Telling Stories, Making Histories: Women, Words, and Islam in Nineteenth-Century Hausaland and the Sokoto Caliphate » (1st Edition)

MARY WREN BIVINS is Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Oswego in New York. Much of her expertise stems from her own experiences teaching in Nigeria, Niger, Zaria and Kano, where she has lived over the past 30 years of her life.

Through reconstruction of oral testimony, folk stories and poetry, the true history of Hausa women and their reception of Islam's vision of Muslim in Western Africa have been uncovered. Mary Wren Bivins is the first author to locate and examine the oral texts of the 19th century Hausa women and challenge the written documentation of the Sokoto Caliphate. The personal narratives and folk stories reveal the importance of illiterate, non-elite women to the history of jihad and the assimilation of normative Islam in rural Hausaland. The captivating lives of the Hausa are captured, shedding light on their ordinary existence as wives, mothers, and providers for their family on the eve of European colonial conquest.

"This book fills in crucial gaps in the historiography and historical knowledge of the Sokoto caliphate. Bivin's book makes an important contribution to research in the social history of precolonial Africa, Islamic expansion and the Sokoto caliphate, and African women's history."

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Acknowledgments     ix
Prologue     xi
Women and Stories, Scholars, and Texts: Women's Voices in Nineteenth-Century Hausaland and the Sokoto Caliphate     1
Missions to Hausaland: European Observations, Investigations, and Conversations     17
In Praise of Farming: Women, Food, and Identity in kasar Hausa     49
"A story, a story. Let it come. Let it go." The Narrative Landscapes and Social Spaces of Storytelling     75
"If A Man Does Not Want You." Stories of Marriage and Marital Crisis     97
"Womenfolk Take Heed!" Hausa Wives and the Lessons of Islamic Reform     111
Telling Stories, Making History: Women, Narrative, and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Hausaland     129
Notes     139
Bibliography     167
Index     185