A Woman of Letters in the Sokoto Caliphate

More than sixty of her works survive, which makes her one of the best documented African women of the nineteenth century by her own hand rather than by report. She wrote in Arabic, Fulfulde, Hausa and Tamachek, and moved between them deliberately according to who was meant to hear. The corpus includes elegies for her father, her brother and other members of the family, historical poems on the jihad and its battles, works of religious instruction, and letters. She was a working adviser as well as a writer: her brother Muhammad Bello consulted her during his rule, and she conducted correspondence on the caliphate's behalf. Her position rested on the household she was born into, and she did not challenge the structure of that household, which is part of why her example was acceptable and therefore effective.

The modern recovery of her work is largely the achievement of Jean Boyd and Beverly Mack, who located manuscripts, established a corpus and published translations from the 1990s onward. Before that she was known in northern Nigeria and almost nowhere else. Reading her is one of the few ways to hear a nineteenth century West African intellectual describe her own society without a European intermediary standing between.