Documenting Hausa Popular Literature prepared by Graham Furniss

From the earliest period of the production of printed Roman script books in the north of Nigeria, a primary concern was the economics of book production. The conundrum was how to break out of the ‘chicken and egg situation’ whereby it was not possible to ‘create’ a reading public unless there were sufficient, affordable, and readable books that a potential reader would want to read; on the other hand, without an existing commercial market for books, how could any publisher continue to publish? (East 1943) . The main government-funded agency, the Northern Region Literature Agency (NORLA), that undertook the publication of the overwhelming majority of Hausa language books in the 1950s (Skinner 1970) , was forced to close when its losses became unsustainable. The complete file is available as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file: view/download [360 Kb 15 pages]

This paper first appeared in print as Furniss, Graham (2000) ‘Documenting Hausa “market” literature’, in T. A. Barringer (ed.) Africa Bibliography 1998, pp. vii-xxxiii, Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute My thanks are due to Ibrahim Malumfashi, Brian Larkin, Murray Last, S B Ahmad, Barry Burgess, Malami Buba and the participants in the Social Histories of Reading workshop, Cambridge, July 2000, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.