ABSTRACT
probably the leading Hausa poet alive today is Malam Aliyu na Mangi. Descended from a branch of the ruling family of the town of Jibiya in Katsina Emirate, domiciled since the days of his grandfather, Abdullahi, in the village of Mangi ten miles south of Zaria, he was born in 1895. Before he was two, he lost his sight through the combined attack of measles and smallpox. In spite of this—one would have thought—overwhelming handicap, he pursued the normal education of a Hausa malam and, though of course being unable to write, over the years studied and learnt by heart the Arabic texts proper to that education, moving from one specialized teacher to another. He wrote his first poem in Hausa at the age of 21. This, he says, was a translation from Arabic of Malam Shi’tu’s Jiddul caajizi, which he fitted to the tune of Kanzul caḍhiimi. Since then he has composed and recited a large number of poems but, despite his knowledge of Arabic, always in Hausa. Of these the most famous are the several parts of his Waaƙàr Imfìraajìi, ‘Song of Comfort’, of which some eight have appeared in print, published in Zaria at various dates since 1949. This poem, of which there remain several hundred verses still to be published, is of the traditional Hausa genre, primarily religious: Praise of the Prophet, Exhortation to Correct Worship, Meditations on the Vanity of the World, etc., etc. But its vocabulary and style, far from being slavishly Arabic, are vividly Hausa and full of everyday metaphors and images.
