of M issian Tilho were highly mutable: one moment a

scientific expedition modeled after Barth, in the next, the expedition could easily

 

107Note the model, as suggested by E. Said, provided by the French study of
Egypt during Napoleon's conquest (Said 1993).

108One thesis and numerous scientific articles were based on the mission's
collections, many of which may still be examined.

214

transform itself into an avenging angel, honoring the death of Cazémajou.
Viewed from the perspective of these conquest accounts, French policy in at least
this part of Africa hardly looks rational or calculating: too many motives were
given credibility, too many accounts, all emphasizing one aspect or another of
the mission, were prepared by its members. Furthermore, the attempt to
establish an air of objectivity throughout the published accounts, especially the
official volumes laying out the results of the mission's scientific observations,
seem almost surreal within the context of the colonial moment. Detailed
drawings of insects, accounts of snails and clams in Lake Chad, and the
meticulous, but overwhelmingly arrogant, collection of physiological
measurements (presented in photographs, charts and hand-drawn, pull-out,
paper-doll-like diagrams) of African people living in the new French territories
seem frivolous in comparison to the intentions of military conquest and
subjugation which are at the dark heart of colonial science (Tilho 1911).
Establishing intellectual control over Damagaram was a vital element in
the internal psychology of French colonialism. However, much of the detail and
nuanced observations of early travel narratives is lost: the more objective our
colonial observers try to be, the less they actually tell us. Both the traveler and
the people visited are subsumed into the categories of scientific method, one as
the investigator, the other as the object investigated. New features of description
and analysis appear and new technologies of producing and reproducing
information bring the results of colonial science before the educated gaze of
European audiences. The Bulletin du Camite’ d'Etudes Histariques et Scientifiques de
l 'Afrique Occidentale Francaise, a weighty example of a significant trend in colonial

science, published ethnological reports, scientific data, maps, and other

215

information produced by a growing community of French intellectuals and
scientists. By the nineteen thirties, the cognitive maps of even the more remote
regions of Africa were no longer filled in with pictures of fantastic beasts and
mythologized rulers. Rather, the Europeans' view of their new African territories
were filled in with scientific data: the fictions of the travel narratives have given
way to the technology of scientific surveys. Was this data any less fantastic than
the wild beasts imagined before? To answer this question addresses the issue of
the reality of official accounts of census, map and ethnographic description in the
setting of colonial Zinder.

Ironically, colonial documents in Hausa Niger and Nigeria were written as
it only one party in the colonial context was observant: colonial writers seem to
be unaware of Hausa commentaries on the Europeans. Hausa oral literature
collected throughout West Africa includes poems and narratives in which Hausa
eyewitnesses to the colonial conquest gave their own account of what they saw
and how they understood the arrival of Europeans in Hausaland (Hiskett
1975:92-117; Fergeson 1973). In Hausa Niger, colonial officials were not even
sensitive to the racial slur implied by the Hausa usage of anasara (meaning
Christian, but with a highly provocative connotation) as the descriptor of the
French. In Nigeria, the English at least forced the usage of the more neutral

bature in place of anasara. .

The Power of the Narrative : Perfecting the Colonial Gaze
The goal of knowledge in the colonial context was always political:
knowledge supported the power to command, the power to control. In this

respect, the meaning of the data generated through the intellectual activities of

216

colonial agents and agencies was deeply entwined with both the nature of French
hegemony as well as the day-to day governance of colonized people. In
Damagaram, this function of colonial documentation would deepen as the
civilian administration matured and the need to be informed became the fixed
objective of local record keeping. In 1908 the military governor of the territory
(Lt. Col. Venel, 1908-10) stressed the importance of securing accurate information
about the people to the very evolution of an effective policy of colonial rule. He

wrote:

Our policies will obtain the best results if we know how to
penetrate the soul of our subjects, follow and, if possible, shape,
the movements of their opinion... (Venel 1908:16)109

In a sense, the progression of colonial documentation form Monteil to
Foreau through Tilho to the reports, monographs, statistical data, maps and daily
record keeping of colonial functionaries marked the passage from Damagaram to
Zinder. Theories of French colonial rule, as such information was circulated to
the commandants of Zinder and their sub-alterns, neither made use of the local
knowledge acquired by administrators in Hausaland, nor were local practitioners
in Zinder able to implement such directives to any degree of ideological
purity.110 Viewed from the local level, colonial rule in Zinder appears strikingly
different from the ideology of French colonialism located elsewhere in the

hierarchy of colonial documentation. Neither, however, are observations of

 

109 He also stressed the need for a united French effort among the colonies of
West Africa (Venel 1908: 16)

110 Original copies of rather important circulars on matters of policy such as
those articulated by Venel in the Rapport Palitique Annuel, 1908, were still to be
found in the jumble of colonial-period documents which were never removed
from the Prefecture, Zinder, to the National Archives, Niamey.

217

notable changes, economic, political or social, within colonized Hausa
communities easy to grasp. Again, I signal the irony of colonial documentation
in Niger: that so much more could be observed and recorded while the Hausa
themselves remained more obscurely observed than in the travel narratives of
Europeans like Clapperton, Barth and Staudinger. Even the acerbic Richardson
offered a more intimate, if not especially flattering, account of Zinder and its
inhabitants. Colonial administration of the Cercle de Zinder was monotonous,
especially after the initial competition between the French and English over
mastery of Hausa territory and Hausa people was settled.111 The documents are
all but lifeless.

Examining the colonial records of the French in Hausa Niger as they exist
in the Nigerien National Archives today, it is difficult not to conclude that these
documents are singularly reticent compared with those of other regions in
French West Africa.112 The late date of the colonial conquest of Damagaram
limits the documentary base for historical research in colonial archives to the
twentieth century. Furthermore, the gender bias of the colonial regimes in
Zinder influenced the documentation of women and the colonial understanding

of gender in Hausa culture.11i-‘ If we are to locate the relationships among

 

111 Nervous references to the loss of population to Nigeria ceases at about the
same time (the late 1920's and certainly by the mid-1930's) as the Cercle de
Zinder settles into its colonial identity: in other words, with the coming of a
more stable civilian regime.

112 And even more so when compared to the historical records of Other parts of
colonial Africa where the diversity of colonial perspectives and records seems
almost too rich by Nigerien standards.

113 French colonial wives are also silent, though they accompanied their
husbands on horseback from post to post. Chapelle, in Kano on his way to
Zinder in June, 1927, met the wife of the only French administrator killed in the
June 5 Mahdist attack on the French post at Tessaoua. She told him how her

218

gender, Islam and ecology in the narrative of colonial, it is only at the local level
where some success may be had. There, at least, the specifically local
observations of colonial informants may be placed in the cultural context of fin
de siecle Hausaland.

For Hausa Niger, the documents created to administer the cantons of the
Cercle de Zinder, offer the most promising historical evidence of the local
conditions of colonialism. These documents include: canton touring reports
(rapports de tournee) assembled approximately every four years and political and
economic reports produced quarterly and annually for the Cercle. . Occasionally,
monographs examining issues of special interest to the colonial regime, such as
the history of the Sultanate of Damagaram were written (Brunot 1913). The
military records created in the years immediately following the conquest, though
of great interest to the social historian, remain scattered, unprocessed and
virtually unusable by historians, though documentation of other parts of Niger
has been used (Rothiot 1988; Rash 1973.)

The canton touring reports, available for the years from 1926 to 1954, are
the most detailed source for investigating the Hausa experience of French rule in
the Nigerien archives. The touring reports were assembled to provide a setting
for the statistical information collected to determine the tax liability of each
canton. At the very least they contain a description of natural resources;
agriculture and livestock production; the canton's political climate; population
movements within the canton and immigration to Nigeria; religious affairs, such
as how many Koranic teachers lived and taught in a canton, how influential they

were and how many students studied with them. Perhaps of greater importance,

 

husband was run through by a spear as he walked into the town a few meters
ahead of her(Chappelle 1960:36-7; Fuglestad 1987:126-7).

219

is the value of the rapports de tau rnee as evidence of the intellectual mission of
French colonial documentation: what the French thought they ought to know
about their Hausa population and the Hausa environment.

The touring reports were essential elements in the flow of information
from the field administrators to the head of each cercle, the districts into which
French colonies in West Africa were divided, and through them to the governor
general of each colony, then on to the governor general of French West Africa in
Dakar and, ultimately, to Paris. Their authors, therefore, were compelled to
prepare reports in which the French were portrayed as the initiators of political,
economic and social control. In the Cercle de Zinder, reported on their efforts to
carry out the directives of the central colonial administration . They described
speeches given to village heads and householders to encourage the
intensification of farming, the maintenance of the reserve granaries, and the
reporting of deaths, births and infectious diseases. In the late 1930's they also
noted the activities of the Societies Indigelnes de Prévayance, a government-
sponsored development agency, which, in Zinder, limited its activities to
improving the quality of goat hides for export.

