Concubines and Power: five hundred years in a northern Nigerian palace (review)

Heidi Nast has written a book that should change the way we look not only at Kano but also at the history, culture, human geography, and/or social and political evolution of Hausaland more broadly and Africa in general, especially the processes of state formation and Islamization. Trained in geography, Nast has written a book with important new data and significant new interpretations. Her book demonstrates the importance of geographical methods to history, in particular by the way she relates changes in political and economic structure of the state to changes in the structures of both the palace and the town around it.

Nast’s basic theoretical premise is, as she puts it, that ‘in agrarian-based state contexts reproduction moves history’. By looking at the history of the role of concubines in the Kano palace she assembles evidence that concubines were critical to the assessment and collection of grain tax, which she argues did more to support the Kano state in its early days than the slave estates which figured so prominently later and which many historians have projected back into the very early days of the Kano Kingdom. She also argues that royal concubines helped to unite the expansive kingdom by tying their natal place to the centre. Since children of concubines were free, and male children could inherit the throne, concubines had an interest in the perpetuation and expansion of the state – in particular the inclusion of their natal place within the kingdom. Thus the acquisition of concubines was important to the expansion of the Kano Kingdom.

Perhaps Nast’s most surprising assertion, based on her find of an extensive indigo-dyeing field in the concubine quarters of the palace, is that royal concubines monopolized the dyeing of indigo cloth, and that the later production of indigo cloth by men in the nineteenth century was an innovation brought on by the Sokoto jihad and the associated shift to a dynasty of Fulani Islamic scholars. This suggests new directions for the study of the economic and political history of the Sokoto Caliphate, and even the role of indigo-dyeing industries run by such Islamic scholars as the founder of the rebel Ningi state, although that is not mentioned in the book.

It is not just geography that is important to the findings in this book. The author shows a strong familiarity with the Hausa language and its use of concepts in an extended, metaphorical sense. Linguistic skill is not just a tool which can be provided by hiring interpreters; it is necessary to get into the mind of a society, especially one like Hausa where metaphors, wordplay and linguistic skills are so important, and where the sense of humour depends so much on wordplay and puns. Her analysis of the various meanings of ‘to eat’ (ci) in Hausa and its relations to ‘inside’ and ‘stomach’ are useful and elucidating, as well as indispensable to her interpretation of the data.

The book does have a few shortcomings. It is surprising that the author does not recognize that early concubinage in Kano may have been a juridical fiction. Since Islam only allows four wives legally, other wives may have been legally classed as ‘concubines’ without an actual change of status. This appears likely in light of the examples Nast gives of non-Muslim kingdoms, such as Buganda and Dahomey, where the Islamic legal distinction between wives and concubines did not operate. If Nast is correct about the relation between royal women and grain taxation in early Kano, this raises questions about the antiquity of natalist ideology in Africa, and whether the extremes of polygyny often seen immediately preceding colonialism were effects of the slave trade, or part of an earlier culture complex involving female and agricultural fertility.

The claim that grain fertility and human, especially female, sexual fertility were linked...