Introduction^{Footnote 1}

In 1947, the British colonial government established an Islamic court in the Cameroon Grassfields town of Ndop to serve the region’s growing Muslim community, comprised primarily of Hausa and Fulani. The former began migrating to the region in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, while Fulani had settled in two distinct waves during the colonial period, first after the First World War and again in the late 1940s.^{Footnote 2} British authorities categorized “Hausas” and “Fulanis” as “native foreigners.” Though the defining characteristics of this peculiar category shifted throughout Britain’s mandated rule in Cameroon, by the 1940s colonial officers in the region argued that these groups should not be governed by customary law but by Islamic law. These views had the support of a number of Hausa and Fulani patriarchs, whose calls for the court were grounded in concerns over the control of women, especially married women accused of bigamy or engaging in adulterous liaisons. With the Islamic court’s establishment, the politics of belonging in the Western Grassfields for these roughly 7,000 Muslim “native foreigners” became institutionalized and would converge with gendered contestations over ideal relations among individuals and their families.^{Footnote 3}

Within the first few months of the court’s opening, the Alkali (Islamic judge) complained to the colonial administration that his authority was jeopardized because he was not allowed to “exercise criminal power for at least [two] offences.” These offences were bigamy, defined as “marrying a woman before her divorce has been made absolute,” and contempt of court, or “refusing to obey a lawful order from the Alkali, such as directing a woman to return to her husband with the object of effecting a reconciliation, or refusal to surrender or disclose details of an Estate for probate.” The Alkali even threatened to resign over the matter: “The Alkali pointed out that [bigamy] must be dealt with criminally under Mohammedan Law, and that unless he had powers to enforce his lawful orders, his authority and the dignity of the court would be destroyed. He felt so strongly on this point, that after the first ‘test case’ (when a girl of about 19 flatly refused to obey an Order of Court) he tendered his resignation on the grounds that under such conditions the Court would become a farce.”^{Footnote 4}

Four months later, the colonial government endorsed the level of jurisdiction the Alkali sought. From 25 November 1947 onward, the North-West Alkali’s court could try cases of bigamy as criminal offences, “provided that any sentence imposed shall not exceed six months’ imprisonment with or without hard labour.”^{Footnote 5} Such stipulations would apply to cases of adultery as well. That the colonial government sanctioned the Alkali’s heightened power reflects British officers’ complicity with local Hausa and Fulani patriarchs, as well as their own gender biases that understood the status and roles of women through their dependent relationships to men. Reinforcing marriage as the ideal site of belonging for women was therefore the centerpiece to the Alkali’s moral authority in the Grassfields, and transgressions relating to it, along with contempt of court, were the only criminal offences this civil court could try.^{Footnote 6}

Like many works on gender and colonial legal regimes have demonstrated, colonial categories and the institutions created to maintain them arose from the entanglement of various African, Islamic, and colonial concepts of social order that involved competing quests for belonging in communities and households.^{Footnote 7} As in other locales, this entanglement in the Western Grassfields also involved reducing the significance of women’s roles in making history even as African patriarchs’ desires to control women became a central component in building colonial governance structures.^{Footnote 8} But the Alkali court records themselves reveal much more about Islamic gender relations in mid-century West Africa, in particular those involving Hausa men and women employing various strategies to navigate their dispersed social world.

Litigants made their way to Ndop to mediate a whole host of conflicts. The many cases in which women participated predominantly involved marital concerns or sexual encounters. These disputes highlight the Hausa diaspora’s mixed historical references in the form of competing patriarchies and rationales deployed in social strategies.^{Footnote 9} The records also show the significance of distance and geographic mobility in contesting and negotiating marriage as the ideal form of belonging for women. Lastly, despite the power of Hausa diaspora society’s dominant discourses and institutions, including the Alkali court, individuals did not uniformly share, abide by, or participate in them, in part because its communities were home to people of mixed cultural heritage with varying degrees of allegiance to Islam.

This paper is primarily concerned with the more than twenty Hausa diaspora hamlets within the Western Grassfields region, as well as the spaces separating them as people traveled between places like Nwa, Lassin, Ndop, and Dumbo, in order to establish beneficial relations or to escape unsatisfactory ones. Given that the Alkali court in Ndop was the only location in the Grassfields where disputes among Hausa were officially recorded between 1947 and 1957, its archive allows for an examination of relations beyond one single settlement.^{Footnote 10} It should be noted that the dispersed nature of Grassfields Hausa settlement that contributes to this landscape of travel and conflict emerged from the nature of Grassfields political structures and geography. The hierarchically organized chiefdoms throughout the region meant multiple sites of integration for Hausas. Colonial attempts to influence the process of Hausa settlement also played a significant role, especially in founding entirely new centers of political authority and economic activity like Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s North-West Region.^{Footnote 11}

