Nana Asma’u bint Usman ﵂
The daughter of the shehu, the sister of the caliph, and in her own right the most prolific female alima West Africa has ever produced. Quadrilingual, sixtyfold as an author, and architect of a women’s education system that two hundred years later still walks through northern Nigeria.
Life
She was born in 1793 in Degel, at about 13.03° north latitude and 5.25° east longitude, in the jama’a village where her father Usman dan Fodio ﵀ had by then been preaching, teaching and writing for nearly twenty years. Her mother was Maymuna, one of Usman’s ﵀ wives; her twin brother Hassan would die young. She was named after Asma’u bint Abi Bakr ﵂, the daughter of the first caliph, the woman who at the hijra to Medina brought food to her father and the Prophet ﷺ in the cave of Thawr. The name was no accident. In that house names were chosen with intention.
She grew up among books and voices. Her father, her uncles Abdullahi ﵀ and Muhammad Sambo ﵀, her older brother Muhammad Bello ﵀ — all scholars, all poets, all teachers. In that milieu she was treated as her brothers were treated: Qur’an first, then grammar, then fiqh, then hadith, then poetry. According to tradition she had memorized the Qur’an in full before her ninth birthday. She read Maliki fiqh in the Mukhtasar of Khalil ﵀, she read tafsir, she read tasawwuf in the Qadiri tradition of her father.
When Usman ﵀ left Degel for Gudu on 21 February 1804, she walked along. She was eleven years old. What she saw on that journey — the dust, the fear, the old people falling behind, her father on the camel surrounded by his followers — she would later set down in Wakar Gewaye, “The Path of Wanderings”: a historical poem in Fulfulde about the struggle of the Sokoto state, one of the rare primary sources for the jihad years from the perspective of someone who had been there.
She married around 1807 Gidado dan Laima ﵀, one of Bello’s ﵀ closest confidants and later waziri — chief vizier — of the caliphate. They had children. Gidado ﵀ died before her. After her father’s death in 1817 her brother Bello ﵀ became the second Amīr al-Muʾminīn, and she became more than his sister: she became his secretary, his Arabic-to-Fulfulde translator, his political advisor, his sounding board. Every incoming letter in Arabic was rendered by her into Fulfulde so that Bello’s ﵀ replies struck the right tone; every outgoing letter received her editorial eye. The correspondence of Sokoto with the ulama of Kanem-Bornu, with el-Kanemi ﵀, with scholars in Timbuktu and in Egypt — much of it passed through her hands.
She survived Bello ﵀ (died 1837) by twenty-seven years. In those later decades she continued working under the third caliph, her nephew Aliyu Babba ﵀. She died in 1864 in Sokoto, seventy-one years old. Her grave lies in Sokoto, not far from her father’s.
Faith and culture
Nana Asma’u ﵂ wrote in four languages. Arabic, the lingua franca of the ulama. Fulfulde, the language of her mother and her Torodbe line. Hausa, the language of most of the caliphate’s subjects. Tamasheq, the language of the Tuareg who lived in the Aïr desert north of Sokoto and who formed an important part of her correspondence. Not every text had four versions, but the larger works she deliberately made available in multiple languages, so that they could circulate — in ajami script — to the villages where no Arabic was read.
Her oeuvre comprises more than sixty surviving works. Poetry — qasidas and madīḥ nabawī — forms the largest part. Sunago, Tabban Hakika, Wakar Gewaye, Godaben Gikku, Kitab al-Nasiha, and dozens of shorter risalat on tawhid, on fiqh, on mourning, on the duties of the believer. Wakar Gewaye — in Fulfulde, later also in Hausa ajami — is of the greatest historical importance: she writes the founding history of Sokoto from the perspective of someone who was at Gudu, was at the victory over Gobir, was at the founding of Sokoto. It is the kind of eyewitness testimony that in most jihad traditions is monopolized by male chroniclers. Here it is by a woman.
Her greatest institutional contribution, however, is not a book but a network. Around 1830, in the years when Bello ﵀ was consolidating, she began to build a system that she — and later researchers — called the 'Yan Taru, “The Associates”, “Those Who Come Together”. It worked like this. Women from Sokoto and surrounding cities were trained by her in the basic principles of the faith: tawhid, prayer, fasting, basic fiqh in Maliki form, the life stories of the Prophet ﷺ and of female sahabiyat such as Khadija ﵂, Aisha ﵂, Fatima ﵂ and the early women warriors. These trained women — they were called jajis, from the Hausa word for “leader” — then traveled back to the villages across the caliphate. There they gathered other women, often during the quieter hours of the agricultural calendar, and passed on what they had learned. They taught Islamic basic curriculum and household skills together — feeding, weaving, caring for the sick, spinning — because Nana Asma’u ﵂ understood that the one did not function without the other.
The jajis wore a distinctive hat, a malfa, so their status was recognizable. They were mobile. They traveled. They returned periodically to Sokoto for further training. This was — documentarily attested — the earliest documented women-led religious education system in sub-Saharan Africa. It was not a side project. It was the way the caliphate reached its female population, and Nana Asma’u ﵂ was its architect.
