Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger

4. Cinderella Goes to the Sahel

Introduction In this chapter, I provide a discourse analysis of a variant of a popular folktale most commonly known as Marainiya (the orphan girl), which illustrates another area of Habsu Garba’s contribution as a storyteller in radio broadcasting. The story is, in fact, a particular version of the Marainiya subgenre that Habsu selected for narration on the national radio. It is a choice she made precisely because of its counterdiscourse message on women’s agency and acumen; furthermore, it reveals Habsu’s creative appropriation of patriarchal symbols in order to subvert the hegemonic ideology of the time. An important attribute of Hausa oral literature, as of Afro-Islamic and other African oral literatures in general, is improvisation. The tale exists only when it is narrated/performed, and with virtually every new narration it assumes a new life in response to the artist’s interpretation of the new 129 Chapter 4 Cinderella Goes to the Sahel reality. A story changes depending on the time, location, setting, mood, and material conditions within which it is contextualized. I examine first the impact of Islam on a recent narration of “The Story of the Orphan Who Marries the Prince of Masar”—a tale of the “wicked stepmother”popularly known as “Cinderella” in the West. This takes place at a time of increasing Islamic resurgence and of growing participation by women in redefining Islam in Hausa culture of West Africa. Secondly, I show how Islam also has been affected and reconfigured in contact with indigenous African cultural practices and spiritual beliefs, especially as it has been appropriated by women. Elsewhere I have argued that, in general, Hausa women’s voices were marginalized in the precolonial as well as the colonial and postcolonial eras as a result of both local culture and colonial patriarchy. There was, of course, a tiny minority of women of upper- and middle-class households that did manage to make a contribution in public life, especially in the field of Islamic knowledge and literary production (Alidou 2004; Mack 2004). The cultural and political activism and literary works of the daughters of Sheikh Usman Dan Fodiyo, the Islamic founder and leader of Sokoto Caliphate , for example, of which Nana Asma’u’s legacy remains one of the most remarkable, are already well documented (Boyd 1989; Boyd and Mack 1997; Mack and Boyd 2000). In general, however, women were heavily marginalized in formal education and administration, leading to men’s control of economic, cultural, and political power, further exacerbating the exclusion of women in public spheres. In the final analysis, then, traditional (Islamic) colonial and postcolonial educational structures combined to further disempower or marginalize women. In this process, Islamic knowledge—still primarily under the control of men—was continuously deployed to construct an ideology that justi fied the silencing of women, especially in the public sphere. However, the wind of democratization that swept over the continent in the 1990s calling for pluralistic rights of social constituents in Niger Republic—for example, Christians and ethnic minorities—created room for women to seek Islamic knowledge on their own terms, even if still within patriarchal space, as a means of reaching a new understanding of women’s rights within Islam and Islamic societies. Ever since, women have seized the political space of liberalization to expose their own knowledge of Islam, make their contribution to the sociocultural and political reshaping of the nation and to engage in the discourse of defining a “Nigerien” Muslim identity by providing a woman’s perspective (Alidou 1999). This development has become particularly noticeable in the public sphere of both the print and electronic media. 130 Women, Folklore, and Performative Identities Nigerien women’s persistence to inscribe their voices in the public space, as the analysis of the radio storytelling of this version of “The Wicked Stepmother”will show, is a significant indication of their resistance against decades of marginalization by patriarchal forces in the nation that controlled the power of symbolic meaning—whether of a religious, cultural , or political nature—in the nation. Thus, Nigerien women’s revisioning of this ancient tale, with a cross-cultural thematic resonance, demonstrates their willingness to use their knowledge of religion and agency to subvert the oppressive patriarchal elements that silence them in the nation. Furthermore, through their presence in the media and their appropriation of cultural fields of meanings such as religion and folklore, Nigerien women are creatively...