Gender and the Commercial Diaspora Legacy

Africanists have by and large succeeded in deploying gender as an analytic lens to complicate colonial history. However, Sandra Gunning, Tera Hunter, Michele Mitchell, Judith Byfield, and many others have lamented that using gender as a category of analysis is still “something of a challenge for African diaspora studies,” as diasporic narratives have tended to “[obfuscate] women’s engagement in the heavy work of traveling, building networks, and imagining the diaspora.”^{Footnote 12} This is equally true for Hausa diaspora studies. For nearly a half-century, the story of Hausa mobility and settlement in Africa has typified what scholars have termed a “commercial diaspora.” Generally speaking, such diasporas are described as groups who have asserted their cultural distinctiveness within their host societies in order to maintain trading networks spread across a vast geography.^{Footnote 13} The resulting social cohesion within their ranks enabled their economic success while positioning them as, what Sanjay Subrahmanyam has termed, a separate group of “privileged intermediaries,” a class in between local “patricians and plebians in imagined constructs of social order.”^{Footnote 14} With this framing, the significance of marriage is often understood in terms of alliances between men, as such arrangements could and often did solidify common interests between African states and the commercial sector, strengthen Islamic influence, and foster assimilation of immigrants.^{Footnote 15} More recently, Anne Haour and Benedetta Rossi have suggested that the sources most readily available to historians of Hausa society have been biased “towards issues of manufacture and trade.”^{Footnote 16} As such, the merchant identity is more an external ascription in many locations where Hausa are present as a minority group.^{Footnote 17} Traders and Hausa speakers by birth were not the only people to travel into the diaspora, for countless individuals of diverse origins, occupations, and social statuses became Hausa as they joined them in the diaspora.

Women, though fewer in number than men, were among these migrants, and they traveled into or joined the diaspora as wives, daughters, sisters, slaves, and slave-concubines. Some models would characterize their movement as “associational migration,” which assumes their mobility only occurred because they accompanied “primary” migrants who were male.^{Footnote 18} Though this model may closely align with the isolating experiences of enslaved women, it overlooks free women’s choices in marriage partners and the occurrence of frequent divorce in Hausa history. It also overlooks Hausa women’s roles as traders, food producers, craftswomen, and performers – or women who might have had a desire to see worlds beyond their places of birth. Hausa women’s diasporic movement can also be viewed as an extension of their broader historical experience as “permanent migrants” in virilocal marriage patterns – “creature[s] of change” who link their families to outside kinship groups both near and far.^{Footnote 19}

Changing the lens of analysis from commerce to gender is particularly important within the context of Hausa diaspora movement and settlement within and south of the Benue River Valley, where their communities were called abakwa. This term’s meaning derives from abakwan riga, or abakwariga, literally “novices of the robe or gown,” which refers to descendants of mixed marriages between Hausa men and local, mainly non-Muslim women.^{Footnote 20} According to Mahdi Adamu, Hausa traders, malams (malam = Qur’anic scholar, teacher), and craftsmen first settled in the river valley within the Jukun kingdom, perhaps as early as the fifteenth century. Some of these Hausa migrants married Jukun women and with them established a Hausa community in the kingdom’s capital, Kwararafa. Oral traditions collected among Jukun peoples indicate that it was they, the hosts of the Hausa, that bestowed the name abakwariga onto the children of these marriages, “for though they spoke more Jukun than Hausa, they claimed Hausa descent and constantly wore the riga, Hausa gown, to assert this claim.” So abakwa came to be the Jukun name for the original male Hausa settlers, while abakwariga referred to their descendants – people who came to exhibit “tenacity (…) in claiming descent through the father.”^{Footnote 21} As a mode of social identification and historical commentary, abakwa thus reinforces patrilineal claims to belonging in the diaspora, acknowledges the roles of non-Hausa women in ramifying networks, and situates unions between men and women as a central component in diaspora narratives – even as it erases the participation of women who were Hausa by birth.

Through the diaspora’s ramification, patrilineality became a determining factor in delineating membership within Hausa diaspora society, a lived structure and a historical narrative that privileges male experiences, like long-distance trade, that have largely not been accessible to women. Such gender bias embedded in abakwa in part mirrors what some scholars have considered the androcentrism of the term “diaspora” itself. Stefan Helmreich has argued: “Diaspora, in its traditional sense (...) refers us to a system of kinship reckoned through men and suggests the questions of legitimacy in paternity that patriarchy generates.”^{Footnote 22} This dynamic is particularly noteworthy considering that abakwa’s privileging of male social participation in the diaspora through patrilineal descent contradicts Hausa practices that had historically combined matrilateral, patrilateral, and bilateral kinship affiliation.^{Footnote 23} Through the diaspora’s ramification patrilineality itself became reinforced and worked to ensure localized male dominance along the way. In acknowledging the mixed historical references and modes of cultural syncretism, abakwa ties an unstable, heterogeneous mode of identifying with Hausaness in the diaspora together with demands for a stable, fixed Hausaness that is grounded in the essential sex difference embedded in patrilineality.^{Footnote 24}

