Ladies’ love lit stirs up Nigeria’s Muslim north

updated 2:10 p.m. ET May 1, 2008

KANO, Nigeria - Each evening, headscarf-shrouded women seeking romantic advice gather at book stalls lining a rush-hour intersection in Nigeria’s Islamic heartland.

With the sun setting red behind a nearby mosque, the women thumb through northern Nigeria’s unique, female-authored literary offerings: cheaply bound but popular volumes that address issues confronting women in a Shariah society: courtship, polygamy and the meaning of love.

While hardly bodice-rippers by Western standards, the controversy surrounding what academics call “Kano market literature” is increasing with the books’ readership. Conservative scholars and clerics in Nigeria’s north deride the tomes as pulp fiction that degrades Islamic and indigenous cultural mores. A top Islamic leaders recently set fire to a pile of the books.

But female readers say the volumes — with such titles as “Edge of Fate,” “False Love” and “Undeceiveful Heart” — help them navigate contemporary life and their titles are proliferating rapidly, pitting younger women against a predominantly male, conservative elite.

“Women are not only writing for pleasure, no, we are writing because we are seeing what is happening in the society and we want a lot of corrections,” says Binta Rabiu Spikin, a 32-year-old single woman who was raised in her grandfather’s home, which included four wives.

“We want amendments made. That’s why we write.”

The books are mostly written in the local language of Hausa. They extoll the values of true love based on feelings, rather than family or other social pressures. Some also carry anti-drug messages.

Several volumes instruct women on how to send loving text messages to their intended mate’s mobile phones: “Knowing I can love U with the distance between our hearts makes my love 4U stronger.”

Still, readers hoping for Kama Sutra-like instruction in male-female relations will be disappointed. The story lines in most of the novels highlight issues facing women and girls, particularly their relations with men.

Many men in northern Nigeria have up to four wives, in keeping with Islamic injunctions, frequently forcing women who may not be natural allies to live together in close quarters. Multiple wives is far less common in Nigeria’s predominantly Christian south.

The books don’t normally offer instructions on how to deal with this family set up, but instead offer a picture of the household dynamics, so that women will know what to expect.

Other volumes take on a dreamier approach, with women openly flirting and dancing closely with men in public. In reality, that’s a rarity in northern Nigeria, where public modesty and chastity are encouraged in women. Readers say the books help them understand female adult life.

“Now we’re living in a modern society, but there are still things they don’t tell you,” says Maryam Muhammed Haladu, a 20-year old devotee of the books. “Some ladies, when they’re married, they don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to take care of a man, how to seduce him.”

But even the depiction of men and women together rankle some conservatives. Throughout the ages, cultural mores were transmitted by village leaders and through families in an oral tradition.

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