Imaginary interview with Nana Asma'u
by Charactorium · Nana Asma'u (1793 — 1864) · Literature · Spirituality · 6 min read
Sokoto, in the heart of the dry season, when the Harmattan wind fills the air with fine dust. In an inner courtyard of the mud-brick residence, seated on a braided mat, a woman in an indigo-embroidered veil sets down a wooden tablet still damp with ink. Nana Asma'u, poet, scholar and daughter of the reformer who transformed West Africa, agrees to speak.
—Do you remember the moment you first took up the pen in a major way?
It was the year 1817, the year of the great void. My father, Usman dan Fodio, whom the community called the guide, had just left this world. I had neither the words of warriors nor those of jurists; I had my tongue, Fulfulde, and grief. So I composed an elegy, a long poem to mourn his passing, first invoking divine grace before naming our loss. I did not write it to lock it in a chest: I entrusted it to voices, to the jaji who carried it from mouth to mouth. I am told that even today, in the northern countryside, women recite it at dusk. A poem, you see, does not die like a man: it only changes throats.
A poem does not die like a man: it only changes throats.
—You must have mourned many losses. How did you bear the loss of your brother Muhammad Bello?
Bello was not only my brother and the sultan of Sokoto. He was the other half of my mind. When a point of theology resisted me, I wrote to him; when a point of law troubled him, he sent for me. In 1837, death took him from me, barely two years after my husband Gidado, the vizier. I did for Bello what I had done for our father: an elegy, because I never knew how to shed my tears except in measured verse. I am sometimes called the living memory of our lineage. It is a heavy burden to be the last to remember the voice of the dead, and to have to lend it to the living so they do not forget.
I never knew how to shed my tears except in measured verse.
—They say your most lasting work is not a poem, but a network of women. Tell us about it.
Around 1820, I looked around me and saw thousands of rural women whom no one instructed, as if faith were a house with no door for them. So I trained educators, the jaji, and sent them from village to village. We called the movement yan taru — 'those who gather'. Each jaji wore a braided straw hat, not for coquetry, but because a woman who teaches must be recognized from afar as one recognizes an authority. I first taught them a poem; then they went and brought it to the women of the countryside. To build an army requires only spears. To build a network of knowledge in villages without roads requires patience — and a hat that is not forgotten.
Faith was a house with no door for them.
—Why entrust instruction to itinerant women rather than to established masters in the cities?
Because established masters will never go and sit in the courtyard of a peasant woman pounding her millet. A scholar from Sokoto can discuss with the ulama of Kano by letter; but what does she know of the woman who has never seen the city? My jaji, on the other hand, walked. They carried a wooden tablet, the alluha, on which verses are inscribed with gallnut ink to learn them, then erased and started over. It is a humble teaching, that of the board that is washed. We did not fill libraries: we filled memories. And a memory, unlike a precious manuscript that a fire can devour, travels on its own legs to the next village.
We did not fill libraries: we filled memories.
—How do you teach women who cannot read the names and virtues of the Prophet's companions?
By making them sing. That is how my Wakar Gewaye was born, the song about the Prophet's companions, composed in Hausa so that rural women could remember it by humming it. A letter fades from an illiterate mind; a melody clings to it like indigo dye clings to cotton. So I set my texts to music, not for entertainment, but as a memory strategy. A woman pounding her grain to the rhythm of a poem learns without even knowing she is studying. I composed more than sixty works in this way, and many were conceived for the throat before they were conceived for the page. Song was my school without walls.
A melody clings to the mind like indigo dye to cotton.
—You composed, they say, in four languages. What difference does language make when transmitting the same faith?
Faith is one, but ears are diverse. I wrote in Arabic, the language of scholars and the Book; in Fulfulde, the language of my Fulani people; in Hausa, that of markets and villages; and I also used the Tamasheq of the desert people. Each language has its audience, its rhythm, its way of making a truth enter a heart. My Bedi'ul Fityan, I wrote in Arabic for young boys and girls, to initiate them together in their duties. For knowledge, you see, has no gender boundary, any more than it has a language boundary. He who teaches only in one language teaches only half the world.
Knowledge has no gender boundary, any more than a language boundary.
—A woman recognized as a scholar, consulted by the sultan: was your status not exceptional?
I was called alima, scholar — in the feminine, which raised many eyebrows. Yet in the house of Usman dan Fodio, a daughter's ignorance would have been a disgrace, not her learning. My brother Bello, when he wrote his chronicle of the caliphate, the Infaku'l Maisuri, cites my role in transmitting knowledge. He consulted me on theology and law, not out of fraternal favor, but because an unresolved question tormented him until I answered it. I see nothing extraordinary in that: our faith commands seeking knowledge, and never specified that the mouth that teaches it should wear a beard. It is men who added that clause; the Book itself did not write it.
Our faith never specified that the mouth that teaches should wear a beard.
—What did you say to those who doubted that a woman could guide the faithful in their practice?
I did not answer them with arguments: I answered them with useful texts. For the faithful of the Qadiriyya order, to which my family has always belonged, I composed poems setting out Sufi doctrine, so that new converts could memorize the basic teachings. A man who receives from me a poem that helps him pray soon stops wondering whether my hand was lawful to write it. Usefulness is the best theological argument. In Sokoto, my manuscripts on local paper, karatas, were kept in the family library alongside those of men. Paper does not distinguish the pen that blackened it; only the ignorant reader cares.
Usefulness is the best theological argument.
—What does a day governed by the Sufi discipline you teach look like?
It begins before dawn. I rise for the fajr prayer, recited in common in the courtyard, when the air is still cool and the mind clear. The morning I give to writing, for a poem is better composed in the silence of dawn. Between the five prayers that mark the day like milestones on a road, I hold my rosary, the subha with ninety-nine beads, telling the names of God. In the evening, after maghrib, the courtyard comes alive with discussion. What I teach the women of the countryside is not primarily a scholarly doctrine: it is to build their day around these five stations, like planting stakes to pitch a tent. Without them, life unravels in the Sahel wind.
The five prayers mark the day like milestones on a road.
—If you dared to imagine being read a century from now, what would you want to remain of you?
That is a question that would make me smile if the idea were not so vain. What would remain? Not my name, I hope — names are garments we shed at death. I would want the yan taru to remain, those women who gather to learn, and that a jaji still walks, somewhere, toward a forgotten village, her alluha tablet under her arm. My father built a caliphate with armies; I built a path of knowledge with poems and straw hats. Empires, I have seen with my own eyes in Sokoto, rise and fall like the wind. But a woman who instructs another lights a lamp that no Harmattan can extinguish. If that remains, then I will have lived usefully.
A woman who instructs another lights a lamp that no Harmattan can extinguish.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Nana Asma'u's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.