Within this context, Hausa policed and negotiated ideal forms of gender relations and competing spheres of patriarchy, but just how these dynamics played out in the Cameroon Grassfields has only become clearer through examining the region’s Alkali court records. Similarly, in her work on gender and legal discourses in Muslim Swahili communities, Susan Hirsch noted that Islamic law and Swahili cultural norms construct the “legal and social positions” of married men and women. Law produces a particular institutional discourse that shapes people’s social lives. However, it is through disputes in Islamic courts that “gender is made, remade, and transformed in fundamental ways,” as people negotiate “through and against gendered subject positions.” Litigants in court cases could often transform others’ “assumptions about their status,” producing a context in which dominant gender relations are reproduced but also undermined.^{Footnote 25}

This is comparable to the ways Islamic law shaped, but was also challenged by, the broader Islamic community in the Grassfields. For Hausa specifically, they navigated this terrain through the element of distance, which separated diaspora settlements both from Hausaland and from each other within the Grassfields. The present analysis demonstrates that conflicts involving relations among men and women arose from gendered power asymmetries that often required recalibration through distance.^{Footnote 26} Indeed, how did gender inequality, together with the essential diaspora factors of distance and travel, influence marital relations or the necessity of marriage as a form of belonging? This question places at the center of analysis the negotiated ties that bind men’s experiences together with the lives of women, thereby examining the multiple relationships that made the diaspora possible. Hausa diaspora mobility and the establishment of multiple settlements were therefore not solely part of the architecture of managing expanding markets and commercial networks forged among men, but also involved gendered, interrelated, and simultaneous processes of separation and connection – both physical and social.

Proximity, Distance, and the Challenge of Household Patriarchy

Throughout much of the Hausa world the adulthood norm of marriage has been the primary way female sexual desire and reproductive power could be controlled and male authority signified. Among Grassfields Hausa communities under British rule, these dynamics translated into legitimating the authority of the Alkali in the colonial hierarchy of power. Given the patrilineal logic of abakwa, marriage among Grassfields Hausa arguably took on added meaning and reinforced its significance as a site of belonging for women, especially those women who were not Hausa by birth or women who traveled to Hausa settlements in the Grassfields from other locations. Whereas men forged different kinds of relationships through which to gain social capital – patron-client relations, friendship, or religious conversion, for example – Hausa or Hausa-ized women had fewer avenues. These considerations run the risk of reinforcing male perceptions of female honor and belonging in Hausa society. But in the writing of Nana Asma’u, the poet, scholar, and daughter of Usuman dan Fodio, there is evidence that elite Fulani and Hausa women “set a high value on a respectable married life in accordance with the norms of their society. In particular, they valued fertility, modesty, piety, neighborliness, an active contribution to household economy, and the care of children.”^{Footnote 27}

Islamic sexual ethics have also heavily influenced the cultural import and role of marriage among Hausa over the course of the last two centuries. Whereas most modern Muslim authors and Hausa alike amplify the significance of women’s domestic and maternal roles within marriage, legal and religious scholar Kecia Ali notes that “premodern Muslim legal writings presented a model of spousal relations in which parental relations were peripheral and children were secondary. (...) Although in the practice of the courts other family duties might get a hearing, in the jurists’ treatises, a wife’s main duties to her husband were to obey him and be sexually available. In exchange, he fed, clothed, and housed her.”^{Footnote 28} This pattern is reflected in the Grassfields Alkali court records in which no court cases dealt with women shirking their duties as mothers or caretakers. To the contrary, the vast majority of recorded conflicts involving men and women dealt with marital issues, namely divorce, bigamy, and adultery.

Given the significance of marriage in establishing one’s local identity in the diaspora, it is no surprise why so many cases involved men and women arguing over it as a form of relation. As socially obligatory as marriage was, it was still an unstable site of belonging. In many ways, the founding of the Alkali’s court institutionalized that instability.^{Footnote 29} Marriage’s social significance and unevenness combined with multiple patriarchies and distances separating diaspora settlements to produce contexts that could jeopardize a woman’s search for belonging in one location but empower another woman somewhere else. Court records also show that husbands, wives, and lovers were not the only people who navigated these factors. Parents, siblings, and community patriarchs also intervened to manage marital relations on behalf of their kin, neighbors, and sometimes themselves.

