Masculinity, Secrecy, and Survival among ’Yan Daudu in Northern Nigeria

Looking For Tukur

I came close to being attacked because I took a wrong turn.

Not dramatically wrong. Just far enough past the familiar geometry of stalls and voices, into a place where the market thinned and the air changed. Where people began to look at me instead of past me. I was looking for Tukur. I knew roughly where the ’yan daudu (singular: ɗan daudu¹) sold food, knew the direction, trusted that I could ask as I went.

That trust was misplaced.

The path narrowed, then seemed to end. The ground softened into something like a dead space. I turned, uncertain, and heard shouting behind me. Then footsteps. Then the unmistakable sound of metal sliding free of leather.

Three men first. Then more. One already had a dagger half unsheathed. The questions came quickly, edged with irritation: Who are you? Where are you going? What are you doing here?

In moments like this, innocence does not protect you. Legibility does.

I said I was looking for someone. I said his name. I described him badly—slim, light-skinned, cooks food somewhere around here. My hands betrayed me, moving too much as I tried to make myself understood.

It was enough.

“It is that ɗan daudu he is looking for,” a voice said from behind me.

The men paused.

“How do you know?” the older one asked.

“Did you not see how he was waving his hands?” the voice replied. “That is how they describe them.”

The space reorganised itself around this new information. Not relief. Not acceptance. Something closer to recalibration.

The older man turned to me. “Is the Tukur a ɗan daudu?”

“Yes,” I said.

The dagger was fully out now, but it stopped moving. Another command followed, firm and final: “We will not spill this one’s blood.”

Then directions. Clear, precise. Turn right. Then left. Go straight down. Their stalls are all there. You can’t miss it.

As I walked away, my legs unsteady, the same man called after me, almost conversational now. He explained why they had reacted as they did. When you see a grown man snooping around here, he said, you are bound to react.

What stayed with me was not only how close I had come to violence, but how narrowly it had been avoided—not by denial, but by naming. By placing my errand inside a category that, while despised, was also familiar. Contained. Managed.

The knowledge that I was looking for a ɗan daudu did not make me safe. But it made me understandable.

I found Tukur shortly after, exactly where they said he would be, sitting among others like him, selling food, laughing, alive in a way that did not spill beyond the boundaries of that small, sanctioned space. When I told him what had happened, he nodded. Unsurprised. Danger, for him, was not an interruption. It was part of the rhythm.

This was how I began to understand what it meant to live as a safe secret — safe only so long as the secret remained useful.

’Yan daudu have never been invisible in Hausa society. They are recognised, spoken about, joked about, sometimes feared. But they have survived by knowing precisely how far recognition may go—and where it must stop. They occupy a space neither fully inside nor fully outside the moral order, tolerated not because they are embraced, but because they are discreet, useful, and careful not to ask for more than the order can give.

Men come to them quietly. Some are married. Some are respected. Some pray five times a day and would never be seen publicly with the very people whose rooms they slip into after dark. What makes these encounters possible is not denial, but arrangement: the shared understanding that certain desires will be absorbed without being named, that certain truths will not travel.

To be a ɗan daudu, I learned, is not simply to desire men. It is to accept a feminised position in the economy of masculinity—to be the receptive partner, the keeper of secrets, the one who does not compete. It is to know that penetration carries meaning, that discretion carries more, and that survival depends on never confusing the two.

The danger I encountered that day was not an aberration. It was instruction. A lesson in how quickly bodies are read, how swiftly violence gathers, and how narrowly it can sometimes be redirected by the right word, spoken at the right moment.

This essay begins there not because that moment was exceptional, but because it revealed—in a few compressed minutes—the fragile grammar that has allowed ’yan daudu to exist at all: a grammar of gender, masculinity, secrecy, and silence.

That grammar is now under sustained pressure—from law, from reformist religion, from media, and from a growing moral impatience with ambiguity itself.

What is at stake is not only the lives of a vulnerable community, but the disappearance of an older social intelligence: the ability to make room for contradiction without demanding that it confess itself.

2. Position, Method, and Ethical Restraint

I do not come to this essay as a neutral observer.

I speak Hausa. I know how much meaning can be carried by a pause, a lowered gaze, a joke that arrives too early. I know what it means to greet properly, to kneel slightly, to let silence do the work that speech would ruin. This knowledge opens doors. It also imposes obligations.

Ethnographic proximity is not innocence. It does not absolve the writer of power; it sharpens awareness of it.

The fact that people speak to me at all, sometimes cautiously, sometimes generously, creates an ethical asymmetry that cannot be wished away. Access is not entitlement. Familiarity is not consent to exposure. To mistake intimacy for permission is one of the oldest errors of writing about other people’s lives, especially lives lived under pressure.

The worlds I write about here are not safely archived in the past. They continue, precariously, in the present. Names change. Places blur. The absence of sustained quotation is deliberate. In a context where repetition can function as evidence, restraint is a form of protection rather than erasure. Details are withheld not to manufacture mystery, but to prevent harm. In a moral landscape where being correctly identified can mean the difference between tolerance and violence, precision is not always an ethical good. Sometimes it is a liability.

This essay therefore practices restraint deliberately.

There are stories I could tell more fully. Scenes I could render more vividly. I do not. Not because they lack force, but because exposure is not the same thing as truth. Visibility, in this context, has always been a double-edged gift. It can illuminate. It can also destroy. To insist on total disclosure—especially for audiences distant from the risks involved—is to confuse revelation with care.

Lyricism, then, is not an aesthetic indulgence. It is also an analytic one. It allows structures that resist enumeration—fear, calibration, hesitation, humour—to appear as social facts rather than private feelings. It is, I hope, an ethical method.

It allows me to gesture without naming, to evoke without fixing, to trace the outline of lives that survive precisely because they resist being pinned down. Description here works sideways, not head-on. What remains unsaid is not an absence, but a form of attention. Silence, like speech, can be deliberate.

This method may frustrate readers trained to expect exhaustive documentation or categorical clarity. That frustration is instructive. It mirrors, in miniature, the moral impatience that increasingly governs public discourse around sexuality: the demand that lives be made fully legible so they can then be governed, corrected, redeemed, or erased.

Part of this essay’s work is to refuse that demand.

I am also wary of translation.

Many of the terms that structure this essay—kunya, harka, ɗan daudu—do not travel cleanly into English. To translate them too neatly would be to misrepresent them. To leave them entirely untranslated would be to turn them into aesthetic artifacts, stripped of consequence. I do neither. Instead, I allow these words to remain slightly resistant, insisting on their density, their refusal to collapse into equivalents drawn from Western moral and sexual taxonomies that do not quite fit.

This resistance matters most when writing about sexuality.

The temptation—particularly for global audiences accustomed to reading desire as identity—is to ask the wrong questions too quickly. Who is gay? Who is straight? Who is pretending? These questions flatten worlds that have long organised intimacy, masculinity, and discretion according to different logics. They assume that desire must always point inward, stabilise into a self, and seek recognition in order to be real.

Hausa moral worlds have not been organised that way.

Here, sexuality has historically been understood less as a declaration of who one is than as a practice embedded in reputation, role, and consequence. What matters is not only what is done, but where, with whom, and, critically, whether it becomes public. Shame is not necessarily attached to the act itself, but to its circulation. This is why intermediaries matter. Why indirection matters. Why jokes, hints, and silence do so much social work.

To write about ’yan daudu as if they are simply “gay men under another name” would be analytically lazy and ethically careless. (Also most of that work has already been done by the scholars I have researched for this and this clarification leans on much of that work). It would impose an identity logic that many of the people described here do not claim, do not need, and in some cases actively resist. It would also misrecognise the labour involved in survival: the careful management of visibility, the refusal to turn desire into declaration, the skill of living intelligibly without becoming exposed.

At the same time, I am not interested in romanticising discretion as freedom.

Survival under constraint can produce ingenuity, intimacy, even joy—but it also produces exhaustion, fear, and loss. To refuse the language of identity is not automatically to refuse injustice. Silence can be chosen; it can also be imposed. This essay holds that tension without resolving it prematurely.

Nor am I attempting to rescue ’yan daudu by translating them into frameworks that might make them more legible to international audiences. Rescue narratives often demand gratitude, coherence, and visibility in return. They risk reproducing the very moral pressure that has made discretion necessary.

What I am attempting instead is careful description.

To show how a society once made narrow, conditional room for people who did not fit its dominant ideals; how that room was maintained through labour, secrecy, humour, and social intelligence; and how it is now being closed by legal, religious, and moral regimes that mistake clarity for virtue and exposure for truth.

This essay is written in the belief that understanding does not require total disclosure, and that care can coexist with critique. If it succeeds, it will not make its subjects safer by naming them more loudly. It will make the world they inhabit more legible—without stripping it of the ambiguity that once allowed them to live.

3. Northern Nigeria Is Not One Moral Terrain

“Northern Nigeria” is a phrase that does too much work too quickly.

It is often used as if it names a single moral climate, a unified religious temperament, a coherent attitude toward gender, sexuality, and difference. In reality, it is a shorthand that flattens a region marked by sharp internal variation—legal, economic, religious, and social. To speak of the lives of ’yan daudu without attending to these variations is to misunderstand not only their vulnerability, but also the strategies that have made survival possible at all.

There is no single North.
There are only shifting moral geographies.

By moral geography, I mean not belief alone, but the spatial organisation of judgment: who watches whom, how quickly knowledge travels, where anonymity is possible, and where reputation accumulates like sediment. Moral life here is not evenly distributed. It thickens in some places and thins in others.

Consider Kano and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja—often invoked in the same breath, yet governed by profoundly different logics.

Kano is dense, historically layered, and deeply enmeshed in religious authority and communal surveillance. People are known by lineage, by neighbourhood, by the long memory of who belonged where and with whom. Moral reputation here is cumulative. It builds slowly and collapses quickly. The city remembers.

The adoption of Sharia-inspired penal codes in Kano State in the early 2000s did not invent conservatism. It formalised it. Long-standing social expectations were translated into enforceable categories, and religious morality patrols—hisbah—were given institutional backing. What changed was not only what was forbidden, but what became legible as a problem. Ambiguity narrowed. Discretion became riskier. Visibility acquired sharper edges.

Abuja, by contrast, is a city organised around arrival.

It is built on movement, bureaucracy, and partial anonymity. People come from Kano, Kaduna, Bauchi, Adamawa, Plateau, and all over the country. They come to work, to trade, to vanish slightly. Kinship here is thinner. Reputation is less genealogical, less anchored in the long memory of families and compounds. Surveillance still exists—through police, landlords, neighbours, municipal authorities—but it is episodic rather than intimate.

What matters more in the FCT is not who your father was, but whether you are drawing attention to yourself; whether your presence becomes inconvenient.

I have felt this difference in my own body.

There were things I could not have done comfortably in Kaduna—certain gestures, certain choices of presentation—that I did without much thought in Abuja. When I gave my first major public reading for Born on a Tuesday in the capital, my nails were painted in black matte varnish. It was not a declaration. It was not even a statement. It was simply something I knew I could do there, in that room, without it becoming the only thing people saw. I am not certain I would have made the same choice in Kaduna. I am certain I would not have made it in Kano.

That is what relative anonymity offers. Not freedom, exactly, but room.

This difference matters.

In Kano, danger is often ambient rather than episodic. It resides in familiarity: in neighbours who know your routines, in relatives who feel authorised to intervene, in the slow tightening of spaces where difference is tolerated only so long as it remains discreet.

