Being and Becoming Hausa African Social Studies Series

Editorial Board Martin R. Doornbos, Institute of Social Studies the Hague Carola Lentz, University of Mainz John Lonsdale, University of Cambridge

VOLUME 23 Being and Becoming Hausa

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Edited by Anne Haour and Benedetta Rossi

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010 Cover: Photograph by David Heathcote.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Being and becoming Hausa : interdisciplinary perspectives / edited by Anne Haour and Benedetta Rossi. p. cm. — (African social studies series ; v. 23) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18542-5 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Hausa (African people)—Ethnic identity. I. Haour, Anne. II. Rossi, Benedetta. III. Title. IV. Series.

DT515.45.H38B44 2010 305.89’37—dc22

2010013403

ISSN 1568-1203 ISBN 978 90 04 18542 5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...... vii List of Maps ...... ix Contributors ...... xi Preface ...... xv Note on Language and Transcription ...... xvii

1. Hausa Identity: Language, History and Religion ...... 1 Anne Haour and Benedetta Rossi

2. The Role of Comparative/Historical Linguistics in Reconstructing the Past: What Borrowed and Inherited Words Tell Us About the Early History of Hausa ...... 35 Philip J. Jaggar

3. Ancient Labels and Categories: Exploring the ‘Onomastics’ of Kano ...... 59 Murray Last

4. More Rural than Urban? The Religious Content and Functions of Hausa Proverbs and Hausa Verbal Compounds ...... 85 Joseph McIntyre

5. Being and Becoming Hausa in Ader ...... 113 Benedetta Rossi

6. Kufan Kanawa, Niger: The Former Kano? ...... 141 Anne Haour

7. Kirfi, Bauchi: An Archaeological Investigation of the Hausa Landscape ...... 165 Abubakar Sule Sani

8. The Hausa Textile Industry: Origins and Development in the Precolonial Period ...... 187 Marisa Candotti vi contents

9. Clothing and Identity: How Can Museum Collections of Hausa Textiles Contribute to Understanding the Notion of Hausa Identity? ...... 213 Sarah Worden

10. God Made Me a Rapper: Young Men, Islam, and Survival in an Age of Austerity ...... 235 Adeline Masquelier

11. Engendering a Hausa Vernacular Christian Practice ...... 257 Barbara Cooper

12. Hausa as a Process in Time and Space ...... 279 John E.G. Sutton

Index ...... 299 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover: Girl in front of a Zaria mosque, in the 1970s. Photograph taken by David Heathcote.

Figure 2.3. Diachronic semantic drift: ‘arrow’ in Hausa and Bole Figure 3.1. The formerly Maguzawa house, Gidan Jatau, Kankara District (Katsina): looking south from its now-disused mbagiro shrine over the millet (gero) and sorghum (dawa) fields towards the farmstead and its trees. Figure 3.2. Within Birnin Kano in 1964, an old house beyond a borrow-pit (kududdufi) in which in the nineteenth century were crocodiles. Figure 5.1. Ader landscape with village, April 2005. Figure 5.2. Movements of groups discussed in text during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Figure 5.3. Shrine of Mashidi, December 2008. Figure 5.4. Remains of furnace and tuyères on the plateau SE of Ago- uloum, December 2008 (the scale shown is 1 metre long). Photo courtesy of Joël le Corre. Figure 6.2. Site of Kufan Kanawa. January 2003. Figure 6.3. Serkin Tsotsebaki (at left) in front of his palace, Wacha, with a guard. Early 2002. Figure 6.4. Folded strip-rouletted vessel, recovered from 2000 excavations, Context C, and reconstituted by Maifada Ganda. Inset: detail of folded strip rouletting motif (Sherd KME E344). Figure 7.2. Site of Tekkira: remains of Furnace 5, with slag heap 4 (including visible tuyère fragments) at background. Figure 7.3. Abandoned house structures on the hilltop settlement of Kal-bokko viii list of illustrations

Figure 8.1. Map of trade routes, northern Nigeria. The National Archives, London, CO 446/51, 1905. Reproduced with permission. Figure 9.1. Group of riders, Sallah procession, Kano City, February 2002 (© Sarah Worden). Figure 9.2. Detail of White robe riga fari (© National Museums Liverpool). Taken by the author, with special permission to publish by National Museums Liverpool. Figure 9.3. A.1878.1.2 Indigo robe riga saki with Eight Knives design (© National Museums Scotland) NMS photographic Ref. PF17154. Figure 9.4. A.2007.125 Silk robe girke barage (© National Museums Scotland) NMS Ref. PF17167. Figure 10.1. Male youths in their best hip-hop gear attending a dance party in Dogondoutchi. Figure 11.1. The congregation of the newly constructed church in Tsi- biri ca. 1948. (Note the Islamic style of the church architecture and the local dress style typical of Muslim Hausa speakers in the region of the congregants). Photo by Ray de la Haye, courtesy of SIM International Archives. LIST OF MAPS

Map 1.1. Map: the Hausa area. Map 2.1. The Chadic languages (Schuh 2002). Map 2.2. The area of greatest linguistic diversity in Afroasiatic: the Cushitic and Omotic families (Ethnologue). Map 3.1. Kano and its neighbours, showing the location of some key early sites. Map 3.2. The districts of Kano emirate, divided into the zones used in this chapter. Map 6.1. Map of sites discussed in text. Map 7.1. Map of the study area. Map drawn by Abubakar Sani Sule and redrawn by Mr Joshua Bako, cartographer of the Department of Archaeology, Ahmadu Bello University.

CONTRIBUTORS

Marisa Candotti obtained her PhD in African Studies at the Uni- versity of Naples ‘l’Orientale’. She conducted three years of archival and field-based research in Northern Nigeria with the collaboration of the Centre of Trans-Saharan Studies of the University of Maiduguri and Arewa House (ABU) in Kaduna. She then obtained her post doctoral fellowship at the University of Naples ‘l’Orientale’, where she also collaborated with the Department of History of Sub-Saharan Africa. She is currently conducting research at the London School of Econom- ics (LSE). Her main research interests concern the economic history of Hausaland and Borno, particularly the development of the textile industry and the influence of the state on the economy.

Barbara Cooper is Professor of History at Rutgers University (USA). She is interested in the intersections between culture and political economy, focusing upon gender, religion, and family life. Her publications have addressed female labour and slavery, gift exchange as social discourse, oral genres, and the negotiation of a shifting political economy through the re-definition of marriage. Her books include Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900–1989 (Heinemann, 1997) and Evangelical Christians in the Mus- lim Sahel (Bloomington, 2006), which won the Melville J. Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association in 2007. Current research concerns the history of debates about fertility, population, and reproduction in the Sahel.

Anne Haour is a Lecturer in the Arts and Archaeology of Africa at the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia (UK). Her doctoral research (published as Ethnoarchaeology in the Zinder region of Niger, Archaeopress, 2003) and subsequent projects concerned the site of Kufan Kanawa, Niger, said to be linked to the Hausa. Her interests in the archaeological materialisation of the historically-described Sahelian polities has since led her to further fieldwork and a broader thematic approach, developed through a number of publications, including her book Rulers, warriors, traders, clerics (Oxford University Press, 2007) which argued for the usefulness of a comparative historical approach. xii contributors

Philip J. Jaggar is Professor of West African Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (UK). He took an MPhil in social anthropology at SOAS with a dissertation on the blacksmiths of Kano, northern Nigeria (1978). His PhD in linguistics at UCLA (1985) was on the coding of referents in Hausa narrative, and he has taught Hausa language/linguistics at Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria (1973–76), Universität Hamburg, Germany (1976–78), UCLA (1978–83), and SOAS (1983–). An unrepentant empirical linguist, he is recognised as a world authority on Hausa and his lifelong study of the language culminated in his 754-page magnum opus, Hausa (Benjamins, 2001).

Murray Last is Professor emeritus in the Department of Anthro- pology, University College London. His PhD in 1964 was the first awarded by University College Ibadan; his previous degrees were from Cambridge (1959) and Yale (1961). He specialises in the pre-colonial history of Muslim northern Nigeria and the ethnography of illness and healing. He has been working in or on northern Nigeria since 1961, researching a wide variety of subjects, especially with colleagues in Bayero University, Kano (where he was Professor of History 1978–80). In 1967 he published The Sokoto Caliphate (Longmans Green), now also in Hausa as Daular Sakkwato; he also has some 100 publications on history and on anthropology. He was sole editor of the Interna- tional African Institute’s journal AFRICA for fifteen years.

Adeline Masquelier is Professor of Anthropology at Tulane Uni- versity. She studied anthropology at the University of Chicago where she received her Ph.D. in 1993. She has conducted extensive research in Niger and has published essays on a range of topics including spirit possession, inter-religious encounters, dress, medicine, and witchcraft. She is the author of Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger (Duke, 2001) and Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town (Indiana, 2009). She is the editor of Dirt, Undress, and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Body’s Surface (Indiana, 2005). She is currently editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa. Her present research focuses on Islam, popular culture, and youth culture.

Joseph McIntyre studied Hausa language and ethnography at SOAS, London (1969–74). He lived in the Old City of Kano from 1974 to contributors xiii

1978, researching Qur’anic education and teaching at Bayero Univer- sity. A fluent Hausa speaker, he has taught Hausa language at Hamburg University and in Cologne, has worked for the Hausa Service of the Deutsche Welle (1983–2000), served as an interpreter for the German courts, police and immigration office, and participated in a Hamburg University research project on the Hausa-speaking migrant community in the city (1999–2002). He has published articles on Hausa language and culture, compiled two dictionaries (with a colleague) and recently co-edited a book on West African Migrants in Hamburg.

Benedetta Rossi is Research Councils UK Fellow at the School of History, University of Liverpool (UK). She has been working on the anthropology and history of the Ader region of Niger since 1995. Through extensive fieldwork, oral history and archival research, she enquired into different aspects of Ader society, looking particularly at recent historical transformations of social hierarchies, labour relations, and migration patterns. Her edited volume Reconfiguring Slav- ery: West African Trajectories has recently been published (Liverpool University Press, 2009).

Abubakar Sule Sani is a Lecturer in the Department of Archaeol- ogy, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (Nigeria) and a doctoral student at the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia (UK). He worked for six years with the National Commission for Museums and Monuments of Nigeria as an archaeologist, before joining Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, initially as Curator of the museum’s Institute for Development Research (IDR). Later he transferred to the Depart- ment of Archaeology. His Masters research involved archaeological and ethno-historical surveys in Kirfi, Nigeria. His research interests concern the states of Northern Nigeria across subjects such as archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and cultural resources management.

John E.G. Sutton has worked on later archaeology and the history of agricultural and pastoral populations, mostly in East Africa (in association with Makerere and Dar es Salaam universities and the British Institute in Eastern Africa), but also in West Africa, being head of the Archaeology section in the Centre for Nigerian Cultural Studies at Ahmadu Bello University in the mid-1970s, and then professor of Archaeology at the University of Ghana. From 1983 to 1998 he was director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, and subsequently xiv contributors

Leverhulme emeritus fellow (for completing research on African agricultural systems) at the Pitt Rivers Museum and Wolfson College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

Sarah Worden is Curator of the African collections in National Museums Scotland (Edinburgh). Her PhD, completed at the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia (2005) on textiles and dress in the construction of identity, focused particularly on the collection of Hausa textiles in the World Museum, Liverpool. In her current post she continues to explore the potential of museum collections, especially of textiles, as a resource for research and exhibition. PREFACE

This volume emanates from two workshops on the theme ‘The emergence of Hausa identity: religion and history’, held in the course of 2008 at the Universities of East Anglia and Liverpool, U.K. These workshops, which included anthropologists, archaeologists, econo- mists, historians, linguists, and museologists, were the result of sustained collaboration during a period of over two years, focusing on the question of the nature and manifestations of Hausa identity. The aims of these ongoing discussions, and of this book, were to explore the current state of knowledge on the time-depth of Hausa society, and to assess directions for future research. We have used as a uniting theme the role of religion in providing models of conduct and identity, for it seems, from a diachronic perspective, to have acted as a major axis of social differentiation within Hausa-speaking society. This, at least, is the picture given by the scant records available. As different Hausa constituencies manifest diverse forms of religious expression, this internal variety of traditions challenges ideas of Hausa cultural boundedness and uniformity. This, in turn, links to ongoing debates about the conceptualisation of West African ethnicity, raising broader comparative questions. The idea of ethnicity has been contested from multiple angles and perspectives; used as an instrument of analysis, it evokes racialist logics that have scarce heuristic value. Tak- ing a different approach, contributions to this volume regard ethnicity as a socially constructed category, and explore the historical shaping of a ‘Hausa’ society: what it replaced; how it manifested itself in different historical and regional contexts; and what were its mechanisms of assimilation and exclusion. The research collaboration and workshops which gave rise to this book would not have been possible without the practical and financial assistance of a range of institutions and individuals. We are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council for their award of a Research Workshop grant within their joint Religion and Society Programme. The Sains- bury Research Unit, (University of East Anglia) the African Studies Association UK, and the Centre for the Study of International Slavery (Liverpool) offered valuable additional support. xvi preface

William Clarence-Smith (School of Oriental and African Studies) provided much-valued steering in the initial stages of the project. At the Sainsbury Research Unit, Lynne Crossland, Julia Martin, Lisa Snell, Fiona Sheales and Joanne Lai, and at the School of History (University of Liverpool), Paula Mills and Valerie Fry, enabled the proceedings to run exceptionally smoothly. Zachary Kingdon was a wonderful host and guide to the African collections at the World Museum Liverpool. We wish too to thank the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, National Museums Liverpool, and the School of History (University of Liver- pool), as well as the Chairs of our sessions: Dmitri Van Den Bersselaar (University of Liverpool), Joanne Clarke (University of East Anglia), Adam Higazi (Oxford University), Jean-Charles Hilaire (Institut National de Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris), and Robin Law (University of Stirling). We are grateful to David Heathcote for providing the illustration for the cover, to Alessandro Rossi for his help with the graphic aspects of this project, to Joseph Daniels for drafting Maps 1.1, 2.1 and 2.2, and to Philip J. Jaggar for helpful comments on the ‘Note on Language and Transcription’. Participants in this research network, including those whose papers are not represented in the present volume, initiated a dialogue which, it is hoped, will lead to a fuller integration of different disciplines, and will raise questions of relevance beyond the sole realm of Hausa studies. We wish to thank all participants for making the events intellectually stimulating and good-humoured. As it was not possible to include in the final volume all the contributions of the speakers, we wish here to acknowledge and thank for their contributions Aliyu Bunza (Usman Danfodiyo University, Sokoto), Patrick Darling (African Legacy), Detlef Gronenborn (Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, Mainz; with Gerhard Liesegang, University of Maputo), David Heathcote, Zachary Kingdon (National Museums Liverpool), Dierk Lange (University of Bayreuth), Addo Mahamane (Université Abdou Moumouni, Niamey), Hauwa Mahdi (Gothenburg University), and Gerd Spittler (University of Bayreuth). We are also thankful to our anonymous reviewers, to Brill’s Series Editors for valuable comments on earlier versions of the present volume, and to Franca de Kort and Birgitta Poelmans (Brill) for seeing it through its final stages. NOTE ON LANGUAGE AND TRANSCRIPTION

Contributors to this multidisciplinary volume follow the conventions in use in their respective fields for identifying various West African geographical, political and ethnic entities. For many non-English words and names, mostly Hausa and Arabic, different forms are in use even within the specialist literature. Some authors mark tone and vowel length on Hausa words, and indicate the glottalic consonants through characters of the Hausa script that do not exist in the Roman alphabet (e.g. the so-called ‘hooked’ letters). Other authors may omit the use of these characters and/or diacritics in Arabic. In addition, some groups are referred to by multiple ethnonyms, or multiple forms of the same ethnonym, which may vary across regions (one issue explored through this book). These considerations account for differences in terminology, orthography, and transcription across chapters in this volume, which we have not attempted to homogenise as long as confusion over meaning did not arise. Map 1.1. The Hausa area. CHAPTER ONE

HAUSA IDENTITY: LANGUAGE, HISTORY AND RELIGION1

Anne Haour and Benedetta Rossi

1. Introduction

Today, perhaps 25 million Hausa-speakers live in northern Nigeria and southern Niger (Map 1.1.), while a further 15 million people throughout West Africa speak Hausa as a second language.2 For at least five hundred years, observers have marvelled at the wide-ranging trade networks, links to the Islamic world, and imposing walled towns of the society we now know as Hausa. In spite of this prominence, Hausa history remains disputed. In particular, there is little agreement on the mechanisms by which developed complex social and settlement hierarchies, Islamic institutions, and links with the wider world, which have come to characterise ‘Hausa’ in the eye of outsiders. The evolution of a Hausa socio-political organisation has generated considerable scholarly discussion for at least two hundred years.3 Generally speaking, early debates are now censured for their uncritical acceptance of oral and written records, while the 1970s and 1980s saw a shift in scholarly focus towards a more sceptical approach, integrating what data were becoming available from historical linguistics and

1 We are grateful to William Clarence-Smith (School of Oriental and African Stud- ies, London), Ibrahim Hamza (University of York, Canada), Dierk Lange (University of Bayreuth), Murray Last (University College London), Robin Law (University of Stirling), Paul Lovejoy (University of York, Canada), and John Sutton (University of Oxford) for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2 Source: SIL International; http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp? code=hau (link checked 8 December 2009). Jaggar, this volume, places the number of speakers of Hausa as a first language even higher, perhaps as many as 40 million. 3 Taking the writings of Mohammed Bello (reproduced in Denham et al. [1828: II: Appendix, no. XII] and Arnett [1922]) and Cooley (1841) as a starting point. 2 anne haour and benedetta rossi archaeology.4 On the whole, demands for greater exegetic rigour have been paralleled by a generalised call for reflexivity in the social sciences and the humanities; indeed, the historiography of Hausa studies reflects wider developments in African studies. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the long-standing debate regarding the relative influence of external versus internal processes. Africanist researchers have now rejected the racist ideological underpinnings of the so-called ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ which, as Sanders (1969: 521) succinctly put it, held that ‘everything of value ever found in Africa was brought there by the Hamites, allegedly a branch of the Caucasian race’. This belief was often paralleled in oral traditions involving the coming of strangers from afar and bringing a new form of political or social organisation.5 In the Hausa case, the two main sources dealing with early history, the Daura Chronicle (also known as the ‘Bayajidda legend’) and the Kano Chronicle, involve the arrival of immigrants and their assimilation, through war or marriage, of the local peoples. Thus early, reconstructions of Hausa history were informed to varying degrees by the idea that both the ‘Hausa’ group and its political organisation resulted from the intermarriage of Hausa women with incoming Berbers.6 Indeed, Heinrich Barth, one of the first European visitors to meet the new Fulani rulers of the Hausa area after the jihad of the mid-nineteenth century, was surprised to find that the ruling class was in fact not physically distinct from the subject population (Usman 1982–1985). Approaches more critical to the written evidence, as well as archaeological documentation of African innovation independent of outside stimuli, have challenged such interpretations relying wholly on external influences. As models based on migration theories have correspond- ingly been revised, greater emphasis has been placed on endogenous

4 Authors whose approach has been regarded most critically include Palmer (1928) and Westermann (1949). We would cite Sutton (1979), M.G. Smith (1983), and Last (1980, 1985) as examples of the new analytical impetus characterised by careful interpretation of oral sources and written tradition. The following pages of this introduction provide a more detailed canvas of recent approaches in the field of Hausa studies. 5 West African examples include the Yoruba, Nupe, and the rulers of Borno and Songhai (Es–Sa’di 1964 [1656]: 6; Barth 1857–9: II: 25; Abadie 1927; Fage 1965; H. Johnston 1967; A. Smith 1970). The intellectual origins and shortcomings of the Hamitic hypothesis are discussed broadly and cogently in Sanders (1969) and Law (2009). 6 See, for example, Palmer (1928: III), Urvoy (1936: 223, 243, 260, 321; 1949), M. G. Smith (1964), Hallam (1966ab), Johnston (1967), Hama (1967), and as late as 1993, Hogben and Kirk-Greene in the unmodified reprint of their 1966 book. hausa identity 3 dynamics and sources of data. The integration of localised phenomena into geographically and culturally broader dynamics is foregrounded in all contributions to this volume, whatever their disciplinary background. Historians explore endogenous versus allogenous factors in Hausa ‘state formation’ (Last, Sutton), and the shifting patterns of political and economic relations with neighbouring societies (Candotti, Rossi); anthropologists advocate multi-sited ethnographic methods aimed at revealing the global ramifications of local phenomena (Cooper, Masquelier); archaeologists balance a narrow focus on single-site excavations with the need to place sites within their wider geographical context (Haour, Sule); linguists explore the diverse influences to which testify place-names, particular linguistic formations and borrowings from other languages (Jaggar, Last, McIntyre); and museum curators seek to situate their collections within the wider framework of West African material culture (Worden). This volume thus attempts to steer a middle course, building upon tensions between global and local processes; allogenous and endogenous factors; large-scale reconstructions and in-depth local studies. While this book considers the integration of the Hausa world into regional—indeed global—economic and cultural contexts, it remains critical of models that interpret such integration as the interaction between bounded ‘races’, ‘tribes’, or ‘ethnic groups’. Contributions emphasise the nature of ethnicity as a social construction, a label denoting ‘who one is’ at any one moment in time; but also a performative category resulting in peculiar ways of living (‘what one does’). Archaeological, economic and linguistic contributions are particularly sensitive to the performative dimensions of identity, while anthropology and history often foreground social and cultural representations. In addition, representations of ethnic identity change in the course of history, and at any one time there are competing views about what constitutes ‘Hausa proper’. Some views provide official visions of the social world, whilst other exist as hidden transcripts (Scott 1990), barely visible over a long time-depth; some representations of Hausa identity remained relevant only within Africa, other spread to the global ethnoscapes (Appadurai 1991) of museum collections. These considerations have pushed us to explore the implications of being and becoming ‘Hausa’ by adopting a multidisciplinary and diachronic perspective. This introduction will explore further the central struc- turing themes of the book, then move on to an overview of the main threads emerging in the different chapters. 4 anne haour and benedetta rossi

2. Themes

Problematising Hausa identity Hausa-speaking society is characterised by important differences across regions, and it includes groups with separate lifestyles and traditions. This internal heterogeneity, well attested through history, has led to descriptions of ‘Hausaness’ as a phenomenon looser than ethnicity. Moreover, the notion of ethnicity itself has recently been subjected to considerable debate in African studies.7 This volume explores how ‘being Hausa’ has manifested itself through time, what were the cultural and material outcomes of this process, and which groups were involved. We suppose that ethnicity does not reflect in any direct or simple way the historical origins and evolution of groups (cf. Fardon 1996a: 157). Following Cooper and Brubaker (2000: 62ff.), we see ethnicity as a ‘category of practice’, employed by individuals to make sense of themselves and of the society in which they live. As do other types of identity classification (such as gender or age), ethnicity defines access to, and exclusion from, symbolic and material resources; thus, struggles over ethnic classification are often at the root of historical change in the redistribution of power across social groups. For instance, Salamone (1975) has argued that in the Yauri Emirate becoming Hausa, and simultaneously Muslim, constituted a strategy of political and economic mobility. The enormous death toll resulting from the mobilisation of ethnic identity in the 2008 electoral campaigns in Jos State shows that ethnicity remains a key idiom in articulating conflicting interests (Egwu 2009). In spite of what these examples may suggest, ethnicity should not be seen as merely the consequence of immediate and circumstantial political expediency. The conscious acts involved in joining and maintaining particular ethnic identities have historical causes (Peel 1989: 199–200), and reference to the ethnic idiom varies across time as a strategy of inclusion/exclusion. Thus, colonial invasion resulted in a heightened sense of ethnic exclusiveness. However, this was not an unprecedented consequence of colonisation. Similar dynamics occurred earlier in West African history (cf. Nugent 2008: 922), as different groups sought to establish

7 For summaries of the main positions see Fardon (1987, 1995, 1996ab), Amselle (1998), Nugent (2008). hausa identity 5 their monopoly over particular axes of trade, or their superiority in the religious or political field. The study of Hausa history offers a stimulating platform for the investigation of notions of identity. Hausa has been described as merely a language (Temple 1919: 405; Hill 1972: 3; Hiskett 1973: 3); a ‘factor’ in West African history (Adamu 1978); and a cultural ‘formation’ within ‘Sudanic civilisation’ (Nicolas 1975b: 400, 422). Beyond the currently unsolved question of the etymology of the name ‘Hausa’ itself (Jaggar, this volume, especially note 3 page 37), it has also proven difficult to identify a unified Hausa social and political structure. Anthropological studies have made clear that various categories have existed in modern times for the classification of individuals within Hausa society. M. G. Smith (1959, 1961) illustrated different criteria of social stratification for Muslim and non-Muslim Hausa society; men and women; adults and children; and free and slave categories. Guy Nicolas (1975a) showed that non-Muslim and Muslim Hausa were structured according to different cosmological and hierarchical principles. Paden (1970, 1973) used Kano as an example to remark that a range of criteria existed for the classification of groups, ranging from very small-scale to very large-scale. He suggested that individuals could be identified by layered categories of identity, including religion (addini), ancestral home (asali), family, urban place of residence, or shade of skin. A recurring dichotomy is that between ‘Azna’ society, often described as non-Muslim, and Muslim Hausa, sometimes called ‘dynastic’ Hausa. While Azna society was organised primarily around the lineage and the household, in dynastic Hausa polities rulers (masu sarauta) and ruled (talakawa) were internally stratified according to multiple criteria (M. G. Smith 1959: 247–249; Nicolas 1975a: 175–179). The Hausa sarauta comprised a complex set of specialised political, military, and economic roles, in which non-Muslim Hausa constituencies were usually represented (Mahamane 2008). Furthermore, both Azna and ‘dynastic’ Muslim Hausa placed an emphasis on occupational specialisation (be it inherited or individually chosen), not fitting clearly with notions of rank or class. This internal differentiation is well captured in William Miles’ definition of Hausa ethnicity as ‘fluid, multilayered, and evolutionary’ (1994: 46). The internal diversity of the Hausa world has been accentuated by its inclusivist nature; integration into Hausa has been easier than into 6 anne haour and benedetta rossi some of its more exclusivist8 neighbours. A number of groups have been assimilated within the ‘Hausa’ ethnic category throughout history, and up to the present day; partly as a symptom of this, the numbers of speakers of the Hausa language are growing fast (Sommer 1992). It is known that at least in the past 150 years, and probably before, migrants and traders have identified themselves as Hausa when in fact they were immigrants from other parts of Africa who had absorbed Hausa culture or claimed Hausa descent (Lovejoy 1973, 1974; Schildkrout 1978). Various migrant Muslim traders who exhibited an Islamic attire and attended the mosque on Fridays have been superficially assimilated to ‘Hausa’ by host societies who did not know their actual origin (for instance in Ghana, see Piault 1970: 14). Another example is offered by the assimilation of slaves into free members of Hausa society.9 Hausa society has been peculiar, in the Central Sudan, for the potential social mobility it offered to slave groups.10 It appears that, since the nineteenth century, emancipation encouraged by Muslim religious codes, and the particularities of Hausa production, inheritance, and succession, resulted in a high turnover of slave constituencies (Lovejoy 1978b: 361; M. F. Smith 1981 [1954]; Hill 1977: 219–20). In Hausa societies stigma is attached to slave descent as everywhere else, and the capacity to renegotiate such stigma depends on the period considered and on the particular trajectory of emancipation: ransom, redemption, or flight tended to yield different outcomes at different periods (Hamza 2001; Lofkrantz 2008: 136–138). Yet in the second half of the twentieth century, assimilation of slaves through integration into their masters’ families (Greenberg 1947: 204; Adamu 1979: 170) or migration out of the site of original enslavement (Hill 1976: 403; 1977: 206) accounted for greater social and economic mobility of Hausa slave descendents than amongst their Fulani and Tuareg neighbours. This is one reason why, in recent times, Hausaisation has been a frequent strategy for

8 We borrow the distinction between ‘inclusivist’ and ‘exclusivist’ societies from Burnham (1996). 9 A proportion of those enslaved into Hausa society may have been free Hausa- speakers before the events that caused their enslavement, so that assimilation into the society of the free would not always have coincided with the Hausaisation of non-Hausa people. However, especially under the Sokoto Caliphate, the ban on the enslavement of freeborn Muslim encompassed other criteria for enslavement, at least in the official mind. 10 M. G. Smith’s (1960: 269–60) evidence of limited social mobility for slaves in Zaria seems to be due to the influence of Fulani customs in this region (cf. Hill 1976: 404; 1977: 211–12). hausa identity 7 slave descendents from other societies, for whom changing ethnicity was easier than changing status (Nicolas 1975b: 422; Rossi 2009a: 4). Despite its internal diversity, Hausa society retains distinctive traits. Studies of Hausa diasporas have tended to demonstrate the resilience of ‘Hausaness’ outside the confines of Hausaland. For instance, in 1835, enslaved ‘Hausa’ figured prominently amongst leaders of a major slave revolt in Bahia, Brazil (Reis 1993: 43). Many of these so-called ‘Hausa’ insurgents had been captured and enslaved during wars related to the jihad movement in Sokoto.11 Turning to the Hausa diaspora within Africa, Rouch (1956) in his study of Hausa migrants to Accra (Ghana), Adamu (1978) in his general survey of Hausa migration, and Tremearne (1914, 1915) in his observations on Hausa religion in Tunis and Tripoli, commented that Hausa abroad tend to form separate networks and preserve their customs. Nicolas (1975b: 425, note 23, our translation) remarked that ‘many Hausa take on behaviours which we shall describe as « standard hausa » when they go abroad or into a city, because such behaviour is considered by members of other local ethnic groups as « typically hausa », but they do not follow such behaviours at home’. The best-known study in this regard remains A. Cohen’s work (1969, 1971) on mechanisms of integration (or perhaps more exactly non-integration) of Hausa migrants in the Sabo ‘Hausa’ quarter of Iba- dan. While asserting the visibility of Hausa ethnicity, Cohen qualified it as a primarily political and opportunistic occurrence, whereby the Hausa diaspora ‘developed, consolidated, and maintained their distinctiveness by a variety of socio-cultural mechanisms’ (Cohen 1971: 271). These examples show that in many instances ethnicity is best seen as the product of participation in a dynamic regional economy, where distinctiveness (expressed in ethnic and religious terms) was expedient to long-distance trade and to ‘doing business abroad’.12 Hausa history therefore offers an example of a ‘fluid’ label for identification and self-identification, fitting well with current understandings of identity not as a static, fixed phenomenon but rather as a negotiated one. Within this vein, one central aim of this book is to

11 As these groups classified as ‘Hausa’ formed networks of resistance in the New World, they benefited not only from a shared language, but also from shared religious ideologies, a proselytising attitude, and willingness to fight for their ideals (Monteil 1967; Reichert 1967; Lovejoy 1994). 12 On this point, see Lovejoy (1973, 1980) and Schildkrout (1978). Lovejoy (1978a) is especially valuable in applying Cohen’s notion of the ethnically-structured trading diaspora to the precolonial period. 8 anne haour and benedetta rossi explore the time-depth of the notion of Hausa identity. At some point in West African history, Hausa became a recognisable identity, albeit one featuring internal diversity and a high turnover in membership. However, reconstructing the history of social and political formations poses specific problems in West Africa; this is due to the nature of the sources, and it is to these that the following section turns.

‘Hausa’ in historical sources The Near Eastern and North African sources relating to West Africa (e.g. Cuoq 1975; Levtzion and Hopkins 2000) give us a vivid image of life some five to ten centuries ago. They demonstrate that there existed a level of political and economic organisation important enough to impress foreign observers, albeit at times grudgingly so.13 However, the earliest sources deal almost exclusively with the Western Sudan and, to a lesser extent, with the Lake Chad area. Their possible references to the areas between these two poles, including the regions and people now known as Hausa, are disputed.14 Indeed, mentions of the name ‘Hausa’ are rare until the seventeenth century,15 references to ‘Aoussa’ becoming more common in eighteenth-century records of slave car- goes and plantations in the Americas (see Geggus 1989). Hence, historical reconstructions of earlier periods of ‘Hausa’ history always run the risk of being anachronistic, projecting in the past a label that may not have been in use or may have carried other associations.

13 For a critique of biases inherent to these records, see e.g. Insoll (1994). 14 Haour (2003, Appendix B) provides an overview in tabular form of points of agreement and disagreement regarding mentions of the Hausa, ninth to nineteenth centuries. 15 At this time, the term ‘Hausa’ is often used as a geographical term. This is the usage made by the Songhai-Zarma author of the Tarikh es-Sudan, in the mid-seventeenth century (see translation by Houdas 1964: 41, 152, 232, 432, 459) and by the anonymous writer of the Tedzkiret-en-Nisiân, in the mid-eighteenth century (translation by Houdas 1901: 116, 120, 175, 186, 213–214, 229). In Muhammed Bello’s Infaq al-Maisur (Arnett 1922), ‘Hausa’ is used primarily to indicate a region, alongside places like ‘Ahir’ (Aïr) or ‘Adar’ (Ader). Barth (1857–1859: I: 471) tells us that the word was used to denote the country on the northern side of the Niger (in opposition to Gurma, the southern side). Lavers (1980) has suggested that in Songhai ‘Hausa’ meant ‘east bank’ or ‘left bank’ (cf. Skinner 1968); in Ader it also means ‘south’ (Rossi, this volume); while finally Jaggar (this volume) cites sources that give the meaning as ‘north (bank of the Niger River)’. hausa identity 9 The earliest generally accepted mention of Hausa society is by the early fifteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi (Last 1985: 194; Lange 1987a: 22–23, n. 52); he writes of ‘Afnu, whose king is named Mastur and very jealous of his womenfolk’ (in Levtzion and Hopkins 2000: 354); in modern Kanuri, Afuno means the Hausa people. We owe the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi a longer description of ‘the people of Afnu’, which mentions ‘seven tribes, one of which professes Islamic religion’ and notes that ‘other peoples enslave through wars the ones who are not circumcised amongst them and sell them in Awgila’.16 Prior to these sources (and bearing in mind the suggestion that al-Maqrizi may have been paraphrasing the earlier writer Ibn Sa’id [†1286]), Hausa areas and people are only tentatively recognised in the written texts.17 However, specific Hausa towns do seem to be mentioned; al-Idrisi (mid-twelfth century) speaks of Kugha, which Last (1985: 207) and Lange (1987a) identify as old Kebbi. Ibn Battuta, who travelled to the river Niger in the fourteenth century, is another important source, and Kubar, to which he tells us copper was brought, has been identified as potentially the Hausa area of Gobir.18 Kubar serves as a good example of the issues raised

16 Our translation from the French, reported in Ciecierska-Chlapowa (1965: 243) alongside the original text. In spite of Çelebi’s statement, in the same passage, that he had reached the lands of the ‘Afnu’, it is debated whether these comments are based on first-hand observations or on reports of informants met in the course of Çelebi’s travels in Africa, which seem to have taken place in 1673 (Bombaci 1943). Last’s suggestion that Çelebi heard of the ‘Hausa seven’ (Last 1980: 164) may have to be revised: could he have heard of the ‘Afnu Seven’? The name Hausa does not appear to figure in Çelebi’s text. 17 Various attempts have been made to identify the Hausa in the writings of al- Yaqubi in the ninth century in particular, while Last (this volume, page 67) has discussed a derivation of ‘Hausa’ from the word ‘Habasha’ at some point after the thirteenth century. Last’s in-depth study of the Kano Chronicle identifies three mentions of the term ‘Hausa’ as such in the later sections of the text (and not, against Palmer, in the earlier ones, cf. Last 1980: 164). The implications of these occurrences, however, are not clear, not only because the date of the composition of the Kano Chronicle (or better, Chronicles) is debated (see M.G. Smith 1981), but also because later copyists introduced anachronisms, and this would be one of the most likely. 18 This identification is agreed on by a number of scholars—Westermann (1949); Trimingham (1962: 130); Levtzion (1968: 15); Cuoq (1975: 319, n. 1); Beckingham and Gibb (1994: 974, n. 94); Lovejoy (1978a: 181); Fuglestad (1978: 331); Levtzion and Hopkins (2000: 450); Lange (1987a: 15, 28). However, it is not clear where Kubar/ Gobir was actually situated at this time; according to conventional wisdom Gobir would then have been in Aïr (Trimingham 1962: 130, n. 2). In this case the allusion to copper imports makes little sense, since Aïr was a well-known producer of the metal. No general consensus exists on the other places referred to by Ibn Battuta, such as Zaghai—though see Last (1985: 208, 216; and this volume, footnote on page 61). 10 anne haour and benedetta rossi by using historical records to trace past Hausa society and religion; as Marquart (1913), Sutton (1979), Last (1985), and Lange (1987a) have pointed out, a problem in identifying it as Gobir is the fact that Ibn Battuta calls Kubar the ‘land of the infidel’, and describes royal burials involving human sacrifice (Levtzion and Hopkins 2000: 281). This unease results perhaps from preconceived notions of what is, and is not, ‘proper’ Hausa behaviour. In fact, Islamisation occurred at different paces in different areas. Human sacrifice was reported as late as the nineteenth century among various Hausa groups (Tremearne 1915: 23; Greenberg 1946: 30; Leroux 1948: 627), and conversion to Islam is still an ongoing process in some regions of Hausaland (see Last 1979). It is possible that ‘Kubar’ in Ibn Battuta’s text refers to a pre-Islamic Hausa state—or to communities later assimilated by the Hausa (Lange 1987a). Similarly difficult is the case of Maranda, which ties in directly with the question of Hausa origins, and the matter of Gobir. The Gobi- rawa have long19 held traditions of migration from Aïr, and Maranda is cited as one of their former places of settlement.20 After the fifteenth century, references to places and people now known as ‘Hausa’ become more clearly recognisable and relatively frequent. Leo Africanus described the towns of Kano, Zaria and Katsina, telling of their population of skilled craftspeople and affluent merchants both local and foreign.21 Anania, a slightly later Italian traveller to the West African coast, added some original information. He wrote of Kano, with its large stone walls, as one of the three cities of Africa (together with Fez and Cairo) where one could purchase any item (Anania 1972 [1573–82]: 338–339). He spoke also of the cowrie currency of Katsina and the Animists of Zaria (Anania 1972 [1573–82]: 335). By the nineteenth century, the fame of the Hausa cities—especially as regarded their extensive manufacturing and trade (Baier 1980:

19 This tradition seems to have been first reported in writing in 1825, when Denham and Clapperton brought back from the Sudan texts by Mohammed Bello (in Arnett 1922: 9) 20 For a discussion of the significance of Maranda for Gobir history, see Hama (1967); Lhote in Gado (1980: 85); Hamani (1975, 1989: 121–122); Haour (2003: 29–31); Magnavita et al. (2007). 21 See Leo Africanus (1956 [1550]: 472ff.). Some other places described by Leo Africanus—such as the shadowy Guber and Guangara—have been less convincingly identified with areas in which Hausa polities are known to have developed at a later date: Gobir, Tessaoua, Kebbi or Katsina (Pageard 1962; Fuglestad 1978; Fisher 1978; Last 1985; Last this volume [page 61], Lange 1987a; Rauchenberger 1999; see also Sutton, this volume, page 292). hausa identity 11

52–55, 150–167)—had spread widely, and the first European explor- ers made them a particular goal of their travels.22 Barth made detailed notes on the historical traditions, trade and manufacture of places such as Kano, Katsina and Zinder. The long-standing organisation of trade and extensive links of the Hausa cities emerge through many European reports. A well-cited example is that of Hugh Clapperton who, upon making his entry into Kano in January 1824, was disap- pointed to find that his foreign appearance was not a novelty, and that items of European trade had preceded him.23 To the external sources relating to West Africa,24 one should add sources written in the Hausa area itself. The most vivid and best known is the Kano Chronicle; containing religious, social and technological information, going far beyond a bare enumeration of kings and feats of arms, it has benefited from a perhaps unfair supremacy in historical studies of the Hausa. It runs from the rule of the immigrant king Bagauda25 up to the nineteenth century. Further sources include the Bayajidda legend and the Wakar Bagauda (Hiskett 1964, 1965ab), both of which address the origins of the Hausa people and their political organisation. Local ‘Hausa’ kinglists, lacking a significant accompanying text, are provided in several other publications.26 These

22 Heinrich Barth, for instance, on the approach to Kano in January 1851, is jubi- lant (1857–9: I: 488): ‘Kano had been sounding in my ears now for more than a year; it had been one of the great objects of our journey as the central point of commerce, as a great store-house of information, and as the point whence more distant regions might be most successfully attempted. At length, after nearly a year’s exertions, I had reached it’. 23 See Clapperton’s narrative in Denham et al. (1828: II: 266). Later, still in Kano, Clapperton comments: ‘I bought, for three Spanish dollars, an English cotton umbrella, an article I little expected meet with, yet by no means uncommon’ (Denham et al. (1828: II: 289). 24 Among other important authors on the Hausa area are Lander (1967 [1830]), Richardson (1970 [1853]), Staudinger (1990 [1889]), Monteil (1895) and Robinson (1900). Robinson (1900: 112–113) famously wrote that ‘It would be well within the mark to say that Kano clothes more than half the population of the Central Soudan’. 25 An event which supposedly took place in the late tenth century, although this was worked out by H. R. Palmer (1928) by adding up possibly inaccurate reign lengths; it refers to the ‘legendary period’ of Hausa historical tradition (see M. G. Smith 1981: 41; Last 1980: section on ‘Birni Legends’). 26 Many major Hausa regions possessed dynastic lists, reproduced in Baikie (1867), Landeroin (1910–1911), Palmer (1910a, 1912), Saley (1982, Appendix 1), and Lange (2009). These mainly consist of brief segments detailing the length of reign of each ruler. The Bayajidda legend or Daura Chronicle has been reported, with slight variations, by a number of researchers: among these Arnett (1910), Walwyn in Palmer (1928: III: 132–135), Hallam (1966b), H. Johnston (1966), and Bioud in Salifou (1971: 12 anne haour and benedetta rossi sources offer important entry points to the question of the evolution of what now characterises ‘Hausaness’. Plainly, they must be treated as the positioned documents that they are; the versions extant today may have been ‘updated’ under successive rulers, altered mistakenly or willingly by copyists, and corrupted with anachronisms and censures (see M. G. Smith 1983; Last 1980, 1983). The bias of the sources towards issues of manufacture and trade has already been mentioned. However, perhaps most crucially, it should be recalled that many writers (or their rulers) were animated by religious concerns and that historical records, usually kept by literate Muslims, are often judgmental of non-Islamic aspects of the past. Furthermore, although today a key feature of ‘being Hausa’ involves ‘being Mus- lim’, this should not be assumed to have always been the case. The continuous renegotiation of the role of religion in the representation and self-representation of groups belongs to the longue durée of Hausa history, as different ways of being Hausa found expression in different articulations of identity and religion. Accordingly, the final theme to be addressed in this introduction is that of religious belief and practice throughout Hausa history.

Hausa religion Very little or nothing is known of the Hausa area in the period preceding contact with Islam. At any rate, oral traditions seem to indicate that political arrangements in early Hausa polities were informed by a high degree of syncretism, involving power-sharing between Animist and Muslim groups. One can cite here the example of traditions in Ader and Arewa, two areas where non-Islamic beliefs and practices have been particularly enduring. Here, an initial ‘pact’ is believed to have established the political primacy of immigrants (who were credited with the introduction of more sophisticated lifestyles and technologies of production), while groups seen as autochthonous retained primacy in relations with the supernatural. The immigrants tolerated and partly embraced this local religion.27 Such ambiguous power-sharing is also

232–236). See also most recently Lange (2004) discussing, inter alia, different versions of the Bayajidda legend. 27 This pact is often evoked in oral traditions by formulas such asmuna ‘ da iko, kuna da kasa’, ‘we have the power (over people), you have the land (and its spirits)’ (Echard 1972: 94ff.; Hamani 1975: 34–39; Nicolas 1975b: 407; Rossi, this volume). hausa identity 13 reflected in written sources such as the Kano Chronicle, which attest to the continued influence of the portion of the population which did not follow Islamic religion, or did so in a syncretic way.28 It seems that an uneasy relationship involved groups not converted to Islam recognising their dependence on the ruler, yet retaining their traditional beliefs and powers. These power-sharing configurations are known in the literature as ‘contrapuntal paramountcy’ (Fuglestad 1978: 324, borrowing the term from Goody 1966: 5). In any case, classifications of different groups as ‘Muslim’ or ‘pagan’ must have been increasingly contested as Islam became established as the official religion of government, and as the ban on the enslavement of ‘Muslims’ was progressively enforced at the expense of ‘pagans’.29 These circumstances would have led to debates on, for example, what degree of syncretism was acceptable for one to be considered a Muslim, with various perspectives supported by different rulers and scholars at the same time. Partly as a result of this complex picture, there exists little consensus about the time-depth and direction of the penetration of Islam. For example, the Kano Chronicle states that the Mande Wangara brought Islam to Kano in the late fourteenth century. Due to their influence, it is said, every town in Kano country observed the times of prayer, Muslim officials were appointed, and long-standing enemies at San- tolo were beaten and their place of sacrifice dismantled (Palmer 1928: III: 104–106). To be sure, this account presents a suspiciously neat picture of Islam’s battle against ‘paganism’.30 An eastern origin for the first Islamic influences to Kano is, indeed, just as likely, considering that some of the peoples in the Chad Basin had been in contact with Tripoli since perhaps the eleventh century (Insoll 2003) and that

28 For instance, the Kano Chronicle tells us that the ruler of Kano ca. AD 1400 returned to the ancestral cult of Barbushe when told that it would help him vanquish the people of rival Zaria (Palmer 1928: III: 107–108). And as late as the seventeenth century, the ruler of Kano could appeal to the Animists of the town—who do not ever seem to have disappeared, but rather cohabited with the established Islamic court—for a charm to protect his throne (Palmer 1928: III: 121). In short, one guesses through these examples at a ‘political’ use of religion. 29 In her doctoral thesis (2008), Jennifer Lofkrantz provides an interesting perspective on the articulations between religion and enslavement by focusing on ransoming policies and practices in the Western and Central Sudan. 30 Its reliability in inferring the timescale for the conversion of the Hausa has been hotly debated, see Al-Hajj (1968), Hiskett (1973: 5–9), Sanneh (1976), A. Smith (1976), Lovejoy (1978c), Sa’ad (1979), Adamu (1984), Lange (1987a), Meunier (1997), Haour (2007). 14 anne haour and benedetta rossi word-borrowings from Kanuri point to an important role for Kanuri speakers in the introduction of Islamic cultural features to Hausa society (Greenberg 1960; Jaggar, this volume). The advance of Islam in Hausa areas was most probably related to the proselytising activities of single individuals, gaining converts at very different times in different places—a factor further contributing to some of the contradictions relating to the Islamisation of the kasar hausa.31 Certainly Islam has been influential in all spheres of social and political life in some of the major Hausa centres since at least the fifteenth century. At the end of the fifteenth / beginning of the sixteenth century, Shaikh Abd al-Karim al-Maghili, of Tlemcen in modern Alge- ria, was teaching in Kano, and the century witnessed the expansion of Islamic intellectual activity and the growth of Islamic literature in classical Arabic written by Hausa ulama [scholars].32 The proselytising role of the Wangara, famed as traders, has just been mentioned. It is also probably no coincidence that in the Kano Chronicle the reign of Yakubu (mid-fifteenth century?) is remembered not only for the arrival of Fulani clerics, but also for the settling in Kano of salt traders, of people from modern Ghana and Borno, and of a group of ‘Turawa’ (variously translated as Arabs or ‘white people’, see e.g. Meunier 1997) (Palmer 1928: III: 111). As has been pointed out by a number of authors (Fuglestad 1983; Last 1985; Insoll 2003), the acceptance of Islam is thus made to coincide with the opening up of trading contacts between Kano and other regions. That Islamisation was marked by accommodation and syncretism, and shaped by the agency of individuals, makes good sense in view of studies of contemporary practice—but is easily lost sight of in the historical literature. A point of note is that on a society-wide scale conversion, whatever its timing, was rarely irreversible. But perhaps the largest obstacle to an understanding of the spread of Islam through the kasar hausa is the fact that, as indicated above, we have little knowledge of what the new religion was replacing. We dispose of few in-depth studies of the non-Islamic elements of Hausa religion, and they cannot be easily disentangled from centuries of interaction with

31 See also note 18 on Gobir, above. 32 See Al-Hajj (1968) and Hiskett (1984: 80–85). The interaction between proselytising activities and trade is well known. As Fuglestad (1978: 328) has noted, ‘wandering clerics who did not engage in trading activities might have found it difficult simply to stay alive’. hausa identity 15

Islam. Pre-Islamic Hausa religion is believed to have survived in some beliefs and practices among groups usually referred to as azna (also Azna, asna, arna, anna) in Niger, and as Maguzawa in Nigeria. The distinction between these two groups appears primarily geographic, the name ‘Azna’ being in use further north than ‘Maguzawa’, and possibly indicating a different history of contact with Muslim traders and rulers. As poorly-understood alternatives to Islam, these merit some detailed consideration here. The significance of the different names Azna and Maguzawa poses problems.33 Last (this volume, p. 63) suggests that “the label Maguzawa was applied to non-Muslims living within the karkara zone [lands surrounding the main cities], whereas generic terms such as Gwarawa or arna were used for non-Muslims living in what was categorised as ‘bush’ ” (see also Last 1980). Somewhat similarly, Lange (2008) also considers Maguzawa/Azna to refer to rural (as opposed to urban) Hausa. His analysis however differs from Last’s in one crucial regard; for Lange, the Azna/Hausa distinction relates to long-established cor- porative differences, predating the arrival of Islam—a long time-depth that is lost if the dichotomy is reduced to one of Islamic/non-Islamic. The meaning of these terms must have evolved through time, but it

33 One of the earlier mentions of ‘Azna’ appears in the notes taken by Richardson whilst visiting Zinder in 1850; here ‘Hazna’ is simply equated with ‘pagans’ (e.g. 1970 [1853]: 245). Similarly, Landeroin (1910–1911: 482, our translation) noted it was not a racial term, but a ‘Hausa term meaning pagan, idolatre, fetishist’; and Trimingham (1959: 39), writing of the Maguzawa of Nigeria, noted that the pagans of Gobir and Maradi were not known by this term but by the Hausa word for ‘pagan’, arne (anne, asne). Similarly, in his study of the Zinder area, Vieillard (1939: 174) reported that in the Hausa countries ‘pagans’ were known as Azna/Arna/Anna or Maguzawa. On the other hand, some authors seem to have understood the label not just as a generic term for ‘pagan’, but also as an ethnonym: Séré de Rivières states that ‘it is both an ethnic expression and a religious designation’ (1965: 47), a double meaning also accepted by Nicolas (1975: 59). The term has no doubt seen semantic extension over time. Urvoy has, for example, hypothesised that the term azna ‘probably referred to the people of the Ader, and has been gradually extended to all pagans (païens)’ (1936: 252, our translation; cf. Echard 1975:11). Confusion also surrounds the etymology of the word ‘Maguzawa’. Temple (1919: 263) described the Maguzawa as a tribe of Hausa, descendents of Maguji, miner and smelter and one of the eleven pagan chiefs who originally led the clans of Kano, as described in the Kano Chronicle. On the other hand, Vie- illard (1939: 174) derives the term Maguzawa from the Arabic for ‘idolâtre’, while Trimingham (1959: 39) is in broad agreement, deriving Maguzawa from the Arabic majus (Qur’an xxii, 17); he suggests that its application was an attempt by jurists in Nigeria to find an acceptable designation for Animists liable for tax payments. Green- berg (1946: 11) translates ‘maguzanci’ and ‘musulmunci’ as, respectively, ‘the pagan way’ and ‘the Moslem way’. 16 anne haour and benedetta rossi remains clear that at least in the recent past these two identities have been defined primarily by religion. Anecdotal evidence suggests that at least to some Azna, their name implied beliefs different from Islam: Nicolas (1975b: 430)’s Azna informants in Maradi, observing a group of Gwari behaving in a clearly un-Islamic way, commented that they were ‘the real Anna (sic)’. Moreover, Greenberg (1946: 41) recorded that some Maguzawa in Nigeria qualified theiska Kure, or hyena, as ‘peculiarly their own’, and in drumming they said ‘kure, borin arna’, ‘Kure, bori of the pagans’. Thus, admittedly scattered sources suggest that association with non-Islamic beliefs has been a defining characteristic of Azna identity in recent times, and that groups known as Magu- zawa would sometimes establish a connection between themselves and ‘arna’. Modern studies indicate that relationships with deities within the Azna pantheon are negotiated by clan-based groups through divina- tion, sacrifice, ritual offerings to particular plants or animals, possession (bori), and magic, in attempts to influence human affairs and natural processes (Piault 1970: 46–47; Nicolas 1975a, 1986). In the early twentieth century, students of Hausa suggested that religious taboos might be interpreted as vestiges of totemism (Palmer 1910b; Tremearne 1914: 30–53, 1915), but these observations were not followed up, possibly because of the loss of popularity of certain terminologies in the anthropology of religion. Azna and Maguzawa also used to be characterised by particular types of facial and abdominal markings called zani (Tremearne 1911: 163), tsaga (Barkow 1973: 66; Greenberg 1947: 197), or aska (Rossi, 2008 fieldnotes); by the habit of living in rural areas rather than in walled villages (Greenberg 1947: 195; Barkow 1973: 65; Nicolas 1975b: 428; Last, this volume); and by a different moral ethos and standards of feminine modesty (Barkow 1973: 72ff.). Today these names have acquired derogatory connotations; Hausa speakers rarely self-identify as ‘Azna’, and non-Islamic religious practices and beliefs have been increasingly considered incompatible with Islam. While they have not yet died out entirely, they are practised discreetly (Gar- çon 1998: 13; Hamani 1975: 51; Masquelier 2001). The establishment of an overarching Islamic government, the Sokoto Caliphate, following the jihad (1804–1808) led by the Shaikh Uthman dan Fodio contributed to the radicalisation of Islam in the heart of Hausaland, resulting in its closer observance amongst some Hausa rulers, and conflict with those refusing to abandon non-Muslim practices. Resistance against Sokoto authority, known as tawaye, never led to a hausa identity 17 restoration of the previous order within the Caliphate territory. While the establishment of the Caliphate at the beginning of the nineteenth century induced important changes, as hinted at above, it would be erroneous to think of it as an abrupt rupture with the past. At this time, in spite of attempts at promoting political orthodoxy manifest in works such as the Kitab al-farq (Hiskett 1960), the assimilation of Islam occurred gradually amongst Animist constituencies (Triming- ham 1959: 30ff.). Alongside gradations of religious syncretism in different sections of the population, different Islamic traditions co-existed. Regrettably, this is another area that has not yet received sufficient scholarly attention. Just as we do not dispose of comparative studies of Azna and Maguzawa groups, so we lack studies of how the Islamic movement expressed by the Caliphate compared to pre-existing forms of Islam, such as those of the Wangara and of maraboutic fractions of Tuareg society.34 Studies of the religious factor in Hausaland should pay attention to the differenceswithin both Islam and Animism, as well as to the interactions and differencesbetween various religious constituencies. Colonial occupation at the end of the nineteenth century strengthened the presence of Christianity in the Hausa world, which had, until then, had hardly any contacts with missionary activity (Cooper, this volume). Through the twentieth century, Islamic identity in northern Nigeria confronted the religion of the colonial occupiers, religious integration apparently preceding both social and political integration in Kano (Paden 1973: 53ff.). In the 1930s Islamic religious brotherhoods provided avenues of incorporation for different migrant groups into the urban economy, especially in the Kano area (Paden 1970: 242). More recent scholars have tended to criticise Paden’s emphasis on the relation between ethnicity and religion, and religious movements in northern Nigeria and southern Niger have been seen as lacking a clear ethnic base (Kane 2003; Alidou 2005). Cooper’s study of Hausa evangelical Christians (2006), and Masquelier’s of Azna confronted with

34 For instance, in nineteenth-century Ader, Islam remained solidly anchored within Tuareg maraboutic and scholarly groups (Tamasheq: ineslemen), but did not become a criterion of political rule, as it was in Sokoto (Nicolas 1975b: 419, note 21). The good relations between Sokoto religious leaders and some Islamic scholars in Ader nuanced Sokoto’s intervention in this region (Last 1967: 111–112; Leroux 1948: 596), where Animist practices had, by and large, not been repressed by the ruling Tuareg warrior elites (imajeghen). This, as elsewhere in the kasar hausa, resulted in the northwards migrations of some Animist chieftaincies who lost out against Sokoto’s power. 18 anne haour and benedetta rossi recent Islamic radicalisation (2001), illustrate the continuous reshaping of religious affiliation and belief. Generally speaking, the trend seems to be the decreasing acceptability of syncretism which had seemingly informed political arrangements in early Hausa polities.

3. Contents and aims

The contributions presented here are structured around the three themes of identity, history and religion which we have just discussed. We now give an outline of their content and of the overall structure of the volume. Over the last thirty years, Hausa historiography has relied heavily on linguistics to shed light on the early history of the society we have come to know as Hausa. Hence, it seems appropriate to start our discussion on the changing implications of being and becoming Hausa with a reassessment of what is known about the history of the language, and the continuing potential of linguistics to offer insights into some of the dimmest aspects of Hausa historical trajectories. In Chapter 2, Philip Jaggar provides a critical summary of the current state of knowledge about the evolution of Hausa, from the westwards spread of Chadic languages across the Sahara between five and three millennia ago to the ‘rapid and recent’ expansion of Hausa in its current homeland. He shows that a reconstruction of linguistic borrowings (in this case from Fulani, Kanuri, and Berber [Tuareg] languages) can provide important insights into social and cultural histories. A parallel argument is advanced in Chapter 3 by Murray Last, who analyses a list of 250 place-names drawn from Kano Province maps to seek Hausa and borrowed toponyms and to suggest a history of settlement and contacts. Exploring cultural, economic, and geo-political dimensions of the transition from proto-Hausa to Hausa, he suggests that a key point was the contrast between the main cities’ surroundings (Hausa: karkara) and the ‘deep bush’. Here, Hausaisation appears as a centripetal force, strongest in the urban poles where Islamic codes of conduct and worldviews are dominant, and weaker further away from the city. Still relevant to contemporary sociological distinctions, the urban/ rural interplay, with its religious implications, is central to Hausa culture and social structures, and seems to have left traces in relatively old language formations. In Chapter 4, Joseph McIntyre suggests that proverbs and verbal compounds constitute valuable sources of information on pre-Islamic beliefs and institutions that have remained ‘fos- hausa identity 19 silised’ in language, while the practices they refer to were transformed by social and religious change. Working on a list of 500 proverbs and almost 1000 verbal compounds, McIntyre notes that these constructs comment upon a world that is predominantly rural and agrarian, and reflects the sacralisation of nature characteristic of pre-Islamic Hausa religion. Functioning as moral commentaries in today’s Muslim Hausa world, they contribute to the resilience of non-Islamic imagery and beliefs, as indeed, McIntyre goes on to show, do some non-teaching practices of Hausa Muslim clerics. Further elaborating on the rural/ urban and Islamic/non-Islamic tensions, Chapter 5 by Benedetta Rossi sheds light on ethnic dynamics at the ‘deep rural’ end of Hausaland. A detailed case study from the Ader region (in today’s southern Niger) illustrates the changing articulations of ‘Hausa’ and ‘Azna’, and the progressive Hausaisation of low-status Tuareg throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines why and how, historically, particular social groups ‘became Hausa’ and what this process of Hau- saisation implied in practice. While maintaining the focus on ways of life and their transformations, Chapter 6 by Anne Haour shifts the discussion to archaeology’s potential for the interpretation of the early dynamics of what is known today as Hausaland. Taking the example of Kufan Kanawa (Niger), reputed through oral and written history to be the former location of Kano, Haour contrasts archaeological results and historical data relating to the site, setting them within the wider context of the archaeology of the Hausa area. Questioning the usefulness of archaeological attempts to identify the ethnicity of past peoples, she suggests that investigations should instead document the spread of, and interrela- tions across, different ways of life (e.g. particular systems of production and trade, or the custom of living within walls). These themes are developed further in Chapter 7 by Abubakar Sule Sani in relation to recent archaeological research in Kirfi, near Bauchi (Nigeria). Sule Sani relies on ethnographic research in interpreting past specialised technologies, such as iron-working and dyeing, and past religious beliefs. Identifying within the survey zone remains which he attributes to different periods on the basis of comparison with neighbouring areas, Sule Sani suggests factors of change which impacted on settlement patterns, technologies of production, trade, and religious beliefs. Inter alia, he suggests that the move from inselbergs such as Kirfi to valley areas may have formed part of the historical development of the sarauta system. 20 anne haour and benedetta rossi

The relation between trade, technology, and particular political systems is also central to Chapter 8 by Marisa Candotti, who examines the evolution of trade relations within and between Hausa areas, and with regions beyond Hausaland. Candotti focuses primarily on the nineteenth century, when consolidation into the Sokoto Caliph- ate erased political and economic barriers between the Hausa polities and entailed major demographic and commercial changes. Using the example of textile manufacture, Candotti illustrates changing patterns of trade and production in the Hausa area, where cloth was an important symbol of status. In the three following papers, the focus moves closer to the present, enquiring into the significance of cloth— its production, trade, and uses—as one of the central markers of Hausa identity. Moving on from production and circulation, Sarah Worden (Chapter 9) examines clothing as an indicator of social, political and religious affiliation. Drawing examples of high-prestige robes from museum collections, Worden addresses the role of clothing style in the construction of Hausa identity, and considers the potential of museum textile collections in approaching ethnicity. She notes that museum collections must aim to decipher implicit and explicit references to cultural meanings and moral values. These same values are also at stake in the intergenerational negotiations taking place in contemporary Hausa societies. In Chapter 10 Adeline Masquelier discusses the processes of individual self-fashioning and generational affirmation through which young Muslims in Dogondoutchi (Niger) negotiate clothing styles and musical affiliations with elders. Masquelier shows that, to these young Muslims, the idea of ‘Hausaness’ is secondary in their efforts to develop identities integrating them into global movements rooted in shared Islamic consciousness and hip-hop culture. Both of these often contrasting transnational discourses offer young Nigériens, faced with poverty and unemployment, an escape from their own marginalisation in international politics and youth movements. They negotiate their identities through bodily performance and a critical engagement with some of the major problems afflicting their generation, such as hiv-aids. The theme of identity negotiation is further developed, with an explicit religious focus, in Chapter 11 by Barbara Cooper. Bringing right up to the present the discussion of religion in defining and reshaping Hausaness made in preceding chapters, Cooper unravels the episte- mological bargaining occurring in the process of ‘becoming Christian’ in contexts where ‘being Hausa’ is synonymous with ‘being Muslim’. hausa identity 21

Based on fieldwork in Maradi (Niger), Cooper notes that evangelical religious culture in Maradi has been shaped by the consciousness that Christianity must prove itself in terms legible to Muslims, but also, if less explicitly, to what remains of non-Islamic Hausa religious beliefs. The negotiations ensuing from these ‘unconventional’ conversions are primarily performative, and are set in the syncretic religious landscape already highlighted by other contributors. Cooper concludes that ‘Hausaness is not a fixed set of practices, but rather an ongoingprocess of conversation, mimicry, struggle, rejection, reform, and renewal’. The focus on Hausa as a process presented in both Masquelier’s and Cooper’s rich ethnographies reiterates the importance of learning from the present to interpret the past. It aptly leads to John Sutton’s emphasis on process as a defining feature of the longue durée of Hausa history. Concluding a wide-ranging exploration of historical manifestations of being and becoming Hausa, in Chapter 12 John Sutton brings up to date his 1979 overview of the question of ‘Hausa origins’ and rethinks the assimilative processes which played a role in the making of a ‘Hausa’ society. He synthesises current ideas on the time scale and mechanisms of the emergence of a distinct Hausa group, and reiterates the importance of historical linguistics in gaining insights into the earliest—and most obscure—phases of Hausa history. Together, chapters suggest that the Hausaisation process involved progressive adoption of the Hausa language; negotiation with Islam, partly as a charter for economic opportunity; and the growing centripetal force of major urban poles, exerting political and economic influence over surrounding regions, and manifest in the organisation of production, trade, migration, and efforts to make rural identities compatible with urban expectations.

4. Conclusion

The papers in this volume discuss, from different angles and disciplinary perspectives, the process of becoming Hausa—the progressive definition of individuals or societies as Hausa (‘Being Hausa’), and the incorporation of different groups into Hausa (‘Becoming Hausa’). They offer a broad coverage, from the traditional ‘Hausa cores’, such as Kano, to ‘peripheries’ such as Bauchi and Ader. Together, contributors highlight a series of dichotomies which appear to characterise this process: Azna/Hausa, rural/urban, external/internal. Many of these have been, and continue to be, articulated through religion. 22 anne haour and benedetta rossi

An explicit goal of this book has been the exploration of different, often conflicting, interpretations, as well as of points of agreement. A particular area of shadow concerns early mentions of Hausa in the historical records. As was seen above, considerable debate surrounds (a) the rarity of occurrences of the term Hausa, in a clearly identifiable form, until the seventeenth century and indeed its possible absence before this time; (b) the interpretation of the derivation of the name ‘Hausa’ from earlier words mentioned in Arabic sources; and (c) the attribution of a set of different terms (geographical locations, ethnonyms, etc.) to early stages of ‘Hausa’ history, before this society came to be identified as ‘Hausa’. This volume does not attempt to iron out disagreements, which would give a false sense of certainty detrimen- tal to future research. However, the intersection of areas of shadow and the shared focus on Hausa ethnogenesis not just as an ideal construct, but also as a material and performative phenomenon, together allow us to identify directions for future research and the contributions that the Hausa case can make to questions of religion and identity in general. Firstly, and thinking back to the still considerable problems in interpreting the early sources referred to just now, we suggest that particular care should be paid to the world-view of the authors, and to the scale on which any events or developments are described. Traditions of migration are very prevalent but, as Bonte and Echard (1976: 246ff.) pointed out in their work among Hausa communities in Ader, oral tradition may use migration as a metaphor for the creation of new centres of settlement within one same cultural sphere, and that migration may occur within a same region and over small distances. Similar clues can be found in the written and oral historical records. The environmental context presented by the colourful Wakar Bagauda is that of a farming society with deep ties to the land (Hiskett 1964, 1965ab). Last (1985: 192, 199 and n. 91) detects in the Wakar Bagauda references to an immigration of craftsmen from the northwest, attracted by the economic opportunities for trade in the Kano area, notably gold and slaves. In foregrounding the importance of regional mobility and migration for interpreting Hausa historical trajectories, we find helpful a focus on internal processes and on ‘way of life’, both of which offer valuable clues to the experience of being and becoming Hausa across time. Theories hypothesising migration over very long distances (e.g. Lange 2004, 2009) must seek to explain how lifestyles were preserved, or altered, during the transition. hausa identity 23

Tying into these questions is the issue of the nature of life in rural Hausaland. There remains a dearth of synthetic, diachronically-appli- cable studies of social and economic organisation in the countryside.35 This neglect mirrors that of the earliest written records, which typically disregarded the more mundane aspects of Hausa life—crops, farmers, and subsistence goods—to instead describe exotic trade goods and urban lifestyles. Yet, it is plain that such urban landscapes, and the scale of trade and manufacture evident in the towns, could not exist without supply from a rural hinterland and buoyant systems of trading, not confined to high-value or specialist commodities (cf. Shea 1983). The marked seasonality of the climatic regime, where a short rainy season concentrates the bulk of agricultural work into a few months between June and October, will no doubt have encouraged farmers to undertake other occupations during the dry season.36 If we surmise the wide-scale involvement of rural populations in the precolonial Hausa economy, then a distinction between a ‘progressive’ hierarchised, trade-oriented, sarauta-structured urban Hausa, and an ‘ancient’ egalitarian, rural world (Riedel et al. 1990; Fuglestad 1983) is mistaken: it conceals the integration of these realities into a single regional system. Historically speaking, it is only within the wider framework of the rural landscape (in particular, thanks to its productive capacity) that the walled, Islamic, widely renowned Hausa towns (birni, birane) could come into existence. These observations are still pertinent to the unequal development of urban and rural parts of the kasar hausa throughout the twentieth century (Charlick 1991: 124–127). In recent times, the Sahelian fringes have faced increasing environmental degradation, with consequences for the organisation of farmers and herders in the hinterland

35 Notable exceptions include the narrative of Baba of Karo (M. F. Smith 1981[1954]); the work of Polly Hill (1970: chapters 6 and 7, 1972, 1977, 1982); and several contributions to the volumes edited by Bawuro Barkindo in 1983 and 1989. 36 Such points have been raised, for instance by Raynaut (1972: 42–47), M. G. Smith (1981), Adams and Mortimore (1999: 133ff.), and Haour (2003). However, their full import remains to be grasped, even though the involvement of rural communities in production and trade has been indicated by a number of specific case studies. Among those, we can cite the observation by Hill (1977) that much of the cloth produced in Kano must have been woven and dyed in the countryside, as well as the complex network of trade contacts—extending to even the smallest villages—which have been documented by authors such as Shea (1980), Baier (1980), Grégoire (1992), Haour (2003), Candotti (this volume) and Rossi (this volume). Much documentary material remains available, too, in local institutions and archives (Murray Last, pers. comm.). 24 anne haour and benedetta rossi

(Bernus 1974; Raynaut 1975; Faulkingham and Thorban 1975; Baier 1976; Watts 1983). Rural producers have reacted to the progressive monetisation of the economy and to recurrent production deficits by unfolding new migration strategies along past long-distance trade routes ( fatauci). Previous generations of long-distance traders have formed diasporic platforms of support for younger migrants from their region, and mobile traders have been joined by seasonal labour migrants attempting to meet farming deficits at home with earnings derived from migrant labour (Prothero 1957; Swindell 1984; Guillas 1984; Main 1989; Rain 1999; Rossi 2009b). Old commercial relationships are transmuted as they become integrated into modern international economic structures (Grégoire 1992: especially chapter 5). If in the nineteenth century Hausa identity functioned as a business charter across a vast subregional economy, today it seems to enter international financial institutions only through the ‘backdoor’ (Meagher 2003), and many Hausa-speakers try to escape poverty by making do in the so-called informal sector. On the other hand, as was the case in earlier periods, religion appears to remain central to modern sub- jectivities, by giving Hausa youths access to global Islamic movements (Kane 2003; Charlick 2007; Masquelier, this volume). Thus, studies of contemporary Hausa society point to the continuing relevance of tensions between rural and urban, external and internal, and different forms of religious identity. In terms of the mediation of identity and religious belief through material culture, a third promising axis of future research emerges: clothing and textiles more generally. Clothing, a vital aspect of self- expression, is a fundamental part of the definition of both Hausan- ess and Islam. A particular attractiveness of this data source is that, as shown by a number of chapters in this book (e.g. Candotti, Mas- quelier, Sule, Worden), it is amenable to approach by very different disciplines: museology, economic history, history, anthropology, and archaeology (indirectly, through evidence of increased textile production and evidence for dyeing). As such, it can be expected to reward future interdisciplinary academic enquiry. At the conclusion of our study, it is clear that ‘Hausaness’ involved considerable negotiated and situational aspects. Also, syncretism is, and has been, part of Hausa Islamic culture for centuries; evidence of this survives in historical records and in language. Therefore, instead of seeking to identify a monolithic ‘Hausa people’ in the past, a more fruitful way of approaching identity is to focus on process. hausa identity 25

In the chapters to follow, the various contributors show us that the process of becoming Hausa has involved a long-standing interplay between different constituencies; one in which religion has seemingly functioned as a central aspect in the definition of individuals and groups, yet has proven at times surprisingly adaptive or syncretic. The continuities underlying change form the core theme of the chapters to follow. As we hope to have shown above, our volume aims both to take stock of the progress made so far in Hausa studies, and to identify future routes for research. More generally, we hope that this volume will help advance thinking on the nature of identity and religion, and its mediation through the performative and material aspects of life.