These documents are, therefore, a curious blend of observations because
the motives for their existence were so mixed. Even the education of colonial
officers influenced the creation of document in Zinder and elsewhere. During
the 1930's and early 1940's, the rapports de taurnee,, for example, often included
remarakably detailed and often beautifully drawn maps of the cantons

surveyed.114 Such maps carried on the tradition of cartographic representation

 

11"1See, for example, the canton maps included in the following rapports de
tournee: ANN 23.3.2 (Miria, Babantopki, Droum, Kissambana, Guidimouni,

220

initiated by the nineteenth century travelers to Hausaland and brought to a
special prominence with the documentation of the Mission Saharienne and the
Mission Tilho (F. Foureau 1905; J. Tilho 1911 ). Detailed and exact, when maps
were included in the rapports de taurnee they were based on the direct
measurement and observations of the administrator who carried out the survey.
The authenticity of these cartographic images of the Cercle de Zinder is at least in
part due to the professionalization of colonial cadets as they passed through the
curriculum of the Ecole Colonial and were indoctrinated (in the 1930's) in the
value of detailed, local monographs (W. Cohen 1971). Europeans within the
limited sphere of influence touched by the information in the rapports finally
acquired a clear picture of the Hausa landscape. Ironically, the excellence of the
early rapports would allow later officials to become increasingly distant from the
populations over whom they exercised control. 115

On the whole, however, the rapports de taumee are testimonials to how
little the government involved itself in the social and economic life of the Cercle
de Zinder.. These documents strongly suggest that the French regime in Niger
simply used Zinder as a tax farm, putting virtually nothing into the development
of economic or social infrastructure, but counting on the flow of revenue
generated by the region's participation in the dynamic growth of the Hausa city
of Kano in British Nigeria. The tax returns and import/ export statistics for the
Colony of Niger clearly demonstrate the economic importance of rural

Hausaland. As taxpayers, grain and livestock producers and consumers of

 

1926), ANN 23.3.14 (Droum, 1932), ANN 23.3.43 ( Guidimouni, 1941), ANN
23.3.40 (Myrriah, 1938), ANN 23.1.2 (Tirmini, Garagoumsa, 1939).

115A fault often considered, then and now, to have been the ultimate weakness
of French administrators in West Africa (Cohen 1971).

221

 

imported cloth, kola and salt, Niger's Hausa population made a substantial
contribution to the financial stabilization of the colonial administration. 116 Yet,
what infrastructure the French built in colonial Niger centered on Niamey and its
immediate hinterland (Fuglestad 1987:119-46; Séré de Riviéres 1952:53, 63-83,
1965:277-89; C.L'A.O.F. 1922).

Writing about gender from the canton touring reports is challenging.
While the occasional report comments directly on women, most often we find
women only in the 'canton census, enumerated as either taxpayers or non-
taxpayers. No where do we find, for example, evidence on the participation of
women in local affairs or in the community development activities of the S.I.P.'s.
Thus, only the population statistics gathered from the cantons and found in the
touring reports offer a source of evidence on women in the administrative
records of the colonial regime in Hausa Niger.

Population statistics collected to create tax rolls were especially tied to the
colonial regime's need for both information and an orderly array of categories
through which to create a definable, even defensible, administrative task for
itself: if people can be counted and put into categories, policies of administration
may then be established to give local colonial regimes some way to assure their
own accountability to their superiors. The canton census were, in effect, the
documents of a bureaucracy attempting to establish control over a region only
recently and reluctantly incorporated into a centralized European state, no
matter how rudimentary the colonial government of Zinder appears. Deceiving

the tax collector has long been a weapon of the weak, to borrow Scott's apt

 

116Here I rely on my journal summaries of statistics found on microfilm in
France and in the National Archives, Niamey, as all of my notes from archival
sources on this topic were stolen in Niamey, 1988.

222

phrase, and the census information collected from the cantons of Zinder surely
contain their share of tampered evidence.117 Nevertheless, the meticulously
recorded data found in the canton reports is an essential source which, if
carefully treated, can yield information about rural Hausa women and their
villages during what Fugelstad called "the great silence" of colonial rule in Niger,

that is, from 1922 to 1944 (Fugelstad 1983:119-46)

Settlements, Households and Families in the Census Reports

Women were rarely of public interest to the French in Niger and only
relatively more significant to the British in Nigeria where the government
attempted to abolish concubinage, to send girls to school and was generally more
involved with the social and economic development of the Hausa region of
Nigeria than were the French in Niger. Lacking other documentation, the census
materials can be used as an alternative source for Hausa women's history, but
with significant limitations. Most of the canton assessments for the colonial
period divide the population only into four groups, taxpayers and non-
taxpayers, male and females. The age structure of the populations can be
estimated only in terms of the ratio of adults to children under the age of 8 (from
1906), the age when children became subject to the head tax. Thus, little beyond
the most general composition of a community's population can be described
from these records. However, in Hausa Nigeria, adult women were not subject

to head tax and, therefore are not even recorded in tax rolls. Possibly the records

 

117In his book, Weapons of the Weak, J. Scott is especially effective in setting up the
class conflicts inherent in the collection of data, whether census materials or oral
history, in peasant societies (Scott 1987).

223

m
. . m

for Niger offer the better estimate of what the population structure of Hausa
communities looked like in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Even as sources of information on general population trends, it is
generally not possible to establish population series with this data becauSe the
census records for most cantons are incomplete. Family reconstitution is equally
impossible: Hausa people are nameless in these records, nor is there direct
information on household size and composition. To keep better records on
canton tax payers, all heads of households (the chef de maisan or mai gida) were
given identity cards on which each taxpayer in the household was listed. In the
census reports, however, the population figures are given by village; individuals
or even individual households were not distinguished one from the other. The
size, geographic distribution, ethnicity and livestock holdings of villages in a
canton, may, however, be compared. From this data estimates of the actual
resource base of villages of various sizes can be obtained. The extremely small
size of some settlements probably reflect complex farming households. Such
evidence describes the economic settings of rural Hausa women's lives in the first
half of this century.

From the French perspective, the census data was created to facilitate the
implementation the head tax. A unique census of the Fulbe community in
Magaria shows that colonized people saw the census in just those terms. On the
other hand the Magaria census also suggests the way colonized people, in this
case a minority, non-Hausa ethnic group within one of the most populous and
environmentally rich sections of Hausa Niger, indigenized the technology of the
census to make it suite their own community needs. A Fulbe scheme of social

categories shaped the design, implementation and results of the census, which

224

was carried out in 1932 (ANN 13.3.1). The Fulbe are counted as families under
the names of their headmen. Some of these units are quite large and clearly refer
to extended families several generations deep. Others are equally small and
undoubtedly refer to a more circumscribed, but nevertheless Fulbe, definition of
family. This census more than any of the others counts people in the
communities they defined themselves: for Zinder it was the only census in
which an African conceptualization of geography and community actually
appeared in the statistical results. The census defined a geography of kinship and
altered French notions of tax paying communities to fit. They complained that
the French approach to counting people in Magaria always led to unfairness:
they wanted their position in the administrative record keeping to be fair in their

own terms and they used the technology of the census to achieve their goal.

Demise of the Sultanate of Damagaram: A Demographic Model

The canton assessment reports document significant demographic
changes within the boundaries of the Sultanate. The northern cantons, where
fiefs and slave settlements attached to the sarauta of Damagaram had been
located, lost pOpulation and were increasingly affected by drought conditions
from 1914 to 1944, the period under consideration here. As regions, they were
left behind as the southern cantons, those closest to Kano and ecologically more
diverse, gained population and participated in growing markets for farm
produce. Early French observers stressed the importance and value of the
northern cantons as livestock producers, and, indeed, the figures for livestock
sales south to Nigeria in the first decades of the twentieth century certainly

support such optimism. The sad truth, however, was that drought began to

225

 

destroy the northern pastures of the Sultanate. The desiccation of Damerghou is
especially striking to see in the assessment reports, especially when these are
juxtaposed with the accounts of earlier travelers. From the touring reports, on
sees the number of villages in which inhabitants did not have a permanent
source of water increasing over time. Population decline is also notable. In
addition to declining natural resources, the end of the trans-Saharan trade clearly
removed the primary source of wealth for such northern towns as Djadjigoua in
Damerghou: without the trade, not even food could be imported into such
places.

