Identity, performance, and secrecy: gendered life and the "modern" in northern Nigeria.

THE RECENT REIMPOSITION OF Islamic criminal law in northern Nigeria has forcefully brought gender issues in the region to international attention. Sentences of death by stoning handed down to Safiya Hussaini and Amina Lawal and the sentence of flogging to Bariya Magazau (all convicted of adultery) have garnered global press coverage and condemnation. Some of this international scrutiny has been strikingly inaccurate, unhelpful, and anti-Muslim: as the northern Nigerian scholar and human rights activist Ayesha Imam has argued, "[H]uman rights are not the exclusive province of international human rights law or international human rights organizations. Human rights concepts exist in Muslim, customary, and secular laws." (1) Bariya's sentence of flogging was irregularly carried out before her appeals were exhausted, while the convictions of Safiya and Amina were overturned by Islamic appellate courts. Other convictions for adultery and sodomy are under appeal. Although none of them has garnered the international concern of Bariya, Safiya, and Amina, there continues to exist an unfortunate politics in which certain convictions for sexual crimes get labeled simultaneously as a defense of traditional morality (by their proponents) and as atrocities (by outsiders, often identified with Christianity and the West). However, the economy of gender and sexual morality within northern Nigerian jurisprudence cannot be reduced to a struggle between Islam and the West or between feminism and patriarchal reaction.

In this article I outline a stereotypical picture of gender relations in northern Nigeria--a normative description that some Islamists inside the region are attempting to enforce and that some outside commentators condemn. But I shall also suggest that this normative version is imperfect and contradictory. There is a much more dynamic way in which northern Nigerians construct their gender identities and through which they imagine and conduct their gendered and sexual relationships. Identities as male and female, as anywhere else in the world, are contingent and ambiguous. Various forms of nonnormative sexuality (extramarital heterosexuality, sex between men, sex between women) also are negotiated within well-developed subcultures and systems of understanding. This essay does not attempt to present a comprehensive overview of northern Nigerian gender, nor does it centrally present an original body of research. Instead, I shall suggest a field of concern for the study of gender and sexuality in the region.

My emphasis here is on Hausa-speakers, particularly those living in and around the city of Kano, which is the capital of the ancient emirate of Kano, as well as of the modern state within the federation of Nigeria. It is also the largest city in the northern section of the country. Kano was not the first state in Nigeria to restore the shari'a courts' criminal jurisdiction, but it did do so shortly after Zamfara state pioneered the innovation. These developments cannot be separated from tensions between the Muslim northern part of the country and the federal government, whose then civilian president was a Christian southerner. Nonetheless, the convictions for adultery (and convictions for sodomy and other sexual crimes) suggest that something much more interesting is at stake than a simple enforcement of heterosexual patriarchy. Rather than imagining that conservative forces are targeting a relatively small group of people who deviate from conventional gender norms, I suggest that politicians have capitalized upon popular anxieties over the categories of normal and deviant. These are interdependent and somewhat negotiable; they stand in supplementary opposition to one another. I juxtapose a normative picture of gender and sexual identities with other practices that are often condemned or ignored. The logic of "normal" gender highlights problem cases and constitutes particular groups of people as deviant and abnormal. However, this logic also tends to undermine itself. This tendency is ameliorated, or at least becomes possible to overlook, through a strong cultural emphasis on secrecy. Immoral behavior is not thought of as being so bad if it is conducted in secret, if it is unknown or at least can be gracefully ignored.

NORTHERN NIGERIA

Popular coverage (and not a little scholarship) depict northern Nigeria as deeply conservative, devoted to an ancient, puritanical form of Islam that dictates appropriate gender roles and sexual morality. Reality is more complicated. Early in the last millennium, a number of the region's Hausa-speaking city-states began to engage in the great trade across the Sahara, between savanna West Africa and North Africa and the Middle East. As trade links intensified, a number of Muslims settled in the region, and increasing numbers of Hausa-speakers themselves converted to Islam. As this process continued, aristocrats and eventually kings also converted, making the states officially Muslim. Our knowledge of Hausa social history in this period is somewhat sketchy, but it is clear that women played significant roles in politics and the economy. Women are remembered as rulers of some states (Queen Amina of Zazzau most notably), and the constitutions of most had various offices reserved for women. Other forms of religion remained important until today, even among nominal Muslims. Notable among these was the bori spirit possession movement, whose adherents and leadership included many women. Muslim rulers negotiated a metaphysical minefield, depending on legitimation from and the protection of indigenous gods even while also maintaining allegiance to a religion for which such accommodation was anathema.