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Pageard, R. 1962. Contribution critique à la chronologie historique de l’ouest africain; suivie d’une traduction des Tables Chronologiques de Barth. Journal de la Société des Africanistes 32, 91–177. Palmer, H. R. 1910a. Notes on some Asben records. Journal of the African Society 9, 388–400. ——. 1910b. Note on traces of totemism and some other customs in Hausaland. Man 40, 72–76. ——. 1912. The Bornu girgam. Journal of the African Society 12, 71–83. ——. 1928. Sudanese Memoirs. 3 volumes. Lagos: Government Printer. Peel, J. D. Y. 1989. The cultural work of Yoruba ethnogenesis. In Tonkin, E., Macdon- ald, M., and Chapman, M. eds. History and ethnicity. London: Routledge. Piault, M. H. 1970. Histoire Mawri: Introduction à l’étude des processus constitutifs d’un état. Paris: Editions CNRS. Prothero, M. 1957. Migratory labour from North Western Nigeria. Africa 27(253), 251–261. Rain, D. 1999. Eaters of the dry season: Circular labour migration in the West African Sahel. Boulder (CO): Westview. Rauchenberger, D. 1999. Johannes Leo der Afrikaner: seine Beschreibung des Raumes zwischen Nil und Niger nach dem Urtext. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Raynaut, C. 1972. Structures normatives et relations électives: étude d‘une commu- nauté villageoise haoussa. Paris and The Hague: Mouton. ——. 1975. Le cas de la région de Maradi (Niger). In Copans, J. ed. Sécheresses et famines au Sahel II. Paris: Maspero. Reichert, R. 1967. L’insurrection d’esclaves de 1835 à la lumière des documents arabes des archives publiques de l’Etat de Bahia (Brésil). Bulletin de l’IFAN 29(1–2), ser. B, 99–104. Reis, J. J. 1993. Slave rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Balti- more: John Hopkins University Press. Richardson, J. 1970 (1853). Narrative of a mission to Central Africa performed in the years 1850–51. Two volumes. London: Frank Cass and Co. Riedel, J., Beck, K. V., Börgel, H., Förster, T., and White-Kaba, M. 1990. Sozio- kulturelle Herausforderungen für die Entwicklungspolitik—die Republik Niger. IFO—Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung München Abteilung Entwicklungsländer. Munich, Köln, London: Weltforum. Robinson, C. 1900. Hausaland or 1500 miles through the central Soudan. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co. Rossi, B. 2009a. Introduction: Rethinking slavery in West Africa. In Rossi, B. ed. Reconfiguring slavery: West African trajectories. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1–25. ——. 2009b. Slavery and migration: social and physical mobility in Ader (Niger). In Rossi, B. ed. Reconfiguring slavery: West African trajectories. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 182–206. Rouch, J. 1956. Migrations au Ghana. Journal de la Société des Africanistes 26, 33–196. Salamone, F. A. 1975. Becoming Hausa: Contributions to a theory of cultural pluralism. Africa 45, 401–424. Saley, M. 1982. Les états Tsotsebaki des origines au XIX siècle. Unpublished Masters thesis, Université de Niamey, June 1982. Sanders, E. R. 1969. The Hamitic hypothesis: its origin and functions in time perspective. Journal of African History 10, 521–532. Sanneh, L. 1976. The origins of clericalism in West African Islam. Journal of African History 17, 49–72. Schildkrout, E. 1978. People of the zongo—the transformation of ethnic identities in Ghana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 32 anne haour and benedetta rossi

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CHAPTER TWO

THE ROLE OF COMPARATIVE/HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS IN RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST: WHAT BORROWED AND INHERITED WORDS TELL US ABOUT THE EARLY HISTORY OF HAUSA*

Philip J. Jaggar

1. Introduction

Hausa, with perhaps as many as 40 million first-language speakers (within the Afroasiatic/Afrasian phylum only Arabic has more), is by far the largest of the 130 or more languages which constitute the Chadic family. Hausa covers most of the northern and western extent of the family, across northern Nigeria and into southern Niger. Chadic languages also extend into northern Cameroon and western and south- central parts of the Chad Republic, and hitherto unknown languages are still occasionally discovered. This area is one of the most linguistically complex in Africa, and is the location of languages belonging to three of the four great phyla as postulated by Greenberg (1963)— Afroasiatic (among which Hausa), Niger-Kordofanian (among which Fula(ni)), and Nilo-Saharan (among which Kanuri). The two major subclassifications of the Chadic family have been advanced by Newman (1977, 1990) (both refinements of Newman and Ma 1966), and Jungraithmayr and Ibriszimow (1994), and between them they classify Chadic into four branches: West Chadic-A (including Hausa, Bole/Bolanci) and West Chadic-B (Bade, Ngizim, etc.), Biu-Mandara or Central Chadic (including languages in northeastern Nigeria, such as Tera, Margi, and northern Cameroon), East Chadic (western Chad Republic, e.g., Kera), and the closely related Masa group (western/central Chad Republic and northeastern Cameroon) (Map 2.1.).

* Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Dmitry Bondarev, Murray Last, Paul Newman, Russell Schuh, Theda Schumann and Lameen Souag for comments on an earlier version of this paper. 36 philip j. jaggar Map 2.1. The Chadic languages (Schuh 2002). the role of comparative/historical linguistics 37

Unlike the well-known and well-researched Indo-European language family with its long literary history, and for which we have a specified and extensive corpus of informative lexical evidence, there is a relative paucity of (reliable) historical/linguistic documentation for the languages of sub-Saharan Africa—most are either undescribed or underdescribed. Because we cannot directly evaluate inferences, therefore, our understanding of the history and phylogenetic affiliation of the languages is limited, as is our knowledge of natural language phenomena such as semantic shift, phonological change (in pronunciation), morphological additions, and regular sound correspondences across languages.1 Sounds and meanings erode over time, and lexical items are replaced, making the task of reconstructing linguistic history still more problematical (this is even the case for Indo-European, see Ringe et al. 2002). These same constraints also apply to Hausa, despite the fact that: (a) it is the best-researched sub-Saharan language, with three recent substantial reference grammars (Wolff 1993, Newman 2000a, Jaggar 2001; see also Newman 1991); and (b) Hausaists have at their disposal lexical and grammatical resources extending back over 150 years (the first published combined Hausa grammar/vocabulary was produced by Schön in 1843), in addition to some historical linguistic information available from Hausa documents in Arabic script (ajami).2 Because of these restrictions, much of what we can confidently reconstruct for Hausa linguistic history is deducible from the comparative study of Hausa and related Chadic languages as they are spoken now, then projecting backwards to the probable ancestral patterns.3

1 Despite our limited understanding, African languages have played a major part in the formulation of models of language change, as well as providing insights into linguistic behaviour—a number of recent theoretical approaches, for example, have been proposed by phonologists researching African languages (see the various chapters in Heine and Nurse 2000). 2 See, for example Prietze (1907), whose Hausa-speaking assistant, Alhaji Musa, marked the contrast between the native retroflex flapr / / (using Arabic ḍād), e.g., raa- naa ‘sun, day’, sarkii ‘emir’, and the historically more recent tap/trill /r/̴ (= Arabic rā). The /r/̴ phoneme entered the language through Arabic, Kanuri and English (in addition to language-internal processes), e.g., (Arabic ) ridda̴ ‘apostasy’, hàrâm̴ ‘unlawful’, (Kanuri) rùbùutuu̴ ‘writing’, (English) sakandàrèe̴ ‘secondary school’ (see Newman 1980b for details). Transcription: aa = long vowel, a = short, à(a) = low tone, high tone unmarked; r ̴ = tap/trill, r = (native) flap,ɓ , ɗ, ƙ = glottalised. 3 As regards the etymology of the term Hausa /hausa/ itself, several proposals have been floating around for a number of years and surface now and again, with varying degrees of plausibility. Skinner (1968) suggests it derives from Songhai hausa (no 38 philip j. jaggar

Gregersen (1977: 144) writes: ‘Athough little is known of the history of African languages, they in turn have proved to be of considerable importance in reconstructing African cultural history’. Although this observation might seem to be little more than a statement of the obvious, the reality is that the potential contribution of comparative- historical linguistics to the scholarly debate is often ignored—it was conspicuously absent, for example, along with archaeology, in the title of the meetings on which this volume is based, i.e., ‘The Emergence of Hausa identity: History and Religion’! Ironically, linguistics has possibly played a greater than normal role in our understanding of prehistory because the African archaeological evidence is so patchy. Why is linguistic history important? Because positing genetically related languages requires us to infer that they must all derive from a single ancestral source—a presumed protolanguage spoken by a particular speech community in a specific place at a specific time. When the community geographically separates, the nuclear language changes over time in each of the new communities until speakers of the new varieties can no longer understand each other and new languages are formed. Communities spread beyond their geographical homeland perhaps because of external pressure (e.g., conflict with other groups, conquest), natural disasters, climate change, in search of land/food, or because of population saturation and a simple need to expand. Hypothesising genetic unity on the basis of shared ancestral vocabulary and morphological paradigms sheds light on the culture and history of the speakers of related languages (with the obvious proviso that traces of cognacy gradually disappear with the increasing separation of languages over time). Sound changes, for example, can sometimes help us establish the period when certain words were first borrowed into a

tones/vowel length provided) meaning ‘east’, but Heath (2005) gives the meaning as ‘north (bank of the Niger River)’ (Lameen Souag, p.c.), and transcribes it /hausa/, i.e., identical in all respects to the Hausa term, making it a possible candidate. Far less convincing is Abraham’s (1962: iv) fanciful claim that hausa “derives from Arabic al-lisān, Hebrew hallāshōn” meaning ‘tongue’. The language name has nothing to do with these two Semitic words, but the corresponding Hausa word harshèe ‘tongue’ does of course—it is fully cognate with the Semitic terms and is a reflex of Proto- Chadic *alsi which in turn (like Semitic) goes back to Proto-Afroasiatic *lš or *ls. Another suggestion is that the source of the name is the Hausa word for ‘Ethiopia’— Habashà. Whatever its historical merits, however, this proposed etymon runs into major linguistic problems, e.g., inter alia, (a) there is no motivation for the /sh/ segment to change (depalatalise) to /s/, (b) the tone on the final a/ / is different, (c) there is no reason why the /b/ in Haḇashà should weaken to /u/ in hau̱sa. In short, we know what its derivational history is not, but we are still not sure what it is. the role of comparative/historical linguistics 39 language by establishing relative chronologies for historical developments. An account of Hausa identity which did not include consideration of the origin, classification and evolution of the language itself would therefore be as incomplete as a characterisation which failed to include religion as a salient factor. There are other components in a comprehensive approach to the problem. In order to form a coherent picture of the remote past (migration, technology, contact, trade, religion, etc.), and shed light on phylic dispersal, ideally a synthesis of archaeology, ethnography, and linguistics is needed (Blench 2006: 3ff.). Human genetics will surely also make an increasingly important scientific contribution to the debate once we have a sufficient body of samples of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences permitting phylogeographic analysis across a range of ethnolinguistic groups. The present paper reinforces the importance of linguistic input from comparative reconstruction, and is aimed principally at non-linguists whose knowledge and understanding of the methodologies used, of family tree models and the genetic classification of Hausa, vary considerably (at times alarmingly) in my experience. (In fairness I recall being largely unconcerned myself about such questions in my former life as an anthropologist!)4 The paper is also mainly derivative, drawing especially on the influential works of leading Chadicists such as Paul Newman and Russell Schuh—empirically-driven specialists in the languages and cultures of the area who have an extensive knowledge of the linguistic principles and rigorous methodologies required (see especially Newman 1977, 1990, 2000b: 259ff.; and Schuh 1981, 1982). It does not therefore claim to offer any further insights into the origins of Hausa, beyond what linguists already know. As an Africanist linguist primarily interested in the description and analysis of synchronic language data (rather than historical/genetic phenomena), I simply provide a balanced synthesis of the types of data and tools utilised by responsible linguists when reconstructing and evaluating the historical backdrop to Hausa and related Chadic languages (or any language(s) for that matter). Such reconstructions are of course probabilistic and

4 Even Africanist linguists are sometimes guilty of woefully ignorant and misleading statements. One of the most egregious examples is to be found in Webb and Kembo-Sure (2000: 31) who write that: “The 300 languages of this family [Chadic] are spoken by 250 million speakers, and were introduced into Africa in the seventh century, after the Islamic invasions”! Not one of these claims is correct. 40 philip j. jaggar entail a degree of error, but the methodological procedures at least are sound, and they allow extraction of salient linguistic history. Inferences about the (largely) undocumented history of a given language proceed from careful evaluation of: (1) its genetic classification and distribution (linguistic geography); (2) its lexicon (word etymol- ogies) and morphology (function items). (I avoid syntax since it is notoriously difficult to reconstruct.) In this paper, Hausa loanwords, especially borrowings from Berber, will be examined in Section 5— illustrating how historical events can be revealed by careful scrutiny and comparison, by professional linguists, of a range of relevant vocabulary-based data. This is in contrast to the selective and dubious data sometimes cited, together with oral traditions, as putative linguistic support for a claim which in reality is little more than a ‘never let the facts get in the way of a good story’ type of approach. We begin with some of the more potent evidence demonstrating the genetic Hausa < Chadic < Afroasiatic connection.

2. The genetic affiliation of Hausa < Chadic < Afroasiatic and its geographical distribution

The classification of Afroasiatic (formerly known erroneously as ‘Hamito-Semitic’) and the other three great African language phyla, namely Khoisan, Niger-Kordofanian, and Nilo-Saharan, is based mainly on Greenberg (1963), whose comprehensive (re)classification of African languages remains the universally accepted model.5 Green- berg set up five fully coordinate families for Afroasiatic—†Ancient Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Semitic (the outlying group located in southwest Asia). A sixth family, Omotic, was added later, by separating it from Cushitic, though this genetic assignment to Afroasi- atic has still to be universally accepted, largely because of the structural diversity of the languages whose genealogical relationship is far from clear. For purposes of this paper, however, I will follow the consensus and include Omotic.

5 There are also physically distinct Pygmy groups in the rainforests of central Africa. They now speak a variety of different languages, including Bantu and Nilo-Saharan, which have presumably replaced the ancestral languages. the role of comparative/historical linguistics 41

Turning to the Hausa/Chadic/Afroasiatic unity, following on Lukas’ (1936) seminal work, Greenberg used the most powerful and mutually supportive indicators of relationships—sound-meaning correspondences in lexical elements and functional morphemes—to demonstrate two related hypotheses: (1) the genetic unity of the Chadic languages, including Hausa, and (2) the affiliation of Chadic (including Hausa) to the rest of the Afroasiatic phylum.

Shared morphology There are a number of specific and systematic correspondences in grammatical morphemes inherited from Proto-Afroasiatic which occur in language after language and which represent a deep-level but unambiguous genetic link between Chadic languages and between Chadic and Afroasiatic (see Newman 1980a, Greenberg 1960b, and Schuh 2003b for details). One of the more resilient features diagnostic of this prehistoric link is overtly marked grammatical gender, a structural feature (‘historical marker’) which Nichols (2003) considers to be persistent within language families, i.e., as representing an important, time-stable genetic signal.6 Hausa and Chadic have inherited an Afroasiatic gender/number-marking pattern which distinguishes masculine *n, feminine *t, and plural *n in a range of environments (where * = reconstructed). Table 1 profiles canonical feminine*T correspondences in languages from all six branches.

6 Hausa, like most Chadic languages, has grammatical gender in the singular only (an inherited Afroasiatic feature). Grammatical gender per se is a typological feature, however, totally irrelevant to establishing relatedness, but has been erroneously used by some as a diagnostic of common heritage. Meinhof (1912), for example, classified his now discredited ‘Hamitic’ family—the myth that Greenberg demolished—largely on the basis of the presence of gender, as well as fallacious non-linguistic racial and cultural criteria. ‘Bad science’ in modern parlance! See Jaggar (2004) for the historical background to the classification of Afroasiatic (and other language phyla in Africa). 42 philip j. jaggar

Table 1. Afroasiatic feminine gender markers on nouns (mainly possessive) ancient egyptian -t semitic Syriac -(a)t Hebrew -at- (construct) Akkadian (Old Babylonian) -(a)t(a) Classical Arabic -ati (non-nominative) Egyptian Arabic -(i)t (construct) Tigre -t berber Ghadamsi -t (all environments) cushitic Beja -t chadic Hausa (West) ta Masa (South) -ta (citation form of nouns) Lele (East) t omotic Aari t (all < *T). Source: Bennett (1998) with some minor adjustments.

Note too the common plural marker *-N in the second person plural pronouns in the following (second person msg/fsg/pl) paradigms (Egyptian c ̆ = English ‘ch’, Berber ă = low central vowel): Ancient Egyptian čw/čwm/čṉ, Hausa kaa/kin/kuṉ, Akkadian (Semitic) ka/ki/kuṉu, Tuareg (Berber) kăy/kăm/wuṉ, Beja (Cushitic) ka/ki/kṉa. Also noteworthy is the common k- element present in all these second person pronouns, and the second feminine singular forms cwm̆ ̲ (Ancient Egyptian), kiṉ (Hausa), and kăm̲ (Tuareg) all ending in a nasal, usually -m. If we did not assume a genetic relationship for these pronouns, the detailed and systematic resemblances would simply be impossible to account for in any rational and credible way. Using data from a number of languages reduces the possibility of chance resemblance and strongly favours a probabalistic explanation based on cognacy.

Lexicon The lexical evidence for common inheritance from a shared ancestor is also very informative, and includes a number of basic vocabulary the role of comparative/historical linguistics 43 items we can confidently reconstruct for Proto-Afroasiatic, where the systematic sound-meaning pairings remain demonstrable despite the intervening millennia. They include,inter alia: *m- ‘what?’, *m-t- ‘to die’, *s-m ‘name’, *sa ‘to drink’, *ti ‘to eat’, *f-d ‘four’, *am ‘water’ (– = unknown vowel) Some cross-family cognate lexemes, all reflexes (present day forms) of the Proto-Afroasiatic root *m-t- ‘to die’ are: Ancient Egyptian mt; (Semitic) Mehri mōt, Ugaritic mt, Hebrew māt, Aramaic myt, Arabic (Standard) māt, Amharic and Tigrinya motä; (Ber- ber) Tuareg ye-mmut; (Chadic) Hausa mutu, Bole motu; (Cushitic) Ren- dille mut. Again, a cross-language trawl produces a strong genetic signal, and substantially reduces—in fact, effectively eliminates—the probability of chance resemblance.

3. Proto-Afroasiatic and Proto-Chadic chronologies: when and where?

Exactly where the origins of Afroasiatic should be placed geographically and chronologically has been a contentious issue. We have written evidence for Semitic (Akkadian) going back more than 4 000 years (at least 6 000 years BP (‘before present’) for Ancient Egyptian), thus allowing empirical investigation and comparison. The Semitic family, moreover, is internally homogeneous compared with modern Chadic and Cushitic languages, and the difference between modern Semitic and ‘old’ Semitic is nowhere near as great as the difference between modern Semitic and, for example, a Chadic or Omotic language. Closeness is generally viewed by linguists as a reliable indication of rapid recent expansion, and the area of maximum geneological complexity represents the original homeland (Sapir 1921). Semitic is therefore a shallow time-depth family compared with Omotic, for example, which is the most divergent and internally diverse family, and was probably the earliest split within prehistoric Afroasiatic (though an accurate phylogenetic tree-structure with (sub)groupings still has to be modelled for the phylum). Even if estimates can only be relative and approximate, these facts, together with the great diversity of Afroasi- atic, indicate considerable antiquity for the proto-language, probably in the region of 10 000–15 000 years. 44 philip j. jaggar

Assuming Greenberg is correct in postulating five fully independent, coordinate families for Afroasiatic (with Omotic added later), then they must have originated and diversified in continental Africa itself. The most likely ancestral homeland for Proto-Afroasiatic and its speakers is the (south)eastern Sahara/northern Ethiopia region, or the contiguous Horn of Africa—this is the centre of diversity where we encounter the most dense concentration of divergent but related Afroasiatic languages, i.e., Omotic and Cushitic (Map 2.2.). Berber languages were also historically more widespread, and there is evidence that Berber was originally spoken in roughly the same area, close to the Nile confluence (Blench 2006: 155). Serious linguists believe that this ‘out of Africa’ scenario is the only one which is consistent with the facts of the current phylic dispersal (as shown by Ehret et al. 2004), and some of the archaeological data basically corroborates this ‘highest likelihood’ hypothesis (Ehret 2000: 291; 2002: chap. 14).

Semitic must also have originated in Africa One significant implication of this hypothesis of course is that Proto- Semitic must also have originated in (northeast) Africa before its speakers migrated into the Near East (southwest Asia). Semitic Ethiopian/ Eritrean languages such as Amharic and Tigrinya, moreover, result from a back-migration of South Arabian speakers from the Yemen around 2 500 BP, via the Red Sea, and Arabic of course spread into North Africa following the rise of Islam. The ‘out of Africa’ hypothesis has the overwhelming advantage of requiring the fewest changes and population movements to generate and explain the observed diversity and geographic diffusion—a variant of the so-called ‘maximum par- simony’ approach (Dunn et al. 2008). What we have, therefore, is a single move for speakers of Proto-Semitic out of Africa, as opposed to a Near Eastern/southwest Asia origin which would entail a mas- sively complicated scenario involving population dispersal into Africa and a counter-intuitive diversification into five families, three of them internally divergent.7

7 Applying the same argument to Fulani, its original homeland must have been in the core area (Senegal) where its closest relatives, e.g., Serer and Wolof, cluster together. Fulani subsequently diverged and spread to the rest of West Africa (see also Gregersen 1977: chap. 14). the role of comparative/historical linguistics 45

Map 2.2. The area of greatest linguistic diversity in Afroasiatic: the Cushitic and Omotic families (Ethnologue). 46 philip j. jaggar

Despite this consensus, one still encounters occasional ‘flat earth- ers’, for example Militarev (2002), who ignore established principles of linguistic geography and cling to what Ehret et al. (2004: 1680) term the ‘generally abandoned view’ of an original ‘out of the Near East’ movement for Afroasiatic. Militarev relates Proto-Afroasiatic to the Natufian agricultural expansion in the Levant, but his hypothesis cannot explain why there is considerably less diversity here than in the south of the phylum’s extent, i.e., in Africa itself, and his proposed proto-forms remain unsubstantiated. On linguistic grounds, therefore, this scenario is at best highly unlikely (and almost certainly wrong). It has also been claimed that Hausa is somehow descended from Semitic (or a Semitic language), an error which is probably attributable in part to the historical prominence of the peoples and cultures of the Near and Middle East (see Schuh 1977 for a critique of similar spurious claims regarding Hausa and Ancient Egyptian). Hausa, however, like its Chadic cousins, does not derive from Semitic—Chadic and Semitic are coordinate families which both descend from the same ancestral source. Although the prestigious cultural accomplishments of speakers of Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc. are well-established— the emergence of major world religions, sacred texts, ancient scripts, sophisticated civilisations, and a long tradition of scholarship, etc.— these phenomena are all non-linguistic, of no relevance to genetic classification.8 Semitic, like Chadic, is merely one of six independent families within Afroasiatic, and Arabic and Hebrew are no more salient with respect to our scientific understanding of Afroasiatic than is a small Chadic language spoken by a few hundred people living on top of a hill in northeastern Nigeria.

Proto-Chadic and the present-day distribution of Hausa and related Chadic languages Based on the rough-and-ready correlation ‘diversity = antiquity’, Schuh (1982: 22) claims that just one subgroup of West Chadic-A is at least as diverse and old as the entire Romance family (which we know of course derives ultimately from Latin spoken around 2 000 BP). And

8 In contemporary terms, adopting such a position would be roughly analogous to identifying America as the historical homeland of English on the basis of its stellar contribution to science and technology. the role of comparative/historical linguistics 47 at a deeper level, the Chadic family as a whole is as internally complex as the Indo-European phylum, and Indo-European is about 5 000– 6 000 years old, so Chadic must be at least as old. These comparisons are, of course, impressionistic and are based on the assumption that languages do not change at vastly different rates.9 (See also Diakonoff 1988: 25, and Ehret 2000.) Regarding the evolution of the Chadic family itself, one generally accepted scenario is that after Proto-Afroasiatic split up, the ancestral core of Chadic subsequently spread westwards across the Sahara into the Lake Chad basin (5 000–6 000 years ago the ‘Green Sahara’ had vegetation, lakes and wetlands, gradually transforming into an arid desert from about 3 000 BP). Historically Chadic languages were probably spoken from northwest Nigeria to their present extent in the Chad Republic, i.e., to the west and south of Lake Chad, and over time some were replaced by Hausa in the west, and by Kanembu and Chadian Arabic to the east. Schuh (2001), for example, documents several now extinct West Chadic-B languages formerly spoken to the east of Hausa—Shira, Teshena, and Auyo. The linguistic geography of the family also looks invasive—Chadic languages are contiguous with Plateau and Adamawa languages, so communities of Chadic speakers presumably expanded south historically and displaced or interspersed with resident Niger-Kordofanian languages. The distribution and vast geographical extent of Hausa together indicate recent rapid expansion out of its homeland, and the dialectal differences are relatively minor, unlike many other Chadic languages in the area. The varieties with the greatest diversity are in the northwest of the Hausa-speaking region (roughly speaking, Sokoto, Zam- fara, Katsina, Gobir, Tahoua, etc.), fanning out eastwards and covering Kano (= Standard Hausa), Daura, and south(east) to Zaria, Bauchi, etc. Hausa alone forms a sub-group of West Chadic, and it has no

9 Known as ‘glottochronology’, this is a controversial technique for estimating when two languages first diverged by inspecting the amount of basic vocabulary they share and calculating the rate of word substitution over time. Roughly speaking, a separation of 1 000 years can lead to a 20 percent loss of cognates through lexical replacements, rendering a language largely incomprehensible to the earlier speakers. The main fault line in the method is that it assumes languages mutate at the same rate, so it is no more than an approximation to be used with care. The comparative method also runs into problems with (presumed) ancient families such as Khoisan, where so much lexical data has been eroded over the millennia that positing anything near a ‘clean’ family tree is clearly impossible. 48 philip j. jaggar close relatives, apart from Gwandara which is a creolised offshoot of Hausa. This contemporary situation is attributable to the historical replacement/assimilation of pre-existing languages in the area, including both related Chadic and genetically unrelated Niger-Kordofanian languages. All these features point to one conclusion: Hausa must have expanded fast and recently (probably over no more than several centuries), an intrusive dispersal facilitated by increased regional mobility in the colonial era. There are two basic (conflicting) theories regarding the source and direction of this Hausa expansion. Sutton (1979) has proposed an east-to-west move, roughly from the southeastern corner of its present-day spread, i.e., the area nearest to Hausa’s closest related West Chadic-A languages such as the Angas, Bole-Tangale, and Ron groups. Schuh (1982: 22ff.), however, suggests the expansion was in the opposite direction, i.e., from the (north)west, the area of greatest dialectal diversity, to the (south)east. This conflict is resolvable, however, if we assume that both hypotheses are in fact valid, but that the two expansions took place at different periods (see Lavers, p.c. to Schuh 1982: 23; and Sutton, this volume). On this scenario, the two movements were as follows: (1) old Hausa initially expands at an early date from its core area of dispersal containing its closest West Chadic-A relatives (Bole-Tangale, Angas, Ron), so from east to (north)west; (2) then more recently Hausa spreads back rapidly from the northwest to the (south) east. This appears to be the highest liklihood scenario explaining the present-day geographical distribution of Hausa.

4. The power of linguistic evidence: detectable lexical borrowing

Although by no means an infallible technique, interpretation of language evidence (e.g., the etymological source of words) can provide reliable clues to the reconstruction of the culture of a people, the history of their language, and interaction with other groups and languages.

Some basic methodologies It is important to distinguish (whenever possible) between contact- induced loanwords, chance look-alikes, and true cognates. Parsons (1960: 127), for example, incorrectly claimed that Hausa mee/mii ‘what?’ was a loanword from Arabic ma. What Parsons did not know the role of comparative/historical linguistics 49 was that similar form-meaning correspondences are also present in other Chadic languages which, unlike Hausa, have had no contact with Arabic historically, e.g., from all four branches of Chadic (Newman 1977: 34), Ron mi, Margi mi, Nancere me, Zime mi. All are cognates, related to Arabic ma and Hausa mee/mii, and ultimately descended from a single ancestral Proto-Afroasiatic form *m- which is widespread throughout the phylum (notice how the changes have been minimal despite the vast time-depth involved). Turning to chance look-alikes, the data below, though simplistic, illustrate the importance of differ- entiating statuses when confronted with such forms: Hausa haƙa ‘dig’ and English ‘hack, dig’ = chance resemblance of no significance Hausa mangwaro = English ‘mango’ = both borrowed (from Tamil via Portuguese) Hausa mee ‘what?’ and Arabic ma ‘what?’ = cognates (< same source) When dealing with loanwords, one other dimension which has to be addressed concerns the direction of transmission. The word for ‘stom- ach’ (or ‘pot belly’) in Nupe, for example, is tùmbi, in Kanuri tìmbi, and in Hausa it is tùmbii (data from Gregersen 1977: 151, see also Newman 2000b: 269). These are borrowed words but which language is the donor? A comparative look at languages related to Nupe and Kanuri reveals no similar words, whereas they do exist in other Chadic languages—so Hausa is almost certainly the source. Segregating look- alikes due to genetic inheritance and those resulting from contact- induced borrowing is not always easy (see Sapir 1921), but it is an essential task in responsible comparative linguistics.

5. Loanwords in Hausa

The impact on the Hausa lexicon of loanwords, mainly nouns, has been substantial. The borrowings derive from a large range of Afri- can languages: among others Berber (Afroasiatic), Fula(ni), Mande, Yoruba (all Niger-Kordofanian), and Kanuri (Nilo-Saharan), thereby setting Hausa apart from other Chadic languages. This could be compared to the linguistic upheavals in Britain over the last two or three millennia and their influence on the English lexicon. I will consider here loans from Berber, Fula(ni) and Kanuri. Note that due to space restrictions and in order to cover some of the lesser-known donor languages, I am excluding well-known borrowings 50 philip j. jaggar from Arabic (Greenberg 1947), in semantic fields such as religion, commerce, law, government, horsemanship, scholarship, literature, etc., and, more recently, English loans. Newman (2000a: 313) reports that Arabic and English account for over 90% of the loanwords in the 9 000-word modern corpus he examined (see also Skinner 1996).

BERBER (Afroasiatic) > HAUSA I begin with the Berber evidence as presented in detail by Kossmann (2005), who bases much of his monograph on Gouffé’s (1971/72, 1974) seminal work on Tuareg-Hausa contact and borrowing (see also Baldi 1985). Kossmann’s reference work of more than 200 pages is devoted exclusively to a careful and comprehensive examination of Berber loanwords in Hausa, most of them from Tuareg—and so is given priority here. I consider, first of all, the example of the Hausa word ràaƙumii, ‘camel’, introduced into Africa around 2 500 BP at the earliest. Ràaƙumii is generally considered to be an ancient loan from Berber (a)-lɣәm which goes back to Proto-Berber *(aa)-l(v)qum) (most early loans are from non-Tuareg varieties of Berber). It has been subsequently transferred from Hausa into other Chadic languages, especially within the Warji group of the West Chadic-B sub-branch, the so-called ‘North Bauchi’ cluster (see (a) below). We can get an approximate fix on the relative age of this particular loanword from a variety of linguistic signals. Taken together, these signals strongly suggest that ràaƙumii must be a very old borrowing. If we compare the source Berber word a-lɣәm with the descendant Hausa form ràaƙumii, several changes have to be accounted for: (1) the initial /ṟ/ in ṟàaƙumii (= /l/ in the source a-lɣәm); (2) the /ɣ/ → /ƙ/ change in a-lɣәm → ràaƙumii; (3) the absence of the a(a)- prefix inràa ƙumii. These will be discussed in turn.

The initial /r/ is ‘wrong’ Probably the most unexpected phonological feature of Hausa /ṟàaƙumii/ is the word-initial flap r/ /. Hausa has two rhotics or ‘R-sounds’ (not marked in the orthography): (a) the historically original native flap r/ /, e.g., yaaṟòo ‘boy’; and (b) the more recent tap/trill /r/̴ which is present in external borrowings, e.g., (Arabic) suuràa̴̱ ‘chapter of Qur’an’, (English) ṟeezàa̴ ‘razor’. Hausa ṟàaƙumii is aberrant, therefore, in not the role of comparative/historical linguistics 51 having the /r/̴ we would expect in an external borrowing. The most likely answer to this anomaly is that the word was initially borrowed with the original /l/, but Hausa subsequently underwent a pandialectal *l > r sound change (Newman 1970; 1977: 14). Here are the details of one plausible diachronic scenario which explicitly demonstrates the types of forensic methods used by responsible comparative/historical linguists (Kossmann 2005: 27ff.): a. The initial /l/ in the Berber root lɣәm is preserved in Hausa (minus the prefix, see below), yielding an intermediate form*làa ƙumii (see for the /ɣ/ → /ƙ/ adjustment). This variant (or something like it) was then borrowed from Hausa by other contiguous West Chadic languages, such as Warji laƙumai, Miya laƙùmii, Diri làƙumi, i.e., where the initial etymological /l/ is still preserved. The modern North Bauchi lexemes, therefore, reflect the earlier Hausa pronunciation. b. Hausa then underwent the lateral *l > r rhotacisation, producing the attested ràaƙumii. Other examples of the same rule are (tones/length omitted): Hausa yaṟo ‘boy’ < Proto-Chadic *wulo, Hausa ciṟe ‘take away’ = Kanakuru tole, Hausa haṟshe ‘tongue’ = Kulere alush (cf. Proto-Chadic *alsi < Proto-Afroasiatic *lš or *ls). Note that the rule does not apply to Arabic loans containing /l/, nor to subsequent loans from Berber, so the rule must have run its course by the time the first borrowings from Arabic entered the language. Note also that the historical *l > r sound change was pandialectal, thus indicating a sound shift of some time-depth, prior to Hausa diverging into different dialects. It is instructive to look too at the example of ṟagàmaa ‘halter’ < Berber (a(a)-l(a)gam (< Latin ligamen ‘string’), where the same *l > r process has applied, and the same phonological arguments hold (Roman influence dates from around 2 000 BP).

The uvular fricative ɣ/ / → ejective /ƙ/ adjustment in (a)lɣәm → ràaƙumii The Berber uvular fricative ɣ/ / normally corresponds to plain /k/ (or /g/) in Hausa. Kossmann (2005: 42) suggests two possible explanations for the presence of the glottalised ejective ƙ in Hausa (attested in only one other loan—daƙàshii < ii-daghas ‘colostrum’ (early milk)): a. Proto-Berber /q/ in *(aa)-l(v)qum) shifted to /ɣ/ (cf. the parallel read- justment in the Arabic emphatic uvular /q/ > Hausa /ƙ/ derivation). When the word was borrowed, Berber *q might in fact have been pronounced as an ejective. 52 philip j. jaggar

The absence of the a(a)- prefix in Hausa ràaƙumii Around 1 000 BP, an innovative nominal prefixa(a)- (masc.), ta(a)- (fem.) started to appear in written Berber (originally long aa- but a- in modern varieties of Berber). There is no prefix in the Hausa loan ràaƙumii, so the word must have entered Hausa prior to the new pre- fixal rule (Gouffé 1974). Below are some commonly occurring loans from Berber (Tuareg) in various semantic domains, including some with the frozen a- prefix (Kossmann 2005: 86ff;ă = low central, ḍ = pharyngealised, é = mid vowel): akàalà ‘lead-rope for camel’, cf. (several varieties of) Tuareg ăkala amaawàlii ‘part of turban covering mouth’, cf. Tuareg (Niger, Ayr) ămawal azùmii ‘fasting’, cf. (several varieties of) Berber azuṃ (< Arabic sawṃ ) takàrdaa̴ ‘paper’, cf. Tuareg (Niger, Ayr) tăkarḍé (< Latin carta) takòobii ‘sword’, cf. (several varieties of) Tuareg tăkoba talàkà ‘commoner’, cf. Tuareg (Ahaggar) talәqqé ‘poor person’ tàntabàraa̴ ‘pigeon’, cf. Tuareg (Burkina Faso) tédǎbért Some Berber etymons have entered Hausa via Kanuri, for example: dabiinòo ‘date(s)’ < Kanuri dìfunò, cf. Berber (Ghadames) abena karàntaa̴ ‘to read’ probably < Kanuri kә̀ràtә ‘reading’ (with the Hausa -antaa verbaliser added), ?< Berber ɣәr ‘read, call’ rubùutaa̴ ‘to write’ < Kanuri rùwòtә ‘writing’ (verbal noun) = ancient loan < Berber (Libyan), cf. Proto-Berber form *v(ʔ)rvb

FULA(NI) (Niger-Kordofanian) > HAUSA Fulani loans in Hausa are few, and a number are kin-terms and cattle terminology, e.g., dattiijò ‘gentleman’, gwaggò ‘paternal aunt’, haaɓè ‘Hausa (non-Fulani)’, hubbaarè̴ ‘tomb of religious leader’, kaawù ‘maternal uncle’, naggè ‘cow’. The loanhubbaar è̴ is especially instructive. Three diagnostic features point to loanword status: a. The geminate bb/ / is unusual in that non-derived geminate obstruents are lexically rare in native Hausa words (geminates [double consonants] are mainly nasals, or liquids, especially /ll/). b. Intervocalic trilled /r/̴ probably did not exist as an independent phoneme in Hausa, and is usually diagnostic of loanword status (historically it developed in part under the impact of Arabic words with intervocalic /r/).̴ the role of comparative/historical linguistics 53

c. The short final /è/ is non-canonical, since most native Hausa nouns (synchronically at least) have long final vowels. Cf. goorò̴ ‘kolanut’ < ?Mande (Skinner 1996:89).

KANURI (Nilo-Saharan) > HAUSA Kanuri-speakers have represented the dominant political and cultural group in northeastern Nigeria and neighbouring areas (under the Borno empire) over the last millennium, and Kanuri has had an impact on many Chadic languages, such as Buduma (which is spoken north of Lake Chad, see Awagana 2001), and Ngizim and Bole (spoken south of the Yerwa area, see Schuh 2003a). The influence of Kanuri on Hausa has (like Fulani) been relatively slight, but is especially notice- able in the domains of politics (titles) and (Islamic) scholarship/literacy (Greenberg 1960a). The situation is being reversed, however, as Hausa now makes inroads into traditional Kanuri-speaking areas (Bross 2002). Examples of commonly-occurring Kanuri loans in Hausa are: Ciròomà̴ ‘title’, dandalii ‘open space’, ìngarmàa̴ ‘stallion’, kwàskwàriimàa̴ ‘improvement, refurbishment’, rubùutaa̴ ‘to write’, ùngoozòomà ‘mid- wife’, Yàriimà̴ ‘Prince’ Hausa birnii̴ ‘city’ is usually cited as a loan from Kanuri, but the source language might have been Hausa. Two facts are relevant here. Firstly, the /r/̴ trill which is usually diagnostic of an external source could in fact be conditioned locally by the presence of the following /n/ (and is analogically copied in the plural biràanee̴ ). Secondly, in contrast to Hausa, the word has a highly restricted distribution in Kanuri, occurring as the head element only in the names of a few prestigious walled cities of historical significance, e.g., Birni Gazargamo, Birni Kafela (both in Nigeria), and Birni Njimi in the Chad Republic (Abba Tijani, p.c.). The derivational history of Hausakàasuwaa ‘market’ is also instructive. It is ultimately a borrowing from Arabic sūq through Kanuri kasugu, via the following complex pathway (tones omitted): a. Arabic sūq is borrowed into Kanuri, which adds a nominal prefix ka-, replaces /q/ with /g/, and adds a final vowel /u/, yielding kasugu, then . . . b. This intermediate form passes into Hausa with the following adjustments: Kanuri /g/ weakens to /w/ between certain vowels (or is completely lost). It is probably heard by Hausa-speakers as something like kaasuu, then a feminine suffix (w)-aa is added, producing the attested 54 philip j. jaggar

kaasuwaa. The long /aa/ in the first syllablekaa.su.waa could be the result of the Hausa (Chadic) propensity for contiguous syllables with opposite/polar values for weight, i.e., kaa = heavy syllable/long vowel followed by su = light syllable/short vowel. This particular derivation is a beautiful illustration of how the complexities of diachronic change (phonological deformation) can mask etymological links. Historical/comparative linguistics provides us with key information on: (1) the replacements which have taken place; (2) the required sound changes; and (3) the added morphology (prefixes, suffixes). We simply have to undo these processes and strip away the added morphology to recover the source. Without this linguistic testimony, we would not (necessarily) relate the original Arabic etymon sūq to the modern Hausa term kaasuwaa.

Hausa replacements Hausa has lost some basic Chadic roots over time, some of them replaced by loanwords from neighbouring unidentified Niger-Kordo- fanian (Benue-Congo/Plateau) languages (Hoffmann 1970). For example, Proto-Chadic ‘two’ *sәr- and ‘fire’*aku , have both been replaced in West Chadic-A languages—cf. Hausa biyu ‘two’, wutaa ‘fire’, and Bole bulu ‘two’, wuti ‘fire’ (Schuh 1982:21). These shared contact-induced replacements must be ancient—long-term borrowings due to the propinquity and close interaction of the languages concerned and predating the break up of West Chadic-A into its different languages. Hausa (and Angas) has also borrowed the word for ‘meat’ naamàa from Niger-Kordofanian (cf. the Proto-Chadic root *ɬәw-). Schuh (1982:21) also suggests that even some apparent cognates could in fact be loanwords (from unspecified languages) of great time-depth, a level of antiquity we can know nothing about. The lateral transfer of such core items of vocabulary indicates a deep-time Hausa/Niger- Kordofanian symbiosis, and such innovations (replacements) shared across languages also constitute reliable phylogenetic signals of common ancestry/subgrouping. Hausa also lacks reflexes for the core nouns ‘water’, ‘sun’, and ‘moon’ (lost or simply unidentified as yet), but has, however, retained words (basic nouns) which are identifiable reflexes of roots confidently reconstructable for Proto-West Chadic, e.g., (tones omitted), garii ‘town’ (< *gar-), turmii ‘mortar’ (< *tә(r)m-), awaakii ‘goats’ (< *a(w)ku), tumaakii ‘sheep (pl.)’ (< *tәmki, also reconstructs for Proto-Chadic), the role of comparative/historical linguistics 55

English Hausa Bole ‘arrow’ kibiyaa ≠ posso

Cf. though: ‘broad arrow’ faasaa

Figure 2.3. Diachronic semantic drift: ‘arrow’ in Hausa and Bole suu ‘fishing’ (< *s-y/w-), irii ‘seed’ (< *-r-) (Schuh 1982:11). Such deep- time reconstructions reflect and illuminate the salient ancestral activities, e.g., crop cultivation, livestock domestication, ecology, habitat, etc., of the speakers of the source language.10 Legitimate cognates are sometimes not recognisable because of semantic shift over time. The word for ‘arrow’ in modern Hausa, for example, is (tones omitted) kibiyaa and in Bole is posso, and these items are clearly not cognates. The real Hausa cognate—faasaa—is tucked away in Bargery’s (1934: 309) monumental dictionary, with the more specialised meaning ‘broad arrow with long barbs’ (Schuh 1982: 9). (Figure 2.3.)

6. Summary

This paper has demonstrated how the developmental history of Hausa culture and contact is mirrored in individual words which carry an important historical signal. Identifying clusters of features in the shape of lexical and morphological evidence derived from the traditional methods of historical/comparative linguistics can produce plausible generalisations and help us get a relative fix on when and from where words first entered the language. Contemporary linguistic patterns are shaped by geographic factors and complex historical events. Care- ful etymological documentation is an important component in any comprehensive model which seeks to eventually correlate linguistics with history, archaeology and the phylogeographical distribution of genetic signals, thereby distinguishing common ancestry from ancient contact.

10 Words reconstructable for Proto-West Chadic include ‘crocodile’, ‘Nile monitor’, ‘baobab’, and ‘ostrich’, items which tell us that speakers must have lived in semi-dry savannah regions near bodies of water (probably Lake Chad) (see Schuh 1982:11). 56 philip j. jaggar

I conclude with an apt observation from Abdullahi Smith (1970: 339), an eminent historian of the region who clearly understood the heuristic importance of using solid and reliable linguistic evidence when considering demographic and ethnolinguistic dispersals: ‘If we are looking for the origins of the Hausawa as a distinct group we must seek them in the origins of the Hausa language.’

References

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ANCIENT LABELS AND CATEGORIES: EXPLORING THE ‘ONOMASTICS’ OF KANO

Murray Last

1. Introduction

‘Hausa’ is primarily a name, a label with at least three distinct histories: [a] one for the Chadic language we now call Hausa; [b] another for the various peoples the label has referred to over the centuries, first since it was initially coined and then during the period when it became generally used for a specific language-group; and [c] a third one for the area(s) one might call Hausaland (or kasar Hausa). It is important to keep these different histories distinct, especially as contemporary discussion over ‘who are the Hausa’ tends to ignore the differences. This chapter, therefore, will look again at the creation of labels and category-terms for peoples in northern Nigeria. It should be seen as offering a piece of intellectual history: not so much a discussion of ‘the origin of the Hausa’, as of the origin and development of terms used for groups of people living in what became known as kasar Hausa. In this light, the aim of this chapter is to offer an analysis of place- names in Kano, in order to suggest that some place-names were not coined by people speaking the Hausa language. The implication is that parts (if not all) of Kano at some early period were not inhabited by Hausaphones. A corollary of this is that the label ‘Hausa’ could have been applied at some point to people who were not speaking the Chadic language we now call Hausa. Two assumptions need to be spelt out here: one, that in any particular area more than one language might be spoken, for example, in ‘enclave’ settlements, or where a lingua franca is used alongside a language spoken inside the home.1 The

1 Enclaves are still common even in as strong a nation-state culture as Europe (cf. Vitaliev 2008). In precolonial Nigeria the context could be complicated, as enclaves sometimes owed allegiance to an extra-territorial Emir (as in Misau). In areas like Adamawa (Fombina) where Fulfulde became the lingua franca by ca. 1850, Fulbe were 60 murray last second assumption is that people can quite rapidly change not only the language(s) they speak, but also their identity: for example, the children and grandchildren of non-Hausa immigrants into Kano can become, or be accepted as, ‘Hausa’. These days, ethnic origin asali( or even iri) can, however, usually be recalled even when the language a person uses is now different from his ‘ancestral’ tongue, but only very occasionally have I met families of nineteenth-century slave origin who knew exactly where their pre-slave forebears came from. Given the number of people imported into Kano to work as slaves, the phenomenon of language-change was so commonplace that it may well have been the case that the majority of Hausa-speakers at certain periods in the nineteenth century were not ‘Hausa’ by origin (asali).2 My argument, then, is two-fold: in any analysis of ‘Hausa’ we need to have a history of the label; and in any analysis of kasar Hausa we need to know about its place-names. Whether it is in studies of language-change or migrations, place-names (‘onomastics’) have long been taken as key indicators in European and North American historical field research. It is time to explore what the phenomenon of naming might tell us in northern Nigeria. A caveat is, however, appropriate here: the use of ethnonyms (‘tribal names’) is highly contentious in Nigeria today, both at a political level (e.g. in the Jos riots of 28–29 November 2008) and in academic circles where the old colonial obsession with ‘tribal’ identities is commonly attacked. We do, however, need a seriously thorough (rather than polemical) study of the usage, in the nineteenth century at least, of such labels as Hausawa, Habe, Fulani, arna, Buzu, Sudani: if they were used, who used them, in what specific contexts, to denote whom? Usage, of course, changes. For example, in everyday life in late twentieth century Kano and Katsina, whether in town or out among the farmsteads, I don’t recall hearing terms like ba-Haushe or Hau-

probably not in the majority. The Hausa language may have been in a similar position in ‘Hausaland’ a few centuries earlier. 2 In 1824 a ‘focus group’ of Arab merchants in Kano reckoned that slaves then out- numbered the free by 30 to 1 (Clapperton 1829: 171); it was the period when the Emir, Ibrahim Dabo, was having to re-conquer areas that had ‘rebelled’ after the death of the Shaikh ‘Uthman dan Fodio. Slaves taken from non-Hausa communities used Hausa as the lingua franca of the slave-settlement (rinji). Although the colonial regime abolished the slave market, many retained their slave status until the late 1920s; and the memory of a settlement as a rinji remains common locally—such a settlement is characterised today by the unusually large numbers living within a single compound. ancient labels and categories 61 sawa very often. Even a term like ba-Maguje/Maguzawa was probably used more by me than by my hosts and their Muslim neighbours. When we look back, in the pages of the Kano Chronicle (Anon., tr. Palmer 1928), to earlier names in current use in the past, we find, for example, Rumawa, Jalutawa, Gazarawa, ‘Adawa, Samodawa—all of which can be identified with groups in the ancient Middle East. I have argued elsewhere (Last 1980) that they can be analysed as historical metaphors, used analogically to ‘place’ the various peoples that lived side by side in kasar Kano.3 Thus Maguzawa (from majus, ‘Magian’) can be considered as one of these old labels, used to legalise the various key groups of local non-Muslims in the eyes of Muslim merchants from abroad who needed these local allies both as friendly farmers and as ‘mercenaries’ to guard long-distance caravans. The aim would be to thereby establish the Islamic credentials in North Africa of trade- goods taken across the Sahara (Brett 1983). In this sense, labels such as Maguzawa are extensions of the same legalising practice that had created the name Habasha (whose possible transformation into Hausa I discuss below). I have argued elsewhere that the trading network most likely to have created these labels was that of the Wangarawa merchants, based first in an established political centre likePauwwa , then in Zaye (known today, as Y. B. Usman reminded us, as birnin Katsina) and then in Dalla.4

3 The point of these names is that they refer to pre-Islamic communities—Byzan- tines, Philistines, Khazars, and the ‘Ad and Thamud of Yemen. I do not think it is significant here that Byzantines were Christian or Khazars Jewish, and therefore ‘people of the book’ (ahl al-kitab): they are simply indigenous non-Muslims who from ancient times had been living in what had become dar al-Islam. What is significant, however, is that they form a set of names; they are not one-off oddities, products of fancy or a joke (as are some names). The use of Habasha for people native to West Africa seems to pre-date these more locally restricted names; originally, in its use for Abyssinians, it may have mattered that they were Christian, but by the time it came into wider use in West Africa their Christian-ness may not have mattered—as far as we know there were no Christians (e.g. converted by Coptic merchants) in any large numbers in, say, the fifteenth or sixteenth century, though there were Jewish merchants from North Africa. Seeing that the Himyar kingdom converted to Judaism, Prof. Abdullahi Smith late in his life offered a Himyarite origin for the Kanuri of Borno: his essay on this was only published posthumously as an appendix in Kyari Tijani’s essay, ‘The Mune in pre-colonial Borno’ (1993). 4 The place now known as Birnin Katsina was called by Leo Africanus,ca . 1500, ‘Wangara’—though the spelling used in translating the name is Guangara (the Gu- is pronounced W- in the Spanish of that time, though some scholars have thought the name was Gangara, ‘slope’). ‘Umar al-Salagawi in the late nineteenth century mentions the old name of Zaye, which seems to have developed from Zaghai, a name Ibn Battuta used in the fifteenth century; cf. Usman (1981: 11)—other identifications 62 murray last

A key consideration here is that these traders and their political allies and patrons functioned in a particular type of space. For underlying Hausa notions of space is a distinction, especially important in the precolonial period, between ‘bush’ (daji, dawa) on the one hand, and the town (gari, birni), with its surrounding karkara or open farmland, on the other.5 Crucially, ‘bush’ is a deterrent to horse-riding—in the ‘bush’ communities were far out of reach of powers residing in towns and cities; therefore the ‘bush’ could safely house both the ultra- religious and the ultra-autonomous, the rebellious or the runaway. Wetlands along rivers, sometimes thickly forested (kurmi), sometimes so broken up was the surface that riding was impossible (e.g. in a kwazazzabo, ‘gorge’), provided another area for safe settlement.6 In today’s context, the concept of ‘deep-rural’ might be more appropriate than that of ‘bush’ because there appears to still exist a line, perhaps most easily expressed in population density, beyond which the distribution and size of farmsteads commonly shifts: in the deep-rural there tend to be larger households, isolated farmsteads with much land and a year- round economy primarily centred upon agriculture. It is here, still, one finds not only non-Muslim Hausa but also the radically Islamist communities that have rejected the legitimacy of central government. As the karkara expands and open grazing land diminishes, so some of these farmsteads and communities decide to move further on, as of course do the pastoralists with whom these deep-rural farmers live symbiotically. This deep-rural subculture seems quite distinctive, and may have deep roots in time.

of Zaghai are less well supported by textual evidence and also require greater (and therefore less acceptable) emendations of the spelling. Pauwwa would seem to have been the town described by Leo Africanus as ‘Kashna’ (Last 1985: 196–8). Dalla is the name used for Birnin Kano in sixteenth-century texts. Both Kano and Kashna/Katsina are names of regions, not cities: hence, Dalla is really the birnin kasar Kano. Birni is originally a loanword from Songhai, the language used by the Wangarawa merchants; its usage in Hausa, then, may date from their establishing defensible trading settlements in the region. 5 Today the expressions dan birni / dan kauye (‘city slicker’; ‘bush man’) might still be used, admittedly mainly in jest. 6 Although people in a kurmi might become afflicted with blindness. Perhaps the best known kwazazzabo is that of Yarkwando, just south of the Challawa: it was chosen as the site for the first assembling of the jihadi forces of western Kano in August 1804—it was safe from cavalry incursions, a good camp but of no use for permanent housing. Kurmi sites were common, for example in Zaria, until colonial health policies, in campaigns against simulium flies, moved residents away from river banks, especially in the late 1940s. ancient labels and categories 63

By contrast, karkara constituted open parkland, with ‘useful’ trees but easy to ride through. Settlements often clustered together as villages of safety; other mechanisms for safety included the maintenance of strips of forest which could provide cover for escape to cities (these are still remembered in Katsina, for instance), or the placing by the gates of cities or towns of high rimi trees, trimmed so that a look-out could keep watch over long distances (Zaria’s still exist, and one can still sometimes see them near rural villages). Elderly rural residents could identify for me ca. 1970 which settlements locally had been good to run to in an attack in the late nineteenth century. Perhaps best-known in this karkara country are settlement walls, sometimes paired with a ditch. These were clearly imposing expressions of power, designed to be seen from afar; their extent encompassed plenty of farmland as well as space for herds. These walls, with guarded gates, naturally also served to keep inhabitants in (cf. Moody 1969; the earlier walls of Birnin Kano (and elsewhere), however, were most likely stockades of timber, not of mud). As walls served to control those within, thieves and robbers tended therefore to settle just outside, as did potential dissidents. Furthermore, city gates, in Hausaland as elsewhere, were too narrow, and tortuous, for a laden camel to pass through. In consequence, any site for gathering very large numbers tended to be outside the walls: market places where many strangers came, caravanserais where beasts of burden and their drovers were kept, encampments used when raising an army for a major expedition (e.g. at Fagge and Faniso outside Birnin Kano). In short, the urban built-environment and its surrounding karkara developed specific ways of life. I suggest that the label Maguzawa was applied to non-Muslims living within the karkara zone, whereas generic terms such as Gwarawa or arna were used for non-Muslims living in what was categorised as ‘bush’.7

7 Pastoralists had different breeds for the different zones—the big red cattlerahaji ( ) for the bush and the white, more douce cattle (gudali, bunaji) for the karkara: the gradual extension, over time, of the karkara into what was once bush put pressure on pastoral groups to the extent that the local, small black cattle (muturu) of the karkara farmers have effectively died out on the Hausa plains; it is possible that epizootics got worse, too, resulting in cattle-less young pastoralists coming onto the Hausa labour market more frequently as potential retainers of ambitious rulers or even as mercenaries. Some names relevant to the pastoralist economy might therefore still be in Fulfulde, but not politically inspired ones. 64 murray last ) fields towards the dawa ) and sorghum ( gero farmstead and its trees. shrine over the millet ( mbagiro Figure 3.1. The formerly Maguzawa house, Gidan Jatau, Kankara District (Katsina): looking south from its now-disused ancient labels and categories 65 ) in which the kududdufi nineteenth century were crocodiles. Figure 3.2. Within Birnin Kano in 1964, an old house beyond a borrow-pit ( 66 murray last

Therefore, a crucial exercise will be to determine where, at any given period, lay the boundary between karkara and ‘bush’, and to recognise them as two distinct political domains. For the nineteenth century, the jihadi regimes marked the boundary by lines of strongholds (ribat, thagr), which served to ‘close the frontier’ of the reformed Muslim caliphate against the raids of rebels (tawaye). For the pre-jihad polities, though our data are very sparse, it seems likely no such specific fortified lines were built; boundary lines are, however, sometimes still known insofar as people can agree that a particular political writ did not go further than a particular landmark. Very occasionally we find a long wall or a dyke crossing the countryside as if to demarcate a territory or form a barrier to horsemen (such as the example north of Katsina), but they seem not to lie between ‘bush’ and the karkara. I would suggest that karkara became, relatively early, a Hausa-speaking zone whereas the zone of ‘bush’ retained settlements that primarily spoke a different language yet might nonetheless also ‘hear’ Hausa. Ideally, then, one might recognise ‘bush’ from the presence of very localised names—for settlements or landscape features—which seem not to be conventionally Hausa in form. In short, the new political economy of Hausaland—merchants and their caravans, city-based rulers and their cavalry—was planted and grew in the karkara. A new social system, a new culture was developing, with Islam and a lingua franca as key features, in a distinct ecological context. It both attracted immigrants and forcibly imported extra workers, resulting in the relatively dense population we have today all speaking the common language of Hausa.

2. The label ‘Hausa’

The earliest labels used to denote the savanna plains, now parkland, that we today label ‘Hausaland’ remain unknown. I have suggested elsewhere (Last, 1985) that for the pre-Hausa period we might use ‘the Mbau plains’, or Bauchi.8 Evidence may emerge that the earliest

8 Bauchi is a generic label for an area of non-Muslims, and may well be linked to the word we now use for slave, bawa. If so, then Bauchi refers to the regions where slaves can be obtained, with bawa or mba’u perhaps more an ethnic label than an ordinary noun. Another slave-term, ba-cucane, is an ancient loanword, in this case from Coptic (via Kanuri). The once-important town of Pauwwa (n.b., not Pawa) could be pronounced as Mbauwa, and it is in this form that it is mentioned in Ibn Sa’id in ancient labels and categories 67

‘foreigners’ in touch with the peoples of these plains will have been Phoenicians from Carthage and Coptic-speaking Egyptians—unless of course, there were the four-horsed chariot-driving Garamantes (as mentioned by Herodotus in the mid-fifth century BC), who might have come south from the Fezzan. It does not, of course, require much contact, let alone direct contact, to have news of distant lands and give them names; allies, local agents, the odd single visitor can be enough. A trade network, and not necessarily a city or a state, can initiate a name. The Romans, in contact directly or indirectly with the area around Lake Chad in the first century AD, did not use the name ‘Hausa’ for those they heard of, but Ngizim (or Agisymba in its Tubu form).9 I have suggested that the area was referred to as ‘southern Habasha’ by al-Dimashqi (in Levtzion and Hopkins, 1981: 211) in the thirteenth century, while the general label ‘Habasha’ had been applied to ‘Blacks’ elsewhere since the ninth century. As was the case with ‘Maguzawa’, the term was a legal one, legitimating trade relations of Muslim merchants with the local peoples: overtly ‘pagan’ goods were otherwise un-sellable in dar al-Islam. Given that a Katsina pronunciation of the Kano form ba-Haushe is ba-Habshe, with the plural Hab- shawa or Habashawa, it seems plausible that the Arabic label Habasha is the origin of the term we now use—Hausa. Linguists have told me firmly thatba-Habshe could not possibly be derived from ba-Habasha or whatever term locals used at the time when adopting the Arabic- speaking merchants’ word Habasha.10 Yet despite the linguists’ confi- dent opposition (see e.g. Jaggar, this volume, note page 38) I still think it is the most plausible derivation on offer. If this part of bilad al-Sudan was identified by the labelHabasha , further west was to become known as Takrur. Thus Habasha came to be identified geographically, and ceased to be a term denoting a

the thirteenth century. Once one is aware of the early significance of Mba’u and its variant spellings it crops up, previously unnoticed, in other texts—the danger, however, is that one overdoes the speculation! A degree of cautious conservatism, as ever, is required. 9 Although other scholars believe that Julius Maternus (late in the first century AD) was speaking of the Niger Bend, they have no explanation at all for the name ‘Agisymba’ or its Tubu form: the location near Lake Chad is plausible, as the route there from Fezzan has long been much travelled (and Roman coins have turned up further south in Nigeria). On the problem of Agisymba see Desanges (1985: 259–61) and Last (1985: 172 n. 15). 10 I am very grateful to Professors Paul Newman, Russell Schuh and Phil Jaggar for their careful comments on this and many other points in a first draft of this essay. 68 murray last generalised legal category. The form Hausa‘ ’ as a term first appears in the extant literature in the seventeenth century (e.g. Çelebi in Hodg- kin 1975: 185), but was current, it seems, in the Timbuktu area by the mid-sixteenth century when it meant, or came to mean in Songhai, ‘east bank’, ‘left bank’, ‘bush’ (Lavers 1979) (For an extended discussion of these and other references, see Last 1985: 167–224, and Intro- duction, above). Historically as well as linguistically, ‘Hausaland’ is particularly interesting as it was, I suggest, the border land between two merchant networks (Last 1985). It seems plausible that merchants either created or standardised many of the labels occurring in our Arabic sources, and did so especially in the boom periods of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Which network was responsible for labelling a particular group or set of groups as Habasha we cannot know, but I expect it to have been a process, perhaps in two stages. I would suggest that the first stage may have been the initial legal categorising of theahl al-Sudan as Habasha by an Egypt-based network. The second stage occurred when the Wangara merchants and their western trade network started both to use labels as ethnonyms, and to source some of their new names (and stories of origin) from Middle Eastern history and geography; Hausaland was not the only place where they did this— Tadmekka (now Essouk in Niger) refers to Mecca, and even the label ‘Yoruba’ (to whom the Wangara brought Islam) is thought to have been derived from a Middle Eastern name.11 Such names were at least familiar and memorable to scholarly merchants. The labelHabasha / Hausa thus came to be applied to the Muslim merchants’ local trading partners, to local employees such as caravan staff or guards, and possibly to suppliers of food and livestock (for meat and transport). What language or languages these partners spoke then is not clear, but

11 On Tadmekka as like ‘Mecca’, see Farias (2003: cxli–ii). According to the Kano Chronicler (Anon., tr. Palmer [1928]: 111), in the late fifteenth century Kano’s soil was recognised as similar to Medina’s: the sharif ʿAbd al-Rahman carried a bag of Medina’s soil with him in order to locate where he should settle by matching it with the local soil—in this instance, Kano’s. The use of Middle Eastern names for places or peoples seems to be a common labelling trope of the time rather than a reference to putative historical orgins. Prof. Abdullahi Smith and I once counted up the number of peoples in West Africa with supposedly ‘eastern origins’: we stopped at 44. Such claims continue to be used in Nigeria, for example, the Igbo to a Jewish origin (and hence a right of return to Israel), and the Efik as originally Palestinians (but no such return is being demanded just now). ancient labels and categories 69

I presume it was one of the several Chadic languages, which gradually became the lingua franca, the Swahili or Saheli, of traders in their deal- ings with locals. My guess is that it was the language Leo Africanus, ca. 1500, called Gubir—that is, a northern branch of Chadic spoken both in Gobir and, Leo Africanus (1956: i. 16) says, widely in the area (e.g. in Wangara and Kano?); ‘Gubir’, by the way, seems to be a Coptic name given by Egyptian merchants to the area. Between themselves, Egyptian traders had used Coptic initially but by the fifteenth century had switched to Arabic.12 Though regional dialects remain, in the course of some five centuries there developed the lingua franca we now call ‘Hausa’. Into the new lingua franca came loanwords from Kanuri, Tamasheq and Songhai, as well as basic key terms from the Benue-Congo group of languages to the south (Jaggar, this volume). The trading stations were cosmopolitan and it is likely the residents of trading stations spoke a local language plus ‘Hausa’—as is the case in the Swahili-speaking areas of east and central Africa. So the question arises: what were the languages spoken in ‘Hausa- land’ alongside (as well as before) ‘Hausa’? In an effort to offer an answer to this question, one major source of possible evidence, as yet vastly under-researched, are place-names; those of settlements, hills, rivers, pools, or rocks. In European onomastics, textual evidence is required from much earlier periods than is possible in northern Nige- ria today. But an alternative source of data is available in the form of map names and oral place-name collecting in the field. The maps used must be the earliest ones available at the largest scale—usually district maps, which record some river names alongside local area names. In the following section, I present an experiment in using such maps for an area I personally know well.

12 The Coptic for ‘henna’ iskouper (Crum [1980]: 114a), and perhaps not coinci- dentally Gobir’s ancient birni is Birnin Lalle (‘city of henna’). Henna has a symbolic role in some early stories of conquest or subordination. Copts are mentioned by Leo Africanus (ii, 462) as being in Gaoga; and historians of Gobir such as Boubou Hama (1967: 9–45) elaborate on the Gobiri traditions linking Gobir with Copts. For the gradually changing use of Coptic in Egypt, see Meinardus (1977: 158–9); al-Maqrizi mentions Coptic as being spoken in Asyut—indeed Coptic persisted longer in upper Egypt whence some of the traders to West Africa came. My essay on evidence for the Coptic (or Coptic-speakers’) presence in West Africa is still in preparation. 70 murray last

3. The Kasar Kano

Methodology To understand the early settlement patterns of ancient kasar Kano, we require some sense of the landscape. I will take as my central reference point the flat-topped, iron-bearing mesas ofDalla and Gorondutse within the city that took over from the sterile inselberg of Santolo as the leading city of kasar Kano (Anon., tr. Palmer 1928; Last 1979; Sieber 1992). These are the first mesas a traveller sees when coming from the east—until then, only granite inselbergs or rock-strewn hills are encountered. Two seasonal streams ran either side of Dalla, which was almost certainly mined for its iron ore (Posnansky and McIntosh 1976: 171). The southerly stream, the Jakara, divides the town in two: the original quarters around Dalla hill to the north, and to the south the foreign merchants and the palace with its royal quarters up the slope from the market place (and graveyard) close by the stream.13 Beyond the city, the great plains of kasar Kano are cut by a few major rivers that flood in the rains, but in the dry season often retain water in the deep channels they have cut through the landscape. The largest rivers are fished, and are suitable for canoe-transport. Bridges were unnecessary, as ferries and rafts could be used instead for people if not for livestock. Riverbanks also house simulium flies (that give river- blindness) as well as mosquitoes, and people fear the spirits that lurk in the wooded fringes (kurmi) of the rivers and in the pools, as well as crocodiles. Though fords across the rivers draw people to them, there are real hazards in staying there all year round; wells near one’s house up on higher ground are a safer source of water. Rivers, then, serve both as sites for dry-season markets and as boundaries between communities.