In the FCT, danger is uneven. It flares and recedes. It depends on where you live, who you associate with, whether you are read as local or transient, whether you fit existing categories of suspicion. Anonymity offers room to breathe, but it also weakens protection. When trouble comes, it comes without buffers.

Kaduna and Plateau complicate this picture further. Their mixed religious demography produces variable thresholds of tolerance and risk. In some neighbourhoods, plurality diffuses attention. In others, it sharpens it. The same behaviour can pass unnoticed on one street and provoke outrage on another. What remains constant is not acceptance, but the need for calibration.

Law, too, operates unevenly across these terrains.

What is written in statutes is rarely decisive on its own. Enforcement depends on networks, discretion, and incentive: on whether a neighbour speaks, whether a family member complains, whether a police officer chooses to act, whether a religious authority decides to escalate. Silence can be protective. Testimony can be lethal.

For communities like the ’yan daudu, survival has long depended on managing the gap between law and practice—knowing when to blend into the ordinary fabric of life and when to withdraw from it entirely.

Colonial history shadows these arrangements.

British indirect rule did not simply preserve “custom.” It selected, froze, and codified particular moral norms—especially around sexuality, gender, and respectability—while delegating enforcement to local authorities. The result was a layered legal landscape in which colonial moral categories, Islamic jurisprudence, and local custom coexist uneasily. Contemporary moral policing does not emerge from a single source; it is the product of these overlapping inheritances, activated differently in different places.

Movement, under these conditions, becomes a form of moral navigation.

Many ’yan daudu relocate not because one place is safe and another is not, but because each offers a different configuration of risk. Kano offers history, familiarity, and dense networks, but also relentless scrutiny. Abuja offers anonymity and economic possibility, but thinner protection. To move is to trade one danger for another: kinship for anonymity, recognition for flexibility, rootedness for room to breathe.

This is why it is misleading to speak of flight or escape.
Movement does not eliminate danger. It redistributes it.

What movement also redistributes is loneliness. In Abuja, anonymity loosens surveillance but thins attachment. A person may pass unnoticed for years and still find no one willing to intervene when trouble arrives. NGO language offers vocabulary without kinship. Rent replaces obligation. Desire becomes more speakable but less held. For some ’yan daudu, the city offers breath. For others, it offers exposure without shelter. The moral intelligence required here is different: less about calibration within known worlds, more about improvisation among strangers. Freedom arrives without instruction, and risk without warning.

Understanding these distinctions is essential. The meaning of being a ɗan daudu shifts across space. What is tolerated in one city becomes unspeakable in another. What is managed quietly in one neighbourhood becomes grounds for intervention elsewhere. Interpretation precedes judgment. Geography shapes legibility.

Before asking what a ɗan daudu is—or how such lives came to be possible at all—we must first acknowledge that possibility itself is unevenly produced. It is shaped by where one stands, who is watching, and how much room a particular place still allows for ambiguity.

4. What “Ɗan Daudu” Means: Etymology, Belonging, and the Risk of Naming

The danger begins, often, with translation.

Words do not travel innocently across moral worlds. They arrive carrying assumptions that feel natural to those who use them fluently, but they land with force on the lives they are meant to describe.

In English, terms such as gay, homosexual, transgender, or queer announce themselves as identities—interior truths presumed to organise desire, selfhood, and politics. In Hausa, ɗan daudu does something slightly different. It does not ask who someone is in an interior or confessional sense. It situates a person within a moral and gendered order—marking where they stand², how they are read, and what kinds of relations become possible, or dangerous, as a result.

This distinction matters because naming, in this terrain, is never neutral. A word can be descriptive or corrosive, protective or prosecutable—sometimes all at once. To ask what ɗan daudu “means,” as if meaning were stable and transferable, is already to misunderstand how the term works.

The more useful question is: who uses the term, in what context, and with what consequences?

Among ’yan daudu themselves, the term functions as an in-group designation—elastic, situational, and strategic. It can name intimacy or hierarchy, familiarity or warning. It distinguishes those who are open from those who are careful, elders from newcomers, the visible from the “clothed”.

In everyday Hausa usage, ɗan daudu circulates in jokes, gossip, and casual insult: recognition without affirmation, familiarity without protection. In reformist religious discourse, the word hardens. It sheds its social nuance and becomes moral diagnosis. Under the state—especially in periods of intensified policing—it becomes a label capable of justifying surveillance, harassment, or arrest.

In public-health and NGO contexts, it is often displaced by bureaucratic abstractions such as MSM (men who have sex with men), which promise epidemiological clarity at the cost of erasing local grammars of gender, labour, and discretion.

The same word passes through radically different mouths, and each passage reshapes it.

Etymologically, ɗan in Hausa does not merely mean “son of.” It marks affiliation, orientation, habitual positioning within a social field: ɗan kasuwa (of the market), ɗan iska (of recklessness), ɗan bori (of spirit possession). It names relation rather than essence.

To be a ɗan daudu is therefore not to declare an inner truth about oneself, but to be recognised—sometimes tolerated, sometimes mocked, sometimes feared—as occupying a particular position within a gendered and moral economy.

The term daudu itself carries a longer and less settled archive than contemporary usage often admits.

Ethnographic work on Bori spirit possession records Daudu as a praise-name associated with a spirit figure within the Bori pantheon. Praise-names in this context are not decorative; they index relations between spirits, devotees, and the social roles that possession authorises. This lineage does not explain ɗan daudu fully, nor does it imply that all who bear the name are Bori practitioners. But it reminds us that the term emerges from a cosmology in which gender was already understood as permeable, situational, and multiple—long before modern sexual taxonomies demanded stable identities.

That plurality has since been narrowed. Under the combined pressures of colonial moral classification, reformist Islamic purification, and the modern state’s demand for legibility, words that once held multiple meanings were forced to carry a single burden. A designation that once marked position within a social and spiritual economy became a diagnosis. A role became a type. Ambiguity was recoded as deviance.

In Rudolf Gaudio’s influential ethnography in Allah Made Us - Sexual Outlaws In An Islamic African City, he foregrounds the social recognition of ’yan daudu as feminine men — understood not as identity, but as gendered positioning — an analytic emphasis that has sometimes hardened into a shorthand with its own risks.

It is within this context that the widespread characterisation of ’yan daudu as “feminine men” in the secondary literature, some of which cite Gaudio’s thorough work, must be approached carefully.³

This formulation does not appear in Rudolf Gaudio’s work as a fixed category or definitional label. Rather, it emerges through the condensation of his analytic emphasis—especially his sustained attention to the ways ’yan daudu are socially recognised as feminine in comportment, labour, speech, and sexual positioning. Gaudio’s ethnography is explicit that femininity here names a mode of social reading, not an interior identity or essence. His refusal of easy equivalence between ɗan daudu and “homosexual” was deliberate, careful, and methodologically generative.

Cooking, food vending, linguistic play, feminine names and pronouns—these appear not as eccentricities, but as structured practices embedded in everyday life. Without this brilliant intervention, much of what follows in this essay would not be possible.

And yet, in some secondary citation—particularly in comparative summaries, pedagogical shorthand, and NGO or human-rights reporting—Gaudio’s careful relational analysis is sometimes condensed into the descriptive phrase “feminine men.” It is this shorthand, rather than Gaudio’s method itself, that requires scrutiny. This shorthand might be faithful in intention, but it is riskier in effect. Detached from the relational grammar that grounds it, the phrase can begin to function as a stable descriptor rather than a situational reading—hardening what Gaudio keeps deliberately contingent.

Translation is never a mirror. It is an argument. To foreground femininity risks over-weighting style and affect at the expense of position. What distinguishes ’yan daudu is not simply that they appear feminine, but that they occupy a feminised location within the economy of masculinity: they do women’s work, assume receptive sexual roles, mediate transactions, keep secrets, and refuse masculine competition.

These are not expressive traits alone; they are structural placements with material consequences.

Moreover, when circulated without context, “feminine men” can quietly reintroduce identity thinking through the back door. For readers accustomed to treating gender as an interior truth, the phrase risks hardening into a type—a knowable kind of person—rather than remaining a contingent social role that can be entered, exited, concealed, recalibrated, or abandoned across a lifetime.

It also risks making ’yan daudu too easily knowable. It offers the comfort of recognition to outside audiences and, in doing so, risks reproducing the very clarity that modern regimes of law and reform weaponise. These lives have endured not because they were clearly defined, but because they were carefully unreadable.

None of this rejects earlier scholarship. I insist only that the afterlife of ethnographic language can acquire effects its authors did not intend, especially when complex social positions are condensed into translatable labels.

In some academic and human rights advocacy literature, ’yan daudu are also described as “gender non-conforming.” That term requires even greater scrutiny.

The phrase "gender non-conforming" travels badly here. It arrives carrying a quiet confidence, as if it names something obvious: a person whose outward expression deviates from an established norm, whose body fails to align with an interior truth, whose life can be understood as resistance to a rule. In many contexts, this language does useful work.

In Hausa moral worlds, it risks misunderstanding the very thing it seeks to describe. To speak of non-conformity is to presume a stable form. But gender in Hausa society has never been organised as a single template against which deviation is measured. It has been plural, ranked, and situational—less a rule than an arrangement, less an essence than a choreography.

What matters is not whether one conforms in the abstract, but whether one’s conduct remains intelligible within a given space: the market, the compound, the mosque courtyard, the rented room after dark. The same body may move differently across these sites without provoking alarm. The same voice may soften here and harden there.

This is not transgression. It is competence.

Gender here is not primarily expressive but positional. A man is not judged first by what he feels himself to be, but by how he stands in relation to labour, authority, shame, and restraint. He is assessed not for coherence of identity, but for appropriateness of placement. To cook is not to violate masculinity. To kneel is not to surrender it. To joke is not to confess. The question is never simply, does this conform? It is: does this hold? Does it stabilise the arrangement, or strain it beyond repair?

For me, the term gender non-conforming mistakes deviation for danger. ’Yan daudu have not historically been troubling because they failed to conform to a masculine ideal. Many men fail that ideal daily and remain unremarkable. What makes ’yan daudu legible is not deviation, but positioning: a feminised location within the economy of masculinity that is simultaneously useful, contained, and non-competitive. Their lives do not announce refusal. They absorb contradiction. They do not challenge authority. They make it workable. To name this as non-conformity is to misidentify the source of anxiety. The problem is not rule-breaking. It is reorganisation.

There is another risk, quieter but more consequential. Gender non-conforming carries with it an identity logic it does not admit. It suggests a person who is something, rather than someone who occupies a role. It implies continuity, declaration, recognisability. It asks gender to stabilise into a trait.

But ɗan daudu has never named an interior truth waiting to be spoken aloud. It names a placement within a moral field—one that can be entered, concealed, recalibrated, or abandoned across a lifetime.

A man may be known as a ɗan daudu in one season and not in another. He may be visible here and unreadable there. He may age into marriage, or into disappearance, without ever needing to resolve himself into an identity. To translate this as "gender non-conforming" is not merely imprecise. It risks making survival sound like self-expression.

Legibility is not neutral. In worlds governed by discretion, to be named too clearly is to be exposed. What endures here is not authenticity but calibration: knowing how far to go, when to withdraw, how to let meaning hover without landing.

Gender, like desire, survives by refusing to insist. None of this denies constraint. Lives lived through indirection are not free lives. Silence can be imposed as easily as it can be chosen. Ambiguity distributes risk unevenly, often cruelly. But to describe ’yan daudu as gender non-conforming is to impose a grammar of resistance where the work being done is one of endurance.