Damerghou's twentieth century fate is an example of the artificiality of
the landscape created by the trans-Saharan trade in the nineteenth century and
earlier European accounts of Hausaland: traveler's routes simply failed to give a
full view of the environment and its limitations. The demise of the northern
cantons which had previously been held in fief to the sarauta of Damagaram may
also stand as testimony to the environmental impact of the slave estates placed in
those fiefs (Dunbar 1977:155-77, 1970:184-90; Salifou 1971:145-51). However,
other factors must be taken into account to explain demographic shifts in the
Cercle de Zinder . . The southern cantons, for example, were simply richer in soils
and water resources and were able to support larger settlements During the
nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the economic life of southern
Damagaram, especially in its larger towns (the so-called Sossibaki kingdoms, for
example) participated in the regional development of Kano. Mentioned time and
again in the narrative sections of the rapports de taurnee and easily spotted in the
statistics of the census tables, population was drawn to southern towns and

villages, attracted by the growing economy stimulated by Hausa communities in

226

 

British Nigeria (Collins 1974). While Maradi was never a part of the Cercle de
Zinder, it to became a magnate for population from other parts of Hausa Niger.
Throughout the 1970's and even in the 1980's Maradi would have the highest rate
of urban growth in the Republic of Niger (Gregoire 1986). Even the survey of
Koranic schools and teachers carried out in 1912 suggested the economic viability
and growth of the southern cantons: it was there that the largest concentration of
schools, teachers and students were found anywhere in the Cercle de Zinder. As
we shall see, the establishment and local support for Islamic education among

rural Nigeriens signaled the direction of modernity in Hausa culture.

Migration Data

Time and again, French referred to the worrisome problem of loosing
Hausa taxpayers and labor to the lures of Nigeria's seemingly bountiful colonial
economy. They thus included data collected on migrants to Nigeria as well as
Nigeriens returning home to Zinder. The anonymity of the census reports makes
the data collected on migration especially useful for studying the household.
Each report accounts for migration in and out of the cantons and frequently notes
the size, composition and livestock holdings of migrant families. Women,
anonymous in the regular census reports, were counted as individuals in
migration reports and some sense of their control over household resources can
be discerned.

In addition to this information, the significance of marriage as a motive for
migration was noted frequently by French administrators. As the collection of
census data became more precise in the late 1940's and early 1950's, it was clear

that in many of the cantons in the Cercle de Zinder the number of women

227

 

migrants crossing into Nigeria to be married continued to outnumber men
migrating to any other destinations except in the case of religious migrants, such
as men going on pilgrimage to Mecca or traveling to other destinations to further
their religious education. This statistical observation seems to have held until the
collapse of the Nigerien peanut market in the late 1970's after the mid-decade
droughts. 11“

Migrants returning to Niger were also counted and this evidence,
supported by oral testimony, confirms the continued maintenance of close ties
between families on either side of the colonial border (Bivins, March 12,
1988:Matamaye ).

Finally, the migration data found in the touring reports clearly indicates
that long distance, long duration migration (excluding pilgrimage) was practiced
by very few Hausa from the Cercle de Zinder throughout the colonial period. The
reason was obvious to the French administrators: they needed only to go to
Kano. In this regard, the colonial experience of Niger's Hausa population was
stunningly different from that of the Djerma of western Niger for whom long
distance migration to the French coastal colonies, especially Togo and even
British Gold Coast, was extraordinarily important (Rouch 1956, 1960).

Islam in the Assessment Reports

Because of their experiences with Islamic militancy and resistance in

Senegal, Mauritania and Mali the French were especially interested in

documenting the influence of Islam in the Hausa cantons. Their fear of Islamic

 

118The 1970's, in fact, mark a watershed in the colonial and post colonial history
of Nigerien and Nigerian Hausa communities. It seem me that it is only after this
decade that significant differences between the quality of life for rural Nigerien
Hausa decline even more dramatically in comparison to their Nigerian
compatriots.

228

 

plots emanating from Kano also stimulated vigilance. From at least 1912,
meticulous records were kept on the number of teaching malams, their religious
affiliation, the number of their students, their political disposition towards the
French regime and the closeness of their ties to Nigerian clerics.

The first detailed survey of Moslem teachers throughout the Cercle de
Zinder was entered into the Cercle's records in May 1914. At that time, several
important localities which would later be detached from the Cercle were
included, notably Magaria and Tessoua. In describing Koranic education in the
Cercle, the report notes that all children received a fundamental education in
Islam. In addition, the children of scholars, both boys and girls, were given the
education they required to carry on in their father's profession. Women teachers
and scholars in the Cercle practiced the discretion required of Moslem women by
placing a screen between themselves and their students as the students recited
their work. While the names of practicing women Koranic scholars were not
listed, that such women existed at all confirms observations made in the Sokoto
Caliphate, but not in Niger. Today, certain women in towns and villages
continue to teach and to be recognized as scholars by others, usually in their own
neighborhoods or families. The privacy which prevailed in the household of
Nana Asma'u and which seems to have shielded here from the curiosity of Hugh
Clapperton also seems to have been practiced in 1914 and continues to operate
for women religious scholars in Hausa Niger today.119 The following chart

displays the information collected by the French.

 

119 Bivins April, 1988: Matamaye; June, 1988:Zinder.

229

 

Figure 1. Koranic Teachers and Students in the Cercle de Zinder, 1914'-20

Lacatian Number of Teachers Number of Students
Secteur Central
Birni 29 109
Zongo 13 ‘ 90
Malam Hassan 1 2 1 6 34
Gaffati 7 39
Dakoussa 21 101
Ouame 3 6
Droum 4 24
D080 5 l 1
Zonkour 1 4
Damagaram (T akiya?) 3 5
Guidamoni 10 76
Gonna 9 22
Mazmni 1 2
Daganou 2 3
Gueza 8 20
Kissambani 1 3
Zermou 9 28
Alberkaram 5 16
Secteur de Magaria
Dan Tchiao 19 52
Daoumbei 5” 243
Gouchi 20 48
Kantché 29 72
Ouacha 36 70

 

120Rapport Na. 21. Rapport sur les ecales caranique, included in Rapports Trimestiral.
Cercle de Zinder, 1914-15.

121A leading scholar (religious superior) of the full Islamic curriculum, Said to
have a library of 300 manuscripts.

230

While the French would limit the spread of literacy in Hausa, they
unwittingly failed to limit the spread of that other powerful element in the
construction of modern Hausa nationalism--and the political movements such an
identity could lead to. Participation in the growing market for agricultural
produce, spurred on not by French development efforts or to growth in the
economy of Niamey and the west of Niger, but by economic developments in
British Nigeria and the private decisions of Nigerien Hausa farmers in the
southern cantons to grow peanuts for the Kano market, seems to have coincided
with the strengthening of Islamic practices in rural Zinder. The census data
shows that Hausa farmers, especially in the cantons closest to Nigeria,
increasingly sent their children to Koranic school and went on the Hajj, often
with their families. Further evidence of the intensification of Islamic practices
among rural Hausa families comes from women now in their sixties who report
that they themselves began to leave the fields and enter purdah marriages at
about the same time (Bivins April, 1988:Matamaye, June, 1988:Zinder). Rural
Hausa families used the profits from farming and trade to adopt an Islamic
popular culture which was significantly more orthodox in its definition of male
and female relationships in marriage. The culture of courtship, however, would
remain in the hands of women and girls. In 1950 a French administrator
remarked that this religious enthusiasm was having a negative effect on the
savings of rural people--a comment which would be repeated by development
specialists in Niger and Nigeria with increasing frequency in the years to come.