13 The stream north of Dalla is called, I am told, Yarwan; others have suggested Bakin Ruwa but I think that’s wrong as the current ward of that name is near the Jakara (the uncertainty is interesting)—the Kano Chronicler (Anon., tr. Palmer 1928: 99) equates bakin ruwa with Jakara. The old city-wall blocked the Yarwan stream, creating a lake which finally burst through the dam in September 1931 (Moody 1969: 61–2); the many crocodiles in the lake then had to find another home. Note that Yarwan is not a typically ‘Hausa’ name—might it therefore denote a community originally different from those occupying the banks of the Jakara? ancient labels and categories 71 Map 3.1. Kano and its neighbours, showing the location of some key early sites. 72 murray last

Kasar Kano can be divided up, then, broadly into zones demarcated by rivers. For example, the Challawa river a few miles to the south both of Dalla and of Santolo further east marks the boundary to what can be termed southern Kano—the districts known as Kura, Rano, Wudil, Sumaila, Tudun Wada to the southeast, and Kiru and Karaye to the southwest (Map 3.2.). Similarly in the east, the river Hadejia (alias Challawa), curving north before turning east, first divides ‘Kano’ from ‘Gaya’, and then separates the north bank districts of Gabasawa, Gumel, Ringim, Hadejia from the south bank areas of Gaya, Jahun, Dutse. To the west of Dalla, the rivers tend to run north/south—not just the Jakara but also the great Tomas and, further on, the Gari dividing Dambatta from Kazaure. I suggest there have long been these two competing ‘halves’ of kasar Kano. The eastern half, centred around the city of Gaya with its circular walls, lay astride the routes to Borno, Egypt and Mecca; its people were, it seems, known as Warjawa, with possibly Ajawa and Ngudawa among them (Anon., tr. Palmer 1928). To the east of Gaya was Dutse Gadawur (not a very Hausa name?) with its great, water-retaining granite hills, and beyond it Birni Ngudu, the centre of Nguduri (as Borno people called the whole area; others now use the Hausa form Kuda or Kudu) and the Ngudawa. To the northeast of Gaya was the trading station of Birni Ngija (Map 3.1.). In the jihad of 1804–1808 the eastern half of Kano was fought over and captured by the eastern faction of the jihadi army independently of the main jihadi force in the west of Kano. The western half ofkasar Kano contains the roads both to Katsina (in the northwest) and to the trading cities of southern Katsina that led on to the kola and gold areas of Gonja and Ashanti (modern Ghana). In the nineteenth century, the road to the suzerain city of Sokoto went straight through the hills and bush before reaching the road that ran along the Sokoto river. In 1906 these ‘roads’ were recorded as being only between one- and five-foot wide, and so little more than paths, often through growing crops; it was easy to lose the way.14 This western half of Kano itself divides into two segments—the more northerly

14 G. B. Scott (‘Northern Nigeria Regiment’), in August 1906 (Military Report on Northern Nigeria, vol. 2, pp. 82–6), is describing the route from Sokoto to Katsina. Much of the road up to Gora is 4–5 ft. wide, and then it narrows; even at 2 ft. wide, he describes it as a ‘well-used road’, while overall the route is judged as “broad, well- made road, sandy in places”. Not all route reports, unfortunately, specify the width of a road. ancient labels and categories 73 Map 3.2. The districts of Kano emirate, divided into the zones used in this chapter. 74 murray last that includes Dambatta, Bichi and Kazaure; the more southerly, with the upper reaches of the Challawa river, which has Dawakin Tofa, Kiru, Gwarzo and Karaye (Map 3.2.). Thejihad started here, and the area saw the battles in which the elderly Sarkin Kano was defeated. He eventually withdrew from Dalla, and moved south across the Chal- lawa to Burumburum deep in southern Kano where he died.15 Other Kanawa who did not want to subordinate themselves to the new jihadi state later fled northwards toMaradun instead (as did the Sarkin Kat- sina to Maradi). I wish to suggest that this basic division of kasar Kano, into eastern and western segments with an almost ‘alien’ southern area across the Challawa river, reflects ancient patterns that may well also have linguistic roots. This paper is an experiment to see what, if anything, a survey of this kind can offer us by way of evidence. We are, of course, extremely short of data of any kind for the early period, making it all the more crucial to explore systematically the potential of ‘onomastics’. My findings are based on fieldwork carried out in 1968–70, and then piecemeal almost annually since then until today. It involved going round (and up!) as many hills in Kano as possible and collecting their names, as well as any other topological terms. Hill names (especially south of the Challawa) were strikingly different from the sort of Hausa names I was most used to; local villages usually had Hausa-style names that differed in form from those of the hills. I would sometimes find that there were older toponyms that had dropped out of use, especially where the settlement site had moved a short distance (as often happens in rural Hausaland, to start anew after, say, a significant death). For this essay I turned to a relatively early source—the District maps of Kano made initially by the British colonial officers who were responsible as D.O.s, ‘District Officers’, for administration and taxation purposes. As no precolonial maps existed, new D.O.s had to draw

15 His grave is still shown to visitors; he had ruled Kano for over 25 years. It is worth remembering he was called Alwali, suggesting he was not only a Muslim but a notably pious one. As elsewhere in the Hausa states, the last Sultans in power just before the jihad of 1804–8 were themselves Muslim reformers; their ousting, as kuffar, by the mujahidun must have seemed to them particularly unjustified. Alwali is said to have spent (during 1806–8) some time in Rano and then a year in Zaria before returning to Burumburum; it may well be that by ‘Zaria’ kasar Zaria is meant, not birnin Zazzau, though the birni was still anti-jihadist at this time (it only fell on Saturday morning, 31st December, 1808). Alwali had finally lost control of Kano city on Friday 30th May 1806, and left that night. ancient labels and categories 75 their own, putting in such data as required—not just village names and tracks, but village areas, river names, sometimes hills. Messen- gers undoubtedly helped to obtain the information; the D.O. initially travelled on horseback so there was time to talk (in Hausa) and height enough to see what lay either side of the track. Clearly there was room for error, though I suspect less room than there was with me, without an assistant. The first maps were drawn around 1910, some seven years after the British invasion; revisions were made in the early 1920s, and again around 1936; further revisions were made around 1956–8 and 1966. Finally, most maps were reprinted (unrevised?) in 1976.16 It is not known what revisions were made during the 50 or 60 years the maps were in use, and the maps themselves vary in content and style— clearly some D.O.s were better cartographers, or simply more assidu- ous, than others. I have not attempted to check accuracy against later maps based on aerial surveys. What these district maps often do show, which no modern map does, are village areas, complete with the name of that area. So it is these names, presumably dating back at least to the early colonial period, that interest me here. For this chapter, I have picked out over 250 possibly non-Hausa place-names from all the names shown on the 29 district maps for Kano Province—that is, I included Kazaure, Gumel and Hadejia; I excluded from further analysis all names which were in my view self- evidently Hausa. This was not always an easy exercise. For example, obviously a river like Maikanmutum seems Hausa (but why was it called so?), so too Mainama. Walijam is too close to Fulfulde to be Hausa; but the common Wailare could be Kanuri since waila is a kind of tree. But what about Nomodugu: could it be not a Mande name but instead a mistake for, say, Na Madugu? Kasko may be an unusual place-name but is feasibly Hausa. Thus, I picked out all names ending in -an, -am, -un, -im, -en; -ar, -al, -ur, -ir; -al, -el, -il; -us, -as, plus all monosyllabic place-names, and analysed their frequency and distribution. One assumption is that names ending in a consonant are potentially non-Hausa; another is that suffixes rather than prefixes are the key to the forms names have in kasar Kano; but in a Benue-

16 I am not sure how many of these maps now survive, and if they do, where they are: the Survey Dept. suffered badly in a riotca . Friday 10th July 1981 and much was burnt. The copies I am using here are my personal copies. The scales vary. 76 murray last

Congo language like that spoken by Ruruma in eastern Zaria, it is prefixes (for exampleMa- ) that matter in the names of hills and places (B. Sharpe, pers. comm.). For this essay, I did not attempt a breakdown of all the apparently Hausa placenames beginning in Ma- or Mai-, but such obviously significant prefixes as Fa- or Pa- (for a low, rocky outcrop) were noted. There are plenty ofcaveats to make, and assumptions to explain. First, river names often reflect local village names; without first-hand knowledge it is impossible to say which name came first. In the map- making procedures of a D.O. I can well imagine, in answer to the question ‘what’s this river called?’, the answer was ‘the river of place X’; and as the river passes many places, the D.O. simply recorded one standard name despite the river possibly having several names over its whole length. Although a hill is a more circumscribed object to name, often small clumps of rocks have names (as do odd patches of ‘bush’); some hills are very widely known as sites of oath-taking shrines—for example south of Kano there is one at Bauda (a suitably ‘Mbau’ name; cf. the ‘Bawada’ shrine by the palace in Birnin Katsina). What is not known is how much a name will have changed over time: for example, might Dalla once have been known as simply Dal, or Goron dutse been once Gulum? Both names occur elsewhere in kasar Kano. Did Hausa-speakers in some key sites ‘domesticate’ otherwise alien names (to offer an extreme example, ‘tal’ means ‘hill’ in the Coptic that early Egyptian merchants in the area were using)? Secondly, I assume that a village area’s name will reflect in some way the area’s early inhabitants. In short, a modern Hausa settlement will not invent a new name that sounds wholly alien—e.g. who would now call a settlement Wak unless it had a meaning for its residents? But which residents? I think it unlikely that many place-names were given by people imported into the area as slaves on a farm (rinji; many places are called Rinjin -), and who then both used their own mother tongue to label their new home, and ensured somehow that their name ‘stuck’. A few ‘non-Hausa’ names occur more than once in different districts, but I am struck more by how few there are: for example, there are only two Balan, two Gadan (and one Gadandan), two Kankan (a possible Hausa word for a type of bag or bed?), two Kundun, two Tsagam, a Fayam and a Fayam Fayam, two Zanbur, two Fulatan (and a Fulatanam); three Danbal, three Shangal, two Wadagul, two Walawel and that is all. I am not yet sure why these are the preferred duplicates; might the names reflect some common ancient labels and categories 77 topological feature in a language I don’t know? For example, walowal in fulfulde is marshland, and wadiwol a valley (from the Arabic wadi). It is interesting, though, that there seems not to be a small standard set of typical place-names that recur again and again, marking e.g. a significant shrine or a chief ’s palace. Certainly, in areas of Kano south of the Challawa which we know were settled by forcibly imported (non- Muslim) people and where new, rectangularly walled towns were built in the eighteenth century and oriented 15 degrees north of east—that is, towards Mecca—there is no obvious sign of giving the places alien names (e.g. Indabo, Barkun). The new towns were, after all, laid out as specifically Muslim towns; older towns tend to be round rather than rectangular.17 So who were the peoples who may have given these places their currently ‘odd’ names? As already mentioned, we know there were Warjawa, Ajawa, and Ngudawa in the eastern half of Kano (near Gaya, Dutse and Birnin Kudu); Warjawa today speak a Chadic language (as well as Hausa), whereas the language of Ngudawa is Benue-Congo. To the south, by Sumaila and beyond to Kauru now, but also around Ningi and the western foothills of the Jos Plateau, as well as Ngudawa there were Mbutawa, Kurama, Ruruma (speaking Benue-Congo languages), while further to the west, beyond Rano, Maska and Yandoto were Kamuku, Achipawa, Kambari, and Dakakari. The generic Hausa label for all these non-Muslim groups was Gwarawa (sing. ba-Gwari); they were not those we now call Gwari or Gbagyi.18 Clearly, if this preliminary experimental paper seems worthwhile, my next primary task is to check both with colleagues in Nigerian linguistics and with Nigerians ‘on the ground’ the place-name patterns among peoples on the southern fringes of kasar Kano.

17 For further material on this period, see Last (1983: 83). The eighteenth-century extension south of the Challawa was carried out by, I suggest, a new, more militaris- tic ‘dynasty’ of a kind that also took power at this time in Katsina: in essence power had shifted from the merchants to the military, and the trade in captives had grown enormously. 18 The colonial British labeled the Gbagyi as ‘Gwari’, and only recently have the Gbagyi reclaimed their own, more appropriate name. Gwarawa occurred commonly in the immediate south of Kano as referring to non-Muslim, non-Hausa-speaking people though Birnin Gwari, a major walled town to the south of greater kasar Kat- sina, was, it seems, using Hausa as its lingua franca in the nineteenth century. I have no evidence that it was ever a Gbagyi town. Remember that the district head’s title at Pauwwa is Sarkin Gwari, whereas the Emir at Kontagora is simply Sarkin Sudan (Sudan being the Arabic label for ‘Blacks’, widely used in titles after the jihad). 78 murray last

Ideally I would have liked to have extended my survey westwards to include all of Katsina, especially southern Katsina, an area I know moderately well, with its borders with Zamfara marked by a range of hills and by the dajin Rubu. There seems to be in Katsina too a distinct north/south boundary, symbolised by the Karaduwa river. Only in Katsina and Kano are there truly Maguzawa, and in both instances they used not to be in the southern parts of the emirates (they are there now, but very few remain truly Maguzawa). In Kano, there exist two distinct groups of Maguzawa—the Kanawa and the Kutumbawa, the latter being, I argue, mainly in the western zone of Kano. There are, of course, non-Muslim Hausaphone groups, e.g. in Daura or in eastern and southern Kano, but I would argue that they are not originally Maguzawa, whatever broad label is now attached to them. Nor are the Gwandara, émigrés from western Kano now living north of modern Abuja and speaking a version of Hausa, Maguzawa: their current ‘traditional’ culture reflects more local habits of faith and food.19 The following section outlines the preliminary findings on ‘odd’, possibly pre-Hausa, place-names and their distribution in kasar Kano.

The data 1. There is a small set of monosyllabic place- and river-names concentrated in south-eastern Kano: Bul, Dal, Kwar, Kwas, Tum, Wak and the rivers Kim, Tsel, and Pa-Kwas (Pa- usually means a set of rocks or hill). In Gaya (‘eastern’ zone), there are Dul, Gul; Tul in Ringim (‘north-east’); Kell in Bichi (‘north’). This concentration of monosyllabic names (reminiscent of areas near the south edge of the Jos Plateau, such as Nok, Kuk?) suggests a non-Hausa population that has either subsequently emigrated, or remained and become Hau- saphone. I assume this population spoke a Benue-Congo language, but much of their territory was (later?) taken over by Chadic speakers or others with a preference for a different style of place-name. [Here it might be appropriate to demonstrate my dilemma by considering briefly the problem ofZak Zak: though it is well outside kasar Kano to the south, could it be a name given by those who spoke the languages once heard in southern Kano? Zakzak is the

19 For more data and references on Maguzawa, see Last (1993). ancient labels and categories 79

name for the city we now call Zaria; yet another name for it is Zazzau, and a Zaria person is a ba-Zagzage. I have suggested (Last 1985: 199) that Zazzau is a southern-Kanuri-style contraction of Zago-Zago / Za’u Za’u in which case, is Zak Zak an old-style vocali- sation of Zago-Zago, with the Hausa Zaria a further ‘domestication’ of an alien name? Or, perhaps better, vice-versa—is Zago-Zago a ‘domestication’ of Zak Zak, perhaps appropriately introduced by the Zagho / Sa’o merchants from southern Borno whom we know were early into this area? To Leo Africanus, ca. 1500, it was Zeg Zeg.]20 2. Very widespread in eastern, central and southern Kano are bisyl- labic place- and hill-names ending in -an (50 in all): classic, closely sited examples are dutsen Gafan, the rivers Tofan and Maskan (all in Kura district; cf. Dalan Dalan, a river in Rano), and the town Rantan; three-syllable rivers are Gaiyaran (again in Rano), Shinki- tan (in Kiru). Overall, two syllables in -an are more than twice as common as three syllables, with the bulk of the former concentrated in southern and central zones. 3. Endings in -un and -um (24 in all) are found especially in the ‘eastern’ zone (11 in all, especially bisyllables), followed by the ‘southern’ zone (7), similarly (e.g. Barkun, but also Burum Burum). Trisyllabic names occur most in the ‘north’ (3). 4. Endings in –in and –en (17 in all) occur almost always in bisyl- labic names, and are found mainly in the ‘eastern’ zone (5) and the ‘central’ zone (4). Examples would be Shegen and Token in ‘central’, Barin, Biskin and Chikin in ‘eastern’ and Chirin in ‘southern’. 5. The distribution of places and rivers with names ending in-am are complicated by the fact that -am is very common in Borno and its western margins (especially the -ram ending; e.g. Damagaram, Gorgoram, the river Yedseram). But though some 17 are found in kasar Kano, most are in the north-east. However there are 4 that interest me here: Shiyam in Kura district, Fayam and Fayam Fayam in Dambatta, and Fagam, Gwaram in Gwaram district.

20 By the way, Zaria’s huge hill is Kufena and the earlier capital (and hill) to the south of Zaria was Turunku, neither of which seem in any way ‘odd’, at least not to me. But there may be alternative, older names for them that I don’t know yet. 80 murray last

6. Places ending in -ar have a similar distribution in eastern, southern and central zones as -an names, but are much less common (-an = 50; -ar = 21). Classic river names are Shimar (occurs twice), Kwarkwar, and place names such as Tsanbar and Pammar. Trisyl- lable names are a third as common as bisyllables—e.g. Tanagar; but interestingly, -ar names also occur in general in the ‘northern’ zone. 7. Endings in -al may be variants of the -ar ending (e.g. kofar Mazu- gal or k. Mazugar in Kano city). They are few (8 in all), with a central and northern pattern, and none in the south. Danbal is unusual in occurring three times, not far to the east of Kano city, whereas Shangal similarly occurs thrice, out to the west. 8. By contrast, endings in -el and -il are relatively common (21). Again, the majority (14) are in the north-east (e.g. Gumel), but four occur on the east of Kano city (e.g. Kutil, Wudil, Gogel, Pellel) and three in Kazaure (Dogel, Korel, Rodel). 9. Endings in -ur (8) and –ir (4) . Again, these are found in place- names in both the ‘southern’ (three -ur; one -ir) and the ‘eastern’ zones (two -ur), and not in the west. Zanbur occurs twice, once in Rano, once in Gaya. And there is a river Zungur in Dawakin Kudu. Minjibir is a very rare example of -ir (north of Kano city), while Gamzir occurs in Tudun Wada, way to the south in kasar Kano. There is aMadakir far out east in Gwaram. 10. Endings in -as, -us are likewise not a ‘western’ phenomenon. In the ‘north’ are Tunas (also the name of a tree) and Katanas, as well as the river Tomas already mentioned; Muras in Dawakin Kudu is the name of riverain wetland across from the ‘south’, where one findsBunnabus (Sumaila) and Lufus (Rano). Dumus (Birnin Kudu) is in the west along with Dundubus (Dutse) and Jikas (Gwaram). The -as ending of course occurs in some ordinary Hausa words such as gabas (‘east’). 11. Finally there are a few more unusual name-forms—unusual at least to me, but also rare on maps. I knew a Maguzawa house called Gidan Makuski—no one knew the origin of that name. In Hadejia, however, one finds aChinguliski and a Jaruski. Obviously that -sk- component is found, say, in the Zaria/Katsina place-name Maska (and the rivers Maskan in Kura and Yasko in Rano) as well as in some Hausa words such as fuska (‘face’, but also used as a direction—e.g. fuskar gabas); there is also the word for a type of pot, kasko, which occurs once as a place-name in Gaya. Unusual ancient labels and categories 81

name forms like Kabbak, Kurumbaddi and Kichinde (and even Jahun’s Chanbe) seem more associated with the north-east (e.g. Hadejia, Kaffin Hausa), but there is Durbundea and a Salmande both in Sumaila (i.e. ‘south’) while Babande (Garki) and Kalhaldi (Dambatta) are both in the ‘north’. Though some of these might well be Fulfulde names (e.g. is kalhaldi short for a ‘bush-bull’?), no real explanations can be advanced at this stage.

4. Conclusions

I can sum up my findings quite simply:

[a] A few distinctive and geographically concentrated, monosyllabic place-names suggest a linguistic connection to peoples now living around the southern edge of the Jos Plateau. This may suggest that the early peoples of southern Kano moved far south, possibly under pressure from non-Hausa Chadic speakers such as the Warjawa and Benue-Congo speakers such as the Ngudawa and Mbutawa. [b] A much wider set of place-names is confined largely to the centre, east and south of Kano city, but very rare in the west (both south-west and north-west). This suggests that the ‘two-halves’ notion of kasar Kano has some linguistic basis. My suggestion here is that pre-Hausa-speaking groups were living around Dalla and Santolo as well as Gaya, and these populations either [i] became Muslim and started to speak the trading lingua franca which became the Hausa we now know; or [ii] they kept their religions and moved south across the Challawa, blending in with or displacing previous communities. Western Kano has almost no examples of names ending in -ar, -al, -ur, -um, -un, -in, which makes it stand out toponymically from the rest of kasar Kano. But could this be little more than a dialectical variable? [c] This raises the question of what languages were spoken in western Kano and southern Katsina. An eighteenth-century name (now ‘lost’; see Hornemann in Bovill 1964: I,116; Last 1989: 137, 145 n. 38) for the Rogo/Mahuta border area is Suran, a form typical of eastern/ southern Kano; I have not yet done detailed toponymic work in the area nor do I have access to the early District maps. There is very slight evidence for a past Kambari and Dakakari presence there, perhaps also Kamuku and Achipawa; it was never a typical ‘Hausa’ area, and had the name Laka. Pauwwa has long been its ‘capital’ (Last 1985: 82 murray last

196–198; 1989), with plentiful iron ore its great attraction to outsiders; its District Head significantly has the title ofSarkin Gwari. It was, I have suggested, the ‘Kashna’ of Leo Africanus’s account (Last 1985: 196). [d] Lastly, Dalla, birnin kasar Kano. The most striking item of data is Magwam rock, to the southeast of kofar Nasarawa, which the Kano Chronicler (Anon., tr. Palmer 1928: 97) speaks of as the site of a chief. Magwam or Mbakwam is indeed the standard Kurama title for a chief, and occurs in early Hausa oral history as Bakwa, but in this form the chief becomes not only a ‘she’ but also a ‘stranger’! Bakwa Turunku features importantly in early Zaria histories, and ‘her’ gender re-appears as ‘Queen Amina’, the ‘queen’ who is identified with the building of the ancient long city walls at both Zaria and Katsina (‘ganuwar Amina’: see Last 1980). Hence Zazzau (or Zak Zak), unsur- prisingly perhaps, was not Hausa-speaking until considerably later—at least not in its rural hinterland; the city will have used the merchants’ lingua franca, Hausa, and thus ‘domesticated’ Mbakwam into bako and bakwa. What is interesting as regards Dalla is that the chief associated with this hill is seen as separate from the chief at Magwam. The Dalla stories have much closer reference to sites in western Kano (e.g. Sheme, Bagwai, dutse Dan Bakoshi). And ‘Bagauda’ (or ba-Gibda, as he is called in the Katsina style) and ‘Bawongari’ (or ba-Wangari) both suggest connections to Gobir and Zaye (as the Wangara-traders’ city we now know as birnin Katsina was arguably first called—see Last 1989: 129–134). So I see Dalla (and its stream the Jakara) as a boundary marketplace between the two segments of a wider kasar Kano that included both these western, ritually significant sites and the eastern world of Gaya and Nguduri. It was perhaps the Wangara merchants of the western network who gave Dalla the essential support they needed to take over first Santolo’s domain and then Gaya’s, as both of these were already linked to the Borno/Barebare trade network which had preceded the arrival of the Wangara connection. It was only in the early eighteenth century that the Sarkin Kano, the ruler at Dalla and now a military man rather than a scholar and the merchants’ ally, was able to complete the take-over of the lands south of the Chal- lawa. Until then, the Hausa linguistic boundary for kasar Kano may well have lain at the Challawa. At least in the rural areas south of the river, people were not yet habitually using the urban lingua franca (the ‘Swahili’) of the merchants and their staffs. ancient labels and categories 83

[e] One footnote: the area north-east of Dalla, north of the Hade- jia river, has its own pattern of non-Hausa place-names, particularly names ending in -el and in - ram. The closer to Borno one gets the more common are names ending in -ri. Given that both Gumel and Damagaram were under Borno control for so long, it is not surprising that the language of those areas were dialects of Kanuri (Manga?), a Nilo-Saharan language, and this is reflected in their place names.

Although some names may be Fulfulde names (or reflect Fulbe pro- nunciations), it is worth noting how few (if any) names did the Ful- fulde-speaking jihad leaders impose on kasar Kano. Similarly, the colonial regime left no obviously English place-names. It appears the study of place-names will tell us almost nothing about politics and the powerful—their history is chronicled in texts and the state’s oral traditions—but it may yet tell us just a little about the otherwise invisible and inaudible ordinary men and women who lived and died on the land: the sort of data that formal histories fail to pass on, and which is usually also beyond the reach of anthropologists. So let us be brave now: build up a corpus of data on place-names, drawn from field walking and texts, and see where it leads!

References

Anon., tr. Palmer. 1928. The Kano Chronicle. In Sudanese Memoirs, vol. 3. Lagos: Government Printer. Bovill, E. W. ed. 1964. Missions to the Niger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brett, M. 1983. Islam and trade in the Bilad al-Sudan, tenth-eleventh century AD. Journal of African History 24, 431–440. Clapperton, H. 1829 [reprinted 1966]. Journal of a second expedition into the interior of Africa from the Bight of Benin to Soccatoo. London: F. Cass. Crum, W. E. 1980 [1939]. A Coptic dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Desanges, J. 1985. Agisymba. In Camps, G. ed. Encyclopédie Berbère. Aix-en-Provence: Edisud. Farias, P. F. de M. 2003. Arabic medieval inscriptions from the Republic of Mali. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy. Hama, B. 1967. Histoire du Gobir et de Sokoto. Paris: Présence Africaine. Hodgkin, T. (ed.). 1975. Nigerian perspectives: A historical anthology. London: Oxford University Press. Last, M. 1979. Early Kano: The Santolo-Fangwai settlement system. Kano Studies, new series, 1(4), 7–23. ——. 1980 [reprinted 1989]. Before Zaria: Evidence for Kankuma (Kangoma) and its successor states. In Mahadi, A. ed. Essays in honour of Abdullahi Smith. Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria; re-published in Kano Studies, 1989, new series, 3(1): 43–65. 84 murray last

——. 1980. Historical metaphors in the Kano Chronicle. History in Africa 7, 161– 178. ——. 1983. From sultanate to caliphate: Kano, 1450–1800. In Barkindo, B. M. ed. Studies in the history of Kano. Ibadan: Heinemann, 67–91. ——. 1985. The early kingdoms of the Nigerian savanna. In Ajayi, J. F. A. and Crowder, M. eds. History of West Africa, Vol. I. Harlow: Longman, 167–224. (Third edition). ——. 1989. Beyond Kano, before Katsina: Friend and foe on the western frontier. In Barkindo, B. M. ed. Kano and some of her neighbours. Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press. ——. 1993. History as religion: deconstructing the Magians (‘Maguzawa’) of Nigerian Hausaland. In Chrétien, J. P. ed. L’invention religieuse en Afrique: histoire et religion en Afrique noire. Paris: Karthala, 267–296. Lavers, J. E. 1979 (1980). A note on the terms ‘Hausa’ and ‘Afuno’, a paper given at the International Conference on Kanuri Language and Literature, Bayero University, Kano. Later published as: A note on the terms ‘Hausa’ and ‘Afuno’. Kano Studies 1980, new series 2(1), 113–120. Leo Africanus, tr. Epaulard, A. 1956. Description de l’Afrique. Paris: Adrien-Maison- neuve. Levtzion, N. and Hopkins, J. F. P. 1981. Corpus of early Arabic sources for West African history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meinardus, O. 1977. Christian Egypt, ancient and modern. Second edition. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Moody, H. L. B. 1969. The walls and gates of Kano city. Lagos: Dept of Antiquities, Federal Republic of Nigeria. Posnansky, M. and McIntosh, R. 1976. New radiocarbon dates for northern and western Africa. Journal of African History 17(2), 161–195. Scott, G. B. 1912. Military report on Northern Nigeria. Volume 2: Routes. London: HMSO. Sieber, E. 1992. Iron age archaeology in Kano state, Nigeria. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of Anthropology. Tijani, K. 1993. The Mune in pre-colonial Borno. Berichte des Sonderforschungsbere- ichs 268, Bd. 2, 239–248. Usman, Y. B. 1981. The transformation of Katsina (1400–1883). Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press. Vitaliev, V. 2008. Passport to Enclavia. London: Reportage Press. CHAPTER FOUR

MORE RURAL THAN URBAN? THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT AND FUNCTIONS OF HAUSA PROVERBS AND HAUSA VERBAL COMPOUNDS

Joseph McIntyre

1. Introduction

The Hausa language is rich in proverbs and verbal compounds (compound words containing a verb). Such phrases are in frequent use and illustrate both the worldviews and material culture of the Hausa people. Many of these proverbs and compounds are found in Bargery’s dictionary (1934) and, assuming that a good number of his informants were about 50 years old when he compiled his dictionary, many of these phrases are at least 125 years old. This paper looks at the religious content and functions of Hausa proverbs and verbal compounds. For most if not the whole of the last millenium, Islam had a huge influence on Hausa society; and while the assumption in West Africa that, if you speak Hausa you are a Muslim, is, strictly speaking, inaccurate, it is not unfounded. Only a small percentage of Hausa are Chris- tians and an even smaller percentage are ar̃na or maguzawa (‘pagans’). I suggest here that Hausa proverbs and verbal compounds contain traces of the animistic, pagan religion. Many Hausa proverbs (Hausa: karin magana ‘folding.of speech’) refer to material culture, but they are used to give advice or express judgment on social and moral issues, and thus have a frame of reference which is closely linked to religion. Verbal compounds (Hausa: adon magana ‘adornment.of speech’) are often used to name ever- day flora, fauna and objects and do not directly comment on social issues or offer moral advice. Nevertheless, they name social roles or behaviour as well as illnesses and their remedies, the latter sometimes being magic charms. Social roles and behaviour, as well as charms, frequently imply religious belief, because what counts as ‘proper conduct’ 86 joseph mcintyre is mediated by religious ideology. Thus verbal compounds also have a religious component.1 Proverbs and verbal compounds are an excellent example of how language transmits culture, often retaining phrases from a previous era. In our own culture (as in Hausa) the sun still ‘rises’ and ‘sets’ despite the fact that, some four hundred years ago, physicists established that the earth revolves around the sun! The fact that such phrases can transmit an older culture is due to what Keane (1997: 63) calls ‘. . . internal cohesion . . . [which is] perceived to remain constant across contexts.’ Interestingly, Keane is referring here to religious language. The ‘internal cohesion’ of Hausa proverbs and verbal compounds is achieved by the fact that they are succinct phrases and that they typically have a binary structure (described for each in the relevant section, below); thus these phrases are commonly used, survive over time and transmit culturally important information. Proverbs and verbal compounds seem to belong in that category of ‘. . . word [or] slogan . . . which help to create the social order’ (Bourdieu 1991: 129–130) and can be discussed in terms of Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’. In his introduction to Bourdieu (1991), J. B. Thompson, the editor, defines ‘habitus’ as ‘. . . a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways . . . generat[ing] practices, perceptions and attitudes which are ‘regular’ without being consciously co-ordinated or governed by any ‘rule’. . .’ (1991: 12). Thompson (1991: 12–13) suggests that these ‘. . . dispositions . . . are capable of generating a multiplicity of practices and perceptions in fields other than those in which they were originally acquired.’ (my emphasis) This shift from one field to another is directly relevant to proverbs and verbal compounds: superficially, the words found in a proverb or verbal compound may have little or nothing to do with moral or social issues; however their application is often precisely in this field (see Bichi 1997). Thus the rather banal proverbRan wanka, ba a ɓoyen cibiya! (On bath-day, one can’t hide the navel) can be applied in contexts which have nothing to do with bathing. For instance, when students take an exam, what they have learned will come to light. The verbal compound hana-salla (‘prevent prayer’) has, on the surface, nothing to

1 The source of the proverbs analysed here is Kirk-Greene (1966), who lists, translates and comments on 500 Hausa proverbs. The verbal compounds examined here are taken from a corpus of some 960 verbal compounds, collected by many authors and collated in McIntyre (2006: 3–4; 263–336). more rural than urban? 87 do with its meaning ‘baseball cap’. In order to understand this compound, one must know that the peak of a baseball cap prevents a Mus- lim performing his prayer—his forehead cannot touch the ground (cf. Masquelier, this volume). Thus, while the ‘bathing’ proverb allows the moral statement that, if you don’t work, you won’t pass your exam, the compound hana-salla names a secular item by evoking—with irony and humour—a religious regulation. Linguistically, the effectiveness of proverbs and verbal compounds derives precisely from their being indirect, using one field (in cognitive linguistic terms, ‘domain’) to comment on or name another. For an individual speaker, an apposite use of proverbs and verbal compounds validates his or her competence as a speaker and lends authority. According to Bourdieu (1991: 106) ‘[T]he proverb and all the stereotyped or ritual forms of expression . . . imply a certain claim to symbolic authority . . . allowing the consensus . . . to be imposed in front of everyone and in the name of everyone.’ (my emphasis) Critical to the present discussion is the fact that Hausa proverbs and verbal compounds contain few images with a direct religious content. The question as to whether they contain traces of pagan religion arises because of their heavily ‘rural’ content. A ‘rural’ versus ‘urban’ dichotomy may seem less significant to Hausa culture than one couched in terms of Islamic versus non-Islamic elements. However, while the latter may be more visible, various authors underline the importance of a rural/urban dichotomy: Nicolas (1975) describes the Hausa of Maradi (Niger) as a society divided into an urban ‘société dynastique’ and the rural ‘pagans’; Spittler (1978) describes the Hausa of Gobir (also in Niger) in similar terms. Lange (2004) argues that a rural/urban dichotomy pre-dates Islam. Commenting on the animistic religion of the Hausa—still actively practised in the 1970s, Spittler (1978: 17) says: ‘Nature is animated by spirits; every contact with nature involves contact with spirits. Millet is intimately connected to the religious system. During the rainy season the millet-field is the house of the gods and, after the harvest, they take up residence in the granary’ (my translation). In the same vein, Nicolas (1975: 235) says that the rainy season (damuna) is ‘. . . la saison la plus personnalisée . . .’ The ‘personalised’ Damuna has a spirit husband Dodo, both of whom are associated with millet and corn (Nicolas 1975: 255f.) as well as with points of the compass used in ritual (Nicolas 1975: 230f.). If the pagan Hausa experienced nature as intrinsically religious one wonders if the rural images in proverbs and verbal compounds 88 joseph mcintyre evoke non-Islamic religious sentiments. This may be true for those few rural Hausa who are still pagan or for people who only recently converted to Islam or Christianity. However, I shall argue that, just as in our own culture the survival of a pre-Copernican image (the sun’s ‘rising’ and ‘setting’) does not challenge accepted scientific fact, so too the morals implied in a proverb, or the behaviour, artifacts or activities named by a compound, do not challenge Islamic precepts. While I have not carried out research on the social uses and functions of proverbs and verbal compounds, I would like to suggest that the everyday use of these phrases, which started life in a different system of beliefs, is an unintended form of syncretism.2 As such, they comple- ment other types of syncretism, which are not simply unintended: at the end of this paper, I offer a brief description of the non-teaching activities of Hausa malamai (Qur’anic teachers) which, perhaps surprisingly, involve activities that are not sanctioned by Islam and would seem to originate in Hausa pagan religion. The co-existence of different sets of beliefs is part and parcel of culture and sociality, and, in spite of the recent tendency in Hausa culture toward the denial of syncretism and the polarisation of religious movements (cf. Cooper, this volume; Rossi, this volume), syncretism is anchored in the language—however innocently—and remains alive in the habitus of the malamai.

2. Proverbs

In this section I look at the religious images found in the proverbs. It is often said that proverbs are more widely used in Hausa than in English and more by Hausa women than by men. However, there is no quantitative survey of the use of proverbs in Hausa.3 Whatever the

2 This kind of syncretism is found in our own culture, e.g. in the choice of the 25th December as the day to celebrate Christ’s birth. This date was originally the day on which the birth of the Hindu-Persian god, Mithra, was celebrated in Rome. Christians chose it for practical and not theological reasons (s. http://www.christianresourceslinks.com/christmas_and_constantine1.htm). 3 In McIntyre (1984) I described how, in the play Malam Maidala’ilu (one of two plays in Maƙarfi 1970) women do not use certain forms of speech, including proverbs. Journalists in the the Hausa Service of the German Radio were surprised when I communicated this fact. They confirmed the opposite quite forcefully when (in the 1990’s) I commented on one journalist’s frequent use of Hausa proverbs. Several of his colleagues remarked that he had lived in a house with many women. more rural than urban? 89 quantitative or comparative facts, Hausa proverbs are a rich source of cultural details. Many Hausa proverbs have a binary structure in which the first statement is embellished or commented on by the second one (see Jang 2002: 215f.). At the suprasegmental level (e.g. the number of syllables; tone—Hausa is a tone language), there are ideally more simi- larities than differences (Wolff 1998 and 2001; Zörner 1994); thus in the proverb Fàararree ƙàararree4 (‘[Only what is] begun [will be] completed’), the only difference in the two parts is the first consonant in each word; vowel lengths and tone are the same. Few proverbs attain this ‘ideal’, nevertheless the binary structure and suprasegmental ‘ideals’ help to preserve and transmit the cultural content. The overwhelming majority of Hausa proverbs do not contain overt religious imagery. Rather we find items of Hausa material culture as well as trees, plants, animals, body-parts, tools and professions. The culture represented in proverbs is one which is largely rural rather than urban. A religious cultural content—making moral statements, giving advice, etc.—is mainly conveyed through non-religious imagery. The example above Ran( wanka, ba a ɓoyen cibiya! ‘On bath-day, one can’t hide the navel’) is typical, as it refers to the limits of human deception in circumstances when people are truly tested. It is relatively easy to adapt this message to Islamic morality, but it is not intrinsically Muslim. The little religious imagery found in proverbs is either Islamic or non-Islamic but the morals expressed with non-Islamic images do not conflict with Islam. In this section, I present lists of words typically found in Hausa proverbs: trees, plants, seasons, agriculture and food, animals and birds, everyday words, body-parts and professions. The words in these lists seem to parallel what Raymond Williams (1988: 15) calls ‘keywords’: ‘. . . a shared body of words and meanings in [the] most general discussions . . . of the practices and institutions [known] as culture and society.’ Following each list are examples of proverbs containing words found in the list; the words found in these lists are underlined in the proverbs quoted. I then look at religious imagery—at non-Islamic

4 Where tone and vowel length are marked, the transcription of Hausa is as follows: aa, ii, etc. = long vowel, a, i, etc. = short vowel; à(a) = low tone, â(a) = falling tone, high tone is unmarked; ɓ, ɗ = laryngeal implosives, ƙ = ejective, r̃ = apical tap/ roll. Abbreviations used in the interlinear translations of verbal compounds are given at the end of the article. 90 joseph mcintyre religious imagery in a few proverbs and then at Arabic loans, where, occasionally, an overt Islamic precept or concept is found.

Trees, plants, seasons, agriculture and food These include: albasa ‘onion’, baba ‘indigo’, barkono ‘pepper’, bunu (baƙin ~) ‘(old) thatch’, ɓaure ‘fig -tree)’,( ceɗiya ‘fig-tree’, dabino ‘date (-tree)’, daddawa ‘black locust-bean cakes’, daji/dawa ‘bush, unused land’, damuna ‘rainy season’, dawa ‘guinea-corn’, duma ‘gourd, pumpkin’, ɗanye ‘raw’, fura ‘gruel’, fure ‘flower’,gabaruwa ‘(large) acacia tree’, ganye ‘leaf’, gari ‘flour’, gauta ‘bitter tomato’, giginya ‘deleb-palm’, gishiri ‘salt’, gora ‘gourd’, goro (also: hannun ruwa) ‘kolanut’, goruba ‘dum-palm’, gwanda ‘paw-paw’, haki ‘grass’, hatsi ‘corn’, inuwa ‘shadow’, kabewa ‘pumpkin’, kargo ‘bark (used for rope)’, koko ‘gruel’, kuka ‘baobab-tree’, kurmi ‘forest’, ƙasa ‘earth, region’, ƙaya ‘thorns’, ƙwai ‘egg’, ƙwarya ‘calabash’, maɗaci ‘mahogany tree’, manda ‘dark salt’, mai ‘oil’, miya ‘soup’, nama ‘meat’, nono ‘(mother-) milk’, raﬁ ‘stream’, rana ‘sun, heat, day(-time), rani ‘dry season’, rijiya ‘well’, rimi ‘silk-cotton tree’, romo ‘broth’, rumbu ‘granary’, ruwa ‘water, rain’, sara ‘cutting down (tree)’, shuka ‘sowing’, taba ‘tobacco’, tafarnuwa ‘garlic’, takanɗa ‘sugar-cane’, tatsa ‘to milk’, tsamiya ‘tamarind’, tsiro ‘germina- tion’, tuwo ‘porridge’, yaji ‘pepper’, zuma ‘honey’. Proverbs with words (underlined) from the above list: 1) Kowane gauta ja ne, sai dai ba a kai shi rana ba. Every tomato is red, unless you don’t put it in the sun. 2) Ƙarya fure take yi, ba ta ’ya’ya. Lies grow flowers, (but) not fruit. 3) Namiji bar̃kono ne, sai an tauna za a san yajinsa. A man is (like) pepper, you have to chew him to know his hotness. 4) Kowa ya je raﬁ, ya yi wanka. Anyone who goes to the stream will wash. 5) Kome daɗin tuwo, ba shi ƙin mai. No matter how tasty the porridge, it’ll ‘stand’ some oil.

Animals and birds These include: agwagwa ‘duck’, akwiya ‘(she-)goat’, babe ‘locust’, balbela ‘cattle egret’, barewa ‘gazelle’, biri ‘monkey’, bunsuru ‘he-goat’, burtu ‘ground horn- bill’, buzuzu ‘dung beetle’, ɓera ‘rat, mouse’, damisa ‘leopard’, damo ‘monitor lizard’, doki ‘horse’, ɗan-tsako ‘chicken’, fakara ‘bush-fowl’, fara ‘locust’, giwa ‘elephant’, guza ‘water-monitor’, guzuma ‘old cow’, jaɓa ‘stinking shrew-mouse’, jaki ‘donkey’, kada ‘crocodile’, kare ‘dog’, karsana ‘heifer’, kaza ‘hen’, kifi ‘fish’, kunama ‘scorpion’, kunkuru ‘tor- more rural than urban? 91

toise’, kura ‘hyena’, kwaɗo ‘frog’, kwikwiyo ‘puppy’, kyanwa ‘cat’, ƙaho ‘horn’, maciji/macijiya ‘snake (m./f.)’, makwarwa ‘bush fowl’, maraƙi ‘calf’, mikiya ‘griffon’,rago ‘ram’, raƙumi ‘camel’, sa/saniya ‘bull/cow’, shaho ‘hawk’, tsuntsu ‘bird’, tsutsa ‘worm, maggot’, tunku ‘mongoose’, tururuwa ‘ant’, ungulu ‘vulture’, zaki ‘lion’, zabo/zabuwa ‘guinea-fowl (m./f.)’, zomo ‘hare’. 6) Haihuwar̃ guzuma, ɗa kwance, uwa kwance. An old cow gives birth: the child is lying down, the mother is lying down. 7) Kowa ya ci kaza, shi ne da ita. Anyone who eats a chicken, is its owner. 8) Ni na riƙa ƙaho, wani na tatsa. I held the horns, another milked.

Everyday words These include: abota ‘friendship’, banza ‘uselessness’, bar̃ci ‘sleeping’, bashi ‘loan’, bawa ‘slave’, ɓarawo ‘thief’, ɓarna ‘damage’, ciniki ‘trading’, daɗi ‘pleasantness, enjoyment’, dare ‘night’, dutse ‘stone’, ɗaki ‘hut, room’, ɗan’uwa ‘brother, friend, colleague’, faɗuwa ‘falling’, fawa ‘butchering’, fiɗa ‘flaying’,gajere ‘short’, gayya ‘communal labour’, gida ‘house, home’, gobe ‘tomorrow’, haƙuri ‘patience’, hange ‘looking at, espying’, iska ‘wind, spirit’, kaifi ‘sharpness’, kasko ‘small earthenware vessel’, kasuwa ‘market’, kibiya ‘arrow’, kiɗa ‘drumming, music’, kuɗi ‘money’, kuturu ‘leper’, kwana ‘spending the night, the 24-hour day’, kwando ‘basket’, kwanta ‘lie down’, ƙamshi ‘good smell’, ƙarya ‘a lie’, ƙauna ‘love, liking’, inuwa ‘shade’, magana ‘speech’, magani ‘remedy’, makaho ‘blind man’, murna ‘gladness’, mutu(wa) ‘die (death)’, nauyi ‘weight’, rabo ‘destiny’, rai ‘life’, rawa ‘dancing’, reni ‘despising’, riga ‘gown’, rowa ‘miserliness’, sarki ‘chief’, sata ‘stealing’, so ‘loving, liking’, taɓarya ‘pestle’, talaka ‘commoner’, tsawo ‘length’, tsofo/tsofuwa ‘old man/woman’, tudu ‘hill’, tukunya ‘pot’, turare ‘perfume’, wanka ‘washing oneself’, wasa ‘game, playing’, wawa ‘fool’, wofi ‘uselessness’, wuƙa ‘knife’, wuta ‘fire’, wuya ‘difficulty’, yanka ‘slaughtering’, yaro ‘boy’, yau ‘today’, zaƙi ‘sweetness’, zama ‘dwelling, living’, zane ‘woman’s cloth’, zumu/ zumunci ‘friendship’, zurfi ‘depth’. 9) Ko da biri ya zama wawa, ba ya yi wasa da itace mai ƙaya ba. Even if the monkey’s an idiot, it won’t play with a thorny tree. 10) Kome daɗin kiɗa, kurum ya ﬁ shi. No matter how pleasant the music, silence is better. 11) Ƙasa ta gudu, ta je ina? The earth (ground, soil) runs—and goes where? 12) Kowa ya haɗiye taɓarya, ya kwana tsaye. If you swallow a pestle you’ll stand all night. 92 joseph mcintyre

Body / Body-parts baki ‘mouth’, cibiya ‘navel’, damtse ‘fore-arm’, gemu ‘beard’, haƙora ‘teeth’, hannu ‘hand, arm’, huntu ‘poor or naked person’, ido ‘eye’, jiki ‘body’, jini ‘blood’, kai ‘head’, kashi ‘excrement’, kitso ‘hair-do’, kunne ‘ear(s)’, ƙafa ‘foot, leg’, wuya ‘neck’, zuciya ‘heart’. 13) Kome tsawon wuya, kai ne bisa. No matter how long the neck, the head is above it.

Professions (ɗan) dambe ‘boxer’, dillali ‘middleman’, imam(liman) ‘imam’, karuwa ‘prostitute’, maƙeri ‘blacksmith’, mahauci ‘butcher’, malam ‘(Qur’anic) teacher’, ’yan-koli ‘petty trader’. 14) Karuwa ba ta kiwon kaza. A prostitute doesn’t look after hens. 15) Kowa ya ba da bashi, ya so dambe. Anyone who gives a loan likes boxing. In the above word-lists and proverbs, there was no specific religious imagery; such imagery is however found in the following lists.

Religious imagery and Arabic loans In the following proverbs we find explicit religious imagery and some Arabic loans. Such imagery is not encountered often; nor do the relatively few Arabic loans in the proverbs necessarily have an overt religious meaning.

Non-Islamic religious images In the four (from 500) proverbs with explicitly non-Islamic religious images (underlined), the meaning of the proverbs refers to, but does not promote non-Islamic religion. Like other proverbs, they can be used in very general social situations: 16) Samun yar̃da ga dodo ke sa a shiga ruwa laﬁya. Getting the spirit’s agreement makes entering water easy. 17) Ranar̃ tsaﬁ, bunsuru ke kuɗi. On the day of sacrifice a goat costs more. 18) Su babu tsaraka, wanka ne. They’re not fishing (using magic charms), they’re only washing. 19) Rab da rab, tsarancen damo da kaska. It’s all the same, a monitor making love5 to a flea.

5 Tsarance ‘mutual masturbation before marriage’ is forbidden by Islam. more rural than urban? 93

Arabic loans In the 500 proverbs investigated, only 53 Arabic loanwords are found, 28 with a religious meaning and 25 with a neutral meaning. Although some of these words are used in several proverbs, the low number of words with a religious meaning would be quite surprising if this were taken as an index of the strength of belief in Islam; as suggested above, this is not the case.

Arabic loanwords with a religious (Islamic) meaning or strong religious association (28): abada used in: har̃ abada ‘for ever’; aibu/laifi ‘fault, crime’; ajali ‘time of death’; (al)bar̃ka ‘blessing’; alhaki ‘guilt, sin’; alher̃i ‘prosperity’; aljama ‘gathering’; Allah ‘God’; annur̃i ‘light’; Bamaguje ‘pagan, peasant’; duniya ‘world’; hali ‘character’; halitta ‘creation’; Jumma’a ‘Friday’; kar̃atu ‘reading, studying’; liman ‘imam’; makar̃anta ‘school’; Makka ‘Mecca’; malam ‘(Qur’anic) teacher’; Mamman, name; munafiki ‘hypocrisy’; Musulmi ‘muslim’; r̃iba ‘interest, profit’;salla ‘prayer’; shar̃ifta ‘descent from Prophet’; tukur̃i ‘group recitation of Qur’an’.

Words with no explicit religious meaning (25): alama ‘sign’; al’amar̃i ‘matter’; albasa ‘onion’; aljihu ‘pocket’; alkama ‘wheat’; ar̃ziki ‘wealth’; ar̃ba ‘meeting unexpectedly’; asali ‘origin’; azaba ‘torture’; bawali ‘urine’; bukata ‘need, desire’; dabar̃a ‘plan’; dar̃aja ‘value’; dillali ‘middleman’; hankali ‘concentration’; har̃ ‘until’; kama ‘likeness’; kunya ‘shame’; lafiya ‘health’; labar̃i ‘news’; miskin ‘destitute person’; niyya ‘intention’; sama ‘above’; sitir̃a/sutur̃a ‘clothing’; tajir̃i ‘merchant’. Words with a clearly Islamic meaning or association are found in proverbs which may or may not contain an Islamic religious concept. In proverbs where the word Allah is used, the content may be religious, as in 20) or quite irreligious as in 21) or, as in 22) it might sound neutral but be quite religious in intent: 20) Allah ya sawaƙa wahala,—tsofuwa ta ga ajalinta ya kusa. May God make it easier—said the old woman nearing death. 21) ‘Allah sarkin daɗi’,—in ji ɓarawon takanɗa. ‘God, the prince of pleasure’ said the cane-sugar thief. 22) Alkama bisa dutse,—Allah ya kan ba ki ruwa. Wheat on stone—God will water you. The wordduniya ‘world’ is of Arabic origin and, in Islamic cosmology, it is the opposite of, and closely associated with, lahir̃a ‘heaven’. Its use in proverbs is very general; it is used to talk about life in general: 94 joseph mcintyre

23) Haƙuri maganin (zaman) duniya. Patience is the universal remedy. The wordlai ﬁ ‘wrongdoing’ has a religious association but may be used with a quite secular meaning: 24) Laiﬁn daɗi ƙarewa. The trouble with pleasure is that it comes to an end. Whether the word Bamaguje ‘pagan, peasant’ is an Arabic loan or not is disputed. While it is certainly used to categorise pagan Hausa according to Islamic law, it is also used to mean ‘peasant’ and, in the two proverbs in which I have found it, we find the meaning ‘peasant’ rather than ‘pagan’:6 25) Ana zaman ƙarya, in ji Bamaguje This kind of life is a lie, said the bumpkin (in town). 26) Biri a hannun malami ya kan yi guɗa, a hannun Bamaguje sai kuka. A monkey in a malam’s hand may ‘yodel’ (with pleasure); in a yokel’s hand it can only cry. Arabic loans which do not have a religious origin are mostly used neutrally (here ar̃ziki): 27) Ar̃ziki, rigar̃ ƙaya. Wealth is a gown of thorns. There is little explicit religious content in proverbs, rather, proverbs are applied in social, moral or religious contexts. Most proverbs retain rural or non-Islamic imagery; Arabic loans are surprisingly few but even proverbs with explicitly religious content—Islamic or non- Islamic—can be used quite neutrally. In the next section we turn to verbal compounds. As in the proverbs, religion is seldom explicit, and the items found in verbal compounds reveal an overwhelmingly rural culture.

3. Verbal Compounds

The structure of the English compound ‘forget-me-not’ parallels the Hausa verbal compounds examined here: firstly, its first member is a verb, ‘forget’; secondly, its meaning is opaque, i.e. the words which

6 Williams (1988: 21) points out that the English words ‘peasant’ and ‘pagan’ share the same etymology. (See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php: ‘. . . from Latin pagus “country or rural district” ’.) more rural than urban? 95 form the compound give no indication that it names a flower. Hausa verbal compounds share the ‘rural’ imagery found in Hausa proverbs and are used in everyday speech. Ahmad (1994) gives almost 400 in current use. Verbal compounds are fixed expressions and have a binary structure: a) the actual words and b) their meaning. There are regular grammatical relationships between these two parts: the meaning may be the subject or direct object of the verb in the compound; thus the ‘cattle- egret’ named in the compound ci-dà-mòotsin-wani (‘eat with movement.of other’) is the direct object of the verb in the compound, ci ‘eat’; the ‘tasteless food’ named by the compound ci-kâr̃-kà-mutù (‘eat don’t die’) is the subject of the verb, ci. In other cases, the compound is an expression which is part of a situation, typifying it and used to name it: thus the meaning of cànee-na-canèe is ‘argument’ (lit.: ‘say I said’; meaning ‘I’ve said my bit, now you say yours’) typifies the kind of utterance one might hear during an argument. The 114 verbal compounds listed below were selected from a corpus of 960 verbal compounds (see McIntyre 2006) because they seem to have a religious content, either in the words which form the compound or in the meaning of the compound. These compounds name plants, medicines (often magic charms) and spirits; they are used as epithets or to name statuses, activities and places. We also find compounds naming forbidden activities: gambling, intoxication, promiscuity, etc. Some compounds name customs which may be Islamic or non-Islamic. On occasion we find a compound naming something Islamic, whereby the words in the compound seem to have little to do with the meaning. In a final group, I list compounds containing Arabic loanwords.

Age of verbal compounds In the introduction, I suggested that many proverbs and verbal compounds are relatively old—perhaps more than 125 years. Verbal compounds have a number of features which suggest that they are old even if no precise date can be given. Some compounds seem to indicate a precolonial origin; some have two meanings, one of which is obviously more modern. Occasionally a word is found in a compound which is no longer in use (at least in Standard Hausa); various kinds of phonological reductions suggest that individual compounds are relatively old. Some compounds with the same meaning occur with varying forms, a fact which also seems to indicate age. 96 joseph mcintyre

Some compounds name activities practised before the arrival of the colonialists: 28) bùuɗà rùmbu7 (open cornbin) forcible confiscation of corn during famine kìfà-kwàndo (upset basket) pagan chief’s seizing man and family and selling them as slaves ƙèetàrà shinge (cross fence) slave who escaped soon after being bought rùuɗà-kùyàngi (confuse slave girls) redness of sky before sunset shàafà gadonkà (wipe bed.of.you) = ƙèetàrà shinge yaawòn-àmaanàa (journey.of trust) extortion in villages by chiefs (In the lists of examples most verbs begin with a low tone; ‘tone lowering’ is part of the compounding process (see Ahmad 1994: 58f.; McIn- tyre 2006: 29–33, 109–117). Nominalised verbs (e.g. yaawòo, in yaawòn àmaanàa above), do not undergo tone lowering. In the text, the verbs are written using the form found in the dictionary.) In the next two compounds, the first meaning is older than the second: 29) sàari-kà-nooƙèe (chop 2mSBJ hide) 1) snake 2) guerrilla hànà-sallà (prevent prayer) 1) wisp of hair on forehead of Woɗaɓe women 2) baseball cap8 Occasionally a word or morpheme is found which is no longer in use. In the next example we find the old form of the Hausa verb cêe ‘say’, viz., canèe/ceenèe. To my knowledge, this form of the verb is only found in these compounds: 30) cànee-na-canèe (say 1sREL.CMP said) argument In the next example, màataakà (lit. wife.of.you) is anomalous; one would expect màatar̃kà (this form, with the modern morpheme -r̃ ‘of’, is found in an alternative compound; see 35 below): 31) sàari-bàa-màataakà (chop.off give wife.of.you) sternum with meat

7 For readers interested in the grammar of these compounds, they are marked for tone and vowel length and there is an interlinear translation. All examples can be found in the appendices of McIntyre (2006: 263f.). 8 A further meaning of hànà-sallà may be older than both of the above: this meaning is found in the phrase Kwaràm, hànà-sallà ‘buying corn in villages and selling in town’ (Abraham 1958: 589 under kwaràmii). Hausa colleagues I asked did not know this meaning. more rural than urban? 97

Phonological reduction may indicate that a word is relatively old. A number of compounds are found with phonologically reduced forms; here I offer examples of two kinds of such reduction found in verbal compounds: a) compounds where the word dà, normally following the verb, is deleted; b) compounds which have become one word. In the following compounds we would normally expect the verb baa dà ‘give (something)’. Here, either dà has been deleted or the verb baa (with the meaning ‘give something’) found in the compound is no longer extant (see McIntyre 2006: 119–122): 32) bàa duhù (give darkness) ‘charm to make one invisible’; bàa-suusà (give scratching) ‘ scabies, prickly plant, gravel’; bàa-tòoyi (give burn) ‘spirit that spits fire’;bàa-zaa ƙè (give sweetness) epithet of very sweet sugar cane. The same kind of reduction is found withbi ‘follow’: 33) bìi-sartsè (remove splinter) ‘Euphorbia latiflora (shrub), remedy for syphilis and lice on women’ (= bìi-dà-sartsè) A number of verbal compounds have become one word; some of these compounds have undergone phonological reduction.9 The original two-member compound is no longer used: 34) gàmshèeƙaa (< *gàmaa shèeƙaa meet, flee) ‘black-hooded cobra’; ƙyûuyaa ‘laziness’ (< *ƙiyà-wùyaa refuse hardship); sàaɓaanii (< *sàaɓaa ni miss me) ‘misunderstanding’; shùugàbaa (< *shìga-gàba enter ahead) ‘leader’; sòosoonìi (< *sòosoo nì scratch me) ‘irritating skin disease; excessive sexuality in woman’ In some compounds there is variation in the surface form; this may be dialectal but it may also indicate that these compounds have survived long enough to allow such variation. In some cases the form of the verb varies, e.g. example 30 (above) cànee-na-canèe ‘argument’ has the alternative cèenee-na-cèe. (The same

9 One possible phonologically reduced compound (not a verbal compound) is sùrkullee / sùrƙullee ‘repeating magic formulae’ (see above). Bunza (2006: 226–239) devotes a whole chapter to the (mostly non-Islamic) activities this word describes. The Bayero University Dictionary (Cibiyar Nazarin Harsunan Nijeriya, 2006: 391) gives an equivalent sàràakulle; Abraham (1958: 782) gives saràkulle (see too Bargery, 1934: 904; but he does not mark tone or vowel length). The first member of the compound seems to be the onomatopoeia sarà/sàrà (‘openly’; see also sàroo) and it may have undergone ‘tone lowering’ and ‘vowel lengthening’, typical features of Hausa compounding (see McIntyre 2006: 32–33 and 113–117). The second member of the compound iskulle / ƙulle which seems to derive from the verb ‘close’. 98 joseph mcintyre compound is found with the modern, phonologically reduced form cêe (< canèe/ceenèe): ka-cèe-na-cèe and cèe-cee-kù-cêe. In some compounds a different verb is found. In example 31 (above) we have the verb sàari ‘chop’. In the following we find the same compound, but with the verbcìiji ‘bite’: 35) cìiji-bàa-màatar̃kà (bite.off give wife.of.you) sternum with meat In some compounds we find an alternative direct object: 36) shàa-tiiƙa / dùndu (drink punch) the mutilla-insect Occasionally an alternative pronoun is found: 37) bìi-ni / ta-dà-zuguu (follow me/her with present)10 physic-nut

Religious elements in verbal compounds In this section I look at the religious elements in Hausa verbal compounds. These 114 examples were chosen from the approx. 960 verbal compounds discussed in McIntyre (2006) because they have a religious element. A number of these compounds have more than one meaning; only the ‘religious’ meaning is given here. A word of warning: many compounds not listed below may have a religious connotation for some Hausa people. We saw (above) that much of the vocabulary found in proverbs may seem to relate simply to rural culture, but that, in Hausa, nature itself is felt to be ‘animated by spirits’ (Spittler 1978: 17). The same is true of the ‘rural’ vocabulary in verbal compounds. The lists below are divided into categories. In the first three categories the 60 compounds seem to name items (spirits, medicines etc.) in the non-Islamic religion:

1. Plants, medicine; charms, spirits 27 2. Epithets, statuses, roles; activities; places 12 3. Gambling, drunkenness, promiscuity 21

10 The meaning ofzuguu is unclear. Bargery [B1144] gives: “1. A strip of white cloth . . . 2. A present made to a chief . . . 3. bi-ni-da-z., physic nut.” more rural than urban? 99

In the next category (16 compounds) what is named may be Islamic or non-Islamic:

4. Islamic or non-Islamic customs 16

In the following we find compounds with Islamic meanings (15) and Arabic loans (23):

5. Islamic culture, Hausa name 15 6. Arabic loans 23

Plants, medicine; charms, spirits In this list of compounds it is the meaning which is religious, not the words in the compound. The everyday words found there are used to name spirits, charms or medicines and this naming function seems to exemplify Spittler’s statement: ‘contact with nature involves contact with spirits’ (1978: 17).11 38) bàa-tòoyi (give burn) spirit that spits fire bàa-duhù (give darkness) charm making p. invisible bìi-dà-sartsè (remove splinter) remedy for syphilis and lice on women cìi-goorò (eat kolanut) bori spirit Ɗan Gàlàdiimà cìi-zaaƙi (eat sweetness) tree12 cìrar̃-ƙayàa (pulling.up thorns) in: ~, kuɗin mararrabaa13 har̃bìn-àlluur̃àa (shooting.of needle) evil magic with needles har̃bìn-dawà (shooting.of bush) disease caused by spirit har̃bìn-iskàa (shooting.of demon) possessed person har̃bìn-kaskoo (shooting.of small-bowl) evil magic14 kàu-dà-bàara (remove attack) charm against attack kàs-dafì (kill poison) poison antidote kàs-kaiﬁ (kill sharpness) medicine against cuts ƙàr̃-dangì (finish family) arrow poison ƙìi-bugù (refuse beating) type of charm

11 We find verbs such as ‘give’, ‘eat’, ‘shoot’, ‘drink’ and ‘wipe’; or abstract nouns such as ‘darkness’, ‘sweetness’ or ‘sharpness’; there are participles or nouns indicating activities such as ‘attack’, ‘beating’, ‘falling’, ‘washing’ and common nouns such as ‘splinter’, ‘kolanut’, ‘thorns’, ‘bush’, ‘blood’ or ‘eye’. 12 The root of the tree is used as an aphrodisiac, see [A150]. 13 (Lit.: pulling.up thorns, money.of crossroads). Meaning: ‘money thrown down at cross-roads for enemy to pick up and fall ill by magic’ [A148]. 14 Abraham [A501] gives: “magically shooting soul of enemy in pot of water”. 100 joseph mcintyre

ƙìi-faaɗì15 (refuse falling) charm against defeat màntà-uwa (forget mother) medicinal plants16 marmartoo-nì (desire me) small plant whose seeds are used in love potions rùfàa-idò (close eye) 1) magic 2) charm or power to make oneself invisible sàa-gudù (cause running) charm giving one ability to make people run away just by yelling shàa-dàadalà (drink slashing) person invulnerable through potions shàa-jini (drink blood) headache medicine shàa-jinin-jìkii (drink blood.of body) charm to see and avoid danger shàa-shi-kà-furzar̃ (drink it 2mSBJ spit) bitter-tasting medicine shàa-ni-kà-san-nì (drink me 2mSBJ know me) plant with purgative properties shàafaa-mù-reeràa (wipe we sing) hypnotic power to make people follow the hypnotizer wankìn-idòo (washing.of eye) charm

Epithets, statuses, roles; activities; places Here the compounds name people, places etc. which are not part of Islamic culture. While uxorilocal and matrilocal marriage (auren-dan- gànà-sàndaa, ɗàuki-kwarìnkà or ɗàuki-sàndankà) are not explicitly religious, they are no longer practised. 47) auren-dangànà (marriage.of lean.on uxorilocal marriage sàndaa stick auren-jîn-daaɗii (marriage.of feeling. temporary marriage17 of pleasure) auren-sôn-zuucìyaa (marriage.of love. = auren-jîn-daaɗii of heart)

15 The final vowel offaa ɗìi is shortened, a feature of compounding (see Ahmad 1993; McIntyre 2006). This verbal noun is unusual and may be an older form; the usual form is faaɗùwaa. 16 The plantscrotolaria arenaria and ansellia congoensis are both used for weaned children. 17 This kind of marriage is forbidden in Islam. more rural than urban? 101

bàagaɗèe18 (give grilling) 1) place where meat is dried over fire 2) altar bàa tàaka (give treading.on) 1) place where no-one will live because considered haunted, etc. 2) a forbidden place 3) cemetery bìi-jini (follow blood) seeking reparation for murdered kinsman buu-dà-gaara (make.way.for presents) in: bàbuudèe ~ epithet of fortune-teller ɗàuki-kwàrinkà (take quiver.of.you) matrilocal marriage = ɗàuki-sàndankà (take stick.of.you) matrilocal marriage kìfà-kwàndo (upset basket) pagan chief’s seizing man and family and selling them as slaves rùuɗà kùyàngi (confuse slave.girls) redness of sky before sunset shân-kàbeewàa (drinking.of pumpkin) pumpkin festival

Gambling, intoxication, promiscuity, miscellaneous The words in the compounds in this sub-section have little or nothing to do with religion; the compounds name activities which are forbidden in Islam. The use of these compounds does not imply syncretism; quite simply, what is forbidden also needs a name! Gambling: 48) bàa-caaca (give gambling) answer in gambling game involving riddle bàa-ni-ƙafàa (give me leg) (said by gambler): give me a loan! bàa-rìkicà (give tangling) answer in gambling game involving riddle

18 The second part of this compound is (related to) gaɗèe ‘cook on a spit before fire’. Bargery [B57] writes this compound as one word: bagade (with -d- not -ɗ-). 102 joseph mcintyre

Intoxication: 49) bàa-màaye (give intoxication) epithet of dàuroo19 mashàa-ruwaa (ma.drink water) 1) so. who drinks beer 2) rainbow20 shân-ruwaa (drinking.of water) drinking beer Promiscuity: 50) àuràr̃-dà-kâi (marry.off self ) woman who marries to please herself 21 bàrà-gadoo (leave.to/for bed epithet of prostitute shuunii indigo) and hence of wife considered sterile through loose ways bàri-shakkà (leave doubt) beads worn just below knee by loose women bàri-tantama (leave doubt) = bàri-shakkà kwaanan-auree (spending-night.of marriage) non-Islamic custom22 kwaanan-gidaa (spending.night.of home) sleeping at one’s paramour’s house shàafà-gadonkà (wipe bed.of.you) prostitute taken as wife shàafà-tàabarmaa (wipe mat indigo) wife sterile due to shuunii previous promiscuity sheegèe-kàa-jee (bastard RHET go = bàri-shakkà goonaa farm) tàakaa-kà-hau (tread.on 2mSBJ mount) = bàri-shakkà Miscellaneous forbidden behaviour: 51) gamà-gàrii (joining town) roving gamà-tsàkaanii (joining between) mischief making shaa-kà-tàfi (drink 2mSBJ go) 1) roving man or woman 2) prostitute 3) witless fool [A799] shaa-mù-ɗooràa (drink 1plSBJ place.upon) rover, idle person shaa-mù-shaa (drink 1plSBJ drink) = shaa-mù-ɗooràa

19 The milletdàuroo (=dàgaràa) may have strange effects (see [B245]). The full epithet is: Dàgaràa bàa-màaye, shàaye-shàayen mài maataa goomà ‘Millet, cause intoxication! The cocktail of a man with ten wives!’. 20 The first meaning refers to ‘a (beer) drinker’; the second meaning is found in Abraham [A662]. 21 See Bargery [B44]. The following variations suggest that the compound is quite old: àmàr-dà-kâi [B28]; àmràr̃-dà-kâi [B30]. See too àmardàgwai [B27] ‘rope round donkey’s neck’ (= taa-zàagài). 22 A previously married woman spends a night with her future husband before the official marriage ceremony. more rural than urban? 103

Islamic or non-Islamic customs? The following Hausa compounds name customs which may exist in both non-Islamic and Islamic cultures: 52) auren-doolè/tiilàs (marriage.of must) forced marriage auren-ɗiibàn (marriage.of scooping.of marriage of woman to wutaa fire) man so that she can re-marry divorced husband23 auren (marriage.of marriage where man gàyyaa collective.work) marries quickly to forget newly divorced wife24 auren-sòoyayyàa (marriage.of love) love marriage auren (marriage.of marriage between two zùmùntaa relationship) families to ‘cement’ relations ci-kà-ɗau (eat 2mSBJ take favourable and quick gàrmar̃kà hoe.of.you) verdict from bribed judge cìrar̃-dangaa (pulling.of fence) in: yaa yi wà màatassà ~25 kwaanan-keesòo (spending.night.of mat) corpse (to be buried in morning) spending night kwaanan-zàune (spending-night.of at home spending night sitting) talking before important event26 kwàntà-ƙùrii (lie.down open.eyed) chaperone màntà-sàabo (forget acquaintance) epithet of judge27 ràkà-mài-gijìi (accompany owner.of part of fence screening house) interior of compound from view

23 There is an equivalent:auren-kisàn-wutaa (marriage.of killing.of fire). 24 In Rayuwar Hausawa (1981:16) the authors also call this kind of marriage: auren-ɗiibàn-haushii (marriage.of scooping.of anger), auren-ɗiibàn-tàkâicii (marriage. of scooping.of indignation), auren-ɗiibàn-tsiiwàa (marriage.of scooping.of insolence), auren-keecè-rainìi (marriage.of tear-up contempt) or auren-kashìn-ƙwàr̃nàﬁi (marriage. of killing.of flatulence). 25 Meaning: ‘he installed new wife, divorcing and turning out previous one’ [A148]. 26 1) A bride and her friends spending the night together before she is taken to the groom’s house. 2) Spending the night doing sth. important like reading or studying (e.g. the night before the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad). 27 This refers to a corrupt judge who forgets he has been bribed. It is found in the expression: kùliyàa màntà-sàabo (kùliyàa seems to be a cranberry). 104 joseph mcintyre

shàa-kanwa (drink potash) feast to celebrate birth or circumcision Shàa-tàmbayà (drink asking) name for kwàntaccee28 tsài-dà-bàaƙo (stop guest) = ràkà-mài-gijìi twàl-dà-ido (peel eye) said of husband visiting in-laws with wife29

Islamic culture, Hausa name In the list below compounds refer to, or imply, Islamic concepts or precepts. The connection between these concepts or precepts and the words in the compound is explained following the list: 53) à-zàabùri-kàryaa (4plSBJ grab bitch) type of sleeveless shirt cìkà-cikì (fill belly) sallàr̃ ~ celebration following Ramadan majìi-ƙâi (ma.feel heart’s the merciful one desire) (epithet of God) mazòo-dà-littaafìi (ma.come with book) the Prophet30 sàɓi-zàr̃cee (take go.ahead) fasting until evening (not in Ramadan) sàdàki31-làƙee (give.alms eat.rapidly) preparing or buying food as alms but giving to members of own household shaa-kùndum32 (drink much) well-read malam shikàn-battàa (letting-go.of receptacle) divorcing wife by saying three times ‘I divorce you’ tàfìi-dà-reerè (go with chatting) inserting vowels into Arabic writing line by line tàfiyàr̃-kuuraa (walking.of hyena) writing Ar. accusative as in Ar.

28 Kwàntaccee is a child considered to have lain in the womb for months or years [B684] and whose mother had a hard confinement, necessitating prayers for her safe delivery [A803]. 29 Bargery [B1066] says that the wife “gads about”, ignoring her husband except to bring him food. The husband has no-one to talk to; shame forbids him to ask about her. 30 This is an epithet of the Prophet Muhammad. Some speakers say this is Bauci Hausa, an innovative dialect. 31 The verb*sàdakàa for which sàdàki would be the imperative form is not known. 32 The wordkùndum is an adverb referring to a ‘large quantity (esp. water)’; the meaning is metaphorical. more rural than urban? 105

tàfiyàr̃-tunkìyaa (walking.of sheep) writing Ar. accusative not as in Ar.33 tàashi-kaa (rise 2msCMP type of cap given as gift fiyà-naacìi exceed persistence) by pilgrims returning from Mecca wankan-tsarkii (washing.of purification) washing after urinating, intercourse, etc. The first compound aboveà-zàabùri-kàryaa (lit. ‘grab a bitch’) names a ‘short-sleeved shirt’ and is, quite simply, a joke: no Muslim would ‘grab a bitch’, and certainly not with bare arms. The relationship between the words in the following compounds and their meanings are clear: cìkà-cikì, majìi-ƙai, mazòo-dà-littaafìi, sàdàki-làƙee and shikàn battàa. The compound shàa-kùndum is a Hausa way of referring to the malam’s great knowledge. (The idea that a learned malam is metaphorically ‘liquid’ is expressed in a similar way outside of compounds: the malam is referred to with the Arabic Bahar̃ ‘sea’.) In tàfìi-dà-reerè the relatively easy task of writing the vowels (after one has written the consonants of the text) is expressed with reerè ‘(easy) chatter’. The meaning of wankan-tsarkii obviously relates to Islamic precepts. (I was not able to find the connections between the Hausa surface form and the obvious Islamic the meaning of sàɓi-zàrcee and of the three pen- ultimate compounds.) Two further such compounds are: 54) ban-hannuu (gimme hand) shaking hands iyà-lauyàa (be.able lawyer) in: gàa ~ there’s a wily lawyer for you! The compoundban-hannuu has an equivalent, mùsaafahàa, an Arabic loan. In iyà-lauyàa we find English ‘lawyer’; but the strong association with the Hausa verb lauyàa (‘accuse falsely’) hints at the fact that law- yers have no place in a traditional Islamic court.

Arabic loans The following compounds contain Arabic loanwords: in the first of the two groups the compounds have an explicit religious meaning; in the second, we find Arabic loans with no religious meaning.

33 Compare: tàﬁyàr̃ ruwaa (walking.of water) 1) infantile convulsions 2) Engl. cursive writing And: tàﬁyàr̃-tsuutsàa (walking.of worm) 1) tickling 2) cursive writing 106 joseph mcintyre

In the first group (55) one word in the compound has a religious meaning or association, e.g. salla ‘prayer’, kar̃atu ‘studying’, hijir̃a ‘asylum’, idi ‘festival’, malam ‘Qur’anic teacher’, haji ‘pilgrimage’, lit- taﬁ ‘book’, r̃ubutu ‘writing’, Rabbana ‘Lord’, kar̃atu ‘study’, fannoni ‘(academic) disciplines’, alwala ‘ablutions’, masi ‘vowels’, asuba ‘dawn prayer’ and kiyama ‘day of judgment’: 55) bìi-sallà (follow feastday) name of child born day after festival ɓatàn-kàr̃àatuu (getting-lost.of reading) error in reading (esp. in Qur’anic school) gudùn-hijir̃aa (running.of asylum) being in exile, seeking asylum jèe-ka-iidìi (go 2mICP festival poor clothes or shoes kà-daawoo 2msSBJ return) kaa-fi-maalàm (you exceed scholar) type of herb majèe-hajìi (ma.go pilgrimage) pilgrim34 maalàm-bùuɗaa (teacher open butterfly manà-littaafìi for.us book) Rabbànâa-kà (Lord 2mSBJ in: ’yan ~ those wadàataa-mu enrich us) looking for help sàukar̃-kàr̃àatuu (arrival.of study) graduation from school (esp. Qur’anic school) shàa-fannooni (drink specialities) well-read, capable malam Shàar̃ùbùutu (drink writing) = Shàa-tàmbayà (above) shìga-dà (enter with station wagon taxi àlwàlar̃kà ablutions.of.you) tàfìi-dà-màasii (go with vowels) inserting vowels into Ar. writing, line by line tàfìi-dà (go with textbook with footnotes maalàminkà teacher.of.you) taashìn àsùbâa (rising.of dawn.prayer) Qur’anic school at dawn taashìn-kìyaamàa (rising.of last.day) day of judgement The nameShàar ̃ùbùutu (drink writing) implies the custom of going to a malam for a medicine which involves writing e.g. a verse of the Qur’an on an allo or ‘writing board’ (often done by a younger student on a smaller board), cleaning the board with water and drinking the water together with the ink used to write out the verse. An alternative to this name is Shàa-tàmbayà (52, above). In the following compounds, the final word is an Arabic loanword but has no religious meaning:

34 Abraham [A640] gives: majèe-hajìi ‘P. who died on pilgrimage’. more rural than urban? 107

56) ban-àl’ajàbii (gimme surprise) surprise gàm-dà-kàtar̃ (meet with luck) good luck mafìi-à’àlaa (ma:exceed importance) the most important shàa-àlwaashi (drink pledge) braggart yaawòn-àmaanàa (journey.of trust) extortion in villages by chiefs zaman-ar̃zìkii (living.of wealth) living happily (married) zaman-girmaa (living.of size in: munàa ~ dà shii dà-ar̃zìkii and wealth) we get on well with him In the verbal compounds listed above, we have seen various kinds of religious meaning, sometimes in the words which form the compound, sometimes in its meaning; some are Islamic, some non-Islamic.

