In this article an attempt is made to achieve three separate but complementary tasks. First, to make a contribution to the ethnography of the rural Hausa of northern Nigeria. Although considerable attention has been paid to the historical development of the centralized emirate systems which provide the overarching framework for the organization of Hausa society (see for example Smith: 1960), comparatively little attention has been paid to the lower levels of Hausa political organization especially in the rural areas where 90 percent of the Hausa live. A notable exception to this neglect of the rural Hausa is the outstanding contribution made by Polly Hill (1972 and 1977), who in her introduction (1972: xiv) states her insistence that “rural (Nigerian) Hausaland is … the great under-explored region of West Africa.” Hill, however, concentrates her effort mainly on economic life and the more directly political aspects receive relatively little attention.
Secondly, this article seeks to examine critically the relationship between the political structure existing in the village and the various, seemingly contradictory, ways in which the inhabitants describe it. It shall be suggested that at several critical points the structure is ambivalent and exhibits a variety of tensions which pull it in different directions. It shall be further suggested that the divergent descriptions of the structure given by informants are, in fact, an ideological representation of these (empirical) tensions. As such they are individually partial, both in the sense of being incomplete and in the sense of representing particular configurations of interest.
Thirdly, to suggest some explanations for the tenacity of these traditional institutions and the continuance of the traditional leadership patterns as the major political force in Hausa village life. In doing this it shall be argued that to attempt an explanation in terms of autochthonous village equilibrium dynamics cannot really answer the problem. Rather, it is only by placing this microcosm in the context of the Nigerian political and social systems as a whole that the basic lack of major change can be fully understood.
