2011
X, 116 pp.
16 colour illustrations, 3 b/w illustrations
Text languages: English, Hausa
Hausa cultural genres have surely undergone many transformations over the course of the centuries. The themes, modes of performance, modes of production, the role of authorship as well as the available technology have all undergone change. It is perhaps the cosmopolitan background of Hausa, the most widely spoken African language in West Africa – not only in northern Nigeria and southern Niger but also in both larger and smaller communities from Sierra Leone to the Sudan –, which has facilitated the development of its traditional cultural forms hand-in-hand with imported technology.
The present work offers descriptions and analyses of recent changes in Hausa cultural genres affected by socio-political and technological developments. The question of survival and transformation of these genres is a key topic in this volume, explicitly discussed or at least implied throughout the work. Another major topic in the present work is the emergence of the new genre of love story (littattafan soyayya) in modern Hausa, in both written and visual media. These love stories originally appeared as novels towards the end of the 1980s, but could soon be found as videos and then DVDs. The first authors of this genre were women, and their male counterparts took up the baton and have continued to write on this theme.
Other genres discussed in this work include folk stories and children’s games, theatre and radio plays, novels, cinema, TV and videos and DVDs. This list is virtually a chronological inventory of these genres and corresponds closely to the direction in which development took place, a development heavily influenced by technology.
Under these links you will find further studies on African media (cultures):
