Barka da zuwa (Welcome!)



Assalamu Alaykum!

Welcome to my meanderings on Hausa popular culture (nishadin hululu). The main idea is to share my various ethnographic researches on Hausa popular culture (literature, music, film and occassional art work). I am based in Kano, Nigeria, and have been conducting an ethnographic study of how global media flows impact on Hausa popular culture.

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Paradigmatic Shift in Literary Ignorance – Removal of Ajami from Nigerian Currency Notes

This post is about the removal of what the Nigerian political and economic establishments called "Arabic inscriptions" on the Nigerian currency (the Naira) on 28th Feburary 2007 in new currency notes that removed the ajami (Hausa written in Arabic script) writing that indicated the denomination of the respective currency note and replaced it with Roman alphabet. The full historical overview of how the Arabic "script" came to become part of essentially northern Nigerian Muslim Hausa educational package is given in Manuscript Learnability and Indigenous Knowledge for Development – Hausa Ajami in Historical Context . This is a paper I presented at the International Conference on Preserving Nigeria’s Scholarly and Literary Traditions and Arabic Manuscripts Heritage held on March 7th and 8th, March, 2007 Arewa House Kaduna, Nigeria, organised by Arewa House, Ahmadu Bello University, in collaboration with the U.S. Embassy, Abuja. I rarely bother to visit Nigerian "N...
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Hausa Literature and ICTs in the Decade of the 1990s

Previously published in New Nigerian Weekly , July 3, 1999, pp. 14-15. Introduction The “titanic” debates that punctuated the pages of New Nigerian Weekly (northern Nigeria) newspaper about the merits or demerits of the more or less recently created Hausa soyayya genre of creative writing, I feel, lose sight of many salient and very significant points in the literary development of the Hausa nationality and how it reflects on the uses of the novel among the Hausa, particularly of Northern Nigeria. I intend to argue that the widespread availability of information technology facilities in the decade of the 1990s has provided the bedrock around which the innate creativity of Hausa writers found expression. Without this technology, there would not have been such literary output at such scale. In this regard, I wish to chronicle the development of the technology as it affects Hausa writing in Kano. The supportive Technology for Hausa Literature in Kano Despite the great flood of soyayya wr...
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Book Burning in Nigeria (1) - The Yandoto Experience

This posting and the next to follow deal with an event that was not widely reported in Nigerian newspapers – the first Book Burning in modern Nigerian literary history. In the next posting, I will give full details. In this posting I want to reproduce an academic paper written by Dr. S.A. Albasu of the Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto (UDUS), Nigeria on the first Book Burning in Nigerian literary history – the destruction of the Islamic Scholar community at ‘Yandoto, near Tsafe, in Zamfara, Nigeria, by Jihadist forces led by Muhammad Bello. This is to serve as a pre-quel to the modern Book Burning that took place in Kano, Nigeria, on Thursday 3rd May, 2007. ************************* Islamic learning and intellectualism in Katsina outside the Birni: The Yandoto experience S.A. Albasu Department of History Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto Taken from Tsiga, Ismail Abubakar. and Adamu, Abdalla Uba (eds) 1995. Islam and the History of Learning in Katsina. Abuja, Spectrum; pp. 187-197....
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