Many men took advantage of both married and single women who were made differentially vulnerable due to distances separating them from consanguine relations, their mobility between Hausa settlements, and ambiguities that sometimes glossed over distinctions between marriage and female enslavement. In one such case, the court’s first Alkali, Malam Ahmadu Yola, tried to mediate a dispute involving a woman named Shatu, her daughter, and three men from Lassin: the defendant, Musa, his brother, and the Sarkin Hausawa (Hausa chief) of Lassin. According to Shatu, who resided roughly 65 kilometers south of Lassin in Ndop, her daughter “was stolen by the certain man about 7 years ago. After 3 years I heard she was at Lasin [sic] and she married the [defendant].” At that point, Shatu said she sent a message to Musa to request that he let her daughter travel back to Ndop to visit her. Musa refused, apparently harboring no sense of obligation to his wife or mother-in-law. He explained his rationale straightforwardly and unapologetically: “I will [not] send her to her mother because I bought with [sic] my money.” Since a purchase marked the tie between himself and Shatu’s daughter, Musa believed her natal kin had lost all claims on her and that his control over the young woman was paramount. Even when the Alkali ordered him to let the woman leave Lassin, he remained obstinate. On the grounds that Musa stood in contempt of court, the Alkali sentenced him to the prison yard. The court then sent an emissary to Lassin to retrieve Shatu’s daughter, but “the older brother of Musa (...) prevent her and said no body can took [sic] this girl, they have bought the girl with their money. He and [Sarkin] Hausawa Lasin they began to contempt the court.”^{Footnote 30}

In the year following the above case, the daughter of Mbem’s Sarkin Bambadawa found herself in a similar predicament as the young woman in Lassin. Her father had married her off to Ibrahim, a male slave belonging to a Mallam Tukur, also of Mbem. In return, the sarki received a dowry worth six pounds, which the malam paid on his slave’s behalf. But the woman loathed her marriage and ran home to her father, who responded by taking his daughter back to the husband. But after a month, she ran away again, explaining in her own words: “The thing that prevent me from sitting at the [defendant’s] house because the [defendant] have said that he bought me I became his conqubine [sic], and I told the [defendant] to pay back £6 dowry which my father paid to the [defendant’s] master Mallam Tukur (...) I no like the [defendant] at all.”^{Footnote 31} This time, the father could no longer refuse his daughter’s wishes and asked that the dowry be returned, hoping to end this ill-fated union.

For the daughters involved in these disputes, their parents’ ability and willingness to act on their behalf had a profound impact on the state of their marriages and the treatment they could expect from their husbands. The relative proximity of the young women’s consanguine relations within the diaspora afforded both of them some measure of protection when the intentions of their husbands overlapped too significantly with those of slave ownership. But in other respects, the 65 kilometers that separated Shatu from her daughter in Lassin had a dualistic effect: the distance was long enough for Musa and his brother to keep the girl separated from her mother, but short enough for Shatu to make claims on behalf of her daughter’s freedom. According to Kecia Ali, Muslim parents had reason to worry about their daughter’s treatment and status once married off. When the early jurists of Islamic law compared marriage with slavery, they did not equate them but expressed “a cautionary sentiment: fathers should be careful about whom they marry their daughters off to, because their daughters will be like captives or slaves to their husbands. Husbands are exhorted to treat their wives kindly, with the vulnerability of the wives expressed in the notion that they are like slaves. This vulnerability is assumed even when the treatment due to a wife and to a slave is sharply distinguished.”^{Footnote 32}

The role of the Alkali court as both an enforcer of Islamic law and arm of the colonial government cannot be overestimated here. Shatu did not have the means or enough power to pressure Musa into treating her daughter fairly, a struggle that endured for seven years. But just months after the Alkali opened his doors in 1947, Shatu took the opportunity to speak for her family. In securing a long overdue reunion with her daughter, Shatu also managed to publically strip Musa and his brother of their domestic patriarchal privileges. Likewise, Sarkin Bambadawa attempted to use the Alkali court to back his authority as a father who supported his daughter’s desire to leave a marriage in which her status was insecure.

Whereas Shatu and Sarkin Bambadawa realized this predicament after their daughters had left their care, Alhaji Umaru of Bamali and his wife feared such a fate would befall their daughter Asmatu if they accepted only a small bridewealth payment for her marriage, an arrangement that was not of their doing. It was Asmatu’s older brother, Alhaji Mohammadu, who in 1955 persuaded his parents to marry her off to Malam Muhammadu Limam in Jakiri. Alhaji Mohammadu was so adamant in his request that he threatened to leave his parents forever if the father refused to support the marriage. The precise reasons behind the brother’s motivations are unknown, but he likely desired some kind of connection to the limam (imam). The parents were worried, however, and did not want to “give the girl out for dash.” Were they to do so, it might give the limam license to “look low on her.” Finally, Alhaji Umaru capitulated and accepted twenty pounds as bridewealth. Then Asmatu left her family to live in seclusion (auren kulle) with the limam in Jakiri. Like Sarkin Bambadawa’s daughter, Asmatu detested her marriage, which she viewed as “a forceful one.” But she endured it for six years.