4. Comments on the imagery found in Hausa proverbs and compounds

In terms of religious content, the above lists are, in the main, fairly neutral, simply reflecting a rural culture. However, this reading ignores the fact that, as we saw in the introduction, the non-Islamic religion of the Hausa was intrinsically rooted in nature (see Spittler 1978 and Nicolas 1975), raising the possibility that the rural images in proverbs and verbal compounds evoke non-Islamic religious sentiments. These phrases have survived a radical cultural change which led to the entrenchment of Islam in most domains of Hausa life. I do not believe that the use of these proverbs and compounds has reduced the pace and extent of Islamisation. However, a number of domains in Hausa culture (described below) are syncretistic and may affect Islamisation.

Syncretism in Hausa culture, especially the non-teaching activities of malams A simple example of the convergence of Islam and non-Islamic religion is found in Besmer (1983): describing the part musicians play in the bori (non-Islamic) spirit cult, he says that their participation ‘. . . involves a constant tempering of Muslim beliefs with the conviction that [bori spirits] shape and cause events around them.’ (1983: 43) Lange (2004) indicates that essential elements of the kingship ceremonies in Daura were non-Islamic. Bunza (2006) is a rich source of information on the survival of non-Islamic influences in contemporary Hausa culture: bori (the spirit cult), camﬁ ‘superstition’, surƙulle 108 joseph mcintyre

‘repeating magic formulae’ (see note 19) and tsaﬁ ‘idol-worship’. Reli- gious syncretism can also be seen in the non-Islamic elements present in the non-teaching activities of Hausa religious specialists, the malams (Qur’anic teachers). McIntyre (1996) shows that, while the teaching activities of malams are purely Islamic, some of their non-teaching activities (not of all malams) may be more readily associated with the traditional doctor or boka.35 These activities range from herbal medicine to contact with spirits. Here I shall give a brief description of, and comment on, some of the activities involved as well as on the language used to describe them. The non-teaching activities of malams are various: they may function as imam (prayer leader), mufti (court assistant) or alƙali (judge). As teachers they may be called upon to offer advice to the parents of their pupils concerning education or behaviour. Their central place in the community may involve them in giving practical, day-to-day, advice on how to solve problems with e.g. neighbours, co-wives or colleagues—situations where competition exists. It is in this area that the malam’s various functions may overlap with his use of medical or spiritual knowledge. Many malams—mainly those who specialise in the Qur’an—have knowledge of herbal medicine, learned during the later stages of their education. They compete withbori (spirit cult) practitioners and with ’yan tsubbu (herbalists with some Qur’anic learning). Since clients are cured by various practitioners, each recognises the competence of the other. There is a fairly wide variety of practises undertaken bymalams ; these include ‘working with the Qur’an’ (aiki da Ƙur̃ani) or with other Islamic books. Texts may be used in various ways: drunk (after being written on a writing board), written on paper, recited or read. Such a text (laƙani) is given to the client by the malam for use in a given situation; for instance, a businessman may recite a text given by the malam prior to negotiating a sale or purchase, in the hope that his business will be successful. Numerology (hisabi) involves the occult study of numbers; together with astrology (duba) appropriate times are selected for particular activities. The wordsiddabaru , seems to

35 Nicolas (1975: 342) also mentions ‘. . . une certaine influence . . .’ of the pagan perspective on the ‘. . . société dynastique . . .’, specifying that this influence affects Qur’anic teachers or malamai (ibid: 345). more rural than urban? 109 be a general word for ‘the unexplainable’: this includes the activities described here as well as the miracles recounted in the Qur’an, Torah, Gospels or other books. In European culture, some of these activities would count as magic or conjuring; many of them imply a belief in spirits, some are explicitly forbidden. Belief in the existence of spirits is a part of Hausa life. Words such as iskoki and aljannu, dodanni and rauhanai are everyday words for ‘spirits’. A malam (or other practitioner) may call on spirits to induce illness, injury, madness or even death. This kind of invocation can be dangerous and sacrifice zub( da jini ‘spilling blood’) will be required to make sure that the illness or injury does not strike the malam or his client. Many Muslims reject such activities and refer to them as hila ‘subterfuge’ or camﬁ ‘superstition’ (see McIntyre 1996). One malam told me that most of these activities (which he also engaged in) are indeed forbidden, and that malams only do them in extremis. In terms of their income however, some malams gain more from these activities than from their teaching. A simple example of the convergence of such practices can be found in the verbal compounds above where we find two names for one medicine—used to help a woman who has had a long pregnancy and/or difficulty in labour:Shàar ̃ùbùutu and Shàa-tàmbayà. The name Shàar̃ùbùutu (‘drink writing’) implies writing out e.g. a verse of the Qur’an on a writing board, cleaning the board with water and drinking the water and the ink. This activity seems to be purely Islamic. However Shàa-tàmbayà (‘drink asking’), refers to a process involving spirits—as can be seen in the meanings of tambaya. Normally, the verb means ‘ask’; however, it is also found in the following: ‘. . . tambaya gare shi he has charms which make him invulnerable’ and: ‘ya tambayu he has taken many potions to make him invulnerable, etc. . . .’ (Abraham 1958: 847) Here we have two names—one Islamic, one non-Islamic— for the same medicine. Furthermore, the generic name for the non-teaching activities of malams is addu’a ‘supererogatory prayer’; similarly, a client who regularly seeks such help may be referred to as ainihin ɗalibi ‘real student’—as against the pupils in the malam’s school! These two terms are Arabic loans and seem to have a euphemistic function, obscuring the oft non-Islamic nature of the activities to which they refer. Perhaps the syncretism described here weakens the place of Islam in Hausa culture; on the other hand, by underwriting the influence of these religious specialists, such activities may achieve exactly the opposite. 110 joseph mcintyre

5. Conclusion

The fact that explicit religious elements are not common in Hausa proverbs and verbal compounds raises the question as to whether the mainly rural images found in these phrases evoke non-Islamic religious sentiments or practices. I cannot give a definite answer to this question but argue that these non-Islamic images involve a kind of syncretism which is perhaps, wholly unintended. However, some of the non-teaching functions of Qur’anic teachers seem to involve practises originating in pagan Hausa religion, and the combination of these practises with Qur’anic teaching is syncretism of a different order. The consequences of this syncretism are paradoxical: by con- solidating the central place of malams in Hausa society, they may well help to consolidate the place of Islam.

Abbreviations in examples of verbal compounds

[A*] Abraham’s dictionary (1958) [B*] Bargery’s dictionary (1933) *The number following the initial is the page number. 1pl = 1st p. plural 1s = 1st p. sg. 2m = 2nd p. sg. masculine 4pl = 4th p. plural (= ‘one’) CMP = completive aspect esp. = especially f. = feminine ICP = intransitive copy pronoun m. = masculine p. = person (in examples) REL.CMP = relative completive aspect RHET = rhetorical aspect sg. = singular so. = someone (in examples) sth. = something (in examples) SBJ = subjunctive more rural than urban? 111

References

Abraham, R. C. 1958. Dictionary of the Hausa Language. London: Hodder and Stoughton (Fourth impression, 1978). Ahmad, M. 1994. Aspects of Hausa Compounding. PhD dissertation, Indiana Uni- versity. Bargery, G. P. 1934. A Hausa-English Dictionary and English-Hausa vocabulary. Lon- don: Oxford University Press. Besmer. F. E. 1983. Horses, musicians and gods: The Hausa cult of possession-trance. Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey. Bichi, A. Y. 1997. Current trends and issues in Hausa proverbs. Harsunan Nijeriya XVIII, 150–156. Bloch, M. 1989 (1974). Symbols, song and dance, and features or articulation: is religion an extreme form of traditional authority? In: Ritual, history, and power: selected papers in anthropology. London/Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone, 19–45. Bourdieu, P. 1992. Language and Symbolic Power. Edited and Introduced by John B. Thompson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Boyer, P. 1990. Tradition as Truth and Communication: a cognitive description of traditional discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. ed. 1993. Cognitive aspects of religious symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press. Bunza, A. M. 2006. Gadon feɗe al’ada. Lagos: Tiwal. Centre for the Study of Nigerian Languages (Bayero University, Kano). 1981. Rayuwar Hausawa. Lagos: Thomas Nelson (Nigeria). Cibiyar Nazarin Harsunan Nijeriya, 2006. Ƙamusun Hausa. Kano: Jami’ar Bayero. Jang, T.-S. 2002. Aspects of poetic balance and cohesion in Hausa proverbs. Journal of African Cultural Studies 15 (2), 215–236. Keane, W. 1997. Religious Language. Annual Review of Anthropology 26, 47–71. Kirk-Greene, A. H. M. 1966. Hausa Ba Dabo Ba Ne: A collection of 500 Proverbs. Ibadan: Oxford University Press. Ladan, A. Y. 1980. Zaman Duniya Iyawa ne. Zaria: Northern Nigerian Publishing Company. Lange, D. 2004. Ancient Kingdoms of West Africa: Africa-Centred and Canaanite- Israelite Perspectives. Dettelbach: J. H. Röll. McIntyre, J. A. 1984. Social restrictions on Hausa speech: Speech restrictions on Hausa society. Unpublished Paper, Deutscher Afrikanistentag, Hamburg, 3. October. McIntyre, J. A. 1996. A cultural given and a hidden influence: Qur’anic Teachers in Kano. In Parkin, D. Caplan, L. and Fisher, H. eds. The Politics of Cultural Perfor- mance. Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 257–276. McIntyre, J. A. 2006. Hausa Verbal Compounds. Cologne: Köppe. Maƙarfi, S. 1970. Zamanin nan namu. Zaria: Northern Nigerian Publishing Com- pany. Newman, P. 2000. The Hausa Language: An encyclopedic reference grammar. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Nicolas, G. 1975. Dynamique sociale et appréhension du monde au sein d’une société Hausa. Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie. Silverstein, M. 1991. Metaforces of power in traditional oratory. Lecture, Dept. of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Spittler, G. 1978. Herrschaft über Bauern: die Ausbreitung staatlicher Herrschaft und einer islamisch-urbanen Kultur in Gobir (Niger). Frankfurt am Main: Campus- Verlag. Williams, R. 1988. Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana Press. 112 joseph mcintyre

Wolff, E. 1998. Afrikanische Sprachminiaturen. University of Leipzig Papers on Africa No. 5. ——. 2001. Tonal rhymes in Hausa revisited. In Nicolaï, R. ed: Leçons d’Afrique: Fili- ations, ruptures et reconstitutions des langues; un Hommage à Gabriel Manessy. CNRS: 117–125. Zörner, S. 1994. Eutonetische Strukturen in Hausa-Sprichwörtern. Hamburg, MA thesis.

Internet Sites Christian resources: http://www.christianresourceslinks.com/christmas_and_constan- tine1.htm McIntyre, J. A. 2006. Hausa verbal compounds. Available online (link checked on 26.03.10): https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/4861 Online Etymological Dictionary: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php CHAPTER FIVE

BEING AND BECOMING HAUSA IN ADER1

Benedetta Rossi

1. Introduction

This paper focuses on Hausa identity in Ader: how it is represented in local ethnic discourse; how it is performed in distinctive ways of living; and how it can be acquired in the process of becoming Hausa. The changing social implications of ethnicity are illustrated here with reference to the recent history (approximately 1860-present) of the village of Agouloum in the district of Tamaske (north-eastern Ader). While in today’s social map of Ader, Agouloum is defined as a ‘Hausa’ village, a closer look at the history of its population in the last one hundred and fifty years reveals the presence of multiple ethnicities, which followed separate historical trajectories. Perhaps I should antici- pate that this detailed historical example is hard to follow for anyone unfamiliar with Ader society. Yet, the cultural and practical meanings of ‘Hausaness’ in this region can only be grasped by delving in the maze of local representations of identity and following the rationales and practices adopted by individuals and groups as they live up to categorisations, or fail to do so. Socially and historically, settlements like Agouloum occupy a particular place in the ‘Hausaisation process’ (Sutton, this volume): they are situated in the bakin daji, or ‘deep bush’ of mainland Hausaland (Last, this volume); and they have been characterised, until recently, by low population densities, symbiosis with pastoralists, and greater freedom to reject dominant models of identity than in politically centralised urban centres. The relevance of such places to Hausa studies is twofold. First, from the beginning of the nineteenth century the political and ideological reach of Sokoto has been weakest in places like Ader, allowing for the endurance of

1 I wish to thank Bruce Hall, Anne Haour, Murray Last, Michael Mortimore and the anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments on different versions of this paper. I owe Figure 5.2. to Ezio Martelli’s help. 114 benedetta rossi aspects of Hausa identity that were transformed sooner elsewhere. Sec- ond, the rural world played a constitutive, if scarcely studied, role in the historical development of the better-known urban Hausa society, and arguably deserves closer attention than it has thus far received (Haour and Rossi, this volume).

2. The place of Ader in Hausa history

Ader’s place in Hausa history is summed up by a paradox: while the few Arabic sources available exclusively illustrate the history of its Tuareg components, oral traditions collected amongst both Hausa and Tuareg informants from the beginning of the twentieth century emphasise the presumed ‘autochthony’ of certain sections of its Hausa-speaking population. Ader lies at the north-western edge of Hausaland. It is not mentioned—at least not as ‘Ader’ or ‘Adăr’—in the corpus of early Arabic sources edited by Levtzion and Hopkins (2000). It figures neither in the Kano Chronicles (Palmer 1967), nor in the Hausa bakwai—Hausa banza legendary division (Hallam 1966; Sutton 1970: 195–199). In a manuscript of which we know only that it was written by a ‘learned Fulbe of Sokoto’ and published by Palmer as ‘Sokoto Arabic Document II’, Ader is placed outside the confines of nineteenth century Hausaland: ‘And as to an explanation and meaning of ‘Hausa’, there is understood by it a district to the west of Borno, to the east of the River Niger, to the south of Ader, and to the north of the land of Zak Zak: that is what is meant by the land of Hausa, but it does not include places far from those mentioned’ (Palmer 1967: 14, my emphasis). This view is confirmed by the fact that older people in Ader commonly use the word ‘hausa’ generically meaning ‘south’ and refer to the town of Madaoua (at the southern edge of Ader) as ‘bakin Hausa’, or the Hausa border. Sultan Muhammed Bello’s Infaq al-Maisur (ed. Arnett 1922)2 suggests that at the beginning of the nineteenth century Ader political leadership was in the hands of different Tuareg groups. In his narra- tion of the jihad, Bello distinguishes between Ader-based Tuareg allies

2 E. J. Arnett published a ‘paragraph and in some parts a translation’ of Bello’s Infaq al-Maisur in The Rise of the Sokoto Fulani(1922). While Arnett’s text is probably unreliable for points of detail (see Last 1967: xxxi), it is used here as a general source of information on Sokoto’s relations with Ader. being and becoming hausa in ader 115 Figure 5.1. Ader landscape with village, April 2005. 116 benedetta rossi and enemies of Shehu Ousman dan Fodiyo. The former include jihadists at the following of Mallam Agale, a close collaborator of the Shehu; and the Sultan of Agadez Muhammad al Bakiri, who is portrayed in visit to ‘his towns of Adar’ (e.g. Arnett 1922: 96). The latter include the Kel Gress (Arnett 1922: 51, 89–90), and other ‘Tuareg of Adar’, such as the Tawantakat and the Itesen (Arnett 1922: 96). ‘Sarkin Adar’ is mentioned alongside other sarakuna with whom Sokoto attempts to negotiate (Arnett 1922: 69, 105). This important source by an eye- witness of many of the events discussed, who was in direct relation with the political leaders of the time, shows that early nineteenth century Ader was governed by different Tuareg groups, with the north falling at least partially in the political orbit of Agadez, and the south controlled by the Kel Gress. The main written sources directly relevant to Ader are a set of manuscripts that illustrate the history of some of the Tuareg groups that inhabit the region between Agadez and Ader. Different versions of the Agadez chronicles have been published by Palmer (1910; 1967[1928]: 46–50, vol. 3), Tardivet (1928), and Urvoy (1934). Ader appears in all of these documents, although Palmer’s and Tardivet’s versions mention it only marginally. Urvoy’s version contains a set of documents that Sultan Oumarou of Agadez had copied for him by clerics at his court. The third section of ‘Manuscript B’, is titled ‘Origine du Sultanat de l’Ader’ (Urvoy 1934: 156). While Urvoy considers the first section ‘very ancient’, he states that the third section was written in 1907 (Ibid: 146). This is the same date when Lieutenant Peignol obtained the ‘Y Tarichi’ on the history of the Lissawan (Peignol 1907), the Tuareg group that in 1900 was placed at the head of the newly created district of Tam- aske in north-eastern Ader. Urvoy’s Origine du Sultanat de l’Ader and Peignol’s Y Tarichi provide similar information on the conquest of Ader by the son of the Sultan of Agadez and five ‘supporting tribes’. While the number and composition of the tribes vary across sources, the sources focusing specifically on Ader tend to emphasise the role of the Lissawan.3 These texts narrate that a junior branch of the Sultanate of Agadez established its rule over Ader following wars led by Agabba ibn Mohammed al Mobarek, son of the Sultan of Agadez, and con- fided the country’s administration to three Lissawan sections (Peignol

3 For a comparison of different combinations of ‘supporting tribes’ in different sources, see Norris (1975: 51–57). being and becoming hausa in ader 117

1907; Landeroin 1911: 483–491; Urvoy 1936: 156). Different sources situate Agabba’s conquest of Ader toward the end of the seventeenth century, which corresponds roughly with Muhammad Bello’s reference to Agabba’s defeat of Kebbi in 1674 (Arnett 1922: 15). This version of Ader history has been accepted rather uncritically and widely reproduced in the historiography of Niger (Urvoy 1936: 254–258; Nicolas 1950: 51–52; Séré de Rivières 1965: 163–164; A. Smith 1970: 343; Echard 1975: 85–87; Hamani 1975: 91–107). However, the written sources from which it is derived have not, to my knowledge, been subjected to critical scrutiny. These often quoted documents on Ader history are the testimonies of Islamic clerics alive at the time when the manuscripts were collected and should be considered with caution: commenting on Urvoy’s Chroniques, Hunwick noted that ‘in no case has a fac-simile of the Arabic versions of any of the above documents been published; nor yet have I been able to lay my hands on one’ (1973: 36); H. T. Norris stated that the information given in the Chroniques disagrees with other, more ‘independent’, sources, such as the Infaq al-Maisur of Muhammad Bello (1975: 51–52); and Djibo Hamani argued that the Y-Tarichi ‘while inspired by the information contained in earlier sources, relies heavily on the Lisawan’s oral traditions, sometimes in spite of historical truth’ (Hamani 1975: 16, my translation). Keeping these provisos in mind, perhaps the earliest mention of Ader is to be found in Manuscript J of Urvoy’s Chroniques corpus, the biography of ‘Abou-Bakr fils de Attaher-Tachi’, born in 1657 AD, which does not mention the role of the ‘supporting tribes’, but suggests that during the author’s lifetime Ader was conquered by the sons of the sultan of Agadez; that on its soil wars were fought between Tuareg and Gobirawa;4 and that Agadez had diplomatic and perhaps commercial relations with Ader, as the author’s profession made him ‘travel in Ader’ (Urvoy 1934: 174). This text is interesting because, as the autobiography of an otherwise unknown person, it does not name groups which could have used the manuscript as a tool to legitimate

4 This information is seemingly in accordance withRaudat al-afkar, which reports a sack of Adar led by sarkin Gobir Soba (ed. Palmer 1916: 267; Palmer incorrectly attributes the text to Muhammed Bello, while Last and others ascribe it to Abd Al- Qadir bin Al-Mustafa, cf. Last 1967: xxxiii). Soba’s reign is usually placed in the early eighteenth century. For a discussion of the dating of Soba’s reign in different sources, see Rigo (1985: 21–37). 118 benedetta rossi their chiefly credentials in the eyes of colonial occupants. If its authenticity were verified, it would be the earliest written source confirm- ing the southwards expansion of Agadez control over Ader, following wars with Gobir in the late seventeenth / early eighteenth century. As we move closer to the twentieth century, the picture becomes clearer, because from 1900 onwards we dispose of copious colonial documentation. In the nineteenth century, Agadez appears to have lost control over northern Ader to the Iwellemmedăn Kel Denneg (Nicolas 1950: 56ff.; Alojali 1975: 36ff.). The Kel Denneg (northern Ader) and Kel Gress (southern Ader) remained in power in Ader until they were defeated by the French colonial army. The region discussed in the following sections of this paper fell within the area dominated by Kel Denneg warrior elites (imajeghăn), who extracted resources and labour from local Tuareg and Hausa populations through tributes and raiding. The Kel Denneg acted more like warlords than like rulers. They led a nomadic existence mostly dwelling outside villages, and moving camps within a region falling in their sphere of influence. Alongside Tuareg dependent sections, Hausa groups became encapsulated in an interethnic hierarchy at the top of which were the imajeghăn. This hierarchy was a loose structure of government, lacking complex bureaucracies and ruling apparata. Hausa villages experienced imajeghăn power directly through the levying of tributes and the threat of violence (Joly 1901; Brescon 1901; Urvoy 1933; Nicolas 1939; Pietri 1945; Nicolas 1950). The Arabic sources discussed above focus primarily on conquest and political rule, and contain hardly any information on Ader’s Hausa past. In spite of this, Ader comprises a large Hausa-speaking population whose oral traditions suggest early presence in Ader, where successive waves of Tuareg-speaking immigrants supposedly found them. The Hausa spoken in Ader belongs to the northwestern variety of Hausa, characterised by the greatest dialectical diversity, and hence possibly signalling earlier installation of Hausa speakers than in eastern and southeastern Hausaland (Jaggar, this volume; Caron 1991). The most detailed colonial ethno-historical studies available to us insist that the first inhabitants of Ader were Hausa-speaking Asna (Landeroin 1911: 484; Abadie 1927: 120; Nicolas 1950: 45–46, 48–49), a view confirmed by a rich and detailed corpus of oral testimonies collected in the 1960s by Nicole Echard, and more recently by myself, amongst both Hausa and Tuareg informants. Discussing the ‘Aznas’, being and becoming hausa in ader 119

Urvoy states that ‘les animistes, qui ont conservé chez les Haoussas fran- çais les croyances les plus pures, sont ceux de l’Ader’ (Urvoy 1936: 252). ‘Purity’ aside, this comment suggests the existence of well-established religious practices, which may reflect antiquity. The name ‘Asna’ in Ader has both religious and ethnic connotations (see Haour and Rossi, this volume). Generically, it refers to followers of non-Islamic Hausa religion, which is being gradually abandoned as Islam becomes less tolerant of syncretism (Nicolas 1981). The term ‘Asna’ is also used as an ethnonym to designate Hausa-speaking groups who practiced this religion and are considered autochthones (Urvoy 1936: 252; Echard 1975: 11). However, following the recent revival of Islamic reformism, ‘Asna’ has acquired derogatory connotations and is usually replaced by ‘Hausa’ or by ethnonyms highlighting residence. The emphasis of written sources on Tuareg warrior leaders is partly explained by the bias of a historical tradition focused on political elites and produced by a class of Islamic clerics, which is absent in Asna society. The sources’ silence about Asna society in Ader leaves many questions open: how, historically, have these groups come to be seen as the ‘original Hausa’ of Ader?5 What language did they speak in the past? And why, if they originated from the same set of Chadic speakers who came to be known as ‘Hausa’, do their political, social, and religious institutions differ so markedly from those of the ‘dynastic’, or Muslim, Hausa? The division of Hausa society as we know it into two identities, whose main distinction is religious, is well known (see, for example, Smith 1959: 240; Nicolas 1975). This division is one of the main explananda of Hausa history. Regrettably, however, it has fallen off the research agenda, as references to ‘ethnicity’ and non- Muslim (or ‘Animist’) belief have become increasingly unfashionable in African Studies.6 Another problem is the scarce evidence available for tracing early references to this distinction. The earliest clearly identifiable mention of the name ‘Asna’ that I have been able to locate is in Richardson’s travel notes. Richardson stated that, when visiting Zinder in 1850 he could not obtain information about the ‘Hazna’ easily. His questions were frustrated by evasive answers:

5 In Northern Nigeria, the Maguzawa have also been seen, possibly erroneously, as the ‘original Hausa’ (Last 1993: 269). 6 This is partly a reaction against the particular use of these notions in the French colonial politique musulmane and politique de races (Soares 2005: 53). 120 benedetta rossi

I only learnt what I knew before, that the Hazna make their offerings, which consist of milk and ghaseb, under trees. These Hazna are mostly peasants—little farmers; and like Cain, they offer their deity the fruits of the earth. The Imam said their deity was Eblis, or the Devil (. . .). He informed me also that there are a good number of Hazna in both Zinder and the other towns and villages of the province. He despaired of their ever becoming Muslims, but added, “The great men amongst them must become Muslims by order of the Sheikh, whilst the poor people are left to do as they please, and so furnish a constant supply for the home and foreign slave-mart. It is not in the interest of the Sarkee or the foreign merchants that they should become Muslims.” (Richardson 1970 [1853]: 245). It appears from this passage that in the first half of the nineteenth century Asna people were stigmatised on religious grounds and turned into primary targets of enslavement. This contributed to their auto- marginalisation (cf. Mortimore 1970: 103). Some Asna communities settled in the ‘deep bush’ and minimised their interactions with reformist Islamic society, whilst relying on alliance with other local groups and building on economic and military complementarities. The story told here is set in this type of context. It focuses on the period going from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present in the village of Agouloum. The choice of this village is not random, as the history of Agouloum illustrates the different meanings of ‘Hausa’, ‘Asna’, and various subdivisions of these two ethnic categories. It also highlights how and why certain non-Hausa speaking groups engaged in the process of becoming ‘Hausa’. Economically and politically marginal today, Agouloum played an important role at the beginning of the 1900s in the restructuring of northern Ader politics. It is often qualified as cibiya‘ ’ (Hausa, ‘origin’, lit. ‘navel’) of many groups now settled in more important villages, and therefore cibiya of the villages themselves and of their political power. The old Agouloum Agouloum( Kofai), now abandoned, was a multi-ethnic settlement containing representatives of several Asna groups, Tuareg elites, and lower status Tuareg groups which ‘became Hausa’ as a strategy of status mobility. The history of Agouloum sheds light on the changing relation between models of ethnic identity and ways of living. The main transformations in this process can be summarised as follows:

• The polarisation of ‘Hausa’ and ‘Tuareg’ identities, partly driven by the formation of colonial administrative districts along ethnic criteria. being and becoming hausa in ader 121

• A tendency toward increasing ethnic uniformity of settlements, as opposed to multi-ethnic villages. • The adoption of sedentary lifestyles by progressively more people, primarily as a result of higher population densities. • The hausaisation of originally Tamasheq-speaking slaves and liberated slaves, as a consequence of the long process of emancipation of slave constituencies. • The increasingly rare use of ‘Asna’ as a form of identification, following from growing intolerance of religious syncretism.

It is impossible, on the basis of the available evidence, to speculate on when the terms ‘Asna’ and ‘Hausa’ were introduced in Ader and what they may have meant originally. It is equally difficult to advance conjectures on when the populations that are thus named today first reached this region, what names they have been called, and what languages they have spoken, if they did not always speak Hausa. Given these limitations, the rest of this paper documents how certain Hau- saphone groups lived, and how their identities were represented, in nineteenth century Ader. The following section examines changing interactions between different components of Agouloum’s population. The identifications relevant to these interactions are not ‘Hausa’ and ‘Tuareg’, but a variety of subgroups distinguished by particular traditions, statuses, and roles within these two broader categories.

3. Ader, ‘carrefour de races’:7 ethnic labels and their transformations in Agouloum

Today, Agouloum comprises three administrative villages in the Canton of Tamaske of the Department of Keita: Agouloum Tudu (2100 inhabitants), Agouloum Karama (835 inhabitants), and Sabon Gari Kaora (989 inhabitants).8 Its population is Hausaphone. Many people in Agouloum self-identify as ‘Asna’, and this is how they are characterised by other Asna groups in the region. At first sight, then, it would appear that Agouloum is one of the Hausa villages in the

7 Souchet (1948: 33); Nicolas (1950: 56). 8 Recensement General de la Population et de l’Habitat 2001, Ministère des Finances et de l’Economie. In 1901 the (single) village of Agouloum counted about 400 inhabitants (Joly 1901: 2). 122 benedetta rossi mixed Hausa—Tuareg population of Ader. However, a closer look to the nature of the historical relations between the social components of Agouloum complicates this picture. At the beginning of the 1900s, Agouloum contained both Hausa and Tamasheq speakers. The Hausaphone population comprised two main groups: Bageyawa and Djibalawa. The Tamasheq speaking section comprised Lissawan, Gawalley, and Izanazzafan seasonal migrants (on Izanazzafan migrations, see Rossi 2009: 198–199). Today, Lissawan and Gawalley have adopted Hausa as first language. Before colonial conquest, Agouloum fell within the area of Kel Denneg political supremacy. Kel Denneg chiefs visited Agouloum few times per year, and sent their representatives to collect tributes in cereals. To summarise (and see also Figure 5.2.), these were the social components of Agouloum until the beginning of the 1900s, classified according to language: ASNA / HAUSA-SPEAKERS* Bageyawa Gazurawa and Tarimawa from Bagey, via Mashidi. Djibalawa Immigrants from Djibale, roughly 1870s. Mostly moved out again in the first decades of the 1900s.

TAMASHEQ SPEAKERS Lissawan* From Ghat and Agadez, via Mashidi. Gawalley* Originally Lissawan dependents. Izanazzafan Former slaves of the Tellemédés imajeghen of the Iwellemmedăn Kel Denneg. Seasonal migrants to Agouloum. [Kel Denneg imajeghăn] Sporadic visits * the asterisk indicates groups whose first language today is Hausa. During repeated fieldwork visits since 1997, I collected two different oral traditions concerning initial settlement in Agouloum from informants who identify as Bageyawa. One version states that the Bageyawa (Gazurawa and Tarimawa) were the first to settle in Agouloum, and were found there by groups of Djibalawa and Lissawan (FN 02/03/2005). Another version states that the Bageyawa first reached Agouloum from Mashidi together with the Lissawan (FN 03/03/2005). In either case, the first group of Bageyawa immigrants reached Agouloum including representatives of the two original groups, which according to local traditions composed the population of Bagey. These are the Gazurawa and Tarimawa. The latter are considered autochthones and are defined as ‘yan ƙasa and Asnan ramu (i.e. Asna of the caves, where they are being and becoming hausa in ader 123 thought to have dwelt before their initial contact with the Gazurawa). Reportedly, the Tarimawa were found in the area of Bagey by the first wave of immigrant Gazurawa, who taught them to wear clothes and live in villages, following an agreement summarised by the expression: ‘you have the land, we have the power’ (kuna da ƙasa, muna da iko). This expression refers to the sharing of power between these two constituencies, the immigrants gaining political power over the society of men (iko), and the autochthones retaining their power over the divinities of the land (ƙasa, territory, comprising visible and invisible features of the environment).9 The first encounter of Gazurawa and Tarimawa in Bagey is characterised in stylised terms, which recall the traditions of other similar encounters between village-dwelling immigrant Asna groups and cave- dwelling,10 non-fully-human indigenes (see also Hamani 1975: 34–35, 40–41; Echard 1963: 12). Today, the village chief of one of the villages of Agouloum descends from both Gazurawa and Tarimawa, and his lineage has ‘inherited the sacrifices’ characteristic of Agouloum (thus, they are characterised as ‘heir’ or gadadde, cf. Nicolas 1969: 213). The oral traditions of Agouloum state that only one Batarimata from Bagey (hence, only one individual from the Asnan ramu constituency) joined the original group of migrants to Agouloum. She was called ‘Giwa’,11 and she is also known as ‘the one in the jar’ (ta karfi), from the large water-jar where her body was buried, once she had become so old that, reportedly, she only ate ash and had ceased to exist as a living human. She is remembered as having had great power over the elements, particularly the rain (FN 02/12/2008). The significance of these identities should not escape us, as they attest to increasingly rare, or rarely voiced, religious beliefs. The religious status of the Tarimawa, ‘children of the earth and Asna of the caves’, was the defining characteristic of their identity in relation to the Gazurawa. While every person and lineage (dangi) engaged with specific spirits for their particular good, the

9 The tradition of the Gazurawa and Tarimawa of Bagey is well documented by Echard (1972: 105–112; 1975: 118–124) and Hamani (1975: 28, 36, 40–41). The Gazurawa are mentioned in the Kano Chronicle (Palmer 1967, vol. 3: 98, 105). Last suggested that in the Kano Chronicle the name Gazurawa (or ‘Gazarawa’) was a historical metaphor assimilating groups living in northern Hausaland to the Khazars (1980: 171, 173). 10 Echard provides a map of the caves she located during her doctoral fieldwork (1972: 117). 11 ‘Giwa’, literally ‘elephant’, emphasises the greatness of her magic powers, as the elephant’s dominance in the bush: ‘giwa ta daji’. 124 benedetta rossi

1 Tarimawa and Gazurawa, first half of XIX century 2 Tarimawa, Gazurawa, Lissawan and Gawalley around 1860 3 Lissawan around 1900

Wassoumaman

Tahoua Bagey Sakole Agouloum 2 Tamaske Mashidi 3 Illela Gawalley 1

Keita Kirari

D 5 km jibale

Figure 5.2. Movements of groups discussed in text during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. inheritors ( gadadde) of the main local cult were responsible for rituals that benefited the entire village and which were carried out in particular sites. All rituals involved sacrifice tsafi( ). The Asna of the sacrifices, or Asna matsafa, entertained privileged relations with the most powerful spirits (iskoki) of the area, and these relations gave them a power different from, but not unrelated to, political power. The Tarimawa and Gazurawa (and other groups settled in Bagey), can also be referred to as ‘Bageyawa’ when their separate histories and specific roles need not be emphasised. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a group of Bageyawa left Bagey ‘looking for farmlands’. Before moving to Agouloum, Bagey migrants spent some time in the interethnic village of Mashidi, where they met a family of Tuareg Lis- sawan and a dependent group, the Gawalley. The Bageyawa (Gazurawa and Tarimawa), Lissawan and Gawalley then left Mashidi and founded Agouloum (see Figure 5.2.). They left Mashidi with the Lissawan, looking for farmlands. The Lis- sawan did not farm, but they (the Gazurawa) were farmers. They were together, but they were independent. They did not intermarry. The Lis- sawan chief was more powerful than their leaders. [. . .] The leader of being and becoming hausa in ader 125

the Lissawan who led them here from Mashidi was Zangi.12 [. . .] The Gawalley were together with the Lissawan and used to elect the Lissawan chief.13 (FN 19/09/2005) The Bageyawa’s residence in Mashidi appears to have been short enough to be accomplished within a lifetime, as some of the founders of Agouloum seem to have lived in both Bagey and Mashidi, before moving to Agouloum. Mashidi, which does not exist anymore, was a multiethnic settlement abandoned after a war that occurred around 1860 (de Loppinot 1950; Assadeck, notes;14 my fieldnotes).15 The earlier residence of the Gazurawa and Tarimawa of Bagey in Mashidi is supported by some of today’s elders, whose grandfathers lived in Mashidi as youths, and by marriage ties with other Mashidawa who are now settled in other villages of northern Ader. Mashidi is also the name of an important Asna spirit, whose shrine is still visible as a circle of stones at the top of an inselberg next to the homonymous, now abandoned, village (Figure 5.3.). Many villages in today’s districts of Tamaske and Keita contain people whose ancestors resided in Mashidi, and who consequently define themselves as ‘Mashidawa’, when appropriate. Contemporary residence in Mashidi created ties across groups that settled in different places after Mashidi’s dispersal. Asna leaders of Agouloum and Tamaske became related through marriage at the time of their common residence in Mashidi, and this tie would play a role in shaping political alliances that led to the creation of the Canton of Tamaske in 1908 (see below). In the second half of the nineteenth century, Asna groups in northern Ader formed a loose network, which included the Bageyawa (Gazurawa and Tarimawa of Bagey), Mashidawa, and a large number of similar groups, such as the Keitawa and Kirarawa settled next to the

12 Zangi, son of Mouhamadine and Aghaishata, see Lissawan genealogy in Aghali Assaleck’s ‘Histoire Vivante de Keita’ (the author is a member of the Lissawan ruling family). Zangi’s power resulted in some local groups using his name as a chiefly title (FN 02/03/2005). 13 This testimony is confirmed by Francis Nicolas: ‘(Les) Gawalley (sont) venus avec les Illissawan en Ader (depuis 1696); ces Illissawan ont formé une caste plus ou moins suzeraine des Noirs Asenawa (animistes) et des Aderawa (musulmans)’ (Nicolas 1950: 47). 14 Cf. sections titled ‘Machidi: de l’installation à l’abandon (1862)’; ‘Occupation des Machidawa’; ‘Agouloum: installation et abandon 1862–1904’. 15 In particular 12/02/2005; 13/02/2005; 19/02/2005; 02/03/2005; 27/05/2005; 16/06/2005; 15/09/2005; 19/09/2005; 22/09/2005; 26/10/2005. 126 benedetta rossi Figure 5.3. Shrine of Mashidi, December 2008. being and becoming hausa in ader 127

Keita lake (in the zone of Kel Gress supremacy). Bagey, Agouloum, and Mashidi were integrated, politically, in an interethnic hierarchy headed by the imajeghăn of the Kel Denneg Iwellemmedăn. The small imajeghăn constituency of the Lissawan of Agouloum had a higher status than Asna leaders (zarummai).16 It was subject to Kel Denneg authority even though it did not belong to the Iwellemmedăn confed- eration. The first group to settle in Agouloum Kofai from Mashidi was ethnically composite, and this multi-ethnic character was preserved in the division of the area into separate, named parcels, each of which is remembered as belonging to a particular group. The first settlers identified the place where they would establish a village because a bull (sa) that carried the luggage stopped there. They would settle where this bull stopped. When they reached Agouloum, they named various areas for cultivation, as follows: Fadama; Gaggabo; Chabako; Mullela; Erub; Akala; Izanna. These were the areas where the first Gazurawa elders had their fields. Today, they have been divided in smaller fields and redistributed, and the original boundaries do not exist anymore. Tesey and Abbagi, also called Tudun Issou and Tudun Ichamat were lands of the Lissawan. They did not cultivate them, but used them for herding. There were also some Buzaye, Izanazzafan, who were the slaves of Ichezi and Ataman [of the Tellemédés section of the Iwellemmedăn Kel Denneg]. They came here as seasonal migrants cin( rani) and built their huts on the farms of Ikanna, Chabako, and Mullela. They did little works for the Bageyawa, such as making ropes. (. . .) After they settled in Agouloum, Mahama Tambari17 gave chiefship (hakim- taka) over Agouloum and power over a larger area to the Lissawan. (FN 19/09/2005) How does this picture fit in the broader regional political history? As mentioned in the first section of this paper, Lissawan trajectories in Ader appear to be tied to the establishement of Agadez power in the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. According to Lissawan tradition (Peignol 1907), Sarkin Ader, who descended from the Sultan of Agadez, entrusted the administration of Ader to three Lissawan chiefs. Agadez control and Lissawan power were replaced in the nineteenth century by Kel Denneg and Kel Gress rule (Hamani 1975). Integra- tion in Kel Denneg rule restructured Ader hierarchies: free Tuareg

16 The term zarumi, pl. zarummai, originally referred to elite archers in Asna society (Noma 2002: 116). 17 Makhămmăd ăgg Elkumati was paramount chief (Hausa: tambari; Tamasheq: amenokal) of the Iwellemmedăn Kel Denneg in the period 1875–1905 (Alojali 1975). 128 benedetta rossi and Hausa constituencies had to pay tributes to the Kel Denneg to avoid being attacked, pillaged, and enslaved. Large constituencies of slaves of the Kel Denneg were settled in villages characterised by collective slave status. These slaves did not pay tributes, but served as reservoirs of resources and labour, and could be sold in times of hardship (for a reconstruction of this system, see Lovejoy and Baier 1975). Free Tuareg elites could either confront the Kel Denneg militarily or ally with them. The small Lissawan group of Agouloum took the latter option, and it seems that they were charged with collecting tributes in some villages of the Agouloum-Tamaske area by the Kel Denneg paramountcy, a role which signified greater authority than that of other free village chiefs (Joly 1901: 4; Pietri 1945: 4; FN 02/03/2005; FN23/05/2005). This political system was characterised by gradations of dependence arranged in separate hierarchies that followed, at once, their own internal rules and the rules of overarching hierarchies in which they were encapsulated. Hence, the ‘ruling hierarchy’ established by the Kel Denneg encompassed distinct hierarchies, for example, of the Lissawan and their dependents (such as the Gawalley); of Hausa society; or of particular political combinations of Tuareg and Hausa subgroups (as exemplified by the history of Mashidi and Agouloum). ‘Skewed alliances’ could cut across separate hierarchies, thereby establishing new hierarchical relations. The free Asna of Agouloum had their own representatives (zarummai); they maintained an alliance with the more powerful Lissawan; they paid tribute to the Kel Denneg via their own representative or the Lissawan chief; and hosted on their lands the Izanazzafan, slaves of the Iwellemmedăn, when groups of Izanazzafan came to Agouloum as seasonal migrants.

4. Asna ways of living, ways to become Asna

In nineteenth century Ader, Asna groups appear to have moved frequently in patterns of small-scale local migrations, and the remains of subsequent settlements are buried under thin layers of soil. Village sites abandoned in the last century lie not distant from what appear to be much older archaeological finds (see La Rumeur 1933: 299–318). The movements of the Bageyawa to Mashidi, and then of Bageyawa, Lissawan and Gawalley to Agouloum, took place in a scarcely populated hinterland area at the border between Hausaland to the south being and becoming hausa in ader 129 and the Sahara to the north. Northern Ader is characterised by low rainfall levels, thin soils, and rocky slopes surrounding narrow fertile valleys. Farmers like the Gazurawa were highly mobile: they moved to look for new lands, while their old fields remained in the hands of family members who stayed in the original village. Short-range dis- persion ensured that ties were maintained between ‘mother villages’ and newly founded settlements. As people moved from one village to the other, they acquired new ethnonyms and added them to old ones, thereby maximising potential claims to resources and alliance. Farm- ers lived in symbiosis with pastoralists and specialised long-distance traders (both Tuareg and Hausa, who followed separate trajectories). High mobility resulted in low investment in permanent buildings and defence structures. Abandoned villages left few traces. The only visible remains on the sites of the abandoned villages of Mashidi and Ago- uloum Kofai are the remains of iron production, and the skeletons buried in graves orientated north-south.18 Mud-brick houses and granaries were (and still are) built with locally available materials that did not stand out in the landscape, lowering the risk of raids and attacks. Alliance with sections of different groups contributed to increasing security: multi-ethnic villages were spared by warriors in good relations with at least one group of villagers; and different ethnicities had complementary economic and military skills (the Asna were primarily farmers and archers; the Tuareg were herders, fought with swords, and wealthier warriors mounted camels or horses). Preferred village locations coincided with spaces surrounded by a range of low hills, which ‘hid’ villages like curtains and contained sacred areas, often located closer to the hill-tops (for the importance of hills in rural Hausa society, see Mortimore 1970: 103–108; Sutton 1979: 184; Haour, this volume). Mashidi and Agouloum Kofai were set in this type of environment. Their primary defense strategy was avoidance. Oral testimonies abound with tales of villages whose magic was powerful enough to make them invisible to enemies. In the rocky and hilly landscape of the Ader Doutchi, one cannot see settlements surrounded by hills. Indeed, the lack of any substantial construction and the likeness of mud-plastered houses and granaries to Ader soil

18 Corpses are buried lying on the left side of their body, with their head toward south and their feet toward north, so that when they awake in the other world, they face the east. This burial form is characteristic of late nineteenth century sites. 130 benedetta rossi makes these villages undetectable from any distance greater than a few hundred meters, even when their location is in open sight. In spite of their avoidance strategies, Asna groups were in contact with transhumant Tuareg and Mbororo pastoralists, with whom they exchanged the products of complementary economic activities. Ader lies at the crossroads of trade routes linking North Africa (for example, Ghat in the Lybian Fezzan and Agadez) to Hausaland (Sokoto, Kat- sina, Kano). It is not surprising, thus, that some of the main Tuareg groups settled in Ader (such as the Lissawan and Gawalley) are said to have come from Ghat in the Lybian Fezzan (Souchet 1948; on the Ilemteyen [‘Ilemtin’] Lissawan section in Ghat, see Duveyrier 1864: 367). Their history is tied to the history of Agadez, In Gall, and Tegid- da-n-Tesemt. Groups of Isawaghen traders used to camp in Agou- loum Kofai, where they exchanged different types of salt for millet and beans (FN 01/12/2008).19 Some Ader villages hosted important markets and communities of Hausa long-distance traders ( fatake). These are the groups most often characterised as ‘Hausawa’ as opposed to ‘Asna’. Hausa fatake brought ostrich feathers, livestock, slaves, and locally produced white cotton cloths (tsawaye) to markets in Hausa- land, especially Kano, and obtained cowrie shells (ɗiyan wuri or ‘yan kuɗi), and dyed cotton (they had unsold tsawaye dyed with indigo and brought back for sale to Tuareg customers on Ader markets, FN 04/12/2008). Some of these traders formed satellite communities in Hausaland, with whom their descendants still have close commercial and social relations. Farming utensils, arrow-heads, chains, and other iron instruments were produced by Asna ironmongers, the maƙeran ƙarﬁ baƙi, with iron derived from local ores (iron, ƙarﬁ, was extracted from indurated laterite, Hausa: tama). Abundant remains of tuyères and large slag (ƙanƙari) fragments are visible on the plateau between Agouloum and Keita (Figure 5.4.), where slag-pit furnaces were used following the techniques documented by Nicole Echard in Noces de Feu until as recently as the 1960s (Echard 1965, 1968; cf. Darling 2008; Jaggar 1973). The men of these Asna communities were

19 The Isawaghen are salt traders in the Tegidda/In Gall region, cf. Bernus and Gouletquer (1976). Bernus and Bernus state that the main caravan traders of the In Gall market are ‘Hausa de l’Ader’ (1972: 85, correction in errata). The oral testimony of Yakoub Madayé on the origins of Tegidda links the traditions of the Isawaghen with those of the Lissawan: ‘Les fractions de nos ancêtres étaient celles des Inoussoufan, Imiskikian, Iwantakam, Ilissawan, Itéssen, Kel Owi’ (Bernus and Bernus 1972: 107). being and becoming hausa in ader 131 farmers, hunters, archers, and ironmongers. Different specialisations required the protection of particular spirits. The identities described so far had porous boundaries, and interaction across ethnic divides facilitated ethnic permutation. Good relations with neighbours were crucial, and sometimes led to co-residence in multi-ethnic villages. The Bageyawa (Gazurawa and Tari- mawa) probably encountered the Gawalley before common residence in Mashidi, when the Gawalley resided in Illela Gawalley, a village abandoned around 1935, which used to be located few kilometres to the south of Bagey (see Figure 5.2; cf. Echard 1972: 73). The Gawalley are reported in a number of sources to have originally been dependents of the Lissawan, to whom they paid yearly tributes of millet and cows, and with whom they descended into Ader from their previous emplacement in Air and, before then, Ghat in the Lybian Fezzan (Pei- gnol 1908: 33; de Loppinot 1948: 9, who spells ‘Ighawallei’; Nicolas 1950: 49; Echard 1972: 72–73). Once they reached Ader, the Gawalley started a process of social mobility, which implied their progressive Hausaisation. Hausaisation occurred frequently amongst Tuareg slave descendants as slaves in Tuareg society could become ‘liberated slaves’, but at least in theory, could not attain free status.20 In contrast, Hausa society offered greater potential mobility to slaves (see discussion in Haour and Rossi, this volume). The name ‘Gawalley’ is a transliteration into Hausa of the Tamasheq ‘Ighăwélăn’, denoting ‘liberated slaves’ and sometimes still used by Tamasheq-speakers in Ader with reference to the Gawalley.21 Just as the ‘Imeghad’ category is today called ‘Magaddey’ in Hausa, so the ‘Ighăwélăn’ became ‘Gawalley’ as this group Hausa-ised. Yet, the term ‘Gawalley’, in Hausa, does not have the connotations of dependence of Ighăwélăn in Tamasheq. Some families of Gawalley ‘became Hausa’ by being gradually integrated into the Gazurawa of Bagey, then Mashidi and Agouloum, accounting for differences in the oral traditions collected from today’s ‘Gazurawa’ elders. These differences suggest varying degrees of dependence from the Lissawan, and traditions that

20 See Rossi (2009); on the limited mobility available to slave constituencies in Tuareg society, see Bernus (1976: 91) and Nicolas (1975: 422). Assimilation of Tuareg people into Hausa society was not limited to slave groups; a well studied example is that of the Agalawa traders studied by Dan Asabe (1987). However also in this case, changing ethnicity arguably gave the Agalawa tangible business advantages. 21 In Tuareg society, freed slaves fit in two generic categories: the Ighăwélăn, whose free status has ancient origins, and the more recently freed Iderfan (Bernus 1974). 132 benedetta rossi (the scale shown is 1 metre long). Photo courtesy of Joël le Corre. Figure 5.4. Remains of furnace and tuyères on the plateau SE Agouloum, December 2008 being and becoming hausa in ader 133 overlap or resonate, alternatively, with those of the Asna of Bagey, or of the Lissawan. The incorporation of a group of Gawalley into the Gazurawa explains why some testimonies in Agouloum argue that the Gazurawa (read Gawalley passing as Gazurawa) and the Lissawan came together from Ghat, while others don’t (Gazurawa from Bagey). It also explains why some Agouloumawa use exactly the same metaphors found in the Y tarichi of the Lissawan, where the metaphor in the Lissawan’s request for political power to Agabba is the same as the one of the ‘Gazurawa’s’ (read Gawalley passing as Gazurawa) request for land to the Lissawan chief.22 For the Gawalley, becoming Hausa was a long-term strategy of social mobility. Slowly severing ties of dependence from their former masters, some Ighăwélăn started calling themselves ‘Gawalley’ and acquir- ing a Hausa identity through intermarriage and shared residence with the Hausa Gazurawa. Today some ‘Gazurawa’ of Agouloum are of Gawalley/Ighăwélăn descent, and have been actively erasing the memory of their forebears’ identity and original enslavement for generations. Separation from the Lissawan and progressive integration into the Bageyawa/Mashidawa/Agouloumawa started with the establishment of relations between Bagey and Illela Gawalley (Figure 5.2.) in the early nineteenth century. It was strengthened in Mashidi before 1860, and later in Agouloum. In 1900 the Lissawan families of Ago- uloum moved to Keita, and many Gawalley stayed in Agouloum. Here, only some of them may have been able to claim ‘Gazurawa’ identity, but they could all confidently assert to be ‘Agouloumawa’—an identity that includes all Hausaphone residents.

5. Mobilising ethnicity: the strategic functions of overlapping identities

If residence with a Tuareg imajeghăn fraction may have benefited the Bageyawa of Agouloum under Iwellemmedăn domination, this situation changed in the first years of French occupation. The Kel Den- neg chiefs refused to collaborate with the French administration, and relations grew increasingly hostile. The Lissawan looked like the

22 The Lissawan asked for a ‘bubu that does not wear out’ to Agabba inY Tarichi, Peignol (1907: 32); the ‘Gazurawa’ requested to the Lissawan chief: ‘a bubu that noone else shall wear’ in Agouloum (FN 02/03/2005). While the metaphor is the same, the latter formulation implies a request for autonomy that is absent in the former. 134 benedetta rossi

Kel Denneg in somatic traits, skin colour, clothing and attire. The Gazurawa of Agouloum claim that they defended the Lissawan vis à vis French diffidence, and supported Lissawan appointment as administrative chiefs over a large region of northern Ader. When the French arrived, they were hostile to all the Abzinawa, whom they called ‘bourgamé’.23 They were at war with the Iwellemmedăn, who lost their power definitively. But people feared meeting the French. Because of the Lissawan’s appearance, the French thought initially that they were Abzinawa. But the Agouloumawa defended the Lissawan and told the French that they were not ‘bourgamé’, they were Lissawan, living with them and speaking no other language but Hausa. The French introduced the institution of the ‘Canton’ and were looking for chiefs to head the newly established Cantons. The ‘big men’ (zarummai) of the Asna constituencies discussed and decided to support the candidature of the Lissawan as Chef de Canton. (FN 02/03/2005) Comparison with colonial sources suggests that this testimony aggran- dises the role of Asna groups in the initial establishment of relations between Lissawan chiefs and colonial officers (Gouraud 1944: 42, 69–70). However, it illustrates how Asna constituencies manipulated different types of ethnic categories. The emphasis on language as the main criterion for defining ethnicity shows that the people of Agouloum understood that French administrators ignored the multiplicity of ethnic subdivisions within both Tamasheq-speaking and Hausa-speaking constituencies. The colonial officers’ limited insight into local identities triggered an instrumental emphasis on the Tuareg- Hausa opposition along primarily linguistic lines. If this criterion was perhaps used, as suggested in the last quote, to initially ‘include’ the Lissawan within the ‘Hausa’ and shield them from hostility directed primarily against Tuareg dissidents, a few years later a diplomatic accident involving Lissawan, Gawalley and Gazurawa underpinned a reverse maneuvre.

23 ‘Bourgamé’ is how people in Ader transliterated ‘brigands’, epiteth given to some Tuareg by the French. Literally, ‘Abzinawa’ is a Hausa term indicating Air (Hausa: Abzin) provenance, and should, therefore, include the Lissawan and exclude the Iwellemmedăn (who are correctly represented as non-Airawa, or characterised as Abzinawan daji in contrast to the Airawa imajeghăn). The term Abzinawa has lost its geographic connotation and is now simply used as a translation of ‘imajeghăn’ and political elite, as in the expression ‘(after colonial conquest) the French became our Abzinawa’. being and becoming hausa in ader 135

One day, while Amattaza24 was in Keita, the word spread in Agouloum that the Lissawan had called the Agouloumawa their slaves. After this, the Agouloumawa did not want to be under the Lissawan’s power anymore. They sent two youths who spoke French to Madaoua, to com- plain with the French about the Lissawan’s administration and to ask to be granted independence from the Lissawan. In these circumstances, some leaders (zarummai) of the Mashidawa of Tamaske decided to collaborate with the zarummai of the Agouloumawa (who were also Mashi- dawa), to ask for the creation of a separate Hausa canton of Tamaske.’ (FN 19/09/2005; cf. 02/03/2005; 02/12/2008) While this accident is widely known in the area of Agouloum and Keita, it is unclear how far (if at all) it actually contributed to the creation of the Tamaske district. Colonial records do not provide a detailed explanation for the reasons of this separation. In any case, if the Lissawan or their political clients at some point referred to the ‘Agouloumawa’ as former dependents or slaves, this may not have been too far from the truth in relation to the Gawalley. But such a claim would have constituted a serious faux pas vis à vis the Asna constituencies (Gazurawa and Tarimawa), enraged at such point that the episode contributed, at least in their retrospective reasoning, to the creation of the new ‘Hausa’ Canton of Tamaske headed by someone of Asna descent and separate from the Canton of Keita, headed by the Lissawan. On this occasion, in contrast to their initial position in support of the Lissawan’s candidature, they argued that they were Hausa and different from theTuareg Lissawan. In 1912, Tamaske became capital of the newly created ‘canton’ headed by Aga, cousin of Mousa chief of the Agouloumawa, who supported Aga’s candidature. Aga was a wealthy farmer in Tamaske, and his kinship tie to Mousa derived from their parents’ contemporary residence in Mashidi. On this occasion, the shared ‘Mashidawa’ identity of Agouloum’s and Tamaske’s leaders was mobilised, out of many sets of identities that made people in Agouloum and Tamaske distinct, to support a particular political strategy. Like ‘Agouloumawa’, ‘Mashidawa’ is one of a set of identities that are not mutually exclusive. Hence, some Agouloumawa can self-identify as ‘Mashidawa’ (previous residence in Mashidi), ‘Bageyawa’ (initial emplacement in Bagey), ‘Gazurawa’ or ‘Tarimawa’ (original ethnonyms in Bagey). They can also be defined as ‘Hausa’ and ‘Asna’. Which identity

24 ‘Amattaza’ is the chiefly title of the Tirizei Lissawan ruling lineage. 136 benedetta rossi is chosen depends on the context, circumstance, and interlocutors. Agouloum, it is said, ‘comes from’ Mashidi and, before then, Bagey. Each stop in the subsequent displacements of a population occasions either the founding of an altogether new settlement, or the integration of newcomers in a pre-existing society (see also Echard 1975: 167– 192). The incorporation of immigrants establishes different degrees of proximity, from mere neigbourhood (sometimes in separate village districts) to intermarriage. This settlement pattern emphasises the firstcomer—immigrant distinction and is matched by a particular ethnonymic structure (Kopytoff 1987: 16–17). Any population settlement has a collective name, which includes original and subsequently incorporated sections. Often this collective name simply means ‘people who live in village x’ (e.g. residents of Agouloum would all be called ‘Agouloumawa’). But its components also have separate names. Being Hausa in Ader implies owning a set of overlapping Hausa identities, which individuals inherit from their parents, or acquire through residence and marriage. This ethnic rationale puts a premium on ‘wealth in people’ (Kopytoff and Miers 1977: 9–11; Guyer 1994), as owning overlapping identities entails the ability to mobilise multiple relations in different circumstances. It reflects an incorporative, rather than exclusivist, ethos (Burnham 1996), which one would expect to find in contexts where risk is high, land abundant, and labor scarce. On the other hand, lacking multiple Hausa identities can be seen as an indication of slave origins and recent integration into one or the other Hausa group. Ethnic passing involves a loss in potential identifications that lasts several generations, until a varied portfolio of identities can be reconstituted. Hence, voluntary ethnic permutation is usually opted for when benefits outweigh losses, for example by granting access to increased status mobility.

6. In conclusion: Hausaisation observed

In Ader, and possibly elsewhere, differences across groups are neither exclusive nor stable. Inclusive identities are maintained so as to maximise opportunities of alliance and collaboration, whilst exclusive ethnic criteria support political strategies in particular circumstances, such as the formation of administrative districts under colonial rule. These observations do not justify a purely functionalist argument. Identity fissions and fusions, as well as the alignments formed behind particular ethnic labels, are rooted in historical experience (Peel 1989; being and becoming hausa in ader 137

Burnham 1996: 155). Hence, the Asna defense of the Lissawan vis à vis the French, the Asna/Lissawan opposition to the Iwellemmedăn, the Gazurawa and Gawalley fusion, the Asna refusal to remain under Lis- sawan power, and the alliance between the ‘Mashidawa’ of Agouloum and Tamaske, reflect historical choices to align with allies, and split from foes. These choices may result from constraint or free will—either way, they are not historically random. ‘Hausa’ in Ader is a language, a region to the south, and a model of identity. When commonalities between Asna and Hausa are emphasised, by virtue of some shared characteristics, primarily language, a Baasne can claim Hausa ethnicity, whilst retaining his other identifications. But this situation has been changing. As many of the characteristics peculiar to Asna identity are becoming obsolete, ‘Asna’ is progressively replaced by ‘Hausa’. In this context, and possibly more generally in the region we now call Hausaland, Hausaisation reflects the adoption of Islam, inclusion in the sarauta system of governance recognised as ‘traditional’ under colonial rule, disappearance of certain occupations (hunting, smelting), lifestyle changes dictated by increasing population density, and the adoption of unilateral kinship. Should this process ever be complete, all Ader ‘Asna’ may one day become exclusively ‘Hausa’ . . . including the ones who were originally ‘Tuareg’ (such as the Gawalley). By an irony of history, those ‘Asna’ who managed, in the nineteenth century, to escape forced Hausaisation by enslavement, may thus be categorically joined with those Tuareg who ‘became Hausa’ in order to erase their slave origins.

References

Abbreviations ANN: Archives Nationales du Niger, Niamey FN: Author’s fieldnotes

Private collections and archival Sources Assadeck, A. n.d. Notes on the history of Keita and the Ader. Four hand-written copy- books constituting research material collected in villages and copied from published sources and colonial archives by A. Assadeck. Private collection. Brescon, 1901. Monographie du Cercle de Tahoua. ANN 17.1.3. Joly, Capt. 1901. Monographie du Cercle de Tahoua. ANN 17.1.1. Loppinot, M. de. 1950. Notes Historiques sur les Villages du Cercle de Tahoua. Tahoua, private collection. Peignol, A. 1907. Monographie du Cercle de Tahoua. ANN 17.1.4. Pietri, Capt. 1945. Note sur les Touareg Oulliminden du Cercle de Tahoua. ANN 17.1.7. 138 benedetta rossi

Souchet, M. 1948. Les Lissaouanes et le Canton de Keita. Esquisse d’une Histoire de l’Ader. Private collection of A. Assadeck.

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La Rumeur, G. 1933. Les témoins d’une civilisation ancienne dans le Cercle de Tahoua. Bulletin du Comité d’Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de l’AOF 16(2), 299–318. Last, M. 1967. The Sokoto Caliphate. London: Longmans. Last, M. 1980. Historical metaphors in the Kano Chronicle. History in Africa 7, 161–178. ——. 1993. History as religion: De-constructing the Magians ‘Maguzawa’ of Nigerian Hausaland. In Chrétien, J. P. ed. L’invention religieuse en Afrique. Paris: Karthala, 267–296. Levtzion, N. and Hopkins, J. F. P. 2000. Corpus of early Arabic sources for West African History. Princeton (NJ): Markus Wiener. Lovejoy, P. and Baier, S. 1975. The desert side economy of the Central Sudan. Inter- national Journal of African Historical Studies 8(4), 551–581. Mortimore, M. 1970. Settlement evolution and land use. In Mortimore, M. ed. Zaria and its Region: A Nigerian savanna city and its environs. Zaria : Ahmadu Bello University Press, 102–122. Nicolas, F. 1939. Notes sur la société et l’état chez les Twareg du Denneg (Iullemme- den de l’Est). Bulletin IFAN 15, 579–586. ——. 1950. Tamesna: Les Ioullemeden de l’Est ou Tuareg Kel Denneg. Paris: Impri- merie Nationale. Nicolas, G. 1969. Fondaments magico-réligieux du pouvoir politique au sein de la principauté Hausa du Gobir. Journal de la Société des Africanistes 39(2), 199–131. ——. 1975. Dynamique sociale et appréhension du monde au sein d’une société Hausa. Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie. ——. 1981. Dynamique de l’Islam au sud du Sahara. Paris: Publications Orientalistes de France. Noma, A. 2002. Tahoua, d’hier à aujourd’hui. Niamey: Nouvelle Imprimerie du Niger. Norris, H. T. 1975. The Tuaregs. Their Islamic legacy and its diffusion in the Sahel. Warminster (UK): Aris and Phillips. Palmer, H. R. 1910. Notes on some Asben Records. Journal of the Royal African Soci- ety 9(36), 388–400. ——. 1916. Western Sudan History: The Raudthat ul Afkari. Journal of the Royal Afri- can Society 15(59), 261–273. ——. 1967 [1928]. Sudanese memoirs. Being mainly translations of a number of Ara- bic manuscripts relating to the Central and Western Sudan. London: Frank Cass. Peel, John 1989. The cultural work of Yoruba ethnogenesis. In Tonkin, E. Macdonald, M. and Chapman, M. eds. History and ethnicity. London: Routledge, 198–215. Rigo, M. 1985. Contribution à l’histoire du Gobir au XVIIIe siècle. MA thesis, Univer- sité de Niamey, Department of History. Rossi, B. 2009. Slavery and migration: Social and physical mobility in Ader (Niger). In Rossi, B. ed. Reconfiguring slavery: West African trajectories. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 182–206. Séré de Rivières, E. 1965. Histoire du Niger. Paris: Berger-Levrault. Smith, A. Some considerations relating to the formation of states in Hausaland. Jour- nal of African History 5(3), 329–346. Soares, B. 2005. Islam and the prayer economy. Ann Arbor: The University of Michi- gan Press. Tardivet, R. 1928. Les sultans de l’Air. Bulletin du Comité d’Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de l’AOF, Oct. 1928, 659–694. Urvoy, Y. 1933. Histoire des Oulliminden de l’Est. Bulletin du Comité d’Etudes His- toriques et Scientifiques de l’AOF, 16(1), 66–97. ——. 1934. Chroniques d’Agades. Journal de la Société des Africanistes 4(2), 145–178. ——. 1936. Histoire des populations du Soudan Central (Colonie du Niger). Paris: Larose.

CHAPTER SIX

KUFAN KANAWA, NIGER: THE FORMER KANO?1

Anne Haour

1. Introduction

Contributions to this volume concern themselves with the question of the time-depth of the Hausa. Yet much as it is clear that archaeology is uniquely suited to supplying answers where other sources of evidence—especially oral and written histories—lack, and on docu- menting ‘everyday histories’ rather than those of rulers and chroni- clers, non-negligible difficulties relate to the archaeological recognition of ‘the Hausa’. Some are specific to thekasar hausa; notably the fact that very little archaeological work has been carried out, and that it has often been casual or cursory. Partly as a result of this, key surveys of the archaeology of West Africa merely comment briefly on the lack of data (see e.g. Phillipson 2005: 279; Connah 2001: 124–125; though see Insoll 2003: 289–304 for a more extended treatment). Other difficulties in tracking the time-depth of the Hausa are, however, due to the nature of archaeological data generally: foremost among these is the thorny question of the archaeological recognition of ethnic identity (Jones 1997; Mayor et al. 2005; contributions in Insoll 2007 for cogent summaries). Archaeologists have become well aware that groups did not exist as bounded socio-cultural units; and they are further limited by the fact that any archaeological recognition will rely on the material expression of identities, which we know from modern case studies are often negotiated in intangible ways (as is shown for the kasar hausa in this volume: Haour and Rossi, Cooper, Rossi, Masquelier, Worden). If the archaeologist is therefore to be useful to the question of the

1 The British Academy made most of this research possible, through awards of Small Research Grants and a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2002–2005). Thank you to Maifada Ganda for his work in reconstituting the vessel in Figure 6.4. For discussions which helped sharpen the arguments in this paper I am grateful to participants of the Hausa identity: history and religion symposium (Sainsbury Research Unit, Norwich, July 2008), in particular Patrick Darling, Murray Last and Dierk Lange; and to the reviewer. 142 anne haour

Hausa past, an initial question must be: how can one define and recognise a Hausa site? This paper begins with a brief overview of the archaeology of the Hausa areas, concentrating on the themes of religion, history and identities. I then offer as a case study the site of Kufan Kanawa (Republic of Niger), reputed to be the predecessor city to Kano and thus linked with the Hausa people. Results of archaeological and oral historical research at Kufan Kanawa (1999–2003) will be outlined, and related to archaeological and historical surveys of the wider region, particularly those around the city of Kano. I then consider what information Kufan Kanawa yields regarding the Hausa past, and also what general lessons it offers in approaching the Hausa archaeologically. What do we know of the chronology and cultural affiliation of the site, and how can history and archaeology be reconciled? I conclude by suggesting that, rather than focusing too closely on the problems of an archaeological recognition of ethnic identities, a more fruitful approach is to consider the general character of past settlements, and the information it conveys about past ways of life and identities. In the case of the Hausa, a distinguishing characteristic is the use of large-scale walls in enclosing settlements, and the existence of a mature agricultural hinterland.2

2. The archaeology of thekasar hausa

Archaeologically speaking, the archaeology of the central Sahel is a young discipline, the vast majority of work falling in the past 25 years. The archaeology of the Hausa area is no exception, and points of data remain dispersed. As detailed overviews of this already exist (Haour 2003ab, 2007; Insoll 2003), this chapter will instead take a thematic approach, expanding on specific case studies where appropriate. As a convenient, albeit admittedly simplistic, classificatory device, we can group into three rough categories the remains that have been considered by archaeologists in the kasar hausa: hills (inselbergs), large-scale occupation sites (sometimes walled), and iron-working sites. Map 6.1. indicates the location of sites discussed in the following overview.

2 Heinrich Barth’s (1857–9: I: 481–488) lyrical comments on the landscape between Katsina and Kano are a good illustration; this was judged (Barth 1857–9: I : 482) “one of the finest landscapes I ever saw in my life”. kufan kanawa, niger 143 Map 6.1. Map of sites discussed in text. 144 anne haour

Inselbergs and their immediate vicinity have often been described as sites of early settlement, sometimes also of potential religious importance (Leggett 1969; Mortimore 1970; A. Smith 1970; Bala 1977; Last 1979; Insoll 2003). The Zaria region has been best described in this respect. Obayemi (1975: 39) reported ‘forcefully convincing signs of previous human habitations’ on the hills enclosed by the Zaria walls, specifically those of Kufena and Turunku, and these were later described in fuller detail by Sutton (1976b, 1977b) and Bala (1978). Kufena inselberg, for example, features stone circles, grinding and pounding stones, pounding hollows, and evidence of terraced stone field walls (Sutton, 1976b and especially 1977b). In addition, inselbergs are often linked with past religious belief and practice; in fact, Obayemi (1976: 3) described religion as an aspect of the ‘hitherto anonymous culture of the inselbergs’. Kufena, for instance, has traditions of religious importance (Sutton 1977b), and ‘altars’ in the shape of stacked rocks are reported on various inselbergs in Zaria district (Leggett 1969; Bala 1977; Sutton 1977b). Spiritual factors could therefore have played an important part, and made inselbergs such as Dalla, Turunku and Kufena centres of powerful cultural attraction (A. Smith 1970). How- ever, difficulties surround the dating of these occupations. Excavations at the inselbergs of Kufena (Bala 1978; Sutton 1977b), Santolo and Fal- lau (Sieber 1992) are illustrative of this: there is often little, or heavily abraded, pottery; shallow or nonexistent occupation sequences; and insufficient charcoal for dating purposes. Vast occupation sites have represented a second focus of interest. Often, these archaeologically-recognised settlements seem linked to specific places mentioned in historical records, and archaeology is deployed to test the validity of the historical record. Occupation sites investigated with this view include Soro and Maleh in the Kebbi valley (Obayemi 1977), Birnin Garafa in the Nigérien kasar hausa (Maître n.d.: 141–145), and Marandet near Agadez (Prautois in Mauny 1953; Grébénart 1993; Fenn 2006; Magnavita et al. 2007). These excavations have not yet been published fully enough to shed light on the question of the cultural affiliation of their inhabitants; in particular, comprehensive details of the ceramics excavated are not known (though see Magnavita et al. 2007 for a promising exception). A more thorough illustration of the issues raised by the investigation of such sites is presented by the work of Sieber (1992), who sampled a settlement at Fallau, near Kano. A noteworthy feature of the site was the presence of a readily accessible stratified sequence created by a gully; Last (1979: kufan kanawa, niger 145

19), who first reported it, pointed out that this was ‘[a] rarity in Hausa- land’, making the site ‘potentially a prime source for a pottery sequence by which to date other sites in central Hausaland’. Sieber (1992) placed an excavation unit adjacent to this gully and recovered pottery, lith- ics, iron and slag, granite fragments and baked clay. Several vertical features contained charcoal, animal bone, burnt clay and sherds. Three radiocarbon dates from the excavation unit ranged over a period of three to four centuries around AD 1000 (Sieber 1992: 66–72; Table 5.14); these can be added to an eleventh-century date known from earlier work (Obayemi in Last 1979: 19). Sieber (1992) divided pottery from surface surveys and excavation into several wares, but no compelling patterns emerged in an essentially stable ceramic sequence. Thus, it proved impossible on the basis of the pottery analysis carried out to determine whether changes in the material were the product of migrations and conquests as indicated in the Kano Chronicle, or of locally driven developments. Nonetheless, the dates and the extent of the cultural material at Fallau did demonstrate the presence in the Kano area of large-scale settlement and consequent social changes nearly a thousand years ago (Sieber 1992). The settlements of thekasar hausa often feature remains of the walling which so impressed outside visitors from the sixteenth century onwards (e.g. Anania 1582, in Berthoud and Lange 1972; Clap- perton et al. 1826, II; Staudinger 1990 [1889]). These walls have also, more recently, attracted the attention of archaeologists and historians (Moody 1967; Mortimore 1970; Obayemi 1976, 1977; Sutton 1976b; Last 1979; Effah-Gyamfi 1986; Darling 1986, 1988ab; Sieber 1992; Connah 2000, 2001; Haour 2003ab, 2007). An example of a direct archaeological investigation of a walled enclosure is presented by the work of Sutton (1977b) at Kufena, strongly linked in written and oral history with the history of Zaria (Sutton 1976b). A trench cut through this wall, its ditch, and an occupation area behind it revealed that the wall was made of clay and clayey laterite with weathered granite, possibly with a past revêtement (Sutton 1977b). Significantly, there apparently exists a connection between walls and inselbergs. Such is for instance the case at Kano, Zaria and Turunku (Mortimore 1970). Effah-Gyamfi (1986: 24), during work in the Zaria region, suggested that the walls at Turunku were constructed to surround a group of inselbergs, while the walls at Kufena and Dumbi are built close to the foot of inselbergs, enclosing them and often very little else (Sutton 1976b, 1977b). Obayemi (1975) confirmed that inselbergs tend to 146 anne haour dominate the interior of the Turunku and Kufena enclosures. Both walling and hills may represent manifestations of power. Iron-working localities are the third class of site considered in some depth by archaeologists in the Hausa areas. Iron-working was obviously practiced in the kasar hausa, and this perhaps from an early date (Darling 1988ab), but the question of continuity or discontinu- ity between these past iron-workers, and the Hausa people who later inhabited the region, remains open. The best known of these iron- working localities, Samaru, illustrates well the problems inherent to studies of such sites. Samaru features the remains of several furnaces, and provided a series of radiocarbon dates suggesting what was probably a short occupation in the second half of the first millennium AD (Sutton 1976a, 1977a; also Obayemi in Effah-Gyamfi 1981b: 6–7, and Sutton 1976a: 12). We know, then, when people smelted, but not who they were. Indeed, excavations have revealed only a small amount of cultural material and a shallow stratigraphy (Effah-Gyamfi 1981b). Though most likely linked to the fact of a very short-term occupation, this lack of material makes difficult any comment on the cultural affiliation of the smelters. Having set the broader framework of the archaeology of the Hausa areas, this paper now considers the site of Kufan Kanawa. Archaeolog- ically speaking, this is the only walled site of the kasar hausa for which we possess chronometric readings and a detailed ceramic sequence. It also benefits from historical data, which will be introduced first.

