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 oral literature. The recent publication history of the narrative demonstrates the process by which European colonial intellectuals acquired pre‐colonial Hausa history and created a standardized account of Daura's story to serve as a metaphor of the Hausa past. Daura was used to back up an understanding of a conquered people in the Sokoto Caliphate, to illustrate the Hamitic hypothesis by historians of the English and French colonial period and, today, in the realm of popular history, to enhance national and transnational identities of Hausa ethnicity.29 Yet, it remains important not to lose sight of the fact that the legend itself belonged to lively, local oral cultures before it was appropriated by emerging political elites. The irony of Dorugu's account, stripped as it is of any reference to either Daura or the Hausa Bakwai, confronts us with the need to examine what the variations of the legend might tell us about class, gender and local knowledge in pre‐colonial Hausaland.30 Imam Imoru, Makada Ibra of Kantché and Sarkin Daura himself, remind us that the legend of Daura is, in the end, an entertaining story, not to be told as one might narrate the course of a specific political event, but as one might tell a story in a specific community. What is crucial to understand is that the community to whom the story would have meaning and would stir feelings of shared identity is itself the product of modern Hausa history and the process of creating an imagined national Hausa community, often through the unique technologies of literacy and the printing press. The legend of Daura seems to have few of the attributes generally attached to epics by specialists in African oral literatures. It was not a poem, nor was it recited by a special caste of traditionalists. While the ‘Song of Bagauda’, an historical poem, gives us some idea of how a legend might have been maintained in an oral literature as the specialized repertoire of a singer, even this mode of transmission is less structured than that which preserved texts of well‐known West African epics, such as those of Son Jara and Zabarkande (Hiskett 1964–5). Texts in the Daura tradition also share an interest in a very prosaic hero and a master metaphor of gender relations and family connections rather than the exploits of an important hero. Only when the narrative is connected to the exploits of a Middle Eastern hero, Abu Yazid, as Bayajidda, is there a hint of the heroic exploits common to West African epics. The essential core of the narrative is the slaying of the snake and the negotiated creation of a new kingdom based on the relationships between three humans, Daura, Bayajidda and the concubine. No wars, no supernatural elements, no heroes of epic proportions replace the human elements of jealousy and childbirth. The narratives are also marked by the absence of poetry, even in living performances of the narrative. Also, in three important texts, all created by Hausa informants (Malam Shaihu, Imam Imoru, and Makada Ibrahim), the Daura episode is attached to much more detailed accounts of historical relevance to the narrators themselves as representatives of unique Hausa communities. When the narrative began to move into the realm of acceptance as a national epic, or at least the national legend of Hausa origins, a rather different process of transmission took place. Variations of the narrative were winnowed down to one text, originally written in Arabic, translated and published in English, French and, finally, Hausa. Found throughout the published French and English colonial sources for Hausa history, the Daura/Bayajidda legend was fully sanctioned as the official Hausa legend of origins by the 1930's and readily available for inclusion into the popular literature of national independence in the 1960's, as Hodgkin (1960) illustrates. From spoken Hausa to written Arabic and English, then back again into Hausa, oral tradition to published text, the making of a Hausa national epic was at hand, served by the levelling technology of the colonial printing press and the democratization of literacy.