Asmatu was the limam’s only wife. But according to her, he kept “many girl friends outside his compound and who always came to fight [her].” One of these women had been married to a malam, a friend and neighbor of the limam. The friendship between the malam and Asmatu’s husband had been a close one, so much so that the malam asked his friend to care for his family after his death. After he died, the limam began a sexual relationship with the widow. He then started to purchase items in pairs: one for his wife and one for his mistress. When Asmatu confronted the limam and asked him to end his relationship with the widow, he retaliated by abusing her.

Adding insult to injury, the limam’s sexual relations extended to “stranger” women as well, including one who stayed in their compound as a guest. The woman had traveled to Jakiri to look for her brother. One evening when Asmatu encountered her husband in the compound, he told her he was on his way to the mosque. But when he left his wife he headed not for the mosque but for Asmatu’s room where the “stranger female” was staying. Later when Asmatu returned to her room, she found her husband “intercourcing [sic]” with the woman. In a start, the limam ran out of the compound toward the mosque with Asmatu grabbing at his robe. Asmatu decided to follow him and waited for him outside. Upon seeing her when exiting the mosque, the limam demanded to know why she “was out at such a time.” In response, Asmatu told the court, “I approached him with anger, seized his [torch] and break it on the ground.”^{Footnote 33} In so doing, an exasperated Asmatu succeeded in transforming a household affair into a public one.^{Footnote 34}

From Asmatu’s perspective, the limam’s relations with the widow and the “stranger female” were more than disrespectful – they were abusive. Asmatu believed that the limam’s sexual promiscuity was a direct assault on her standing as his wife. But the widow and the “stranger female” may have also had their own motivations for linking themselves to the limam. The widow received some measure of local protection and material support from the limam. This support may have been essential depending on the number of children she had, whether the malam had left her a livable inheritance, the amount of income she earned on her own, and whether she had any natal kin nearby to turn to upon the end of her marriage. Moreover, becoming a mistress or engaging in prostitution or courtesanship (karuwanci) had historically been acceptable forms of courtship and income generation for previously married women (zawarawa) in mid-century Hausa social worlds, even if some people in the community, like Asmatu, did not approve of it.

The situation of the “stranger female” is less clear, as is the nature of her relationship with the limam. As the stories below will also illustrate, it was common for traveling Hausa women to stay in the compounds of local community leaders, such as wealthy patrons or Hausa chiefs. The question remains, however, whether the woman was a willing participant in her sexual liaison with the limam. It is possible that she, too, was comfortable with some form of prostitution in exchange for lodging and protection, hoping to mitigate the vulnerability that her mobility caused. Given that it was common for court clerks in colonial Africa to code rape as adultery or some other kind of illicit sex in the law books, it is equally possible that the limam violently exploited the woman’s isolation and temporary dependency on his power and connections.^{Footnote 35}

These three women form a living triptych that reflects how their unique experiences of isolation were ultimately connected. The widow lost the “rope of her marriage” and with it access to material resources that she and her children likely had difficulty earning on their own. To mitigate these challenges, she opted for pre-Islamic forms of Hausa relations that allowed her to engage in informal marriage or karuwanci with the limam. The “stranger female” and Asmatu were isolated by distance separating them from consanguine relations, both of them vulnerable to the ways in which the limam exercised patriarchal privileges associated with his domestic and community authority. For Asmatu, this seemed to be compounded by the requirements of seclusion, a practice which is comparatively rare among Grassfields Hausa.^{Footnote 36} Through marriage, Asmatu belonged to the limam, but this was not Asmatu’s ideal form of relation. However, none of these limitations stopped Asmatu from demanding better behavior from her husband and more respect for herself as a wife.

Eventually, Asmatu confided in her brother, explaining the nature of the limam’s transgressions. Realizing his mistake in forcing the marriage on his sister, Alhaji Mohammadu informed his father, who then wrote letters to the limam requesting that he send Asmatu home to visit her family. The pretext for her return was to bid farewell to a sister leaving for Nigeria with her husband, but it also coincided with the Hausa custom of ganin gida whereby secluded wives are expected to visit their parents after roughly five years of marriage. The limam hesitantly agreed and sent his wife to Bamali, accompanied by one of his boys. After three days, the boy returned by himself with a message from Asmatu’s father. Apparently her mother had become ill, so she needed to stay home longer than expected – creatively spun tales also facilitated by distance. The limam eventually traveled to Bamali to retrieve his wife, but the family did not allow him to see her. He complained to the Sarkin Hausawa of Jakiri and other community leaders, but Asmatu remained with her family. Despite his many visits to Bamali, the couple’s separation endured for two years, until at one point the father informed him that he and Asmatu were now divorced. The father did not have the legal authority to make this decision, and the limam sought justice against him by bringing the case to the Alkali. The trial’s outcome is unknown.