3. Kufan Kanawa: prior knowledge

Even prior to archaeological investigations by myself and Nigérien colleagues, Kufan Kanawa (Figure 6.2.) was a relatively well-known site, both locally and in academic literature. This fame came largely from the site’s alleged association with the city of Kano: tradition held that the people of Kufan Kanawa had abandoned it to go found Kano. Today, the area is referred to as Tsotsebaki territory, a group who consider themselves as part of the wider Hausa community, and with a particular historical trajectory involving the creation of a series of independent polities around Zinder. The time-depth of the Tsotsebaki has been explored by Saley (1993–1994), and we know that ‘Zozo- bachi’ attracted the notice of the sixteenth-century Italian author Anania (1582, in Berthoud and Lange 1972: 335 and map facing page 302; also Sutton 1979: 198, n. 76). kufan kanawa, niger 147 Figure 6.2. Site of Kufan Kanawa. January 2003. 148 anne haour

Kufan Kanawa lies between two granite ridges; the site is now unin- habited and is used as farming land for millet, sorghum and groundnut. A stone wall, consisting in parts of well-aligned granite blocs, and in other parts of lateritic rubble, and enhanced by a natural embankment, is the first striking evidence of past settlement. This wall forms a semi-trapezoid enclosure of about 6 kilometres’ perimeter, surrounding an area in excess of 260 hectares. It appears to have been built in a single phase: no additions, kinks or segment junctions are apparent. Also visible within the enclosure are remains of what is known locally as the gidan serki (house of the ruler), a double line of stones forming a near-square of 150 by 150 metres. Mounds of stone throughout the site suggest that additional structures once existed, now cleared by agricultural activities. There is in both published and oral sources a long-standing understanding that the place known today as Kufan Kanawa is of relevance to the emergence of Kano; but this link also sits alongside traditions which talk of a varied local cultural mix. Traditions reported by Landeroin (1910–1911: 425–426) state that a Borno prince named Mohammed Nafarko arrived in the region sometime between 800 and 1050 years ago, in pursuit of three fugitive slaves. He caught up with them at a place called Ganuwa, then inhabited by Hausa-speaking asnas subject to a ruler called Ganda Ganga or Dabo, who was based at Kufan Kanawa and was a Hausa-speaker. Ganda Ganga offered the rulership of the region to Mohammed Nafarko, and went south to found Kano. Brouin (1938: 470) too documented a connection between Kano and Kufan Kanawa. He also states that Kufan Kanawa (which he appears to have visited, and been impressed by) was founded by immigrants of Borno origin, specifically from Birni Gazargamo, and that it was a prosperous town, with a stone wall several metres high and 15 gates, and a dozen wells fifty metres deep. For Brouin (1938: 469), the people of the area are thus the result of a fusion of ‘éléments haoussas installés dans le pays de temps immémorial’, with influences from, particularly, Borno. A. Smith (1970: 343–344, 1976: 187) also embraced the idea of a foundation of Kano by the people of Kufan Kanawa, and a Tsotsebaki origin for Bagauda, the legendary founder of Kano in the Kano Chronicle. Most recently, Saley (1993–1994 : 75) described Kufan Kanawa as ‘le site le plus important et le plus connu des historiens comme étant un habitat hausa’. Considering it to be part of a Hausa migration southwards from Aïr, he suggests that the initial settlers, hunter-gatherers, chose the site because of its natural resources; the stone enclosure was erected at a later date (hypotheti- kufan kanawa, niger 149 cally, eleventh-twelfth centuries AD), at a time when the Hausa sought to affirm their political stability and might, and as a defence against Tuareg raiders from Aïr (Saley 1993–1994: 76–83; see also Plate page 79). In Saley’s view (1993–1994: 101–109), several ninth-tenth century Hausa sites in addition to Kufan Kanawa and Ganuwa exist in the Tsotsebaki area. He understands these as asna villages around which arose the first political structures, and onto which later Kanuri elements were grafted. Therefore, a series of academic sources3 give Kufan Kanawa and its area a key role in Hausa history. The key oral tradition informing this understanding appears to be the Wakar Bagauda, which was reported by Hiskett (1964, 1965ab). This tradition speaks of Bagauda as a hunter and agriculturalist who, during a dry season migration, planted crops and began a settlement at Kano which soon attracted many new inhabitants. Later attacked by slave-raiders from Tumbi/ Wacha, the people made Bagauda their ruler for protection. Hiskett’s informants had identified Tunbi and Wacha as pagan deities (His- kett 1965a: 114–115, n. 28 and 29), but they are in fact towns of the Tsotsebaki area (A. Smith 1976: 187, 188 n. 124; Last 1985: 192, n. 91). Wacha is just twenty kilometres from Kufan Kanawa, and is the current seat of the Serkin Tsotsebaki (Figure 6.3.), in whose safekeeping lie local historical traditions. Indeed I heard a very similar version of the Wakar Bagauda near Kufan Kanawa, and interviews around the site confirmed that the link with Kano is well known locally: here, too, it is recounted that the people of Kufan Kanawa emigrated under the leadership of Bagauda to found Kano, leaving authority over the Kufan Kanawa area to the first ruler of the Tsotsebaki, Dundurusu,4 whose capital was at Ganuwa (Haour 2003a). The connection between this area and Kano is of course also reflected in the name—Kufai means ‘abandoned settlement’ in Hausa, and the Kanawa are the people of Kano. This generic name is certainly shared with other sites,5 and any earlier name for the settlement, which might be mentioned in precolonial written evidence, is seemingly lost.

3 To those cited above one can add briefer allusions to the link between Kufan Kanawa and Kano, e.g. Mauny (1961: 138), or Trimingham (1962: 126, n. 2). 4 The list of Tsotsebaki rulers I obtained in Wacha closely matches previously published versions, but with some variations. ‘Dundurusu’ ( frightening in Hausa) is variously an Arab, a Borno slave, a Gobirawa, or a settler from the Borno town of Gazargamo (Haour 2003a: 46 for overview). 5 For instance, Obayemi (1975: 39; 1976: 8) mentions a place called Kufan Kanawa west of Katsina, featuring a small quadrilateral stone structure. 150 anne haour

Figure 6.3. Serkin Tsotsebaki (at left) in front of his palace with a guard. Wacha, early 2002. kufan kanawa, niger 151

Having set the ground lines of what was known of Kufan Kanawa, I now present the archaeological work I directed at the site, in collaboration with colleagues from the Institut de Recherches en Sciences Humaines (Niamey). This work combined archaeological investigation, anthropological interviews, and historiographical critique to begin to consider why, how and when Kufan Kanawa was settled.

4. Archaeology at Kufan Kanawa

Full accounts of the archaeological work carried out at Kufan Kanawa are given in Haour (2003a, 2006); here, I shall merely offer an overview of the work and of the material encountered. A further aim, driven by the multidisciplinary nature of this volume, is to give a sense of the challenges faced when taking up the gauntlet thrown down 25 years ago by Murray Last (Last 1979) to use archaeology to shed light on the Hausa past. Two field seasons were undertaken at Kufan Kanawa, in 2000 and 2003; these followed on from a preliminary investigation in summer 1999. The six-week 2000 field season consisted of a pilot excavation and a systematic survey which sampled materials on the surface of the site. The opportunity for excavation arose when our team discovered that a gully had cut through the stone wall surrounding Kufan Kanawa. At this point, inspired by a similar feature at Fallau described by Last (1979) and Sieber (1992)—see above—and by comments by Sutton (1976b: 5–6) on the benefits of an archaeological cross-section in eluci- dating wall construction, we investigated this ready-made section. This provided crucial information on the wall’s construction, and the first idea of its date. The width of the wall here was approximately 1m30, and its height 1 metre; on its inside face was a homogenous soil with very little cultural material, possibly a former earthen embankment. The wall stood atop a thin yellow layer (potentially of anthropogenic origin) sealing an apparent rubbish pit which contained intermingled ash, soil, charcoal flecks and sizeable potsherds. Two charcoal samples from this pit yielded very similar readings,6 after calibration falling between AD 1320 and 1620, with the likeliest period the fifteenth century. The occurrence of potsherds and charcoal sealed beneath the wall

6 495 ± 40 bp [Gr-18305] and 470 ± 45 bp [Pta-8471] (Haour 2003a: 78). 152 anne haour presented an ideal-case scenario as outlined by Sutton (1976b: 5–6) in his discussion of the Zaria walls: it offered an assemblage of material culture from a known date, and placed the likely completion of the structure before approximately AD 1500. It also suggested that the site was occupied before the wall was erected, perhaps for a substantial length of time given the depth of the layers accumulated. The surface survey, carried out in parallel, yielded pottery similar to that of the excavated stratigraphy, suggesting settlement continuity; it also identified areas where cultural materials were particularly dense, which we presumed indicated foci of past activity. The five-week 2003 field season allowed us to excavate at some of those presumed foci; these included the vicinity of the seasonal ponds at the centre of the site, the interior of the gidan serki, and the higher, sandier parts of the site on which dense pottery scatters had been recorded. These excavations were complemented by surface collections at neighbouring sites: Ganuwa, 14 kilometres north-east of Kufan Kanawa, remembered as the first capital of the Tsotsebaki Hausa, and Tudun Awaki, a site to my knowledge hitherto unreported, 1 kilometre from Ganuwa. Five further radiocarbon dates were obtained for Kufan Kanawa. One lies in the first millennium bc and is thus surprisingly early; although not out of character with the wider archaeology of the region, it requires further corroboration (Haour 2006: 41). The other four dates fall between AD 1300 and 1650 after calibration,7 confirm- ing the results obtained in the first field season. During both field seasons, particular attention was devoted to the pottery recovered. Since no comparable sites had been excavated and fully reported in a radius of some 100 kilometres, it was necessary to develop from scratch a ceramic typology for the Kufan Kanawa material. Taking the results overall, the material appears by and large domestic, and is homogenous in form and in decoration, suggesting settlement continuity. Decoration is rare; less than a third of the total assemblage studied was decorated. What decorated pottery existed demonstrated a clear preference for a type of decoration featuring rows of small convex oblongs similar in shape to grains of rice (Figure 6.4.); this folded strip rouletting results from the use of a tool made of folded strips of palm frond, rolled over the pot surface before firing.

7 330 ± 40 bp [GrA-23652], 350 ± 35 bp [GrA-23667], 410 ± 40 bp [GrA 23653], 570 ± 40 bp [GrA 23658] (Haour 2006: 38, Table 1). kufan kanawa, niger 153

Figure 6.4. Folded strip-rouletted vessel, recovered from 2000 excavations, Context C, and reconstituted by Maifada Ganda. Inset: detail of folded strip rouletting motif (Sherd KME E344). 154 anne haour

Naturally, pottery typologies are but a tool, only relevant in identifying past cultural events if the ‘correct’ variables are selected. Which variables happen to be the significant ones in a given assemblage usually derives from experience, so the analyses carried out on the material from the 2000 season proved particularly useful in 2003. In considering the pottery from Kufan Kanawa, but also from Ganuwa and Tudun Awaki, a crucial variable appeared to be fabric. Part of the assemblage contained naturally-occurring inclusions of quartz, feldspar and mica, while another group was characterised by conspicuous pores indicating the use of vegetal matter for tempering. The occurrence of vegetal tempering correlated very strongly with decoration—for example, at Kufan Kanawa, 253 of the 254 folded strip roulette-decorated sherds were tempered with vegetal matter (Haour and Galpine 2005). This can probably be explained by functional reasons, a particular type of vessel being identified through its fabric, and no doubt its shape, with a particular function (Haour and Galpine 2005). The work of Patrick Darling (1988a: 21) in the Kano area has similarly suggested that certain fabrics may be of importance in determining ceramic types. A few stone and metal implements, and beads, were recovered, and a seemingly pre-Islamic burial was excavated (Haour 2003a, 2006). Archeologically-recovered indications of long-distance contact are absent at Kufan Kanawa. Here, as at other sites of the kasar hausa (Takusheyi [Gronenborn 2008] and Maleh [Obayemi 1977] being notable exceptions), high-value objects plausibly associated with elites and long-distance trade do not occur. This absence of exotics at Kufan Kanawa squares well with the essentially utilitarian nature of the pottery assemblage, but might equally derive from factors of archaeological preservation: ivory, cloth and slaves would leave few traces.

5. Discussion

Kufan Kanawa now stands out in the archaeological map of the area: it is one of the most fully dated settlements of the kasar hausa, and one for which a pottery typology (derived both from surface and secure stratigraphic contexts) has been published. Thus, archaeology has led to a better understanding of this important site in several fundamental respects. First, it has confirmed the scale and suggested date of the enclosing wall. We know from historical records there existed a dense net- kufan kanawa, niger 155 work of Hausa walled settlements, and the birni appears to have been a characteristic part of the settlement hierarchy. The presence of a large-scale enclosure at Kufan Kanawa thus fits well with the image of Hausa cities—even if large-scale enclosures are of course not unique to the Hausa, those of Borno and Benin remaining perhaps the best known (e.g. Connah 1981; Darling 1984; Insoll 2003). In morphological terms, the use of stone at Kufan Kanawa offers little information; Sutton (1976b: 2) is surely right to state that building materials were dictated by local geology. In overall shape, the quadrilateral wall of Kufan Kanawa differs markedly from the rounded enclosures, with gradual accretions, known from places such as Kano. In fact, Kufan Kanawa conforms to a late type of walling in the model advanced by Last (1983) and Darling (in Insoll 2003); these authors attribute similar rectangular enclosures, oriented roughly 15 degrees north of east, to an eighteenth-nineteenth century phase of Islamic wall-building. Militating against such a relatively late date for the Kufan Kanawa enclosure are the datings obtained and the fact that no nineteenth- century source mentions an active settlement in this location (Barth [1857–9], Richardson [1853], and the French-despatched Mission Foureau-Lamy [Foureau 1903–1905] all passed near Kufan Kanawa but fail to mention it). It is true, however, that the wall at Kufan Kanawa seems to have been built quickly, in one effort; and some part of the occupation indicated by the radiocarbon dates may relate to an unwalled phase. What the presence of such a large construction at Kufan Kanawa unequivocally suggests—a key point in terms of past social structure—is a culture able to bring to completion a large-scale endeavour, where settlement demarcation was considered desirable. In this respect, Connah (2000) is surely right to talk about the sense of community and identity offered by city walls—and to lament the lack of systematic attention given by researchers to the wider theme of the enclosure of settlements. Walls define the community within them, as well as those without, and the whole society involved in their maintenance and construction (Haour 2007: Chapter Four). Secondly, archaeology gave a firm sense of the time at which Kufan Kanawa was occupied. Six dates from Kufan Kanawa fall between AD 1300 and 1650; these are in disagreement with the age of over 1000 years implicitly assigned to the site by oral tradition. Dismissing oral tradition as unable to deal with the distant past would be one way of resolving this contradiction; it is however much more likely that those persons responsible for passing on oral history will have transposed 156 anne haour onto Kufan Kanawa a date heard or read in the Kano Chronicle, which places the founding of this city in AD 999. The connection between Kano and Kufan Kanawa is likely to be truthful, not as the record of a specific, single historical ‘fact’ but as a metaphor for wider migration movements and shared culture. Thirdly, the enquiry at Kufan Kanawa offered methodological insights. It confirmed the difficulty of dealing with large sites where cultural remains may not be recovered in the quantities suggested by their scale and often the presence of walls representing considerable labour investment (see Bivar and Shinnie 1962: 3–4; Sutton 1976b, 1977b; Sieber 1992). Indeed, as we saw above Last (1979) had already noted that stratified sequences were rare on sites ofkasar hausa. Since such large sites are common in the Niger-Nigeria borderlands, and appear crucial to a successful understanding of the area’s past, we must find the right tools to approach them archaeologically. The paucity of remains, and the difficulty in obtaining significant stratified archaeological assemblages, is probably due to a combination of pre- and post- depositional factors. In other words, remains may have been spatially discrete to begin with, due to cultural factors, then further subjected to natural processes of sedimentation and deflation. Thus, archaeologists cannot, in approaching sites which appear important through their size and oral-historical connections, rely solely on evidence provided by surface remains or random sampling. Geophysical prospection or shovel tests (Magnavita and Schleifer 2004; C. Magnavita, pers. comm.; Haour 2006; Connah 2008) offer viable alternatives to such ‘chance’ work. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the material culture—primarily pottery—recovered gives some indication of cultural affiliation for Kufan Kanawa. As noted, the preferred decoration of the occupants of the site was folded strip rouletting. It is known that such a decoration occurs widely on archaeological sites of West Africa (Haour et al. eds. in press) but, unfortunately, as regards the kasar hausa itself only Effah-Gyamfi (1981ab), Darling (1988ab), and Sieber (1992) provide adequate information on pottery they recovered, and their descriptions are insufficient to determine how much their material parallels that from Kufan Kanawa.8 It is clear from a single sherd from Zaria,

8 Contra Haour (2003: 107), the images published by those authors leave room for confusion with knotted strip roulette (see Langlois 2004 and Haour et al. eds. in press for overviews of these problems). kufan kanawa, niger 157 illustrated by Potocki (1974: Figure 2), and from data reported by Sie- ber (1992) on pottery from the Kano area, that folded strip-rouletted sherds certainly occurred in the kasar hausa. But it is for regions farther east—the Nigerian Chad basin—that this decoration is best theo- rised, and the required level of quality attained in illustrations and description. There, it has been suggested that the occurrence of folded strip rouletting after about 1100 years ago could be associated with the spread of Kanem-Borno, and with the Kanuri more generally (Connah 1981; Gronenborn and Magnavita 2000; Langlois 2004; but see Wies- müller 2001). On the whole it is obvious that, as folded strip rouletting is common throughout West African archaeological assemblages, it is almost certainly not its presence or absence, but rather its ratio in the assemblage, which carries significance. We should now reconsider Kufan Kanawa within the wider framework of debates on the origins of Hausa identity, and the contributions to them of archaeology.

6. Conclusion

Their origins remain the hottest point of contention in the history of the Hausa people and of their political organisation. The period running up to AD 1000 is perhaps the most critical and most obscure. Heterogeneity seems a key feature of modern Hausa society, but was this always the case? If there was a time when Hausa society was not stratified and diverse, what were the factors behind the change, and how much can we apply the label ‘Hausa’ to a group so different from that known now? Because the Hausa towns suddenly appear in the written record in the fifteenth century, with no extant information relating to the build-up of these societies, researchers have often resorted to arguments involving immigrants from afar (this volume: Haour and Rossi, Sutton). The debate which, twenty to thirty years ago, opposed theories postulating eastern and northern origins for Hausa society (A. Smith 1970; Sutton 1979; Last 1979, 1985), is well-known. The idea of a long-distance migration is apparent in Saley’s reconstructions of Kufan Kanawa, discussed above. But John Sutton (1979) has argued against the possibility of Hausa culture, language and identity having migrated ‘partly or largely ready-made’ to the present-day kasar hausa, while Murray Last (1985) has similarly encouraged us to seek 158 anne haour local roots. These arguments seem entirely persuasive. Crucially, neither author excludes migration and population movement as a factor: but these are of a different vein than those envisaged by earlier dif- fusionistic models. Both authors argue for internal processes leading to social and political complexity. They emphasise the importance of economic and ecological factors and of ‘way of life’ in the definition of the Hausa ethnic group—very credibly, given the long-standing association of ‘Hausaness’ with urban/rural complementarity, expressed by monumental walled settlements and a rural hinterland (this volume: Last, McIntyre). These aspects of definition involve material correlates and patterns of occupation of the wider landscape, both of which are issues which archaeology is uniquely well placed to explore. That archaeology can indeed be very helpful was shown at Kufan Kanawa. The scale of the wall, the date of the site, the nature of the ceramics, and the wider archaeological visibility of these settlements are now much better understood. Yet the mechanisms by which Kufan Kanawa, and the vast numbers of neighbouring sites, came into being and were later deserted, and the identity of the inhabitants, remains archaeologically unresolved. This will stay largely so until we obtain much improved data on material culture, and most specifically on pottery. Pottery analysis lies at the heart of any archaeological endeavour, not just because it is durable, but also because the dissemination of various pottery techniques—most visibly, decoration techniques— addresses questions of learning, innovation and transfer. Studies of ceramic vessels and fragments are therefore fundamental in helping to map notions of identities and social organisation, and this is perhaps especially true of the archaeology of West Africa: a vast area of land, only now receiving sustained archaeological attention, and where former sites often take the shape of enormous scatters of broken potsherds on the landscape. Although it is expecting too much from the humble potsherd to ask it for hard and fast answers (for example, the time depth of the Hausa), pottery is entirely appropriate to a focus on ‘way of life’, superseding a narrow concern with ethnic and linguistic identities. As such, we cannot afford to ignore the information which pottery can yield. The challenge currently being taken up by West Africanist field archaeologists is a much finer-grained analysis of a great many more sites, and the use of a systematic classificatory framework for ceramics. At the same time, archaeologists are now asking what the spread of different ceramic styles, and fashions in roulette types, actually kufan kanawa, niger 159 signify. These debates are driven largely by the work of anthropologist colleagues, who have convincingly demonstrated that various aspects of ceramic culture in West Africa are differentially affected by contacts between people and groups (see e.g. Gosselain 2000; Mayor et al. 2005; and references therein). In the case of Kufan Kanawa, the widespread occurrence of folded strip rouletting points to strong forces of interaction—even if the processes by which different decoration types once spread remain poorly known. It seems at any rate obvious that pottery decorating techniques spread through a range of networks, and that they may depend not just on ethnic or linguistic identities, but also on more specific subgroups. For example, Livingstone Smith (2007) has drawn on studies of contemporary potting to suggest that potter/blacksmith ‘castes’ may have offered a likely vehicle for the transmission of different rouletting types. Another promising avenue for enquiry consists of linking changes in ceramic styles with relationships which can be defined, loosely, as ‘political’. The suggested relation between empire and pottery in the Chad Basin was mentioned above, and Gosselain’s point (2000: 209) that rouletting styles may ‘allow for the identification of loose and situational networks of interaction in which geographical propinquity and local processes of imitation and conformity play a leading role’ seems important here. I have suggested elsewhere (Haour in prep.) that the commercial and political links which would arise through the operation of loosely defined, but prestigious, groups like the Hausa are precisely the sort of relationship that may find expression in roulette style variations. As further archaeological work is carried out to shed light on the history of contacts within the central Sahel, its results can be confronted with historical evidence. Kufan Kanawa serves as an example of the problems raised by conflicting datasets: it is absent from contemporary written historical evidence, linked to the development of Kano by oral tradition, and placed in the mid-second millennium by archaeology. The association between Kano and Kufan Kanawa, though unlikely to be accurate in its detail, certainly reflects a true shared history—informing us about past ideas on what was deemed significant. Looking more widely, the archaeology of the relations between the Hausa and the Chad Basin emerges as worthy of further investigation. By 550 years ago at the latest, Kanem-Borno and Hausa were apparently in commercial, diplomatic, dynastic and cultural contact (e.g. Barth 1857–9: II: 586–587; A. Smith 1970). The archaeology 160 anne haour of these relations—and the archaeology of areas that became ‘caught’ between these two major socio-cultural groups—retains a particular interest, and has been little attempted (though see Last 1985 and Lange 1979 for some thought-provoking directions). The links made in oral history between the Wacha area and Borno were alluded to above and, looking more generally, it is surely significant that tradition identifies the same legendary Sao man as being involved in the creation of Kano and Gazargamo as urban centres (for Kano, see Askell Benton 1911: 26 and Palmer 1928: II, 67; for Gazargamo, Palmer 1928: II, 66–68 and Lange 1987). This serves as a further example of the need to consider archaeological and historical sources side by side: the interrela- tion between groups, and the spread of ‘ways of life’—the custom of living within walls being one example—can structure our attempts to understand the past much more effectively than can do the search for discrete, perhaps illusory ethnic groups.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

KIRFI, BAUCHI: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE HAUSA LANDSCAPE1

Abubakar Sule Sani

1. Introduction

Kirfi, in Bauchi state (Nigeria) constitutes generally undulating terrain at an altitude of about 700 metres, watered by the Gongola River, the largest right-bank tributary of the Benue. This is an area of open savannah woodland (Udo 1970: 151), with predominant soil parent materials derived from Pre-Cambrian granites, gneisses and migma- tites of the basement complex (Oluwatoyin 2004: 17–25). Culturally, Kirfi accommodates mainly people known as Kirfawa (Giiwo), and falls in a region where Hausa is the dominant identity. Investigations of Kirfi can shed light on the questions related to Hausa identity: the finds and monuments of Kirfi share commonalities with other parts of the Hausa geographical area and relate to religion, socio-economic complexity, political arrangements and technology. Work carried out at Kirfi has the potential to contribute to broader debates on the emergence of Hausa identity and society. These include the notion of walls as symbols of autonomy and images of the Hausa way of life (Mabogunje 1968; Obayemi 1973; Sutton 1976b, 1993; Haour 2005), the existence of furnace-types and associated apparatus similar to sites of Samaru-West and Tsauni in the Zaria region (Sut- ton 1976a, 1985), or the trend of the occupation of hilltops associated with iskoki (‘spirits’). Historical writings about ‘Hausaland’ refer consistently to urbanisation, militarism, belief systems, craft specialisation, complex subsistence strategies, and architecture; these aspects

1 This paper builds on work carried out as part of a Masters dissertation at the University of Maiduguri, Nigeria. I am grateful to Garba Ibrahim for introducing me to Kirfi; and to Anne Haour and Benedetta Rossi for including me in the present research project and for comments on earlier versions of this paper. 166 abubakar sule sani are illustrated in the archaeology of Kirfi and shall be discussed in succeeding sections. Very little was known previously of the history and archaeology of the Kirfi area, and virtually no written literature exists on these aspects. However, three sources relating to Bauchi generally can be highlighted here. These include a report of excavations of two exposures in a rock shelter at Kariya Wuro (about 75 kilometres northwest of Kirfi), conducted in 1981 and 1983 by Allsworth-Jones (1983: 154). The work includes ethnographic details as well as archaeological data; although the excavated materials were never dated, they are thought to relate to an earlier period of occupation. A second relevant source, Aremu (1999), discusses iron smelting processes and furnace types within the context of Yankari National Park (about 45 kilometres southwest of the Kirfi area), and presents a survey of the archaeological potential of the park. Yankari and Kirfi share common physical and cultural characteristics, and remains such as the shaft-furnaces and barrel-like tuyères recovered at Yankari are similar to those of both the Kirfi and Zaria regions (Figure 7.2.). Finally, Abubakar (1974) utilised linguistic, archival and ethnographic sources to interpret the historical relationships amongst the ethnic groups occupying Bauchi region, and the later attendant influence of thejihad struggles on the development of Sokoto authority over the Bauchi emirate. The present archaeological reconnaissance and survey therefore represents a pioneering investigation of the archaeological potential of the Kirfi area. It revealed surviving evidence of extensive industrial iron working at the site of Tekkira, and of abandoned settlement sites involving remarkably well preserved standing structures on the Kirfi hills and in the western valley plains (Map 7.1.). Two distinct occupation phases are suggested: an intensive iron-working phase, and an occupation in the historical period by people whose settlement pattern and subsistence are well recorded in an ethno-archaeological context. Thus, while the habitation sites of the historic Kirfawa are documented, those of the iron working people which are assumed to have preceded them still remain to be discovered.

2. The archaeological survey

Sites were identified with the aid of oral tradition and interviews with selected groups. I transected the study area into four zones reflect- kirfi, bauchi 167

Map 7.1. Map of the study area. 168 abubakar sule sani ing the heterogeneous nature of the terrain, traversing hills and their associated abandoned settlements on foot and engaging the services of motorcycle and canoe in the valley and the plain. Furthermore, ethnographic observation of traditional industries such as blacksmithing and building were carried out. A Global Positioning System (GPS) was used to document the location of features and surface finds. Selective samples were taken of diagnostic materials—such as a smoking pipe, potsherds and grinding stones—on hilltop sites, and iron-smelting artefacts at the Tekkira industrial site. A total of approximately 53 kilos of potsherds were collected randomly from the hilltop settlements, the bulk of which came from the site known as Kal-bokko (shown as settlement ‘B’ on Map 7.1.). Seventeen kilos of samples of ironstone were collected at Tekkira.2

Ironworking remains at Tekkira The Tekkira site, named after an extant Fulani settlement, features the by-products of iron working. The primary goal of the survey was to examine relationships between the Tekkira mining area and its associated ancient smelting features, and to present the character of the sites identified. The survey identified 14 heaps of slag within one square kilometre complex, and some of the heaps were completely covered with fragments of tuyères. Furnaces were also recovered in association with the slag heaps. In addition, more than ten holes hitherto believed by oral tradition to be former dwellings have now been identified as former mineshafts for the excavation of ironstones. Eleven such shafts were discovered about 1 kilometre northwest of the modern Tekkira settlement. The mineshafts were found in clusters of rectangular openings, believed to be connected underground. The mineshafts cluster covers an area of about 70 by 20 metres; individual mines are typically 10 metres deep. The abundance of iron-bearing gravels within the proximity to the Tekkira furnaces suggests the advantages enjoyed by the Tekkira smelters in local sourcing of raw materials. At the Tekkira site, seven massive slag mounds were discovered spread within an area of about one square kilometre. Mounds enclosed an average of two furnace remains, and were overlain by huge amount

2 Items sampled are stored in the Museum of the Department of Archaeology, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, pending further analysis. kirfi, bauchi 169

Figure 7.2. Site of Tekkira: remains of Furnace 5, with slag heap 4 (including visible tuyère fragments) at background. of tuyère fragments; the tuyère fragments and the total of 18 furnaces recovered are here treated as an integral part of the slag heaps. Mound 4 can be briefly described here, as containing some of the best-preserved evidence. This mound enclosed the remains of five furnaces, the highest number in the area, with a high preponderance of tuyère fragments. The slag heap measured over 4 metres in height; the principal furnace still stands at over a metre while the remaining four are slightly shorter. Overall, the furnaces recorded at Tekkira can be classified as a single type. Their bases are set on ground laterite, and standing portions suggest that the walls were made of slabs of mud, highly enriched with ferruginous sands and laterite and possibly fired before being vertically arranged and covered with mud. These furnaces are of the shaft (free-standing) type, similar to some of those recognised around Zaria by Sutton (1976a: 4). They are somewhat barrel-shaped, and at their lower part, about 20–30cm above the soil surface, can be identified bellow openings, ranging in number from 6 to 8 around the body of the furnace. Typically, six tuyères of a length of 50 to 60 centimetres appear to have been used. 170 abubakar sule sani

Surveys conducted in Zaria area by Sutton (1976a) and Jemkur (1992) have revealed the existence of numerous abandoned furnaces, iron ore mining pits, slag heaps and broken tuyères; furnace structures were commonly set near river banks. These trends are startlingly analogous to the Kirfi finds. As was seen above, at Tekkira, 18 furnaces were recorded within one square kilometre, with large heaps of slag and almost 1800 tuyère fragments on Mound 2 alone and 13 mineshafts nearby. These smelting structures are located on the western bank of Bela Kawu stream, itself just 500 metres away from the River Gongola.

The Kirfi hilltop settlements The Kirfi hillsdutsen ( Kirfi) run approximately 2 kilometres from east to south. On the top of this hill were identified five abandoned settlements of distinct archaeological features and finds, namely; Zamani (A), Kal-bokko (B), Kal-lombo (AS-B), Kwal-kataffa (C), and Kal- gwaja (D) (see Map 7.1.). The archaeological content of these hilltop settlements, likely of historical age, is remarkable. A further associated site was the Kirfi abandoned settlement, according to oral tradition the first point occupied by the hill dwellers after their descent into the plains and prior to their final settlement at Kirfin Kasa and Kirfin Sama. The line of a single city wall encircled the five hilltop settlements. This walling system covers an area of about 5× 2 square kilometres, surrounding 40% of the dutsen Kirfi at the foot of the hills. It is similar in design with the birane walls such as those of Zaria, Turunku, Kano and Bauchi, which were also built around the hilltops settlements, but the Kirfi walls differ from those of other known city walls, in that their foundations consist of a large amount of rock-boulders and dry- stone arrangements reinforced and supported by earth, while those of Bauchi and Kano were largely made of earth (Sutton 1976b). The mud is likely to have been washed away by rains and winds, leaving only the stone heap arrangements. However, nothing remains that might suggest entry gates in the past. The main Kirfi abandoned settlement is known as Kal-bokko (Fig- ure 7.3.). This is, according to Yerima (2006), where the initial chiefs of Kirfi lived. Kal-bokko seems larger than the other four abandoned sites as far as can be discerned by the abundant preserved house foundations, and it also exhibited a range of structures which local kirfi, bauchi 171 informants (Madaki 2007) identify as palatial remains, associated with a mosque, a royal burial mound, royal bath, royal cemetery, house foundations and slave quarters. These remains will now be described in some detail.

The former settlement at Kal-bokko Foundations in Kal-bokko include both circular and (predominantly) rectangular structures. They consist mostly of stone, while the structure is finished with mud. House foundations were observed to have been surrounded by walls, presumably delimiting compounds. In most of these enclosures, small stone arrangements of about 2 metres in diameter were found, arguably the remains of former granaries. A monument credited to Mukhtar Babban Gwani, the famous nineteenth-century Hausa builder who built the renowned Kafin Madaki and Zaria national monuments, was located at Kirfi. This palace consists of a monumental reception or throne room and an accompanying central mosque, situated in the central portion of the main settlement. Its major characteristics is the main zaure (reception) which traditionally housed the chief ’s throne. Although the main zaure is the palace’s prominent structure, there exist two other smaller zaure inside, demar- cating the wives’s quarters (Madaki 2007). An ‘African-type’ ceramic smoking pipe was collected within the palace area; its mouth piece, though broken, is believed to be protruding and barrel-like, and the diameter of the smoke chamber opening is 3 centimetres. The pipe is believed to have been used by the affluent members of the society, and constitutes a strong indicator of external trade, since such artefacts are not common in the area and oral traditions fail to provide explanation of its local existence in contemporary Kirfi area. According to Philips (1983: 303), pipes ‘with an angle between the bowl and the stem (or stem socket), also called elbow-bend pipes’, of the type of the Kirfi specimen, are associated with tobacco-smoking; they have been recovered in contexts dating after about AD 1600, such as at Old Accra in the early seventeenth century (Philips 1983). A post-1500 AD date for the Kirfi pipe was also suggested by Okpoko pers.( comm. 2007) on the basis of a visual inspection. The mosque is few metres away from the chief palace, linked to it by an adjoining corridor. It is said (Yerima 2006) to have been built in the late 1830s by Mukhtar Babban Gwani. The mosque is principally built of mud bricks (tubali) and further plastered with mud paste, a 172 abubakar sule sani

Figure 7.3. Abandoned house structures on the hilltop settlement of Kal-bokko. common practice in Hausa architecture, both to protect the building from the wear of rain and as decorative element. According to oral traditions collected locally, the actual mosque complex was roofed with a flat, corniced terraced top accessible by matakala (stairways) specifically leading up to a raised platform for adhan (caller of prayers) just outside the imam’s (leader at prayer) chamber. Inside the uwar masallaci (main prayer hall) is evidence of two rows of three pillars and columns supporting the building. Both pillars and main mosque wall are about half a metre thick. The Kal- bokko stucture represents one of the rare examples of the Islamic building tradition whose arch and vault construction is unique to Hausaland, known for instance in the Zaria mosque. This element, the bakangizo (vault/arch-shaped structure serving as the ceiling of a room) represents one of the most important features in the structural evolution in mud architecture in West Africa (Dmochowski 1990). An enclosed area at the courtyard of the palace allegedly served as the slaves’ abode at the yard of the palace in both the pre-jihad and jihad periods. It is surrounded by walls built of a mixture of tubali and stones, still standing at an average height of 6 metres. This structure is said to have housed more than 400 slaves; oral tradition indicates they kirfi, bauchi 173 were traded as commodities, and further served as sources of labour in various heavy construction works undertaken in Bauchi. These works include the building of the complex defensive walls around the hilltop settlements; the Babban Gwani-built mosque and zaure, and in the transportation of building material for the construction of another Babban Gwani structure, in the palace of Yakubu I of Bauchi shortly before the commencement of the jihad (Aliyu 2006). Close to the palace is a raised mound, said to be the area where the past 43 rulers of Kirfi lie buried. Scattered stone pebbles and boulders occur, presumably indicating individual graves as is the Islamic burial practice today.

Archaeological remains in the Kirfi plains More than sixty pits were discovered at the Kirfi sites. They are circular in shape, with a wall thickness ranging from 3 to 8 centimetres. Their conspicuous whitish colour suggests the use in their construction of kaolin, a mineral deposit found in commercial quantities in the area. According to oral tradition, such pits were used for dyeing of textile materials, and the dye pits ceased being used about 35 years ago at Kirfin Kasa. A cluster of 13 pits were identified at the outskirt of Kirfin Sama, while a principal cluster of 57 pits was recorded northeast of Kirfin Kasa settlement. The pits cluster, which covers an area of 50 by 20 metres, was surrounded by a raised earthen bank about 2.5 metres high, said to result from the accumulation of waste during production. Textiles making and associated dyeing were a prominent industry in Kirfi in the recent past; it was a specialised trade that wadonG Kirfi was a popular article in the markets of Wase (Jos Plateau area) and Kano up till the first quarter of the twentieth century (Abubakar 1974). The industry is still active in modern Kirfin Kasa, but no longer relies on the use of pits, iron bowls, plastic basins and other utilitarian imports being employed instead.

3. An ethnoarchaeological view of the Kirfi way of life

In order to set the archaeological finds detailed here within a broader context, archaeological survey was complemented by ethnographic observations in the Kirfi area. The aims and practice of ethnoarchaeology are well known (Van der Merwe 1971; Stanislawski 1973; Stiles 174 abubakar sule sani

1977; Schmidt 1983; David et al. 2001; MacEachern 2002; Okpoko, 2006); the particular focus here was on economic activities of the present Kirfawa (Sule 2007, 2008) to provide a reflection of the material remains found, with a particular concern for Kirfi blacksmithing tradition. The data in the section below issue from ethnographic interviews with local craftsmen (see references).

Economy and subsistence As with most Hausa societies, agriculture was the dominant occupation of the vast majority of the Kirfi people. The practice of terrace farming occurred in Kirfi before thejihad and has persisted to the present day. Crops produced locally in historical times include Guinea corn, millet, maize, beans, groundnuts, sorghum, sugar cane, onions and tomatoes among others. Though mostly produced for subsistence, surplus was sold. Hunting, a tradition of the past (Abubakar 1974), remains an important pastime. Certain individuals or lineages in the area practice it as a specialised occupation; most other local inhabitants devote time to it only during the dry season, outside of the period used for farming. Hunting is said to be the specialised occupation of the founder of Kirfi (Barogha Basini), and its continued practice by the people of Kirfi serves as an example of an inherited and preserved subsistence tradition (Sule 2008). Because of the proximity of Nigeria’s premier game reserve, Yankari, there is still a relative abundance of animals for hunting. The early 1960s saw the first widespread use of Dane guns side by side with the traditional bow and arrow kit. After Nigeria’s independence (1960) governments reserved parks and protected wild- life, leading to the development of guild of hunters with sarkin baka (head of users of bow and arrows) and sarkin bindiga (head of the users of Dane guns). They negotiate with the government so that their activities are not seen as poaching, applying for state licensing to hunt (Muhammad 2007). Hunting provides meat and means of economic exchange, but also supplies raw materials such as hides and skins that serve social needs and political differentiation. Some exotic skins such as the antelopes’ are worn by the affluent and members of royal families, while those of the revered lions adorned palaces. kirfi, bauchi 175

Crafts Smelting is no longer carried out, and the blacksmithing tradition too is fast disappearing in the Kirfi area; there is an average of only one blacksmith workshop in each of the settlements studied. The knowledge of forging is reserved to a closed lineage, though on rare cases outsiders may be taken on as apprentices. Blacksmiths, always male, are socially respected members of the society, and they are feared, as people believe that they possess mystical powers. Oral tradition points out that the overall head of the Kirfawa blacksmiths is accorded the title of medijo (overall head of the blacksmiths’ guild) and san kira (technical adviser to the medijo) at the chief palace. Income from the trade is complementary to their principal means of subsistence, which is farming. Workshops are mostly sited around market places, to enhance exposure to customers on weekly market-days. Following Akinade (2005: 66), modern practices of iron-working were studied in communities in close proximity with the archaeological sites, namely at Kirfin Sama and Kirfin Kasa settlements. Black- smith workshops there were mostly circular in shape, and constructed of sticks and grass, with no walls or doors in order to allow appropriate ventilation during the smiting process. The fire points, typically at the centre of the workshop, are made of a durable, refractory substance such as firebrick, which is provided with a number of tuyères, through which air is forced by a bellow or blower fan. Charcoal is used as fuel. The forging process (kira) starts with setting fire in the fireplace, coupling the bellows (zuga-zugi), pouring charcoal and subsequently heating up the metal sheets in the furnace, until they can be worked with the help of a heavy hammer (Kwaita, pers. comm., 2006; Sankira 2007). Participation at workshop activities is influenced by age. An older member supervises and directs, in terms of iron flattening, beat- ings and hand-blowing bellows, which demands the energy of younger smiths. Blacksmithing is the only remnant of metallurgic traditions surviving not only in the Kirfi area, but through Hausaland. The only departure is that blacksmiths used iron direct from iron smelters in the past whereas today ready-made iron scraps are the only source of raw material for the blacksmiths. According to Kwaita (2006), the cre- ators of the Tekkira ironworks are their great-great-grand parents. He believed that blacksmithing now is the only left-over of the full-scale smelting in the prehistoric past. The likely break of smithing today 176 abubakar sule sani is probably not of traditions, beliefs and process but in the sphere of sourcing raw materials: since smelting is an extinct tradition in the Kirfi area, the smiths rely on scrap metal and scrapped machiner- ies. This process is noted in other Hausa areas of northern Nigeria, where scrap iron (karfen Turawa) came to replace iron ingots from the smelters in the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Jaggar (1994: 27) it is probable that by the late 1930s imported scraps had all but replaced native mine iron as the smiths’ raw material in northern Nigeria. This is an inevitable offsetting factor associated with the traditional profession of iron ore mining and smelting. Thus, today blacksmithing serves as the only, indirect, mirror into what iron smelting might have looked like. Specialised craftsmanship also played an important economic role in Kirfi in the historical period: wool, weaving and dyeing techniques produced fine clothes that were much sought after. According to oral tradition, these items were exported to other towns and cities such as Kano, Katsina, Borno and Sokoto areas in the past centuries. Eth- nographic data enable us to appreciate dyeing practices analogous to those detected in the archaeological context described above. The demise of the traditional dye pits over 35 years ago is attributed to the import of cheap fabrics shortly after the attainment of Nigeria’s independence. However, indications regarding their use are available (Maikeke 2007). The pits, constructed using kaolin sourced from the Kirfi area, served as basins where different pigments were prepared and dipping activities took place. Dyers prepared and poured in the pits a plant-based product called baba and a bagaruwa solution. If the solution is added to the desired tincture, it produces indelible stains on cloths. Each pit is usually reserved for a single colour. Kirfi people had a well organised guild of dyers, led by Sarkin Marina who until the disorganisation of the craft was a titled holder in the Kirfi palace. Though there was a family ofmarina , apprenticeship in this craft was open to outsiders. The head of the guild controlled the dyeing practice by collecting taxes for the palace, pegging the prices for dyed products, sourcing raw materials, ensuring the security of the entire dye pits (karofi) and participating in the marketing of their finish products. According to Maikeke (2007) traditional dyers in the last 30 years produced goods either on request or for supply to market places. kirfi, bauchi 177

Settlement pattern and constructions Settlement patterns relate to the division of a population into towns, cities and states, and can facilitate the deciphering of state-formation processes (Rouse 1972; MacEachern 1990, 2002; Holl 1993; Sutton 1993; Andah 1995; Magnavita et al. 2001; David et al. 2001; Haour 2005). The Kirfi area is divided into hamlets, wards, villages and towns, and the population, which is not overly dense, can be divided into nuclear and linear. Most of the Kirfi settlements are clustered, with the exception of the few Fulani settlements, such as Tekkira, Kafin Maigari, Kesun Badara, Feltun or Bedoji, which are dispersed. The nucleated settlements are divided into compounds inhabited by the male head of family, his wife or wives, and other members of the extended family. Each compound is further separated into houses. A compound is usually surrounded by a raised wall of mud. House- holds are accommodated in huts of either round or rectangular shape, reflecting the situation in the hilltop archaeological sites. Every compound possesses its own rumbu (granary) at a central place for security reasons, for storing surplus food production. This storage facility seems similar to the ones documented by Garba (1999: 2–3) in the Dufuna area of Yobe state. It was suggested above p. 171 that such rumbu foundations can also be identified on the Kirfi hilltop. Refuse heaps (bola) are located just behind the main walls of compounds. Thirteen refuse dumps were documented in the Kirfi area and in addition one archaeological feature believed to have served as a bola in the past was identified in the palace back yard on the hill-top; however its content is yet to be studied. A compound contains about three to seven families, while an anguwa (ward) contains about twenty to thirty compounds. According to interviews conducted, Kirfawa compounds hold an average of forty dwellers, yielding a total population of about 1 200 people. And, the major settlements in the Kirfi area supposedly are populated by about 5 000 people, except the Fulani settlements that are lightly populated with an average of 1 500. Such statistics on extant landscape occupation provides a good trajectory for approaching the occupation of the abandoned Kirfi settlement under study. In the Kirfi area, houses have a circular or square plan, with coni- cal and dome-like roofs. Building materials are those available locally, such as mud, bamboo, grass and sticks for roofing and stones for foundation reinforcement. Mud is either transformed into bricks to 178 abubakar sule sani be sun-dried, or turned into tubali. Foundations are made by digging trenches which are filled by a mixture of stone pebbles and mud to a height of about half a metre. For tubali, successive layers of well-mixed mud are built daily until the desired height is reached, while the mud- brick system involves the use of rectangular-like mud compressed tablets used in building houses. Here, homogeneously mixed mud is applied in-between each block laid, until a desired level is attained. The above two systems of construction are both practised in Kirfi, but the tubali technique is the most common in the archaeological remains discussed at Kal-bokko. Afterwards, wooden sticks and bamboo are framed to support further additional layers of grass to build the roof. Though cement and cement blocks, timber,azara (Palm tree logs-Arecaceae) and zinc are used nowadays in constructions in the Kirfi area, this technique is less frequent. Contemporary inhabitants of the Kirfi area are predominantly Muslim. Archaeological evidence, especially the spectacular mosque on the hilltop settlement of Kal-bokko, demonstrates that Islam has been present in the area for at least 150 years. According to oral tradition, past religious practices in the history of Kirfi survive only in the form of rituals and sacrifices related with blacksmithing, hunting and butchery. Up till the end of 1980s, blacksmiths in Kirfi brewed a local beer (giya) and made sacrifices to solicit safe production. Like the hunters, they sometimes slaughtered goats and make blood offerings before setting out on hunting expeditions, which sometimes involved incantations. Most of the ethnographic evidence of ritual practices that are contradictory to Islamic traditions is, however, only carried out secretly (Aliyu 2006). Notably, a gigantic baobab tree at the abandoned hilltop site of Zamani, 500 metres from Kal-bokko, is believed to be 400 years old and is associated with aljannu. A popular phenomenon in understanding aspects of religious belief of Hausa society, this mythol- ogy is associated with spirits or demons: aljannu can assume the body of human beings or animals, and may be good or evil. They live in fire, air and in inanimate objects such as the baobab tree. According to oral traditions I collected, blacksmiths and hunters still make sacrifices secretly here to encourage fruitful outings. kirfi, bauchi 179

4. Periodising the Kirfi archaeological sites

Pending the outcome of this ongoing research in the Bauchi area, I rely on indirect evidence and extrapolations to divide the study area into two periods, and consider also well-known dates obtained from other smelting areas of northern Nigeria. The Tekkira site produced enormous quantities of slag, tuyère fragments and furnace remains. The attributes and nature of the smelting tradition seem to tally with the Samaru West (Zaria) iron working culture (about 500 kilometres from Kirfi). There, Sutton (1976a, 1985) obtained a cluster of radiocarbon dates suggesting a brief occupation in the second half of the first millennium AD. Considering the simi- larities in the smelting traditions based on iron working remains, it is suggested we can provisionally apply these dates in understanding the age of Tekkira. This also tallies with a date obtained by Fagg (cited in Sutton, 1976a: 19) of 635 ± 95 AD at Dala Hill in Kano. The well-known Taruga furnaces (Nok, 450 kilometres from Kirfi) have been held to be the earliest iron working remains in Sub-Sa- haran Africa with dates of 440 BC, 300 BC and 280 BC. Other dates reported in Andah (1995: 84–85) are 591± 75 BC, 538 ± 84 BC and 342 ± 133 BC from furnaces at Taruga in the Nok culture area. These are remotely older than the traditions under study. The implication of these dates is placing the Samaru West, Dala in Kano and tentatively Kirfi area to the later period (final phase) of iron working. Overall the Kirfi ironworks can be tentatively ascribed to the middle/late Iron Age period, falling within the final stages of the Taruga periods and in harmony with the later phase of Samaru West and the Dala Hills iron working periods. On the other hand, the Kirfi hilltop sites and the valley settlement are dated to recent historic period, as evidenced for instance by the influence of Islam on their material culture. The existence of juma’aa mosque on the hilltop site indicates that the people who constructed and utilised it were Muslims since precolonial times. The architectural design of the mosque shows Islamic and Arab influence. The occupants of the hilltop are, it is suggested, not the people that operated the Tekkira iron-workings, and the settlement places of the latter remain undiscovered. This paper suggests that it is most likely that the hilltop occupation was younger than the Tekkira remains. 180 abubakar sule sani

5. Placing the Kirfi phenomenon within ‘Hausaland’

Direct analysis and interpretation of the archaeological finds and features within the study-area indicates that Kirfi was a complex socio- technological community in the past. Undoubtedly, iron working represented one of the most important industrial activities in the Kirfi area. Its widespread use is indicated by furnaces; slag heaps and discarded tuyères comparable in magnitude to none in the Bauchi region. The quantity of smelting paraphernalia in Kirfi suggests a long period of practice, extensive demand of its product by outsiders and perhaps their expertise as further exemplified by the local availability of iron ores in the area (Oluwatoyin 2004). Moreover, our survey traced the source of the raw materials for Kirfi ironworks to the area where ferruginous iron stones (tama) were mined. Thus this study offers a rare illustration of a near complete archaeology of the iron-working process, from mining to smelting, with ethnographic research on blacksmithing. From the archaeological features recovered, we can infer that the hilltop of dutsen Kirfi was settled during precolonial and colonial periods, and perhaps that the hilly nature of the area served as a natural barrier and defensive mechanism against external attack. But with the return of peaceful conditions, ensured by Emirate government in Bauchi that signed peace treaties and accords for various communities, the hilltop people descended and settled in the plain settlement named Kirfin Sama II abandoned site before moving farther to the present location. However, due to the initial scarcity of drinking water at the hilltop site and the tendency of scattered communities on the plains to unite, they decided to move to a more ‘central place’ at the present settlement not far from the Gongola river bank in the late 1950s. This saw their regrouping with people from Cheledi and Kirfin Kasa, who had descended earlier to areas where water table is higher, as attested by the reports of the geology department’s survey of Ahmadu Bello Uni- versity, Zaria (Grace 1999). The existence of enormous dyeing pits karofi( ) in the area suggests that the Kirfawa at that period had distinct guilds of specialists. The two clusters of pits at Kirfin Kasa and Kirfin Sama connotes that the dyers were not only producing dyed textile materials for domestic consumption, but also for trade and other exchanges that flourished kirfi, bauchi 181 with communities such as Gombe, Katsina, Sokoto, Wase and Kano as confirmed by written (Abubakar 1974) and oral traditions. It may indicate that the people of Kirfi at different periods practiced diverse specialised crafts, and that the administrative class was distinct from the guilds and industries. The presence of large-scale walling at the Kirfi hilltop sites has parallels with numerous other parts of West Africa. The discovery of African-type smoking pipe at the hilltop abandoned settlement provides another avenue to cautiously date the site as pre-seventeenth century; the African smoking pipe predates European smoking pipes of the nineteenth century. Oral accounts by Kirfawa support an early seventeenth-century date for the settlements of the dutsen Kirfi. The dating of the walling systems of Zaria and other Hausa states and the common periodisation of ‘mountain-table settlements’ occupation in Jos-Plateau suggest that the Kirfi hilltop settlements were inhabited in the fifteenth-sixteenth century. Precise chronological sequencing will arise through future excavations. The elaborate remains of the Kirfi walling systems attest the existence of an important political class in the enclosed occupation area in the past. This is further buttressed by ethnographic data of a well organised state administration. Indeed the dynamics of Kirfi’s political structure in the recent past were assisted in several ways by the growth of Bauchi and the subsequent development of the emirate government, which fought in the jihad of Uthman Fodio (1803–4). Kirfi traditional institutions continued to exert influence in the administration of the emirate. Kirfi still plays an important role in the emirate government, and holds titles such as Bauchin Bauchi, Barayan Bauchi, Wambai of Bauchi and Waziri of Bauchi. Presently, the Waziri of Bauchi, who is the prime minister of the emirate, second in command to the Emir and the highest ranking in the temple of the Bauchi king-makers (elec- tor), is an offspring of Kirfi town.

6. Conclusion

Only multidisciplinary approaches can answer relevant questions about the emergence of Hausa identity. It is clear that the socio- technological adaptation of the Kirfi people to their environment was reflected in their belief system. The connections between technology and culture are partly supported by archaeological evidence examined 182 abubakar sule sani in Kirfi, which suggests that this site partook of some of the main stages generally attributed to the evolution of Hausa society. We have seen the existence of walling systems as an indicator of centralised administration, urbanisation and military engineering in Hausaland in cities such as Kano, Rano, Katsina, Zaria, Turunku, Kufena, Bauchi, Kirfi, Faskari and medium sized towns like Tirwun (10o35’North and 90o52’East), Soba (10o58’N and 8o04’E), Maigana (11o02’N and 7o46’E, Kwatarkwashi, 12o15N and 6o50’E) among others (Moody 1967; Effah-Gyamfi 1986; Sutton 1993; Connah 2004; Haour 2005). Due to constant attacks and invasion, defensive walls became common and the military personnel required to defend such settlements increased. In areas like Kwatarkwashi, Kirfi and Zaria, natural hills were used for protection. The construction of permanent defensive works symbolises a continuing requirement for the protection of political, spiritual, economic or military interests associated with a particular society. Therefore, warfare and militarism might have contributed greatly to the emergence of towns such as Kirfi and other cities of Hausaland. Craft specialisation is also a vital character of social arrangement in understanding the Hausa landscape. When the process of iron smelting in ancient times and blacksmithing in recent history are examined, we observe uncommon secret and magical operations associated with sacrifices and incantations to ensure success. The roots of such practices with traits and norms of pre-Islamic belief systems are prevalent in blacksmithing in Hausaland, and the practitioners are either revered or despised, because of the intrigues of the trade. The spiritual exercises associated with iron working explain why smelting sites were often isolated from the domain of common people. We can gain insights into the occupation of inselbergs and hilltops such as Kirfi before they descended down to valley areas, following the historical development of centralised governments that ensured the administration (and protection) of less organised societies. The Hausa generally are believed to have a sentimental attachment to these abandoned hilltops, because of the spirits associated with them. At the Kirfi site of Zamani grows a baobab tree over 400 years old, and the settlement is believed to have been protected by the iskoki cherished by the founder of Kirfi itself, Barogha Basini. It is hoped that this paper has shed light on hitherto unreported archaeological enquiries into the way of life of some of the societies which occupied regions now inhabited by ‘Hausa’ people. Further kirfi, bauchi 183 research in northern Nigeria is required to link early subsistence patterns, as revealed by archaeological excavations, to the evolving identities of Hausa society.

References

Primary Sources Name Age Occupation Place of Interview Date Saleh Muhammad 48 Hunter Tekkira 2/1/2007 Mohammed Yerima 71 Farmer Kirfin Sama 31/11/2006 Abubakar Galadima 52 Carpenter Kirfin Sama 31/11/2007 Musa Ibrahim 65 Retiree Kirfin Kasa 7/5/2006 Garba Madaki 58 Chronicler Kirfin Sama 9/5/2007 Muhammad Ibrahim 56 Herbalist Kirfin Sama 9/5/2007 Abubakar Muhammad 70 Barbing Kirfin Sama 18/6/2006 Isa Chindo 51 Building Kirfin Kasa 7/5/2007 Dr. Garba Ibrahim 57 Historian Kirfin Kasa 7/5/2007 Bako Sankira 67 Blacksmith Kirfin Kasa 9/06–6/07 Kwaita Ishaku 82 Blacksmith Cheledi 7/06–05/07 Danjuma Saleh 41 Educator Kirfin Sama 19/3/2007 Ibrahim Musa 33 C/Servant Kirfin Kasa 5/2/2006 Abdullahi Maikeke 56 Dyeing Kirfin Kasa 20/4/2007 Aliyu Sarki II 65 43rd Sarkin Kirfi Kirfi 10/06–5/07

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Van der Merwe, N. and Skully, R. T. K. 1971. The Phalaborwa story: archaeological and ethnographic investigation of a South African Iron Age group. World Archae- ology 3, 178–196. CHAPTER EIGHT

THE HAUSA TEXTILE INDUSTRY: ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE PRECOLONIAL PERIOD

Marisa Candotti

1. Introduction

Textiles are finished products which represent not only the material resources of an area but also the culture of a people. In Hausaland, cloth had many functions; for centuries it was used for clothing, to transfer wealth, as a medium of exchange, as tribute, as an item in religious and burial rituals and as a symbol of differences in religious, economic, political, ethnic and social status. The symbolic functions of cloth were as important as the practical ones and influenced the demand for textiles. Different uses required different kinds of cloth, which varied according to size, quality, colour and durability; this led to significant product differentiation and economic specialisation. This helps to explain the development of the textile trade. Cloth-producing areas frequently imported different kinds of cloth from other producing areas. Dif- ferent techniques of weaving, dyeing and tailoring in various areas contributed to the complex pattern of trading relations within the separate Hausa areas, as well as between them and other areas beyond Hausaland. The manufacture of textiles was not just the prerogative of a few specialised artisans, but involved the whole population scattered throughout the territory. Textiles were produced in both urban and rural areas and, although clothing was a symbol of religious and social identity, the making and trading of cloth in Hausaland was the expression of a culture that tended to integrate different strata of the population regardless of ethnic identity. This complex pattern of trade and manufacturing developed over many centuries and was closely connected to the flow of events and historical circumstances. Textile production was not characterised by a uniform development but by different phases, reflecting the political 188 marisa candotti and economic changes that took place in the region. The nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the Hausa textile industry, a growth that was not limited to a few cities, as in the past, but extended to all the Hausa territories; its main causes are still a matter for discussion. Moreover, not much is known about the origins and development of the Hausa textile industry before the nineteenth century. Most of the existing literature has focused on the period just before and after colonisation, at the beginning of the twentieth century, analysing the artistic and technical aspects of cloth; only a few pioneering studies have explored textile trade and manufacturing (cf. Shea 1974, 1975, 1983; Johnson 1973, 1976, 1977, 1978). The aim of this chapter is to identify the main characteristics of the Hausa textile industry, exploring its origins, development and main distinguishing economic features in the precolonial period. A focus on the history of cotton growing and textile manufacturing allows us to study the evolution of Hausa material culture from the perspective of the interrelationship between rural and urban areas.1 Finally, this chapter aims to contribute to the debate on the distinctive characteristics of what Adamu (1978) calls the ‘Hausa factor’, which can be primarily identified as the potential capacity to integrate foreigners into the Hausa network of trade and production and its system of recruiting and organising labour on a pluralistic ethnic basis.

2. Cloth and Muslim traders before the nineteenth century

The origin and spread of clothing and trade Written sources are almost silent on the manufacturing of cloth in the Hausa-speaking area before the nineteenth century. They testify to the use and spread of clothing among the different peoples in this area and the opportunity for trading in cloth by foreign merchants. However, looking at these aspects helps to identify the origins of a culture that led to the development of the Hausa textile industry. It is clear that the use of clothing accompanied the spread of Islam and the rise of an urban culture mainly influenced by the beginning of a network linked to trans-Saharan trade and the establishment of Muslim merchants

1 Unfortunately, it remains unclear when cotton was first used generally in West Africa (see Kriger 2006: 26, 73–76). the hausa textile industry 189 in Hausaland. Al-Dimashqi first testifies to the use of clothing in this area at the beginning of the fourteenth century, referring to the Wan- gara state where: ‘the Muslims inhabit the town and wear sewn garments . . . those who live near the Muslims cover their privy parts with skins’ (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981: 212). The periodca . AD 1259–1400 saw the systematic penetration of Hausaland by the Wangara (traders in the western network), who were able to build their independent settlements but also to establish states, the most important of which was Zaghai or Zaye, perhaps on the site of what is now Katsina city (cf. Last 1985: 216, and footnote on page 61, above). The adoption of chemises quadāwīr( ), mantles (aksiya) and turbans by the Wangara merchants is reported already by al-Idrisi in the twelfth century (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981: 113). They could have imported the use of this clothing from the North African traders with whom they exchanged gold for weapons and luxury cloth. Like their North African counterparts, the Wangara arrived south of Hausaland in search of gold and to market their cotton cloth. The immigrants were also skilled craftsmen and probably helped to develop the Hausa textile and leather industry (Lovejoy 2005: 137; Lovejoy 1978b: 184). It seems likely that it was precisely the Wangara merchants who originally spread the cut of the characteristic gowns (riga) used in Hausa- land (cf. al-Idrisi in Levtzion and Hopkins 1981: 111). There, as all over western Sudan, the use of this kind of clothing was initially adopted only by the ruling classes and their client traders; the clothes of the common people consisted of skins with which they cover their ‘privy parts’ (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981: 80, 83, 212, 213).2 Wearing clothes became an indication of the conversion to Islam and belonging to the Islamic umma (community). The spread of Islam contributed considerably to reshaping concepts of personal identity, expressed through different clothing styles (see Worden, this volume). This contrasted with the practice of facial scarification, within the animist tradition, which was likewise a sign of group identification (Last 1989b: 11). These different customs also underlie the emergence of a relationship between town and country, resulting in the withdrawal into the latter of groups who were opposed to Islam or who were disadvantaged in the emerging urban economy (Last 1985: 214). This new economy

2 Al-Bakri (pp. 80, 83), Al-Dimashqi (pp. 212, 213) (eleventh and fourtheenth centuries respectively). 190 marisa candotti appears to have led to the development of leather manufacturing in western Hausaland, although textiles are not mentioned, cotton was reported as growing on ‘great trees’ (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981: 133, 210).3 Cotton was the primary resource needed for the manufacture of cloth, and its cultivation presupposed a basic agricultural development. Usman (1972: 179) has suggested—though the evidence he uses is unclear—that around the area of Dalla hill, the original settlement of Kano city, at the end of the fourteenth century, the economy was already based on trade in grain especially corn and millet, exported northwards to Takedda through Borno (Barkindo 1989: 148–9).4 By all accounts, cloth manufacturing appears not to have reached Kano, since the Kanuri (Kanem/Borno people) considered the southern Habasha to be Afnu (naked people, cf. Last 1983: 72; Barkindo 1989: 150).5 By contrast, in Kanem the manufacture of textiles was well established by the fourteenth century since, according to Ibn Battuta, dyed cloth was already exported to Takedda while, as Ibn Sa’id reports, luxury textiles were imported from North Africa across the Sahara (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981: 188, 302). Around the end of the fourteenth century, historical accounts say that the Saifawa dynasty abandoned Kanem and established Borno in the south-eastern savanna, perhaps suggesting a new emphasis on an economy based on agriculture. Cotton cultivation and textiles benefited from this new economy compared to that of Kanem, which was based on cattle- breeding (Brenner 1973: 106; Barkindo 1985; 244). Indeed, it is likely that the textile trade spread in such a way that strips of cloth became the principal medium of exchange. As Al-‘Umari reports (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981: 260): . . . their currency is a cloth which they weave, called dandi. Every piece is ten cubits long. They make purchases with it from a quarter of a cubit upwards. They also use cowries (wada’ ) . . . but all valued in terms of that cloth.

3 Abu Hamid (p. 133), Al-Dimashqi (p. 210) (twelfth and fourtheenth centuries respectively). 4 Bala Usman has suggested that the economy of Kano may have been based on trade in grain following his interpretation of ‘The Song of Bagauda’; see Hiskett (1965). 5 Most of those who came from Borno and its satellite states appear to have had some common identity in terms of language and culture which was normally Kanuri while, according to Murray Last, the Habasha are to be identified with the people later known as Hausa. the hausa textile industry 191

During this period, Hausaland lay between two main centres of commercial and political power (Mali/Songhai and Kanem/Borno) and textiles were probably mainly traded by Wangara and Kanuri traders, who also spread the use of cloth for military purposes. Last (1985: 213, 214) has suggested that a consequence of Hausaland’s position as a frontier zone between two rival networks was that merchants tended to rely on private military escorts for the protection of their caravans: as a result, local professional escorts or mercenaries became an important factor in the evolution of a military elite. The Kano Chronicle reports that quilted cloth armour (lifidi in Hausa) used for the cavalry was introduced into Kano at the end of the fourteenth century.6 The derivation of the word ‘lifidi’ from the Kanuri lebduri (from the Arabic libd) (Palmer 1928: 107; Hunwick 1985: 331) shows, in all probability, that this armour was introduced precisely from Borno (Barkindo 1989: 151). Borno had an important role in the formation of the Kano state and the introduction of quilted armour indicates the spread of the use of horses and the rise of a military elite. The rise of the cavalry permitted an increase in the capture of slaves, who were sold to Borno in exchange for cloth, horses and other North African goods (Lovejoy 1978b: 188, 189). During the fifteenth century, however, there was a greater inflow of Wangara traders into Hausa- land after the defeat of Mali by the Songhai. These savanna merchants were also attracted to Hausaland by the opening up of new gold-fields in the Akan states situated in present-day Ghana (Garrard 1980: 20, 21). There was an attempt by the Wangara to establish a trading hegemony and, according to Portuguese sources, cotton cloth became a major item in the Wangara gold diaspora (Garrard 1980: 26; Wilks 1982: 464, 465). In Hausaland, there was a reaction to this hegemony and it seems that the Wangara cloth trade started to be taxed by the local governmental authority (Hunwick 1970: 13). On the other hand, Borno sent a prince to form a settlement at Kano where his followers founded a market. In the mid-fifteenth century, a Borno–to–Gonja route (in the Volta basin) via Kano was eventually opened up and large numbers of traders from Borno and Aïr moved into Hausaland (Palmer 1928: 109–11; Hunwick 1985: 334; Last 1985: 218).

6 The Kano Chronicle is an indigenous contemporary document on Hausa history written in the seventeenth century. 192 marisa candotti

These merchants established commercial links between Hausaland and North Africa and contributed to many economic and political developments. Hausa traders started to engage in the long-distance trade ( fatauci) to the southern area, where one of the main imported goods now became kola-nuts. Politically, there was the rise of a new governmental organisation, called by Bala Usman the ‘sarauta system’, which had a more centralised political authority and was based on the birni (fortified town) (1981: 5–35). Indeed, during this century, Hausaland saw the rise of an urban culture, the main features of which were Islam as the dominant ideology of the towns, and jihad involving military forces based in towns, mounted on horses and often using slaves (Last 1985: 223).

The rise of Kano as a manufacturing centre During the sixteenth century, economic and political innovations may have led to the development of local leather and textile manufacturing in some Hausa states, initially in Kano, Zamfara and Gobir (Ramusio 1554: 86, 87).7 This century saw the rise of Kano as the richest and most important commercial centre of Hausaland, and many North African traders started to settle in the city (Anania 1559: 335, 336).8 As a consequence, the Kano authorities sought to affirm their own autonomy from Borno. This is symbolically explained by an episode of the Kano Chronicle known as Kisoki’s ‘cure for nakedness’. During the reign of Sarki M. Kisoki (ca. AD 1505–65) Kano undertook an expedition to Ngurnu, a border town of Borno. During the expedition, Kisoki is said to have ordered his men not to capture slaves but only to take horses and cloth. Although the Chronicle is open to several interpretations, its symbolism could be used to discuss relations between the two states. Indeed, it shows the pattern of their trade relations: Kano exported slaves to Borno in exchange for horses and cloth (Bar- kindo 1989: 157). Contra Adamu (1979: 62), this confirms that woven cloth was not Borno’s major import from Kano before the nineteenth century, but the opposite.

