ABSTRACT
At public events, men associated with traditional rule—in Zaria, they include the Emir of Zaria, his family members, titled chiefs, and district heads—wear babban riga, often with turbans, which distinguish them from men associated with Zaria Local Government Secretariat workers, teachers, and Islamic scholars who wear kaftan and caps. Craft production thus contributes to the visual and material reproduction of these interrelated forms of political organization in Zaria. Crafts represent a category of social things, often connected with memories of place and people, as well as with particular production processes associated with certain modalities of scale and with the past. This chapter reconsiders Johnson’s materialist argument, explaining the continued demand for, and hence, existence of some craft work by virtue of its association with memories of the past people, time and places related to a certain way of life connected with the form of government associated with the Emirate of Zazzau and the nineteenth-century Sokoto Caliphate.
