Postcolonial Perspectives on Hausa Literature and the Politics of Language in Northern Nigeria

Hausa literature has developed within a colonial and postcolonial political context that has profoundly shaped its production conditions, the status of Hausa as a literary language, and the ways in which Hausa writers have engaged with questions of identity, power, and cultural survival. This doctoral study develops a postcolonial critical theory of Hausa literature, examining how colonial language policies, missionary and governmental translation projects, and postcolonial educational language policies have structured the conditions of Hausa literary production and reception across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on postcolonial theory, African literature studies, and language politics scholarship, the research employs a critical historical and textual methodology spanning five years. The historical analysis reconstructs the colonial politics of Hausa literary production through archival research at the National Archives Kaduna, the Arewa House Kaduna, and the Bodleian Library Oxford. Textual analysis of Hausa literary works from different periods examines how writers have engaged with the colonial and postcolonial conditions of their production. Interviews with 45 contemporary Hausa writers, publishers, and literary scholars probe present-day engagements with the politics of literary language. Original theoretical contributions include a Postcolonial Framework for Hausa Literary Analysis that articulates the specific colonial legacies shaping Hausa literary politics, distinguishing the Hausa context from other African literary language situations. The study argues that the colonial printing and standardisation of Hausa has had ambivalent effects, simultaneously enabling a mass literate Hausa readership while embedding colonial orthographic conventions that constrain regional variety expression. Keywords: Hausa literature, Postcolonial theory, Language politics, Northern Nigeria, Literary history.