What these lives reveal is not a failure to conform, but a refusal to collapse: a way of inhabiting gender as relation rather than confession, a practice of living intelligibly without becoming fully legible.

In the present moment, especially where law demands clarity and media rewards exposure, this distinction is no longer academic. To call someone in Northern Nigeria gender non-conforming is to invite a form of recognition they may not survive. The language meant to protect can become another instrument of capture.

This essay therefore does not use that term out of care, not pedantry. It holds on to ’yan daudu because translation itself carries risk, and because some lives have endured not by standing out, but by standing just enough inside the frame to remain breathable. Here, gender does not ask to be declared. It asks to be managed.

Before turning to Bori more fully, it is necessary to sit with this instability. Meaning here does not reside in etymology alone, nor in any single scholarly account. It resides in use—in jokes and whispers, in markets and rooms, in rituals and arrests, in moments when naming saves a life and moments when it endangers one.

The next section enters Bori not as an origin myth that explains everything, but as a living world in which gender has long been practised as porous, rhythmic, and shared—a world that made such lives imaginable before modern clarity tried to render them impossible.

5. Bori: Spirits, Rhythm, and the Long Memory of Gendered Porosity

Bori is often described too quickly.
Sometimes it is dismissed as residue: something pre-Islamic, superstition clinging to the margins of a “more serious” faith. At other times it is conscripted as an origin story, forced to explain everything that appears anomalous in Hausa society: spirit possession, gender crossing, unruly bodies, excessive joy. Both gestures misunderstand what Bori has been and what it has done.

Bori is not an explanation for ’yan daudu. It is merely one of the worlds in which such lives were already imaginable.

But the contrast matters. In Bori, permeability often arrives as ritual. It has a beginning. It has witnesses. It has an ending. The drums call it forth, the ceremony holds it, the stopping of rhythm returns the body to ordinary life. What is permitted is permitted within a frame.

For many ’yan daudu, by contrast, permeability is not episodic. It is not confined to trance or ceremony. It is lived as intermediacy: daily, negotiated, exposed. In markets, kitchens, rented rooms, back courtyards. Not as spectacle, but as arrangement. Not as a temporary permission, but as a working position within the economy of masculinity. Bori does not give us a template for identity. It gives us something older and more useful: precedent. Proof that the body can carry more than one grammar at once, and that gender need not be sealed.

Historically, Bori has taken many forms across Hausaland and its neighbouring regions, shaped by court politics, local cosmologies, trade routes, and changing relations with Islam. It predates Islam in the region, but it has also coexisted with Islam for centuries—sometimes accommodated, sometimes ridiculed, sometimes violently suppressed. It is neither a frozen “traditional religion” nor a simple site of resistance. It is a living cosmology organised around spirits (iskoki; singular: iska), possession, music, and embodied knowledge, continually reshaped by the moral regimes it inhabits.

To enter a Bori gathering is to encounter a different organisation of the body.

Sound arrives first. Drums repeat themselves into insistence, into patience, into command. Rhythm does not hurry. It circles. It waits. The music is not accompaniment. It is instruction. It teaches hips where to go, shoulders how to loosen, feet when to yield. It teaches the body that it can be taken over, and that this, too, can be lawful.

Spirits in Bori are not abstractions. They have names, histories, preferences, hierarchies. They are gendered, social, temperamental. Some are imperious. Some flirt. Some mock. Possession is never merely individual. It is relational: between spirit and medium, between medium and audience, between rhythm and flesh. When a spirit arrives, the body is reassigned. Voice shifts. Gait changes. Authority appears where it was not before.

What matters here is not spectacle, but permission.

Possession authorises what everyday life restricts. A man may speak in a woman’s register. A woman may command men. A body may exaggerate what it is usually required to contain. But permission is not limitless. Bori is not chaos. It is disciplined. There are priests and priestesses, elders and novices, sanctions and corrections. Spirits are invoked and dismissed. The dance ends. Ordinary roles return.

This boundedness is crucial.

In Bori, gender permeability is often episodic. It belongs to ritual time. It arrives with the drums and recedes when they stop. For many ’yan daudu, by contrast, permeability is not confined to trance or ceremony. It is lived daily. It is practised as skill.

This is why Bori mattered not only as ritual, but as social refuge.

Historically, Bori compounds gathered those who did not sit comfortably within dominant kinship and moral structures. These were not enclaves of rebellion. They were working households. In a single compound one might find a Bori priestess, a divorced woman, a woman fleeing an arranged marriage, a discreet sex worker, a young man whose manner unsettled others, children running between rooms, drums stacked against a wall, pots blackened by daily use. Food was cooked. Money circulated. Clients arrived and left. Gossip travelled. Care was administered. Discipline was enforced.

These were ecosystems, not utopias.

What brought these lives together was not shared identity, but shared precarity. Many were women whose independence made them morally ambiguous. Many were karuwai, whose labour rendered them economically necessary and socially despised. Some were unlucky, ill, widowed, or simply excessive in ways respectable life could not absorb. And among them were ’yan daudu: men whose labour, affect, and social alignment placed them closer to women’s worlds than to the masculine hierarchies that promised protection only to those who competed successfully. (The women later called karuwai were not yet reducible to a single moral category; they were simply women living outside marriage, inside necessity.)

Bori did not so much as abolish stigma as it managed it.

Within these compounds, possession could confer authority. A woman dismissed elsewhere could speak with a spirit’s voice. A man whose manner unsettled could be valued for humour, organisation, or skill. Gender ambiguity was not celebrated as principle. It was absorbed as practice. Excess was not eliminated. It was housed.

That housing had limits.

Power differentials persisted. Conflicts sharpened. Hierarchies reproduced themselves even here. Bori did not liberate. It accommodated. But accommodation matters. It matters because reformist Islam found Bori intolerable not only for theological reasons, but for architectural ones. Bori clustered too many exceptions in one place. It blurred boundaries reform demanded be sharp.

Where reform sought sorting, Bori practised gathering.

Many ’yan daudu moved in and out of these spaces. Not all were Bori practitioners. Not all believed in spirits. But the compounds mattered. They offered models of living where feminised labour was not immediately ridiculous, where gender play did not automatically invite punishment, where bodies that carried excess could still be fed, housed, and recognised.

This coexistence extended into religious life. Many who danced at night prayed at dawn. What might appear as contradiction from outside was, for those living it, calibration: knowing which grammar applied where, and when to switch.

Bori made such calibration thinkable.

It did not guarantee safety. It did not promise permanence. But it sustained a form of social intelligence: the capacity to hold difference without demanding confession. When Bori weakened, what disappeared was not only ritual, but an infrastructure of coexistence.

What followed was not purity. It was exposure.

6. Who Is a Karuwa? Autonomy, Shame, and the Narrowing of a Word

One of the words that sits at the centre of this choreography of shame and desire is karuwa.

I grew up hearing it long before I understood its weight. A whisper tossed at a laughing girl. A warning murmured to a daughter. Sometimes a careless insult hurled at a woman whose walk, voice, or clothes unsettled the fragile order of things. In my childhood imagination, karuwa meant one thing: a woman who had crossed an invisible line.

Much later, I learned the word carried a longer and more complicated history, one that reveals more about Hausa moral anxiety than about the women it names.

Karuwa did not begin as a simple synonym for prostitute, nor did it originally designate a clearly bounded profession. Linguistically, the term appears to have entered Hausa through contact with Kanuri, where karua referred to women living outside the strict architecture of marriage. These were women not formally under the authority of a husband, often economically self-supporting, and socially ambiguous. Some scholars trace the term further back to Arabic roots associated with sexual impropriety, though even there the meaning was never singular or precise.

Early Hausa dictionaries reflect this ambiguity. In Bargery and Abraham, karuwa does not settle neatly on sex work. It stretches. The word is used to describe a harlot, but also a profligate man, a thief, a paramour, even a destitute or socially disreputable person. It functioned less as a professional label than as a moral category: a name for those who lived beyond the sanctioned perimeter of respectability.

Crucially, this category was not always exclusively female.

Over time, however, karuwa narrowed. As Hausa societies became more tightly organised around marriage, lineage, and increasingly reformist moral regimes, the word shed its earlier elasticity and fastened itself almost entirely to women. And not to all women, but to women whose autonomy was visible.

Widows who refused to remarry. Divorced women who did not retreat quietly back into family compounds. Traders, performers, beauty workers. Women who received gifts from lovers. Women who chose where they lived, when they slept, whom they entertained.

Across Kanuri and Hausa societies from Niger through northern Nigeria, there existed recognisable karuwa milieus: women living outside marriage as an alternative life path. Some sold sex. Many did not. What united them was not prostitution, but independence from patriarchal supervision.

This distinction matters.

To translate karuwa simply as sex worker is to miss what made these women threatening. Their danger did not lie primarily in sexual exchange, but in autonomy. They were women whose lives were not fully absorbed by lineage, whose desires were not entirely hidden, whose economic survival did not depend on marriage. As in many societies, autonomy with a female face quickly came to be framed as moral disorder.

The name hardened.

What once described a broad zone of moral ambiguity collapsed into a single accusation. Karuwa ceased to name acts and began to police visibility. It no longer mattered what a woman did. What mattered was that desire could be seen, suspected, or narrated.

Today, to call a woman karuwa is to injure her socially. A girl who laughs too loudly. A woman who walks without deference. A wife who touches her husband’s hand in public. A student sitting too close to a boy at dusk. The insult functions like a blade. It cuts at reputation, and in a culture governed by kunya, reputation once torn rarely repairs.

Karuwa punishes not sex, but legibility.

This is where the word connects to everything else in this essay.

In Bori compounds, women later named karuwai, spirit mediums, divorced women, and ’yan daudu often lived side by side. They were not bound by shared identity, but by shared precarity. These were spaces where women whose respectability was already compromised could survive without pretending otherwise. Where gendered labour and erotic ambiguity were folded into the ordinary work of living. Bori did not redeem karuwai. It accommodated them.

As moral language tightened, that accommodation grew fragile.

The narrowing of karuwa preceded the tightening of law. By the time Sharia codes and modern policing arrived, the word was already sharpened. The social imagination had done its work. A category existed. A body could be named.

And yet, buried inside the insult is a fossil of the older meaning: a woman answerable first to herself. Language remembers even when culture pretends not to.

When I hear karuwa now, flung casually in arguments, wielded by elders to discipline younger women, whispered by preachers anxious about desire, I hear centuries layered inside it. Fear of women who wander. Fear of women who choose. Fear of bodies not supervised by lineage, husband, or mosque.

In its deepest register, karuwa is not about sex. It is about control.

And yet, people continue to live otherwise.

When I think of the women in Mary F. Smith’s Baba of Karo, with their secret lovers and coded arrangements; of karuwai who built economies out of attention and care; of ’yan daudu navigating desire with fluency born of necessity; of wives who reserve their boldest selves for nightfall, I see not deviance, but a quiet archive of refusal. A reminder that culture is always larger than the words designed to discipline it.

In my own memory, karuwa becomes something else. Not a slur. Not a sentence. A diagnostic. It reveals the moral machinery through which Hausa society has long sought to contain women’s autonomy.

Desire here is never just desire.
It is language. It is reputation. It is fire under a clay pot.

The parallel with ɗan daudu is not exact, but it is instructive. Both names began as broad moral categories rather than fixed identities. Both narrowed under anxiety into accusations. Both came to police visibility more than acts.

Yet the burden has never been evenly shared.

Where a karuwa is condemned for autonomy, a ɗan daudu may be tolerated so long as he remains useful, discreet, and non-competitive. Women who step outside marriage threaten lineage. Men who feminise themselves threaten masculinity only when they insist on recognition.

