A FEW minutes into Kantin Kwari market, sandwiched between the stalls selling grain and those hawking second-hand shirts, is a little alleyway where girls flock for advice. It is in short supply in Nigeria’s mostly Muslim north, where women are poorly schooled and married off at their fathers’ behest, often as children. Those with wedding woes or family dramas could do worse than consult the littattafan soyayya, or “love literature”, flogged by booksellers there.
Written in Hausa, these romantic novels are the work of mostly female authors, who have been printing their own works in Kano since Nigeria’s publishing industry fell apart in the 1980s. They are not exactly “Fifty Shades of Grey”, the West’s self-published sex sensation of recent times: many are classic Cinderella stories or pious parables about housewifery. But there are also blistering tales of child marriage, polygamy and philandering; subversive stuff for a conservative region.
This is sadly familiar to many of the authors. Balaraba Yakubu, a pioneer of the industry, recounts how she was removed from school to be married at 13. Another...Continue reading
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