In demanding better treatment and eventual escape from her husband, Asmatu concurrently reinforced patriarchal social structures and expected norms of masculine behavior while defying the patriarchal authority of her own husband.^{Footnote 37} Though Hausa norms sanctioned her husband’s sexual promiscuity, Asmatu and the men of her natal family agreed that it compromised her respectability. That these sexual exploits placed her in an undesirable situation further underscored her family’s perception that the limam abused his patriarchal privilege. They accordingly supported their kinswoman’s desire to leave her marriage.^{Footnote 38}

In her work on domestic violence in colonial Sikasso, Emily Burrill argued that women employed an “informal system of observation of male behavior.” This neighborhood system pressured men to uphold their end of the bargain in marriage–to refrain from taking advantage of their patriarchal privileges especially through excessive physical abuse.^{Footnote 39} The Ndop Alkali court records show that women also relied on male allies, such as fathers, brothers, neighbors, and community leaders, to support them in times of marital crisis.^{Footnote 40} With their backing, women like Asmatu could condemn their husbands while reinforcing expected norms of Hausa masculinity. This public role of men supporting other men’s wives in their struggles for a peaceful married life also took form in its opposite: men supporting and defending the health, wellbeing, and respectability of their own wives against others’ ill intentions or negligence.^{Footnote 41}

None of this means, however, that women have never acted to reinforce established patriarchies. Maintaining community hierarchies has served the interests of many women, including post-menopausal women, female kin of prominent men, senior wives, and female slave owners. Deniz Kandiyoti developed the concept of the “patriarchal bargain” to indicate which rules or scripts regulate gender relations “to which both genders accommodate and acquiesce,” even though individuals often act to contest and negotiate those norms. This concept therefore aids in assessing the ways in which women support, implement, or strategize within patriarchal systems while they themselves are subjugated by them. Very often, men provide certain rewards, protections, or benefits in return to those women who aid in the control of other women.^{Footnote 42} Such dynamics unfolded in the Alkali records, as women participated in communal violence against alleged witches or sought to advance their own social standing by ascribing slave status to other women.^{Footnote 43}

Navigating Marriage and Divorce through Space, Time, and Testimony

Asmatu’s father told the limam that their marriage had ended, but according to Maliki Islamic law he did not have the right to make that pronouncement. Marriage was a bilateral contract requiring the “consent of the wife, someone acting on her behalf, or both.” By contrast, divorce was first and foremost a unilateral act that only husbands could perform. Citing the analogous relationship between marriage and slavery, Norman Calder has written: “Divorcing wives and freeing slaves are peculiar problems because these are, in Islamic law, performative utterances: simply uttering the correct words in the correct form can produce a change in the status of others.”^{Footnote 44} A man can divorce a wife whenever he chooses and in various ways. He might divorce his wife through multiple, usually three, repudiations at one time or spread across a matter of days, weeks, or months. Jurists of the Maliki school, which is followed in the Grassfields, claim that the presence of the wife was not necessary and that no witnesses were required when the husband might decide to utter those fateful words. Finally, a husband could state that the divorce was revocable, meaning that he could take the wife back without contracting a new marriage or requiring her consent. The Maliki in particular deemed that “in some cases action combined with intent was sufficient for a husband to take back a wife,” though they preferred – but did not require – that his declaration be witnessed.^{Footnote 45}

Since Muslim men may divorce wives through triple repudiation, nearly all divorce cases brought to the Alkali court involved wives or their natal families desiring a divorce or husbands trying to retrieve wives or their bridewealth. Many cases demonstrate how the lack of witnesses and variation in pronouncing triple repudiation could leave room for confusion and contestation over whether a divorce had actually taken place. As a result, both spouses could exploit the fragility of nuptial bonds and the unobtrusiveness of repudiation in order to claim a status as married or unmarried. A number of divorce cases involved allegations of bigamy or adultery, as previously married women (zawarawa) sought out new marital ties. Many repudiated women had become mobile in order to form these new relations. The distances separating Hausa diaspora settlements thus contributed to this landscape of contestation and belonging.

