By Olukorede Yishau
Hajia Maimunatu Dadasare Abdullahi killed herself at 66. This was in 1984, fourteen years after she was honoured with the Member of the Order of the Niger (MON). In 1929, a colonial administrative officer made her a sex slave, impregnated her, and ran away shortly after she hathe baby. The baby died at infancy and she never had another.
The end began when she jumped into a well, was rescued, rushed to the hospital, and stabilised. But enough damage was already done and the Grim Reaper still took its own. A day before she jumped into the well, she had told her adopted daughter, Aishatu Dikko, to come and see her if she could.
“If you come and do not meet me, look under my pillow. I’m going to leave a message for you there,” she told her adopted daughter.
Aishatu wondered what she meant and sought an explanation, but she gave none.
“From tomorrow you will see me no more,” she was also quoted to have told her house help. He was the one who discovered her in the well early the next morning. Her funeral was in progress when her adopted daughter arrived three days after she jumped into the well.
Aishatu Dikko retrieved two letters under Dadasare’s pillow. One of the letters contained details about how she wanted her wealth shared. When Dr. Aliyah Ahmad, who was researching on Dadasare, asked Aishatu Dikko about the content of the second letter, she got tears for an answer. Dr. Ahmad’s husband advised her to wait until their next meeting. Dikko herself died before the meeting. So, the content of the second letter remains unknown.
You may be wondering who was this Hajia Abdullahi and I will tell you she was a woman of many firsts: Had no formal primary and secondary education but went on to qualify as a midwife in the UK, went on to become the first female journalist in the North and an health officer of note in colonial Northern Nigeria.
Her autobiography, published posthumously, is titled ‘It Can Now Be Told’. It has an introduction and afterword by Dr. Aliyah Adamu Ahmad, which fills some gaps in the story of this remarkable woman.
Her story started in Gola, a Fulani enclave, that modernity has made history. She had a dream of marrying a man of importance in the North but before she was twelve, a shameless white man she refused to name had her abducted and forced to play wife. He was to run away shortly after she gave birth without the decency of telling her he was not returning to Nigeria. She returned to Gola but later went to Zaria to be the kept woman of another white man, this time of her own volition. She was fifteen. He was 35. This white man is said to be well known in the North as the father of contemporary Hausa literature. He died in the 70s but without formally marrying her, even though she played the role of his wife for years. The man, Dr. Rupert East, returned to the UK and married a Briton, and had two kids. He was ‘gracious’ enough to facilitate her training as a midwife as well as other opportunities, including writing.
East, who founded Hausa newspaper ‘Gaskiya’ in 1939, also left her some money in his final Will and testament. It was not clear why they never married and Hajia exercised her right to privacy by volunteering scanty details about the man who allowed her to answer Mrs East in the civil service. Hajia’s book identifies him as Jaumusare. Dr Ahmad feels this could be her way of protecting him from scrutiny. Dr Ahmad, however, unveiled him in the introduction to the book.
Dr. Ahmad wondered if in her life-long devotion to Dr East she warded off any suitors even after he married and started having kids.
While she was in the civil service, she worked to educate women in the North through an adult literacy programme. On her return to Nigeria in 1956, she was absorbed as Assistant Superintendent of Adult Education. She was in the Women’s Section at the Field Headquarters in Zaria. At a time the population of the North was between 17 and 18 million, the number of women on the roll call of literacy classes was about 4,000.
“Little had been done to reach the large number of women in purdah,” she wrote and she set out to correct this.
She observed that: “Wastage through marriage was heavy. In primary school very few girls got beyond standard 7 as their families took them away to marry them off. The handful that continued their education might get as far as training college and become teachers, for example, but they too would marry in due course. The problem lay in the structure of our society which expected a girl to get married at the age of about 14 and demanded that then she should not go about in public unless she was heavily veiled. These two factors made it extremely difficult for a woman to get herself the education and specialised training which would give her professional qualification and, even if she did quality, enable her to practise a profession.”
She began a War Against Ignorance, and educating the women in purdah was a key part of this war. It was not easy but she fought it her way, without being forceful. The Independence let to the dissolution of the agency with which she waged her war. After that, she functioned more in the hospitals and also was involved in one or two researches with researchers at the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU).
At a point, her people wanted her to return home and, after dilly-dallying, she did, but not before building a home in Gombi.
“She had settled fully in the village, performing what a female elder, one that was educated and had seen the world at the highest vantage point, was expected to do. Also, no one was able to tell us about the demons she had been grappling with at that period of her life. No one, probably, foresaw the tragic foreclosing of a life so remarkable,” wrote Dr. Ahmad.
My final take: Evil has no gender, race, creed or religion. It is not a preserve of the Black man. The man who made Hajia Dadasare Abdullahi a sex slave at less than twelve years of age was Caucasian and supposedly Christian. Being evil is all about individuals and not their gender, race, creed or religion.
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Evil has no gender, race, creed or religion. It is not a preserve of the Black man. The man who made Hajia Dadasare Abdullahi a sex slave at less than twelve years of age was Caucasian and supposedly Christian. Being evil is all about individuals and not their gender, race, creed or religion
• Yishau is a columnist and author of ‘In The Name of Our Father’and Vaults of Secrets’.