The research carried out in the late 1950's through 1970's by French

ethnologists continued to show how the culture of rural Nigerien Hausaland was

231

marked by the infusion of money into households and the rural economy from
the production and marketing of peanuts ( Nicolas 1960, 1962a, 1962b, 1967,
1975: Raynaut 1976, 1977a, 1977b; Collins 1973). More physical evidence of this
cultural shift may still be read in the square, mud-walled compounds, often
decorated with the elegant designs created by specialized Hausa builders and
sheltered by metal roofs, found in the older neighborhoods of the villages and
towns of southern Hausa Niger. Such houses mark the practice of Islamic
marriages with their interior wells (or, for the wealthy in towns like Matamaye,
stand pipes), separate rooms and colonnaded verandahs for the now secluded
wives of Hausa farmers and merchants. Peanuts and the wealth they produced,
though now nearly twenty years gone from Hausa Niger's major peanut-growing
regions, allowed Islamic definitions of private and public space to be
incorporated into the domestic architecture of the regions towns (J. Collins
1974:73-91). By 1962 / 3 the connection between peanuts, marriage and Islam was

evident, as the French commandant of Magaria noted in his annual report:

The introduction of groundnut culture in the Magaria
district gave birth to new needs, or at least gave a particular acuity
to those which already existed. It is thus that celebrations have
multiplied, particularly those connected with marriages, which
always call for considerable expense: money for their organization;
for clothes. One only has to attend a spectacle of this type to see
how richly adorned and clothed are the young people (girls and
boys). 122

 

122 Karimou, G., Commandant de Cercle, Magaria, Rapport sur la Traite,
1962/ 3:13 (quoted in Collins 1974:83).

232

Conclusion: The Ecology of Taxation and the Demise of Damagaram

The tax systems of the Sultanate of Damagaram and the Hausa Emirates
of the Sokoto Caliphate were based on an ecological mapping of Hausaland and
an assessment of each community's tax liability within its ecological niche.
Individuals and individual communities were taxed in kind, though craft
workers in some of the emirates paid taxes in coweries (Shea 1976). As economic
specialization allowed the exploitation of unique environments and the
concentration of skilled craft workers in specific locations where their needs for
natural resources (cotton, indigo, water, for example), the Sultanate developed an
equally specialized system of tax collection: an ecological model of each
community's tax burden. 121‘

The checks and balances of a tax system based on an ecological model are
unique and strikingly different from those found in tax systems where taxes are
not paid in kind, but in some sort of coinage. Though the tax system removed
ecologically determined wealth from specific locations, much of that wealth was
recirculated within the large social and political unites of the sultan's own
household and the households of title-holders on whom the charge of tax
collecting was laid. Any instincts towards greed at the higher levels of tax
utilization could be dealt with in the moral economy of the communities
oppressed or abused. Relationships which required largess or charity or the
exchange of gifts between officials and commoners, marriage partners and their
families, kin, neighbors and friends, the wealthy and the poor, owners and
slaves, those who held power and those who depended on them--all such

relationships influenced the distribution and use of local resources. Other

 

123This section is based on: Abadie (1927); Salifou (1971:136-147); Dunbar
(1970:156-83); Brunot (1913).

233

 

scholars have defined political power in pre-colonial West Africa as control over
people, organized into huge households of kin, slaves and other dependents.
These households would have enjoyed a mixed economy, depending on their
own productive capacity in farming, herding, trading, craft work, as well as
tapping into the proceeds of rural taxation it they were attached to an office
holder within the sultanate. In this respect, wealth generated from taxation went
directly back into the productive capacity of the emirate and of local
communities: taxes in such political systems were elements of social
reproduction at all levels of political. Not only could one say that all politics was
local, but also all taxes were local as well. Wealth was not removed from the
community, even if it was redistributed through taxation. Abuse of the moral
economy of taxation would come if practices of charity, gift exchange and
obligations to support dependents were not met. The tatsuniyoyi document the
moral economy of this tax system in stories about the acquisition of wealth,
power and prestige. Stories also chronicle the decline and fall of individuals who
fail to acknowledge the responsibilities of power.

Only slave raiding within the sultanate by the sultan (which occurred in
the first half of the nineteenth century, and was observed by Richardson, Barth
and experienced by Dorugu, would have removed wealth in the form of
population and labor from a local area and redistributed it either within or
without the sultanate, depending on whether the captive was sold out of the
sultanate or placed on a slave estate belonging to the sultan or to an office holder.
The use of slave raids within the sultanate's taxable territory makes no sense.

Historical geographers note that the wealth of a port city is tied to

the wealth of its nterland. The sultan's control of taxation on international

234

 

caravan trade represented a form of taxation not based on ecology, but on
geography and the rise of Kano. Proceeds from this trade supported the special
and exclusive needs of the Sultan and his court.

Studies of the growth of Damagaram tend to favor an economic explanation
which prioritizes the growth of the trans-Saharan trade. I think that the
hinterland is too poor to sustain significant growth. Furthermore, Damagaram
was simply too close to Kano and Kano was in an infinitely more populous and
resource-rich region: Kano had a much more wealthy nineteenth century
hinterland and that hinterland would grow in the twentieth century. Ultimately,
it would capture significant and productive regions of southern Damagaram.
The economic base of Damagaram, as long as it depended on raiding and the
trans-Saharan trade was very vulnerable. I even wonder it one can think of
Damagaram as experiencing economic growth in the nineteenth centurynor
simply as reflecting the development of the Sokoto Caliphate's economy,
especially in the region of Kano.

In the initial period of military occupation of the Cercle de Zinder,
administrators collected information which was seen to be essential to the
strategic position of the regime. This included rather general observations on
agricultural production, some comments on local manufacturing, careful
statistics on the trans-Saharan trade, Moslem scholars and taxes and prestations.
It was also during this period that the terrible drought and famine of 1913-14
took place throughout Hausaland. The French in Zinder produced a chillingly
detached narrative of the drought year and its aftermath, noting the increasingly
desperate strategies taken by Hausa villagers in the Cercle as the enormity of the

famine became more and more pressing.

235

The first rapports de tournee show that the early colonial administration
was dependent on their understanding of the organization of fiefs directly tied to
the sultan's household. Beginning in 1926 and showing up in 1931 and 1932 as
well, the canton's most easily defined and, therefore, first to be counted were
regions which had been fiefs during the late sultanate.

Rapports de Tournee
23.3.1 not available
23.3.2 Myrria, Babantapki, Droum, Kissoula, Guidimouni 1926

23.3.3 Dogo 1930
23.3.4 Nomads 1931
23.3.5 Garagoumsa 1931
23.3.6 Gouna 1931
23.3.7 Baouré Boulili 1931
23.3.8 Zermou 1931
23.3.9 Dakoussa" 1931
23.3.10 Zinder 1931

" Slave estates of Sultan Tenimou

Examining the rapports de tournee . through the 1930's and into the early 1940's the
basic structure of cantons in the central division of Zinder, that is, in Hausaphone
Niger, continued to be based on the fiefs. This observation, however, is
somewhat misleading. While the names remained the same over this thirty year
period, individual rapports describe a most fluid definition of boundaries, one
which suggest that Hausa still worked in terms of a social geography rather than
a spatial geography. Villages, for example, were associated with different
cantons; the suppression of some villages and the creation of others depended on
the requests of local villagers. What is most interesting about such comments is
that they show the French responding to local initiatives. Hausa people used the
occasion of census reporting to affirm or to change the political ties of their

settlements to chefs de canton. In other words, it looks as if the census reports

236

are a simple device of the colonial administration, but, in fact, they could be
incorporated into local, Hausa politics with little or no reluctance on the part of
the French. The indigenization of the technology of the rapports de tournee seen
in the Magaria census of 1932 was echoed throughout the Cercle during the

1930's.

237

Chapter 7. Conclusion: Gender and Modernity in Hausa Niger

This book concludes with a question: what do we know about the
women? For my study of medieval marriage brought me to the
frontiers of an unknown realm: the word of women. I had been
hearing about women all along, but the speakers were always men
representing members of the other sex as objects at once
contemptible, terrifying, and tempting. What I want to do next is
try to demystify this male discourse and find out what the position
of women really was in the period with which I am concerned."
(Duby 1983zxx)

Where in a colonial narrative can Hausa perceptions and practices of
gender be positioned? Where can Islam be positioned? For that matter, where
can a Hausa interpretation of environment be fit into the European notion of
Hausaland as a geopolitical entity and as an economic ecology? What, in fact,
did Hausa Zinder look like by 1942? Modern ethnography would fix its
scholarly gaze on the Hausa of Nigeria and Niger with real concentration in the
middle decades of the twentieth century. Both the French and the British would
put into the field professionally trained, not infrequently government-supported,
anthropologist who would initiate a more systematic examination of the Hausa
society. Ironically, the date of these efforts would establish something of an
intellectual benchmark from which social scientists would tend to view the
Hausa past in an especially vague way. From this work, for example, the Hausa
communities of northern Nigeria would be marked as deeply conservative and
Islamic. This notion in turn would influence the rhetoric and politics of post-

independence Nigeria, especially confusing the meaning of Hausa political

238

ll 3...-r V_'__r T'

 

aspirations and contributing to the perilous rise of communal violence which led
to the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War in 1967.

