Harmony O'Rourke's compelling book, Hadija's Story: Diaspora, Gender, and Belonging in the Cameroon Grassfields, presents a vivid tale of one woman's struggle for survival within the broader context of the twentieth-century Hausa migration to the Grassfields of Cameroon. The book is comprised of six well-arranged chapters, grouped into two parts, including Acknowledgements, an Introduction, a Conclusion, a glossary of terms, notes, bibliography, and an index, making it easy to follow structurally. The author creatively uses legal cases to illustrate ‘the complicated contradictions of dominant racial ideology’ regarding gender relations in Hausa Grassfields society, while also shedding some light on the Hausa diaspora experience and identity politics, emphasizing the importance of gender in contestations over marriage, morality, and belonging (31).

In the 1920s, in the town of Lere, near the Jos Plateau in Nigeria, a local ruler promised two girls to Hadija's husband, Alhadji Goshin (Gashin Baki among the Hausas). Goshin was a wealthy, long-distance trader from Kano, Nigeria, who had settled in the northwest region of Cameroon in the town of Mme-Bafumen (which is part of the so-called Hausa diaspora, or abakwa). Historically, the British colonizers had used their influence to attract migrant Hausa to the more luscious Grassfields regions for grazing. Notably, Goshin is documented in colonial records, but the women he marries are not identified with the same detail. ‘One of the women disappeared entirely from the record’ and was ‘silenced’. The only information about her is ‘her transfer to Gashin Baki’ in the town of Lere (1). There is also little information about the other woman, Hadija: no birth name, date, or place of birth. Gashin renamed her Hadija as she entered the Hausa diaspora in Bamenda. She thus became linked to this trader, his network of friends and family, and even a senior wife named Talle. But soon after their arrival and settlement in the region after the First World War, Gashin died (80). Hadija would later learn that in this marriage she had been referred to not as a wife, but as a slave-concubine. Nonetheless, with her husband's death, Hadija is left alone and vulnerable. Seeking safety to mitigate her isolation in a strange land, she quickly married another man.

O'Rouke weaves this illuminating story about Hadija around an analysis of the roles of marriage, enslavement, and community patriarchy in the making of Hausa diaspora settlements. She also explores how colonial rule, Islamic law, and Hausa cultural mores shape the way people experienced dispersal and diasporic formation (59). Multiple historical sources are used in the analysis, including Islamic court records, oral traditions and proverbs, family and individual oral histories, personal collections, official colonial sources, missionary reports and photographs, a German artist's travelogue and paintings, and secondary sources on Hausa and Grassfields societies (14).

The book is divided into two parts. Part One explores how German and British colonists harbored attitudes towards diasporic Hausa peoples that grew out of the chasm between African realities and European perception of Africans, reflecting European sources from 1890s to 1940s. According to O'Rourke, ‘Europeans established Hausas as permanent strangers’, and they focused their attention and writings on the activities of itinerant Hausa men (16). Chapter One, ‘Worthy subjects’, serves as background to the study of Hausa people and traces the profound historical changes that took place in the Grassfields from the late nineteenth century, with regards to state centralization and slave trading. These changes prompted the entrance of the Hausas into the Grassfields, who integrated themselves into local political structures, and later German and British ones. Chapter Two, ‘People of the north’, examines the Hausa diaspora from the time when the British assumed rule over the western Grassfields after the First World War until the 1950s and decolonization. This chapter points up the contradictions in British policies towards the Hausa. For instance, the British used a legal category of ‘native foreigners’ to identify them, while at the same time Islamic courts were established in 1947. This process was a gendered one that unevenly institutionalized religious and household patriarchies within the Grassfields’ Muslim communities. It also constituted a response to complaints by men over their inability to control women.

British colonial desire to regulate African markets, collect taxes, and ‘manage political boundaries between Grassfields polities influenced how Hausa integrated themselves into local host communities’ (6). Hausa women such as Hadija were historically treated as ‘items of exchange’ to enhance the economic and political standing of men through patronage (8). However, as O'Rourke shows, these women were more than mere items: they filled many roles, including as food producers, dancers, and spiritual leaders. Characterizing the process of Hausa dispersal as one that involved only male commercial agents presents ‘a deeply masculinized narrative’ that involves ‘the erasure of women, children and lower status or socially nonconformist males’ (1).

In 1952, Hadija was brought to trial in an Islamic court in Cameroon and charged with bigamy, a crime of which she was unaware. Court proceedings soon turned to questions of whether she had been the wife or the slave-concubine of her deceased husband. O'Rourke illuminates a set of contestations involving marriage, slavery, morality, memory, inheritance status, and identity for Muslim Hausa migrants, especially women. In so doing, she disrupts dominant patriarchal and colonial narratives, which often emphasize male activities and projects, and she brings to the fore women's prerogatives and concerns, including those of prosperity, generational cohesion, and Islamic religious expectations in communities that were often separated by long distances.

Part Two of the book consists of four chapters focused on oral narratives and records from Alkali Court. These sources shed light on the gendered principles upon which Hausa authority and identity were constructed and challenged at household and community levels. Chapter Three, ‘Slave or daughter?’, examines Hadija's court trial, which fundamentally questions her existence and status as a wife, to illustrate how gender dynamics of kinship, travel, and death shaped discourses and anxieties over belonging (95). Chapter Four, ‘First reversal: marriage and enslavement’, explores the significance of the union between men and women, free and unfree, in the Hausa diaspora. Chapter Five, ‘Second reversal: death and survival’, investigates how social ties are severed after death, as well as gendered survival strategies and inheritance practices. Chapter Six, ‘Third reversal: conflict and judgment’, analyzes the various ways Hausa men and women of the diaspora formed and managed several sites of belonging, while also challenging each other and figures of authority.

In the Conclusion, O'Rourke begins with a Hausa proverb and advocates peace and acceptance in the diaspora. This point seems a bit glib, especially for people — such as the long-standing inhabitants of the Grassfields — who have had their land conquered and occupied, and who were forced to stand by in the land of their birth as the colonizers gave preferential treatment and higher status to newly-arrived ‘strangers’ from neighboring lands. Of course, this story is Hadija's, and in the end her honor and social status emerge intact. O'Rourke suggests that she wants to emphasize ‘gendered contestations over meanings of the past and social acceptance in the present’ (15). But it is also important to address the lasting consequences of colonial actions and policies in the Grassfields. Local people there viewed Hausas as ‘colonial intermediaries’ who worked first with the Germans and later with the British to seize local peoples’ land. This book could have benefitted from a more balanced consideration of the plight of the peoples of the host regions. They serve as background to Hadija's story and to other women of the Hausa diaspora; O'Rourke does not analyze the devastation that ensued for them, thanks to British colonial policies.

Nevertheless, this book is a welcome addition to the Cameroon Grassfields Studies and a notable read for students and scholars of Hausa diaspora, gender, and African history.