In her own work — see her Yearning for the Prophet (Begore) and her Sunago (an elegy for her deceased sister Fadima) — she speaks of faith as a domestic discipline and at the same time as a public duty. She never separated the two. Women’s knowledge was not a supplement to men’s knowledge; it was the same Qur’an, the same sunna, the same juridical tradition, with attention to the concrete lives in which it was lived.
Legacy
Her collected work was first systematically published between 1989 and 1997 by Jean Boyd and Beverly Mack — The Caliph’s Sister (Boyd, 1989) and The Collected Works of Nana Asma’u (Mack and Boyd, 1997). Before their work she was virtually unknown in the West. Within northern Nigeria and Niger she had never been forgotten. Her qasidas were recited by jajis generation after generation, her pedagogical texts remained in use in Qur’an schools, her Wakar Gewaye was learned by heart by children.
The 'Yan Taru network has lasted to this day. Until the second half of the twentieth century it operated in an adapted form in Sokoto, Kano, Katsina, Zaria and numerous smaller places. Jajis — now sometimes in formal malama roles, sometimes informally — continued to teach women in the villages. After 1999, with the partial reintroduction of shari’a legislation in twelve northern Nigerian states, her legacy was made publicly visible again. Schools were named after her. Her grave in Sokoto became — and remains — a pilgrimage site for female scholars from across West Africa.
But the legacy has also suffered damage. The Boko Haram insurgency, which has devastated northeastern Nigeria since 2009, did not target education by accident, and did not target women’s education by accident. In Borno and adjacent states, madrasas that stood in the 'Yan Taru tradition were destroyed; jajis were killed or driven out; the network that Nana Asma’u ﵂ had built two hundred years earlier was systematically pulled apart in precisely those regions where it sat deepest. That this attack targeted her project is no footnote. It was strategic. A movement that took Boko haram, “western education is forbidden”, as its slogan understood very well that it was precisely Nana Asma’u’s ﵂ system — female ulama, mobile, literate — that embodied the opposite vision. The echo runs through into the twenty-first century, in the form of an as yet unfinished struggle.
For Afro-Caribbean Muslims listening tonight, her existence is indispensable for one reason. When someone claims that Islam excluded women from scholarship, that the West African Islamic tradition was a male affair, that teaching is an import product from Europe, then Nana Asma’u ﵂ is the direct counter-argument. She is not an exception. She is a representation: the most visible point of a tradition in which Fatima al-Fihri ﵂ founded a university in Fez in 859, in which female muhaddithat in Mamluk Cairo carried hadith chains, in which Bangladeshi huffaz and Senegalese murshidat continue the work to this day. Her scholarly work was integral to how the Sokoto Caliphate functioned — not despite her gender, but because the caliphate knew that a state without women’s knowledge is a half state.
On the map
Four places. Degel (13.03°N, 5.25°E) as birthplace, where she lived her first eleven years and completed her first Qur’an memorization. Gudu (12.75°N, 4.50°E) as the destination of the hijra in February 1804, where as an eleven-year-old she experienced a chain step she would later record in Wakar Gewaye. Sokoto (13.06°N, 5.24°E) as her adult home, the place where she wrote the sixty works, organized the 'Yan Taru and lies buried. Wurno (~13.2°N, 5.4°E), the ribat her brother Bello ﵀ founded about fifty kilometers northeast of Sokoto, where she also taught and held fieldwork sessions of her jajis. The four places lie within a radius of seventy kilometers. Within that small triangle a women’s education system was built that rolled out across the entire West African caliphate.
Primary sources: Nana Asma’u ﵂, Wakar Gewaye (Fulfulde); Sunago; Godaben Gikku; Tabban Hakika; Kitab al-Nasiha; Begore (Yearning for the Prophet); collected qasidas. Jean Boyd, The Caliph’s Sister: Nana Asma’u 1793–1864 (Frank Cass, 1989). Beverly Mack and Jean Boyd (eds.), The Collected Works of Nana Asma’u, Daughter of Usman 'dan Fodiyo 1793–1864 (Michigan State University Press, 1997). Muhammad Bello ﵀, Infāq al-Maysūr.
Stage pronunciation: “Nana Asma’u” as NAA-na as-MA-oo; “Gidado dan Laima” as gi-DAA-do dan LAI-ma; “Wakar Gewaye” as WA-kar ge-WAA-yeh; “'Yan Taru” as yan TAA-roo; “jajis” as JAA-jis; “malfa” as MAL-fa; “Fulfulde” as ful-FUL-de; “Tamasheq” as ta-ma-SHEK; “Wurno” as WOOR-no.
Uncertainties:
- Birth year 1793 generally accepted; a single source gives 1792.
- Exact marriage date with Gidado ﵀ uncertain; between 1807 and 1811 is the usual range.
- Oeuvre size “more than sixty”: Boyd/Mack catalogue; some later attributions remain disputed.
- Dating of the start of 'Yan Taru as a formalized network: “around 1830” is reasonable but not firm; it grew organically.
- Coordinates of Wurno are approximate (~13.2°N, 5.4°E) — the modern town exists; the historical ribat location within it has not been precisely established.
- Boko Haram-targeted destruction of 'Yan Taru successor institutions: documented for specific schools in Borno; the scope as network damage varies by source.