Concubines and Power: Five Hundred Years in a Northern Nigerian Palace (review)

Geographer Heidi Nast has written a refreshing study of the history of the Kano Palace—a study that challenges much received wisdom about the character of power in the Hausa kingdoms. Historical work on the Hausa-speaking region has long suffered from myopia regarding how gender, reproduction, and the control of grain influenced the history of state-building and the transformation of power over time. An overemphasis upon the period from the nineteenth-century jihad of Usman 'dan Fodio to the present has colored the interpretation of the available sources. Politics has often been treated as a male enterprise, and where women have been treated within that period, the work has had a celebratory quality, emphasizing the roles of exceptional women among the family of jihadist Usman 'dan Fodio. To this overworked terrain, Nast brings a welcome feminist sensibility and an innovative sociospatial analytical approach, which invited her to reflect upon the history of Kano palace occupants who were not from among the elite: the concubines and the eunuchs. She has had the courage to push familiar and not-so-familiar sources to shed light on the rise of the Kano kingdom before the jihad and to trace the sociopolitical landscape of the palace over five hundred years. The result is a book that is thought-provoking, challenging, and at times exhilarating.

Nast argues that large-scale state concubinage enabled the elaboration of a slave-based administrative hierarchy that linked the palace to the kingdom's agrarian base. Concubines literally and figuratively embodied links to the fertility and productive capacity without which the kingdom could not thrive. At a bureaucratic level, they were nodes in a network through which the palace was provisioned with food and the king's capacity to provide for others was made visible. In productive terms, concubines brought different kinds of knowledge to the palace: knowledge about the social structures from which they came, knowledge about the production and distribution of grain (the kingdom's primary source of wealth), and knowledge about techniques of dyeing, weaving, animal-raising (secondary sources of enrichment). Their most important function was reproductive: they produced freeborn offspring for the king, generating an expansive pool of children whose marriages could be used to generate political alliances. Through such alliances, slave lineages could become inextricably bound to royal households, ensuring that slave households would have an abiding interest in sustaining the patronage patterns created through the system of royal concubinage.

Taking a broad comparative frame to contextualize her material, Nast makes it clear that reading state formation exclusively through the lens of the spread of Islam is inadequate. Thus, while she offers numerous comparisons with Funj, she notes consistently interesting parallels with the kingdoms of Dahomey and Buganda, and she goes to great lengths to seek confirmatory data from other Hausa kingdoms. The book strikes an interesting balance, noting the centrality of Islamically derived institutions (such as the inheritance of free status from the father) and exposing traces of un-Islamic practices in the architecture of the Kano palace well after the jihad. The palace was at once a central marker of the Islamicness of the kingdom and a site in which powers derived from concubines were exercised to the benefit of the kingdom.

The book takes the dictum "follow the money" and recasts it literally to follow the pathways of the wealth generated by grain. By attending to the pathways linking the countryside to the palace, the palace to the market, and the unthreshed grain to the cooked and redistributed grain, Nast convincingly argues that concubines were at the heart of the system of taxation and distribution. Central offices existed for them in markets and grain collection sites. As modes of taxation and wealth shifted, they gradually lost centrality within the grain-distribution system and cloth-production network. This book tallies up their losses of power after the jihad with a materiality...