The result is an uneven economy of shame.

Women are punished for choosing. ’Yan daudu survive by refusing to choose too loudly.

What unites them is not deviance, but labour: the work of living in the cracks, of desiring without insisting, of existing in a world that watches closely for those who cross the wrong line too visibly.

7. Internal Difference: Hierarchy, Passing, Marriage, and the Limits of Gender Crossing

If karuwa reveals how women’s autonomy is disciplined, ’yan daudu reveal how masculinity survives by redistributing contradiction.

It is tempting, especially from a distance, to speak of ’yan daudu as if they form a single, coherent type: visible, feminised, marginal, precarious. This temptation must be resisted. What binds ’yan daudu together is not sameness of life or belief, but a shared negotiation with masculinity under unequal conditions. They are read in similar ways by others, exposed to overlapping dangers, and disciplined by the same moral regimes. Beyond this, their lives diverge sharply.

Difference here is more structural than incidental.

One of the most decisive fault lines among ’yan daudu is visibility. Some live openly within recognisable networks, selling food in markets, socialising publicly with other ’yan daudu, adopting feminine names or registers of speech in particular spaces. Others live quietly, known only to a few, carefully modulating their presentation depending on place, audience, and moment. Rudolf Gaudio documents this variability repeatedly in Kano, noting that not all men who engage in daudu practices accept the label or the exposure that can accompany it.

Among Hausa speakers, the phrase ’yan daudu masu riga (singular ɗan daudu mai Riga) circulates to describe those who can pass as conventionally masculine when needed. The phrase itself means, “clothed ‘Yan Daudu”, ‘Yan Daudu who are able to disguise their femininity and live closeted lives, so to speak. Passing here is not deception in the moral sense. It is calibration. It involves learned techniques: lowering the voice, stilling the hips, choosing silence where speech would draw attention. It is labour, often invisible, often exhausting. As with women navigating accusations of karuwanci, it is not behaviour itself but legibility that determines danger.

Hierarchy also structures these lives.

Within daudu worlds, age matters. Elders, often referred to as uwa, exercise authority. They mediate disputes, enforce norms of discretion, and correct younger ’yan daudu whose flamboyance risks collective exposure. Care and discipline coexist. Mistakes are remembered. Recklessness is rarely forgiven quickly. Marginality does not abolish power. It redistributes it.

Class further differentiates experience. Many ’yan daudu cluster in feminised occupations such as cooking, catering, and food vending. These forms of work provide social intelligibility and daily protection, but they also intensify visibility. Educated ’yan daudu, students, or those connected to salaried or NGO work often face a different configuration of risk: less market exposure, greater mobility, but weaker embeddedness in dense networks of mutual protection. Class does not eliminate danger. It reshapes it.

Sexual practice, too, is heterogeneous. While many ’yan daudu describe themselves as receptive with men, this is neither universal nor fixed across a life course. Some engage in harka, or sex for money. Others refuse it. Some insist on strict receptivity. Others are more flexible. These differences are not morally neutral within daudu worlds. They are discussed, joked about, and judged, often through humour that carries disciplinary force. Desire is internally stratified.

Religion introduces another axis of differentiation. Contrary to caricature, ’yan daudu are not uniformly aligned with Bori. Some participate actively. Others attend occasionally. Many distance themselves entirely, cultivating visible Islamic piety as a form of protection. Prayer, fasting, and mosque attendance function not only as theological commitments, but as reputational resources. A man known for discipline and restraint is harder to denounce convincingly, even when rumours circulate.

Marriage must be understood within this ecology.

Some ’yan daudu marry women. This fact unsettles readers who expect sexuality to move in straight lines. But within Hausa moral logics, marriage is not a declaration of desire. It is a social technology. It repairs respectability, stabilises reputation, and provides protection against the vulnerabilities of age. For some, marriage marks recalibration rather than renunciation: a shift in visibility, not necessarily in intimacy.

Marriage can function as cover, compromise, care arrangement, or negotiated truce with family pressure. Some married ’yan daudu continue same-sex relations discreetly. Others withdraw from visible daudu life altogether. What matters is not sincerity in a confessional sense, but intelligibility. Marriage restores legibility within dominant scripts of adulthood, provision, and responsibility, even when it coexists with other forms of desire.

This does not render marriage benign. It can produce harm, particularly for women whose husbands’ lives are managed through silence rather than honesty. But analytically, marriage must be treated as movement within constraint, not as moral resolution. To read it otherwise is to impose an identity logic that does not belong here.

Women remain the most tightly policed terrain in these negotiations.

Some ’yan daudu maintain relationships with women, emotional, sexual, or both. Such arrangements are frequently the subject of rumour and anxiety. Hausa talk sometimes frames these relationships as evidence of disorder, occasionally invoking the blunt language of “lesbianism.” What unsettles here is not sameness of anatomy, but the fear that gender boundaries are dissolving too completely. Feminisation may be tolerated so long as it does not threaten male dominance. Women’s autonomy triggers a different, sharper anxiety.

This asymmetry matters. It reveals that moral panic is less about sex than about control.

Taken together, these differences clarify the limits of gender crossing in Hausa moral worlds. Permeability is tolerated when it remains managed, useful, and non-competitive. It becomes dangerous when it insists, when it accumulates, when it refuses to resolve into recognisable roles.

Again, ’yan daudu are not a community because they are identical. They are a community because they are read similarly, disciplined similarly, and compelled to develop shared grammars of discretion, humour, and survival, while living very different lives within those constraints.

This internal differentiation is not a weakness of the category. It is its condition of possibility.

It is necessary, at this point, to name what has been implicit throughout. Women are not merely the context within which ’yan daudu are read. They are active participants in the moral labour that sustains this social world. Women interpret, tolerate, discipline, and sometimes shield ’yan daudu, often in ways shaped by their own precarious negotiations with shame and respectability. In markets and compounds, ’yan daudu may function as allies, buffers, confidants, or competitors, depending on circumstance. A woman whose reputation is already fragile may rely on a ɗan daudu’s discretion as much as he relies on hers.

Women are not simply the terrain on which these negotiations occur. They are among their most skilled regulators. They decide when a ɗan daudu is harmless, when he is useful, when he is irritating, when he has overstepped. They interpret tone, posture, intention. They warn quietly. They withdraw protection silently. Their moral labour is rarely named as power, yet it is decisive. Without it, intermediacy would collapse much faster.

This is the hinge.

Women’s autonomy threatens lineage directly. Men’s feminisation threatens masculinity only when it insists. The tolerance extended to ’yan daudu is therefore not a sign of greater generosity toward gender fluidity, but a reflection of where punishment is most efficiently placed. This essay follows masculinity not because women’s lives matter less, but because masculinity is the hinge on which tolerance and punishment turn. Women absorb sharper sanctions. ’Yan daudu survive, unevenly, by refusing to demand what women are denied outright.

Tracing masculinity here is a way of locating the hinge of tolerance, not of assigning value. Women’s lives absorb harsher sanctions precisely because that hinge turns against them first.

8. Pronouns, Names, And The Art of Crossing Back

If English-language debates about pronouns in the West often frame gendered reference as a recent cultural rupture, Hausa reminds us that grammar has long been a daily, unavoidable negotiation of gender.

Hausa marks gender insistently in ordinary speech. Third-person singular pronouns are gendered—shi (“he”) and ita(“she”)—and gender does not appear only once per sentence and then recede. It returns through agreement patterns in adjectival and nominal predication, through demonstratives and modifiers, through the small grammatical decisions that accumulate across everyday talk. One does not simply mention a person; the sentence keeps circling back to gender, re-marking it again and again. There is no neutral default to hide inside.

This is what makes the linguistic practices of ’yan daudu so analytically revealing.

Within trusted in-group spaces, ’yan daudu commonly refer to one another using feminine pronouns and feminine forms of address. A fello ɗan daudu friend is not aboki(male friend) but ƙawa (female friend)—a word that names not merely friendship but shared sociality in women’s worlds. To call another ƙawa is to affirm intimacy, alignment, and mutual recognition. It is a way of saying: here, we are legible to one another as women among women, even when our bodies are read otherwise outside this circle.

This use of ita and ƙawa is not occasional performance. It is sustained grammar. In a language that continually forces speakers to choose between “he” and “she,” choosing she repeatedly is neither accidental nor symbolic alone. It is a disciplined linguistic practice that creates an interior social world, a room built out of pronouns, names, and shared understanding.

Names matter here as much as pronouns.

It is not unusual for the same person to move between names depending on space, audience, and moral temperature. A man may be Mohammed in the mosque, in the market, in dealings that require public masculine legibility, and Aisha among ’yan daudu, among lovers who know how to listen, and among women who have earned access to that circle of trust. These names are not masks and not confessions. They are instruments of placement. They answer not the question “who am I, really?” but “how must I be read here, now, by these people?”

What matters is not the crossing alone, but the return.

The ability to move back into masculine reference—back to shi, back to Mohammed—is not a failure of femininity. It is an expression of kunya understood as social intelligence rather than mere shame. It signals an awareness of borders: which spaces tolerate what, which ears turn language into accusation, which kinds of intimacy must not be audible everywhere. Switching pronouns, switching names, lowering the voice, stiffening the gait—these are not denials of self but techniques of survival in a moral world where grammar itself can endanger.

And then, among ƙawaye (plural for ƙawa), the door opens again.

The feminine pronouns return. The women’s names surface without irony. Laughter loosens the sentence. What appears from the outside as contradiction is, from within, competence: the ability to inhabit gender relationally, to let it shift with space without insisting that any single register swallow the others whole.

This is why it is misleading to read these practices through imported frames that assume gendered language must always signal identity declaration or political stance. The use of ita among ’yan daudu predates contemporary Western battles over pronouns by decades, if not longer. It is not an argument addressed to the world. It is a language spoken to one another, sustained by trust, and withdrawn when trust is absent.

Crucially, ’yan daudu do not live entirely inside femininity.

They identify one another’s femininity, name it, and play with it—but they also keep a door open to masculinity, stepping through it when circumstances demand. That door is not imaginary. It is held open by grammar, by naming, by the disciplined ability to read a room before a room reads you. This is not fluidity as freedom. It is permeability as labour.

The linguistic artistry here lies not only in crossing gendered registers, but in crossing back without rupture. Few social skills are more difficult. Few are more misunderstood.

Pronouns, then, are not merely references. They are instruments of calibration. Names are not labels but coordinates. Together, they form a quiet grammar through which ’yan daudu manage legibility—allowing femininity to circulate where it is held, and masculinity to reassert itself where it protects.

This grammar prepares the ground for the next problem the essay must face.

Because language alone does not sustain life. It must be anchored in work, in economy, in the everyday labour that gives bodies a place to stand. The same skill that governs pronouns and names reappears in how ’yan daudu earn, host, cook, and mediate—how they enter women’s work without fully abandoning masculinity, and how labour itself becomes another register for crossing and return.

That is where we turn next.

9. Doing Women’s Work: Labour, Economy, and the Quiet Politics of Masculinity

Work, in Hausa society, is never only work. A task places a body. A livelihood writes a sentence in the grammar of gender.

To cook is not merely to cook. It is to stand in a particular moral light.
To sell food is not simply to earn money. It is to inhabit a space—whether a market, doorway, or courtyard—already dense with expectations: who should be there, how they should move, what kind of voice they should use, how much laughter is permitted, how much visibility is too much.

This is why it matters that so many ’yan daudu cluster around what is broadly understood as women’s work.

