Nana Asma'u

The problem the Yan Taru solved was distance. Learning in the caliphate was concentrated in scholarly households and towns, while most women lived in rural compounds they could not readily leave, and books were scarce, expensive and useless to anyone who could not read. Nana Asma'u composed instructional poetry in Fulfulde and Hausa that could be carried in the head, covering the obligations of prayer and purity, the life of the Prophet, the tenets of the faith and the biographies of exemplary women, and trained older women to travel between settlements teaching it. Those teachers, the Yan Taru or associated ones, were identified by a distinctive headdress that marked their standing and gave them safe passage.

A pupil learned by recitation, memorised what she had been taught, and could pass it on herself, so the network reproduced without any central institution to maintain. It survived the fall of the caliphate in 1903 and the whole colonial period, and Yan Taru groups operate today in northern Nigeria and among Nigerian communities in Europe and North America. As a piece of educational design it is worth attention on its own terms: a syllabus, a teacher corps, a credential and a delivery method, all built out of verse because verse was the only medium that would travel.

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.