Friendship and networks

A recurring theme in the studies Salamone reviews is that women build strong networks of their own. Because husbands and wives often lead separate social lives, women share intimate matters with female friends and relatives rather than with their husbands. They visit one another, mostly at night, and exchange news at weddings, naming ceremonies and other rituals where no men are present. Through these networks, he argues, women influence what happens in their extended families.

The same chapter compares two parts of Kano. In the Old City, houses have an entrance hall and private rooms at the back, so that a husband’s guests never see the women’s quarters. In the barracks area, a newer part of town, houses lack that arrangement and men spend their days near the mosque or elsewhere, leaving the area to women. Many of these women are from other parts of Nigeria and have no kin in the city, so they replace family with friendships built across the whole of Kano.

This evidence is a reminder that Hausa women act within structures, and that they create social worlds of their own. It also reminds us that most of the written accounts were collected by outsiders, many of them male, and that the Salamone study of kirki notes that its own data came mostly from men.