Nishad'in Hululu (Hausa Popular Culture)

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...

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...

Published as “Hausa Literature in the 1990s”, New Nigerian Weekly , April 24 and May 1, 1999) Introduction The recent debates that punctuated the pages of this paper about the merits or demerits of the more or less recently created Hausa soyayya genre of creative writing, I feel, loses 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. In this presentation, I intend to take the position of a protagonist of the Hausa literary expression in general, but the soyayya genre in particular, situating my arguments within the analytical framework of at least four uses of the novel in any society. The Hausa ethnic nationality has established themselves as great travelers and scholars spread all over the West African sub-region. Their iterant mercantile capitalism has established the dominance of the Hausa language all over sub-Sahara. And yet despite long tradition of Islamic scholarship, the Hausa ...

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.