Teachers · a Light

She built a network of women teaching women across Sokoto

Nana Asma'u, born in 1793, was the daughter of Usman dan Fodio and one of the most learned figures of the Sokoto Caliphate in what is now northern Nigeria. She read and wrote Arabic, Fulfulde, Hausa and Tamacheq, and more than sixty of her works survive: poems, elegies, instruction in law and medicine, and a verse history of her father's movement. Her lasting work was organisational. She trained older women as itinerant teachers, the jaji, who travelled between villages teaching women in their own homes, each carrying a cloth or a symbol marking her as a teacher. The network she set up in the 1830s is called the yan taru, and it still operates in northern Nigeria. She died in 1864.

Nana Asma'u · Sokoto, 1793-1864