Market Forces and Hausa Literature
Previously published in Weekly Trust (Nigeria), March 10-16, 2000 Oh dear! Just when you thought it is all over and laid to rest, someone has to stroke the embers of The Great Soyayya Debate again. It would appear that Garkuwa magazine (January 2000) and its prophets of doom were too early in gleefully mourning the “death” of Hausa novel (and don’t count the over 35 new, non-continuity novels that have been released in Kano alone since January this 2000). I am of course referring to the opinionnaire review of soyayya novels as given by Alhaji Ibrahim Bello, the Area Manager of the Zaria branch of Macmillan Nigeria Publishers Ltd, and Alhaji Ja’afaru D. Mohammed, General Manager of the Northern Nigerian Publishing Company (NNPC), Zaria in New Nigerian Weekly of Saturday February 19, 2000 (“Soyayya Novels Get a Kick in the Face”). Macmillan and NNPC, it should be recalled, make nice bedfellows, so the views were part of the same vacuous, and thus innocuous, continuum. Ordinarily, the vi...