Women in seclusion are not idle. They cook for sale, prepare foods such as fried bean cakes and rice cakes, spin cotton, embroider caps, braid hair and trade cloth, cosmetics and household goods inside the compound. Children, especially girls, act as intermediaries: they carry cooked food and goods to market, a practice called talla, “hawking”, and bring back money and orders. A woman may thus run a business from inside her home without leaving it.
Researchers on Kano and other cities, among them the contributors to Coles and Mack’s collection Hausa Women in the Twentieth Century (1991), show that many women have their own income, which they control and use for ceremonies, savings and gifts. This economic independence is one of the reasons why the stereotype of the passive, secluded woman is incomplete. Rural women combine farming, processing and trade, and Hausa tradition also remembers women of rank (see the chapter on Queen Amina).
Sources for this article
- Coles & Mack 1991, collection as a whole
- Salamone 2010, ch. 13, pp. 133–141