Rudolf Gaudio notes that cooking and serving food are considered women’s work in Kano, and that ’yan daudu themselves describe a wider constellation of practices they recognise as feminine: songs, dances, gestures, modes of address. The point is not simply that they do feminised labour. It is that labour becomes the vehicle through which other gendered possibilities can be practised, explained, tolerated—and, when necessary, policed.

Labour here is both economic and symbolic.

It confers and withdraws legitimacy within a social field. Pierre Bourdieu’s language of symbolic capital helps name this process, but Hausa social life already performs it daily. One does not merely work; one performs one’s place in the order of things. Certain kinds of labour permit warmth, humour, softness without immediately provoking sanction. Others do not.

Here lies the paradox that structures survival.

Women’s work is often treated as low prestige, yet it is indispensable. It is everywhere and expected to remain modest. This contradiction creates a narrow corridor in which certain forms of difference can endure. A body may be expressive in the kitchen in ways that would invite punishment in the mosque courtyard. A voice may soften over a pot of soup and be read as hospitality. The same voice, among men, may be read as provocation.

So why do ’yan daudu cluster here?

Part of the answer is structural. In gendered spaces organised around lineage and masculine authority, many routes to economic security pass through male networks: apprenticeships, patronage, inheritance, the quiet credibility of a father’s name. For those already marked as anomalous among men (feminised, gossiped about, suspected) these routes can be narrower, more hostile, or more expensive to enter. Women’s work, by contrast, often requires less capital to begin, less formal endorsement, less lineage permission. It occupies the cracks where survival becomes possible.

But the deeper answer is political.

To do women’s work is to occupy a feminised position in public without claiming masculine authority. This matters because hegemonic masculinity is not only a set of traits. It is a system of boundary maintenance.

Raewyn Connell’s framework in Masculinities helps articulate what Hausa life already enacts: an idealised masculinity—provider, disciplined, penetrative, respectable—surrounded by other masculinities that either benefit from it, defer to it, or threaten it.

Many ’yan daudu survive, in part, because they are not read as rivals to that ideal. Their labour helps sustain the social world in which hegemonic masculinity remains intact.

They feed people.
They host.
They soften social space.

They are useful.

Usefulness is not freedom.
But it buys time.

Markets are therefore central to this story. They are public yet gendered, open yet regulated. Scholarship on Hausa women has long shown that even within norms of seclusion, women develop complex economic strategies—sometimes public, often mediated, always negotiated. Hausa gender orders are sustained not only through restriction but through improvisation. The same logic applies, under different pressures, to ’yan daudu. Their work is a negotiation with the gaze: visible enough to trade, not so visible as to provoke.

Here labour functions both as protection and exposure.

A stall can be destroyed. A customer base can evaporate. A food seller is vulnerable not only to police action but to rumour. The violence here is rarely spectacular. It is procedural. Someone speaks the word ɗan daudu too loudly. Someone advises others not to buy from a particular stall. Someone reports a gathering. Someone decides that discretion has failed. The market, which grants visibility, also provides the stage for humiliation.

Periods of intensified moral enforcement—hisbah patrols, Sharia-era policing, broader climates of suspicion—therefore have economic consequences that are easy to miss if attention is focused only on arrests. Intolerance does not only punish bodies. It punishes livelihoods. Raids are visible. Economic attrition is quieter, slower, and often more devastating.

There is another kind of labour ’yan daudu perform, one that rarely registers as work because it leaves no receipts: mediation.

In Keepers of Secrets, I describe ’yan daudu as managers of information, brokers in a social economy where many desires must not announce themselves. Similarly we learn from Gaudio’s work that the worlds surrounding karuwanci and same-sex relations are not reducible to sex alone. They include food, conversation, humour, games, and atmosphere. What is exchanged is often not a body, but a temporary suspension of vigilance.

In this economy, ’yan daudu frequently act as intermediaries: between men and women, between men and other ’yan daudu, between desire and its disguises. To call this “pimping” imports a moral frame that does not fit. This is facilitation in a society where direct asking can be shameful, where approach must often be indirect, where kunya requires that certain things be done sideways. They know which questions must not be asked.

This also explains why hegemonic men may trust them. Not because of approval, but because ’yan daudu have mastered discretion. They understand how to make desire possible without forcing it into speech. They protect other people’s dignity, often at the expense of their own.

Play, in this world, is not the opposite of seriousness. It is one of its most refined instruments. Joking, exaggeration, flirtation, and deliberate theatricality soften edges and redirect attention. A high voice can be dismissed as comedy. A swaying walk can be read as entertainment. Laughter allows everyone to pretend that nothing consequential is happening. What appears as excess is often precision: knowing exactly how far to go, and how to retreat behind humour when attention sharpens.

But usefulness has a cost.

When one’s place in society is justified primarily by service to other people’s respectability, dignity becomes conditional. Protection lasts only as long as discretion holds. Visibility becomes dangerous when it is read as excess. This is the same logic that haunts the word karuwa: autonomy reinterpreted as threat, survival recoded as moral failure.

Class sharpens these vulnerabilities unevenly. A street vendor is exposed differently from a caterer with private clients. A ɗan daudu with education or NGO-linked employment may be less dependent on public markets and more able to relocate, but also more isolated from dense local networks of protection. Economic position shapes not only income, but risk.

What emerges here is not simply marginality, but a patriarchal bargain. Not identical to those described elsewhere, but recognisably structured by the logic Deniz Kandiyoti identified: the exchange of certain freedoms for certain protections within constraint. For many ’yan daudu, the bargain is this: accept feminised labour and a non-competitive position; protect other men’s secrets, especially those you have sex with; and a narrow corridor of managed ambiguity may remain open.

The corridor is not a home. But it allows for some air.

Masculinity here does not survive by resolving contradiction, but by arranging who carries it.

This is the ground on which the next section stands.

10. Sex without Identity: Hausa Logics of Desire

The questions some rush to ask are often the wrong ones.
Who is gay?
Who is straight?
And who is pretending?

In the Hausa moral worlds that shape the lives described here, the decisive questions have historically been different.

What was done?
With whom?
In what role?
And, most importantly, did it travel from the private to the public?

Desire has not traditionally been asked to account for the self. It has been asked to account for consequence.

This is not because Hausa society is uniquely permissive or uniquely repressive. It is because sexuality has long been organised less as interior truth than as social practice.

Desire does not announce identity. It enters an already existing moral field structured by reputation, gendered role, and the management of visibility. What matters is not what one wants, but whether what one does can be absorbed without disturbance.

Rudolf Gaudio’s important work in Kano remains indispensable precisely because it refuses to collapse ’yan daudu into a sexual identity category. What he documents is not a hidden population awaiting recognition, but a thick social world in which erotic acts appear alongside labour, friendship, boredom, joking, money, and care. Sex is present, but it does not organise the whole. It does not automatically harden into selfhood. It does not require declaration in order to exist.

This distinction matters.

Within these moral grammars, acts do not necessarily crystallise into identities. A man may have sex with men and remain socially intelligible as a man. What determines the outcome is not the object of desire, but the position one occupies within the act, and the fate of the knowledge afterward.

Here, penetration matters less as anatomy than as narration.

Penetration assigns direction. It stabilises asymmetry. It allows an encounter to be placed within a recognisable order of gendered roles. Within Hausa masculinity, the penetrative position functions as a safeguard. It permits certain acts to be absorbed without fracturing masculine standing. Penetrative receptivity, by contrast, is feminised and therefore dangerous to reputation. It is the receptive position that risks being read not as something one did, but as something one is.

One anecdote explains this a bit. I once heard of a man who walked in on his younger brother naked with another young man. Disgusted and shocked, he ran out of the room and called out to his brother. Panting, he glowered at his brother but made sure to ask the question that would decide how intense he would let his anger get: Were you penetrating or the one being penetrated? Because for this older brother, having his sibling being the receptive one would present a peculiar set of problems.

Because men, real men, penetrate. They are not penetrated.

This asymmetry explains much that otherwise appears contradictory.

It explains how some men who seek sex with ’yan daudu do not understand themselves as gay or bisexual in any meaningful sense. It explains how marriage does not necessarily conflict with same-sex practice. It explains why wives and children stabilise masculine standing even when other desires circulate quietly. Masculinity here is preserved not by denying sex, but by organising it.

Marriage, in this sense, goes beyond intimacy to reputational architecture.

This is why secrecy is not an individual failing but a collective arrangement. Shame is not lodged primarily in the act itself. It is lodged in circulation. Who knows. Who speaks. Who repeats. Kunya does not forbid desire outright. It disciplines its movement.

Within this arrangement, ’yan daudu become erotically legible in a specific way. Their feminised positioning renders them non-competitive. They do not threaten lineage. They do not contest masculine authority. They understand indirection. They know how to make desire possible without forcing it into speech. Their usefulness lies not in availability, but in discretion.

Language does much of this work long before sex appears. ’Yan daudu often become acute listeners and agile speakers, not because they enjoy language for its own sake, but because language here is shelter. They learn how to answer without answering, how to joke without confessing, how to let meaning hover just long enough to be useful and then dissolve. Pronouns slide. Names are playful. Metaphors do the work direct statements cannot. Meaning is distributed across tone, pause, and implication. What survives is not truth as declaration, but truth as manoeuvre.

Management, not approval.

But management has limits, and those limits are revealed most clearly in what is called kifi.

Kifi, (not to be confused with the word with the same spelling that means fish) draws on Hausa verbal forms meaning to flip, to turn over, to invert. It names arrangements that fail to settle into recognisable roles. It is sometimes used colloquially to describe relationships between women, but this is not an identity claim. It is a structural analogy.

I learned about kifi not as theory, but as something obvious.

Walking one evening in Sabon Gari, Magaji—a “clothed” ɗan daudu, one of those who move through public life in recognisably masculine form—explained to me that some ’yan daudu became sexually involved with one another. He described it without outrage, without alarm, and then dismissed it with laughter.

“It is just like two women,” he said. “In fact, it is exactly like two women.”

He was not making an anatomical claim. He was describing a problem in sexual grammar.

Within the moral logic he outlined, the ɗan daudu is already positioned as receptive, feminised, non-penetrative. When two such figures come together, the encounter cannot resolve into asymmetry. There is no clear answer to the question that ordinarily stabilises sex. Who does what to whom?

“Who will penetrate whom,” he asked, laughing. “They are not compatible.”

Kifi names narrative failure.

Sex, in this grammar, is expected to produce direction. It should settle. It should assign roles that allow the encounter to be absorbed without residue. When sex flips without settling, when it cannot generate a coherent story, it becomes unserious rather than dangerous. Laughter functions as regulation. It marks the boundary of what can be tolerated.

This distinction matters.

Kifi does not provoke panic, policing, or reformist fury. It is dismissed. And dismissal, here, is not harmless. It is a way of denying durability, seriousness, and future. The arrangement cannot be taken far because it cannot be narrated. It cannot be made useful. It cannot stabilise masculinity.

What kifi exposes is not moral failure, but a failure of arrangement. Masculinity here survives only so long as contradiction can be placed somewhere else.

Comparable grammars of containment exist in many patriarchal societies, where sex is organised around role, reputation, and silence rather than identity. What distinguishes the Hausa case is not its uniqueness, but the density with which these logics have been elaborated, named, and socially enforced.

Kifi marks the edge of tolerance.

When desire cannot be organised into asymmetry, when it cannot decide who occupies which position, it exposes the fragile scaffolding on which discretion, survival, and intermediacy rest. What fails here is not morality, but structure.

That failure leads directly into masculinity itself.

