Hausa music in northern Nigeria stands in a select company of arts in West Africa that not only flourish within their own traditions but also extend their cultural hegemonies outside national boundaries. With its major creative centres in the cities and towns of the sultanate of Sokoto, the emirates of Katsina and Kano, and to a lesser extent those of Zaria and Bauchi, its audiences are found not only in Nigeria itself, but also in Niger, Chad, Benin, Ghana and Sierra Leone. Although regional differences often mark individual performances, Hausa music nevertheless exhibits an overall stylistic unity that separates it from the music of neighbouring cultures.
4. Traditional folk music and modern popular music.
ANTHONY KING
Early accounts of the music, that is from the time of its origins in the early Hausa kingdoms before the 16th century up to the arrival of the British at the turn of the 20th century, are rare. There is evidence, however, for a considerable, though perhaps superficial, North African influence up to and including the 18th century. Initially this influence reached the Hausa states via the empires of Songhai and Mali in the west, and Bornu in the east. Its major impact appears to have been on ceremonial music, which served the rising power of the Hausa states, especially on the fall of the Songhai empire at the end of the 16th century. Although our knowledge in this respect is almost wholly confined to the borrowing of instruments that originated in the Maghrib, in the case of ceremonial instruments, borrowings clearly went hand in hand with a transfer, although modified, of their role. Thus the Kakaki (a long trumpet; fig.1), which was associated with military power in the Hausa states and which was introduced into state ceremonial music during the 16th century, was in use by the Songhai cavalry at the beginning of that century. The Tambari (a large kettledrum; fig.2), to this day a symbol of sovereignty, relates both in material form and ceremonial usage to the court tabl at Fez at the beginning of the 16th century. The Algaita oboe derives from the Maghribi ghayta, but does not appear in a ceremonial role in Hausa music until the 18th century.
These borrowings were not, however, confined to ceremonial music. The Goge (a single-string bowed lute or fiddle), condemned by religious teachers as an agent of immorality, stems from the Maghribi ghugha. Reciprocal borrowings also took place. The shantu, a women’s percussion tube, was carried across the Sahara from Hausaland and Bornu and reached North Africa as a by-product of the trade in female slaves. Most instrument borrowings followed the north–south route and after various assimilations were in turn passed on until they finally reached the southern and coastal areas of West Africa. A notable example is the hourglass drum, which was first noted in the Maghrib at the beginning of the 14th century. It occurred in Hausa music at a fairly late date in various forms as the Kalangu, the jauje and the kotso, and finally reached the West African coast at the beginning of the 18th century. Thus the Yoruba set of double-headed dundun drums, the Akan donno drum and the single-headed Yoruba koso (directly linked to the Hausa kotso) are but three examples of an instrumental migration that spanned almost four centuries.
Islamic attitudes to music, and in particular those upheld by Usuman D’an Fodiyo in his reformatory jihad against the Hausa states at the beginning of the 19th century, did not impose any lasting restrictions on music, nor did they effect any notable changes in musical practices that had their roots in the pre-jihad or Hab’e states and which continued to flourish in the post-jihad emirates. D’an Fodiyo himself proclaimed that ‘A drum should only be beaten for some legitimate purpose, such as for calling a meeting, announcing the departure of an army, when it pitches camp or returns home and the like’; he continued, ‘How much worse, then, is what the ignorant people do playing musical instruments for entertainment and singing?’. Nevertheless, the rich variety of present-day music stems directly from 19th-century practice, and in particular from the three types of music that predominated: state ceremonial, court praise-song and rural folk music.
Ceremonial music, or rok’on fada, remains, as in the 19th century, a symbol of traditional power. As such, it is as opposed to change as the power that bred it. It is still largely dominated by instruments of external origins and, with its highly functional role, maintains itself apart from the mainstream of musical developments. This separation, particularly in musical aesthetics, has led to the rejection of state ceremonial music by large sections of the society who see its instruments as the prestige symbols of the authority they serve rather than hear them as makers of music.
The most important ceremonial instruments are the tambura (sing. tambari), the state drums, and kakakai (sing. kakaki), the long state trumpets. Less important ceremonial instruments include the farai (a short wooden trumpet; fig.3), the k’afo (a side-blown animal horn) and the Ganga (a double-headed snared drum; fig.4); these are probably indigenous to this part of Africa.
The occasions for state ceremonial today are ultimately controlled by the emir as traditional head of state and successor to a Hab’e kingdom. Although variations occur between emirates, the main occasions are usually sara, the weekly statement of authority on Thursday evenings outside the emir’s palace; Babbar Salla and K’aramar Salla, the major religious festivals, on which the emir rides in procession to and from the mosque; and nad’in sarauta, the installation of emirate officials, including that of the emir himself. Other occasions for state ceremonial are the emir’s departure or return from a journey, visits from other emirs or figures of national importance and such occasions as weddings and births within the emir’s family. Senior emirate officials often have their own bands, and, while these do not use the same instruments as the state bands at the central court, they play on similar occasions and generally model their performances on those of the state musicians.
