Hausaland Tales from the Nigerian Marketplace

For a thousand years the Hausa people have been traders in sub-Saharan Africa, and most have remained a pastoral people.

Village life revolves around the weekly market days, when all the people come to the great open market to buy, sell, visit, gossip, and tell stories.

Gavin McIntosh, a young Canadian schoolteacher working with the Hausa, was fascinated by the stories he heard and by the relish with which they were told.

He gathered them from native tellers, and has translated and retold twelve of them here.

McIntosh has used fictional tellers -- Umaru the weaver, Musa the potter, Ibrahim the blacksmith, Amina the vegetable seller, and Tsalla the herbalist, among others -- to recreate the atmosphere of the marketplace.

In so doing, he has painted a vivid picture of an ancient culture in the process of modernisation, where the herdsman's handmade coal stove coexists with modern kerosene cookers, and the camel and the donkey coexist with the Mercedes.