Hausa Poems as Sources for Social and Economic History

In his foreword to Neil Skinner's first volume of translations of Frank Edgar's collection of Hausa folk stories, M.G. Smith made the following observations on the historical and sociological value of the collection: “…to students of Hausa culture and history, [Edgar's collection] provides a comprehensive body of diverse materials, much of which being explicitly fictive, is of great ethnographic significance as a projection of Hausa attitudes and practice on to other planes. Together these texts, descriptive and narrative, supply rich first-hand materials on Hausa institutions, inter-ethnic relations and social stratification, supplementing such standard sources as the Kano Chronicle and other Emirate histories, and presenting with insight and economy the characteristic failings, virtues and orientations of Hausa differentiated by rank, sex, age and circumstance. Directly, and in narrative obliquely, the texts also present many insights into Hausa values, beliefs and social orientations. As documents that transmit the flavour of Hausa life and the background of individual experience, they have few rivals.” It seems appropriate to refer to Smith's observations at the start of this examination of three Hausa poems since, in my opinion very similar observations could be made about the materials in several collections of Hausa prose and poetry made by a number of German scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from one of which the three poems discussed in this paper originate.