Hausa Songs in Algeria: sounds of trans-Saharan continuity and rupture

Abstract

What can North African music, as a system of embodied knowledge, tell us about the trans-Saharan movements of people and practices? What could it mean to listen to such a history of continuity and rupture? This essay details the existence of two bodies of Hausa songs still performed today in Algeria within the Dīwān of Sīdī Bilāl, a music and trance ritual tradition that originated, coalesced, and developed out of the trans-Saharan slave trade. These songs, categorised as the Hausawiyyn and Migzawiyyn suites, feature Hausa ritual objects, song texts, musical aesthetics, and spirit names from the Hausa bori (ceremony) pantheon among many other sub-Saharan echoes. However, dīwān communities rarely recognise these precise connections and simply consider them generically ‘sub-Saharan’ (sūdānī). Nevertheless, because the Hausa repertoires express the most purely sūdānī qualities of the entire ritual corpus, they serve as the primary example of both admirable ‘black African’ authenticity (and, therefore, ritual power) and risky alterity. Such viewpoints serve as a basis for crises about how practising Muslims should engage with the supposed ‘pre-Islamic’ origins of dīwān while preventing ancestors’ histories from disappearing. Informed by recent (2013–2016) first-hand ethnographic fieldwork with dīwān communities as well as both primary and secondary historical sources, this essay is not only the first research to document these Hausa songs in Algeria but also highlights how and why these songs matter in Algerian history and to local communities today.