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Muhammadu Agigi's Trans-Saharan Saga by Haji Ahmadu Kano: Comments on an Early Hausa Dramatic Text
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
Extract
The material under review comprises two texts of dramatic narratives in Hausa by one “Hajj Ahmed” (henceforth Haji Ahmadu) Kano, who was based in Tunis. The narration was done in 1902, and the story was about the trans-Saharan journey of another Bakano or Kano citizen, from Tripoli to Kano. This traveler was a merchant called Muhammadu Agigi. Haji Ahmadu's narratives were done at the instance of a German scholar and traveler, Rudolf Prietze, who specified the form, which was dialogue, the narration should take. Prietze subsequently had the recorded material annotated, translated, edited and published. Prietze's article appeared under the general title “Wüstenreise des Haussa-Händlers Mohammed Agigi” (“The Journey of the Hausa Trader Muhammadu Agigi Through the Desert”) with the sub-title “Gespräche eines Kaufherrn auf der Reise nach Kano” (“Conversations of a Merchant En Route to Kano”), and was published in two parts (“Von Ghadames nach Rhat [Ghat]” and “Gespräche in Rhat”) in Mittheilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen zu Berlin (1924), 1-36,175-246.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 1991
Footnotes
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This paper was originally prepared (in Hausa) for the Hausa Studies Conference, of the Centre for the Study of Nigerian Languages, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria: September, 1987.
References
Notes
1. I am indebted to the following for their role in my critique of Prietze's work: Gisela Siedensticker-Brickay of the Department of Creative Arts, University of Maiduguri, Nigeria. Despite very short notice, she agreed to translate the annotations from German; Graham Furniss of the Department of African and Asian Languages, SOAS, London, who on request, supplied me with an offprint copy of Prietze's article; and Pilasziewicz, S., whose “Literature in the Hausa Language” in Literatures in African Lanuages, ed. Andrzejewski, B. W.et al. (Cambridge, 1985), 228Google Scholar, set me to investiage the source and form of these earliest of written dramatic literature, in Roman script, in Hausa.
2. See Prietze, Rudolf, “Hausa-Sänger mit Ubersetzung und Erklärung,” Nachrichten von der Königl. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, ph-hist. kl. (1916), 173-230, 552–604.Google Scholar
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4. Ibid., 175.
5. Ibid., 1.
6. Ibid., 175.
7. Presumably referring to Lippert, Julius, “Rabah,” Mitheilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen (III Afrikanische Studien) (1899), 242-56.Google Scholar
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13. Gisela Siedensticker-Brickay (translator's note.)
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