If a questioner asks you

In 1905 a British captain wrote that Hausa had no literature. Two years later Malam Shaihu, a scholar who knew no English, began filling hundreds of pages in Ajami.

Captain G. Merrick’s collection of Hausa proverbs was printed in London in 1905, and its introduction opens with a compliment. Hausa, he wrote, “abounds in proverbs and sayings.” A page later he wrote that Hausa “is not, strictly speaking, a written language, that is to say, it has no literature.” Near the back, in his notes on grammar, he said it again and added a word. Hausa was “an uncultivated language”.

He was not a careless man, and it is fair to say so. He asked for Hausa manuscripts in every town he visited, and he noticed that many more men could write than people supposed. Three times, he says, he was given a manuscript whose writer had chosen, unasked, to write in Hausa. One was a poem. The other two were letters that no scholar he showed them to could read. He watched learned men struggle with each other’s handwriting and concluded that whatever literature Hausa had was oral, made of “proverbs, simple poems, and war songs”. His preface even corrects his opening line, after readers told him of at least three earlier collections of Hausa proverbs.

Two years later, in 1907, a scholar named Malam Shaihu began to write. R. S. Rattray, the British officer who engaged him, described him as “entirely ignorant of English”. Over four years Shaihu filled many hundreds of sheets in Ajami, Hausa written in Arabic script, with tales, proverbs and accounts of customs, some of it translated from Arabic manuscripts. Between most of his words he set a small mark, Rattray says, “to facilitate easy reading”. In 1913 the university press at Oxford printed the pages in facsimile, his handwriting on one page and the Roman letters on the page opposite, as a textbook for students of the language. In the preface the Oxford anthropologist R. R. Marett called Shaihu’s hand “a masterpiece of artistic penmanship” and observed that “a considerable library of Hausa literature is already in existence”. That was eight years after the captain’s sentence.

Hausa writing did not begin with Shaihu. The language had been written in Ajami for centuries. Nana Asmaʼu, who died in 1864, wrote poetry in Hausa and Fulfulde and founded the Ƴan Taru, a circle of women teachers. In Niamey, the IRSH at Université Abdou Moumouni holds more than three thousand manuscripts, some of them in Hausa and Tamasheq Ajami.

Shaihu set out his explanations of customs as questions and answers. “If a questioner asked you what was done at the naming of an infant,” one of them begins, “you say.” His proverbs open with a definition. In Rattray’s English they are “words which are taken and jumbled up”, so that not every listener will catch their meaning. Merrick had complained that the meaning of a proverb was “very easily missed”, and that one man was known to have given three explanations of the same saying on three successive days. Shaihu’s pages suggest the tangle is deliberate.

Shaihu could not have read the captain’s sentence. It was printed in English, in a book about his own language that he had no way to open. That is the strange position of anyone judged by readers who have not read them. For Hausa the reply was already on paper, in Asmaʼu’s poems and in the many pages that never reached the captain, and it waited for readers willing to take the trouble.

The same mistake is easy to make today, and no captain is needed. Most AI systems have been built to recognise language mainly when it appears as text. In October 2026 Hausa was the main language of fewer than one website in a thousand, and Zarma did not appear on the language list of a major online translation service. A study of AI models in African languages, presented in 2025, found them weakest where the web holds the least text. From there it is a short step to calling a language hard, and the field already has a term that files such languages as short of resources. The verdict sounds technical. It is reached the way Merrick reached his, from whatever happened to arrive.

Among Shaihu’s proverbs is a short one on the subject, Hausa ba dabo ba ce, which Rattray translated as “Hausa is not a conjuring trick”, adding in brackets that it is easy to learn. The Hausa that is easiest to find also leaves things out. Rattray noticed that Shaihu’s pages showed vowel length clearly, and that a learned scholar would count a wrong length as a spelling mistake. Standard Hausa spelling in Latin letters, the script most Hausa is written in today, marks neither vowel length nor tone. Speech carries both. At Namu we build speech AI so that people can use technology by speaking, in their own language.

Both volumes have been scanned and can be read online. Shaihu’s handwriting faces the Roman letters page after page, and between most of his words sits the small mark he put there to make the reading easy.