Two major state bands are found in almost every emirate and comprise a consort of either five or six tambura or the more heterogeneous combination of the kakaki, the farai and the ganga. The inclusion of the k’afo in this second ensemble is rare, the usual composition of the band being a solo kakaki with six or more chorus trumpets, one or two farai, and up to 12 ganga. The symbolic rather than musical status of these two bands is reflected in their performances, which, on certain occasions, are in close proximity to and in competition with each other. The double-reed algaita, though sometimes an instrument at an emir’s central court, is more often an instrument of his senior officials. In combination with one or more lesser snared drums, or gangar algaita, it is used as a solo instrument or in groups.
Performance on ceremonial instruments, and in particular the ensemble of kakaki, farai and ganga, is usually based on the melodic and rhythmic realization of a normally unverbalized text known as a take. The instrumentalists are joined by a vocalist who acclaims his patron through the performance of a kirari. Take texts are usually epithetical and are further distinguished from kirari texts by being traditional to the office they celebrate rather than to the office holder and patron. Their instrumental realization is possible because Hausa is both a tonal and a quantitative language, that is, its meaning depends in part on syllabic pitch and length. Texts are thus ‘performed’ on instruments by an imitation of the sequences of pitch and to a lesser extent length values that mark their spoken forms. The musical realization of a take for the office of the Emir of Katsina as performed by a solo kakaki and chorus is shown in ex.1. The trumpets, solo and chorus, produce their 2nd and 3rd partials, the chorus being pitched a semitone higher than the solo. Acute and grave accents mark high and low tone syllables in the text, and the sequence of long and short syllables is shown in its scansion.
While appointments in ceremonial music, whether as overall head or as a section leader, are made primarily on hereditary grounds, appointment as a praise-singer is almost always on musical grounds. Because praise-singing is not always a hereditary profession, its standards are on the whole more rigorous than those of ceremonial music. Yabon sarakai, praise of officials in song, is the most generally esteemed form of music in Hausa society today. Two styles of praise-song can be distinguished, the first based on the urban classical traditions of the past and the second a product of popular music of more recent origins. Songs in the classical tradition are performed by professional singers devoted exclusively to this art form. As court musicians, they depend on the patronage of a single patron, and the more powerful a patron, the more competition there is for his patronage. The best praise-singers thus gravitate to the courts of a limited number of office holders. Praise-songs in the style of popular music are performed by freelance musicians who compose for a number of patrons, generally those who offer the greatest rewards. There is therefore a tendency for praise-song, whether classical or popular, to centre on a selected group of officials within an emirate.
The instrumental accompaniments to classical praise-songs are supplied by the singer together with his masu amshi (chorus) on drum sets traditionally associated with this kind of court music. The instruments most frequently used are the banga and tabshi (fig.5), both small kettledrums, and the jauje and kotso, hourglass drums of which the former has a double membrane and the latter a single.
The classical praise-singer composes songs that reinforce his patron’s authority by lauding his ancestry, religious devotion, authority, chivalry, generosity and other attributes. He equally undermines the authority of his patron’s rivals by ridiculing their inadequacies. While the song text is thus of prime importance, so is the more musical consideration of how it is sung. So interdependent are these two aspects of performance, especially in the interplay of language tones and quantities with musical pitches and rhythms, that the singer’s art cannot be evaluated separately in terms of either the text or its setting.
Fragments of praise-songs from the past survive in the public’s memory, but the present-day flowering of this genre is largely attributed to the genius of the most celebrated court praise-singer of all, Narambad’a (c1890–c1960). Narambad’a lived and worked in Sokoto under the patronage of Sarkin Gobir Na Isa Amadu, district head and great-grandson of Usuman D’an Fodiyo. His best songs, such as Dodo Na Alkali, D’an Filinge and above all Bakandamiya, set a standard by which court songs to this day are judged. His most notable successors include Jan Kid’i, D’an K’wairo with his brother Kurna, and Sa’idu Faru, all from Sokoto; Mamman Sarkin Tabshi from Katsina and Aliyu D’an Dawo. They show their indebtedness to Narambad’a by indirect borrowings from his works and by modelling their compositions on his formal structures.
