HAUSA DIASPORA TAKES CENTRE STAGE: HIBAF 2023 REVIEW
The theme for this year's festival is 'Hausa Diaspora' which seeks to explore Hausa outside the walls of its known domain of Northern Nigeria. We were amazed to know that Hausa has built homes across the globe not just in academic spheres of Europe and Asia which is predominantly taught as part of foreign languages in universities of United States, United Kingdom, Japan, China and so on but migration has taken it to virtually every nook and cranny of Africa, heart of Europe and as far as Southern America. Hausawa are now bonafide settlers of some of these places most of them knew nowhere but these countries and became the Hausawan Togo, Hausawan Brazil, etc. It will interest you to know that #HIBAF2023 explored another aspect of Hausa settlers especially in Saudi Arabia and United Kingdom where Hausawa have descendants that are so acclimatized to such environs that they can speak little of Hausa language as a result of their limited interactions. In their HIBAF panel, the d...