7 Ramusio published the account of Al-Wazzan, known as Leo Africanus, who was in Hausaland around the 1520s. 8 Anania reports the account of a Ragusan merchant, Vincenzo Matteo, who was probably in Kano around the 1560s or early 1570s. the hausa textile industry 193

For the Kanuri, the Hausa were still ‘Afnu’ (naked people), a term also used to identify animist peoples. As pointed out by Last (1985: 214), ethnicity as a convenient label was mainly used for identifying allied groups. In Kano, artificial ethnic labels like Maguzawa‘ ’ gradually became terms applied to all non-Muslim yet subject peoples in the countryside. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Maguzawa who controlled slaves and iron supplies became allies of the urban authority (Last 1985: 214; Last 1989: 126). This new relationship between town and country benefited the whole local economy, leading to the spread of the cotton and textile industry. In the Kano countryside, according to Leo Africanus, grain and cotton started to be cultivated in large quantities (Ramusio 1554: 84–6). The availability of cotton appears to have been an incentive to the rise of cloth manufacturing in the city; it was also stimulated by the immigration of numerous Kanuri into Kano (ca. AD 1565). Most of these Kanuri were said to have originally been tailors and long-distance traders engaged in fatauci, especially in baki (dyed cloth), salt and kola-nuts (Barkindo 1989: 160). It is no coincidence that in this period Leo Africanus first makes specific reference to textile manufacture in Hausaland, indicating Kano city as the residence of specialist artisans (Ramusio 1554: 84). This manufacture probably increased considerably if cotton cloth, together with slaves and grain, began to be exported to Borno (Barkindo 1989: 159). Moreover, cotton cloth started to be bought by Tuareg traders in Kano in exchange for salt, copper and luxury foreign cloth. As reported by Leo Africanus (Ramusio 1554: 84): Gli habitatori vestono assai bene, l’habito de quali è panno di bambagio negro e azzurro ma i sacerdoti e i dottori lusano bianco . . . e (vi è) molto guadagno (per) gli habitatori nel traffico delle tele bambagie il quale fanno con i mercanti di Barbaria e essi all’incontro vendono molti panni d’Eu- ropa, rame, ottone.9 During the sixteenth century, Kano had already diversified its cloth production, and indigo-dyed cloth was also produced and exported to Borno and the Tuareg area (Ramusio 1554: 84).10 On the other

9 ‘The inhabitants dress very well in black and blue cotton cloth, but priests and scholars wear white . . . and the inhabitants earn very well by trading cotton cloth with Tuareg merchants. In exchange, the latter sell many [types of ] cloth from Europe, copper and brass’ (my translation). 10 According to oral sources collected by Philip Shea (1971), indigo-dyed clothes were introduced and mostly produced by Kanuri immigrants in Kano. 194 marisa candotti hand, North African and luxury European textiles were imported into Kano by North African traders through the Sahara, ‘clothing the rich and sophisticated urban elite; . . . the rural and poor population being almost wild, wearing skin in the winter, while in summer it is enough to cover their private parts with a piece of cloth’ (Anania 1559: 333, 334). The emphasis on different clothing shows that Kano was already characterised by social divisions where the main social groups were the rulers (sarakai) and their kinsmen, the merchants, the scholars and the talakawa (poor) (Last 1985: 223). Interestingly, Leo Africanus stresses that Muslim scholars wore white clothes. From the seventeenth century onwards, the white gown (riga fari) started to be very popular among the whole Hausa population due to its close association with Islam, and it was worn on important Islamic ceremonial days. White cloth was also used for Muslim burials (likafani) (Perani 1989: 71).11 Luxury clothes were synonymous with cupidity all over the Muslim world. To underline the cupidity of rulers during the seventeenth century, the Kano Chronicle reports that they wore clothes embellished with gold embroidery (Palmer 1928: 24). On the other hand, wearing rich clothes was also a sign of power and wealth. The distribution of wealth in Hausaland was very unequal, compared to industrial societies, and only the wealthy could wear rich clothes. The more luxurious the cloth, the richer were the people wearing it. In Borno, the wealthy used to wear several layers of clothes. In Hausaland, the most spectacular garment was the babbar riga (large gown), which was up to twelve feet (3.66 m) wide (Heathcote 1972: 15). This gown became so common that, in the Benue valley, the descendants of the Hausa traders are even today known as ‘Abakwariga’, from their typical large gowns. These traders started to reach this area around the sixteenth century and most specialised in manufacturing cloth (Adamu 1978: 39). Hausa traders were often also itinerant weavers using a transport- able, narrow, horizontal, double-heddle loom that produced narrow strips of cloth which were then sewn together in rectangular garments. This loom spread throughout western Sudan up to Lake Chad, where the ‘pit loom’ was used (so called because the weaver operates pedals in a pit below ground level). There has been much speculation about the origin and spread of narrow strip looms in West Africa (Johnson

11 White was the preferred colour of the Prophet and adopted by Muslims to indicate sanctity. See Figure 9.2. for an example of a riga fari. the hausa textile industry 195

1977: 169–78; Magnavita 2008: 250). Through technical analyses of narrow strip cloth, Kriger found that in Hausaland it fell into two subgroups defined by two ranges of standard cloth width, indicating two types of production in the export sector: cloth consisting of very narrow strips (1.25–6 cm) was transported in the salt trade to the north, and the natron trade of Borno,12 whereas wider strips (8–12 cm) were prominent in trade to the western Sudan region. Kriger supposes that the latter spread with the rise of the kola trade in the late eighteenth century (1993: 370). It may also have spread southward before this time and been introduced by Wangara traders during the Akan gold trade. Eventually Hausa and Kanuri long-distance traders took their place in the Gonja trade, but they could have maintained the same cloth width as a standard of measurement, just as they adopted the Songhai monetary system based on cowries and gold (Lovejoy 1978b: 184, 185, 193). In Hausaland cloth was also used as a store of value but it was not used as money, as was the cotton strip (gabaga) in Borno. The seventeenth century saw the gradual break-up of the Wangara network following the Moroccan invasion of Songhai in AD 1591. As a consequence, there was a forceful reassertion of Borno’s leadership in the region (Last 1989a: 135). Borno became a centre of international trade and its capital, Birni Gazargamo, a prominent centre of textile manufactures that were exported up to Sennar and Darfur (Lavers 1980: 205). To compensate for the loss of trade revenues after the collapse of the Wangara commercial network, Kano became increasingly dependent on rural production and craftwork, such as finished cloth. However, financial problems led to new kinds of taxes being imposed, including taxes on the market (Last 1983: 79, 80, 84). The Hausaland economy was eventually devastated by a prolonged famine at the beginning of the seventeenth century. A series of military attacks from the Jukun state (the so-called Kwararafa invasion) of the Benue valley added to the misery. The local economy recovered at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the rise of a new political power in Sokoto.

12 This difference in production attests to the flexibility and adaptability of local weavers to the markets. 196 marisa candotti

3. Textile boom and state during the nineteenth century

Jihad and restoring the economy: cotton as a raw material in the manufacture of cloth The jihad of Sheikh Usman dan Fodio (1804–8) consolidated much of the Hausa states into the Sokoto Caliphate. The consolidation erased political barriers and involved major demographic changes that led to market expansion. The new government influenced this expansion more than has often been recognised. The economic growth of the Caliphate was not a completely spontaneous phenomenon but a consequence of the domestic policy that emerged after the jihad. The pro- moter of this policy was the Sheikh’s son, Muhammad Bello, who had to cope with the economic reconstruction of the territories destroyed by the war. Initially, Muhammad Bello tried to establish control over the emirates, as in Zaria and Kano, which first succeeded in restoring their local economy, and people from the peripheral areas were often enslaved and resettled around the metropolitan Hausa cities (Denham and Clapperton 1966/1826, IV: 639). After AD 1825 Bello began to facilitate the economic integration of the whole territory. For this pur- pose, he stimulated commerce and handicrafts through the spread of garrison towns (ribats) even in the most remote areas of the Caliphate (Chafe 1990: 40, 46). Textile manufacturing was the productive sector that benefited most from the economic policies adopted by Caliph Bello. Foreign traders and specialist artisans were attracted to the main Hausa cities by the favourable social and economic conditions, contributing to the expansion of the textile industry. However, underlying the growth in the manufacturing sector, there was an investment in agricultural production of foodstuffs and primary goods, such as cotton (Last 1998: 231). Without the initial investment in cotton production, textile manufacturing would not have been able to expand so widely. Following the jihad, there occurred a substantial decline in the Caliphate’s cotton production because of the devastation of the war. Cotton and indigo plantations then started to be established around the surrounding area of Kano, Zaria and Sokoto through the investment in slave labour (Denham and Clapperton 1966/1826: 639, 658; Mahdi 1989: 196). In Zaria enslaved manpower was easy to provide and many slaves were placed on agricultural estates ( gadaye) belonging to the the hausa textile industry 197 city authorities (Lovejoy 1978a: 344). Significant cotton production also began to develop in the region of Zamfara, situated on the border of the Sokoto emirate. Much of the cotton produced in this region was exported to markets in the cities of Sokoto and Wurno (Barth 1962/1857–8: 240, 255). Transport over long distances is evidence of the development of textile production but it was a phenomenon that came about especially during the second half of the nineteenth century while, at the beginning of the century most of the cotton plantations were situated in the proximity of the principal manufacturing cities (NAK SNP 7, acc. 2410/1907; NAK SNP 1/1–4, acc. 2944/1903). Cotton is a low unit-value good and is very sensitive to high transport costs.13 Moreover, the cultivation of cotton requires large quantities of land and manpower. This explains why cotton farming spread especially around Zaria, where a middle-density population supported by slave labour existed and there was a type of clayey soil rich in nitrates. Such characteristics were essential for the extensive cultivation of this product because cotton greatly impoverishes the soil, making it unusable for a long period (NAK SNP 7, acc. 1515/1919). Zaria and Zamfara were the only areas where it was possible to practise shifting cultivation, while in other areas of the Caliphate cotton was cultivated by local farmers together with subsistence crops (NAK SNP 10, acc. 347p/1915). The diffusion of this type of cultivation among the farmers is interesting because the cost of producing cotton was very high in comparison to that of other agricultural products. Farmers could not afford the cost of transporting cotton over long distances and were often at the mercy of price speculation by the rich traders (SNP 7, acc. 1515/1919). The rich merchants’ monopoly on cotton and other raw materials such as cotton and indigo needed for textile manufacturing also contributed to the regional specialisation of production within the Caliph- ate. Most of Zaria’s cotton was transported by wealthy merchants to Kano, where the purchasing power of local weavers was much greater (NAK Kano Prof., acc. 2568). During the middle of the nineteenth century, the emirates of Zaria and Zamfara specialised in growing cotton while those of Sokoto and Kano specialised in manufacturing textiles. This specialisation was to the benefit of those emirates where

13 The value of indigo and raw silk was higher than cotton. For this reason, they could be transported over longer distances. 198 marisa candotti manufacturing activities were more developed because the sale of the final product was more profitable (Lovejoy 1978a: 358). However, textile manufacturing spread all over the territories and expanded rapidly. By the end of the century, the demand for cotton was so high that considerable quantities of yarn for weaving were even imported from Tripoli through the Sahara (Trade and Trade Routes . . ., 1899: 544; Johnson 1976: 97).

Economic policy and the rise of Sokoto manufacturing At the end of the nineteenth century, the city of Kano alone produced more than two million rolls of cloth per year (NAK SNP 7, acc. 1140/1911). Kano was the Caliphate’s principal manufacturing and commercial centre, but textile industries were distributed and developed all over the other emirates and local textiles began to be exported throughout West Africa, all over Borno and up to Tripoli and Lagos (Barth 1962/1857–8: 115). This development has been attributed to the demand for luxury cloth (Kriger 1988: 52) from an ever-expanding government elite whose economic basis was the collection of taxes and the use of large-scale slave labour (Flint and McDougall 1987: 386, 392). As will be argued, luxury cloth was not fundamental at the beginning and increased only in the second half of the century. The development of textile manufacturing was, indeed, favoured by a large domestic market of ordinary consumers connected by an efficient distribution network. Moreover, this development was not a spontaneous phenomenon but benefited considerably from the social and economic innovations implemented by Caliph Muhammad Bello. The main innovations adopted by Muhammad Bello to improve trade and manufacturing in the Caliphate were: integration of the rural areas with the urban context, continuous protection of the trade routes and greater regulation of transactions (Bello 1983b: 53–66; Last 1966: 56–9). To pursue this aim he stimulated the construction of numerous strengthened citadels (ribats) in the more remote areas of the territory. The presence of these citadels in rural areas guaranteed greater safety for production and trade, and a greater integration of the local population (Chafe 1990: 46). The urbanisation of rural areas allowed for greater administrative control since all the territory was connected to the main urban centres of each emirate through a network of administrative officialsjakadu ( ) who had the task of enforcing the law and managing tax collection. Better control of the territory also permitted the hausa textile industry 199 a constant flow of goods between urban centres and rural areas and the expansion of agricultural production and handicraft activities in all the territories of the Caliphate. The safety offered by these citadels attracted many merchants and artisans to areas that before the nineteenth century had been excluded from commercial activity (Garba 1986: 151–7). One of the most famous ribats in the Caliphate was Wurno, a town built by Muhammad Bello a few kilometres from the city of Sokoto (Last 1967: 77). It seems to have encouraged the local population to undertake productive activities which he himself pursued. To stimu- late handicraft activities in other ribats and villages, Caliph Bello then started to send letters to the emirs stressing the importance of developing local craftsmanship. As Bello writes to the emirs (Chafe 1990: 46; Minna 1982: 245): . . . foster the artisans, and be concerned with tradesmen who are indis- pensable to the people, such as farmers and smiths, tailors and dyers, physicians and grocers, butchers and carpenters and all sorts of traders who contribute to [stabilising] the proper order of this world. The ruler must allocate these tradesmen to every village and every locality. A consequence of this policy was the rise of textile manufactures in the city of Sokoto. The textile industry there began to develop as a consequence of the employment of enslaved manpower imported from Nupe, where the art of weaving was ancient and well known (NAK Sokoto Prof., acc. 260/1905; Perani 1992: 101–3). Thanks to the practice of murgu,14 slaves did not work only for their masters but also practised handicrafts and sold their products in the markets during the evening hours and at some periods of the year (Lovejoy and Hogen- dorn 1993: 203–7). Slaves produced mainly coloured textiles, while the free population manufactured white robes (riga fari) that were the main exported products of the Sokoto emirate (Clapperton 1966/1829: 222). Sokoto specialised in producing white cloth because it was the religious centre of the jihad. Thus strict attitudes prevailed and had a restraining influence on the embellishment of clothes (Heathcote 1972: 13). The whiteriga fari became a hallmark of Islamic reformers due to its close association with the sanctity of Islam. It seems that

14 Murgu is a Hausa term for the amount given by a slave to the owner instead of doing personal work for him. 200 marisa candotti its increased demand and production created a constant and regular source of patronage for weavers of this cloth (Perani 1989: 71). Sheikh Dan Fodio had encouraged the use of white robes among the Islamic reformers to sanction their purity in faith and intentions (Clap- perton 1966/1829: 186, 204). In the whole territory of the Caliphate coloured clothing was never appreciated and the use of suits enriched with gold embroidery was completely forbidden by Dan Fodio (Barth 1962/1857–8: 199, 257; NAK Katsina Prof., acc. G/AR 3/1). The adoption of simple clothing by the new leaders shows that their level of consumption was not very high. Hence, the trade and manufacture of expensive goods, and particularly that of textiles, did not initially play an important role in the development of local industry (NAK Sokoto Prof., acc. 260/1905).15 During the century more embellished garments began to spread all over the Caliphate. Therigan giwan, a robe embroidered with eight- knife imagery, became very important, being associated with Caliphate office-holders and used by the Muslim elite regardless of ethnic affiliation (Kriger 1988: 52; Heathcote 1972: 12, 14). Some of these robes were officially distributed by the state but, rather than an official robe of the Caliphate, it indicated social identity and prestige. Its religious symbolism was expressed by the embroidered eight-knife compositions which, like the older two-knife motif, possibly derived from a representation of the two-pointed sword of the Prophet frequently depicted in Islamic iconography (Kriger 1988: 52, 55, 79).16 The spread of more elaborate garments was also a consequence of the moderate policy of Muhammad Bello on the type of garments that could be worn. Above all, Bello had a more pragmatic personality and placed greater emphasis on commercial development (Bello 1983a: 215–17). Indeed, during the century the importance of the export sector in the economic balance of the Caliphate increased, which also stimulated the production of dyed textiles and the construction of dyeing pits in Sokoto. From 1815, outside the city boundaries of Sokoto, around 285 dyeing pits were built (NAK Sokoto Prof., acc. 260/1905).17

15 In Sokoto the cost of dyeing at the end of the nineteenth century was 500 cowries per cloth. 16 For a detailed description of this dress see Worden, this volume. 17 Interestingly, of the 285 existing dyeing pits in Sokoto, 200 belonged to only one owner. Given that Kano in 1855 had 2 000 dyeing pits and the richest dyer did not own more than 5 of them, one might assume that the holder of the Sokoto pits, a certain Mallam Basheru, was not perhaps the real owner but must have been only the manager on behalf of the government authorities. This hypothesis is confirmed the hausa textile industry 201

Bello was aware that to attract the Tuareg merchants into Sokoto it was necessary to develop the manufacturing of dyed textiles (Bello 1983a: 215–17). The indigo-dyed textiles were in fact sold to the Tuareg traders in exchange for the salt that they brought from the desert oases (Clapperton 1966/1829: 229). Local and imported textiles also became one of the main items used as a store of wealth in the capital’s public treasury and constituted a considerable part of the annual tribute pouring in from the other emirates to the Caliphate’s capital. Kano, for example, was sending to Sokoto a tribute of 1 000 garments per year by the end of the nineteenth century (NAK Sokoto Prof., acc. 151/1904).18 These textiles were not considered proper tributes but gifts gaisuwa( ) that the emirs gave to the Caliph as a sign of their political alliance and in recognition of his spiritual superiority (Barth 1962/1857–8: 241, 252; Ubah 1979: 313).19 If Kano sent textiles to the Caliph to seal his political authority, Sokoto then exported textiles to Kano where they found a wider market. This exchange demonstrates the complementary economic and political roles of the two cities. If Sokoto was the political and religious centre of the Caliphate, Kano was its economic core.

Kano and the development of the Caliphate’s textile trade and industry During the nineteenth century Kano’s textile industry reached extraor- dinary production levels. In 1851 the city’s annual production was estimated at about 300 million cowries (Barth 1962/1857–8: 115).20 In Kano the manufacture of fabrics was later pursued by the local population but initially numerous slaves devoted to weaving were also imported from other emirates (mainly Nupe) (Lovejoy 1978a: 341; Parliamentary Papers 1843, no. 27).21 The Kano government authorities

by the fact that Sokoto was the only city in the whole Caliphate where there were no taxes on dyeing pits. 18 It seems, however, that during the second half of the century Kano sent more than 15 000 garments to Sokoto. 19 The amount ofgaisuwa varied according to the wealth produced in each emirate. The emirs sent the Caliph textiles, but also items mostly produced in their own territories, such as slaves, horses and sacks of cowries. 20 At that time a family could live on an annual income of 50 000 cowries (£5 sterling). 21 The Parliamentary Paper (1843, n. 27) reports that the textile industry of Nupe was severely damaged by the high taxes imposed by the Caliphate and by the enslavement of the population. 202 marisa candotti also stimulated production through the immigration of many artisans specialising in the manufacture of textiles, particularly Kanuri (Shea 1975: 571–3). Different ethnic groups often produced different kinds of clothes but, as in the case of rigan giwan (robes embroidered with the eight-knife imagery), members of many ethnic groups contributed to their production, the garments changing hands at different stages in the process (Kriger 1988: 52). The making of garments entailed different stages of manufacture and a relative division of labour. Spinners, mainly slaves and women, prepared the thread for weaving cotton strips sewn together by tailors and often beaten and then dyed by professional workers and eventually embellished by embroiderers. Craftsmen often had no special workshops, some habitually worked in the markets according to demand and Quranic scholars often learned embroidery to bring in a small income (Heathcote 1972: 17). Textile workers differed in kinds and levels of skills attained and types of products they made but, apart from some working for elite markets, there were few weavers whose households did not produce their basic food needs and often raw materials (Barth 1962/1857–8: 115, 116). The weaver was often himself a farmer and a petty trader in the non-farming season (Johnson 1978: 267, 268). Some skilled tailors and dyers devoted themselves exclusively to their handicraft activities in Kano city, like the tailors of the Soron D’Inki ward (Pokrant 1982: 99), but most of the spinning and weaving was practised by seasonal workers scattered throughout the surrounding rural areas. The fabrics produced in the rural areas of Kano were bought by traders and then transported to the city to be dyed and sewn (Shea 1975: 40, 56; Ferguson 1973: 309–14). Traders played an important role in connecting people scattered over the territory. During the nineteenth century Tuareg merchants also began to invest in dyeing centres which started to be oriented towards export production. Thus successful dyeing centres tended to specialise in one or two kinds of dyed cloth: Kura specialised in the yan kura turbans and Bunkure in the kore gowns. Other towns specialised in the dyeing and beating of black cloth (turkedy), which was later taken several kilometres away to be sewn in alternating strips with cloth produced in these localities (Shea 1974/77: 59; Perani 1992: 98).22 Some technical innovations were

22 Caliphate cloth included other types of narrow band cotton and silk cloths, mainly of Nupe manufacture: saki, a minutely checked or striped, blue and white the hausa textile industry 203 introduced into the dyeing and beating stages of production, rather than weaving, but the reorganisation of the industry itself brought about significant economies of scale by permitting a more efficient use of labour, improved training for craftsmen and reduced capital expenditures. This economic organisation of the industry permitted Kano to produce high-quality cloth at a lower cost than other textile centres (Shea 1974/77: 55, 56). The great attraction of textiles produced in the Kano emirate was their competitive price, making it possible to export them to very distant areas. During the nineteenth century, however, two major changes occurred in the textile production of the emirate. First, instead of importing slaves from other emirates, Kano started to buy textiles produced there (Barth 1962/1857–8: 116, 122; Ferguson 1973: 377, 387; Staudinger 1990/1889, I: 181, 220). Secondly, during the second half of the century, textile manufacturing developed especially in the surrounding rural areas, particularly Kura (Shea 1983; 93, 104). Kano became mainly an entrepôt for textiles produced elsewhere (NAK Kat- sina Prof., acc. 1309). Kano’s popularity as a market was due to a series of commercial incentives and the greater regulation of market transactions (Denham and Clapperton 1966/1826, IV: 653).23 Many rich merchants (attajiraj) settled there and exported textiles to distant areas, often in exchange for local textiles. Sometimes, they lent expensive clothing to small traders who paid for them after having sold the clothing (Ferguson 1973: 374–8; Flegel 1985/1885: 6, 7). The traders in the finished products and the landlords ( fatoma) frequently accommodated visiting buyers and arranged sales (Shea 1974/77: 59). In the second half of the nineteenth century, these rich merchants began to acquire greater influence in Kano business circles. The power of these merchants was such that when the price of textiles fell, the merchants were able to buy most of them and wait for prices to rise again (Denham and Clapperton 1966/1826, IV: 653; NAK Katsina Prof., acc. 1309). These rich Hausa merchants benefited from the city authorities, unlike North African

cotton cloth; barge, a striped, red and white silk and cotton cloth; tsamiya, a striped, beige and white silk and cotton cloth. These textiles had a plain weave, measuring 1–4 inches (2.54–10.16 centimetres in width, and were sold in rolls or edge-stitched together to form larger pieces of cloth (Perani 1992: 98). 23 The Kano market was regulated with great fairness; if a garment purchased in Kano was discovered to be of inferior quality it was sent back, and the seller was obliged to refund the purchase money (Clapperton 1966 [1826], IV: 653). 204 marisa candotti traders who were forced to pay taxes on their commercial transactions (Monteil 1895: 291). Certainly from the late nineteenth century onwards, almost all Kano’s commerce began to be monopolised by the rich merchants whose main aim was to capture and control widely scattered markets (Pokrant 1982: 88). The export of textiles from this city towards distant areas was increasingly facilitated by the political authorities. The conquest of new areas, particularly the territories ofFombina (the south), was a determining factor in the productive and commercial expansion of Kano. These areas, known as Adamawa by their Fulani conqueror, attracted many merchants from Kano who began to ‘invade’ them with their textiles (Barth 1962/1857–8: 197). These merchants exchanged their textiles for slaves and ivory; the profit was not very high, a turkedy bought in Kano for 1 800 cowries was sold for 2 500 shells in Adamawa, but a turkedy could purchase a slave who could be sold in Kano for 4 000 cowries (Barth 1962/1857–8: 197). Thus the merchants made most money on slaves; any profit at all on goods taken in the other direction would increase the overall profit (Johnson 1976: 115). Commercial development between Kano and Adamawa also affected the manufacturing production of other peripheral areas. Along the commercial routes between Kano and Adamawa numerous ribats were built where many Hausa artisans were located who began to spread the art of weaving among the local population (PRO, CO, 446/1905, no. 34768; NAK Kano Prof., acc. 6969/1912). In these areas there were great quantities of raw materials, such as the indigo and raw silk found in Bauchi. As they were a long way from the chief urban centres of the Caliphate, there was less competition in the handicraft industry (Aliyu 1974: 218–23, 241). Therefore, in the late nineteenth century, a great number of small artisans and traders resident in the chief Hausa cities began to move to the peripheral emirates of the Caliphate. The Hausa artisans were often forced to emigrate thus because in the second half of the century, numerous taxes began to be imposed on textile manufacturing and other handicraft businesses (Garba 1986: 132, Smith 1960: 154–8).24

24 In the first half of the century, in each emirate taxes were levied only on the main handicraft occupations, while from the 1870s taxation was not only increased but extended to a greater number of workers. In Zaria, for instance, an annual tax of 3 200 cowries on dyeing was imposed in 1880. In Kano from the second half of the the hausa textile industry 205

Despite fiscal pressure, the conquest of new markets enabled producers to compensate for the tax increases, and textiles produced in the main textile centres of the Caliphate were exported towards more distant areas and sold to a larger sector of the population. At the end of the nineteenth century, cloth dyed in Kano was sold all over Borno and the Caliphate textiles reached such distant places as Baghirmi, the western coasts of the Atlantic, Tripoli and Lagos from where they were exported even to Brazil where they were required by the slave populations that had been deported during the previous centuries (Parlia- mentary Papers 1857, no. 2257). The export of textiles towards Lagos and other southern territories also led to the rise of new markets inside the Caliphate, such as Jega, a town situated south of Sokoto, that began to compete with Kano (Barth 1962/1857–8: 267; NAK Sokoto Prof., acc 260/1905). The emergence of new markets was accompanied by a greater control of the rich merchants and an ideological corruption of the government authorities who, in collusion with the merchants, hindered increasing numbers of petty traders by increasing the tolls between the emirates (NAK Kano Prof., acc. 4048). At the end of the nineteenth century, almost all the Caliphate’s long-distance trade was monopolised by a few rich Hausa merchants and some middle- men located in distant areas like Lagos, who began to demand higher percentages on commercial transactions (Rhodes House, MSS Afr. s. 1385) (see Figure 8.1. for a depiction of trade routes, AD 1905). The monopoly on trade by these merchants and the increase in taxes on petty commerce shows that the political authorities of the Caliphate, at the end of the nineteenth century, unlike the first reform leaders, benefited increasingly from the affairs of rich merchants and damaged the common population (talakawa). As reported by a British officer (NAK SNP 7, acc. 2001/1907): . . . when the tolls are abolished the tendency will be for farmers to leave the land and take up petty trading. The Hausa is a born trader, and is satisfied if he can turn over his small capital, . . . the inducement will be greater for slaves to leave their masters and tour around the country with one sheep or one piece of cloth.

century an annual tax of 700 cowries was levied on each dyeing pit (kurdin karofi). In Katsina a tax was also imposed on yarns. Sokoto was the only city where there were no taxes on dyeing pits. (Garba 1986: 132; Smith 1960: 154–8). 206 marisa candotti

Figure 8.1. Map of trade routes, northern Nigeria. The National Archives, London, CO 446/51, 1905.

By the end of the century, the making and trading of cloth in Hausaland had become, indeed, the expression of a culture that tended to integrate different strata of the population regardless of ethnic identity.

4. Conclusion

The development of textile manufacture in Hausaland reflects the economic and political trends that occurred in these territories from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The following scenario can be suggested at the current state of research. Initially, the diffusion of the cloth trade was due to increased trading expeditions and the immigration of foreign traders and weavers into Hausa towns. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, Borno was the main exporter of textiles to Hausaland and immigrant Kanuri spread the art of dyeing to Kano. In the sixteenth century Kano became a prominent produc- the hausa textile industry 207 ing centre thanks to trans-Saharan trade and the integration of the urban and rural economy. In the nineteenth century, under the new political leaders who emerged after the jihad against the ancient Hausa rulers (sarakuna), textile production experienced unprecedented growth. The Caliphate’s cloth started to be exported all over West Africa, including Borno, and textile manufacturing was extended to all the emirates. Economic and productive growth was mainly due to a policy that actively promoted agricultural expansion and increased market demand for foodstuffs and manufactured goods. The manufacture of textiles in the Caliphate was not only the prerogative of a few specialised artisans but involved most of the population scattered throughout the territory. Textiles were produced by the greater part of the population as a secondary occupation when farming activities were suspended. Seasonal weavers could also provide for their basic needs of food and raw material, thus reducing marginal production costs (Johnson 1978: 267, 268). Cotton spinning was the slowest activity in the process, which explains the imports of threads from North Africa across the desert. Despite its competitiveness, there were some constraints on production within the textile industry. Apart from a few rich landlords, most craftsmen lacked the incentive or the means to make technological innovations as they produced for a relatively stable market of poor consumers or for an export market controlled by merchants whose main aim was to capture and control widely scattered markets (Pokrant 1982: 88). If we attribute innovation not only to technological change but also to the organisation of the market, the Hausa textile industry was characterised by several innovations. But, in the absence of widespread investment in cost-reducing technical innovations, the pre-eminence of some cities such as Kano, resulting also from external economies such as the regulation of the market’s activities, benefited from product differentiation based on colour and pattern (Hopkins 1973: 49, 50). Different products for many diverse uses were demanded by a heterogeneous population. Nevertheless, the demand for textiles increased over the centuries due to the spread of a Muslim culture and the integration of scattered populations. Some cloth, such as the giwan riga, became a symbol of this culture. The adoption of cloth was a symbol of religious and social identity but, above all, it was cloth manufacturing 208 marisa candotti and trade that characterised the Hausa way of life. The spread of textile manufacturing among a heterogeneous population of free artisans and slaves supports Adamu’s observation that the process of ‘Hausa- isation’ was rooted primarily in its system of trade and production. The integration of foreign traders and slaves in this system reinforced other cultural and social forces that related to ethnic identification as Hausa (cf. Lovejoy 2006: 187).

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CHAPTER NINE

CLOTHING AND IDENTITY: HOW CAN MUSEUM COLLECTIONS OF HAUSA TEXTILES CONTRIBUTE TO UNDERSTANDING THE NOTION OF HAUSA IDENTITY?

Sarah Worden

1. Introduction

As clearly demonstrated in the previous chapter, historically the production and use of cloth has been a highly significant medium of cultural and symbolic expression for the Hausa. Since the mid 1800s many museums have acquired textiles and clothing associated with the Hausa that can provide a particular historical resource for the study of the relationship between dress and identity. Museum collections of Hausa artefacts are almost exclusively the result of acquisition by early European travellers and those involved in the colonial enterprise. A comprehensive survey of Hausa textile collections across the United Kingdom is beyond the scope of this essay which will draw on examples from the National Museums Scotland (NMS) and the National Museums Liverpool (NML) to examine continuity and innovation in clothing styles, through which issues concerning clothing and the construction of collective and individual identity are raised. Through illumination of the characteristics of specific robesriguna ( ) in the collections this essay will deconstruct the notion of a ‘Hausa style’ by identifying religious, political and cultural influences which have contributed to the development of formal attire associated with the Hausa. As a key element of cultural expression, clothing is an indicator of both collective and individual identity. Across time and space the ways in which people dress the body are highly expressive markers of social, political and religious affiliation. The materials, styles, colours and embellishment of clothing are established, maintained and developed as the result of a huge range of influences, some more clearly identifiable than others. Whilst contemporary clothing practice can 214 sarah worden be identified, observed and interpreted through fieldwork, the fundamental framework of the presentation of the self through dress is built on a complex of implicit and explicit references to an historical past. Photographic archives can be a useful source of images but finding the physical evidence of an historic past in the form of textiles and dress is often problematic due to the loss of materials through wear and tear. Ethnographic collections can bridge this gap. As textile historian Louise Taylor has observed, ‘surviving clothing in museum collections provides researchers and collectors with a powerful tool for historical and socio-cultural investigation’ (1998: 338), whilst curator Anita Herle proposed that the ethnographic museum can be considered ‘a field site for anthropological knowledge’.1 Considered thus, the museum becomes a primary location for the study of ethnographic material, another ‘authentic’ version of ethnographic reality. Focus- ing specifically on textiles and dress textile historian Peggy Gilfoy also identified the museum as a vehicle for exploring other cultures through the textiles they create. However, it is precisely Gilfoy’s notion that ‘careful selection and presentation can provide a deeper understanding of certain aspects of another culture . . .’ (1988: 8), which is problematic in the study of dress. Selection is an isolating practice, necessary in all museum collecting and presentation of material culture, but a practice that privileges certain items over others. The NMS and NML collections are, like many other collections, partial accumulations of Hausa clothing traditions. Whilst this does not mean that it cannot be a useful source of information relating to cultural expression, we must acknowledge that rather than static objects symbolising the cultures from which they came, we must discuss (and display) them as a significant and complex aspect of dynamic histories. Through consideration of the biography of the object now in the museum collection, it is possible to gain a perspective of how the Hausa presented themselves through the clothing they wore and how those who they encountered perceived them.

2. Investigating Hausa Dress

Renowned for the production and trade of hand-woven cloth, indigo- dyeing and embroidery skills throughout West Africa and the Sahara

1 University of East Anglia Conference paper on the Opportunities and Problems in the Exhibition of Ethnographic Materials in 2002. clothing and identity 215 for over five hundred years, textiles have developed as a highly significant medium through which Hausa cultural identity has been given visual expression. This paper proposes that, for the Hausa, clothing and adornment of the human body has developed as the primary expression of Hausa material culture, conveying complex relationships between religion, status, gender and artistic creativity. In artistic traditions that historically have not developed the practice of figurative sculpture and representational art, such as the pre-dominantly Muslim Hausa, any manipulation, definition and exaggeration of the human body through dress takes on a particular significance. The human being, him- or herself, is, consciously or sub-consciously, the ultimate figurative icon, not replicated in any other material form, and therefore a potential primary focus for artistic and creative energy.2 The Hausa tailored garments in museum collections exemplify skills in production of hand-woven, hand-dyed and hand-stitched clothing techniques associated with Hausa weavers, dyers and embroiderers. There are also robes which reveal the introduction and assimilation of factory made cloth and machine stitching which accompanied colonial expansion in Nigeria in the early twentieth century. Whilst large robes are worn across many West African countries, many embellished with embroidery, the notion of a ‘Hausa-style’ will be considered. Produc- tion of Hausa textiles is gender-specific: traditionally men weave, indigo-dye, tailor and embroider cloth for the robes they wear. With relatively few items of clothing associated with Hausa women from the same period in UK collections, Hausa clothing traditions are represented with a male bias. As John Mack has observed, it is interesting that the gender of dress has rarely been an issue in collection or documentation (pers. comm. 2004). In practice it may be argued that during the period from which the robes originate the Muslim Hausa cultural arena (the public face of Hausa society) was (and continues to be) a male preserve and emblems of the male sphere of Hausa culture were therefore dominant in the exchange of materials and ideas. The influence of social and economic practices such as trade and gift-giving/exchange leads to questions regarding the whole definition of ‘Hausa’; produced by the Hausa for other markets, such robes were popular in many areas not culturally Hausa. It is also relevant to consider those who have not adopted such a style of dress, those whose

2 This statement acknowledges that Hausa contemporary arts do include the use of representational forms on wall decoration and as pottery toys for children. 216 sarah worden ceremonial wear in particular, is not tailored but consists of layers of wrapped lengths of cloth, such as the kente cloth worn by the Asante rulers and dignitaries of Ghana. Although beyond the scope of this paper, by comparing Hausa and non-Hausa, the boundaries and margins of categories can be both identified and problematised, articulating the fluidity of such definitions.

3. Contexts of origin and use

Study of the contexts of origin, production and use of Hausa textiles reveals complex relationships between people and places in both historical and contemporary contexts which are influential in the development of a Hausa style. A comprehensive overview of the development and influence of Islam in West Africa can be found in the edited volume by Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (2000) including a chapter by Rene Bravmann concerning Islamic art and material culture in Africa which follows earlier detailed studies on the subject (1974, 1983). With the introduction and adoption of Islam in West Africa, from as early as the eighth and ninth centuries, came a growing requirement for appropriate clothing which not only covered, but concealed the body as completely as possible. In many societies the unclothed body has been traditionally been regarded as an unfinished entity and, as Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro suggest, clothing and dress have ‘been assigned the responsibility of transforming the incomplete body into a complete cultural package, substituting the fabricated for the organic. . . . In framing the body, dress contributes to the symbolic translation of materiality into cultural images or signifiers’ (1999: 3). Through the treatment of the unclothed body, the physical body in society, fundamental principles and ideologies are articulated through a range of practices which seek, through physical regulation, to control and maintain morality and thus social order. In the context of the Hausa the significance of Islamic prescriptions concerning the unclothed body are particularly relevant. Comprehensive literature in the form of subject specific pamphlets on Islamic dress is published to ensure the faithful are fully conversant with all aspects of grooming and dressing according to the Holy Koran (see for example Diwan 2000). Such rules are couched in the most insistent terms such as ‘compulsory’ and ‘strictly forbidden’ (haraam), indicating the significance of the presentation of the body in Muslim consciousness. Such clothing and identity 217 dictates have been accommodated in Hausa clothing styles to conform to the ideological framework regarding the presentation of the body. The requirement of appropriate clothing resulted in the growth of markets for cotton, woven cloth and tailored clothing, developing agriculture, trade and textile specialists. Islamic religious scholars were often instrumental in setting up textile industries alongside their teaching. Studies which foreground the influence and significance of an Islamic visual repertoire in the decoration of clothing created and worn in northern Nigeria include Labelle Prussin (1986), Colleen Kriger (1988, 2006) and Judith Perani (1979, 1980, 1988, 1989). Islam thus found not only its most explicit and immediate mode of visual expression across Muslim areas of West Africa in clothing and dress, but was also at the forefront of the associated commerce and trade. Complex trading links across West Africa and north across the Sahara were dominated by the Hausa from the fifteenth century. They were known for their trading expertise at both local and long-distance levels, made particularly effective by their strategic geographical location bordering the Sahara to the north, accessible from the coast to the south, and strategically placed on west to east trading routes. Historians including Marion Johnson (1973, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1983), Paul Lovejoy (1971, 1978, 1981), Philip Shea (1975, 1980, 1983) and most recently Marisa Candotti (this volume) have written widely on the development of production and trade of cotton, and weaving and dyeing networks involving the Hausa within and beyond Hausaland which reached the height of production and trade in the nineteenth century.

4. The Sokoto Caliphate and Robes of Honour

Particularly influential for the development of the clothing now in museum collections is the period during which the Hausa, Nupe and some northern Yoruba city states became part of the Sokoto Caliph- ate under the rule of Fulani administrators as a result of jihad, begun in 1804. Murray Last, in his work on the history and formation of the Caliphate (1967) reveals the complex development of a unifying structure of government. Over time the ruling class Fulani adopted the Hausa language and were absorbed into Hausa culture, and today in Hausaland are referred to as Hausa-Fulani. With the formation of the Caliphate came the need and desire to give physical expression to the unifying ideology through the codes of dress. Defined in the 218 sarah worden

Islamic literature as ‘Robes of Honour’, created from what Kriger has distinguished as ‘caliphate cloth’ (1988: 32), Caliphate robes became de rigueur for all leaders and high ranking officials from 1804, produced with high quality production processes and materials of high value, both monetary and symbolic, and often presented as gifts between officials in, and beyond, the Caliphate. However, as Last has observed, it is unlikely that these robes were known as caliphate robes or cloth at the time. ‘Caliphate’ is a term invented as late as 1964 and included lands outside those of the Hausa, and therefore there is the potential for a large range of cloth under such a definition (pers. comm. 2004). In this paper, caliphate cloth is recognised as a range of distinctive cloths made into large, tailored robes, produced by several ethnic groups in northern Nigeria. For further analysis see Kriger (1988) who proposes that the most important feature was not their ethnic affiliation but rather their use by the Muslim elite. The robes might therefore be found in a wide number of locations within and beyond the boundaries of the Caliphate. The development of Hausa clothing styles was influenced by patronage at the highest level. Investigation of production and patronage by Judith Perani and Norma Wolff (1999) identifies relationships between Hausa and neighbouring cultural groups which supplied a highly developed demand for quality textiles which has continued to the present. Deconstruction of the complex of materials, colour, designs and motifs of these expansive and highly embellished robes and trousers reveals stylistic templates which have become symbolic referents to a cultural and religious heritage, which include local and long-distance influences, given cohesive visual expression under the Sokoto Caliphate.

Characteristics of the Hausa robe The focus of this essay are robes which are historically associated with religious and political elites. Emphasis of the physical form and the extended body resulting in the increase of personal boundaries is well-developed in the context of Hausa leadership. The most immediate visual characteristics of the Hausa riga are the size, colour and embroidered decoration. Up to 2.5 metres wide and worn almost to the ankles, the robe both covers and emphasises the body, extending its actual size. Usually worn as part of a total ensemble by the Hausa on ceremonial occasions this includes multi-layering of robes worn with huge expansive trousers, and the addition of headgear, boots, clothing and identity 219 sashes and weaponry; all are worn whilst astride a horse that is also decked out in regalia. As Douglas Fraser and Herbert Cole have elaborated, hierarchical structures of power, are visibly reinforced by codes of dress and regalia, ‘creating isolating, protective spatial envelopes for leaders’ to separate them conceptually from the world. At the same time, however, they conform to the concept of visibility, making them more conspicuous, enhancing their superior status and the power to control. They argue that the main function of status dress is to ‘affect a visual contrast between a leader’s person and environment, and that of his followers, which provides a visual corollary to their socio-political differentiation’ (1972: 308). It is also a strategy of invisibility. The physical form, the body, is often concealed with wrapping, layering, and head and face covering. Thus, whilst the presence of a figure of power is more visible, the person inhabiting the clothing of leadership is actually invisible (1972: 309). His public identity is an image which instantiates power and status. However ‘invisible’ the person (or perhaps more accurately, the personality), leaders must maintain a connection with those they lead—sharing sufficient characteristics of dress creates a visual rapport, clothing styles and forms may be shared with subordinates but distinction is maintained with exaggeration of size, style and decoration. The size of the ensemble is then a key factor in the presentation of image in contexts of leadership and power. Traditionally Hausa robes were tailored from a small range of narrow-strip hand-woven cloth; the narrower the strips the more highly valued the robe. These were indigo and white woven cloth known by the Hausa as saki; white or fari cloth; imported red silk striped cloth known as barage and local brown silk woven with white cotton cloth known as tsamyia. Hausa robes also have characteristic embroidery, predominantly on the upper left chest, with additional areas to the right and around the front opening edge and extending to the upper middle back of the neck. The trousers worn with the robes are similarly vast, narrowing to heavily embroidered ankle bands which enable the wearer to ride on horse back—and can be seen worn today by the men on horse-back who take part in many ceremonial occasions, some of whom also continue to wear decorated leather riding boots and shoes produced by Hausa leatherworkers. The robes and trousers in museum collections would not appear out of place in contemporary ceremonial situations 220 sarah worden

Figure 9.1. Group of riders, Sallah procession, Kano City, February 2002 (© Sarah Worden). in northern Nigeria although they include garments over 120 years old (Figure 9.1.).

Collecting and Collections The colonial encounter between Britain and West Africa, and more especially Nigeria, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, resulted in acquisition of African objects from Hausaland throughout museums in the UK on a large scale. The different strategies of collecting, donation and presentation of material are indicative not only of the museum’s quest for specimens but the desire of the collectors and donors to be associated with such an endeavour. Arjun Appadurai (1986: 5) persuasively argued that ‘things (objects) can be understood more fully through the meanings inscribed in their forms, their uses and their trajectories’ (my emphasis). The NMS and NML Hausa collections are, like many others, the result of series of exchanges between the Hausa, the European donor and the museum. The early European travellers’ accounts in the nineteenth century often referred to textile production and use by the Hausa. Whilst the perspective is frequently personal, they are nevertheless an enlightening source of information and description of clothing practice during the clothing and identity 221 period. Colonial reports from the early twentieth century also contribute to knowledge of the role of textiles in Hausa society. In these reports the primary concern is with the organisation of production of raw materials and the implementation of imported technologies for colonial profit. It is during this period that many robes of more ‘traditional’ materials and manufacture entered the museum, at a time when the new European influenced textile technologies in Nigeria must have affected the perceived value and status of such cloth and clothing. Whilst information relating to the objects can be sketchy it is often intriguing, and locates the object in the chain of human transactions across time and space offering insights into the significance attached to the acquisition of Hausa textiles, and therefore their role in the construction of cultural identity. Similarly, donor history is worthy of investigation not only to identify more detailed strategies of collecting at NMS and NML but also because it can contribute to the ‘cultural biography’ of collections (Kopytoff 1986: 64–91). The earliest type of cloth tailored into large robes by the Hausa was white hand-woven cloth embroidered either with green or white thread which, under the influence of Islam, became directly associated with religious piety (Figure 9.2.).3 Examples of fari riguna in the NML collections, acquired between 1904 and 1931, include two robes donated in 1906 by Captain John Fremantle, a colonial official in northern Nigeria in the early twentieth century, who was based at Zungeru on the Kaduna River, the headquarters of the Nigerian Pro- tectorate.4 Whilst there are no direct references to these robes in his journals he records several occasions when presents, including garments, were exchanged with local dignitaries. One robe is tailored from narrow strip locally woven cotton cloth and one from imported machine made cotton cloth and reveal continuity in style but variation in materials and embellishment. An interesting feature of the robe of machine cloth is the folding and stitching of the cloth to create false seams to replicate the appearance of very narrow hand-woven strips joined together. It would appear that without these seams the robe lacked the distinctive feature of Hausa narrow strip cloth whose associations conveyed status and value whilst such embellishment also made the robe much more substantial in weight and bulk, another positive attribute in status dress.

3 As Candotti has noted in this volume, pages 194 and 199, above. 4 NML Registration numbers 5.10.06.2; 5.10.06.3. 222 sarah worden

Figure 9.2. Detail of White robe riga fari (© National Museums Liverpool). Taken by the author, with special permission to publish by National Museums Liverpool.

The earliest robe in NMS collections is created fromsaki cloth,5 one of the most commonly mentioned types of robe in nineteenth century accounts of northern Nigeria and found in all museum collections researched by the author (Figure 9.3.). Saki cloth is woven from indigo-dyed and white cotton yarn to produce fine narrow stripes or checked ground patterns. Robes of saki cloth were always embroidered with white thread. The adoption of the ‘robe of honour’ in the nineteenth century and the prestige associated with indigo-dyed robes in the Sokoto Caliphate led to the rapid expansion of the textile industry which included the development of highly commercialised centres of production of indigo and indigo-dyed cloth. In precolonial Nigeria the riga saki was only worn by individuals of the highest political and social

5 NMS Registration number A.1878.1.2 clothing and identity 223 stature (Perani and Wolff 1999: 143). We see evidence of the worth of saki cloth in a schedule of inheritance relating to a high-ranking official of the Kano Court in the late nineteenth century. The vast list contains references to numerous riguna and trousers of all caliphate cloth types, including saki, with the monetary value of each alongside. Compared with a riga of machine-made cotton cloth which is listed at twenty thousand cowries, the riga of saki cloth on the list is valued at sixty thousand cowries (Mervyn Hiskett 1966: 137). The list indicates that whilst imported fabric was assimilated as a high status cloth, saki remained more highly valued and prestigious. The NMS robe is important not only as an early example in UK museum collections but because it has provenance which identifies the donor and previous owner and offers an opportunity to contextualise the robe. According to the museum register the robe was collected between 1862 and 1865 by Captain Colin Mackenzie Dundas of the Royal Navy during a tour of duty as Lieutenant on anti-slavery duty on board HMS Dart off the West African coast. The museum register notes the robe was worn by ‘King’ Massaba, who was the Nupe Emir in Bida in 1859 and the son of a Hausa mother and a Nupe father (Valentine Robins 1867: 85). Massaba’s reign was characterised by imperialistic expansion, which resulted in a steady flow of wealth. As a major art patron he encouraged the development of Bida art industries. S. E. Nadel’s earlier work on the Nupe (1942) and Perani’s (1979; 1980; 1988; 1989) more recent focus on the textile production of the Nupe identify patronage of art and craftsmen at the highest level. Visits to Massaba during his rule are recorded in the notes and journals of a number of travelers and officials. As noted above, such robes, of high monetary and symbolic value were often presented as gifts between officials in and beyond the Caliphate and it may have been via this route that the robe entered the NMS collection. Comments made by travellers to the region in the early nineteenth century show that the Nupe were already outstanding in their production of woven cloth and embroidery. According to Hugh Clap- perton there were many Nupe slaves living in Hausa cities in the 1820s that were considered ‘the most expert weavers in the Soudan’ [sic] (1829: 222 n. 16). Heinrich Barth also makes several references to Nupe robes purchased in Hausaland. In one passage he describes them as favourite articles, to be used for gift-giving during his travels through the countries on the middle course of the Niger ‘where nothing 224 sarah worden

Figure 9.3. A.1878.1.2 Indigo robe riga saki with Eight Knives design (©National Museums Scotland) NMS photographic Ref. PF17154. is esteemed more highly than these native manufactures’ (Barth in G. T. Bettany ed. 1890: 147). Although saki robes are the most commonly mentioned in the accounts, the most common type of Hausa robe in the NMS collections is tailored from barage cloth. Woven on a narrow-strip loom from imported red or magenta silk, known as alhari, this was actually silk waste from Tunisia traded across the Sahara. More recently European silk industries have been a major source of alhari via North Africa (Lamb and Holmes 1980: 40). In the southern Nupe town of Egga the weavers specialised in weaving barage cloth, which is characterised by a large white stripe often flanked by narrow black and yellow stripes set against a red or magenta silk ground. The four robes in the NMS collection show the different types of striped design. Robes of barage cloth are, like the fari robes, decorated with embroidery of green thread (Figure 9.4.). Two of the barage robes in the NMS collections are known as girke or elephant robes.6 They are distinguished from the riga by the insertion of gussets of cloth to increase the width of the robe at the hem and the weight of the garment adding to the

6 Registration numbers A.1903.354 and V.2007.125 clothing and identity 225 desired physical monumentality of the robe. Whilst there are no barage robes in the Liverpool collections there is a fine example in the British Museum identified as a gift to a British Vice-Admiral from the King of Dahomey in about 1863, evidence of the networks of exchange and value of Hausa/Nupe robes in neighbouring countries. Barage cloth was also used as a distinctive feature attached as a wide band around the hem of many white and indigo robes. Both NML and NMS have examples of indigenous silk yarn tsamiya robes in the collection which were collected between the end of the nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, identified by Perani and Wolff as the most highly esteemed and expensive of the caliphate gowns in Hausaland along with the barage robes (1999: 143). The silk was collected by the Hausa in the north, traded south to the Nupe and Yoruba weavers, and as cloth and tailored robes were sold to Hausa traders for distribution along northern trade routes. The significance of this type of cloth is evident if we look at the range of terms used in Hausa language for the different tones of the finished cloth. David Heathcote has identifiedBa’in tsamiya for darkish brown, jan tsamiya for medium brown, and farin tsamiya, sometimes called gamba, for light coloured, or white silk. Additional terms for tsamiya thread describe its texture. For example, tsamiya baya ‘daya is thread of even thickness, while tsamiya mai rama is uneven or lumpy (1979: 151). The fact that the Hausa define the silk so precisely and in specific terms suggests the significance of silk as a commodity through which those with the means could express their status and wealth through distinctions of colour and finish.

Surface Elaboration of the Hausa robe In his thesis on Hausa embroidered dress Heathcote identified at least one hundred and fifty different terms for the many motifs used in Hausa embroidery, although not all are employed in robe decoration (1979: II: 104–114). Garments attributed to the Hausa studied to date by the author in the National Museums Liverpool, National Museum of Scotland, British Museum and the Wisbech and Fenland Museum, Cambridgeshire all share a particular embroidered imagery and spatial organisation. These include the motifs described in the following section. A characteristic of the Hausa robe is a large pocket on the left of the robe. Most of the embroidery is concentrated on this feature; patterns defining the opening edge of the pocket have a correspondence 226 sarah worden

Figure 9.4. V.2007.125 Silk robe girke barage (© National Museums Scotland) NMS Ref. PF17167. with designs defining the neck edge. The pocket may originally have held the wearer’s copy of the Koran, or written excerpts placed over the heart. There has been a general trend towards larger and larger pockets over time. Contemporary robes on sale in Kano City market seen by the author in 2002 incorporated pockets which almost cover the whole left front of the robe to the hem, ceasing to have any functional use but have developed as an extensive embroidered feature. Heathcote proposes that the presence of embroidered motifs evolved from sewing which met a need to reinforce certain seams and edges, in particular the neck, hems and pocket openings. Because the basic cut of such gowns has remained virtually unchanged, the original embroidered elements have also remained in the positions where they began as a structural addition (1979: 52). Heathcote further observes that most Hausa embroiderers who produce traditional decorative patterns often ‘seem powerless’ to break free from them, suggesting that ‘It is almost as if the various motifs which together form the pattern are so compelling that without their correct traditional form the final product is quite unacceptable’ (1979: 202). It appears that the repetition of well-known embroidery patterns and the level of craftsmanship involved are the qualities that most Hausa hand embroiderers who use traditional designs look for in evaluating a piece of work. Although Nupe embroidery uses the same patterns as the Hausa, art historian Judith Perani observes that its form tends to clothing and identity 227 be more solid and massive than the fluid, linear forms found on many Hausa gowns (1979: 54).

The Knife(Aska) Most of the classic hand-embroidery designs on the earliest caliphate robes, and still used today, are those that incorporate some form of the pointed knife, described in Hausa as the aska motif. There is continuity in the use of this shape over at least one hundred and sixty years. These are the Two Knives, aska biyu, and the Eight Knives, aska takwas design. The earliest examples of both designs in British collections were collected during the Niger expedition of 1841 held in the British Museum. The Two Knives and Eight Knives embroidery compositions share the same vocabulary of imagery, although the latter may be more recent, probably developing as an extension of the former. With no known examples of nineteenth or early twentieth century compositions representing intermediary stages, Eight Knives appears to have been introduced as a fully developed design motif. The termaska takwas refers to the eight embroidered, pointed ‘knife’ shapes, three on the gown’s left front, next to the neck opening and five along the top of the pocket. More prevalent than Two Knives during the nineteenth century, it has been suggested by Kriger that the Eight Knives composition could be interpreted as a signifier of the new dynasty established at Sokoto (1988: 57). A further suggestion is that the original Two Knives embroidery motif may have been derived from representations of Dhu’l-Fakar, the two-pointed sword of the Prophet frequently depicted in Islamic iconography. The sword was thought to have magical properties, with the two points used to put out the eyes of the enemy. Kriger suggests it may therefore have functioned as protection against the evil eye which would correspond to its crucial position over the heart of the wearer (1988: 79). It is also noteworthy that Hausa craftsmen sometimes refer to both blunt and an elongated type of triangle with the term laya, a word also used for a written or printed charm (Heathcote 1979: 103; Arnold Rubin 1984: 67–70). The function of the triangle as a protective device is well documented across cultures (Paine 1990: 141), and is, therefore, an appropriate motif for the robe pocket as a site of vulnerability.

Right Hand Vertical Border Whilst the overall pattern imagery of Two Knives design remained little changed, the Eight Knives pattern imagery transformed considerably 228 sarah worden during the nineteenth century. The most dramatic change took place in the motif running vertically along the right hand edge of the composition as it is viewed. On early robes it is shown with the Eight Knives motif as several simple parallel lines forming a curved band or arc; on later ones it has become a series of squares and rectangles containing knot forms, interlaces, checkerboards or crossed lozenges. Kriger suggests that such stylistic changes indicate that the Eight Knives composition was not yet a firmly established visual statement and was probably more recent than Two Knives (1988: 78). Whilst a number of the robes surveyed have no vertical ‘border’ motif along the right edge of the composition, all are of the Two Knives design. It is not clear whether this was due to regional variations, which added and omitted certain motifs.

Eight-pointed Stars Another common motif is the eight-pointed star. These have been noted as talismans on Islamic banners used both in war and pilgrimage. Edward Westermarck noted that the double square, as it is otherwise known, served as protection against the evil eye in Moorish iconography (1904: 217). Its widespread appearance in the Islamic world in Koran illumination and on tomb covers further indicates protective functions.

The Square The square is an important symbol in Islamic iconography and is a feature in robe embroidery design. A square motif appears on the pocket edge of Two Knives embroideries and also on early Eight Knives compositions. It is a square divided into nine equal squares (3x3), with five of them, the corners and the centre, completely filled with embroidery. On later Eight Knives compositions, it has been transformed into a crossed lozenge or interlace form. The only name recorded for this 3x3 square motif is ‘house of bees’ or ‘house of five’. The numbers within the 3x3 square add up to fifteen in each direction, in its simplest form with the number five in the centre. The number five has a key significance in Muslim life used for the five Pillars of Islam and the five daily prayers and the centre square is frequently referred to as the mosque (Prussin 1986: 75). Further discussion on the complex associations between numbers and letters in Islamic belief and their use in the decoration and elaboration of text, clothing and clothing and identity 229 architecture in West Africa can be found in Prussin’s studies on the subject (1976; 1986).

The Tambari Apart from the magic square, the circle is a key motif of Caliphate style robes. Kriger’s iconographical analysis demonstrates associations of motifs with official insignia and protective devices. The motif found on the wearer’s right chest and centre back has been referred to as tambari, or king’s drum. Contemporary dictionary definitions of the word include ‘seal’ and ‘official stamp’ (Awde 1996: 152). Kriger proposes that rather than a direct visual representation of the drum it is associated with the title tambari given to Hausa and Tuareg war leaders and it may well be that the title came to be associated with their robes. Components of the motif, such as the crossed circle and square, have appeared on pendants, weapons, shields and on palace and mosque facades across the Sahara region, contexts that indicate protective properties (Prussin 1976: 16–19; 1986: 221). The circle, square and star motif, including concentric circle motifs is a common pattern on leather boots, bags and cushions produced by the Hausa.

The Northern Knot orDagi The Northern knot ordagi motif occurs as a decorative motif in all forms of Hausa decoration formed from interlocking lozenges, of two or more, forming a linked cross-over motif. Thedagi is not only expressed as an isolated motif but as an extended, continuous linear motif and as a shorter but extended dagi motif. The dagi motif continues to be a common architectural decoration on house facades and boundary walls and is included in Hausa trouser embroidery. In 2002 the motif was clearly a popular motif for decoration on horse trap- pings during the Sallah processions. One of the most interesting and intriguing aspects of Hausa embroidery is the marked difference between robe and trouser decoration. The trousers in the NMS Hausa collection are comparable with those in other museum collections in shape, style and embroidery. There seems no clear explanation for the difference between robes and trousers in motifs, designs and colour palette. Whilst executed within a canon of motifs and overall composition based on symmetry, the use of a polychrome palette, different stitches and threads suggests a more flexible framework of reference than that of the robe decoration. Just 230 sarah worden as there may have been certain regional preferences in cloth and colour for robes it seems likely that that certain combinations of embroidery motifs in both robe and trouser decoration were also regionally specific. Further study of contemporary embroidery motifs on a regional basis could be illuminating, whilst more research on contemporary embroidered robes and trousers may also offer insights into the reasons why they share very few of the same motifs.

Tradition and Innovation In the NMS collections there is a robe donated by Captain L. H. T. Sloan in 1929 which exemplifies both tradition and innovation within the characteristic caliphate clothing style worn by the wealthy elite in northern Nigeria in the early twentieth century. Like imported silk, factory produced cloth which broke away from traditional colours and designs were highly desirable due to its non-local origins and innovative qualities and exclusivity. In the register this outfit is described as ‘worn by the son of Nupe Waziri’. Connections with a high-ranking official give this robe high status associations. However, neither materials nor embellishment could be described as typical of Caliphate riga traditions. Whilst the style of the robe follows convention the use of gold brocade cloth and grey silk embroidery breaks with tradition. The restrained use of embroidery allows the weave in the cloth to be appreciated, the linear self-striped pattern echoing narrow-strip hand- weaving traditions. As previously noted Nupe influence on the aesthetic of the high-status riguna was well-developed. Whilst we do not know the origins of this riga, whether created by Nupe or Hausa, patronage at this level endorsed such innovation. The desire for shiny fabrics with extravagant designs continues to the present with lurex thread used in hand-woven cloth to create a popular range of cloth which incorporates a metallic shine, which not only adds to the extravagant nature of the riguna but references the protective qualities of metal- work in arms and armour.

5. Conclusions

The potential instability of clothing as a medium of self and collective expression means that across time and space the intention and interpretation of dress is re-interpreted and re-evaluated dependent on clothing and identity 231 the location and audience. The museum gallery, which characteristi- cally foregrounds historical material or combines objects from different historical periods to represent a cohesive whole, becomes a prime site for this negotiation. This depends not on the original intention of the wearer and reception of the viewer but on contemporary perspectives of the curator and the museum visitor. This is an issue which concerns all museums including the National Museum of Scotland, as new displays are developed to present the visitor with different aspects of cultural identity displayed through the selection and interpretation of clothing and dress. Dress is a visual communicator of gender, ethnicity, religion, political and social status, and aesthetics. However, without those who selected and wore such garments, (who, after all, are the key to their existence), a vital aspect, the performance of dress, is absent. Whilst the potential for photographic archives and contemporary images to illuminate the performative aspect of such robes is acknowledged, by theorising the practice of dressing and dress, consideration of the essential relationship between dress and the body as a cultural construct is brought to the fore. Dress is also identified as a complex of details and elaborations to which particular associations regarding moral and spiritual concerns are attached. The restricted range of shape, size, colours and materials indicate a shared sense of what was (and remains) appropriate in terms of dress for the Hausa. The overall uniformity of the intended image of the well-dressed Hausa male supports the notion of a ‘Hausa- style’. This image is a multi-layered physical and symbolic construction which draws on and expresses notions of an historic past, which is similarly complex and multi-layered. The notion of ‘Caliphate’ clothing and with it the implication of a sense of caliphate identity in the nineteenth century proposed by Kriger appears to be well-founded and relevant to the collections discussed as a significant influence and inspiration. Many descriptions of clothing found in the accounts of early travellers suggest a well- developed and formalised clothing style which took its inspiration from the Arab world. This visual expression of belonging through dress was embraced and maintained by the Hausa-Fulani ruling elite in their quest for the restoration and maintenance of appropriate Mus- lim clothing at the time of the jihad, assimilated over time by those with the means to emulate elite clothing style. The use of particular 232 sarah worden materials, embroidery designs and colour combinations certainly appears to suggest a dominant clothing tradition but there are more subtle variations within the overall framework based perhaps on contemporary regional variations—sub styles which indicate and identify district allegiance allowing for expressions of difference within overall conformity. During the Sallah festivities in Kano City attended by the author in 2002 the mounted representatives of each district wore essentially similar styles of clothing but each group had distinctive elements, either variations in material or colour of robes or headgear. Analysis and interpretation of the embroidery of the Hausa robes reveals a number of ‘classic’ design motifs and combinations. A shared canon of motifs developed across architecture, leatherwork and clothing decoration using images and ideas from both Islamic and non- Islamic sources, many with talismanic, protective or defensive aspects further confirms the notion of a ‘Hausa-style’ although one which has been influenced through production and patronage of neighbouring groups particularly the Nupe whose skills and expertise are well represented in museums due to their accessibility to European traders on the Niger. Whether the robes in museum collections were originally gifts, commissions or purchases they are historically associated with the demonstration of wealth. As objects for accumulation and distribution such items of attire created and visualised political, religious and status relationships. Theriga style remains important status attire today, particularly for ceremonial and religious occasions, but the well-dressed Hausa male can chose from a number of clothing styles: including western-style shirts and eastern-style kaftans dependant on age, status and financial means. The interest in dress and clothing styles and decoration is not confined to the wealthy and powerful. The promo- tion of contemporary Hausa fashion was brought to my attention by a poster, purchased on the street near Kura town in 2002 for a few naira. The poster, entitled ‘Hausa Traditional Designs’, is presented in a format also used for posters of film and television stars. Male head and shoulder shots model different named embroidery designs stitched around the neck opening of the over shirt popular as everyday wear with Hausa men. The production of this poster clearly situates the subject of clothing design in popular culture and the continuing importance attached to embroidered decoration in male fashion. Explicating the role of caliphate style robes in Hausa culture foregrounds the multivalent potential of dress as a communicator of com- clothing and identity 233 plex notions of religious and cultural identity. Rather than distinct and separate, identity is about the dynamic and interactive relationships between cultures. Studying the factors that contribute to the construction and maintenance of identity is similarly about dynamic and interactive relationships between disciplines. Ethnographic collections of dress can be a revealing tool in understanding the role of dress in the expression of identity.

References

Appadurai, A. 1986. Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In Appadu- rai, A. ed. The social life of things. Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–63. Awde, N. 1996. Hausa-English dictionary. New York: Hippocrene Books. Balfour-Paul, J. 1997. Indigo in the Arab world. Richmond: Curzon Press. ——. 1998. Indigo. London: British Museum Press. Bettany, G. T. (ed.). 1890. Barth’s travels in Africa. Timbuktu, Sokoto, The Niger, West and Central Soudan. London: Ward, Lock and Co. Clapperton, H. 1966. Journal of a second expedition into the interior of Africa from the Bight of Benin to Soccatoo. London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd. Diwan, R. A. 2000. The beauty of Islamic dress. Delhi: Adam Publishers. Entwhistle, J. 2001. The dressed body. In Entwhistle, J. and Wilson, E. eds. Body dressing. Oxford and New York: Berg, 33–58. Fraser, D. and Cole, H. M. 1972. Art and leadership: an overview. In Fraser, D. and Cole, H. M. eds. African art and leadership. Wisconson and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 295–328. Gilfoy, P. S. 1988. Patterns of life. West African strip-weaving traditions. Washington D. C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Heathcote, D. 1979. The embroidery of Hausa dress, Vols. 1 and 2. PhD thesis, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. Hendrickson, H. 1996. Introductio. In Hendrickson, H. ed. Clothing and difference: Embodied identities in colonial and post-colonial Africa. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1–16. Hiskett, M. 1966. Materials relating to the cowry currency in the Western Sudan-1. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 29(1), 122–142. Johnson, M. 1973. Cloth on the banks of the Niger. Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 6, 353–364. ——. 1976. Calico caravans: The Tripoli-Kano trade after 1880. Journal of African History 17(1), 95–117. ——. 1978. Technology, competition and African crafts. In Dewey, C. and Hopkins, A. G. eds. The imperial impact: Studies in the economic history of Africa and India. London: The Athlone Press, 259–269. ——. 1980. Cloth as money: the cloth strip currencies of Africa. In Idiens, D. and Pon- ting, K. G. eds. Textiles of Africa. Leeds: The Pasold Research Fund Ltd., 193–202. ——. 1983. Periphery and centre- The nineteenth century trade of Kano. In Barkindo, B. M. ed. Studies in the history of Kano. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 127–146. Kopytoff, I. 1986. The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process. In Appadurai, A. ed. The social life of things. Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 64–91. 234 sarah worden

Kriger, C. 1988. Robes of the Sokoto Caliphate. African Arts 21(3) 52–57, 78–9, 85. ——. 2006. Cloth in West African history. Lanham, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Inc. Lamb, V. and Holmes, J. 1980. Nigerian Weaving. Roxford: V. and A. Lamb. Levtzion, N. and Pouwels, R. L. eds. 2000. The History of Islam in Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Last. D. M. 1967. The Sokoto Caliphate. London: Longmans. Lovejoy, Paul E. 1971. Long-distance trade and Islam: The case of the nineteenth- century Kola trade. Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 5(4), 537–547. ——. 1978a. The role of the Wangara in the economic transformation of the Central Sudan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Journal of African History 19(2), 173–193. ——. 1978b. Plantations in the economy of the Sokoto Caliphate. Journal of African History 19(3), 341–368. ——. 1981. Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate. In Lovejoy, P. E. ed. The ideology of slavery in Africa. Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications. Miller, D. 2005. Introduction. In Miller, D. and Küchler, S. eds. Clothing as material culture. Berg: Oxford and New York, 1–20. Nadel, S. F. 1942. A black Byzantium. London: Oxford University Press. ——. 1954. Nupe religion. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Perani, J. 1979. Nupe costume crafts. African Arts 12(3), 53–57, 96. ——. 1980. Patronage and Nupe craft industries. African Arts 13(3), 71–5, 92. ——. 1988. The cloth connection. Patrons and producers of Hausa and Nupe prestige strip-weave. In History, design and craft in West African strip-woven cloth. Papers presented at a symposium organised by the National Museum of Africa, 95–112. ——. 1989. Northern Nigerian prestige textiles: Production, trade, patronage and use. In Engelbrecht, B. and Gardi, B. eds. Man does not go naked. Ethnologisches Semi- nar der Universität und Museum für Völkerkunde, Basel, 65–80. Perani, J. and Wolff, N. 1992. Embroidered gown and equestrian ensembles of the Kano aristocracy. African Arts 25(3), 70–81, 102. ——. 1999. Cloth, dress and art patronage in Africa. Oxford and New York: Berg. Prussin, L. 1986. Hatumere: Islamic design in West Africa. Berkeley, California and London: University of California Press. Roach-Higgins, M. E., Eicher, J. B., and Johnson, K. K. P. eds. 1995. Dress and identity. New York: Fairchild Publications. Rubin, A. 1984. Layoyi: Some Hausa calligraphic charms. African Arts 17(2), 67–70, 91. Saleh, A. S. 1997. The issue of Isbaal. London: Daar Al-Tawheed Ltd. Shea, P. J. 1975. The development of an export oriented dyed cloth industry in Kano emirate in the nineteenth century. Michigan, UMI Dissertation Services. ——. 1980. Kano and the silk trade. Kano Studies, new series, 2(1) 96–112. ——. 1983. Approaching the study of production in rural Kano. Barkindo, B. M. ed. Studies in the history of Kano. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 93–115. Tarlo, E. 1996. Clothing matters. Dress and identity in India. London: Hurst and Company. Taylor, L. 1998. Doing the laundry? A re-assessment of object-based dress history. Fashion Theory. The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 4, 338–56. Valentine Robins. T. 1867. Notes and sketches on the Niger. Transactions of the Eth- nological Society of London 5, 82–90. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Warwick, A. and Cavallaro, D. 1998. Fashioning the frame. Boundaries, bodies and dress. Oxford and New York: Berg. Westermarck, E. 1904. The magic origin of Moorish designs. The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 34, 211–222. Wilson, E. 1985. Adorned in dreams. Fashion and modernity. London: Virago Press. CHAPTER TEN

GOD MADE ME A RAPPER: YOUNG MEN, ISLAM, AND SURVIVAL IN AN AGE OF AUSTERITY1

Adeline Masquelier

1. Introduction

In Muslim majority Niger where demographic growth has translated into a large cohort of youth, unemployment among young men has skyrocketed. Excluded from the normative world of work and wages, male youth are confined to merely talking about the possibility of a future. Many of them have turned to hip-hop2 to find a means of expressing their concerns about the world in which they live. Initially, they participated in hip-hop for entertainment and to set themselves apart from their parents’ generation—who disapprove of ‘foreign’ traditions and denounce rap music as un-Islamic—and connect with the world ‘out there’ from which they felt excluded. With time, hip-hop has become a means of taking a moral stance against social injustice. Nigérien hip-hoppers speak out against government corruption, poverty, unemployment, and child labour among other things. Through their socially pertinent lyrics, they have created a platform for youths to voice their frustrations, challenge the status quo, and dare to imagine a future for themselves. By singing in local languages and incorporating traditional sounds and harmonies into a vibrant electronic medium, they have repackaged a foreign musical form into a lingua franca that

1 Research on which this essay is based was made possible by a grant from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a fellowship from the Newcomb College Insti- tute at Tulane University. 2 Hip-hop emerged as a cultural movement during the late 1970s in New York City to denounce living conditions in the ghettos. It consisted initially of break dancing, graffiti art, deejaying, and emceeing (rapping). Break dancing and graffiti have become less prominent. Hip-hop has migrated to Europe and Africa where it touches on fundamental preoccupations of contemporary youth. Although it has developed there into distinctive expressions capable of addressing local concerns, scholars have described it as a “universal musical language” (Mitchell 2002: 12). In Niger hip-hop emerged in the late 1990s. 236 adeline masquelier reaches out to a wide audience not only in urban neighbourhoods but also in rural Niger where French is less widely spoken. Through their embrace of hip-hop, young Nigérien men have intern- alised the discourse that constructs them as a generation at risk. Aware that Niger’s population growth3 (combined with decreasing resources) has attracted mounting concern about potential radicalism—owing to the correlation between young men and violence—they refer to themselves as a ticking time bomb to which the government should attend by providing jobs and educational opportunities. Whether they write rap lyrics or simply listen to them, they appropriate the rhetoric of exclusion said to characterise their situation to justify their departure from their elders’ moral, social, and stylistic conventions. Anxious to distinguish themselves as a generation saddled with problems of unprecedented magnitude and armed with a distinctive voice, they invoke, through their adoption of hip-hop values, the right to define a new moral order, devoid of STDs, poverty, and corruption. By adopting hip-hop, Nigérien youth engage in forms of consumption and recreation that closely resemble modes of entertainment elsewhere in the world.4 Yet hip-hop is not simply a pivotal link to the global community but also a form of social engagement and part of a survival strategy. Hip-hop artists and their audiences see rap music as a way to speak about poverty and as a weapon of social change. Niger in the last half century has seen tremendous changes in local patterns of religious practice. For those who converted to Islam soon after independence, there was no question about the definition of Islam and the authenticity of Muslim practice. In recent years, Mus- lims in Niger have become increasingly aware that their own way of life, refracted as it is through the critical gaze of others, may not map onto what they once understood to be orthodoxy. With the spread of new ideas about what being Muslim means, there is considerable debate about the forms that ethical reforms, Islamic knowledge, and Muslim morality should take (Charlick 2004; Grégoire 1993; Mas- quelier 1999; Niandou-Souley and Alzuma 1996). Although scholars acknowledge the diversity of Muslim practices in Africa, the assump-

3 Niger has the highest natality rate in the world. 75% of the population is under 25 years of age. 4 Owing to the absence of a gender lens, the concept of youth generally evokes a world of male youths. Mindful that youth is used as a synonym for male youth, I specify the gender of the youths whose case I discuss unless I am referring to both men and women. god made me a rapper 237 tion is that people are either ‘traditional’ (and often Sufi) Muslims or Muslim reformists (Otayek and Soares 2007). This simplistic binarism cannot account for the complex ways in which Nigérien youth (whose engagement in hip-hop is denounced by Muslim preachers as hereti- cal) produce themselves as Muslim subjects. Though the majority of youth are not observant Muslim, Islam is nevertheless an essential part of their identity. Nigérien youth (les jeunes in French), particularly young men, are outspoken about what it means to be Muslim regardless of whether they engage in explicitly pious acts. Through an analysis of the testimonies of young Muslim men, the fashions they adopt, and the lyrics they write, I consider how male Nigérien youths design new ways of being Muslim in the contemporary world that stress moral responsibility, social success, and ethical commitment in step with modernity. By centering on the Muslim identities of youth coping with economic decline, disease, and disenchantment with multiparty politics, the processes of self-fashioning, social activism, and generational affirmation I examine how some young men negotiate both their youthfulness and their Muslimhood. The setting for this ethnographic study is Dogondoutchi, a pro- vincial town near the Nigerian border.5 I conducted research there in 2004 and 2006–2007 among male youths with various educational backgrounds and religious commitments. Most of the town’s residents identify as Mawri. The rest identify as Fulani, Tuareg, Hausa, or Zarma. Traditionally recognised by their ‘ethnic’ marks, scars that cut their cheek on each side, Hausaphone Mawri are an heterogeneous population of 250 000 people. They occupy Arewa, a region of semi- arid savannas and thorn shrublands situated on the Western edge of Niger’s Hausa-speaking region. Although Arewa residents are lumped into the larger Hausa ethno-linguistic entity by scholars, they are the result of an ethnic brassage and claim ties to both Hausa and Zarma populations. They have linguistically and culturally assimilated to the Hausa, but do not refer to themselves as ‘Hausa.’ The Hausa, from their perspective, live in northern Nigeria.

