Emotions in Motion: Sleaze, Salacity, Moral Codes and Hausa Literature
Published previously in (Nigerian) New Nigerian Weekly , Saturday November 6, 1999 What a befitting coda! Just as you thought the Great Soyayya Debate has died down, especially with the departure of Ibrahim Sheme from this newspaper, it is rekindled again by Muhammad Dantala Aliyu in The Write Stuff of 25 September 1999. In the article I was accused of being the enemy within (‘da dan gari akan ci gari’) who holds the door open for the enemies of public morality, i.e. specifically contemporary Hausa writers, to lay to waste our pristine moral landscape. My crime — delightfully accepted — was an unbridled support for Hausa literary expression in whatever form in a crusade to further the cause of Hausa literature and cultural studies; a crusade which, not tainted by the impurity of being a specialist in the area, gives a me a vantage moral edge and cause to fight more convincingly. Being an empiricist, let me state my analytical framework. I can easily measure the impact of alcohol consu...