The City and the Birth of Modern Hausa Fiction

There were many Hausa writers distributed in many cities in northern Nigeria. Cities like

Kano harbours many such authors, each one on his own and not knowing how to tell his

story to the public by having them published. But Kano, being a city of ideas and

opportunities provided a conducive atmosphere for creativity to thrive. Kano is an old

city dating back to over one thousand years, the largest inland port south of the Sahara,

and a major commercial and industrial centre in Nigeria. Its dual-city nature and structure

gives it the capacity to pull populations from far and near. Kano’s dual nature - allowing

traditional and modern cities to co-exist side by side - makes it an active centre of culture,

learning, commerce and what have you.

Kano offers a lot of activities and services to keep the writer and the critic very busy. It is

sufficient as a laboratory and a library as well as a market for the writer to develop and

propagate his ideas and sell his books. It is also a sufficient landscape with all its

highlands and valleys which allow the emergence, growth and cultivation of all kinds of

ideas and criticisms, (Adamu, 1999).

Therefore, the commercial nature of the city and the great potentials this movement

portends, prompted some booksellers to decide to take the risk of becoming the

distributors of these newly produced books. Many radio stations that serialised the books

helped in creating potential reader/buyer population that became a ready market for the

books. The pioneer booksellers in Kano include the following: Jakara City Bookshop

located in the heart of the old city (Jakara) Sauki Bookshop and Garba Mohammed

Bookshop located in Sabon Gari Market (the hub of commerce and writers’ meeting

place), Habibullah Bookshop, Mashi Bookshop and I.N. Bookshop located in Sabon-Titi

in Kano city.

These bookshops, especially those at the Sabon Gari market form the nucleus of the book

trade. They became the centres where booksellers came to buy books and take to their

respective states. Booksellers came to Kano to buy books just like other traders come to

buy other commodities. They became so successful that even books that were published

in other places like Zaria and Sokoto have to be brought to Kano and then taken back to

such places to succeed.

Within few years, the book trade had become a big business and more and more

booksellers from all over the country came to Kano to buy books. The movement created

its own readers even beyond the borders of Nigeria; see Appendix 1 for sample pictures.

Hausa in Diaspora became fans of the books and merchants bought the books to countries

like Benin, Togo, Ghana, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Sudan, Gabon and Central African

Republic. Outside Africa, Hausa in Diaspora in Saudi Arabia also became huge fans. See

Figure 2.

Saham