5 Dogondoutchi is reputed to be a stronghold of ‘fetishism’ owing to the practices of spirit possession (bori) and spirit veneration (aznanci) taking place there (Mas- quelier 2001). Many Muslim residents denounce spirit-centred practices as ‘satanic.’ Youth avoid participation in bori given the moral opprobrium attached to it. 238 adeline masquelier

If these distinctions matter to elders, they are largely irrelevant to youths struggling to define their place in the world.6 Because young people are socialised in an overwhelmingly Muslim society, their self- definition is strongly shaped by a sense of belonging to theumma , the global Muslim community; this is a trend that has intensified since 9/11 as awareness rose of a possible worldwide confrontation between Islam and the West. Male youth, in particular, define themselves primarily as Muslim, as Nigériens, and through their engagement in hip- hop culture. This essay explores how young men in Dogondoutchi draw from images of insecurity and ideologies of survival to engage in musical and stylistic experiments which their parents and grand- parents perceive as un-Islamic, but which they see as ethical ways of addressing their current predicament.

2. The logic of survival

All youth unevenly participate in what Castells (1996) calls the ‘network society,’ the rapid movement of goods, people, and ideas across the planet. Using electronic-based technologies, they access information and obtain inspiration from global sources, thereby linking locales across transnational spaces. The transnational potential of youth collectivities (Cole and Durham 2007; Nilan and Feixa 2006; Weiss 2009) by no means translates into a homogenised global youth culture. Although youth learn about ‘what is fashionable, and therefore socially valued’ (Cole 2009: 108) from foreign places, imported lexicons, dress styles, and other practices are ‘always domesticated to some degree’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005: 27). In Niger, young men learn to rap by imitating the lyrics, gestures, and mannerisms of American hip-hop artists. Few of them speak English, yet they appropriate and repackage English words and expressions (‘mic,’ ‘love,’ ‘baby,’ and so on) to create a hybrid lexicon that valorises rap lyrics (Auzanneau 2001). Eng- lish, as a lingua franca, expresses ideas that appeal to the international community, thereby widening local rappers’ audiences.7 By peppering

6 Alidou (2005) downplays the importance of ethnicity, arguing that Nigérien women have responded to the challenges and opportunities presented by globalisation and the Islamic revival by carving out a place for themselves that transcends ethnic particularism. 7 Successful Nigérien hip-hop artists have been invited to perform in the US and some supposedly made it big there. For local youth, a career in hip-hop offers the possibility of escaping poverty and finding fame and fortune in the ‘land of plenty’. god made me a rapper 239 their lyrics with English (and French) terms and juxtaposing Hausa, Zarma, Fulfulde, and Tamasheq when they don’t simply rap in French, artists create songs that become ‘points of intersection, points of connection between here and elsewhere, between sameness and difference, between received identities and a global imaginary’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005: 27). While a focus on the young’s engagement with globality has yielded fresh perspectives on issues of knowledge, agency, and generation, the overwhelming majority of the world’s youth are excluded from the benefits of mainstream economic participation, political representation, and civic responsibility. In Africa where shifts associated with neoliberal capitalism have derailed local economies from a ‘temporal developmental trajectory’ (Ferguson 2006: 190), young men are largely condemned to poverty and forced to postpone marriage. Unable to acquire jobs and take on the responsibilities of adulthood, they have been referred as a ‘sacrificed generation’ (Cruise O’Brien 1996; Sharp 2002). African youth’s response to economic exclusion has taken diverse expressions ranging from religious engagement to social banditry to excessive consumption (Biaya 2005; Diouf 2003; Gondola 1999; van Dijk 1998). In appropriating cultural resources to overcome poverty, youth often break away from social conventions, thereby threatening older sources of authority (Gable 2000; Ngwane 2004). Young men in Dogondoutchi are no exception. They are perceived by the older generation as ‘revolutionaries’ who have no regard for gado (heritage). I was told by disillusioned parents that sons no longer respected elders, refused to do farmwork,8 and spent their time drinking tea and playing card games.9 Worse, some made a living selling drugs. At some level, there is nothing remarkable about these generational tensions. Youth are typically perceived as vectors of modernity and associated with all that is novel, experimental, and disruptive. They are expected to rebel against tradition. Yet linked to the perception that young men (and, occasionally, young women) have become defiant and unruly, there is

8 Most Dogondoutchi residents are farmers cultivating millet, sorghum, beans, groundnut, and corn. Although most households derive secondary incomes from men’s involvement in trade, transport, masonry, tailoring, or artisanship, crops remain an important source of revenue as well as of sustenance. 9 Because it is widely assumed that youth play for money, card games are decried by devout Muslims as immoral, a threat to the fabric of society and a sign of young men’s impiety. 240 adeline masquelier a growing sense that today’s Nigérien youths are facing an unparal- leled crisis. ‘Young people can’t find work,’ my neighbour Abdoulaye explained. ‘They have no trade. Because they think a lot, they are worried. When they listen to music, their worries are diminished. This is why they listen to music.’ Aside from reminding us that youth, because of their structural position in society, constitute a ‘kind of counternation’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 308) well poised to access global con- sumer goods yet paradoxically unable to earn a living, Abdoulaye’s comments suggest that listening to music can be a purposeful, fruitful activity. Throughout Niger, youth have joined neighbourhood discussion groups known as fadodi that meet regularly at a set location. As members of fadodi with evocative names such as ‘Cowboys,’ ‘The Internationale of the Unemployed,’ or ‘Bel Air,’ they listen to popular music, drink tea, play card games, and share their concerns, frustrations, and aspirations with one another. Membership in these youth groups cut across social strata, educational backgrounds, and religious affiliations. Led by an executive team whose officers are appointed by the membership, fadodi provide assistance to members in need in the form of friendship and support. Like youthful expressions of associative life elsewhere on the continent, they have reconfigured the ‘spaces and logics of sociality and public places’ (Diouf 1996: 235). After Independence in 1960, the Nigérien government successfully mobilised the country’s youth through the creation of samarya, youth organisations based on traditional models of associative life. With the liberalisation of national politics in the 1990s, the samarya disappeared. Aided by the rapid expansion of private radios, the fada (founded and managed by youth) emerged to provide a forum where young people could voice their insecurities and aspirations. In recent years, the number of fadodi has mushroomed, leading to new forms of solidarity and creativity. Although these associational energies have been mobilised during national elections to promote political candidates, fadodi differ from the forms of social activism documented by Cooper (1995) and Alidou (2005) in that they have no agenda besides providing a space where youth can articulate their alienation and hopes for the future. Muslim women, Cooper and Alidou argue, actively shape Niger’s civic and public spaces through their engagement in literacy campaigns, family planning programs, and politics. Fada members, in contrast, do not (except when they campaign for political candidates) engage god made me a rapper 241 in consciously political acts. Rather they are ‘driven by the force of necessity—the necessity to survive’ (Bayat 1997: 58). In his discussion of how slum dwellers in Iran’s large cities have progressively taken control of resources, such as land and water, to move forward and better their lives, Bayat (1997) finds that because their mobilisation is silent and free-formed, it is not easily accounted for by the concept of civil society. By privileging associational life over other forms of social expression, debates on civil society exclude ‘modes of struggles’ which can be ‘more extensive and effective than conventional institutions outside the state’ (Bayat 1997: 55). What brings the poor to engage in protracted struggles is first, the initial urge to advance their lives and second, the lack of institutional mechanisms through which they can express grievances and work out their problems. Consequently actions perceived by outsiders as illegal become morally justified: the disenfranchised defend their acts of transgres- sion by invoking the need to survive. In Dogondoutchi young Mus- lims claim that they are driven by the force of necessity—economic hardship—to use hip-hop as a forum for denouncing social inequities and describing reality as a ‘raw,’ unmediated experience. They find moral justification for their social, musical, and sartorial transgres- sions in the urgency of survival.

3. Dress, modesty, and the modern look

‘Religion, it’s in your heart. It is not appearance that makes you a Muslim!’ nineteen-year-old Nassirou blurted out during a conversation about Islamic dress. Nassirou’s candid remark aptly captures what ‘being Muslim’ means to many Nigérien youths, particularly young men, at the dawn of the millennium. In Dogondoutchi where most young men state unequivocally that they are Muslims, one cannot identify at first sight members of Izala, the anti-Sufi association cham- pioning a return to a ‘pure’ Islam, from ‘yan darika, a designation that encompasses not only members of darika (Sufi orders) but also any Muslim who opposes Izala reformism. In the early 1990s young Muslim reformists emboldened by the growing popularity of Izala started making vestmental corrections to male and female garb. They urged women to cover their bodies and enjoined men to shed their voluminous and richly embroidered riguna (robes) in favour of the humble jaba, a long-sleeved tunic. The modesty of a ‘true’ Muslim’s 242 adeline masquelier attire was a measure of his (or her) virtue, they proclaimed as they let their beard grow and exchanged their embroidered hats for turbans. Izala women wore the hijabi (veil) to visibly signify their reformist identity. For men, shortened pants (that stopped above the ankle so as not to collect dirt) and beards signaled their uncompromising commitment to Izala. In recent years sartorial signs of religious affiliations have become blurred. Izala young men no longer engage in visible affirmations of religiosity by sporting beards and turbans. They often wear t-shirts and pants of Western inspiration. If many of them put on the jaba before attending prayer, so do other male youths who do not claim to be part of Izala.10 Vestmental items that were once emblematic of specific Muslim identities have thus expanded the range of religious affiliations they represent. Not only does dress no longer signal Mus- lim affiliation but many young men reject the notion that dress should index religious identity. Although they identify as Muslim, they reso- lutely eschew ‘Islamic’ attire to adopt instead Western t-shirts (or long sleeved shirts) and trousers. Like Malagasy Christians who express concern for the deceptive potential of clothing (Cole 2009), Dogondoutchi residents often note that external appearance—dress and so on—can be manipulated to conceal who a person really is. Echoing Nassirou’s claim that religion is ‘in the heart,’ young men like to point out that faith has little to do with the length of their pants, the provenance of their outfits, or the forms of entertainment they engage in. They are no less Muslim, they claim, because they don’t wear their religion literally on their sleeves. In their opinion, turbans, ankle-length pants, and beards are superficial indicators of religious commitment. Inspired by the dress styles of hip-hop performers, a number of male youths in Dogondoutchi have adopted what is referred as MC dress. Baggy pants, oversized t-shirts, high tops (or ‘Nike’ sneakers and ‘Timberland’ hiking boots), and baseball caps are now central components of any fashion-minded young man’s wardrobe (Figure 10.1.). One male youth told me that

10 By the same token, the hijabi (veil) has lost its exclusive association with Izala militancy. It has become a fashion statement, and also creates respectability: young women wishing to advertise their suitability as wives wear the hijabi in certain contexts (Masquelier 2009). god made me a rapper 243

Figure 10.1. Male youths in their best hip-hop gear attending a dance party in Dogondoutchi. 244 adeline masquelier

In Niamey, even here in D[ogond]outchi, one must imitate at all cost the way our brothers and sisters dress. We dress like Americans. When we watch video-cassettes [of rap performances], we get a chance to imitate Americans. Here you can now buy bagy [sic] jeans. And big shoes with thick soles, you know, Timberland. Or you wear baskets [basketball shoes]. To enhance their tough look, rap fashion enthusiasts put band-aids on their noses (or cheeks) and wear heavy chains. Other hip-hop acces- sories include bandanas, Du-rags, hooded sweatshirts, and earrings. A young man showed up with a ‘pimp’ cane when I offered to take his picture. Arguing that the depth of people’s religious commitment should not be measured by whether they dress in a recognizably Muslim style, young men insist that they are entitled to assert their youthfulness by embracing sartorial (and musical) styles that better reflect who they are even if, as is often the case, they incur the older generation’s dis- approval by doing so. Wearing MC dress has its own rewards: ‘if you become a rapper,’ a young man told me, ‘girls will all love you madly.’ Dressing like a rapper is first and foremost a means of being in ‘step with the times.’ Consider my conversation with eighteen-year- old Lamidou: A.M.: What clothes do young people like? Lamidou: The clothes we wear have to be the latest. We like novelty. You don’t want to wear an old thing. A.M.: But why does it have to be always new? Lamidou: We are new so we only like new things. While this fixation on novelty can serve as a means to demarcate oneself from the previous generation, it is also proof of one’s participation in a world of frenetic consumption. In Niger clothing is centrally implicated in the creation of social bonds (Masquelier 1996). Cloth- ing also communicates something about the wearer’s identity: wealth, education, adherence to Muslim values and so on—although, as noted earlier, the distinctions signaled by dress are not uniformly recognised. Because dressing fashionably indexes one’s economic status—one’s access to money as well as one’s connections to the wider world— youth eagerly follow the fashions. To be fashionable is a matter of both contemporaneity and connectedness. However much they might appear to conform to Muslim norms of modesty—their loose fit insuring that the body’s contour is largely hidden—baggy trousers and t-shirts are nonetheless vehemently criticised by devout Muslims who deplore young men’s disregard for established sartorial conventions and the impiety that such disregard supposedly god made me a rapper 245 entails.11 ‘Youth who wear tufafin zamani [modern clothes], they do not pray,’ Alhaji Hamissou, a Sufi cleric explained to me in 2004. In the eye of conservative Muslim leaders, what makes tufafin zamani un-Islamic is that they are inspired by Western rather than Middle- Eastern, and more specifically Meccan, fashions. For Muslims around the world, Mecca is the spiritual and spatial centre of the umma, the global Muslim community. As such it provides the definitive model for authentic Muslim practice, especially for those who feel relegated to the periphery of the Muslim world. Disputes that splintered the Muslim community in recent years have centered around the alleged presence or absence of particular ritual practices and dress styles in Mecca. Dogondoutchi residents frequently say that they dress (or conduct themselves) like Muslims in Mecca when defending their ways of being Muslim. Western imports, on the other hand, are perceived by many residents not only as a threat to Muslim values but also as expressions of a corrupt lifestyle. Muslim preachers refer to American-style baseball caps and baggy pants as ‘American clothes’ to highlight the non- Arabic—and therefore non-Islamic—provenance of these garments and their unsuitability in a post-9/11 world structured around a Manichaean opposition between Islam and the West. Good Muslims, preachers imply, do not wear these clothes. Disapproving parents do not meddle with their children’s choice of dress and pastimes, know- ing that young people will eventually give up those ‘things of youth.’ Yet all the same the supposedly US origin of tufafin zamani reinforces the perception of an incompatibility between youthful activities and a virtuous life. There is a sense among the elder generation that young men who dress like hip-hop performers are lax, wasteful, and lazy. According to a civil servant, Parents all criticise their children’s [modern] dress. They say ‘this is not the proper dress of a Muslim.’ Generally, those who follow this path [of dressing like rappers], they spoil. They don’t want to study anymore. They will go to night-clubs, hang out here and there, and visit bars. This is not good. Not only has hip-hop fashion tainted origins but it is considered impractical because it is difficult to keep sagging pants free of dirt in

11 Clothes of Western inspiration tightly espouse the shape of the wearer’s body, so are rejected as haram, forbidden, by conservative Muslims for whom dress should conceal, not reveal, the body. 246 adeline masquelier the sandy, dusty Sahelian environment. Preachers and parents alike thus admonish young men against wearing loose-fitting (and therefore excessively long) pants that drag on the ground, gathering dust and grime. As a kola nut vendor observed, Islam requires that men wear a hula [hat], a jaba [tunic], and pants that do not drag on the ground when you walk. God said not to wear a babban riga [voluminous robe favoured by wealthy merchants and politicians] that hangs on the ground when you walk. God forbids big clothes that drag on the ground and gather dirt. He likes his followers to wear clean clothes that have not been soiled by urine or dirt. Young men do not dispute the notion that Muslims should wear clean clothes at prayer time. But they reject the idea that one must wear hula and jaba to become a ‘true’ Muslim. Salifou, a secondary school student, explained: ‘The clothes that we wear do not prevent us from praying. The important thing is that they be clean. You cannot pray if your clothes are full of stain, like chicken shit.’ Like others who invoke the right to be at once ‘good’ Muslims and fashionable youths, Salifou insisted that the value of one’s prayer had less to do with style and superficial appearance and more with one’s internal state of mind. Although it is largely true that many young Nigériens neglect prayers and distrust religious authorities, it is misleading to assume that they have abandoned Islam. The performance of religious acts is but one of a possible range of ways through which to fashion a Muslim identity. Whereas for some Nigérien youth, religiosity is more important than religious identity, for many others who do not engage in delib- erate acts of religiosity, Islam is nevertheless an integral part of their identity. Like Iranian youths who transform the highly charged ritual of Muharram—which commemorates the martyrdom of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet—into ‘Hussein parties’ filled with fun and flirting (Bayat 2007), young Nigériens use existing Muslim concepts and institutions to accommodate youthful claims about dress and music. Drawing on the notion of subversive accommodation through which Bayat (2007) analyzes Iranian youth’s adaptive pursuit of pleasure, I suggest that young men in Dogondoutchi position themselves as ethical (and entitled) persons by recasting their adoption of hip-hop culture in Islamic terms. In the face of repeated warnings that Muslims wearing baggy (and therefore necessarily dirty) pants will have their prayers invalidated and by implications, their entry into paradise compromised, young men take a quiet but determined stance by refusing to give up their god made me a rapper 247 right to dress fashionably. They argue that to cast their conduct as un-Islamic on the basis that they do not dress like their fathers is pure hypocrisy. Whether or not they agree that Muslim dress is a requirement for prayer, they reject the idea that dressing ‘like Americans’ will lead them on the wrongful path. When preachers started condemn- ing their use of baseball caps as un-Islamic on the grounds that the vizor prevented their wearers from touching the ground with their foreheads when prostrating during worship, some of them gleefully pointed out that they wore their caps backwards–like the American rappers they saw on television. In doing so, they proved both their fashion sense and their commitment to Islam. Not only is dressing glamourously no hindrance to one’s religious obligations but it can be further taken as a sign of true devotion, according to some young men. Muslim identity is not a superficial cover that one wears on the outside for others to recognise but rather something based on a much deeper moral sensibility operating less visibly, but also more durably. According to a young carpenter apprentice, those who pressed their forehead tightly into the ground during prostrations to earn the mark of piety—a dark patch of callused skin on the forehead—that every ‘good’ Muslim ideally displayed only proved that they were more interested in demonstrating piety than in serving God. Echoing other youths, he dismissed as vacuous and insincere the commitment of Muslims who flaunted calluses on their foreheads and let their prayer beads hang from their pockets (or around their necks). Faith, he declared, should be a matter between oneself and God, not an object of ostentatious display.

4. The mission of Hip-hop

Young men affected by cuts in the education system and unemployment have found in hip-hop music a medium for channeling their creativity and commitment to social change. They are aware that the music they make or listen to is denounced by devout Muslims as un- Islamic because haram—forbidden.12 Although they occasionally admit that the forms of entertainment they engage in befit their age—youth being synonymous with immaturity and experimentation—they insist

12 The association between rap and rebellion is not limited to Niger. Perullo (2005) notes that in Tanzania, hip-hop artists and fans are labelled hooligans. 248 adeline masquelier that far from being a frivolous diversion, hip-hop is an educational activity and an effective means of shaping the consciousness of youth. Witness the conversation I had in 2006 with Moussa and Oumarou, two secondary school students and aspiring hip-hoppers: Moussa: Some malamai [Muslim religious specialists] criticise rap music. Some don’t. Some even encourage us. But a true malam is going to criticise. Because music is not something that is tolerated by religion. A.M.: Why is that? Moussa: Because music is not in the Qur’an. People here work with the Qur’an. Oumarou: For Islam, all music is Satanic. Moussa: But some malamai have understood. They see that we are talking about important things. Moussa and Oumarou knew that Muslim clerics would largely condemn their use of hip-hop as a means of expression, regardless of what their songs might be about; the Qur’an, they had been told, took an uncompromising stance against all forms of musical expressions. Yet they felt vested with a mission: it was their duty to inform youth about the threats and challenges they faced. Moussa was the youngest of seven children. He was fortunate to enjoy the support of his father, a prominent local malam who believed that youth should express their views even if they ruffled elders’ sensibilities in the process. Malam Ibrahim was reluctant at first to accept his son’s artistic calling, but he eventually came to appreciate the value of the message Moussa’s music conveyed. By promoting morality, safe sex, and a strong work ethics, the songs Moussa and Oumarou sang raised awareness among the younger generation. Malam Ibrahim felt that aspiring musicians should be encouraged to follow their dreams as long as these did not interfere with the performance of academic and religious duties.

5. Being ‘Branché’: music, knowledge, and truth

Although the consumption of Western things is seen by conservative Muslims as a sign of impiety, those who consume them do not see foreign imports as un-Islamic—on the contrary. By embracing foreign styles and practices, youth redefine their relations to the wider world from which they feel otherwise excluded. Hip-hop is a case in point. Like other emerging musical styles (such as Senerap in Sen- egal, Hip-Life in Ghana, and Bongo Flava in Tanzania), Nigérien rap is hugely popular among contemporary Nigérien youth who struggle god made me a rapper 249 with marginalisation and poverty. Rap, I was told a number of times, is a form of awareness because it teaches youth how to conduct themselves responsibly while denouncing injustice and government corruption. ‘Of course, we like the music, the dancing. But it’s the words that are important in rap. You see, the songs are about AIDS, girls’ education, and democracy. They are about real problems,’ a male youth explained. Aside from raising awareness of the problems confronting youth in this era of shrinking opportunities and heightened risks, hip-hop has given the young generation a sense of national pride. Niger, to the great shame of Nigériens, is last on the U.N. Human Develop- ment Index that ranks countries according to life expectancy, literacy, and GDP per capita among other things. Young Nigériens are often heard lamenting that they cannot expect much of life (and least of all, of their government) since they live in the poorest country on earth. When the hip-hop group representing Niger at a world competition earned 4th place behind the U.S., France, and Senegal in 2004, music became a national source of pride among youth. Aside from demonstrating that Nigériens were not last in every aspect of development, Niger’s honorable ranking at the musical competition helped youth come out of their isolation and encouraged them to think beyond the images of crippling poverty that have long defined their country and by extension, their own circumstances. Young men rarely missed an opportunity to mention Niger’s musical ranking when discussing hip- hop matters with me. As one of them put it, ‘Music is very important to us. It is what matters to us. We love to listen to Nigérien rap. It is a way of showing that Nigérien music is part of the world’s musical production. A Nigérien group received the 4th prize for their musical performance.’ Niger’s position right behind Senegal has enhanced the visibility of youth in the public sphere: hip-hop artists are (largely male) youths who sing about youth for youth. It has given hip-hop audiences something to boast about. Nigérien youth can feel that they are symbolically and literally part of the world. As they sometimes put it, through their engagement with hip-hop, they have become branchés—‘plugged in’ and fashionable: ‘Nigériens are branchés, this is why they rank fourth in the world in terms of rap performance. Besides, everyone likes rap music because it’s a way of opening up about the weight of misery, the weight of poverty. People must speak up and they do it through rap music.’ 250 adeline masquelier

In French slang, to be branché is to be at once joined, oriented, and informed—in a word, ‘plugged in.’ Brancher something (an electric tool, for instance) is to connect it to the system that allows it to function while brancher someone is understood as connecting this person to someone else or alternatively, arousing his or her interest. By channeling the frustration of the disenfranchised through the common language of suffering, protest, and entitlement, Nigérien rap groups are making an important contribution to global cultural production in the eyes of local youth. By producing—and performing—not simply for local audiences but for the world, Nigérien rap groups have transformed the country from a passive recipient of international aid into an active contributor to global music, enabling other young Nigériens to enjoy the recognition that comes with such contribution—and in some cases, to contribute their own songs to the national hip-hop project. Countering Muslim clerics’ claims that listening to rappers and looking like one are sure ways to end up in hell—in part because listening to music is said to interfere with the timely performance of prayer—young people insist that hip-hop is an educational activity that benefits both performers and audiences. According to eighteen- year-old rapper Issoufou, Hip-hop deals with themes that touch us youth, that touch our country. When you reach a certain age, you start thinking about what is happening in your country. Through hip-hop, we can have an impact, we can contribute, it is our country. This is why in rap we use themes that touch us like AIDS and STDs, unemployment, and other problems our country is facing such as insecurity and ineffective governance. By addressing the problems youth must confront in their quest for a more prosperous future and by teaching them about rights and responsibilities, hip-hoppers construct themselves as educators who help young people survive very real threats to their well-being and their economic future. As the voice of the youth and through their activist stance—note, for instance, the focus on ‘our country’—hip- hoppers bring together education and citizenship.13 As Issoufou makes clear, they view themselves as social agents actively involved in the reconfiguration of knowledge and informed perspectives on reality. By providing information on the precautions youth must take to pro-

13 In one of their videos, members of the popular hip-hop group Kaidan Gaskia are seen dancing in front of a map of Niger to stress, perhaps, that they promote local rather than foreign values. god made me a rapper 251 tect themselves against AIDS, for instance, hip-hoppers can claim the moral high ground and gain legitimacy in the eyes of the state. The fact that nowadays ‘even the government uses rap groups’ during campaigns aimed at raising awareness of social and health issues points to the ways in which hip-hop is changing the content of what public institutions consider to be worthwhile knowledge (see Niang 2006, Pardue 2004). When stressing the educational impact of their musical performances, young hip-hoppers in Dogondoutchi point out that they are themselves the product of the state-sponsored education system. Unlike other forms of musical expression that do not require literacy on the part of the performers, hip-hop is a medium that can only be exploited by those who, by attending school, have acquired French fluency as well as the worldly knowledge and civic training that enable them to speak with authority about social issues such as child labour or early marriage. It is by claiming that they speak of what they know that young people can dismiss the claims of Muslim elders who accuse them of immorality and subversiveness. As one young man put it, ‘we know rap. We like it because we have studied it. Those who haven’t been to school, they don’t like rap. Sons of malamai, they say rap is not good because they haven’t studied. We don’t care.’ In contrast to other hip-hop traditions that have emerged elsewhere (Pardue 2004), Nigérien hip-hop’s claims to inclusiveness are belied by youthful affirmations that the message of hip-hop only appeals to those who are educated and who don’t let narrow religious concerns stand in the way of their musical appreciation. When pressed, a young man admitted that ‘rap deals with the problems of youth, especially those who gradu- ated from high school but who have no work.’ Contradicting those who denounce rap music for the supposedly depraving influence it exerts on youthful audiences, young hip-hop enthusiasts maintain that far from turning them into lazy, improvi- dent, and morally lax individuals, such music teaches them about the value of enterprise, self-sufficiency, and sexual restraint. They contend that Nigérien rap performers are socially conscious artists who through their music help their country’s youth by providing advice on issues ranging from safe sex to politics to education. Ousouman, a young hip-hop artist and high school student, told me: ‘I want to become a role model for other youths. I want to keep doing music in the future. We sing in French but we use Hausa words. As well as Zarma words. I write for les jeunes.’ His friend Adamou chimed in: 252 adeline masquelier

Adamou: We talk about Islam in our songs but Islam doesn’t like rap. A.M.: How do you combine religion and rap? Adamou: Well, we can because [in our songs] we tell the truth. We must speak especially when the president of Niger is threatening the country’s jeunes. We must sing about it. We will talk about it. A.M.: So this is a political message? Ousouman: Yes, yes. Adamou and Ousouman write and perform songs locally under the name ‘Plantation Boys.’14 Although they recognise that rap music cannot be part of Islam proper, they insist that their music is not anti- Islamic. The subject of music’s licitness in Islam has drawn fierce debates in Nigérien society. Hip-hop performers defend their activities by invoking their commitment to truth. Truth (gaskiya), I argue, is the point of entry through which Muslim values can be seen to overlap with the aspirations of hip-hop. Gaskiya is central to the ways that Muslims in Dogondoutchi position themselves as enlightened and faithful servants of God in the face of ignorance, impiety, and shirk (idolatry). Muslims of various stripes may disagree vehemently about what ‘Islam’ is but they concur when it comes to Islam’s singularity. Their disagreement is rooted in the notion that there is only one ‘true’ Islam and therefore one ‘correct’ way of living a Muslim life. It is the duty of so-called true Muslims to preserve and promote the message of the Prophet. Hip-hoppers too see themselves as champions of gaskiya. A rap group that shot to prominence and is now one of the top hip-hop crews in Niger goes by the name of Kaidan Gaskia (Act with the Truth). Its members want to remind audiences that truth must be respected. Whether rappers praise or denounce what is happening around them, there is a widely shared sense that their mission is to sing the truth. As one young man put it, ‘we are rappers. We are here to sing about reality. We cannot lie, everything we say is real. We describe reality.’ One of Adamou and Ousouman’s songs is entitled Faux Gou- verneurs (False Governors).15 It is about corruption, lies, and the need to hold politicians accountable. The song is aimed at the Nigérien gov-

14 The two youth were unaware of the irony ‘Plantation Boys’ evoked. They did not know what the expression meant but liked it. 15 False Governors/In life [there is] no truth in the conscience of people/It is time to say corruption go [in English in original],/those who corrupt and who are corrupt [must be] immediately arrested,/those people who dress differently from us/They make money, eternity, all our troubles are rooted in corruption/limos, great for us, they are all thieves,/buildings without any planning and no jails for them./Yet we have common rights and duties. god made me a rapper 253 ernment (referred to as ‘faux gouverneurs’) whom the two artists hold responsible for the poverty and unemployment of the country’s youth. ‘Our leaders are thieves and liars. They pretend they are doing something for Niger. But they do nothing, they are worthless,’ explained Ousouman. Denouncing government corruption is a popular strategy in Nigérien hip-hop but it is also a dangerous game: ‘Last year, some rappers were thrown in jail because they criticised the government.16 Of course, they were insulting [our leaders]. [Adamou and I] want to tell the truth. But we do it by speaking metaphorically. We don’t say it directly.’ In another song, ‘Sida’, singing the truth translates into a message aimed at those who ignore the ugly reality of AIDS. The HIV/AIDS infection rate in Niger is one of the lowest in Africa. But the epidemic is looming, and youth are particularly affected. In Hausa, the disease is known as ‘welcome to the grave.’ Because of the profound stigma attached to AIDS, most patients die before they can be tested. In ‘Sida’ Adamou and Ousouman sing about those who ‘did not want to believe’ that AIDS causes such devastation. AIDS, they insist ‘is the truth’ that should be confronted squarely. In the face of this threat, it matters little what Muslim preachers say about the irreligiousness of hip-hop.17 For many youth, this denunciation of rap culture reveals the extent to which preachers are out of touch with the younger generation. Young people face challenges of unprecedented magnitude, but they are offered limited guidance. It is precisely because their parents are for the most part unaware of their children’s problems and cannot offer counsel that youth must look elsewhere for sources of advice. Rap is one such source of insight and edification. As a nineteen-year- old young man put it, ‘rap is a way of seeing the world.’

6. Conclusion

By virtue of their structural position (no longer children, not yet adults), young people are well positioned to experiment and embrace

16 Ousouman is referring to the authors of a popular rap song entitled Barrawo, Sarkin Sata (Thief, King of Theft). The rappers were jailed after they accused the country’s president of corruption. 17 The songSida by Adamou and Ousouman ends with the following verses: Mic phone phone [in English in the original]/I repeat AIDS kills people in Niger, in Africa, and everywhere in the world/Wai you have wives but you follow different girls/Be careful, don’t catch AIDS or you’ll have problems. 254 adeline masquelier novelty (Cole 2004). As such they have the potential to speak for their generation. Speaking for those without power is precisely what hip- hop has enabled young men to do in Niger. Although many Muslims see hip-hop as un-Islamic and part of the corruption imported from the West, no other occupation has allowed youth to climb the ladder of economic prosperity and achieve fame so quickly and successfully. A number of Nigérien rappers have become wealthy. For some, success has facilitated emigration to more prosperous countries; several members of Kaidan Gaskiya are now settled permanently in the US. For the large majority of aspiring rappers, however, wealth and visibility remains painfully unattainable; like Adamou and Ousouman, most young rap artists lack the basic means to produce their music for distribution. All they can do is meaningfully articulate their distress in the songs they write and occasionally perform at local venues. I have argued that by positioning themselves simultaneously as victims of poverty and exclusion and as moral individuals actively engaged in educating society, young men in Dogondoutchi can claim both youth and Muslimhood. In a world riddled with obstacles ranging from poverty to disease to violence and corruption, people’s primary duty is to survive. By invoking the need to develop new strategies for survival, rap artists and fans find moral justification for modes of struggle and creative expression which elders denounce as contrary to Islam. Hip-hoppers find motivation in their urge to improve their lives in the absence of any other institutional mechanism for voicing their anguish and addressing their predicament. Because it is aimed at reforming corrupt practices and uncovering the truth, rap, as they see it, cannot be constructed as un-Islamic. Rappers are the voice of Niger’s youth, denouncing social evils, praising industriousness, and promoting civic responsibility. In the words of Ousouman, ‘we sing for all of Niger. We sing to help our country develop. We sing for all those who are realists. We sing for them.’ A Qur’anic scholar once complained to me that les jeunes who lis- tened to popular music but forgot to pray ‘were in the world but they didn’t know how to be in the world.’ His comment—grounded in the notion that Muslims must struggle between the requirements of addini (religion) and the needs of duniya (world)—is particularly ironic when considering the conditions of exclusion that characterise life for the majority of young men in Dogondoutchi. As I have suggested, for young men frustrated by their lack of future, the classic opposition between worldly pleasures and spiritual fulfillment (or between hip- god made me a rapper 255 hop and Islam) no longer makes sense in the contemporary moment. Paradoxically the man’s description of youth as both part of the world yet unable to fully participate in it was aptly realistic. Given the challenges they must confront, young men cannot afford to be choosy. As many see it, to make it in this ruthless world, one must inform oneself and seize opportunities when they present themselves even if doing so, in the eyes of society, compromises one’s integrity as a Muslim. I once asked a popular radio DJ if he thought that Malam Ibrahim (a once staunch critic of Western music who had begun praising hip-hop after his son earned local recognition as a rapper) was being forthright. My interlocutor responded laconically, ‘in Niger, you have to survive.’ The lesson was powerfully brought home to me a few days later when in a Dogondoutchi street, I crossed path with a young man on his way to a dance party. A perfect emulation of the stars of the global rap scene, he was sporting baggy khakis and Timberland knockoffs. On his black t-shirt was emblazoned the stark English message: ‘Life is not about being good or bad. It is about survival.’

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ENGENDERING A HAUSA VERNACULAR CHRISTIAN PRACTICE1

Barbara Cooper

1. Introduction

An exploration of the multiple meanings of Hausa identity in contemporary Niger provides a window onto Hausa-ness that gives us some distance from the ready conflation of Hausa culture with the Islam of the Sokoto jihad. The Maradi region of Niger became the stronghold for the recusant forces of the rulers of Gobir, Katsina and Kano who continued to resist the jihad for decades after the consolidation of the Sokoto and Gwandu emirates. While the rulers of these resistant camps (focused around the towns of Tsibiri, Maradi, and Tessaoua) regarded themselves as Muslims, their authority rested upon an ability to accommodate and recognise the beliefs and practices of the many Arna Hausa speakers of the region. Court practices in these relatively urban centers encompassed titled positions for various strands of Arna leadership. Urban spiritual practices represented a distinctive amal- gam of the highly localised spirit world of the Arna and the more labile djinn or bori who populated the invisible domain of these Hausa speaking Muslims. In many ways the accommodations of the pre- jihad Hausa world were elaborated upon and expanded in what was to become southern Niger (Smith 1967; Nicolas 1975; Cooper 1997). Evangelical missionaries of the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) were driven by a ‘burden’ to convert the Muslim Hausa of colonial Nige- ria, but found that political circumstances in that colony were not

1 This chapter draws from my bookEvangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). I am grateful to the many missionaries and archivists of SIM International who shared their history with me, and to the evangelical Christian community of Maradi for sharing their lives with me. I am grateful in particular to Barbara Kapenga for many illuminating discussions of these issues. Funding supporting this research came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Historical Association, and New York University. 258 barbara cooper propitious for direct evangelism to the populations of the northern emirates. Missionaries eager to convert the benighted Muslim masses to trigger the Second Coming chaffed at the restrictions placed on their activities and spatial movements by the British colonial administration (Barnes 1995). By the early 1920s SIM began to look across the border to Niger to see whether there might be better prospects in a marginal and scantily administered French colony (Bingham 1943). Despite early frustrations and setbacks at their station in Zinder, at length SIM did find in the Maradi region a setting in which it had a virtual monopoly on evangelical activities that were relatively unim- peded; the complex and variegated spiritual landscape lent itself to openness to new ideas. One of the ironies of colonial rule in West Africa was that it fostered the expansion of Islam by privileging the literate populations of urban centers and building pragmatically upon the relatively familiar legal practices of Maliki Islam (Triaud 2000). At the turn of the century only a small urban minority made of clerics, traders, and sarauta class elites were Muslim. As the century progressed Islam spread in the region extremely rapidly, bringing with it practices in trade, the legal domain, and family life that are broadly shared across the different ethnic groups of Niger while marginalising the practices of those rural populations that did not convert (Masquelier 2001). Today the most recent Demographic and Health Survey for Niger suggests that 98% of both men and women regard themselves as Muslims. Only 0.7% self report as being Christian (République du Niger 2007: 32–33). Those few remaining holdouts who converted neither to Christianity nor to Islam are buried in the categories Animist, without religion, and Other, which makeup a scant 1% total. However in the Maradi region the expansion of Islam occurred in a context in which Arna who sought the prestige of a literate monotheistic culture and resented the occasional arrogance of urban Muslims had an alternative religious practice available to them. Many converts to Christianity in the region were outliers in one sense or another—in the larger towns they came from insignificant lines of the sarauta courtly class, for example, or they were from the families of socially marginal butchers. Many, however, were attracted to evangelical Christianity from among the rural Arna villagers who had never converted to Islam. The urban character of Islam in this setting and the sometimes haughty pretentions of Muslims in positions of greater power meant that some Arna found in Christianity an appealing alternative route to engendering a hausa vernacular christian practice 259 the kinds of claims to civilisation that come with a literate tradition. The story of how the Maradi region came to be thecibiya or navel of evangelical Christianity in Niger is long and complex, however by the late 1970s a vibrant and distinctive Christian community had emerged (Cooper 2006). Given the tiny percentage of Nigeriens who claim to be Christian, it would be a stretch to suggest that Christianity is a dominant force in contemporary Niger. Nevertheless because the Christians are concentrated in particular villages, towns, and regions, the impact of evangelical and more recently Pentecostal Christianity can be far more significant in some areas than in others. Maradi, as the heartland of SIM’s efforts in Niger, has a particularly important place in the history of Christianity there. Other important centers include Dogondoutchi and more recently the capital Niamey. Christianity has become part of the pattern and texture of life in these settings for those who know how to see it. Interestingly, Catholicism has had a far less significant impact in Niger than it had in many other former French colonies such as Dahomey and Senegal. Catholic missions entered into the region very late, in part as a result of an effort on the part of the Vichy government to counter the influence of Anglophone missionaries in Niger during World War II. While there are Catholics in Niger, they are often the descendants of Dahomean civil servants who had been stationed in Niger by the French colonial administration to provide a cadre of civil servants (especially teachers) capable of administering the colony in French. The Catholic presence was not intended to prompt conversions, nor was evangelism particularly encouraged among those Cath- olic missionaries who did assist in the building of the Catholic schools beginning in the 1950s. The indigenous Christian population in Niger is, on the whole, protestant and evangelical in disposition and style rather than Catholic (Berthelot 1997; Benoist 1987; Cooper 2006). Since the 1990s SIM has found itself increasingly in competition with Muslim reformists on the one hand, and Pentecostal preachers on the other for those individuals who might be seeking an alternative to traditional Islamic practice in the region. The flowering of civil society in the past decade has fostered tremendous religious ferment in west Africa as young Muslims question the Sufi practices and socio- economic prerogatives of their elders (Kane 2003), as spirit-driven preachers often from Nigeria offer a theology of prosperity (Marshall- Fratani 2001), and as Sufi Muslims attempt to channel the reformist 260 barbara cooper spirit in ways that can revitalise their traditional practice of Islam (Mas- quelier 2001). Central to much contemporary debate in Niger is the shape and moral tenor of change, particularly as it touches of family life and ethical governance. In this chapter I will explore some of the dynamics that emerge in a context in which ethnic identity is cross-cut with several competing strands of religious practice in the context of the kind of brassage Sahélien that Ousseina Alidou insists has been at the core of the history of the region (Alidou 2005). Religious practice in the region has always been in the nature of a lively conversation among and between peoples of a variety of lifeways, religious traditions and ethnic groups (for the ‘long conversation’ of missionisation see Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997; Peterson 1999). Of course the metaphor of conversation may overemphasise the self-consciousness of the kind of hybridisation and interaction at play in the encounter of two different and contested universal religions with the complexities of African social, political and spiritual life. Jean-Loup Amselle would insist upon the ongoing quality of the mestizo logics affecting the missionary encounter with Africa. Taking the example of the expansion of Islam rather than of Christianity, he finds no ‘zero degree paganism’ and no ‘White Islam’ to serve as originary interlocutors in the imagined conversation. Rather, he argues, the successive waves of Islam in Africa (characterised by oscillation between periods of reform and periods of synthesis with local practice) make for very supple paganisms, very mixed Islams. In this plural and fluid encounter there are no recoverable fixed systemic wholes; the multidi- rectional flow of cultural interaction is, indeed, poorly captured in the kinds of binaries that the dialogic models (however richly nuanced) tend to imply (Amselle 1998). Following Amselle I suggest that Hausa-ness is not a fixed set of practices but rather an ongoing process of conversation, mimicry, struggle, rejection, reform and renewal. For evangelical Christians in the Maradi region of Niger, being Christian is accomplished in a Hausa idiom, but that Hausa spiritual vernacular (if you will) resonates strongly with Islam, with the bori spirit possession rejected in evangelical Christian- ity as demonic, and with the deeper spiritual landscape of the Arna that is the backdrop to all religious practice in the region. The Hausa spiritual vernacular is an uncontrollable confluence of converging and diverging ideas, practices and beliefs rather than a codified lexicon. As Peel observes of Yoruba religious dynamics, ‘Where the internal critics of Yoruba Islam were most anxious to upgrade its Islamic cre- engendering a hausa vernacular christian practice 261 dentials, the most persistent demand on Yoruba Christianity has been to prove its African ones. . . .’ (Peel 2000: 190). Converts to Islam and Christianity had to constantly prove both that they were sufficiently monotheistic and that they were authentically African. For Christians this was a particularly complex enterprise, given that Africans in this region had long been exposed to Islam: Islamic practice had already come to be seen by many as ‘authentically African.’ A vernacular is rich and multi-vocal, it borrows shamelessly from other vocabular- ies and revels in the improvisations of real users in messy settings; in the end it refuses formalisation and fixity. The ‘authentic’ African element, or Christian element, or Islamic element—or for that matter Western—element is a chimera, a fiction that is passionately sought after but upon closer inspection betrays its own hybrid origins. For one only seeks explicit evidence of an authentic conception when its taken-for-grantedness has been flushed out into the realm of an articulated ideology—in other words, when it has already come into contact with other forces and modes of thought (Brenner 1993, 2000). Today evangelical Christianity in the overwhelmingly Muslim milieu of Niger faces an irresolvable quandary. This fundamentalist Christian minority consciously and unconsciously emphasises commonalities between its beliefs and practices and those of traditionalist Muslims, reformist Muslims, and Arna so that there will be a ‘bridge’ to others, making conversion imaginable and co-existence conceivable. It is essential that local Christianity have a vernacular flavor, that it not appear to simply mimic a corrupt and alien West. But if there were no real difference between Christianity and other spiritual practices then there would be no impetus to convert. Furthermore it is important to evangelical Christians that Muslims understand that conversion to Christianity is not reversion to the paganism and ignorance of Arna/bori practice. Nothing in this setting stings so much as to be taunted as a kafir by Muslims. So Hausa speaking Christians emphasise differences from Muslimsand Arna and further insist that those differences are critical to salvation. This emphasis on distinguishing difference can be alienating if drawn too forcefully. And so it is that the evangelical Christian practice of Hausa speakers in Niger oscillates constantly between poles of attraction and repulsion, commonality and difference, ever mindful of the disdain of Muslims, the criticisms of other Christians, and the judgments of the American dominated SIM International mission that introduced evangelical Christianity into the region. 262 barbara cooper

Christianity in an ethnically diverse town such as Maradi, of course, encompasses more than simply native Hausa speakers. Furthermore the Christianity of the evangelical Churches is not entirely representative of the more Pentecostal strains of Christianity now spreading like wildfire in the region. The growing presence of Hausa speaking Chris- tians of other ethnic backgrounds in the Christian church in Niger has generated many strains, and some debates about just what constitutes Christianity. For many Christians Hausa identity is not generally at the forefront of their minds—what distinguishes them most from other citizens of Niger is not ethnicity, but religion. Still, since Chris- tianity in Maradi is practiced in a Hausa idiom, ethnicity is inevitably a dimension of the religious practice of the region, complicating both religion and ethnicity. Schisms have emerged within the evangelical Christian fold as native Hausa speakers in the earliest church in Maradi watched the emergence of practices grounded in Tuareg and Fulani spiritual vernaculars that differed considerably from their own, often with the blessings of the new generations of missionaries of SIM. Because the Hausa speaking church of the Maradi region emerged earliest some of its members see it as original and authentic; they regard practices that deviate from those of the Hausa language church as imperfectly Christian, not always recognising the ways in which religious practice is vernacu- larised. Newer strands of evangelical Christianity, often inspired by Pentecostal preachers from Nigeria, on the other hand, can be quite critical of the vernacularising strategies of the older church, imagining that they themselves can remain pure of these tendencies. This chapter explores some of the ways in which Hausa speaking Christians in the Maradi region of Niger have engaged in performative debate about the nature of Christianity and its relationship to Hausa- ness. The context of Niger can differ substantially from the context of Nigeria. In Niger many early Christians were native Hausa speakers, whereas in Nigeria often prominent Hausa speaking Christians were ‘Middle Belt’ Christians drawing upon Hausa as a lingua franca, converts whose claim to Hausa-ness would inevitably be weak. Southern Niger, as home to the flexible Islam of those who fled the Sokotojihad , provided a locus in which converts could be simultaneously ‘Hausa’ and Christian. I argue here that evangelical Christianity emerged in a context in which it had to prove itself to be ‘vernacular’ in culture yet distinct from Islam. This competition with Islam in many ways set the terms of the performative debate that ensued (for a compara- engendering a hausa vernacular christian practice 263 tive case see James 1988). Women have had a particularly important role in shaping the religious practices through which this interplay has occurred, despite their marginalisation from positions of formal authority within the evangelical churches.

2. ‘What are the Obligatory Acts in which Christians must engage?’

I would like to open with some reflections upon the ways in which the central assumptions of Islamic practice in this region of Hausaland have shaped how Christians present themselves and how they have come to understand what appropriate Christian practice might be. Because most Hausa-speaking Muslims in Niger did not have direct access to sacred texts written in Arabic until relatively recently, much debate (as elsewhere in West Africa) has centered not around exegesis but rather around the particulars of ritual performance (Launay 1992). This emphasis on practice makes itself felt within Hausa evangelical Christianity in two ways. First of all, Hausa Christians participate in broadly held Hausa understandings of the sacred, deeply colored by Islam and very much taken for granted. Secondly, Hausa evangelical Christians consciously distinguish themselves from Muslims through a variety of specifically Christian adaptations to or refusals of Muslim practices. For example at a seminar I observed on evangelisation to Hausa women sponsored by the evangelical churches of Niger in Maradi in February of 2001, a broad cross-section of women from the Evangelical and Pentecostal communities gathered to discuss how best to present Christianity to their female relatives, neighbors, and friends who are Muslim. An American woman missionary theologian presented the general outline of the beliefs and practices of Islam, describing the five obligatory acts that are the pillars of Islam (statement of belief or shahada, regularised laudatory prayer or salat (in Hausa salla), tithing or zakkat, fasting and abstinance during the month of Ramadan known in Hausa as azumi, and performing the collective pilgrimage to Mecca known as the hajj if one has the means). She then asked the audience to break into small groups to reflect upon a number of questions that she noted are commonly asked by Muslims, the first of which was, ‘what are the obligatory acts in which Christians must engage?’ Interestingly the women at the conference all approached the question of obligation with the attitude that in fact Christianity does entail 264 barbara cooper obligatory acts (ayyuka wajibai). Although the participants included some women from Pentecostal churches as well as the larger numbers of women from the splintered evangelical churches, no one dissented from this view. Although the different breakout groups used slightly different language and ordered their responses in a variety of ways, their presentations to the whole assembly were remarkably consistent. The obligations of the Christian are as follows: profession of faith ban( gaskiya), prayer (addu’a), tithing (zakkat), fasting (azumi), preaching (wa’azi), love (‘kauna), fellowship (zummunci). It seemed to me that although the women who had higher training in evangelical schools emphasised love, it was embedded in the list and did not have any particular priority. Ban gaskiya, or faith, was not presented by any of the groups as different fromayyuka , or works, although somewhat later a male Hausa, Pastor Lawali, who had had higher theological training, did gently suggest that so long as Christians had faith, they did not need works. But clearly the more popular perception and practice among devoted Christian women—who are of course charged with socialising children into Christianity—is rather different. Indeed, one can draw up a series of parallels between the obligatory acts of Hausa Muslims and those popularly perceived by Protestant Hausa Christians: Muslims Christians Kalma Shahada Ban Gaskiya Statement of the Arabic Faith, trust, to publicly announce formula whereby an one’s acceptance of Christ as individual acknowledges that Savior. he or she is a Muslim: there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. Salla Addu’a The five daily prayers of For Christians the word is used for Muslims praising God, more any prayer other than the ritual or less synchronised so that prayer of Muslims. Such prayer all in the community pray generally contains praise of God, uniformly at the same time. thanks for what God has provided, and finally requests or invocations. Addu’a can be performed at any time, and can be individual or collective. engendering a hausa vernacular christian practice 265

Zakkat Zakkat/Baiko Tithing a percentage of one’s Regular giving for the benefit of wealth annually for the good one’s Church. The giving would be of the entire community irregular and imprecise but would make up a substantial proportion of a Christian’s income. Azumi Azumi Collective fasting and from Voluntary individual or collective sunrise to sunset during the fasting as an occasional matter month of Ramadan. to enhance prayer and reflection to address a specific problem or concern. Hajj [Pilgrimage] Pilgrimage for those who [No one suggested that Christians have the means to Mecca have an obligatory pilgrimage, during the month of Zulhaji, although West African Christians the twelfth month of the do visit Jerusalem and the Holy Muslim calendar. Lands. Christian women who have been to Jerusalem are referred to as ‘Hajjiya, the term used to describe a Muslim woman who has been on pilgrimage to Mecca.] Nuna ‘kauna To show love to others. Zummunci To take part in Christian fellowship. Shaida bishara; wa’azi To give witness to the good news of salvation through Jesus; to preach. A number of features of this parallel list emerge upon closer inspection. Protestant Christians see themselves as performing many of the same acts as Muslims. However, because they don’t simply do those acts at prescribed times and collectively, they understand themselves to engage in acts of devotion more freely, more often, and with less ostentation, than Muslims do. For example one relatively well educated woman noted that while Muslims have five required times for prayer, when Christians pray, their prayer is perpetual: ‘I can be walking down the street and be praying,’ she observed. And indeed my own experience with Christians suggests that this is not much of an exaggeration: I haven’t yet done an interview, attended a meeting, or 266 barbara cooper visited a home when prayer wasn’t called for. Thus Hausa evangelical Christians have the sense that you don’t confine prayer to artificial times, and that it is appropriate at all occasions. Their insistence that their devotion is fuller than the prayer of Muslims is perhaps a reaction against the common Muslim perception that Christian practice is not as exacting (and therefore not as meritorious) as Muslim practice since Christians only go to Church on Sunday. Of course Christians must overlook zikiri, the more or less constant Sufi prayer in remem- brance of God to lay a claim to more constant devotion. There has been a long verbal struggle between Christianity and Islam in Hausaland over who gets to lay claim to the central Arabic term for prayer, salla. It is sufficient to remark of someone that he or she does salla to convey that the individual in question is a Muslim. However in Arabic the term has a broader usage and could certainly be used to describe Christian prayer. Since Hausa Muslims monopolised the term salla, Christians had to make use of other words to refer to their prayer. Accordingly Christians gravitated towards the Arabic lexicon of prayer searching for a different alternative. The invocational prayer Muslims offer after their salla, often to pray to God for assistance in the face of a particular difficulty such as drought or a personal problem, are known as addu’a. Christians have come to use this term to describe their own prayer, whether it is prayer in praise of God, prayer in thanksgiving, or prayer invoking God’s aid. Semantically, the word addu’a seems not terribly distant from the Hausa word ro’ko, but its Arabic origin gives the word a sanctity that provides useful spiritual capital. Given the linguistic divide here, where Muslim prayer is salla and Christian prayer is addu’a, misconceptions inevitably abound. Hausa Muslims imagine that collective Christian prayer consists only of invocation (so when they see Christians say grace before a meal they may suppose that Christians are in fact praying to the food itself), while Hausa Christians often see Muslim prayer as highly formalised and de-personalised. The understanding of prayer as praise and thanksgiving, so important to most Christians, is lost in the term addu’a, which refers specifically to requests made to God. Thus Christian prayer may appear to the non-Christian to be insufficiently respectful. On the other hand Christians may find the tendency of Muslim women (who pray at home rather than in the mosque) to perform salla with their eyes open in the midst of all manner of tumult (radio, conversation, engendering a hausa vernacular christian practice 267 children crying) to be empty. In a final odd twist to the vocabulary of prayer, when Christians want to convey the sense of joining together for the collective prayer they perform on Sundays, they make use of the term sujada, which more properly refers to the prostrations Muslims do when they touch their foreheads to the ground in obeisance to God. But it is precisely this act of prostration that Christians regard as the outward mark of empty ritualism verging upon idolatry in Islam. Thus while Christians maintain careful parallels between their acts of devotion and those of Islam, they are constrained by a spiritual competitiveness to develop ways of distinguishing their acts from those of Muslims. If wealthy Muslims make a collective pilgrimage to Mecca, fortunate Christians make a voluntary individual trip to Jeru- salem instead, earning the title ‘Hajjiya’ if they are women. Where Muslims in principle give a set portion of their annual wealth to the community, Christians make regular voluntary gifts more commonly known as baiko to their churches. If Hausa Muslim women veil and increasingly take on a form of burka known locally as hijabi, Hausa evangelical Christians often argue that Paul teaches that it is ‘obligatory’ for Christian women to cover their heads. Yet Hausa Christian women are not attempting to ‘pass’ as Muslims, for the print on the cloth they wear often carries Biblical verses and Christian symbols that make it entirely clear that the wearer is Christian. Christians and Muslims agree that smoking and drinking are ungodly. While young Hausa Muslim men do nevertheless regularly smoke, I’ve never seen a practicing Christian in Maradi smoke. In other words, there are quite a few parallels between Christian and Muslim practice that prompt me to suggest that there are specificallyHausa dimensions to evangelical Christian praxis in Maradi, and that those elements reveal an agonistic acquiescence to traditional Hausa Islamic assumptions about spiritu- ality. Both Christians and Muslims reject the practices of the Arna, despite a broadly shared Hausa belief in the existence and power of spirits. Evangelical Christians share with reformist Muslims an antipa- thy for bori therapeutics. Nevertheless there is one element on the list of Evangelical Chris- tian ‘obligations’ I have drawn up that is specificallyevangelical rather than Hausa. That is the enumeration ofwa’azi or evangelisation among the obligatory works of Christians. If this duty is kept more in the breach than the observance among Hausa evangelical Christians in my experience, nevertheless it is a legacy of the evangelical outlook 268 barbara cooper of SIM. Christian women remind themselves and others in their con- gregations of this obligation regularly through song, as if they were in danger of forgetting: Always, always we keep preaching the Good News The end of the world comes and people have no humility They are not obedient to the love of God They don’t know that judgment day will come and they will give an accounting . . . We followers [of Jesus] let us not ignore our duty to preach the good news of Lord Jesus The commitment, however lackluster, to evangelisation does distinguish evangelical and Pentecostal Christians quite markedly from local Catholics. Catholics regard the evangelical impulse of Protestant Christians as culturally inappropriate and as inviting conflict with the Muslims. When violence is visited upon the evangelical community, both Catholic and Muslim Hausa speakers may murmur sympatheti- cally, but they tend to shrug and remark, ‘well, they have been preaching’ in a tone that suggests that ‘they’ had it coming.

3. Performing Christianity

Christians of this region have developed a series of public practices that simultaneously resonate with Muslim practice, perform the nature of Christianity as a distinctive belief system, and effectively serve as modes of evangelism. These events seize upon the reality that in Niger, any unusual event will draw a large crowd of young and curious onlookers. Probably the most striking of these adaptations is the bikin suna, or naming ceremony. Muslim families hold a naming ceremony eight days after the birth of a child outside the father’s home. Muslim scholars will be invited as well as friends, neighbors and kin. The ceremony occurs very early in the morning before the work of the day has begun. Women gather inside the compound, crowding the mother and baby in a room decorated with heavy wall hangings, smoky with incense. Men sit on mats in front of the home, and it is they who actually listen to the speech of a Muslim scholar who will choose a name. Within about five minutes the name has been chosen there will be noisy ululations as the women inside receive the news. Everyone will share a meal together and a ram will be sacrificed as alms and the meat distributed. Muslim men regard the purchase of engendering a hausa vernacular christian practice 269 such a ram as an absolutely necessary expense and will borrow money at high rates of interest to meet this social obligation. The evangelical Christian variant on this serves a function somewhat akin to infant baptism. The men gather outside the home of the couple, the women inside, and the bikin suna is carried out early in the morning. At first the event seems indistinguishable from a Muslim ceremony. But the naming event among Muslims occurs very quickly, and in reality the name chosen has little social significance because most Muslim women have a taboo against using the formal name for fear that it will bring bad luck to the child. So in practice the child will almost never be referred to by his or her formal name. Christians have a very different relationship to the name itself. The parents choose a Biblical name themselves, and they invite a pastor to offer a sermon reflecting upon the meaning of that name for the gathered Christian community. The child is not kept hidden inside the compound, but is brought out to the doorway and joyously displayed to the crowd, as if to demonstrate a lack of fear of the evil eye—the Christian God will protect this child. When describing the difference between Christian and Muslim bikin suna, Christians never fail to note that the child is brought out for public viewing. The display is one way of establishing the community’s claim upon the child. In effect Christians use the name as an occasion to preach to the Muslim kin, neighbors and curious on-lookers some key values of Christianity, some key texts, and something about the nature of Christian community. Because public preaching to evangelise is not permitted, but naming ceremonies can not be forbidden, these ceremonies have become one of the most important ways in which the Christian community reaches beyond the walls of the church. Pentecostal Christians are somewhat anxious about this ritual, in which they may also participate, for fear that its Islamic and pre-Islamic history may offer precisely the kind of ‘opening’ demons seize upon to inhibit the success of the child in the future. Evangelical Christians in Maradi are awash in a world imbued with Islam and they must navigate urban terrain in which status, power, and authority all derive from access to Islamic capital banked through collective acts of devotion. In order to take part in that world they have had to find ways to participate in the kinds of social exchange valued and recognised by their Muslim kin and neighbors—performing a bikin suna and inviting neighbors is one very good means of participating in social exchange. As ‘religions of the book’ Islam and 270 barbara cooper

Christianity would seem to share a great deal of common ground. Because Muslims recognise Jesus as one of the prophets, they are willing to entertain the possibility that the Gospels are a sacred (but potentially corrupted) text. Interestingly, therefore, relatively scholarly Muslims often consult with Christians about what might be contained in that text (the linjila) and this opens a door for Christians and Mus- lims to share in the ‘religion of the book.’ Curiosity about just what Christianity has to offer in part attracts neighbors to join the crowd at a Christian bikin suna. Christianity’s claim to exclusivity, however, guarantees that Islam and Christianity compete within this terrain, and therefore the ‘currency’ of sacred literacy is non-convertible. Evangelical Christians feel they have something to ‘give’ Muslims, but refuse to receive anything in return. Christian rejection of the spiritual capital of Muslims, in effect, makes it rather difficult for them to function within the same social economy. As a result Muslims in Maradi have long taken a defensive stance towards Christianity. If educated Muslims may initially take an interest in the sacred writings about ‘Annabi Issa’ (the Prophet Jesus) they react strongly against the exclusivity of Christian- ity and many elements of Christian belief they regard as polytheis- tic (the trinity, the birth of Christ as God, reverence for Mary). With growing social tensions due to the failure to build social capital they can at length come to regard Christians as kafirai, or pagans. Muslim men may attempt to marry Christian women in hopes of converting them, but a Christian man who hopes to marry a Muslim woman will be ostracised from his Church. These failures of reciprocity can take a more material form, as when Muslims offer meat to their Christian neighbors at the major festivals. Christians may decline to accept the gift, or if it is taken then the Christian may struggle to determine how and when to reciprocate. Since Christians do not necessarily butcher their meat in accordance with Islamic law, it is hard to provide food in return (cf. Ficquet 2006). The commensality so critical to forging social relations is difficult to sustain. For close to a century, however, Hausa Christians and Muslims in Maradi have lived alongside one another relatively peacefully. There are a number of reasons for this, with contradictory implications. Of the ‘duties’ enumerated by Hausa Christians the one that is most strikingly distinct from Hausa Muslim ritual is the commitment to show love, a commitment that is captured in many Hausa Christian songs sung by women in their fellowship groups: engendering a hausa vernacular christian practice 271

If you don’t love your brothers and sisters You don’t truly have Jesus in your heart Jesus said we must love one another For love is the greatest [commandment] SIM missionaries, who have historically had a more literal understanding of evangelism as ‘giving the word’ or preaching, often miss the more affective and performative ways in which Hausa Christians enact the duty to ‘give witness.’ And so I imagine that this gentle and loving approach to their Hausa Muslim neighbors has, in the past, contributed to the creation of feelings of sympathy and commonality. Christian women spend much of their limited free time visiting sick friends and neighbors, sharing snacks with their children from their petty trade in cooked food, and offering advice on everything from schooling to health. However their sense of marginality and vulnerability also causes Christians to emphasise their participation in a specifically Christian community. The women’s group in most churches is known as the Zummuntar Mata, and in a rare borrowing from English, Hausa speaking Christians in Niger sometimes refer to such gatherings using the term ‘women’s fellowship.’ Since zummunci can be something shared with Muslims, it seems that the English term ‘fellowship’ captures a specifically Christian form of sociability enjoyed by the ‘followers of Jesus.’ If the exhortations to show love and to evangelise would seem to invite a great deal of interaction with Muslims, in practice many Christians keep more or less to themselves whether out of fear or indif- ference. The greater part of their time, energy and income is devoted to activities with other Christians, and their gifts are directed by and large towards the building of their churches and the assistance of other Christians. Women’s fellowship groups are devoted in a sense to vernacularising Christianity through song, not only in the sense of drawing upon the Hausa vernacular translation of the bible, but also in the sense of rendering Christian belief into song in forms that conform to Hausa oral modes of cultural production. Certainly the translation of the bible into Hausa was one very important way in which Christianity became vernacular, however that labor was organised by missionaries who depended heavily upon male mediators who were often neither Christian nor native Hausa speakers themselves (Cooper 2006). By contrast the labor of rendering the text of the Hausa bible into song, or recasting the textual into the oral in a memorable and 272 barbara cooper reproducible way, was accomplished almost exclusively by women. In effect it was women who transformed the Hausa language service into a lively experience in which illiterate women as well as men could participate. The service in song was expressed in the language local populations could best understand, particularly the women who were so difficult for male missionaries and preachers to reach. Evangelical Hausa Christianity is somewhat shackled by its efforts to meet and counter the hostile gaze of an imagined Muslim audience by converting its own practice into forms calculated to placate Muslims. Women have been highly effective in translating Christianity through song into forms that other women could grasp and embrace. Despite the centrality of women to this work and to the socialisation of children, I was told that women should not be made pastors because Muslims would see and they would disapprove because women don’t preach in mosques. This is an odd stance to take given the extraor- dinary vitality of the women’s groups in the churches. One of the most important ways in which Christianity accedes to the constraining embrace of Islam is in its retention of a highly patriarchal vision of Christian community and family. Certainly the fundamentalism of SIM explains in part this rejection of leadership roles for women, but Hausa Christians have been known to part ways with the mission on other issues, most notably sources of funding associated with the relatively liberal World Council of Churches. Hausa Christianity, as we have seen, is not a carbon copy of SIM’s American inflected fundamentalism, but in this respect it has remained true to its parentage. If there is a certain consistency among evangelicals regarding gender roles, the evangelical churches have splintered over such issues as whether drumming and dance are admissible in the churches, given that Muslims regard such activities as inappropriate for the mosque. Older church leaders in Maradi regularly spoil the fun of youth group music festivals by loudly proclaiming the typically Hausa dance and music competition to be sinful. As a result they are losing some of their younger members to the newer highly kinetic Pentecostal churches that give no quarter to Muslim perception—although they may be even more critical of the dangers of dance. In many ways the boundaries of evangelical Christian practice have been set in advance by Muslim perceptions of spiritual practice—by contrast Pentecostal Christianity today actively rejects Islam as Satanic, and does little to placate Muslim sensibilities. One reason the Pentecostal movement has taken off in Niger may be that younger Christians and rural Christians engendering a hausa vernacular christian practice 273 from villages with less exposure to Islam see no particular reason to continue this tradition of mirroring Islam in order to out-perform it. Pentecostal churches devote much more energy to evangelisation that the ‘evangelical’ churches do, and they are unabashed in their use of electric instruments, loud drums, and outspoken sermons amplified so that the entire neighborhood can hear. If the traditionally evangelical churches seem hampered by the constraining embrace of Islam, Pen- tecostal churches march, quite literally, to a different drummer. One of the most striking Muslim attitudes to have affected evangelical praxis is a hostility to Hausa spirit veneration. Despite a contempt for kafirci, traditionalist Islam in the region nevertheless did import some elements of Arna belief into what became a highly textured accre- tion of largely urban religious practices. But in a bid to be more pious than Muslims, evangelical missionaries rejected all Arna practices and historically SIM did little to either address or recognise the demands of the spirit world. As a result the evangelical community that has emerged has missed the opportunity to convert the energy devoted to spirit veneration into something more like reverence for the Holy Spirit. It is precisely this more daring and confrontational move that the Pentecostal churches made, whether as a conscious strategy or not. Rural Hausa in regions relatively untouched by Islam have been quite drawn to Pentecostalism, which drives out spirit possession with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, replaces bori dancing with speaking in tongues, and displaces all night wasa drumming and dancing with long evening services in which a heightened state is achieved through loud and repetitive music. Precisely because Pentecostalism takes the spirit world extremely seriously as the source of demonic constraints upon the success of the convert, the community, and the nation, it is more attuned to the sensibilities of rural Arna. Rather than simply domesticate or ignore spirit practices, it actively works to counter them—to exorcise them. Similarly it works to excise all Islamic practices, not to placate Islam. However if Pentecostalism is highly effective in terms of evangelisation, it also tends to inflame Muslim resentments even more than evangelicalism. Christians, then, engage in the local social economy in a complex and contradictory fashion. They have a long history of drawing upon Islamic terminology, partly because of the reliance upon Muslim ‘middle figures’ in the translation of Christianity into Hausa. They also have mirrored and amplified many Hausa spiritual practices in their own Christian praxis. On the other hand they have disrupted the 274 barbara cooper

Figure 11.1. The congregation of the newly constructed church in Tsibiri ca. 1948. (Note the Islamic style of the church architecture and the local dress style typical of Muslim Hausa speakers in the region of the congregants). Photo by Ray de la Haye, courtesy of SIM International Archives. local social economy by refusing both Muslim and Arna social capital. The spirit of toleration and borrowing that had long been a hallmark of religious practice in this region (in contrast with Hausa speaking northern Nigeria) seems to have become a thing of the past, while religious friction is very much on the increase. One can only hope that the deeply held indigenous Hausa value of zummunci—the honey-sweet quality of mutual sociability—which pre-dated both Islam and Chris- tianity in the region, is powerful enough to withstand the growing tensions in a weak state and an ever declining economy.

