Lost history · 1793-1864
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Two hundred years ago in Sokoto, a woman wrote poems so that women who could not read could still learn. Then she sent teachers out to carry them village to village.
Nana Asma'u was born in 1793 in Degel, a remote little community in what is now the far north west. Her father was Usman dan Fodio, the scholar who would go on to found the Sokoto Caliphate. She was named after Asma bint Abi Bakr, one of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad.
She was a child when everything around her turned upside down. Between 1804 and 1808 her father's movement fought the wars that built the Caliphate, which became the most powerful Muslim state in West Africa. Asma'u lived through those wars and later wrote about them in a work called Wakar Gewaye, "The Song of Wandering".
Her family took learning very seriously, and they did not keep it for the men. Her father's circle believed that knowledge you did not share was empty, that to learn without teaching was pointless. Asma'u was trained in Qur'anic study, and she kept going: law, theology, mysticism, history and politics. She was fluent in four languages, Arabic, Fulfulde, Hausa and Tamasheq, the language of the Tuareg. She was not the only woman of the family with a voice. Her sisters Maryam and Fatima and her father's wives Aisha and Hawwa'u also played big literary and political roles. But Asma'u became the best known of all of them.
When her half-brother Muhammed Bello became the second ruler of the Caliphate, she became one of his counsellors and worked closely with him. She outlived most of the founding generation, and later rulers kept coming to her for guidance. Because of her name as a scholar, she wrote to people across the region.
More than 60 of her works survive, written over about 40 years, in Arabic, Fulfulde and Hausa. All of them were written in Arabic script. That last detail matters more than it sounds. Writing Hausa and Fulfulde in Arabic letters, a style called Ajami, meant her ideas were not locked inside Arabic, a language only a small educated elite could read. Rural women, people who spoke no Arabic, and communities that had only just become Muslim could all get at what she wrote.
A lot of her poetry is history. There are also elegies for people she lost, laments, and warnings about how leaders ought to behave. But the poems had a working job too. They were built to be remembered. Her poems of guidance became a way of teaching the basic principles of the new state, and women who could not read could learn them by heart and recite them.
That is the clever part. She did not wait for women to become literate before teaching them. She put the lesson into a form they could carry in their heads.
Around 1830 she put it all into a system. She trained a group of women teachers called jajis. They travelled across the Caliphate, teaching women in their own homes. Each jaji then used Asma'u's writings, and those of other Sufi scholars, mostly in the form of recited verse, to train groups of learned women called the yan-taru. The name means "those who come together", the sisterhood.
She gave every jaji a sign of office: a malfa, a hat tied with a red turban. Here is the surprising bit. That hat had been the ceremonial mark of the old Hausa priestesses of Gobir, from before the Caliphate. Asma'u took the symbol and gave it a new meaning, so the women teachers became walking signs of the new order and of Islamic learning, even to people outside women's circles.
The network did more than teach. Its members gave advice on marriage, helped at childbirth, and offered counselling to their communities. It has been called one of the earliest organised networks of women scholars in Africa.
The project started partly as a way of bringing captives from conquered non-Muslim areas into the Muslim community. It grew far beyond that, reaching the poor and people in villages across a huge territory.
She died in 1864. For a long time the outside world barely knew her. Back in 1898 an Algerian scholar, Ismaël Hamet, writing for French readers, complained that Europe's feminist leagues had never heard of her. That changed slowly. Jean Boyd's biography The Caliph's Sister came out in 1989, her collected works were published in 1997, and a book with Beverly Mack, One Woman's Jihad, followed in 2000. In 2019 part of one of her laments appeared in the anthology New Daughters of Africa.
At home she never went away. In northern Nigeria today, women's groups, schools and meeting halls are named after her. In 2019 the Sokoto State governor told the lands ministry to find land for a Nana Asma'u University of Medical Sciences, to be set up by the Sultan's foundation. A woman who sent teachers out on foot two centuries ago now has a university planned in her name.