11. Masculinities in Tension: Intermediacy, Stability, and the Work of Arrangement

Now let us examine masculinities in Hausa culture. Masculinity in Hausa society has never been singular.

It is better understood as an arrangement of positions held in relation to one another, organised around authority, provision, restraint, and public dignity. Men move through these positions across a lifetime. Some approach the centre. Some orbit it. Others remain at the edges—not expelled, but never fully admitted. What gives the system durability is not coherence of selves, but coherence of arrangement: who may command, who must defer, and whose bodies quietly store the contradictions others cannot carry.

This is where masculinities theory becomes useful, if treated as relational rather than classificatory.

Raewyn Connell’s Masculinities describes masculinity not as a personality type but as a configuration of practices situated within a gender order. Hegemonic masculinity names the dominant arrangement that claims authority, sets standards, and secures consent. It is aspirational rather than representative. Few men fully embody it. Many benefit from it. Others are subordinated or marginalised in relation to it. Crucially, these configurations are historical, mobile, and mutually constituted.

Connell’s later work with James Messerschmidt sharpens this point further. Hegemonic masculinity is rarely singular or stable. It endures because it is flexible, capable of absorbing contradiction, borrowing from subordinate forms, and repositioning itself in response to challenge. Masculine power survives not by purity, but by adaptation.

Within Hausa moral worlds, the hegemonic masculine ideal is recognisable even if rarely achieved without remainder. It is adult, married, religious, publicly respectable. It is anchored in provision and lineage, disciplined through religious legibility, and stabilised by a sexual grammar in which penetration signifies authority and receptivity threatens reputation. Most men approximate this ideal unevenly—failing economically, privately anxious, sexually curious—yet still oriented toward its gravitational pull.

Again here, marriage functions here not simply as intimacy, but as architecture. It anchors reputation, absorbs contradiction, and restores coherence when other aspects of life threaten to destabilise masculine standing. Public piety performs similar work. Showing up at the mosque, dressing respectably and conservatively, performing hajj, giving alms to the poor. Masculinity survives not by being uncontested, but by remaining narratable.

’Yan daudu clearly occupy subordinate positions in important respects. They are feminised in labour, affect, and sexual role. They are associated with women’s social worlds. They are denied public masculine authority and exposed to ridicule, sanction, and violence.

But subordination alone does not explain endurance.

Many subordinated men experience harsher exclusion or direct elimination. Poverty, disability, or visible failure often provoke faster erasure. Feminisation does not automatically produce tolerability. Something else has been at work.

The survivability of ’yan daudu is better explained by the intermediate position they have historically occupied within the masculine order: subordinate in gendered presentation and sexual role, yet complicit in stabilising hegemonic coherence.

This claim here is a structural one.

Yes, ‘yan daudu are feminised, but they are not organised as competitors. They do not contest lineage or demand public authority. They do not insist on recognition that would force reorganisation. Instead, they absorb contradiction. They house what cannot be acknowledged elsewhere. They make deviation manageable.

They occupy feminised corridors of labour that are indispensable yet morally contained. They understand kunya not as abstraction but as technique. They know when not to look, when not to ask, how to preserve another man’s public coherence even when private life deviates from the script. In doing so, they function as buffers, allowing the centre to remain intact.

They are subordinated in hierarchy, yet complicit in stability.

This intermediate position does not contradict Connell’s framework. It extends it. Masculinities overlap, borrow, and coexist. What appears here is not a new category, but an ethnographic demonstration of how subordination and system-maintenance can coincide.

The limits of this arrangement become visible when manageability fails.

Kifi marks precisely that failure. When two ’yan daudu engage sexually, the encounter cannot resolve into penetrative asymmetry. Both are already positioned as receptive. The sexual grammar collapses. The act flips without settling.

The response is laughter, not panic.
It is dismissal rather than repression.

That laughter is regulatory. It signals that tolerance depends on legibility. Difference is acceptable only insofar as it stabilises the masculine order. When desire ceases to do that work, it becomes unusable.

Intermediate positions depend on a tolerance for ambiguity. They require moral worlds willing to allow lives to exist without forcing them into speech. When reformist religion, juridical codification, and surveillance narrow that tolerance, intermediacy itself becomes suspect. What once functioned as buffer begins to look like loophole.

The cost of coherence is not evenly distributed. Some men remain shielded by marriage, lineage, and respectability. Others absorb risk so the system can remain intact. ’Yan daudu become the bearers of contradiction—the bodies through which masculine order preserves itself.

Masculinity here functions as a tool of organisation.

And this organisation is ethical. It preserves social stability by assigning the labour of contradiction unevenly, binding safety to usefulness and dignity to silence.

The next section turns to what that assignment costs over time.

12. The Cost of Being Useful: Secrecy, Care, and the Ethics of Endurance

Usefulness is often mistaken for safety.

From a distance, usefulness can look like tolerance, like room, like evidence that a society has found a way to accommodate difference. But usefulness is a conditional hospitality. It is permission granted without guarantee, sustained only so long as one continues to serve the coherence of others.

For ’yan daudu, usefulness has long been one of the principal conditions of survival.

They feed people.
They host.
They soften social space.

They facilitate encounters that cannot announce themselves. They absorb awkwardness, redirect desire, and protect reputations. Their labour makes certain nights possible. Their discretion keeps certain men intelligible.

This arrangement keeps people alive but also extracts a cost.

Secrecy, in this world, is not the absence of speech. It is work. Serious work.

It requires calibration: when to speak and when not to; when to laugh; when to withdraw. It demands attention to space and timing, to who is present and who is not, to what can be said sideways and what must never be said at all. It requires the ability to produce ordinariness on demand.

This is not duplicity. It is survival under constraint.

Secrecy functions as infrastructure. It allows contradictions to exist without becoming claims. It enables intimacy without reorganisation. It protects some lives by relocating risk onto others.

That relocation is asymmetrical.

Men shielded by marriage, lineage, and public respectability use secrecy as a management tool. For them, discretion preserves standing. For ’yan daudu, secrecy is not optional. It is the condition of remaining legible at all.

This asymmetry shapes intimacy.

Relationships between ’yan daudu and hegemonically masculine men may involve warmth, humour, even tenderness, especially in private. But they are structurally unequal. One partner risks embarrassment. The other risks erasure. One can afford exposure. The other becomes exposure’s container.

Care, in such a system, becomes indistinguishable from self-effacement. Being good means being discreet. Being trusted means being silent. Dignity becomes conditional.

Over time, this produces a particular exhaustion.

Not the exhaustion of open persecution, but the fatigue of constant adjustment. The fatigue of knowing that one’s safety depends on remaining useful, agreeable, and forgettable. The fatigue of carrying other people’s contradictions without ever being permitted one’s own.

This violence rarely announces itself.

It appears as attrition: livelihoods slowly undermined by rumour; social spaces narrowing; gatherings becoming riskier. It appears acutely in aging, when usefulness declines and protection thins. It appears in the quiet disappearance of those who have served many people’s needs but find no sanctioned role to age into.

Yet ‘yan daudu are not passive victims. They are skilled navigators of moral worlds. They make lives where little space is offered. They find pleasure where pleasure is permitted.

But endurance is not freedom.

The ethic that preserves others can erode the one who practices it. Care becomes obligation. Silence becomes proof of goodness. Survival begins to blur into disappearance.

This is the cost of being useful.

The danger sharpens with age. Bodies that once entertained tire. Hands that cooked all night stiffen. People get sick and die. Networks thin as younger figures take their place—more agile, more visible, more disposable. There is no honoured elderhood built into this arrangement. No sanctioned role into which one graduates when desirability fades.

Some marry late.
Some disappear quietly.
Some become dependent on the very people whose secrets they once protected.

And when they get ill, especially with an ailment that is too shameful to name out loud, they sometimes go to a place they are not known to die, away from familiar, wagging fingers. A bigger town where you can hide in plain sight, or where there are hospitals that provide the treatment they need. Or a smaller town where no one knows them. There are no large families sitting at the patriarch’s feet listening to wisdom, even though they have plenty of it. They rarely transition into that elevated space often granted to men who grow old.

A system that survives by arranging who carries contradiction rarely asks how long those carriers can endure.

This is where endurance begins to look less like resilience and more like attrition.

13. Law Without Names: Criminalisation, Care, and the Collapse of Ambiguity

Often, law does not negotiate.

Where moral worlds governed by discretion permit contradiction to remain unspoken, law demands clarity. It insists on categories. It requires that bodies be named, acts defined, intentions inferred, futures predicted. What cannot be stabilised through speech is stabilised through force.

For lives organised around ambiguity, this shift is devastating.

The legal targeting of ’yan daudu in northern Nigeria has rarely required the law to speak their name. Silence has been sufficient. Broad statutes against “unnatural offences,” public indecency, cross-dressing, loitering, or moral nuisance have long provided mechanisms for selective enforcement. These laws do not describe identities. They describe behaviours whose meaning is decided after the fact.

This is not accidental.

Legal ambiguity allows enforcement to remain discretionary while punishment remains exemplary. Authorities can act without committing themselves to explicit definitions that might provoke challenge. The law becomes a tool not of moral clarity, but of manageability.

It was the expansion of Sharia governance in the early 2000s, rather than the federal legislation of 2014, that most decisively altered the conditions of survival for ’yan daudu.

Beginning with Zamfara State in 1999 and quickly followed by Kano, Katsina, Sokoto, Kebbi, Jigawa, Bauchi, Niger, and others, Sharia penal codes were reintroduced not simply as legal reforms but as moral re-engineering projects. These codes did not only criminalise specific acts; they reorganised public space. They extended juridical attention into dress, movement, gathering, leisure, and gendered comportment. The emphasis fell less on what happened in private than on how bodies appeared in public.

Hisbah institutions became the visible arm of this transformation.

In Kano, the establishment and subsequent empowerment of the Hisbah Board in the early 2000s produced a new form of everyday policing. Hisbah officers patrolled markets, wedding venues, cinemas, Bori compounds, and informal social spaces. They enforced dress codes, gender segregation, curfews, and moral comportment. They disrupted gatherings deemed inappropriate, including night-time food vending sites, music events, and ritual assemblies.

These interventions mattered not because they named ’yan daudu explicitly, but because they dismantled the infrastructure that had made intermediacy possible.

Spaces where ’yan daudu clustered—markets, food stalls, informal catering networks, rented rooms attached to women’s economies—were rendered suspect. Night-time economies were restricted. Mixed-gender sociality was narrowed. Performance, humour, and bodily expressiveness became legible as violations rather than tolerated excess. The corridor of managed ambiguity shrank.

At the same time, parallel pressure was placed on independent women.

Several northern states explicitly framed unmarried women as moral problems. Government-sponsored “mass weddings” were organised in states such as Kano and Zamfara, often justified as social welfare but animated by the assumption that unmarried women represented disorder. Women living independently, trading on their own account, or moving without male supervision increasingly found themselves subject to surveillance, moral reprimand, or forced reintegration into marital structures.

This mattered for ’yan daudu because their survival had long been entangled with women’s worlds.

Food vending, catering, mediation, and informal domestic labour tied ’yan daudu to spaces occupied by divorced women, widows, traders, and women living outside marriage. As those spaces were narrowed—through curfews, inspections, marriage campaigns, and moral discourse—the social ecology that sustained ’yan daudu collapsed alongside them.

Bori suffered a similar fate.

