Guest Essays

Here is the first ever guest essay.  Submit an essay too if you love to write for fun. Any critical thinking piece welcome.

About the writer
Maryam Garba is a Nigerian currently studying at Harvard University. She did her undergraduate studies at Stanford university. In her essay she talks about the fluidity of identity. The whole of Nigeria should be proud of this young intellectual.


“Are you Hausa?”

Last week someone asked me the question, “Are you Hausa?” Six years ago, I would have readily answered this question with a confident “yes”. This time, however, I hesitated. Instead I asked, “What makes a person Hausa?” My reluctance to respond and my ensuing question gave me deep insight into my own understanding of my identity as an African student at Stanford.

The Hausas are one of approximately 250 ethnic groups living in Nigeria today. The Hausas live mostly in northern Nigeria (although they can be found in other places) and the vast majority of this ethnic group practice Islam. My parents come from the city of Kaduna in Northern Nigeria, but I was born and grew up primarily in the Southern part of the country. When I was growing up, my family always cooked and enjoyed traditional Hausa dishes including “tuwo” (a starchy paste made out of carbohydrates) and “miya” (a complementary soup) and we spoke both Hausa and English equally at home.

However, when I left Nigeria six year ago to attend school in the United Kingdom and in the United States, I stopped using my Hausa. My only opportunities to practice the language was over the phone with my relatives or when I went home during the holidays, which was never for more than three weeks in a year. I also went for long periods of time (sometimes up to a year) without eating a single Hausa meal. There were very few Hausa students in the schools I attended and the other Hausa speakers I met felt more comfortable speaking English than they did speaking Hausa. Almost all of my communication was done in English. In a fairly short period of time, English very quickly became my primary language of thought and communication.

My primary identity also evolved from being “Hausa” to being “Nigerian”. When I lived in Nigeria, everyone understood what I meant when I identified myself as a Hausa girl. To them it meant that my parents came from Northern Nigeria and that perhaps I had spent some time living in the North. When I arrived at Stanford, however, even some of my African friends did not know which country the Hausa ethnic group came from. I could no longer identify myself as Hausa because no one understood what I meant. I had to embrace a broader identity, which was “Nigerian”. My response to the question, “where are you from?” was no longer “Kaduna State” but rather “Nigeria”.

My friends at Stanford came from very different places including Botswana, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. Through these friendships, I learned to dance like a traditional Zulu woman, discuss political issues in Botswana and cook Middle Eastern food. Yet I could not remember the last time I listened to a Hausa song, followed the news in Kaduna State or cooked a Hausa dish. I was so distant from Hausa culture that it had failed to inform my choices for almost six years.I began to feel like I was losing my Hausa-ness.

Today, after four years of calling myself a Nigerian, instead of a Hausa person, I now feel like I am less Hausa and more Nigerian.After six years of living outside Nigeria, my primary identity has shifted. I have also taken up other identities through sharing in other cultural experiences and forming new relationships with people from other parts of the world. Through these experiences I realized that identity is not fixed, but rather it changes as we move through life. Human identity is a complex, diverse, fluid and constantly changing phenomenon.

To deal with the complex nature of identity, perhaps we need to stop asking “Are you?” questions and instead pose “Do you?” questions. Are you questions cause us to feel that we belong to one bounded category and are excluded from another. Thus if I identify as Hausa, then it means I cannot be Zulu, Tswana or anything else. On the contrary, Do you questions allow a person to relate to any group they see themselves belonging to.As the world continues to become a more globalized environment, questions about identity and diversity should allow individuals to identify the different aspects of him or herself that allow him or her to relate to different groups. Therefore I can say “I speak Hausa” and “My family eats tuwo” without having to say “I am Hausa”. Another example would be to ask “Do you have a Nigerian passport?” or “Do you live in Nigeria?” instead of simply asking, “Are you Nigerian?” Do you questions allow individuals to fully associate with all aspects of their different concurrent identities without feeling like these identities are mutually exclusive.

If anyone asks me again, “Are you Hausa?” My response will be “I speak Hausa, I come from Northern Nigeria and I eat Hausa food. Does that make me Hausa?”