Daura and gender in the creation of a Hausa national epic

Abstract

Summary Beginning with the story as it was told in the Sokoto Caliphate in the first half of the nineteenth century we illustrated the narrative's practical political value within the context of the Sokoto's relationships with the newlyconquered Hausa, and also presented it in the form in which it was first transmitted to Europeans. Not until the early decades of the twentieth century would variations of the Daura narrative influenced by the cultural and political relationships between the eastern Hausa kingdom of Kano and the neighbouring Kanuri empire of Bornu come to the attention of Europeans. The texts from eastern Hausa sources also revealed aspects of the Hausa's Islamic cultural literacy. Finally, a unique and highly divergent telling of the narrative, created by a Kano‐educated Islamic scholar in the early years of the twentieth century, shifted the story out of either the equally Islamic Sokoto and Bornu intellectual traditions and reasserted its fundamental relationship to pre‐Islamic Hausa ora...