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Documenting Hausa Popular Literature
Graham Furniss1
School of Oriental and African Studies
From the earliest period of the production of printed Roman script books in the north of
Nigeria, a primary concern was the economics of book production. The conundrum was how to
break out of the 'chicken and egg situation' whereby it was not possible to 'create' a reading
public unless there were sufficient, affordable, and readable books that a potential reader would
want to read; on the other hand, without an existing commercial market for books, how could
any publisher continue to publish? (East 1943). The main government-funded agency, the
Northern Region Literature Agency (NORLA), that undertook the publication of the
overwhelming majority of Hausa language books in the 1950s (Skinner 1970), was forced to
close when its losses became unsustainable.
In the early 1980s it looked as if a breakthrough was about to occur. A new generation
of young people were benefitting from the introduction of Universal Primary Education (UPE)
in 1976, even if that introduction was less than 100 per cent effective. At the same time, the
economic boom in Nigeria had meant that a large number of publishers had geared up to cash in
on the schoolbook market, forming partnerships between existing or new local publishers and
international conglomerates (Macmillans with the Northern Nigerian Publishing Company
(NNPC); Hodder & Stoughton with HudaHuda Press; OUP with Ibadan University Press;
Longman Nigeria). I remember being told in about 1980 that NNPC had a list of some 75 titles
that they were preparing to publish over the ensuing years. The collapse of the Nigerian
economy in the 1980s put paid to all that. Some publishers continued to publish on a much
reduced scale; some like NNPC, the holders of the backlist which represents the bulk of Hausa
publishing, pretty near stopped publishing at all, and have produced little or nothing new ever
since. The economic measures which sent the Naira plummeting, cut back on Ministry of
Education book purchasing budgets, severely reduced the buying power of public sector salaries,
and brought state education to its knees, effectively kicked any prospect of a take-off in formal
publishing well into touch. Babangida's nominal refusal to accept IMF terms for a financial deal,
and his subsequent introduction of 'SAP' measures to meet their demands, put paid to a lot
1 This paper first appeared in print as Furniss, Graham (2000) 'Documenting Hausa "market" literature', in T. A.
Barringer (ed.) Africa Bibliography 1998, pp. vii-xxxiii, Edinburgh University Press for the International
African Institute My thanks are due to Ibrahim Malumfashi, Brian Larkin, Murray Last, S B Ahmad, Barry |
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