Poets, storytellers and novelists

Hausa has both a rich oral literature and a long written one. Evening tales (tatsuniya), riddles (kacici-kacici), proverbs and praise-songs were passed on by speech, and are still the first literature that most children meet. Written literature began in Ajami, the Arabic-based script of the chapter on Islam. Poets such as those of dan Fodio’s circle composed religious and political verse in Hausa, adapting Arabic metres to the tones and syllables of Hausa, and the Wakar Bagauda, a verse account of Kano’s dynasty, shows how oral memory and learned form met.

Women were among the creators of this literature. Nana Asma’u (1793–1864), a daughter of Usman dan Fodio, wrote prolifically in several languages, and organised a network of women teachers who spread learning through the caliphate (see the chapter on Women).

In the 1930s printing in Latin script began to bring Hausa reading to a wider public. Abubakar Imam (1911–1981), the first Hausa editor of the newspaper Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo, submitted his story Ruwan Bagaja to a literary competition in 1933, and later compiled Magana Jari Ce, a book of tales. From the 1980s a boom of inexpensive novels sold in Kano’s markets, many by women writers about love, marriage and family, created a new popular reading public. Scholars including Graham Furniss have studied this “market literature”.

Haƙuri maganin duniya.

Hausa proverb: “Patience is the medicine of the world.”