Study with special reference to the village of Batagarawa.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

This book was originally published in 1972 and relates to the Hausa-speaking people of West Africa. At the time of publication there were perhaps as many as 15 million Hausa-speaking people in the area, most of whom lived in the countryside in northern Nigeria and the neighbouring Niger Republic. This book is at once an examination of the socio-economic life of a small Hausa village and a study of the way of life of the rural Hausa generally. The book as a whole provides a wide-ranging survey both of what was known and of what was, and in some cases still is, little understood. Very few books had been written on the rural Hausa, much of the literature consisting of scarce pamphlets and official reports; this book not only reports important research, but also surveys literature which was otherwise not generally available. The themes which emerge from this study are similar to many which Polly Hill has stressed elsewhere: people who do not fit into crude stereotypes and socio-economic life are always much more varied and sophisticated than superficial observers would suppose.

How have different forms of colonialism shaped societies and their politics? William F. S. Miles focuses on the Hausa-speaking people of West Africa whose land is still split by an arbitrary boundary established by Great Britain and France at the turn of the century. In 1983 Miles returned as a Fulbright scholar to the region where he had served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1970s. Already fluent in the Hausa language, he established residence in carefully selected twin villages on either side of the border separating the Republic of Niger from the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Over the next year, and then during subsequent visits, he traveled by horseback between the two places, conducting archival research, collecting oral testimony, and living the ethnographic life. Miles argues that the colonial imprint of the British and the French can still be discerned more than a generation after the conferring of formal independence on Nigeria and Niger. Moreover, such influences persist even in the relatively remote countryside: in the nature of economic transactions, in local education practices, in the practice of Islam, in the operation of chieftaincy. In Hausaland as throughout the world, the border illuminates the vital differences between otherwise similar societies.

Discusses the role of small towns as agents for rural improvement and focuses on the links provided by small towns to both rural areas and larger towns. Reviews the role of selected indigenous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in supporting the activities of small enterprises in small towns and rural areas. Covers trends from the 1960s.