“Go by Appearances at Your Peril”: The Raina Kama Writers' Association in Kano, Nigeria, Carving out a Place for the “Popular” in the Hausa Literary Landscape

Abstract

The 25th anniversary of the publication of Karin Barber’s fertile and provocative overview of the “Popular Arts in Africa” provides an occasion to turn back to the concepts and challenges she set out there and consider how useful they remain after twenty-five years. In discussing the way in which a longestablished cline of the “traditional/popular/elite” had been hitherto deployed, Barber drew attention to the definitional processes at work in cultural production such that producers and consumers claim and contest affinities with other cultural forms. In addition to issues surrounding the social and political position of producers and consumers, processes of production were differentially embedded in commercial or noncommercial relations. There were many other issues raised in that original article but this is the theme that will be pursued further here. This article considers the emergence of a new mode of popular fiction in Hausa in northern Nigeria in the late 1980s and reflects on the consciously selfdefinitional processes that were in play at that time among a group of emerging writers. They placed themselves on the “traditional/popular/elite” spectrum and quite self-consciously situated themselves also along alternative definitional clines, i.e., to what degree they were seen to be aligned with Islam or “Hausa customs.” In one brief experiment, they also sought to distance themselves from both Western and Middle Eastern cultures, as symbolized by the use of Roman and Arabic scripts. The growth and spread of this literature was driven by engagement at the level of subject matter with urban youth and predominantly women’s concerns