Across northern Nigeria, Bori was increasingly framed by reformist Islamic authorities as un-Islamic, fraudulent, or dangerous. Hisbah raids on Bori ceremonies were reported in Kano and other states. Drumming, possession rituals, and spirit-related gatherings were disrupted or banned outright. Practitioners were harassed, fined, or forced underground.

This was not merely a religious dispute. It was an architectural one.

Bori compounds had long functioned as spaces where women outside marriage, spirit mediums, performers, healers, and gender-ambiguous figures could coexist. They were sites of labour, care, ritual, and containment. When these spaces were dismantled, it was not only a religious practice that disappeared, but an entire social technology of accommodation.

By the late 2000s, this cumulative erosion had already produced a qualitative shift.

Where survival had once depended on discretion and usefulness, it increasingly depended on disappearance. Markets closed earlier. Gatherings dissolved. Informal protection networks frayed under fear of implication. Even those who had mastered the grammar of secrecy found that grammar no longer legible to a moral regime organised around visible enforcement.

The law did not ask what they did.
It asked what they looked like.

Against this background, the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act of 2014 functioned less as an initiating rupture than as a federal ratification of an already transformed moral landscape.

The Act, signed into law by President Goodluck Jonathan, criminalised same-sex marriage and public association, but it did not introduce new modes of surveillance in the north. Its enforcement was uneven, and in many northern states, existing Sharia frameworks already provided broader powers of intervention. What the Act did provide was symbolic reinforcement: moral cover for harassment, extortion, and arrest; confirmation that visibility itself could be treated as offence.

For many ’yan daudu, the damage had already been done.

It is therefore analytically misleading to treat the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act as the decisive rupture for lives such as those traced here. The Act functioned primarily as a federal symbol: loud, expansive in rhetoric, uneven in enforcement.

Sharia governance, by contrast, operated as an everyday architecture. Through hisbah patrols, market inspections, gender segregation, dress enforcement, bans on music and ritual, and the moral regulation of women’s lives, Sharia codes reorganised the conditions of visibility long before 2014. They did not merely criminalise acts; they dissolved spaces. Where the SSMPA threatened punishment after recognition, Sharia governance foreclosed the possibility of recognition itself by eroding the social ecologies that had once absorbed difference quietly.

For ’yan daudu, the decisive loss was not the arrival of a federal statute, but the disappearance of markets, compounds, rituals, and women’s worlds in which discretion had once been intelligible. The difference is not legal severity, but moral scale: one law named an offence; the other remade daily life.

The social spaces that once allowed them to be useful without being legible had already been dismantled by Sharia governance, hisbah enforcement, and reformist moral discourse. The SSMPA intensified fear, but it did not fundamentally reorganise everyday life in the way that local moral policing already had.

Alongside this legal tightening came another, quieter transformation: the arrival of care as a regime of legibility.

Public health interventions, particularly those organised around HIV prevention, introduced a parallel apparatus for naming bodies and organising intimacy. The category “men who have sex with men” was designed as a pragmatic alternative to identity-based labels. Yet in practice, it produced its own form of exposure. Bodies that had survived through indirection were now required to speak in clinical grammars that demanded clarity about acts, partners, frequency, and risk.

This demand did not emerge from malice.
It emerged from institutional necessity.

Care systems function through classification. They require populations to be enumerable, behaviours to be legible, and patterns to be traceable. But for lives organised around discretion, this logic produced a cruel paradox: to seek care was to risk recognition; to refuse care was to risk illness.

Clinics became spaces of both refuge and danger. Medical records travelled. Knowledge leaked. Epidemiological categories collapsed into moral ones. Care joined law as another site where visibility accumulated.

Violence here was rarely spectacular. It was administrative.

The cumulative effect was attrition. Lives narrowed. Networks thinned. Knowledge that had once circulated quietly stopped circulating at all. The cost of being known began to outweigh the benefit of being useful.

Law reorganised intolerance.

By demanding legibility, law collapsed the social technologies that had once allowed contradiction to be stored without explosion. What had been survivable through discretion became actionable through suspicion.

This is the ethical transformation law introduces.

Where moral worlds once asked how to live together without speaking everything aloud, law asks what must be named, recorded, punished. It converts social skill into liability. It replaces negotiation with procedure.

The next section shows what happens when this legal demand for clarity is amplified by circulation—when ambiguity is no longer only illegal, but impossible to contain.

None of this is an argument against law as such, or against care as such. Legal protection matters. Medical access matters. What this section insists on is that when these systems enter moral worlds organised around discretion, they do not arrive alone. They arrive with demands for legibility that redistribute risk unevenly. Any serious reform must reckon with that redistribution rather than deny it.

14. From Discretion to Spectacle: Media, Circulation, and the Collapse of Scale

Moral worlds organised around ambiguity depend on scale.
They require that knowledge move slowly, locally, reversibly. What is seen can be unseen. What is known can be contained. What circulates does so within recognisable limits. Gossip travels by mouth, not archive. Shame can be negotiated. Silence can repair.

Media destroys these conditions.

This is not because media introduces new desires or new moral judgments. It does something more structural. It removes the brakes that once governed circulation. It collapses distance, accelerates exposure, and converts what was once local knowledge into permanent record.

In this sense, media does not necessarily create intolerance as much as it reorganises it.

In Hausa-speaking circles, the representation of ’yan daudu has long existed across multiple registers: humour, insult, folklore, rumour, cautionary tale. These representations were rarely stable, but they were contained. A nickname remained in one neighbourhood. A story lost its force with repetition. Mockery faded as attention moved elsewhere.

Digital media changes the terms.

A video recorded in one compound can circulate far beyond its moral context. A joke told for a familiar audience becomes evidence for strangers. A moment of performance, ritual, or intimacy is stripped of its framing and re-presented as spectacle. What was once legible only to those who understood the codes becomes legible to everyone, and therefore to no one in particular.

Scale destroys discretion.

This shift has been especially acute in the circulation of images and clips of “gender nonconformity”. Short videos shared on messaging apps or social media platforms flatten difference into caricature. They invite commentary from people with no stake in the lives depicted, no knowledge of the social negotiations that made those lives possible. Laughter curdles into outrage. Familiar mockery hardens into moral panic. (For a country so petrified of people operating outside gender binaries, Nigeria has a phenomenal amount of “entertainers”, from north to south whose primary means of conveying humour is cross-dressing and “drag”.)

The figure of the ɗan daudu becomes unmoored from context.

Once abstracted, he can be used for anything: proof of decadence, evidence of foreign corruption, justification for reform, content for ridicule. Media turns ambiguity into symbol, and symbols demand resolution. They do not tolerate complexity. They ask to be condemned or erased.

Long before social media accelerated exposure, Hausa-language cinema had already begun disciplining how not fitting into gender binaries could appear in public imagination. In Kannywood films from the 1990s onward, figures recognisable as ’yan daudu appeared frequently, but almost always within narrow registers: comic relief, exaggerated flamboyance, moral warning. Femininity was amplified for legibility through high-pitched speech, exaggerated gait, and stylised excess, rendered recognisable through caricature rather than social embeddedness.

Comedy offered containment.
Ridicule neutralised threat by ensuring that difference could be laughed at rather than taken seriously. By rendering the ɗan daudu unserious, cinema pre-empted any possibility that such figures might be read as rivals to masculine authority. Laughter absorbed anxiety.

Over time, repetition hardened caricature into type.

Cinematic shorthand displaced social knowledge. The ɗan daudu became not a person with a place in an economy of labour, secrecy, and mediation, but a visual trope: loud, ridiculous, excessive. Interior life disappeared. Ethical complexity vanished. What remained was a recognisable figure available for instant judgement.

While cinema did not invent stigma, it certainly simplified it. Then social media radicalised consequence.

Across Hausa-speaking digital spaces, videos of ’yan daudu now circulate with extraordinary speed. Some show dancing, joking, playful self-performance. Others document arrests, raids, confrontations, or public humiliation. Context is minimal. Names, locations, and relationships are flattened into caption and comment.

What is new here is not visibility alone but also scale without accountability.

Earlier moral ecologies attached risk to exposure. To shame someone publicly was to entangle oneself in consequence: retaliation, mediation, reputational cost. Digital circulation dissolves that reciprocity. One can condemn from a distance. One can amplify without knowing. One can moralise without responsibility.

Comment cultures reveal the shift starkly.
Under viral clips, moral language intensifies: calls for punishment, religious denunciation, appeals to law enforcement. What once would have been managed through avoidance or private warning becomes a public performance of righteousness. Kunya is inverted. Shame is no longer something to be contained. It becomes content.

This transformation is not accidental. Platforms reward intensity. Algorithms privilege excess. Subtlety does not travel. Ambiguity does not go viral.

Social media also enables a new class of moral entrepreneurs. Clerics, activists, influencers—some formally trained, many not—name, circulate, and condemn. Short clips are repurposed as evidence. Screenshots harden into accusation. Moral judgement is crowdsourced.

What emerges is a form of policing that operates beyond the state yet often in alignment with it.

Unlike traditional community surveillance, which relied on proximity and relational knowledge, digital moral policing is abstract. It does not require knowing the person, their family, their history, or their strategies of survival. Recognition of a type becomes sufficient.

This matters because intermediacy depended on partial unreadability.

Digital media collapses that partiality. It fixes bodies in frames. It turns gestures into proof. It makes retreat difficult because circulation leaves residue: reposts, archives, screenshots that cannot be withdrawn.

Beyond arrest or violence, there is the danger of permanence.

The collapse is not only technological. It is also generational.

Older ’yan daudu did not arrive at discretion by instinct. They were trained into it. Knowledge moved through proximity: who could be trusted, where to stand, when to withdraw, how to laugh without inviting attention, how to disappear before danger gathered momentum. Mistakes were corrected quietly. Excess was disciplined not through ideology but through consequence. Ambiguity was an apprenticeship.

That apprenticeship depended on slowness.
It required moral worlds where exposure carried immediate relational cost, where a warning could travel faster than a rumour, where a life could be adjusted without being archived. These conditions no longer hold.

Younger figures now come of age under radically different pressures. NGO language, rights discourse, global queer vocabularies, and digital visibility offer new ways of naming experience. These languages can be empowering, but they also recalibrate risk. What once functioned as protective opacity becomes misread as shame or fear. What was once tactical silence is read as lack of courage.

Skills developed for one moral ecology fail under another. Discretion does not travel well across platforms designed to reward declaration. Ambiguity collapses under systems that demand clarity to function.

Media accelerates this collapse by removing reversibility.

A rumour could once be denied. A photograph cannot. A gathering could once be explained away. A video reappears without context. Exposure is no longer an event. It is a condition.

This has consequences beyond representation.

Media circulation feeds back into law enforcement, religious reform, and communal vigilance. Videos become evidence. Screenshots become accusation. Outrage becomes justification. The line between spectacle and prosecution blurs. What circulates publicly acquires juridical weight even when no formal charge follows.

The moral economy shifts.

Where once the primary question was whether something could be managed quietly, it becomes whether it can survive circulation. Usefulness offers less protection when visibility is uncontrollable. Silence ceases to function as repair.

This is why media feels like rupture even when it repeats old stories.

It changes not what people think, but how fast and how far those thoughts travel. It transforms local moral judgements into scalable campaigns. It converts human lives into content whose meaning is decided elsewhere.

For ’yan daudu, this represents not merely increased hostility, but the loss of an entire operating system.

Ambiguity can survive gossip. It cannot survive virality.

The world that allowed intermediacy to function depended on limits: limits to audience, to memory, to consequence. Media removes those limits. What remains is exposure without negotiation.

