Oral Poetics and Social Memory in Hausa Heroic Tradition: Toward a Theory of Hausa Epic Narrative

The Hausa heroic oral tradition, which includes long narrative songs celebrating the exploits of warrior leaders, Islamic heroes, and founding ancestors of Hausa states, constitutes a significant but theoretically underanalysed genre of Hausa oral literature that encodes social memory and cultural identity in ways that continue to resonate in contemporary northern Nigerian political culture. This doctoral study develops an original theory of Hausa epic narrative, examining the poetics, social memory functions, and living performance contexts of heroic oral tradition across northern Nigeria. Drawing on oral formulaic theory, social memory studies, and ethnography of communication, the research employs a multi-year performance ethnography and textual analysis methodology. Fieldwork over three years involved recording and transcription of live heroic song performances by 20 specialist singers in Kano, Sokoto, Katsina, and Daura, in-depth interviews with performers on compositional processes and social functions, audience reception observations at performance events, and archival recovery and analysis of colonial-era heroic song transcriptions for longitudinal comparison. The performance analysis examines formulaic composition patterns, genre conventions including the warrior epithet tradition, narrative sequencing, and performance-specific adaptive strategies. Social memory analysis examines how heroic narratives encode, selectively preserve, and politically inflect community historical consciousness. Original theoretical contributions include a Hausa Epic Narrative Theory articulating the genre's formal principles, its relationship to Islamic literary traditions, and its distinctive social memory functions in northern Nigerian political culture. Keywords: Hausa epic, Oral poetics, Social memory, Heroic tradition, Performance ethnography.