Rebellion by romance novel
KANO, NIGERIA Nestled among vegetables, plastic kettles and handdyed fabric in market stalls are the signs of a feminist revolution: Piles of poorly printed books by women that advocate forcefully against conservative Muslim traditions such as child marriage and quick divorce.
They are part of a flourishing literary movement centred in the ancient city of Kano, in northern Nigeria, where dozens of young women are rebelling through romance novels. Hand-written in the Hausa language, the romances now run into thousands of titles. Many rail against a strict interpretation of Islam propagated in Nigeria by the extremist group Boko Haram, which recently posted video showing dozens of the 218 girls militants abducted from a remote school in April 2014.
“We write to educate people, to be popular, to touch others’ lives, to touch on things that are happening in our society,” says author Hadiza Nuhu Gudaji, whose views have gained a recognition unusual for women in her society.
Gudaji’s novellas are so popular that she is invited to give advice on radio talk shows. She describes how she was able to influence the future of a 15-year-old who called in, begging the novelist to persuade her father not to force her into marriage.
“We said: ‘The father of this girl, you are listening to us, you hear what your girl is saying,” Gudaji says. “‘If you force her, maybe the marriage will not end so well, maybe the girl will run away and come to a bad end.’ ”
A few weeks later, the girl called to say thank you, and that she was back in school — a striking example of the kind of power the author wields.
The novellas are derogatorily called “littattafan soyayya,” meaning “love literature,” Kano market literature or, more kindly, modern Hausa literature. Daily readings on about 20 radio stations make them accessible to the illiterate.
“It’s a quiet revolution,” says Ado Ahmed Gidan Dabino, a male novelist, essayist, actor and head of the Kano branch of the Nigerian Writers’ Association. “Nothing hard-hitting, but small, small, and gradually challenging.”
They have become so popular that young girls call in to say they’re learning to read because they want to follow more stories. That is no minor feat in a region that has more children out of school than almost anywhere on Earth.
In northeast Nigeria, the birthplace of Boko Haram, only one in five girls has had any formal education. Parents routinely pull 13and 14-year-olds out of school to get married. Even the name Boko Haram means “Western education is sinful.”
Boko Haram denounces the Western influences that are inextricably entwined with the romance genre — an argument Gudaji firmly rejects. Her 16-year-old son was blinded in one eye and took seven bullets during a 2014 Boko Haram attack on Kano’s Grand Mosque. Boko Haram has also kidnapped girls from the Chibok school and married them off to militants.
“What they are preaching and doing is not in the Qur’an, it’s unIslamic,” she says. “They are not really against education — their problem with the education of girls (masks) their own agenda.”
Although the romance industry caters largely to women, it’s often men who profit. The best-known reader on the radio is a man, journalist Ahmad Isa Koko, who raises his voice an octave to imitate a woman’s.
Book hawker Adamu Said buys 70 novellas at the market one recent day, boasting that he can deliver them via motorbike to villages inaccessible by car. He purchases them for about 130 naira (about 65 cents) and sells them for 200, and has been doing so for 12 years.
“I make a comfortable living,” says the 30-year-old, who makes enough to support his wife and sixyear-old boy.
The Maharazu Bookshop has piles of paperback novels reaching to the ceiling, some gathering dust on the floor. Two teenage girls look at posters of just-published books but are unable to read the titles. They say they just like the pictures.
Owner Suleiman Maharazu is going through a list from a middleaged woman reader who is too shy to be interviewed without the permission of her absent husband. They have titles that translate as The Importance of Love, Big Tragedy, Your Face is Your Passion, The Beauty of a Woman is in Cooking, and The Woman Who Lost Control.
“I don’t read them,” Maharazu says. “I just sell them.”
Only a couple of the Hausa novels have been translated into English. Sin is a Puppy that Follows You Home was translated by Indian publishers and subsequently made into a Bollywood movie. The book is available on amazon.com, which describes it as “an Islamic soap opera complete with polygamous households, virtuous women, scheming harlots and black magic.”
Author Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, a veteran founder of the movement, was herself a child bride twice, after her first husband returned her to her family, and she learned to read and write only as an adult.
The books may sound dramatic, but they often mirror life. In one recent Kano court case, a prosecutor sought the death sentence for a girl forced into marriage at 13 to a 38-year-old man whom she poisoned and killed. A lawyer managed to get the girl freed, but her family rejected her because they had to return the bride price paid for her.