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FARMERS AND ‘PROSTITUTES’: TWENTIETH-CENTURY PROBLEMS OF FEMALE INHERITANCE IN KANO EMIRATE, NIGERIA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2003

STEVEN PIERCE
STEVEN PIERCE
Affiliation:
Tulane University
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Abstract

This article focuses on the implications of an emir of Kano's decision to forbid women from inheriting houses and farms in 1923 and a successor's reversal of that policy in 1954. The earlier emir justified his policy by claiming that women inheritors were becoming prostitutes and the later one argued that women's re-enfranchisement would ameliorate the poverty of destitute elderly women. Both these events appear to have been radical innovations for their time and reflect continuous anxiety over women living outside of male control and a longer-term attack on women's public role. While the emirs' explanations do not fully comprehend the political logic of their decisions, both the proclamations and the way they were explained illustrate contradictions and ambiguities within Hausa conceptions of gender.

Keywords

NigeriagenderIslaminheritance
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , November 2003 , pp. 463 - 486
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, at the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan, in the Department of History at Columbia University and at the ‘Identity and marginality in West Africa’ Conference at Tulane University. I am grateful for the comments I received on those occasions, and for the readings of Lucine Taminian, Lisa Lindsay, Atieno Odhiambo, David William Cohen, Gracia Clark, Nancy Rose Hunt, Kerry Ward, David Graeber, Al Harrison, Dodie McDow, Maritza Okata, Arvind Rajagopal, Riyad Koya, Susan O'Brien, Leah Hagedorn and the readers and editors of the Journal of African History. My particular thanks to Heidi Nast, my discussant at ASA and a participant in the Tulane conference, and to Anupama Rao, whose critical suggestions have been most helpful. I am also grateful to Lucine Taminian for help with Arabic. Research in Nigeria was supported by an Africa Program Dissertation Fellowship of the Social Science Research Council, a Predoctoral Grant by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, a Dissertation Grant by the Rackham School for Graduate Studies and a COR grant from Tulane University. Archival references prefaced by ‘NAK’ refer to the Nigerian National Archives, Kaduna. Those prefaced by ‘HCB’ refer to the Kano State History and Culture Bureau. ‘DO’ refers to documents stored in the District Office, Ungogo, Ungogo Local Government Area. All interviews cited here were conducted during fieldwork in Ungogo town and Kano city in 1996–7. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.