We are limited in what we can say about Hausa women under colonial
rule by the nature of the administrative records. We learn nothing, for example,
about women's lives which might help us to understand the psychological
impact of such evidence as the high rate of infant mortality expressed in the
statistics of the canton censuses and observed by Europeans from Richardson to
the administrators of the Cercle de Zinder. However, the very absence of women
in the records of the colonial state of Niger, coinciding, as this observation does,
with the paucity of colonial interest in and financial support for social welfare
issues such as health care, education or sanitation, especially in the Cercle de
Zinder , raises serious doubts about the reality of colonial rule to most rural
Hausa during the silent years of the 1930's and 1940's. To people for whom the
colonial state was little more than a tax collector , the idea that an ideologically
French colonialism, and not, for example, the closer reality of marketing boards
in Nigeria or the merchants in Magaria, determined the quality of their lives

would have been hard to argue.l~' 4

 

124 A lesson I was taught every time I tried to engage my informants in
extended discussions of taxes, recruitment for communal work, or, in more
general ways, the difficulties of life under the French before the Second World
War. Men who could give me lively descriptions of the gifts required to marry a
girl from a town (as opposed to a girl from a village) either could not or would
not talk to me about paying taxes or maintaining the reserve granaries. Perhaps
my gender influenced their response.

239

Summary: The Culture of Courtship and Marriage in a colonial context

Hausa women experienced colonial rule and the technologies of
modernization which accompanied it without being dislodged from a position of
power they themselves carved out of the culture of fin de siecle Hausaland: their
power to control their own sexuality and those aspects of the transfer of wealth
which accompanied their adult lives: courtship, marriage, and childbirth.

In the first four decades of colonial rule in Zinder, women continued to
control the key life ceremonies in which the individual's relationship to family,
kin and community was re-stated or re-fashioned according to newly acquired
significations of status. Informants' descriptions (and ethnological accounts
when available) show that the ceremonial life of Hausa communities in Niger
continued to be focused on the events of individuals as they entered into the
institutions of family and marriage: weddings, naming ceremonies and the
celebrations and rituals of work. Increasingly, as the figures for increasing
numbers of children attending Koranic schools, the rituals of Islam would also
have been added to those of family and work. In the small communities of rural
Zinder, such ceremonies would have promoted a shared religious and cultural
life.

There is evidence that women controlled other fundamental aspects of
ceremonial life as well. .Women continued to control childbirth and other aspects
of women's medicine. Even in rural health clinics today, pregnancies, deliveries
and postpartum care has not been taken out of the hands of women by male
specialists. While Islam took command of the public life of urban Hausa, women
retained control over the culture of courtship, and marital relationships. This is

expressed today in the arrangement of worshipers at Friday mosque in virtually

240

any Hausa town with a Friday mosque: men group themselves in the immediate
vicinity of the mosque to pray behind its Iman; women of childbearing age stay
at home, but elderly women arrange themselves in the shade of nearby
compounds to be as close 5 possible to the locus of public prayer. On along
journey, women as well as men will pray in public (but not together), as for
example, at a small in Birnin Konni maintained by the national bus line for the
convenience of its patrons.

Hausa women strengthen their control over bori, which became almost an
exclusively female domain in the twentieth century, a process already underway
among Moslem Hausa in the nineteenth century. Neither men nor women,

however, give up a kind of understanding that bori may still express spiritual

forces. "Akwai iri, iri mutani chikin duniya", there are all kinds of people in the V

world, as on devoutly Moslem woman told me about the presence of bori
drumming in her especially Moslem ward (Bivins Matamaye: June, 1988).
Neither bori nor other aspects of pre-Islamic religion retained their public
prestigeunor are they completely abandoned and rendered powerless within the
Hausa communities. However, the ceremonial roles and status of royal women

suffered irretrievable loses from the imposition of both Islamic and European
political models: offices held by women in the Hausa emirates of Niger and
Nigeria were abolished(Mack 1988:44-77, 1991:109-129; Dunbar 1970:139). In this
way, colonial states encouraged the masculine takeover of the public and
political sphere by removing virtually all of the female offices in the emirate
structures. In Damagaram, the sister of the sultan, the magaram, historically, an
office of influence and power also in Bornu, lost her estates, her rights to taxes on

women marrying for the first time and the prestige of her position in the

241

 

‘ in .k.

hierarchy of the court. Royal women, however, retained aspects of power
through access to sources of wealth, including land and opportunities to trade
and through the politics of strategic dynastic marriages (Mack 1988: 44-77).125
Finally, for ordinary, even rural women, the rise in personal incomes among
male peanut farmers seems to have stimulated what Raynaut described as
modern forms of prostitution in the Hausa towns of Niger's peanut-growing
region (Raynaut 1977, 4:569-97). Even prostitution, however, is an expression of
an essentially private relationship, and in this sense, Hausa women simple
modernized an option they had exercised in fin de siecle Hausa culture.

It is here that the dilemma of feminism in a Hausa context arises. To say
that women have power in the context of the family and the privacy of
household affairs (even defining household to include the arrangements
negotiated by "modern" prostitutes) means that women in general can not be
described by a feminism that demands public manisfestations of power, either in
the market place or in politics.

The Islamification of rural Hausaland intensified the identification of men
with public ceremony and re-adjusted the prestige associated with male and
female ceremonial roles. Women lost out as animist practices became
increasingly confined to the practice of medicine and rituals celebrating the life of
the family, both of which were now placed within a new and competitive field of
knowledge. In rural Hausaland, women have not lost control over naming
ceremonies and marriages and weddings and the transfer of wealth across

generations associated with those ceremonies. The Islamic, male centered rituals

 

125 Young elite, western-educated men continue to rile against the politics of
"power marriages" especially among university educated women.

242

of the mosque are not in competition with the women-centered, family
ceremonies of marriage and birth, but both are now essential to defining a
modern Hausa man or woman. In the sphere of public consumption of wealth
and power, the Alhaji culture also displays an Islamically defined manner.
Nevertheless, rural peOple themselves and the reproducible wealth of rural
economies has been marginalized by the economies and politics of modern Niger
and Niger. Women and ecology both loose out in this equation of power.

The rise of Islamic political positions in the context of Hausa
independence movements and post independence states of Niger and Nigeria
has allowed for Hausa Islamic culture to find a role in and achieve forms of
expression in politics. In Niger where virtually the entire population is Moslem,
the potential for Islam, combined or even recombined with other political
identities, to become a disruptive element in the body politic is somewhat
neutralized. Only if Niger would find itself in the midst of competing Islamic
authorities—as has been the case in Algeria, for example--could Islam become the
vehicle for political violence. On the other hand, in Nigeria where religion,
ethnicity and class have conspired over the last 30 to create a highly volatile
political climate, Islamic power politics have been crucial in the political life of
the country.

While I have argued in this dissertation that women continued to hold
positions of economic and cultural importance in their communities and, in
ideological terms, within the expressions of Hausa culture, I can not close this
dissertation without reflecting, however, briefly, on the ways in which the Hausa
definition of modernity which I have described here has been undermined by

forces quite outside of the realms of women, ecology and Islam. One of the most

243

important is that the ceremonial value of women as marks of success for Hausa
men, including the western-educated elite, has devalued women in other, most
significant ways. Once placed into the context of larger, more urban settings, and
in households where a husband's wages support and determine family life,
Hausa women, as their western sisters before them, enter a realm where
enforced, almost ceremonial, leisure overwhelms their value as productive
economic actors: they can exist just for display. This is precisely why I find the
discussion of modern Hausa women found in the current work to be a real break
with the past, or at least with the past of most rural Hausa women: there is a
modern Hausa middle class urban woman whose life is no longer shaped by a
cultural context in which the wealth and power she wields through life
ceremonies and her dominance within the household and the family and her
own marriage has significance. As work moved out of the household along with
the male workforce, the equations of gender relationships were altered.
Eventually, even the pattern of household marketing, the honeycomb market or
hidden trade observed by nineteenth century travelers and documented in
studies of Hausa women carried out by social scientists, is affected. For example,
while women in Mahuta exchanged essential food products made from locally
produced ingredients, women in Kano, Matamaye (more urban settings)
incorporated imported ingredients into their products and changed their product
lines to include essentially exotic snacks. Fulbe women in Kano were by 1979
using tinned, powdered milk instead of milk from their own family herds. Thus
that very aspect of women's production which was so closely linked to the
ecology of their homes in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth

(certainly this was the norm in Mahuta) is lost in the urban milieu. Instead of

244

providing detailed evidence of a Hausa ecology and a Hausa relationship with
that ecology, women's food sales now document the ecology of the international
food product marketing: Nido replaces nono , Uncle Ben's substitutes for locally
grown rice varieties. Nigeria has made a killing supplying such goods to Niger
as anyone visiting Birnin Konni can quickly see. For the Hausa women of rural
Niger, especially the poorest or the oldest, the consequences can be
devastating. 126

The Hausa case is less dramatic than that of southern African women
stranded by the patterns of migrant labor imposed on their families and
marriages by the structure of industrial work. Yet, in the quietness of Hausa
women's lose of social meaning as makers of wealth and wielders of power
within the culture of the family and the economy of the home, one clearly detects
the repeated pattern of social change in modernizing societies: the fragmentation
of life's components of work, social relationships and religion. As a particularly
poignant symbol of this change, I note that not even the wedding goods so
cherished by every Hausa bride carry the same economic and social meaning to
all women today. In the past and for many rural women, especially those with
little or no access to the security, exchange value and prestige of a spouse's
wages, kayan aura still remains a vital source of personal wealth, negotiable
capital which could spell the difference between family security and extreme
depravation in times of social or ecological stress, such as drought and famine,

the death of a husband, divorce, widowhood or old age. Yet nothing of this

 

126I found nothing as aggravating or frustrating as trying to counter the
complaints of high-living, urban-based expatriate development specialists that
Hausa women do not do anything.