4. Conclusion

This chapter has explored the ever-shifting space of Christian practice in Niger as it oscillates ambivalently between the hegemonic assumption that to be Hausa is to be Muslim on the one hand, and the missionary insistence that to be Christian is to be an evangelical fundamentalist on the other. Being a Protestant Christian in Niger means not simply engendering a hausa vernacular christian practice 275 adopting a certain set of beliefs or attending a certain church. Histori- cally it has meant seeking out and sustaining a community that is at once Christian and Hausa through a variety of ‘vernacular’ practices that could be in tension with the social practices of the early missionaries and of their more contemporary successors. Converts have long been aware that the practices of missionaries are not the same thing as Christianity itself. Evangelical Christian practice in Maradi has been shaped in substantive ways by the consciousness that Christianity is in competition with Islam and must constantly prove itself in terms that are legible to Muslims. Christianity in such a setting is constituted out of and through its simultaneous embrace and rejection of other religious practices (most notably Islam)—it is not really possible to imagine Hausa evangelical Christianity as an abstraction apart from its relation to Islam. Such an observation renders nonsensical the notion of civilisations that exist as ideals separate from one another outside of space and time, only to somehow come together as victims of history to ‘clash.’ Religious practice occurs through human interaction and is defined by it. Chris- tian and Islamic religious culture are to an ever increasing degree generated and lived in relation to one another; these religious practices are made meaningful precisely by their commonalities and differences experienced in space and time (for rich studies along these lines see Soares 2006 and Meyer and Moors 2006). Within this evangelical sub-culture the generation of a sense of community has in many ways fallen to women and their lively fellowship groups, without which it is difficult to imagine the contemporary churches surviving the many fractures created by competition among men of different generations, ethnicities, and regions. However the fear that the surrounding Muslims and American fundamentalist missionaries would see female leadership of the churches as profoundly unset- tling prevents the evangelical Churches from really taking advantage of the dynamism of women participating in the Christian churches. Women may sing vernacular songs, but they may not lead congre- gations. Christian practice in Niger oscillates, in a play between the contradictory poles of faith and works, fundamental difference and adaptive absorption, between masculine authority and feminine resilience, and between the commanding presence of Islamic hegemony and the appealing call to Christian distinction. 276 barbara cooper

References

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Shankar, S. 2006. A fifty-year Muslim conversion to Christianity: Religious ambigui- ties and colonial boundaries in Northern Nigeria, c. 1906–1063. In Soares, B. ed. Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa. Leiden: Brill, 89–114. Smith, M. G. 1967. A Hausa kingdom: Maradi under Dan Baskore 1854–1875. In Forde, E. ed. West African Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century. London: Oxford University Press, 93–122. Soares, B. ed. 2006. Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa. Leiden: Brill. Triaud, J.-L. 2000. Islam in Africa under French colonial rule. In Levtzion, N. and Pouwels, R. L. eds. The History of Islam in Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 169–208. Wall, M. 1960. Splinters off an African log. Chicago: Moody Press.

CHAPTER TWELVE

HAUSA AS A PROCESS IN TIME AND SPACE1

John E. G. Sutton

1. Introduction

Hausaland comprises a remarkably extensive area containing a very substantial population. A mere glance at a language-distribution map brings out this phenomenon of size: spatially as well as demographically Hausa contrasts overwhelmingly with the myriad of separate tongues spoken by the communities characterising Nigeria’s ‘middle belt’.2 Such a broad geographical spread of a single language with only moderate dialectical fragmentation implies a relatively recent process—several centuries perhaps, but scarcely a full millennium—driven by some powerful dynamic. That might be partly explained demographically, by imagining that Hausa rural settlement developed as a productive agricultural regime of land-clearance and crop combinations,3 relying on improved iron tools and husbandry techniques, altogether stimulating population growth and a frontier moving forward each generation to claim new territory. But more than a sole matter of increased pro- creation and forceful expansion, the process would at the same time have doubtless been assimilative, existing local communities gradually

1 This is an essay in rethinking—after three decades spent in other parts of Africa— issues raised in my 1979 article ‘Towards a less orthodox history of Hausaland’ in Journal of African History. I am grateful to the conveners of the symposium for this opportunity, and to various participants, more conversant than myself with subsequent developments in this field, for helpful comments and essential references. I revisit here the question of the direction of expansion of the Hausa language and people in the savanna belt—from the north (as the old historiography would have it), from east to west (as argued from language geography in my previous paper), or from west to east (as comparison of dialects within Hausa might suggest). 2 See Greenberg (1963) and Hansford et al. (1976). The same broad observation has been made many times, in both general historical works and linguistic contributions: e.g. Schuh (1982), Philips (1989). 3 Insofar as one can project backwards from ethnography, dominant crops would have been sorghum and pearl millet, variously supplemented with other grains, roots and legumes. For aspects of the agricultural economy, see Hill (1972) and Mortimore (1970). 280 john e. g. sutton identifying themselves with the dominant Hausa system and adopting its language and mores. Yet by itself such a rural agricultural dynamic looks insufficient for explaining the process of ‘Hausaisation’. Why was it Hausa in the first place, rather than some other local savanna community with a quite different tongue, that fulfilled this expansion- ist and assimilative role, and promoted the broad, and doubtless prestigious, sense of identity—what might be called ‘Hausaness’? That may be unanswerable historically; but the question under- lines the impressionistic nature of the imagined reconstruction being offered, and points to the danger of anachronism if not circular argument, especially in supposing agricultural and technical developments which remain inadequately demonstrated by archaeological or other research. Moreover, the assumption of an historical element of prestige in Hausa identity stimulates the search for an additional factor, notably in the emerging political organisation of the zone, insofar as that is understood in the early and middle centuries of the second millennium AD. As Hausaland (especially its eastern half ) has long been described in the literary sources, both internal and external, as a series of separate, even rival, kingdoms, a simple nation-state model of centralisa- tion and progressive standardisation cannot apply here; even less some supposed imperial conquest promoting conformity of culture and language on subject peoples. Rather, the relevant factors must have been internal and informal. One of these may well—as the widespread repu- tation of Hausa traders might suggest—have been commercial, notably the development of routes crossing the savanna from the Niger bend to the Lake Chad basin in the east, and intersecting with those carrying varied produce from and to (what is now) southern Nigeria in one direction and, in the other, the Sahel (with the trans-Saharan caravans beyond). But this focus on long-distance trade must assume the prior existence of local and regional infrastructures of rural production and exchange onto which the former could latch itself effectively. For smooth operation, moreover, such a commercial network would have needed not just reliable contacts and rulers ensuring a welcome and security in each and every locality but, rather, an accepted system of authority, protection and trading facilities pervading the petty political divisions within the zone. In such circumstances markets and attendant industries would develop in towns, suitably defended according to circumstances and resources, whose ruling cliques naturally exploited, but in due measure, the wealth which accrued. Impression- hausa as a process in time and space 281 istic though such a picture remains, the multi-state configuration of Hausaland over several centuries suggests the importance of common standards—administrative, legal and of course linguistic—through which business could be conducted from place to place. This sort of image is not invalidated by the observation that at certain times some or all of the Hausa kingdoms were subject in varying degrees to external powers—for example, Songhai in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Borno from the later sixteenth to eighteenth, the Fulani empire in the nineteenth, and its successor, British North- ern Nigeria. Rather, the established and extensive Hausa system and standards proved sufficiently robust to withstand periodic threats of disruption, including wars and episodes of siege and sacking. They adapted to the changing political milieu, the principal towns and centres of authority, population, commerce and industry—notably Kano, Katsina and Zaria—maintaining their role within the successive polities. Thoughsarki s and emirs here and there might be deposed, killed or expelled, or a whole set of old dynasties supplanted (notably by the Fulani jihadists two centuries ago), such events need not appear so revolutionary when considered within the longer social and economic experience of Hausaness and the extensive Hausa system.4 One discerns therefore two models—not necessarily opposed, but certainly competing for priority—to explain the emergence of Hau- saness and the process of Hausaisation in pre-jihad centuries. The first (pressed in my 1979 paper) focuses primarily on the rural and agricultural factor; the other emphasises urban and commercial developments, alongside political control devolving from elites and ruling families in the walled centres and capital birane. This latter might be called the ‘state and trade’ model, so well entrenched in the telling of West African history generally. It has also attracted archaeologists, the spectacular, if crumbling, remains of city walls presenting an obvious challenge.5 At the same time, the notions of Hausaness and a ‘Hausa

4 For background, see Cambridge History of Africa III–V (1975–7), chapters by Fisher and Hiskett; and History of West Africa I (ed. Ajayi and Crowder, 1971/1976/1985), chapters by Smith, Last and Hunwick; also Hogben and Kirk-Greene (1966), and Crowder (1962). 5 For preliminary studies of Zaria, Kano and Surame (in Kebbi), see below; also Connah (2000). Patrick Darling recently drew attention to the clustering of old walled birane in the Daura-Katsina area, and its likely significance in the development of the distinctive Hausa system, an important factor being the crossing of trade routes hereabouts. 282 john e. g. sutton system’ should be examined geographically. Could they have simply arisen at a particular period over the whole length and breadth of the zone? Or, more plausibly, was Hausaisation a process which advanced, whether slowly or rapidly, across the zone from one or other side? The evidence of comparative linguistics, notably the position of Hausa within the Chadic language-family of which it is, conspicuously, the most westerly representative, strongly suggests, prima facie, that the Hausa language expanded from east to west along the savanna zone (as I earlier advocated). That argument stands in stark opposition to the common supposition, reflected in most secondary historical accounts, of migrations of early Hausa, or at least of formative elements, from the Saharan edge southwards (a view which has sought support from certain traditional sources and preserved chronicles). A different linguistic explanation, based on study of existing Hausa dialects (a factor underplayed previously), would indicate a direction of expansion from west to east (from Kebbi or Gobir and beyond in the north-west, a picture which might conceivably fit with a modified form of the old ‘northern origin’ assumption). These conflicting arguments deriving from linguistics6 bear on the different models of the Hausaisation process. That advocating gradual east-west expansion suits a ‘grass roots’ image, with the emphasis on agricultural production, rural population growth and progressive assimilation (markets and long-distance commerce, and equally political centres, developing secondarily within all that). The opposite view of a late ‘standard’ Hausa dialect issuing from a westerly quarter to permeate the central and eastern parts, in tandem with their emerging kingdoms (principally Katsina, Zazzau [Zaria] and Kano), would be more consonant with the focus on trade, towns, capitals and ruling elites over the last five or six centuries. The present paper addresses these opposed models and approaches, but must fall short of offering a definitive solution.

2. The direction of Hausaisation: deconstructing the notion of northern origin

At the least, as an adaptive process of taming and populating the savanna, as well as promoting trade and communications together

6 See works cited above; also Jaggar, this volume. My thanks to the latter for further discussion of the relevant linguistics. hausa as a process in time and space 283 with developing markets and towns, the historical progress of Hau- saisation most likely followed that zone, either from east to west or vice versa. Any notion of an invasion or wholesale implantation of a peasant community from a ‘foreign’ environment such as the more humid and forested terrain to the south, or the Saharan fringes to the north, seems unrealistic. Strangely, however, Hausa historiography has been captive to a persistent supposition of a northern ‘origin’, a view seemingly grounded as much on conviction as on evidence. In fact, this supposition appears to consist of several strands pointing northwards or eastwards—for instance an Islamic consciousness, or the influence of Borno—which have reinforced each other, though without necessarily concurring logically. However, it is the Bayajidda legend, with its variants and sequels—notably the Hausa bakwai, an ‘original’ series of seven kingdoms, together with genealogies of some of their ruling houses for the sake of legitimacy—which has long skewed Hausa historiography by concentrating on those named kingdoms and their supposed ‘foundations’, together with the belief in an ultimately external ‘origin’ on the Sahelian/Saharan side or even further afield (e.g. Lange 2008). It has also stoked the idea of a superior ruling caste, sometimes considered separate in origin, if not in race too, from the cultivating subjects. While not necessarily spelled out, that implicit notion7 was from the beginning of the twentieth century broadly consistent, intellectually as well as administratively, with the British imperial mind and the ideology of ‘indirect rule’; and, being thus embedded in the historical mentality, it was not easily discarded by the supposedly ‘enlightened’ scholarship of the Independence period.8 Indeed, the accent of the ‘new’ historiography of the 1960s,

7 For a late and remarkably explicit statement of this line of thinking, see Johnston (1967: 1–2): ‘To understand the origins of the Hausa people it is first necessary to review the history of North Africa’ [from the Roman period onwards], Hausaland being ‘the meeting place of two distinct ethnic and linguistic strains’, namely the ‘indigenous Sudanic’ and the ‘Hamitic’ of northern derivation. In a similar vein—beginning the story with the Roman and Arab empires, before carrying it across the Sahara to survey the empires, kingdoms and states of the Sudan belt, Hausaland included—is Hog- ben (1967). This was the new Nigerian edition of Hogben’s Muhammedan Emirates (1930), following the revision of the latter, with A. H. M. Kirk-Greene: The Emirates of Northern Nigeria (1966). The prestigious forewords to these 1960s revisions lend a significant touch of authority. 8 Notably Abdullahi (H.F.C.) Smith: 1971/1976 (in HWA I). While Smith avoided the term ‘Hamitic’ and specifically distanced himself from the discredited Hamitic hypothesis, his reconstruction of early Hausa history assumed a substantial southward movement from Abzin. Similarly, Mahdi Adamu (1976), with a map (p. 4) showing ‘the historical boundaries of Hausaland’ extending on the Sahelian side to well north 284 john e. g. sutton in Nigeria as across the continent more generally, was on rejecting the colonial image of African backwardness and on demonstrating indigenous achievements and chronological depth instead; thus, those states or kingdoms for which historical outlines were available were now hailed as evidence of sophisticated political systems in the precolonial past. Hausaland—or, more pointedly, the cluster of Hausa states—was especially attractive in this excited intellectual climate of the 1950s to 1970s, since this series of ‘states’ exhibited the twin qualities of scale and documented antiquity.9 But in presentations to students and the public with renewed enthusiasm and appropriate rhetoric, not all of the underlying, even reactionary, assumptions were questioned.10 This external and vaguely northerly focus recalls the old Hamitic hypothesis, which would deny sub-Saharan African peoples any origi- nality or achievement in technology, social organisation or political development, except where initiated from outside. Moreover, the outlook of many colonial-era scholars11 was guided by ethnological concepts current at that time, alongside an administrative zeal for clas-

of Agadez—as indicated also on Urvoy’s map of 1936: 329f. For Murray Last’s considerably modified handling of Smith’s chapter in the third edition ofHWA I (1985), see below. 9 This emphasis on, if not obsession with, ‘states’, at least for presentation purposes, is demonstrated by the chapter and section headings in Ajayi and Crowder, HWA; and more pointedly in Michael Crowder’s succinct Story of Nigeria (1962), esp. ch.II: ‘Sudanese states’, where Hausa history is summarised essentially by reference to known ‘states’. Comparing Crowder’s book with the title and structure of Hogben’s of 1930 (above) illustrates a remarkable degree of continuity of approach, for pedagogic purposes, from the ‘high colonial’ to post-colonial times. 10 For instance, Hogben’s assertion (1930: 106–7) that ‘the ruling classes of Gobir are entirely distinct from the ordinary people’, together with elaborate stories of roots in ancient Arabia and Egypt, is repeated in essence in the 1966 revision (pp. 368–9), although for the Nigerian edition of 1967 (pp. 192–3) the phrasing is considerably toned down. Interestingly, these pages (of the 1930 edition) are translated, virtually verbatim, in Boubou Hama (1967: 9–12). In retrospect, one might argue that, even if the distinction between classes, together with claims of separate origins, could be established and critically evaluated, the ‘ordinary people’, by implication indigenous, were as relevant to the historical development of Hausaland as the ‘ruling classes’. 11 This is not to overlook the meticulous work of collecting important evidence— documentary, oral, linguistic and ethnographic—that might otherwise have been lost: for instance the collections edited by Palmer as Sudanese Memoirs (1928), which include (vol. III) the Kano Chronicle and other documents from Hausaland. Also relevant to the question of a northern connection if not origin, for Gobir in the west if not Hausa generally, are Palmer (1910) and (1916); and Urvoy (1934). In this way historical scholarship of the colonial period was not constrained by the Anglo-French (Nigeria/Niger) border in its search for evidence, although the main interest on the British side was with the principal Hausa kingdoms south of the line. hausa as a process in time and space 285 sifying people by ‘tribe’. Thus historical enquiry was routinely driven by the question of origins, fostering an implication of migrations some time back, if not specifically ofconquest . While antiquarian perceptions of this sort (especially when further provoked by rival claims or access to resources) may be expressed as keenly by subjects as by their rulers, they were, in a colonial situation, apt to be pursued with enhanced enthusiasm by administrators who regarded classification an essential tool.12 For the present argument one should consider the handling of the traditions of Gobir—a kingdom that constituted the principal power of western Hausaland in the late eighteenth century, and which is remembered for its determined, albeit eventually unsuccessful, resistance to the Fulani jihadists in the opening decade of the nineteenth.13 As usually told, the history of Gobir contrasts somewhat with those of the main easterly and central Hausa kingdoms.14 Territorially, Gobir extended further into the Sahel than the others, although its boundaries seem to have been rather fluid (or vaguely defined) over time; in fact, one might wonder whether the eighteenth-century kingdom was appropriating a previously less formal name for the Hausa west and north-west broadly. It insisted, nevertheless, on bakwai authenticity, but also on having remained, uniquely, independent of Borno. These Gobir traditions indicate a migration from Aïr massif (or Abzin) in Tuareg country, far to the north where the Sahel verges into the Sahara proper.15 There is, presumably, some substance to this, suggesting that certain clans in eighteenth-century Gobir, and possibly the ruling family, had been of northerly extraction, having perhaps been attracted by the richer pastures to the south or by the opportunities to exploit the

12 Exemplified by Temple (1919/1922):Notes on the tribes. . . .—an encyclopedic endeavour, arranged alphabetically. More analytical is Meek (1925). 13 See the general works cited above; also Last (1967). 14 This is the Gobir ‘anomaly’ of my previous paper (1979); see below for further discussion. 15 See the chronicles and other documents, translated by Urvoy and Palmer, from Aïr/Abzin, Agadez and Sokoto (cited above). Also influential, if not explicit on migrations, is the brief statement in the early nineteenth-century history-cum-gazetteer Infaq al-Maisur (usually attributed to Sultan Mohammed Bello of Sokoto, but perhaps from the pen of Abd al-Qadir: Last pers. comm.) that Aïr was formerly part of the Sudan or ‘land of the black people’ (Arnett 1922: 9). That might be seen in the political context of the early Sokoto empire (see below), having conquered Gobir yet not wishing to defame its historical traditions and territorial claims. 286 john e. g. sutton agricultural production and commerce of that zone.16 Moreover, from the Tuareg side, there appear to be memories of a former ‘black’ population in Aïr which was squeezed southwards by the Tuareg advance from the Saharan side over several centuries.17 But to expand from that, as some historians have been inclined,18 by imagining a migration of the Gobirawa from that desert-edge region as Hausa (or speaking Hausa) seems hardly warranted. Equally questionable is the further supposition of Aïr and Agadez having been ancient Hausa territory,19 with the implication of Hausa as a whole, the people or the language or both, having derived from that direction. That would require an incredibly swift cultural and economic acclimatisation from the marginal Sahel to the fertile savanna environment. More particularly, the assumption of the Hausa language having evolved in so northerly a clime, distant from anything remotely related to it, and then shifting en bloc to its present zone, places severe strains on any sensible deduc- tion from the language map. While this point will be elaborated below, one cannot cavalierly dismiss the belief in a former ‘black’ (or non-Tuareg) population in Aïr, or of claimed vestiges of that still identifiable there. But there are confusing factors, one being a Songhai presence, especially in Aga- dez and In Gall, attributed to the conquest by Askia Mohammed in 1514/5 (Urvoy 1936: 172; also Bovill 1958: 108). Moreover, a much more ancient population strain from the ‘aquatic’ adaptations of the early Holocene which, arguably, would have been associated with the Nilo-Saharan language family (Sutton 1977), might be traceable; but it is unclear whether its representatives survived around Aïr into recent millennia. Such speculation apart, the supposition of Hausa or, somewhat more plausibly, a Hausa-related people having inhabited Aïr some centuries ago has to assume a lost geographical extension of the

16 For a cautious interpretation of the available traditional evidence, sceptical of the notion of mass migration of Gobir as an old Hausa population once inhabiting Aïr, see Fuglestad (1978: esp. 337)—contra the assumptions of Smith (1971/1976), Mahdi Adamu (1976) and Fisher (1977: 264–5, 293). 17 See Urvoy (1936: 141–2, 153, 243); Nicolaisen (1963: 414–6); F. Nicolas (1950: 42–46); G. Nicolas (1969: esp. 203–6). These various accounts do not, for the most part, cite separate or incremental evidence, but repeat received opinion of pre-Tuareg Aïr and of migration southwards to Gobir. Their attempts at dating the latter event or process are distinctly impressionistic. 18 Notably Hogben, followed by Boubou Hama (see above). 19 E.g. Smith and Mahdi Adamu (cited above); also Urvoy (1936)—especially the map (p. 329) purporting to show the Hausa situation about the seventh century AD, comprising the present territory with extensions to west, east and especially north. hausa as a process in time and space 287

Chadic language-family. The implications of a phenomenon of that order would profoundly affect historical understanding of the whole region, the logic of which has not been seriously faced. Recent advocates of a predominant northerly factor in the emergence of the Hausa identity and people have appreciated that the settlement of what became Hausaland must have involved substantial absorption of preexisting local farming groups, noting moreover, from the evidence of vocabulary borrowing,20 that the latter would have belonged mostly to the ‘Plateau’ branch of the Benue-Congo language family21 (which remains well represented along the southern and south-western side of Hausaland, and not merely on the Jos plateau). That, of course, agrees broadly with the picture of Hausaisation of the savanna belt offered here—except that the direction of the process differs completely. In reconsidering Abdullahi Smith’s treatment of the subject (1970, 1976), one discerns an obvious conflict between his endeavour to keep abreast of innovative trends in historical reconstruction, in particular the message of regional linguistic research, and his reluctance to jettison the old notion of a formative northern factor in Hausa history. Thus he seems to have imagined that the family of languages to which Hausa belongs—labelled Chadic in Greenberg’s continental classification—should have originated in the Sahel, to the west of the vast Bodele-Chad depression. Further, he assumed that a few millennia ago the onset of drier climate forced these early Chadic-speakers southward, that movement being essentially completed more than two-thousand years back. It would have been during that process, so Smith surmised (1976: 178), that a simple divergence opened between Hausa and the rest of the Chadic languages, in this way explaining how Hausa happens to protrude, like an outstretched limb, at the westerly extremity of that family’s overall distribution. Such a reconstruction reveals a misapprehension of linguistic phylogeny, and more particularly of the divisions within the Chadic family. That consists of three or more principal branches and subsequent

20 As explained further in Jaggar (this volume). Note also the potential of place- names, with the likelihood of non-Hausa names having been adopted or adapted into Hausa (Last, this volume), a subject deserving systematic investigation under comparative-linguistic controls. 21 This, broadly, is the line taken by Last in the third edition ofHistory of West Africa, Vol. I (see above). But that still seems to follow Smith in assuming that the Hausa language was brought into Hausaland by a population element of northern derivation. 288 john e. g. sutton divisions within these (mostly scattered southwards and eastwards of Lake Chad).22 Hausa belongs genetically within the most westerly of those divisions, while geographically it lies to the west of all other Chadic tongues. In broad but clear terms that should indicate its emergence from its eastern edge (somewhere in the north-eastern quarter of modern Nigeria), not from the northern, Sahelian, side (in modern Niger) where no trace of Chadic ancestry is evident. Further- more, Hausa as Hausa must be much more recent than Smith was imagining. The supposition that it had ‘basically formed’ millennia ago, and could have remained one undifferentiated language as if fos- silised through so long a period of expansion and varied encounters, would be contrary to experience worldwide. Likewise, palaeo-climatic and environmental data indicating the desiccation of the Sahara and Sahel in the final millennia BC, which Smith (1976: 154–8, 178) used to argue for a southward migration of the ancestral Hausa, are irrelevant in view of the much shorter chronology which linguistic and other considerations require for the existence of the Hausa people.

3. Hausa expansion: a single process or separate phases? from east to west or vice versa?

From the above considerations, environmental and especially comparative-linguistic, it seems that Hausa expanded from early in the second millennium AD through its present savanna zone, presumably from east to west. If anything, a ‘take-off ’ area somewhat south of east might be indicated by the current distribution of western Chadic languages. But any such quest for precision must remain unrealistic owing to the difficulty of establishing the regional language geography and relationships several centuries back, particularly given the late spread of Kanuri westward of Lake Chad. Equally misguided, moreover, would be the concept of a Hausa ‘homeland’, as if an ‘original’ Hausa community existed ready-formed for some unspecified period before its expansion ‘began’. Rather, it would have been as that process got underway that Hausa as recognisably Hausa distinguished itself, as a community, culture and language. And as Hausaisation progressed through the savanna, it would have incorporated, gradually in some

22 Hayward (2000: 77–8); and Blench (2006: 141–62); also Jaggar, this volume, with maps. hausa as a process in time and space 289 areas, perhaps more rapidly in others, local communities with various tongues. Most of those would have belonged, as noted already, in the Plateau division of the Benue-Congo language-family; but on the northern side Tuareg offshoots (speaking Tamasheq) may have been absorbed, and possibly also relics of the Nilo-Saharan family or even separate, unrecorded, Chadic languages. This notion of assimilation of former populations is broadly shared by most recent historians. Geographically, however, the process, if perceived at all clearly, has, in most accounts, been imagined as one intruding into the savanna belt rather than progressing along it. In discarding therefore the old assumption of northern ‘origin’, and pressing the logic of east-west expansion along the savanna as indicated by the language map—notably the configuration of Hausa’s nearest existing relatives—the argument faces, nevertheless, a difficulty at the micro-linguistic level, namely that of dialects within Hausa. Dia- lect formation across most of Hausaland seems, in fact, remarkably undeveloped, one reason for that, plausibly, being the role of the language in regional trade and travel, placing a premium on maintaining a standard form comprehensible from town to town and across intervening landscapes. Indeed, some commentators have described the language as undifferentiated throughout.23 That may be stating the situation just too simply; in particular, Gwandara, spoken in scattered parts of south Zazzau and beyond in the Nigerian ‘middle belt’, has long been recognised as distinct.24 More pertinent to the argument are the dialects of the western end of Hausaland, that is Kebbi/Sokoto and the north-westerly fringe of Gobir and beyond (in Niger). These are usually acknowledged as somewhat distinct from the ‘standard’ Hausa spoken in Kano and the central and eastern districts generally. More than that, there are indications that ‘archaic’ vocabulary elements occur in the west, and that there may have evolved a series of dialects,

23 Such an impression might be gathered from Smith (1970, 1976). More explicit is Mahdi Adamu: ‘Dialects do not exist in the Hausa language’ (1976: 5)—although he may have been understanding the word ‘dialect’ somewhat differently from normal comparative-linguistic usage. This emphasis on the consistency of a single language among the Hausa bakwai as a whole echoes the observations of Muhammad Bello and/or Abd al-Qadir two centuries ago: ‘The language of every part is the same’ (Arnett 1922: 11), and of other commentators up to three centuries earlier again (see Fisher 1977: 684 for editions)—e.g. Çelebi, Anania and Leo Africanus. 24 Normally regarded as a creolisation, Gwandara might perhaps be explained as a southerly offshoot of Hausa rather than a true dialect relevant to the overall historical development of the language: note 2 above, and Phil Jaggar (pers.comm.). 290 john e. g. sutton altogether suggesting greater antiquity of the language on this western side.25 That would suggest that the early crystallisation of Hausa was in the Kebbi-Gobir region and that the expansion—the Hausaisation process—progressed rapidly eastwards from there,26 carrying with it a particular dialect of the language to Katsina, north Zazzau, Kano and beyond. That secondary, eastern dialect would, by the same argument, have boasted standard status, the form of the language used by traders and in the towns, whence, over time, it would have filtered into the countryside of what was becoming central and eastern Hausaland. We are, therefore, confronted with conflicting pointers, the macro- linguistic evidence versus the micro-, the one indicating east-west expansion, the other west-east. If proponents of the latter case are right about the longer development of the language and dialect formation in the west, so distant from all other existing representatives of the Chadic family, one wonders how Hausa managed to emerge in that region in the first place. One possible answer would presuppose a former continuum of related Chadic languages right across what is now Hausaland (or its northerly edge), followed eventually by the extinc- tion of all but one of them; that single survivor would have been Hausa advancing powerfully from the western end in the early or middle part of the second millennium AD and comprehensively assimilating the rest during that process.27 Such a scenario ought to be detectable in word-borrowing, although it can be more difficult to recognise borrowings from closely related languages, especially dead or hypothetical ones, than from unrelated groups (for instance, the adjacent division of the Benue-Congo family). But this whole notion of reverse expansion, let alone the eradication without trace of a whole chain of westerly Chadic languages, looks uncomfortably complicated.28 A variant

25 See Jaggar’s contribution in this volume; also Schuh (1982). I am indebted to Phil Jaggar for further discussion of this point. 26 Note the Kebbi claim recorded in Temple (1922: 405n, 557) ‘that they are the original Haussa-speaking people from whom the other [Hausa] acquired the language’. 27 This would be close to the ingenious solution of two periods of expansion—early (or proto-) Hausa from the east, followed by late (‘standard’) Hausa rebounding from the west—suggested by the late John Lavers, as mentioned by Schuh (1982: 23) and by Jaggar. 28 Certain restricted Chadic languages, distinct from Hausa, exist on and near the eastern edge of present Hausa territory (see the works and maps cited in note 2, above; also Jaggar’s contribution). Moreover, memories and word-lists of certain others, now extinct, were recorded a century ago (Schuh 2001). But these hardly amount to vestiges of a chain which could once have reached the watershed dividing the Lake Chad hausa as a process in time and space 291 explanation might involve a former arc of West Chadic stretching from Lake Chad to the Aïr massif and continuing thence towards the Middle Niger valley or Kebbi basin, all but its westerly extreme being subsequently erased by expansion from the Saharan side of the non- Chadic Kanembu/Kanuri language group into the Lake Chad region, and also of Tamasheq into Aïr and southward still. An obvious attraction of this line—in particular imagining a former Hausa-related, though not specifically Hausa, language in Aïr—would be in offering a solution to the vexed question of the pre-Tuareg population of that massif and the nearby oases, including Agadez; and also perhaps in explaining the prominence of Aïr in the historical traditions of Gobir, as already discussed. But, without the support of any specific linguistic pointers, such a reconstruction seems unduly speculative. One wonders therefore whether the distinctive features of the westerly dialects of Hausa could stand explanation in some other way. Might they be merely local relics of an early phase of Hausa expansion from the east, or peripheral deviants (like Gwandara), which escaped thorough assimilation during a secondary standardising wave of Hausaness? As a compromise speculation, such a two-wave process, in which each wave would have rolled from east to west, might be feasible; but that would require identifying a double dynamic, one for the initial expansion of Hausa language and identity, another for the secondary standardising movement. Clearly, any solution demands a complicated hypothesis! In the face of this stalemate, ancillary arguments which might support either line can be considered. The traditional sources—notably the bakwai legends, with the patriarchal Bayajidda and his offspring, as well as the chronicles of Kano and other sarkinates of the pre-Sokoto period—describe a configuration of early Hausaland strongly weighted to the east. Lists naming the ‘original’ seven kingdoms vary slightly, but it is notable that the whole western half of Hausaland is usually represented by Gobir alone. The kingdoms with cities of size and continuity over several centuries—Kano, Katsina and Zazzau (with Zaria)—all lie eastward of centre (see Map 1.1.). More compellingly,

and River Niger basins, as required by the west-east hypothesis of Hausa expansion. Any investigation of this would require a less direct (and more problematic) approach to reconstructing the regional language situation at different times past (by employ- ing a methodology akin to that pioneered in eastern Africa by Christopher Ehret 2000 etc.). 292 john e. g. sutton the inclusion in the list of places of distinctly lesser significance—Rano (whose location, near Kano, was vaguely known abroad), Daura (a city of honorific seniority) and either Auyo or Garun Gabas (the ‘eastern walls’, being marginally Hausa against the Borno border)—strengthens the easterly bias by suggesting that it was on this side that Hausaness and the Hausa ‘system’ evolved.29 By contrast, western Hausaland— Zamfara, Kebbi, Gobir, Arewa etc.—lacking centres of comparable fame and continuity, would be the region of subsequent extension of that system. That would corroborate the suspicion of Gobir being an impostor which managed, at a late stage, to write itself into the Hausa foundation charter. Against this, advocates of early Hausa evolution in the west can argue that the easterly emphasis of traditional sources results from Bornoan manipulation in the centuries preceding the Fulani conquest. By this view, the Bayajidda and bakwai legends can be explained—for Hausaland as a whole, except of course ‘free-born’ Gobir—as a list of Borno’s tributary territories, notable for being uniform in language and therefore conveniently administered, or exploited, as a consistent region. Furthermore, there is no doubting that Gobir as a name is several centuries old, and that it has for long been associated with the Hausa language. While the region called ‘Kubar’ by Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century (Gibb and Beckingham 1994) cannot incontrovert- ibly be attested as the same, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, at latest, Gobir was clearly known lying to the east of Songhai; it was then that Leo Africanus recorded it, commenting moreover that its language was shared with the other Hausa kingdoms (Epaulard 1956: 16, 472–9). Though Leo’s information on the Sudan belt was derived from Songhai and partly muddled, thus perhaps exaggerating the importance of Gobir in the Hausa west (Fisher 1978), it demonstrates that wider Hausaland already existed as such, being recognised as a series of kingdoms or statelets.

29 This follows the gist of my article of 1979. The north-easterly concentration of places of memory and old walled towns (cf. Darling’s comment, note 5 above) might stand extension to Tsotsebaki and Damagaram, on which see Anne Haour’s account of Kufan Kanawa (2003). Equally the tentacles of the system may have extended southward from the Katsina-Daura region to Kano and Zazzau. A scenario of this sort, so Darling suggests, might indicate the radiation of Hausaness (or a secondary wave of that) from a fairly central core, thus explaining how the periphery, especially in the west, underwent less effective dialectical standardisation. hausa as a process in time and space 293

Searching for further clues which might support the case for west- east expansion, one might consider the Wangara factor in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which, arguably, not only introduced aspects of Islamic learning and observance from the Mali empire (and, slightly later, the Songhai sphere), but also drew the Hausa region into the trade networks of the western Sudan. The normal assumption has been that these Wangarawa extended their operations into a region which was already Hausa, but perhaps they were actually instrumental to the Hausaisation process. A separate westerly factor—for which a clear chronology is lacking— is that of Fulani and cattle-herding. How important were these mobile Fulani, in their eastward spread during the centuries preceding the jihad, in helping develop a successful rural symbiosis with Hausa (or Hausaising) savanna cultivators? Might one speculate about such an interaction of sedentary farmers with transhumant pastoralists, encouraging the development of more intensive food-production, and facilitating at the same time itinerant traders and teachers (‘Wan- garawa’, with the appellation widened to allow for Fulani malams), together with industries and markets, these requiring in turn safe centres under established ruling bodies? If so, a case might be made for an impetus from the western end some five to seven centuries ago, one which would have propelled Hausaness with a late ‘standard’ dialect of the language eastwards to Katsina, Zazzau, Kano and beyond, regions which till then—by this argument—would have been non-Hausa. If Hausaisation in the centre and east really did occur so late, relatively speaking, one might associate the process with political, military and urban developments—those attributed to Korau and successors in Katsina, Rumfa in Kano and Queen Amina at Zaria (whether real persons or not)—as are indicated so strikingly by the fashion for building and enlarging city walls. That might necessitate the relegation of older (albeit inadequately understood) centres—notably Dalla hill in Kano city, Turunku in Zazzau, as well as Kufena outside Zaria itself—to an essentially pre-Hausa phase of the regional history.30 Such a position

30 This section with its rapid survey of opposed speculations draws from the known literature (references above). For summary accounts of Zaria City and Kufena and their complex wall systems, see Sutton (1976b, 1977b). Further west, the deserted walled sites of Kwiambana deserve attention—an unsuccessful southward Hausaising attempt from early Katsina? or a pre/non-Hausa centre (like Turunku, perhaps)? Or would the ruins of old Kebbi (below) be a closer parallel? (see Map 6.1. for the location of some of these sites). 294 john e. g. sutton might indeed accommodate Murray Last’s insights on pre-Hausa rural culture and cults and their absorption in the Hausaisation process. That might still need a little chronological juggling, as well as swing- ing the direction of the incoming factor, from distant Abzin/Aïr at the desert edge to nearby Gobir/Kebbi on Hausa’s western side. In this way the discussion would return with renewed force to the Wangara effect,31 and the fifteenth-century ‘watershed’ in Hausa history, recognised by several scholars.32 But this would invalidate the idea of a long pre-state period of specifically Hausa history.

4. A problem yet unresolved

Speculation along such lines calls for a systematic programme of archaeological research, one to include constructing basic chronologies of the towns, in the first place by dating the stages of enlargement of their encircling walls and other physical features. That could be use- fully accompanied by place-name studies, rural as well as urban. From such an archaeological and toponymic base, one could return to the chronicles and other traditional sources to test how their information, and especially their dating pointers, correlate. The discussion could doubtless benefit, moreover, from deeper anthropological insights. Meanwhile, the case for reasserting the antiquity of western Hausa- land neatly removes the Gobir ‘anomaly’.33 It also offers a new perception of the Kebbi kingdom in the sixteenth century. As a former power in the west, the ruins of Kebbi’s fortified towns, situated only a few miles downriver from (later) Sokoto, continued to impress those who passed by (as traders, malams, cattle-herders or mounted troops). Moreover, its memory inspired the Fulani jihadist leaders at the beginning of the nineteenth century as they not only built and walled Sokoto, but also set about reviving Hausaland as an empire, once more driven

31 Note in particular, Fuglestad (1978) and Lovejoy (1978). 32 Smith (1970, 1976); similarly Hiskett (1965) and Fisher (1977: 294f.). 33 We might follow Last (1985: 208–9) in equating the name ‘Gobir’ roughly with Kebbi, for the period before Kanta, and thus before the connotation of Gobir with more northerly elements arose. That would make Leo’s ‘Guber’ and also Ibn Battuta’s ‘Kubar’ (see above, and Haour and Rossi, this volume) more comprehensible. But in that case, Leo’s ‘Guangara’—assuming the name denoted a geographical area, rather than a conceptual one—might need to be identified further east. hausa as a process in time and space 295 from the west.34 The role of historical consciousness and yearning for revival exhibited by the Sokoto jihad have long been acknowledged, but mainly in the context of Islam (e.g. Willis 1967); equally it might be seen as a regional political revival, in which the west of Hausaland led by a new ruling elite reasserted itself over the established centres of the east and the power of Borno behind them. Any solution will have to respect the regional language distribution and relationships, in particular reconciling Hausa’s geographical position at the extreme end of the widespread Chadic family with the pattern of relatively recent dialect formation within Hausa. If the two sets of information apparently offer quite contradictory messages, that only emphasises the shortcomings of present knowledge. Thus, despite the attractions of the west-east expansion hypothesis, as just outlined, it still must overcome the formidable problem of explaining how a Chadic language happened to be in that westerly region several centuries ago. Whichever hypothesis prevails—west-east or east-west—it will need to account for the thoroughness of Hausaisation within kasar Hausa, among the rural cultivators as well as the towns, a point per- ceptively made forty years ago by Abdullahi Smith. While the southern and south-western edges of Hausa, as mapped, are somewhat irregular, being abutted by numerous other languages, the Hausa area itself contains remarkably few remnant islands of non-Hausa. Smith’s insight highlights the need to identify an effective cultural dynamic. The east-west argument would emphasise agricultural settlement as a process of environmental and economic adaptation to the savanna, in the stride of which towns would have arisen as both markets and seats of authority in symbiosis with the village farming communities. The west-east argument, by contrast, would downplay the ‘grassroots’ element by pointing more directly to trade, markets, towns and the emergence of ruling elites, together with the Wangara wave of Islamic influence, and perhaps an increasing Fulani presence. Demands for rural produce, to help feed the elites and town trading communities,

34 As stated in Infaq al-Maisur (as rendered by Arnett, 1922: 15): “No other kingdom in the past history of these countries ever equalled Kebbi in power. The ruins of their cities surpass any we have ever seen.” For brief descriptions of the deserted fortified enclosures of Surame and Gungu, see Sutton (1976a); also Obayemi (1976), for nearby sites associated in tradition with the warrior-hero Kanta and old Kebbi. For a conspectus of western Hausaland, before as well as after the jihad, see Last (1967: esp. lix ff.). See Map 6.1., this volume, for the location of some of these sites. 296 john e. g. sutton and those employed in plantations and industries (cotton-cloth among others: Candotti, this volume), would have accelerated Hausaisation. However, the language adherence of the vast rural areas of Hausaland seems amazingly complete for such an imagined top-down, urban- driven, process.35 Certain historians may dismiss as irrelevant the question whether particular communities in the past (whether visible archaeologically or documented in chronicles or memory) spoke languages of branch x or branch y of a particular family, or belonged to a completely different language-family again. Nevertheless, languages (and their dialects) remain central—albeit in complex ways—to communities’ identities, cultures and politics. Language history and geography provide an essential tool—indeed the prime one for defining and understanding the emergence of Hausa and Hausaland.

References

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‘Ad, society, 61n Anania (also D’Anania), 10, 145–146, ‘Adawa, 61 192, 194, 289n Abzin, see Air Animism, 17 Accra, 7, 171 Animists, 10, 12, 13n, 15n, 17, 193 Adamawa, Animist practices, 17n, 119, 189 Languages, 47 Animist chieftaincies, 17n Region, 59n, 204 As survey category, 258 Adar (also Ader), Aphrodisiac, 99n Region, 8n, 12, 15n, 17n, 19, 21, 22, Arab, 113–137 Empire, 283n Sarkin Ader, 116, 127 Merchants, 60 Ader Doutchi, region, 129 As an identity, 149n Addu’a, see prayer Arab influence, 179 Administrative officials, 13, 198, 218, Arab world, 231 223 Arewa, region, 12, 237, 292 Afnu (also Afuno), people, 9, 9n, 190, Armour, 191, 230 193 Ashanti, region, 72 Agabba ibn Mohammed al Mobarek, Askia Mohammed, 286 conqueror of Ader, 113, 117, 133, Astrology, 108 133n Asyut, city, 69 Agadez, Atlantic, ocean, 205 Chronicles, 116 Autochthonous groups, 12, 114, 119, City, 116–117, 127, 144, 284n, 285n, 122 286, 291 Auyo, city, 292 Sultan of, 116–118, 122, 127 Awgila, city, 9 Agouloum, village, 113, 120–137 Azna (also Anna, Arna, Asna, Hazna, Agisymba, 67, 67n arne, anne, asne), 5, 15, 15n, 16, 17, AIDS, see HIV-AIDS 19, 21, 60, 63, 118–125, 127–130, Air (also Abzin, Ahir, Aïr, Asben, Ayr), 133–136, 149, 257, 258, 260, 261, 8n, 9–10, 52, 131, 134, 148–149, 191, 267, 273, 274 283, 285–286, 291, 294 Asnan ramu, 122, 123 Ajami, script, 37 Akan, Baba of Karo, 23n Gold trade, 195 Babban Gwani, Mukhtar, 171, 173 States, 191 Bagauda, king, founder of Kano, 82, Al-‘Umari, 190 148–149 Al-Dimashqi, 67, 189 Legend (also Wakar Bagauda), 11, 22, Algeria, 14 149, 190n Al-Idrisi, 9, 189 Bagey, 122, 123, 123n, 124, 125, 127, Aljannu, see spirits 131, 133, 135 Allah, 93, 264 Bageyawa, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131, Al-Maghili, 14 133, 135 Al-Maqrizi, 9, 69n Bahia, 7 Al-Yaqubi, 9n Baikie, William, 11n Amattaza, 135 Baki, see dyed cloth Amina, Queen, 82, 293 Baobab, 55n, 90, 178, 182 Ganuwar Amina, 82 Barebare, 82 300 index

Barogha Basini, founder of Kirfi, 174, Cheledi, town, 180 182 Christ, 88, 264, 270; see also Jesus Barth, Heinrich, 2, 8n, 11, 142n, 155, Christianity, 17, 21, 88, 258–264, 266, 159, 197–198, 200–205, 223 268–273, 275 Bauchi, 165, 166, 170, 172, 179, Cicatrices, see markings 180–183, 204 Citadels, see ribat Bayajidda legend, 2, 11, 12n, 283, 292 Clapperton, Hugh, 10n, 11, 60n, 196, Prince, 291 199, 201, 203, 223 Bedoji, Fulani settlement in Kirki, 177 Cloth, 23, 154, 187, 188 Beans, 130, 174, 239n For military purposes, 191 Beer (giya), 102, 102n, 178 As currency or medium of exchange, Bela Kawu, stream, 170 190–192 Bello, Mohamed or Muhammad, 1n, As sign of status, 20, 221, 223, 242 8n, 10n, 114, 117, 196, 198–201, 285, As store of value, 195 289n Barage (also barge), 203n, 219, Benue River, 165 224–225 Valley, 194, 195 Black (turkedy), 202 Bida, city, 223 Caliphate cloth, 202, 207, 218, 223 Bilad al-Sudan, 67 Cost of dyeing in Sokoto, 200n Birni (pl. Birane), walled city, 11n, 23, Cotton, 189, 191, 193, 223, 296 62, 62n, 69, 74n, 155, 192 Dyed, 190, 193, 202, 222 Birni Gazargamo, 53, 148, 149n, 160, Factory-made, 215, 230 195 For military purposes, 191 Birnin Garafa, 144 From Europe, 193n Birnin Lalle, 69 Kente, 216 Blacksmithing, see iron working Likafani, 194 Bodele-Chad depression, 287 Luxury, 189, 193–194, 198 Bori, 17, 99, 107, 108, 237n, 257, 260, Machine, 221, 223 261, 267, 273 Manufacturing of (also textile Borno, 2n, 14, 53, 61n, 72, 79, 82, 83, production, manufacturing or 114, 148, 149n, 155, 157, 159, 160, industry), 20, 24, 187–189, 190, 176, 190, 190n, 191–196, 205–207, 192–194, 195–201, 203–207, 281, 283, 285, 292, 295 220–223 Bourdieu, Pierre, 86–87 Organisation of tasks in production Brazil, 7, 205 of, 202, 214 Bricks, see tubali Produced and/or dyed in Kano, 198, British Museum, 225, 227 203, 205 Burumburum, 74, 74n Regional preferences in types, 230 Bush, see daji Revealing Christian identity, 267 Byzantines, 61 Rolls of, 198 Saki, 202, 219, 222–224 Cairo, 10 Strips of, 63, 190, 194–196, 202, 219, Camel, 50, 52, 63, 91, 129 221 Cameroon, 35 Symbolic functions of, 187, 207, 213, Carthage, 67 225, 232, 242, 267 Çelebi, Evliya, 9, 9n, 68, 289n Trading of (also textile trade), Cemetery, 101, 171 187–189, 191, 193, 206 Chad, Tsamiya, 203n, 219, 225 Basin, 13, 48, 157, 159, 280 Weaving, 192, 214, 217, 219, 221, 223, Lake, 8, 48, 53, 55n, 67, 67n, 194, 288, 230 290n, 291 White, used for burials (likafani), 194 Republic, 35, 48, 53 White, 98n, 194, 199, 219, 221 Challawa, river, 62n, 72, 74, 77, 77n, Woman’s (zane), 91 81, 82 Yarn for weaving, 198, 222, 225 index 301

Colonialism Abraham, 38n, 97n, 100n, 102n, 106n Colonial occupation, 4, 17, 96, 118, Bargery, 55, 85, 97, 98n, 101n, 102n, 122, 134n, 215 104n Period of colonial rule, 48, 75, Djibalawa, 122 136–137, 180, 257–259, 284n, Dogondoutchi (also Dogon Doutchi), 20, 285 237–239, 241–246, 251–252, 254, 259 Colonial health policies, 62n Dumbi, site, 145 Officers, 74, 134, 221 Dundas, Captain Colin Mackenzie, 223 Ethnic labelling, 77 Dundurusu, first ruler of the Tsotsebaki, Place labelling, 83 149 Colonial writings, 118, 134–135, 221 Dutsen Kirfi,see Kirfi hills Colonial-era scholars, 284 Dye-pits, 173, 176, 180, 183 Army, 118 Politique musulmane, 119n Efik, society, 68n Politique des races, 119n Egga, town, 224 Administrative districts, 120 Egypt, 68, 69n, 72, 284 Colonial encounter, 220 Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, 9 Colonial profit, 221 Egyptian merchants, 69, 76 Colonial obsessions, 60 Es-Sa’di, 2n Colonial image of African Essouk, town, 68 backwardness, 284 Estates, agricultural (gadaye), 196 Colonial abolition of the slave market, Ethiopia, 38, 44 60 Ethnicity, 3–5, 7, 17, 19–20, 113, 119, Conversion 131n, 133–134, 137, 193, 231, 262 To Islam, 10, 13n, 14, 189 Ethnonym, 15n, 22, 60, 68, 119, 129, To Christianity, 21, 261 135–136 Cooley, William Desborough, 1n Evangelical religion, 21, 257–264, Copper, 9, 193 266–270, 272–275 Copts, 69 Coptic merchants, 61 Fabric, see cloth Coptic language, see languages Fallau, 144n, 145, 151 Corruption, 205, 235–236, 252–253 Faskari, town, 182 Cowrie, currency, 11, 130, 190, 195, Fatauci, Hausa long-distance trade, 24, 200n, 201, 204, 205n, 223 192, 193 Fatoma, see landlords Dabo, ruler of Kufan Kanawa, 148 Feltun, Fulani settlement in Kirfi area, Dahomey, colony, 259 177 King of Dahomey, 225 Fez, 10 Daji (or ‘bush’), 15, 18, 62–63, 66, 68, Fezzan, 67, 130, 131 72, 76, 90, 99, 113, 120, 123n Fombina, 59n, 204 Abzinawan daji, 134n Fremantle, Captain John, 221 Dakakari, 77, 81 Fulani, society, 6, 44n, 204, 293, 295 Dalla hill (also Dala hill), 62, 63, 70, 72, Rulers, 2, 217, 231 74, 76, 81–83, 144, 179, 190, 293 Clerics, 14 Damagaram, 79, 83, 292 Jihadists, 281, 285, 294 Dangi, see lineage Empire, 281, 292 Darfur, 195 Settlements, 168, 177 Daura, 47, 78, 107, 292 Ethnic label, 60, 237 Chronicle, 2, 11 Spiritual vernacular, 262 Daura-Katsina area, 281, 292n Language, see languages Demographic and Health Survey of Fulbe, 59n, 83, 114 Niger, 258 Fulfulde, see languages Diaspora, 7, 191 Furnaces, 130, 146, 165–166, 168–170, Dictionaries, Hausa 175, 179–180 302 index

Gaisuwa (gifts to rulers and powerful Hausa, persons), 201 Kasar Hausa/hausa, Hausaland, 7, Ganda Ganga, ruler based at Kufan 10, 14, 16, 19–20, 23, 59–60, 63, Kanawa, 148 66, 68, 74, 113–114, 118, 123n, Ganuwa, site, 148–149, 152, 154 128,130, 137, 141–142, 144–145, Gaoga, 69n 154, 156–157, 165, 172, 175, 180, Garamantes, 67 182, 187, 189–195, 206, 217, 220, Garun Gabas, 292 223, 225, 263, 266, 279–281, Gawalley, 122, 124–125, 128, 130–131, 283–285, 287, 289–292, 294–296 133–135, 137 Etymology of term ‘Hausa’, 5, 46n, 67 Gazargamo, see Birni Gazargamo Hausa bakwai, or seven Hausa states, Gazurawa (also Gazarawa), 61, 122–125, 9, 114, 283, 285, 289, 291–292 127, 129, 131, 133–135, 137 Pre-Hausa, 66, 78, 81, 293, 294 Gbagyi, 77 Proto-Hausa, 18 Ghana, 6, 7, 15, 72, 191, 216, 247 Urban-rural tension in Hausa society, Ghat, 122, 130–131, 133 15, 18–19, 21, 23–24, 63, 82, 85, Gidan Jatau, 64 87, 89, 113–114, 158, 187–189, 192, Giya, see beer 194, 198–199, 204, 207, 257–258, Global Positioning System (GPS), 168 273, 281, 293–294, 296 Gobir (also Gubir, Guber), 9, 10, 14n, Hausaisation process, 6, 18, 19, 21, 15n, 47, 69, 82, 87, 118, 192, 257, 282, 113, 121, 131, 136, 137, 280–282, 284n, 285–286, 289–292, 294 287–288, 290, 293–296 Kubar, 9, 10, 292, 294n Hazna, see Azna Gobirawa, 117, 149 Hebrew, see languages Gold, 22n, 72, 189, 191, 194–195, 200, Henna, 69n 230 Herodotus, 67 Gombe, city, 181 Hijabi (veil), 241, 267 Gongola River, 165, 170, 180 Himyar Kingdom, 61 Gonja, 72, 191, 195 Hip-hop, 20, 235–238, 241–255 Gorondutse, hill, 70 HIV-AIDS, 20, 249–251, 253 Gospels, 109, 270 Holocene, 286 Gowns, see riga Horn of Africa, 44 GPS, see Global Positioning System Hunters, see hunting Granaries, 87, 90, 129, 171, 177 Hunting, 131, 137, 149, 174, 178 Greenberg, Joseph, 6, 10, 14, 16, 35, Hunter-gatherers, 148 40–41, 44, 50, 53, 279n, 287 Groundnuts, 174, 239n Ibn Battuta, 10, 11, 61, 190, 292, 294n Guangara, 10n, 61n, 294n Ibn Sa’id, 9, 66n Gubir, see Gobir Ibrahim Dabo, emir of Kano, 60 Gumel, 72, 75, 80, 83 Iderfan, Tuareg liberated slaves, 131n Gurma (as southern side of river Niger), Igbo, 68n 8n Ighawelan, 131, 133 Gwandara, society, 78 Ilemteyen (also Ilemtin), 130 Language, see languages Illela Gawalley, 124, 131, 133 Gwandu, emirate, 257 Imam, 92, 93, 108, 120, 172 Gwari (also Gwarawa), 15–16, 63, 77 In Gall, 130, 286 Sarkin Gwari, 82 Indo-European, see languages Infaq al-Maisur, 8, 114, 117, 285n, Habasha, 9n, 61, 67–68, 190 295n Habe, people, 60 Inselberg, 19, 70, 125, 142, 144, 145, Hadejia, river and district, 72, 75, 80–81, 182 296n Iron, 145, 173, 193, 279 Hamitic hypothesis, 2, 283n, 284 Working, 19, 129–130, 142, 146, Language, see languages 166, 168, 175–176, 179–180 index 303

Iron ores, 70, 82, 170, 180 Kasar Kano (or Kano area), 17, 22, Iron Age, 179 61–62, 70, 72, 74–79, 81–83, 145, Karfen Turawa, scrap iron, 176 154, 157 Isawaghen, 130 Chronicle, 3, 9n, 11, 13–14, 15n, 61, Iska (also iskoki), see spirits 68n, 70, 82, 114, 123n, 145, 148, Islam, 10–16, 21, 24, 44, 61n, 66–68, 156, 191–192, 194, 284n, 291 85, 87–89, 92n, 93, 100n, 101, 107, Sarkin Kano, 74 109–110, 119, 137, 178–179, 188–189, Kano court, 223 192, 194, 199, 216–127, 221, 228, Variety of Hausa spoken in Kano, 235–237, 241–242, 245–248, 252, 254, 47, 289 257–258, 260–263, 266–267, 269–270, Kano province or district maps, 18, 272–275, 295 74–75 Islamisation, 10, 14, 107 Kanuri, society, 61n, 149, 157, 190–191, Israel, 68n 193, 195, 202, 206 Itesen, 116 Language, see languages Iwellemmedan, society, 118, 122, 127, Kariya Wuro, site, 166 128, 133, 134, 136 Karkara, 15, 18, 62–63, 66 Izala, 241–242 Kashna, see Katsina Izanazzafan, society, 122, 127–128 Katagum, 296n Katsina, 10–11, 47, 60–61, 62n, 63, Jakara, stream, 70, 72, 82 66–67, 72, 74, 76, 77n, 78, 80–82, Jalutawa, 61 142n, 149n, 176, 181–182, 189, Jega, town, 205 205n, 257, 281–282, 290–291, 292n, Jesus, 265, 268, 270–271; see also 293 Christ Kazaure, 72, 74–75, 80 Jewish, 60, 68 Kebbi, 10n, 117, 281–282, 289, 290, 292, Jihad, 2, 7, 16, 72, 74, 77n, 83, 114, 294 116, 166, 172–174, 181, 192, 196, Old Kebbi, 9, 293n, 295n 199, 207, 217, 231, 257, 262, 293, Kebbi Valley or Basin, 144, 291 295 Keita, town, 124–125, 130, 133, 136 Pre-jihad period, 66, 172, 281 Department, 121 Jos, state, 4, 60 Lake, 127 Plateau, 77, 78, 81, 173, 181, 287 Keitawa, 125 Jukun, state, 195 Kel Denneg, 118, 122, 127–128, 134 Julius Maternus, 67n Kel Gress, 116, 118, 127 Kesun Badara, 177 Kaduna, river, 221 Khazars, 61n, 123n Kafin Madaki, monument, 171 Khoisan, phylum, see languages Kafin Maigari, Fulani settlement in Kirfi, Kirarawa, 125 177 Kirfawa (also Giiwo), 165, 166, 174, 175, Kal-bokko, site, 168, 170–172, 178 177, 180–181 Kambari, society, 77, 81 Kirfi, 19, 165–166, 170–182 Kanem, 190 Kisoki, Sarkin Kano, 192 Kanem-Borno, 157, 159, 190, 191 Kitab al-farq, 17 Kanembu, see languages Knife motif as gown decoration, see riga Kankara District, 64 Kola-nuts, 72, 192, 193, 195, 246 Kano Kontagora, town, 77n City, 5, 10–11, 13–14, 15n, 17, 19, Koran, see Qur’an 21–22, 23n, 59–63, 67, 68n, 69, 72, Korau, king of Katsina, 293 74, 76–82, 130, 141–142, 144–146, Kubar, see Gobir 148–149, 154–157, 159–160, 170, Kufan Kanawa, 19, 141–142, 146, 148, 173, 176, 179, 181–182, 190–198, 149, 151–159 200n, 201–207, 220, 226, 232, 257, Kufena, city, 79n, 144–146, 182, 293 281–282, 290–293 Kugha, 9 304 index

Kura, town, 72, 81, 203, 232 Omotic, family, 40, 42–45 District, 79 Romance, family, 46 Kure, name of iska in Bori pantheon, 16 Ron, 48–49 Kutumbawa, 78 Semitic, family, 38, 40, 42–44, 46 Kwararafa, 195 Shira, 47, 296n Kwatarkwashi, 182 Swahili, 69, 82 Teshena, 47, 296 Lagos, 198, 205 Tuareg/Tamasheq, 17n, 18, 42–43, Lander, Richard, 11n 50, 52, 69, 121, 122, 127n, 131, 134, Landeroin, Captain Moise Augustin, 239, 289, 291 11n, 15n, 117–118, 148 Tubu, 67 Landlords (fatoma), 203, 207 Yoruba, 49 Languages, Zarma, 239, 251 Afroasiatic phylum, 35, 38n, 40–50 Zime, 49 Akkadian, 42–43 Leo Africanus, 10, 61n, 62n, 69, 79, 82, Angas, 48, 54 192n, 193–194, 289n, 292 Aramaic, 43, 46 Levant, 46 Auyo, 47, 296n Lifidi, see armour Babylonian (old), see Akkadian Likafani, see cloth Bade, 35 Lineage, 5, 123, 175 Bedde, 296n Lissawan, 116, 122, 124–125, 127–128, Benue-Congo family, 54, 69, 75, 77, 130–131, 133–136 78, 81, 288–290 Loom, 194, 224 Berber, 18, 40, 42, 44, 49–52 Bole-Tangale, 48 Madaoua, 114, 135 Chadic family, 19, 35–37, 38n, 39, Maguji, 15n 39n, 40, 41, 41n, 42, 43, 46–51, Maguzawa, 15–17, 61–63, 67, 78, 80, 85, 53, 54, 55n, 59, 69, 77, 78, 81, 119n, 193 119, 282, 287–290, 290n, 291, 295, Maigana, 182 296n Maleh, site, 144, 154 Coptic, 66–67, 69, 76 Mali, empire, 191, 293 Cushitic, 40, 42–45 Mallam Agale, 116 Egyptian, ancient, 40, 42, 43, 46 Mande, society, 13 Fulani/Fulfulde, 18, 52–53, 239 Language, see languages Guandara, 48, 289, 291 Manga, see languages Hamito-Semitic family, former Maradi, 15n, 16, 21, 74, 87, 257–260, erroneous classification of 262–263, 267, 269–270, 272, 275 Afro-Asiatic, 40, 41n Maradun, 74 Hebrew, 38n, 42, 43, 46 Maranda, 10 Indo-European, phylum, 37, 47 Marandet, 144 Kanembu, 47, 291 Marina (dyers), 176 Kanuri, 9, 14, 18, 35, 37n, 49, 52–53, Markings, scars (facial and abdominal), 66, 69, 75, 79, 83, 288, 291 16, 189, 237 Khoisan, phylum, 40, 47n Mashidi, 122, 124, 125, 127–129, 131, Mande, 49, 53, 75 133, 135 Manga, 83 Massaba, Emir of Bida, 223 Margi, 49 Mastur, king of the Afnu, 9 Nancere, 49 Mawri, 237 Ngizim, 35, 53, 67, 296n Mbau, society, 66, 76 Niger-Kordofanian, phylum, 35, 40, Mecca, 68, 72, 77, 93, 105, 245, 263, 265, 47–49, 52 267 Nilo-Saharan, phylum, 35, 40, 49, 53, Medina, 68n 83, 286, 289 Middle Belt, Nigerian region, 262, 279, Nupe, 49 289 index 305

Middle East, 46, 61, 68 Omotic, see languages Migration, 2, 6, 7, 10, 17, 21, 22, 24, Onions, 90, 93, 174 39, 44, 60, 122, 128, 145, 148–149, Origins, question of origins in Hausa 156–158, 193, 202, 254, 282, 285–286, historiography, 59–60, 282–283, 284n, 288 289 Military activities, 77n, 82, 120, 129, Oumarou, Sultan of Agadez, 116 182, 191–192, 195, 290 War, 2, 7, 9, 116–118, 125, 134, 196, Pagan, paganism, 13, 15n, 16, 67, 85, 228–229, 259, 281 87–88, 93, 94, 96, 101, 108n, 110, 149, Weapons, 182, 219, 229, 236 260–261, 270 Millet, 64, 87, 102n, 130, 131, 148, 174, Palestinians, 68n 190, 239n, 279n Pauwwa, 61, 62n, 66n, 81 Misau, 59 Peignol, lieutenant, 116, 127, 131, 133n Mission Foureau-Lamy, 155 Pentecostalism, 259, 262–264, 268–269, Missionary activities, 17, 257–260, 272 262–263, 271–275 Philistines, 61n Mithra, 88n Phoenicians, 67 Mohammed Nafarko, 148 Pottery (also sherds), 144, 145, 151, 152, Monteil, Parfait-Louis, 7n, 11n, 204 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 168 Moorish iconography, 228 Pottery toys, 215n Mosque, 6, 171–173, 178–179, 228–229, Power-sharing, 12–13 266, 272 Prayer, 13, 86, 87, 93, 96, 104n, 106, Muhammad, Prophet, 103n, 104n 109, 172, 228, 242, 246, 247, 250, 263, Muhammad al Bakiri, Sultan of Agadez, 264, 265, 266, 267; see also specific 116 types of prayer: Addu’a, 109, 264, 266 National Museums Liverpool, 213, 222, Asuba (dawn prayer), 106 225 Call to (adhan), 172 National Museums Scotland, 213, Terms employed for Christian vs. 224–225, 231 Muslim prayer, 266–267 Ngizim, see languages Salla, 86, 87, 93, 106, 263, 264, 266 Ngurnu, town, 192 Pre-Cambrian, 165 Niamey, 151, 244, 259 Proselytism, 7n, 14 Niger, Country, 1, 15, 17, 19–21, 35, 52, 68, Qur’an (also Quran, Koran), 15n, 50, 93, 87, 117, 141–142, 156, 235–240, 106, 108–109, 248 244, 249, 252, 257–263, 268, Qu’ranic teachers and scholars, 88, 274–275, 284, 288–289 92–93, 106, 108, 110, 253 River, 8n, 9, 38, 114, 223, 232, 291 Qu’ranic school, 106 Bend, 67n, 280 Expedition, 227 Radio, 88n, 240, 255, 266 Nigeria, Radiocarbon dating, 145–146, 152, 155, Country, 1, 15–17, 19, 35, 46–47, 179 53, 59–60, 67n, 68n, 72n, 119n, Ramusio, 192–193 156, 165, 174, 176, 179, 182, 215, Rano, 72, 74, 77, 79–80, 182, 292 217–218, 220–222, 230, 237, 259, Rap, 235–236, 238, 244, 248–254 261, 274, 279–281, 283–284, 288 Raudat al-afkar, 117n Niger-Kordofanian, phylum, see Rayuwar Hausawa, 103n languages Red Sea, 44 Nilo-Saharan, phylum, see languages Religion, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12–18, 20–21, Numerology, 108 24–25, 39, 50, 85, 87–88, 92, 94, 98, Nupe, 2n, 199, 201, 202n, 217, 223–226, 102, 107, 110, 119, 142, 144, 165, 215, 230, 232 231, 240–241, 248, 252, 254, 258, 262, Language, see languages 270 306 index

Religious brotherhoods, Islamic, 17 Slave trade, 22, 120, 130–131, 133, Religious radicalisation, 16, 18 135–137, 192–193, 203–204 Resistance to the Sokoto jihad (tawaye), Sloan, Captain L.H.T., 230 16, 66 Smoking pipe, tobacco-, 90, 168, 171, Ribats, 66, 196, 198–199, 204 181 Richardson, James, 11n, 15, 119, 120, Soba, town, 182 155 Soba, Sarkin Gobir, 117n Riga, or robe, 91, 94, 134, 189, 194, Sokoto, caliphate, 6–7, 16, 17n, 20, 166, 199–200, 202, 213, 207, 217, 221–230, 196, 217–218, 222, 285n, 291 232, 242, 246 City, 47, 72, 113, 114, 116, 130, 176, Rinji, slave settlement, 60n, 76 181, 195–201, 205, 227, 285n, 289, Ritual, 16, 82, 87, 124, 178, 187, 245, 294 246, 263, 264, 267, 269, 270 Emirate, 197, 199, 257 Robe, see riga Jihad, 257, 262, 295 Robinson, Charles Henry, 11n River, pre-Sokoto period, 291 Roman, period, 283 Songhai, empire, 2n, 192, 195, 281, 286, Empire, 283 292–293 Influence, 51 Language, see languages Coins, 67 Songhai-Zarma, 18n Romance, see languages Sorghum, 64, 148, 174, 239n, 279n Roulette (pottery-decorating Soro, site, 144 implement), 153, 154, 156, 157, Soron D’inki, ward, 202 158, 159 Sources, historical, 2–3, 8–9, 11–13, 16, Rouch, Jean, 7 18, 22, 68, 114, 116–119, 131, 134, Rumawa, 61 141, 148, 160, 166, 173, 188, 191, Rumbu, see granaries 193n, 232, 280, 282, 291, 191, 194 Rumfa, king of Kano, 293 Spirits, Ruruma, society, 76–77 Aljannu, 109, 178 Iska (also iskoki), 16, 91, 109, 124, Sabo, Ibadan neighbourhood, 7 165, 182 Sacrifice, 10, 13, 16, 92, 109, 124 Staudinger, Paul, 11 Sahara, 18, 44, 47, 61, 129, 190, 194, Stratigraphy, soil, 146, 152 198, 214, 217, 224, 229, 283, 285, 288 Sudan, 10n, 283n, 285n, 292–293 Sahel, 142, 159, 257n, 280, 285–288 Central, 6, 13 Salla, see prayer Western, 8, 13, 189, 194, 195 Sallah procession 220, 229, 232 Emir of Kontagora as ‘Sarkin Sudan’, Samaru (Samaru-West), site, 146, 165, 77 179 Bilad al-Sudan, 67–68 Samodawa, 61 Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), 257–259, Santolo, 13, 70, 72, 81–82, 144 261–262, 267, 271–274 Sao, 160 Sufism, 237, 241–242, 245, 259, 266 Sarauta, 5, 19, 23, 137, 192, 258 Sugar cane (also cane-sugar), 90, 93, 97, Scarifications, see markings 174 Semitic, see languages Surame, site, 281n, 295n Senegal, 44n, 249, 259 Swahili, see languages Sennar, town, 195 Syncretism, religious, 12, 13, 14, 17, Sheikh, or Shaikh, Usman dan Fodio, 18, 21, 24–25, 88, 101, 107–110, 119, see Uthman dan Fodio 121 Shira, see Languages SIM, see Sudan Interior Mission Taboo, 16, 269 Slavery, 5, 9, 13, 22, 60, 66n, 76, 91, 96, Tadmekka, 68 101, 120, 121–122, 127, 128, 148–149, Tahoua, 47, 124 154, 171–172, 191–192, 196–199, Tailors, tailoring, 187, 193, 199, 202, 201–102, 205, 208, 223 215–219, 221, 224–225 index 307

Takedda, 190 Tuyères, 130, 166, 168–170, 175, Takrur, 67 179–180 Takuyeshi, 154 Talakawa, 5, 194, 205 Ulama, 14 Tamasheq, see languages Umar al-Salagawi, 61n Tamaske, town, 124–125, 128, 135, Uthman dan Fodio (also Ousman dan 137 Fodiyo, Uthman Fodio, Usman dan District, 113, 125, 135 Fodio), 16, 60n, 116, 181, 196, 200 Canton, 121, 125, 135 Tanzania, 247n, 248 Vichy (French government during Tarikh al-Sudan, 8n World War II), 259 Tarimawa, 122–125, 135 Taruga, 179 Wacha, 149, 140, 160 Tawantakat, 116 Walls, surrounding settlements, 10, Tawaye, see resistance 19, 63, 72, 82, 142, 144–145, 152, Taxes, 15, 74, 176, 191, 195, 198, 201n, 155–156, 160, 165, 169, 170–173, 204–205 175, 177, 182, 229, 269, 281, Tedzkiret-en-Nisiân, 8n 292–294, 296 Tegidda-n-Tesemt, 130n Wangara, 13–14, 17, 51, 62n, 68–69, Tekkira, site, 166, 168–170, 175, 177, 82, 189, 191, 195, 293–295 179 War, see Military activities Teshena, see languages Warjawa, society 72, 77, 81 Tessaoua, 10n, 257 Wase, town, 173, 181 Textile production, see cloth, Weapons, see military activities manufacturing of Weaving, see cloth Textile trade, see cloth, trading of Wisbech and Fenland Museum, 225 Thamud, 61 Wurno, town, 197, 199 Tirwun, 182 Tlemcen, 14 Yakubu, king of Kano, 14 Tobacco, see smoking pipe Yakubu I, king of Bauchi, 173 Torah, 109 Yankari National Park, 166, 174 Totemism, 16 Yauri, emirate, 4 Tributes, see taxes Yemen, 44, 61n Tripoli, 7, 13, 198, 205 Yobe State, 177 Tsauni, site, 165 Yoruba, society, 2, 68, 217, 225, 260, Tsibiri, 257, 274 261 Tsotsebaki, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152, Language, see languages 292n Tuareg, society, 6, 17, 19, 114, 116–122, Zaghai (also Zaye), 9n, 61–62, 189 124, 127–131, 133–135, 137, 149, 193, Zak Zak, see Zaria 201–202, 229, 237, 262, 285–286, 289, Zamfara, 78, 192, 197, 292 291 Zaria (also Zak Zak, Zazzau), 6n, 10, Language, see languages 13n, 47, 62n, 63, 74n, 76, 78–80, 82, Tubali (mud bricks), 171–172, 178 114, 144–145, 152, 156, 165–166, Tubu, see languages 168n, 169–172, 179–182, 196–197, Tudun Awaki, site, 152 204n, 281–282, 289–291, 292n, 293 Tumbi, 149 Zarma, society, 237 Tunis, 7 Language, see languages Tunisia, 224 Zaure (reception room), 171, 173 Turawa, 14 Zaye, see Zaghai Turkedy, see cloth Zazzau, see Zaria Turunku, old town, 79n, 82, 144–146, Zozobachi, see Tsotsebaki 170, 293 Zungeru, town, 221