Narambad’a divided his songs, as did his predecessors, into solo stanzas with recurrent chorus refrains. The chorus was allowed to join in the solo stanza towards its end and from there to proceed to the refrain. D’an K’wairo has extended this practice by involving each member of his chorus as a soloist in his own right, each contributing his own stanza to what is nevertheless D’an K’wairo’s composition. Narambad’a periodically repeated individual lines, or pairs of lines within a stanza, thus obtaining a balance of length between successive stanzas and at the same time adding emphasis to the lines repeated. In Sarkin Tabshi’s songs, repetition occurs in almost every stanza and may range from a couple of lines to the complete stanza. In his longer songs, the refrain itself appears periodically as a stanza with chorus repetition, which divides the composition into major sections each comprising a group of stanzas.
In Narambad’a’s songs, lines are on the whole of balanced length. In the songs of his successors, notably Sa’idu Faru and Sarkin Tabshi, not only are lines of balanced length, but the choice of words within lines is so strongly controlled by the song’s metre that the whole composition can often be scanned as written poetry. Song metres are relatively restricted in their variety and are in most cases based on a division of the implicit bar into five, six or eight units, notated as semiquavers. The division into five units, as in ex.2 from the refrain of Zuwa Tariya Alhaji Maccid’o by Sa’idu Faru, is perhaps the most classical and at the same time most intractable of the metres, allowing almost no rhythmic variation between bars. The division into six units, as in ex.3 from the refrain of Abubakar na Bello by Aliyu D’an Dawo, allows the use of hemiolas between successive measures. The division into eight units, as in ex.4 from the refrain of Sardauna Namijin Tsaye by D’an K’wairo, allows a contrast similar to that of a hemiola in the alternation of a sequence of equal lengths (2 : 2 : 2 : 2) with a sequence of unequal lengths (3 : 2 : 3). In almost every song, similar cadential patterns are used to mark the ends of stanzas. Narambad’a frequently reserved the cadential use of his tonic for the end of the stanza and its refrain, and later singers have often emphasized the tonic by making it the note of lowest pitch in the song as a whole, as in ex.4.
An important feature of Hausa society before the arrival of the British was the separation of urban society centred on the court and its nobility from rural peasant communities on whose agriculture the political system largely depended. The musical outcome was an equally marked separation of urban art music, with its focus on court praise-song, from traditional rural folk music. Under British administration, established at the beginning of the 20th century, the traditional territorial officials were made directly responsible for rural administration and were required to live in the districts for which they held office. The concentration of court musicians in the emirate capitals was dispersed, and court praise and ceremonial music put into closer contact with rural music. In addition, the gradual development of new industries brought a migration of rural workers to the towns; new urban middle and working classes began to emerge, with radio programmes directed at them and gramophone records produced for them. Thus the rapid growth of a popular urban music became possible, drawing its performers from traditional folk music and its forms and styles from urban as well as rural models.
Rural music itself survives with diminished audiences today, and in continual competition with the newer popular music. The latter, together with classical praise-song, now reaches the most distant country areas through radio broadcasts and gramophone recordings. The last strongholds of folk music lie in traditional dancing, such as young girls’ asauwara, and in bori, the pre-Islamic religious acceptance of possession by gods.
Popular music thus flourishes as the real rival of court praise-song, competing with it in two main respects. It appeals to the same general urban audience and is similar to praise-song in the artistry of its leading exponents. Its leading singer, Muhamman Shata, is better known than Narambad’a or his classical successors, and Shata’s song Bakandamiya stands as a direct challenge to Narambad’a’s most celebrated composition, from which it borrows its title and some of its characteristics.
While it rivals court praise-song, popular music is distinguished from it in its use of instruments, whether for the accompaniment of song or for virtuoso display. The kalangu (hourglass drum) and its set, originally beaten for butchers and for young people’s dances, is now the most popular of the accompanimental instruments because of the example set by Muhamman Shata. The goge, used by such virtuosi as Audu Yaron Goge and Garba Liyo, and its smaller counterpart the kukuma, popularized by singers like Ibrahim Na Habu, are the main rivals of the kalangu. The kuntigi (a single-string plucked lute) has a leading exponent as an accompaniment instrument in D’an Maraya, and the garaya (a two-string plucked lute), originally identified with songs in praise of hunters, is now used in its various sizes by all kinds of singers.
Because popular song is mostly directed at general audiences rather than at individual members of the ruling classes, it does not have to conform to the same proprieties as court praise-song. Its performers are freer in their choice of subjects for composition, and freer in the place and manner of their performances. Its songs, as exemplified in the compositions of Shata, not only praise the social leaders and the eminent but also denounce them; in the same way gamblers, thieves, drunkards, delinquents, pimps and prostitutes are both praised and ridiculed. Popular song is performed not only at the houses of the illustrious but also in hotels and bars where the general public may pay for admission.
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