245

 

quality of value rests in the rococo collections of goods collected by wealthy, or
simply middle class urban brides. Prestige, yes, essential asset, probably not.

The intensification of women's formal education in Islam can be seen as an
attempt to renew their position of status and power within the homennot
dissimilar to the postion of the stress placed on women's roles as wives and
mothers within conservative Christian communities in the United States. Islam
and Christianity in such situations seem to be asked to pick up the meaning lost
as women's economic position within the family and, perhaps more importantly,
the family's within the community of work, are altered in specific, socio-
economic contexts. This, perhaps more than the simple passing of time, is at the
heart of the difference among the nineteenth century women I have described
here, the women I knew twenty years ago, and the women so often described in
current social science research.

Yet the meaning of Islam in Hausa society has undergone enormous
change in the past twenty years. The Hausa identification with Islam in. a
political arena has been fundamentally changed from the days of the Sarduna of
Sokoto and the early years of independence in Niger and Nigeria. Islam as a
political force has changed; more Hausa have adopted a personal identification
with an increasingly more militant Islam. While the troubles in the past between
Hausa and non-Hausa, especially Christian Ibo, communities was led by ethnic
differences of which religion was probably secondary to postion within the
economic and political hierarchies of power in the late colonial and early post
colonial states, religion alone can now provide an articulated focal point for
communal violence. I note with dismay the fact that Funtua, the market town

closest to my home in Mahuta, Nigeria, was wracked by communal violence in

246

 

1992. Even in the most dangerous periods of communal violence in the nineteen
fifties and sixties, this did not happen.

I am reluctant to bring this dissertation to a close with images of massive
and tragic social change. Many millions of Hausa women still live within
marriages, families and communities similar, if not identical, to those I have tried
to describe here. I would insist that the model of gender, ecology and Islam I
have constructed from cultural evidence of fin de siecle Hausa women be placed
in dialogue with the evidence of a new kind of urban, literate, non-working
Hausa wife, engaged in redefining herself and her role through the agency of
Islamic education and entry into the public arena of modern politics (Coles and
Mack, 1991:3-26; Dunbar, 1991:69-89; Yusuf, 1991:90-108; Sule and Starratt,
1991:29-49).

The blending of Hausa notions of gender, ethnicity and Islam empowered
Hausa women's participation in the social and economic transformation of the
nineteenth century Hausa landscape and the Hausa response to European
conquest. In the culture of fin de siecle Hausaland, gender was an essential
element in Hausa definitions of ethnicity and Islamic practices, including, though
not always in perfect concordance with, the reformist teachings of Sokoto's
scholarly Fulbe elite. The critical role assigned to issues of gender and women's
role in an Islamic state by Hausa politicians in post-colonial Niger and Nigeria
closely parallels the significations of gender promulgated by Islamic reformers in
nineteenth century Hausaland. The historical connections between women,
gender, ethnicity and Islam are essential to understanding the influence of the

past on the present in Hausa culture and political movements.

247

 

Bibliography

248

Bibliography

Abraham, R.C. Dictionary of the Hausa Language. 1962. London: University
of London Press LTD.
An Introduction to Spoken Hausa and Hausa Reader for European
Students. Lagos. Government Press. .1940.

Africanus,]ean Leon. Historiale description del'Afrique. Lyons: 1556.

Anderson, B. Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso. 1990.
Language and Power, Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press. 1990.

Baier, Stephen. An Economic History of the Central Sudan. London: Oxford
University Press. 1980.
and Paul Lovejoy. "The Desert-side Economy of the Central Sudan."
International journal of African Historical Studies, 8, 4(1975):51-581.

Bargery, G. A Hausa English Dictionaryand English-Hausa Vocabulary.
London: Oxford University Press. 1934.

Barkindo, B.M., ed. Studies in the History of Kano. Ibadan: Heinemann
Educational Books (Nig.) Ltd. 1983.
Kano and Some of Her Neighbors. Kano: Ahmadu Bello University Press
Ltd. 1989.

Barth, Heinrich. Die Grosse Reifl: Forschungen und Abenteur in Nord-und
Zentralafrika, 1849-1855. Stuttgart: Thienemann, Edition Erdmann.
1986.
Travels and Discoveries in North Central Africa. 3 vols. London: Frank Cass
& Company Ltd. 1965 (1858-9).

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: The Noonday Press. 1972.
"Myth Today," in Sontag, S. A Barthes Reader. New York: Hill and
Wang. 1982: 251-95.

Berger, 1. The Sense of Sight. New York. Pantheon Books. 1985.
and Mohr, 1.
Another Way of Telling. New York. Pantheon Books. 1982.
Pig Earth. New York, Pantheon. 1978.

249

Berry, Sara. Fathers Work For Their Sons. Accumulation, Mobility and Class
Formation in an Extended Yoruba Community. Berkeley: University of
California Press. 1985.

Bivins, M.W. Field journals. Mahuta, Nigeria, 1974-76.
Field journals. Kano, Nigeria 1978-79.
Acquisition Record: Hausa Textiles, 1974-76, 1978-79.
Photographic Studies (women 's lives, daily work and ceremonial occasions;
portraits of informants).
Field journals. Republic of Niger. 1987-88. Niamey, Zinder, Matamaye.
Accounts of interviews. 1987-88.

Brenner, L. West African Sufi. The Religious Heritage 65' Spiritual Search of Cerno
Bokar Saalzf Taal. Berkeley. University of California Press. 1984.
and Last, M. "The role of language in West African Islam." In Peel, ].D.Y.
and Stewert, C., eds. "Popular Islam ” South of the Sahara. Manchester.
Manchester University Press. 1985:432-446.

Coleman, 1. Nigeria, Background to Nationalism. Berkeley. University of
California Press. 1965.

Coles, C. "Muslim Women in Town: Social Change Among the Hausa of
Northern Nigeria." Ph.D. diss. The University of Wisconsin-Madison.
1983.
and Mack, B., eds. Hausa Women in the Twentieth Century. Madison.
University of Wisconsin Press. 1991.

Collins, 1. "Government and Groundnut Marketing in Rural Hausa Niger:
The 1930's to the 1970's." Ph.D. diss. Baltimore. The johns Hopkins
University. 1974.

Caron, B. Le Haoussa de L'Ader. Berlin. Dietrich Reimer Verlag Berlin. 1991.

Cyffer, N. and Huschinson, ]., eds. Dictionary of the Kanuri Language.
Dordrect. Foris Publications. 1990.

D015, M., trans. Medieval Islamic Medicine, Ibn Ridwan's Treatise "On the
Prevention of Bodily Ills in Egypt. Berkeley. University of California
Press. 1984.

Dubish, 1., ed. Gender and Power in Rural Greece. Princeton. Princeton
University Press. 1986.

250

Duffill, M.B. "Hausa Poems as Sources for Social and Economic History." In
History in Africa. 13 (1986):35-88, 16 (1989):97-135.

Dunbar, RA. "Damagaram (Zinder, Niger), 1812-1906: The History of a Cental
Sudanic Kingdom." Ph.D. diss. Los Angeles. University of California-
Los Angeles. 1970. .

Dusgate, R. The Conquest of Northern Nigeria. London. Frank Cass. 1985.

Edgar, F. Litafi na Tatsuniyoyi na Hausa. Belfast. W. Erskine Mayne. 1911-
1913, 3 vols.

Ehret, Christopher and Posnansky, Merrick. The Archaeological and Linguistic
Reconstruction of African History. Berkeley: The University of
California Press. 1982.