The next section returns to ethics—not as abstraction, but as question: what kinds of lives become possible, or impossible, when the skills that once made endurance viable no longer work. Where, after spectacle, does care go.

15. After Ambiguity: Ethics Without Confession

This essay is not arguing that ambiguity is just.

Lives organised around silence, discretion, and indirection are not free lives. They are constrained, unequal, and often cruel in their own ways. Ambiguity distributed risk unevenly. It protected some by placing others closer to danger. It asked certain people to carry contradiction so that others could remain coherent. There is no innocence here to recover.

What ambiguity offered was not justice. It was survivability. And while survivability is a low ethical bar, it is the bar against which lives under constraint are often forced to measure success.

It made it possible for people to live without insisting that their lives be translated into declarations that would then be governed, corrected, or destroyed. It allowed desire to exist without demanding that it explain itself. It allowed gender to be practised as relation rather than confession.

What has been lost is a form of social intelligence.

This intelligence knew how to look away without pretending not to see. It knew how to keep knowledge local, reversible, and accountable. It understood that not all truths improve by being spoken aloud, and that some forms of care depend on restraint rather than exposure. It accepted contradiction not as failure, but as condition.

The collapse of this intelligence has been framed, too often, as moral progress. Clarity is equated with courage. Visibility with liberation. Speech with truth. But clarity is not neutral. Visibility is not evenly survivable. Speech does not distribute risk equally.

For lives such as those traced here, the demand to be fully legible is not an invitation to freedom. It is a demand to enter systems that do not know how to hold them.

Law does not hold contradiction. Media does not forget. Bureaucracy refuses often, to negotiate.

In these regimes, ambiguity appears not as care but as obstruction. Silence is recoded as deceit. Discretion is mistaken for shame. What once functioned as skill becomes suspect. What once kept people alive becomes evidence.

This is the ethical failure of our moment.

Not that it recognises difference too clearly, but that it refuses to ask what kind of recognition different lives can survive. Not that it speaks too much, but that it assumes speech is always benign. Not that it demands justice, but that it mistakes exposure for ethics.

’Yan daudu have survived not because they were embraced, but because they learned how to live inside contradiction without insisting that it resolve. They learned how to be known without being circulated. They learned how to exist without demanding that the world account for them.

That knowledge is now disappearing.

What replaces it is not necessarily a better world, but a louder one. A world in which care is conditional on confession, in which protection requires declaration, in which lives that cannot be easily named are rendered disposable.

This essay does not ask for a return. The moral worlds it describes were never equitable enough to deserve nostalgia. But it does ask for recognition of what has been lost: the capacity to live with difference without forcing it into spectacle; the ability to make room for lives that do not resolve into slogans; the humility to accept that some forms of endurance are not failures of courage but refusals of unnecessary harm.

Ethics, in such a world, is not a demand for visibility but a discipline of attention.

It asks not only who speaks, but who bears the cost of that speech. Not only what is named, but what naming does. Not only which lives are recognised, but which lives are made more dangerous by recognition itself.

To remember this is not to defend silence as virtue. It is to refuse the fantasy that justice arrives automatically with exposure.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the lives traced here were sustained only by fear. There was pleasure too, not always defiant, not always political. Laughter that did not seek permission. Desire that did not ask to be redeemed. Moments when the work of secrecy fell away and the body moved simply because it could. These moments mattered not because they challenged the order, but because they reminded those living within it that life was still available. What is lost when ambiguity collapses is not only protection. It is this quieter joy, which required no audience and left no archive. If this conclusion feels unsatisfying, that dissatisfaction is part of the argument. Lives organised around survival cannot always be redeemed by solutions designed for systems.

After ambiguity, the task is not to force clarity everywhere.
It is to learn, again, how to tell the difference.

Source Notes

On Ethnography, ’Yan Daudu, and Hausa Sexual Worlds

• Gaudio, Rudolf Pell. Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

• Gaudio, Rudolf Pell. “Male Lesbians and Other Queer Notions in Hausa.” Journal of Homosexuality 43, no. 1 (2002): 31–66.

• Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities.New York: Palgrave, 1998.

• Evans-Pritchard, E. E. “Sexual Inversion among the Azande.” American Anthropologist 72, no. 6 (1970): 1428–1434.

On Masculinity, Gender Order, and Social Theory

• Connell, Raewyn. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; 2nd ed. 2005.

• Connell, Raewyn, and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 829–859.

• Kandiyoti, Deniz. “Bargaining with Patriarchy.” Gender & Society 2, no. 3 (1988): 274–290.

• Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

On Bori, Spirit Possession, and Gendered Permeability

• Last, Murray. “The Importance of Bori Cults in Hausaland.” Africa 39, no. 1 (1969): 1–13.

• Lewis, I. M. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession. London: Routledge, 1971.

• Rasmussen, Susan J. Spirit Possession and Personhood among the Kel Ewey Tuareg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

• Hiskett, Mervyn. The Development of Islam in West Africa. London: Longman, 1984.

On Hausa Women, Karuwa, Markets, and Moral Economy

• Smith, Mary F. Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa. London: Faber and Faber, 1954; New Haven: Yale University Press reprint.

• Lovejoy, Paul E. Caravans of Kola: The Hausa Kola Trade, 1700–1900. Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1980.

• Bargery, G. P. A Hausa-English Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press, 1934.

• Abraham, R. C. Dictionary of the Hausa Language. London: University of London Press, 1949.

On Law, Criminalisation, and Moral Policing in Nigeria

• Federal Republic of Nigeria. Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act. Abuja, 2014.

• Kano State Government. Sharia Penal Code Law. Kano, 2000 (and subsequent amendments).

• Zamfara State Government. Sharia Penal Code Law. Gusau, 2000.

• Human Rights Watch. “Tell Me Where I Can Be Safe”: The Impact of Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act. New York: Human Rights Watch, 2016.

• Amnesty International. Nigeria: Human Rights Agenda Reports on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.London: Amnesty International, various years.

On Sharia Governance, Hisbah, and the Erosion of Ambiguous Social Space

• Ostien, Philip. Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria 1999–2006: A Sourcebook. Ibadan: Spectrum Books / IFRA-Nigeria, 2007.

• Adamu, Abdalla Uba. “Gender, Hisbah, and the Regulation of Popular Culture in Northern Nigeria.” In Transglobal Media Flows and African Popular Culture. Kano: Visually Ethnographic Press, 2018.

• Last, Murray. “From Sultanate to Caliphate: Kano and the Politics of Moral Reform.” In The Sokoto Caliphate and Its Legacies, edited by Toyin Falola. Ibadan: Bookcraft, 1999.

On Media, Circulation, and Kannywood Representation

• Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

• Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–343.

• Adamu, Abdalla Uba. Transglobal Media Flows and African Popular Culture: Revolution and Reaction in Muslim Hausa Popular Culture. Kano: Visually Ethnographic Press, 2018.

• Adamu, Abdalla Uba. Selected essays on Kannywood, censorship, and gender representation, published in Hausa and English.

On Ethics, Religion, and Moral Discipline (Comparative)

• Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

• Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Authorial Works and Ethnographic Narrative

• John, Elnathan. “Keepers of Secrets.” Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Cassava Republic Press, 2016

1. Note on Hausa Orthography

In this essay, Hausa terms are written using standard Hausa orthography where clarity matters. The word rendered here as ɗan daudu uses the hooked d (ɗ), an implosive consonant distinct from the ordinary d in Hausa; ɗan does not simply mean “son of” in a biological sense, but marks affiliation, orientation, or habitual positioning within a social field. The same goes for Ƙ/ƙ which is not the same consonant as K/k(e.g. ƙara a verb which means to increase as distinct from kara a noun which means stick) The plural ’yan daudu is formed using the Hausa plural marker ’yan, where the apostrophe represents a glottal stop and signals contraction rather than punctuation.

In common Nigerian English usage these distinctions are often flattened (dan daudu), but retaining ɗ and ’y here reflects both linguistic accuracy and the relational logic embedded in the term itself. The orthography matters because the word names a position, not an identity.

2. By saying that ɗan daudu “does not ask who someone is” but rather “where someone stands,” I am making a structural and relational claim, not a metaphysical one. The distinction is crucial.

This formulation should not be read as denying interiority, self-understanding, desire, or emotional depth to those designated as ’yan daudu. Nor does it suggest that the term functions only as an externally imposed label devoid of subjective meaning. Rather, it marks a difference between identity as confessional essence, which dominates modern Euro-American sexual discourse, and social positioning, which has historically structured Hausa moral worlds.

Anthropological and sociological scholarship has long noted that sexual and gender categories do not function uniformly across cultures. As Foucault famously argued in his discussion of the emergence of “the homosexual” as a modern identity, Western sexuality underwent a historical shift from regulating acts to naming persons—a shift that should not be universalised as the default grammar of desire (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I). Subsequent scholarship has shown that many societies continue to organise erotic life through roles, relations, and consequences, rather than through stable identity claims.

In Hausa social life, moral intelligibility has not depended primarily on the articulation of an inner self, but on a person’s situatedness within a network of gendered, sexual, economic, and reputational relations. Categories such as ɗan daudu operate less as declarations of what one is than as indications of how one is read, what forms of conduct are expected or tolerated, and what risks or protections follow from that positioning. The question implicitly asked is not “Who are you, really?” but “How are you placed, and what does that placement permit or endanger?”

This helps explain how desire, behaviour, marriage, prayer, discretion, and same-sex intimacy can coexist without stabilising into fixed identities. As Rudolf Gaudio demonstrates in his ethnographic work in Kano, men who engage in same-sex practices do not necessarily understand themselves—or get understood by others—as “gay” or “bisexual” in a modern sense; what matters instead are gendered role, visibility, and adherence to norms of modesty and discretion (Allah Made Us; see also Gaudio on Hausa sexual speech). Desire is socially consequential not because it reveals an inner truth, but because of how it circulates.

In this sense, ɗan daudu names a relational position within a gendered moral economy, not an ontological category. It situates a person within a field of expectations and constraints—particularly around feminised labour, receptive sexual roles, discretion, and non-competition with hegemonic masculinity—without requiring that these practices be translated into a stable selfhood or identity claim. This positioning can be inhabited, concealed, recalibrated, or exited over time, and may coexist with other social roles such as husband, father, Muslim, trader, or migrant.

This reading also aligns with relational theories of gender such as Raewyn Connell’s formulation of masculinities as configurations of practice rather than fixed types. Connell’s work emphasises that gender positions are defined by relation to structures of power, labour, and sexuality, and that individuals may move between or occupy overlapping positions across a life course (Masculinities; Connell & Messerschmidt).

Thus, “where someone stands” refers not to moral worth or authenticity, but to placement within an order of relations—an order in which survival has often depended on being intelligible without being fully exposed.

3. See Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds., Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities(New York: Palgrave, 1998). Although this volume predates Rudolf Gaudio’s Allah Made Us, later comparative scholarship, course syllabi, and secondary summaries that draw on both Murray and Roscoe and on Gaudio’s ethnography have frequently glossed Hausa ’yan daudu as “feminine men” when situating them alongside other African same-sex or gender-variant formations.

This condensation becomes more explicit in applied contexts influenced by anthropological literature. For example, Human Rights Watch, “Tell Me Where I Can Be Safe: The Impact of Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2016), draws on Gaudio’s work in background sections on northern Nigerian sexual cultures and describes ’yan daudu as men perceived as feminine who have sex with men. While the report does not quote Gaudio verbatim, it operationalises his ethnography through precisely the kind of shorthand under critique here, collapsing social femininity, sexual role, and identity into a compact descriptive phrase calibrated for legibility to international audiences.