Allegations of adultery pertained only to illicit relationships between married women and men other than their husbands. Similarly, the acceptability of polygyny and unlimited concubines meant that only married women and the men “enticing” them into unlawful marriages were found guilty of bigamy. In the 1950s, Baba of Karo referred to adultery as sace jikinta, whereby a woman “steals her own body.” Because a Hausa husband gains control over his wife’s sexual services through marriage, if she defies her husband’s authority by engaging in illicit sex she has essentially “stolen her body” from him.^{Footnote 46} People could also be accused of these offences if women took part in marriages or sexual relations before completing idda, the period of waiting newly divorced or widowed women must observe before remarrying. Adultery could also apply more broadly to any suspicious or inappropriate interactions between married women and male acquaintances.^{Footnote 47}

Court cases on divorce, adultery, and bigamy, not only illuminate tensions and misunderstandings between men, women, and their families in the diaspora. Trying adultery or bigamy as criminal offences was a central element in legitimating the authority of the Alkali in the colonial hierarchy of power. Unlike other areas of the Hausa world where the Alkali rarely mediates marital disputes, the Grassfields Alkali was the only official guarantor of divorce outside a husband’s repudiation. This signifies a particular diasporic context. Neither Hausa chiefs nor limams were officially vested with that authority, and Alkalis were quick to point that out in a number of cases. In general, divorce, adultery, and bigamy were not uncommon features among the Islamic diasporas resident in the Grassfields. They constituted a considerable portion of cases over which the Alkali of Ndop presided.^{Footnote 48}

In 1953, both Njidda of Babanke and Muhammadu of Nwa accused their wives and the wives’ second husbands of bigamy.^{Footnote 49} Njidda had given his wife Nenne permission to travel, first to Bamenda to “collect debt” and then to Santa where she wanted to “salute Mallam Muhammadu” regarding a death that occurred in his family. But when Nenne arrived in Santa she decided to stay with the Sarkin Pawa, the chief butcher, telling him that she was a divorced woman. The Sarkin Pawa then took her under his guardianship and oversaw her marriage to a Santa man named Idinsu. Believing that Nenne was a divorced woman, the Sarkin Hausawa approved Idinsu’s marriage, and the new couple began living together as husband and wife.

For Muhammadu of Nwa, his wife Azumi also traveled a fair distance, more than fifty kilometers to Dumbo, seeking a new form of male guardianship under the guise of an unmarried woman. She soon attached herself to the Hausa chief of Dumbo, residing in his compound where a man named Umaru asked her to marry him. Both Nenne and Azumi claimed that their husbands had severed their marital ties, while Muhammadu and Njidda denied their wives’ claims and desired their return. In the court of the Alkali, Nenne admitted that Njidda had never divorced her and that she alone was guilty for entering into an illicit union with Idinsu. Azumi, on the other hand, dared Muhammadu to swear on the Qur’an that he did not divorce her. It appears that at least in her mind she was a repudiated woman, but Muhammadu swore to the contrary and Azumi was found guilty of bigamy.

Hausa women’s lower social status situated their male lovers as the sole instigators of illicit unions and were therefore deemed more culpable and punished more severely in the courts.^{Footnote 50} The only apparent exception to this rule occurred when the male acquaintance, lover, or second husband could prove or swear on the Qur’an that he had no knowledge of the woman’s marital status. In both cases above, the second husbands were acquitted based on their ignorance of the status of their wives’ other marriages.^{Footnote 51}

In seeking out ties with new men and new Hausa communities, Nenne and Azumi made use of the distances separating Hausa settlements in the Grassfields, as well as the relative anonymity that such distances caused. They also possessed the cultural knowledge that Hausa chiefs and other community leaders often acted as temporary or even permanent guardians for stranger women traveling through enclaves in the diaspora. Abner Cohen’s research among Hausas in Ibadan during the 1960s indicates that it was advantageous for Hausa chiefs to attract women to their settlements and to keep them there through marriage. More women meant more marriages, which in turn meant increased permanent settlement of men, more followers, and potentially greater political and economic power for the Hausa chiefs. A greater number of “stable” families also had repercussions on the local economy as housewives offered important services to the community through their petty trade in food items.^{Footnote 52} Hausa women, however, could exploit community leaders’ competing demands for their social, economic, and reproductive capacities.