"The Demographic Implications of Linguistic Change and language

Shift." In Fyfe, C. and McMaster, U, eds. African Historical Demogaphy.

Erickson, C. The Medieval Vision, Essays in History and Perception. New York.
Oxford University Press. 1976.

Falassi, A. Folklore by the Fireside. Text and Context of the Tuscan Veglia.
Austin. University of Texas Press. 1980.

Ferguson, D. "Nineteenth-century Hausaland, Being a Description by Imam
Imoru of the Land, Economy, and Society of his People." Ph.D. diss.
Madison. University of Wisconsin. 1973

Fika, A. The Kano Civil War and British Over-Rule, 1882-1940. Ibadan.
Oxford University Press. 1978.

Finnigan, R Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1970.
Fletcher, RS. Hausa Sayings and Folklore. London. 1912.

Foreau, F. Mission Saharienne Foureau-Lamy. Paris. Masson. 1902.

Fried], E. "The Position of Women: Appearance and Reality." In Dubish, 1.,

ed. Gender and Power in Rural Greece. Princeton. Princeton University
Press. 1986.

251

 

Fuglestad, F. A History of Niger, 1850—1960. London. Cambridge University
Press. 1983.
"A reconsideration of Hausa history before the jihad." In journal of
African History. 19, 3(1978):319-339.

Furniss, G. and Iagger, P., eds. Studies in Hausa Language and Linguistics.
London. Kegan Paul International. 1988.

Gowers,W.F. Gazetter of Kano Province. London. Waterlow. 1921.

Great Britain. Public Record Office. C0446: Original Correspondence,
Northern Nigeria, 1898-1913

Greenblatt, S. Marvelous Possessions, The Wonder of the New World. Chicago.
The University of Chicago Press. 1991.

Greenburg, ]. The Influence of Islam on a Sudanese Religion. New York. 1.].
Augustin. 1946.

Haddad, Y. and Findly, E., eds. Women, Religion, and Social Change.
Albany, State University of New York Press. 1985.

Hallam, W. "The Bayajida Legend in Hausa Folklore." In journal of African
History. 7 (1966):42-60.

Hart, K. The political Economy of West African Agriculture. Cambridge.
Cambridge University Press. 1982.

Hassan and Shu'aibu. A Chronicle of Abuja. Ibadan. The Univesity Press. 1952.

Hill, P. Population, Prosperity and Poverty. Rural Kano, 1900 and 1970.
Cambidge. University of Cambidge Press. 1977.
Rural Hausa: A Village and A Setting. Cambridge. Cambridge
University Press. 1972.

Hiskett, M. "The Origins, Sources and Form of Hausa Islamic Verse."
Unpublished Seminar Paper. London.School of Oriental and African
Studies. n.d. (1968).

A History of Hausa Islamic Verse. London. School of Oriental and
African Studies. 1975.

Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T., eds. The Invention of Tradition. London.
Cambridge University Press. 1984.

252

Hodgkin, Thomas. Nigerian Perspectives. An Historical Anthology. London:
Oxford University Press. 1960.

Hogendom,j. Nigerian Groundnut Exports. Zaria. Ahmadu Bello University
Press. 1979.

Hopen, C. A Pastoral Fulbe Family in Gwandu. London. Oxford University Press.
1958.

Hunwick, ]. "Songhay, Borno and Hausaland in the Sixteenth Century." In
M. Crowder and A.Ajayi, eds. History of West Africa. Bath. Longman.
1976, 1: 264-601.

Iliffe, j. The African Poor, A History. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
1987.

Imam, A. Hausa Bakwai: Kune ya Girmi Kuka. Zaria. Northern Region
Literature Agency. 1954.

johnston, H. A Selection of Hausa Stories. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1966.

junaido, M. Tarihin Fulani. Zaria. The Northern Nigerian Publishing
Company. 1956.

Kirk-Greene, A. Decorated Houses in a Northern City. Kaduna. Baraka Press Ltd.
1963.

Kowal, ]. and Kassam, A. Agricultural Ecology of Savanna: A Study of West
Africa. Oxford. Oxford University Press. 1978.
and Knabe, D. An Agroclimatological Atlas of the Northern States of
Nigeria. Zaria. Ahmadu Bello University Press. 1972.

Kriedte, P. Medick, H. and Schulbohm, I. Industrialization Before
Industrialization. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1981.

Labaru Na Da da Na Yanzu. Zaria. Northern Nigerian Publishing Company.
1968.

Labarun Hausawa da Makwabtansu. Zaria. Gaskiya corporation, n.d.

Landerloin, M. and Tilho, j. Dictionnaire Haoussa. Paris. Irnprirnerie
Nationale. 1909.

253

Last, M. The Sokoto Caliphate. 1967.
"Historical Metaphors in the Kano Chronicle." In History In Africa
7(1980):161-178.
"From Sultanate To Caliphate: Kano, 1450-1800."In Barkindo M., ed.
Studies in the History of Kano. Nigeria. Heinemann Educational. Books
(Nigeria) Ltd. 1983: 67—91.

LeGoff,]. The Medieval Imagination. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press.
1988.

Leroy-Beaulieu, P. Le Sahara, Le Soudan ct Les Chemins de Fer Transsahariens.
Paris. Guillaumin et Cie. 1904.

Lewis, B. The Muslim Discovery of Europe. New York. W.W. Norton 8:
Company. 1982.
The Political Language of Islam. Chicago. The University of Chicago

Press. 1988.
Race and Slavery in the Middle East. An Historical Enquiry. Oxford.

Oxford University Press. 1990.

Lindfors, B, ed. Forms of Folklore in Africa. Narrative, Poetic, Genomic,
Dramatic. Austin. University of Texas Press. 1977.

Lovejoy, Paul. Caravans of Kola.: Hausa Trade with Ashanti, 1700-1900. Zaria.
Ahmadu Bello University Press. 1977.
Transformations in Slavery. A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge.
Cambridge Univesity Press. 1983.
"Plantations in the Economy of the Sokoto Caliphate." In journal of
AfricanHistory. (1976):341-368
"Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate." In Lovejoy, P., ed. The Ideology of
Slavery in Africa. Beverly Hills. Sage Publications. 1981.
"Concubinage and the Status of Women Slaves in Early Colonial
Northern Nigeria." In journal of African History, 292245-66.

Low, V. Three Nigerian Emirates: A Study in Oral History. Evanston.
Northwestern University Press. 1972.

Lugard,F.D. Political Memoranda. Revision of Instructions to Political

Ofl‘icers on Subjects Chiefly Political and Administrative, 1913-18.
London. Frank Cass and Company Ltd. 1970.

254

 

Lugard, Lady (Flora Shaw). A Tropical Dependency. New York. Barnes & Noble.
1965.

Mack, B. "Songs from Silences: Hausa Women's Poetry." In Davies, C. and
Graves, A., eds. Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature.
Trenton. Africa world Press, Inc. 1986:181-190.

"Hajiya Madaki: A Royal Hausa woman." In Life Histories of African
Women, ed. P. Romero. Atlantic Highlands. Ashfield Press. 1988:44-
77.

"Waka Daya Ba Ta Kare Nika--One song Will Not Finish the

Grinding: Hausa women's Oral Literature." In Contemporary
African Literature, ed. H. Wylie et a1. Washington, DC. 1983:15- 46.
"Wakokin Mata": Hausa Women's Poetry." Ph.D. diss. Madison.
Universtiy of Wisconsin. 1981.

Macleod, Olive. Chiefs and Cities of Central Africa. London: Blackwood. 1912.

Matlon, P. "Income Distribution Among Farmers in Northern Nigeria:
Empirical Results and Policy Implications." East Lansing. African Rural
Economy Papers.18. 1979.

Matsushita, S. An Outline of Gwandara Phonemics and Gwandara-English
Vocabulary. Tokyo. Study of Languages and Culture of Asia and Africa.
1972.

Mauss, M. The Gift. The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New
York. W.W. Norton. 1990.

Merchant, C. Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, Science in New England.
Chapel Hill. The University of North Carolina Press. 1989.

Metcalf, B. Perfecting Women. Maulana Ashraf 'Ali Thanawi's Bihishti Zewar.
Berkeley. University of California Press. 1990.

Mischlich, A. Uber Die Kutturen Im Mittel-Sudan. Berlin. Andrews and
Steiner. 1942.
Wc'irterbuch Der Hausaaparache. Berlin. Druck Un Verlag Von Georg

Reimer. 1906.

Morel, ED. Nigeria and Its People and Problems. London. Frank Cass &
Company, Ltd.. 1911.

