The Yan Taru, a Curriculum in Verse

The problem the Yan Taru solved was distance. Learning in the caliphate was concentrated in scholarly households and towns, while most women lived in rural compounds they could not readily leave, and books were scarce, expensive and useless to anyone who could not read. Nana Asma'u composed instructional poetry in Fulfulde and Hausa that could be carried in the head, covering the obligations of prayer and purity, the life of the Prophet, the tenets of the faith and the biographies of exemplary women, and trained older women to travel between settlements teaching it. Those teachers, the Yan Taru or associated ones, were identified by a distinctive headdress that marked their standing and gave them safe passage.

A pupil learned by recitation, memorised what she had been taught, and could pass it on herself, so the network reproduced without any central institution to maintain. It survived the fall of the caliphate in 1903 and the whole colonial period, and Yan Taru groups operate today in northern Nigeria and among Nigerian communities in Europe and North America. As a piece of educational design it is worth attention on its own terms: a syllabus, a teacher corps, a credential and a delivery method, all built out of verse because verse was the only medium that would travel.