century and the Sokoto Jihad – a powerful cam-
paign of Islamic religious reform that had major
impacts on gender relations in the region that still
resonate today. It is the ideologies and practices of
seclusion that keep married Hausa Muslim women
largely within their domestic courtyards screened
from the public male gaze by high compound walls.
The image of “leisured” domesticity associated
with seclusion indicates high social status. Thus,
with increased prosperity, or aspirations in that
direction, wives find themselves increasingly tied to
the domestic sphere by seclusion. Conversely, it is
also argued that Hausa women opt for seclusion in
order to boost their own social status and to reject
the hard work of agriculture (associated with slave
status of former times).
Geographically and historically Muslim Hausa
women’s identities, as constructed through notions
and practices of the domestic, reflect past and present
ideological constructions and practices. Ideologies
around domesticity are not monolithic, but inter-
sect with other ideological terrains around gender,
seclusion, marriage, ethnicity, and so on. Individ-
uals and groups of people negotiate within and
across these ideological fields. Ideologies and prac-
tices of domesticity shift with political and eco-
nomic changes, but always involve conflict, power
relations, and reconstruction of ideological fields in
arenas of contestation and negotiation.
Seclusion is claimed to tie women to the domes-
tic sphere, reduce their spatial mobility, limit their
opportunities for income earning and increase their
dependence on men and children. However, within
their domesticity many Muslim Hausa women
operate as secluded traders with economic roles
that are diverse and in many circumstances funda-
mental to their household’s economic survival.
There are, however, class variations, such that a
few urban women work in the professions and the
formal sector, thereby transcending the domestic
sphere to work in public space(s) and in non-
domestic occupations. Thus, not all Hausa women’s
identities are defined by domesticity.
Up to the 1980s at least, in cities such as Katsina,
another minority of Hausa women pursued alter-
natives to domesticity (that is, marriage, seclusion,
and domestic labor) by supporting themselves as
courtesans. This was also known in the past in rural
areas with the existence of gidan mata(houses of
women). Similarly and alongside courtesans, Hausa
women Bori (spirit possession) adepts are dissoci-
ated from domesticity in that they do not observe
seclusion, may go on ™ajjwithout their husbands,
and suchlike. However, even Hausa women Bori
adepts, while portrayed as powerful independent136 domesticity
agents, are also recognized as being affected by the
strong gendered social norms of Hausa femininity
and its equation with domesticity and seclusion, in
that relative to male Bori adepts their mobility is
nonetheless restricted. With growing Islamism,
options for women to pursue lifestyles as courte-
sans and Bori adepts were becoming less tenable by
the 1990s.
Early insights into the domesticity that so over-
whelmingly permeates the lives of many Hausa
women are to be found in the account of Baba of
Karo – an ordinary rural Muslim Hausa woman
who recounted her life story to the anthropologist
Mary Smith in the mid-twentieth century. Rural
women today are much more widely secluded than
in Baba’s time.
In the literature there are two contrasting and
contradictory representations of Hausa women as
formed through domesticity and their engagement
with domestic labor: Hausa women as victims
(domestic drudges) and in contrast Hausa women
as agents (powerful matriarchs). Although this is a
somewhat crude and caricaturing binary division, it
nonetheless draws out the extent of diverse por-
trayals of Hausa women. In many ways both sets of
representations are (regulatory?) fictional identi-
ties, in addition to being rather narrow and unidi-
mensional. Alternative discourses and subject
positions might be provided by Hausa women
themselves, but we have very little information on
how Hausa women would account for themselves.
Clearly, who does the reporting partially deter-
mines how Hausa women are viewed and repre-
sented. Even such accounts as there are derived
from Hausa women themselves contain contradic-
tions. Baba of Karo provides evidence both of
Hausa women actively resisting seclusion (Smith
1954, 80) and initiating divorce (ibid. 107–8), but
also as victims of violent domestic abuse from their
husbands (ibid. 169, 204, 232–5).
Discourses of Hausa women as victims of domes-
ticity see them as subjugated by patriarchal oppres-
sion, subordinate, dependent on men/children,
dispirited drudges, constrained, restricted to the
home, immobile, to be pitied, imprisoned by seclu-
sion, and controlled by husbands, men, and patri-
archy; they are illiterate, poor, ignorant, powerless,
and isolated.
At the other end of the spectrum, discourses of
Hausa women as domestic agents portray them as
intelligent, creative, strong, independent, self-reliant,
and even subversive individuals actively resisting
patriarchy and domestication. Albeit operating
within and from the domestic realm, they are seen
as powerful individuals, initiators of divorce, able