255

Mortimore, M. and Wilson, 1. Land and People in the Kano Close—settled Zone. Zaria:
Ahmadu Bello University, Department of Geography. 1965.
Moughtin, j.C. Hausa Architecture. London: Ethnographica. 1985.

Musallam, B. Sex and Society in Islam. Cambridge. Cambridge University
Press. 1983.

Niger, Republic of. Archives Nationales du Niger.
Archives of the Prefecture of Zinder. Rapports de Toume’e. 23.3.1-
23.3102 (1926-1944).

Palmer, H.R. Sudanese Memoirs: Being Mainly translatins of a Number of Arabic
Manuscripts Relating to the Central and Western Sudan. Lagos, The
Government Printer. 1928.

Peel, ].D.Y. and Stewart, C., eds. "Popular Islam " South of th Sahara.
Manchester. Manchester University Press. 1985.

Pilaszewicz, 5. "Literature in the Hausa Language." In B. Andrzejewski,
Pilaszewicz, S. 8: W. Tyloch, eds. Literatures in African Languages—
theoretical Issues and Sample Surveys. Cambridge. Cambridge
University Press. (English Edition). 1985:190-254.

"'The Song of Powerty and Wealth': A Hausa Poem on Social
Problems by A1_Haji 'Umaru." In Africana Bulletin. Warsaw. 21
(1974):67-97.

Pommerol J. Among the Women of the Sahara. London. Hurfilanhltt, Lts.
1900.

Prietze, J. Bornu-Texte. In Mitteilungen des Seminars fur Orientalische
Sprachen zu Berlin. Berlin. 1930.

Prussin, Labelle. "Fulani-Hausa Architecture," African Arts. 33 (1974), 4:8-19.
Hutumere: Islamic Design in West Africa. Berkeley. University of
California Press. 1986.

Raphael, J. Through Unknown Nigeria. London. T.Werner Laurie Ltd. n.d.
(early 1920's)

Rash, Y. Les Premieres Annees Francoises au Damergou. Paris. Societe
Francaise d'Histoire d'Otre-mer. 1973.

256

Rattray, R.S. Hausa Folk-Lore, Customs, Proverbs, Etc. Oxford. Clarendon Press.
1913.

Richardson, I. Narrative of a Mission to Cental Africa Performes in the Year 1850-51.
London. Chapman 8: Hall 1853.

Robinson, H. Specimens of Hausa Literature. Cambridge. Cambridge
University Press. 1896.

Roden, C. A Book of Middle Eastern Food. New York. Vintage Books. 1974.

Rothiot, j. L'Ascension D'un Chef Africain au Debut de La Colonisation, Aouta Le
Conquerant (Niger). Paris. L'Harmattan. 1988.

Rodd, FR People of the Veil. London. MacMillan &Company Ltd. 1926.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. 1979.
Culture and Imperialism. New York. Alfred A, Knopf, Inc. 1993.

Saunders, M. "Marriage and Divorce in a Muslim Hausa Town (Mirria, Niger
Republic)" Ph.D. diss. Bloomington. Indiana University. 1978.

Shea, P. "The Development of An Export Oriented Dyed Cloth Industry in
Kano Emirate in the Nineteenth Century." Ph.D. diss. The University
of Wisconsin-Madison. 1975.
"Approaching the Study of Production in Rural Kano." In Barkindo,
8., ed. Studies in the History of Kano. Heineann Educaitonal Boks
(Nigeria) Ltd. 1983:93-115.

Sahlins, M. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities. Structure in the Early
History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdoms. Ann Arbor. The University of
Michigan Press. 1981.

Islands of History. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press. 1987.

Salifou, A. Le Damagaram ou Sultanate de Zinder au XIX Siécle. Niamey. Centre
Nigerien de Recherches en Sciences Humainse. Etudes Nigeriennes
27. 1971.

Schon, I. Vocabulary of the Haussa Language. London Church Missionary
Society. 1843.
Grammar of the Hausa Language. Nendeln/ Liechtenstein. Kraus-
Thomson Organization, Ltd. 1970

257

Magana Hausa.. Native Literatur, or Proverbs, Tales, Fables 8 Historical
Fragments in the Hausa Language. Dordrect. Nedeln, Kraus Reprint.
1971

Scott, 1. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven. Yale University Press 1985.
Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Hidden Transcripts. New
Haven. Yale University Press. 1990.

Séré de Rivieres, E. Histoire du Niger. Paris. Editions Berger—Levrault. 1965.

Skinner, N. Hausa Readings. Selections from Edgar's Tatsuniyoyi Madison.
University of Wisconsin Press. 1968.
Hausa Tales and Traditions. 3 Vols. London. Frank Cass 8: Co. Ltd.
1969-77 (English Translation of Edgar, F. Litafi na Tatsuniyoyi na Hausa.
1911-13).
"The slattern--a theme of Hausa Poetry." Hamburg. Hamburger
Beirtage Zur Afrika-Kunde. 1971.
Anthology of Hausa Literature in Translation. Zaria. Northern
Nigerian Publishing Company. 1980.
ed., Alhaji Mahrnadu Koki. Zaria. Ahmadu Bello University Press.
1977.

Shenton, R. The Development of Capitalism in Northern Nigeria. Toronto.
University of Toronto Press. 1986.
and Lennihan, L. "Capital and Class: Peasant Differentiation in
Northern Nigeria." In journal of Peasant Studies. 9 (1981), 1:47-70.
and Watts, M. "Capitalism and Hunger in Northern Nigeria." In Review
of African Political Economy. 15/ 16 (May-December 1979):53- 62.

Staudinger, P. In the Heart of the Hausa States. Athens, Ohio. Ohio University.
Monographs in International Studies. Africa Series. 56. 1990.

Smith, A. "The Early States of the Central Sudan." In Crowder, M. and Ajayi.
A History of West Africa. Bath. Longman. 1976, 1:178
"Some Considerations Relating to the Formation of States in
Hausaland." journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria. 1971, 3:152- 195.

Smith, Mary. Baba of Karo. A Woman of the Moslem Hausa. New Haven. Yale
University Press. 1964.

Smith, M.G. The Aflairs of Daura. History and Change in a Hausa State, 1800-
1958. Berkeley. University of California Press.1978.

258

Stenning, D. Savannah Nomads: A Study of the Wodaabe Pastoral Fulani of
Western Bornu Province, Northern Region, Nigeria. London. Oxford
University Press.

Sutton, 1. "Towards a Less Orthodox History of Hausaland." In journal of
African History. 20 (1970):179-201.

Taggart, j. Enchanted Maidens: Gender Relations in Spanish Folktales of
Courtship and Marriage. Princeton. Princeton University Press. 1990.

Tibenderana, P. Sokoto Province Under British Rule, 1903-1939. Zaria.
Ahmadu Bello University Press, Ltd. 1988.

Tilho, 1. Documents Scientifiques de la Mission Tilho, 1906-1909. Paris.
Imprimerie Nationale. 1911.

Tremearne, A. "Marital Relations of the Hausas as Shown in their Folk-Lore." In
Man. 1914, 12-13z23-6, 69:137-39, 76:148-56.
Hausa Superstitions and Customs. London. 1913.

Usuman, Y.B. "Some Aspects of the External Relations of Katsina Before 1804."
In Savanna 1 (1972), 2:175-197.
The Transformation of Katsina: (1400-1883) The Emergence and Overthrow of
the Sarauta System and the Establishment of the Emirate. Zaria. Ahmadu
Bello University Press Lts. 1981.

Vansina, Ian. Paths in the Rainforests, Towards a Political Tradition in Equatorial
Africa. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. 1990.
The Children of Woot. A History of the Kuba Peoples. Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press. 1978.
Oral Traditionas History. Madison. University of Wisconsin Press. 1985

Vischer, I. La Nigeria Du Nord. Paris. Attinger Freres, Editeurs. n.d. (1914).

Wall, L. Hausa Medicine: Illness and Well-Being in a West African Culture.
Durham, North Carolina. Duke University Press. 1988.

Watts, M. Silent Violence. Food, Famine 8 Peasantry in Northern Nigeria.
Berkeley. University of California Press. 1986.

White, L. Magomero, Portrait of an African Village. London. Cambridge
Univesity Press. 1989.

259

Whitting, W. Hausa and Fulani Proverbs. Lagos. Government Printer. 1940.

Zipes, jack. Arabian Nights. The Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One
Nights. New York: Signet Classic. 1991. (A new adaptation of
Richard Burton's The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.

Benares: Kamashastra Society. 1885-6.)

260

"lllllllllllllllllllli