The Learner

This is a short-story culled from my novel, A Weird Hope (2012). It was, again, published in   Voices from the Savannah (2010), an anthology of the National Association of Language and Literary Studies, Bayero University , Kano Chapter, vol. 3.  It's told to a girl, Shahada by her nanny, Gwaggo. The story is about one of the latter’s peer’s eventual marital life. GWAGGO CLEARED her throat—emulating her master's (Shahada’s father) habit. “The story began when we were in our early youth, now about five decades ago. Surely I won't use her right name because she still lives; thus, let me call her Ummi, as the house-hold name in the Hausa communities, was betrothed to a young man called Audu. “Audu?” she tried to recall the exact name. “Yes Audu.” The gentleman was a common farmer like his father who was also a great scholar in our village. One day, a fortnight to their wedding, one of the eminent wealthy men living in the village heard about it through one of his

Dr. Salisu Shehu Department of Education Bayero University, Kano muhammadtafawabalewa@gmail.com sshehu2002@yahoo.com With all sense of modesty, I can proclaim that I belong to a generation of Muslim activists that were intellectually nurtured and brought up, and are still being influenced in a number of ways by, among other things, the brilliant weekly write-ups and commentaries of the likes of Mallam Adamu Adamu. In fact, Mallam Adamu stands out quite prominently among them. Having grown up and had my primary education in a village in the late sixties through the seventies, and even while at the teachers’ college in the early eighties I was never used to reading, not to talk of appreciating the value of newspapers. I got introduced to reading them when I set my foot in Bayero University Kano, as a student in the mid-eighties. Once initiated, I immediately got hooked up to Mallam Ibrahim Sulaiman’s Column and Mallam Adamu’s DEFINITIONS-IN-HUMOUR, both in the Sunday