Women were also aware that the anonymity created by traveling between Hausa settlements allowed them to rewrite their biographies, which Hausa leaders seemed happy to accept at face value on behalf of their growing communities and sometimes on their own behalf. In the late 1940s, Bakari of Bangolang accused the Sarkin Hausawa of Bamessi of bigamy, believing the Hausa leader had illicitly married his wife Hadija. The Sarkin Hausawa had indeed taken the woman in, but it was ambiguous whether the two had married. What did become clear in the court proceedings, however, is that Bakari and Hadija were never husband and wife to begin with: “No dowry or good marriage had been made at all. She has a husband at Bamum with two children there. The plaintiff had just kept the woman temporarily [sic].” Hadija thus succeeded twice in using distance and the demand for female dependents among Hausa men to create new and perhaps more favorable relationships.^{Footnote 53}

Some of these relationships solidified in new marriages – licit and illicit – while others, including Hadija’s ties to Bakari and the Bamessi Sarkin Hausawa, ambiguously straddled informal marriage or karuwanci. The process of triple repudiation and marriage itself could be ambiguous within and between Hausa diaspora communities – social and geographical areas of gray men and women exploited to suit their needs and desires. But even in cases where triple repudiations occurred in the public eye, divorcees, their second husbands, and sometimes their family members were accused of contracting marriages before idda had run its course.^{Footnote 54} Such cases demonstrate that the business of marriage and divorce could be foggy – a fogginess that was often compounded by distances between Hausa settlements, competing patriarchal claims over women, and competing knowledge of what actually constituted a marriage, a divorce, or the observed length of idda. Moreover, the breaking of marital bonds and arranging of allegedly illicit unions not only occurred at the behest of the very men and women involved in such relationships. They were also orchestrated by other individuals, namely parents concerned with the wellbeing and respectability of their daughters, as well as men of various rank and influence attempting to control the ways in which women related and created ties to men.

In an argument that arose between two community leaders, at issue was the question of whether one of the men had the authority to marry off the other man’s daughter. Not all aspects of the story are clear, but it appears that the daughter capitalized on the distance separating the two men in order to marry the husband of her choice. Her father was the limam of Babanke, and he declared that the Sarkin Hausawa of Konnane, “take my daughter and tied marriage to her without my knowing (…) I got no relation with [him].” In the limam’s mind, the Sarkin Hausawa had no right to act as the guardian to the limam’s daughter because he did not have his permission to do so. The Sarkin Hausawa defended himself by pointing to the actions of the young woman. According to him, the daughter asked him to tie a marriage for her. She also brought a letter to him proving that “she got no marriage.” Believing this letter to be sufficient evidence, the Sarkin Hausawa “tied the marriage for them.” In the end, the Alkali’s judgment restored the limam’s household authority and in so doing publicly reinforced his own power in indicating what defined the proper behavior of all individuals involved: “The father of the daughter said he do not like the marriage of the husband with the daughter. And in Muhammadan Law book the father is the man who is going to be (waliyi) of his daughter, and if not the father no body is fit to tie marriage for her. There fore [sic] when the father of the daughter refused the marriage, there is no marriage between them.”^{Footnote 55}

Similar to other Alkali court cases, the authority of fathers and husbands over unmarried and married women, respectively, took precedence over the community authority of any Sarkin Hausawa since this role is not recognized in Islamic law but is borne of a particular West African historical context. Such debates highlight the important connections between kinship, community, law, and patriarchy that lay at the core of people’s attempts to navigate and control family life in the diaspora. From the vantage point of the Alkali, the limam’s lawfully sanctioned authority over his daughter trumped the Hausa chief’s power to incorporate stranger women into his community through marriage. Before the establishment of the Alkali court in 1947, individual Hausa chiefs usually mediated such conflicts in their communities. As such, parents like the limam, and husbands like Njidda and Muhammadu, would have found it more difficult to re-establish their authority over women when the community-building interests of Hausa chiefs were at stake. Though the Alkali’s legal and religious authority over such matters appeared to have kept Hausa chiefs in check, sometimes entailing tighter constraints and tougher consequences for the women involved, the contestation between these various forms of patriarchy continued into the 1950s and beyond. These conflicts reflected broader tensions among men regarding what it meant to act like a “proper Hausa,” especially when it came to market affairs and relations with women. The various Alkalis seemed most annoyed when men displayed a lack of knowledge regarding Islamic principles, especially when those being reprimanded were Hausa community and religious leaders.^{Footnote 56}

These debates over the control of women certainly left the door open – if only slightly – for women themselves to exercise their agency in how they created and maintained ties with Hausa communities. Geographical distance could help to widen that opening. Though the women and men discussed here were eventually made to abide by the Alkali’s judgments, many people in similar situations likely avoided such public scrutiny. People thus contended with multiple realms of patriarchy, sometimes employing them against one another to their advantage. Many women tried to exploit the multiple, coexistent patriarchies to geographically, socially, and sexually navigate the diaspora world, and they did so to exercise some form of control over their means of belonging. Such astute navigation often entailed simultaneously violating and supporting patriarchal privileges. But women did not often attempt this navigation alone: other women and men aided them, too, most often out of their desires to ensure the fair treatment of female kin, for increased followership, for friendship, or to acquire a wife or concubine of one’s own.