In northern Nigeria’s Shariah-ruled region, erotic writer Fauziyya Tasiu Umar has built a paying audience of thousands on women-only WhatsApp groups — completely out of reach of religious censors still focused on burning paper books.
GARUN MALAM, Nigeria — On a recent morning in northern Nigeria, thousands of women’s phones pinged. The latest chapter of “Nymphomaniac King” had just dropped on a women-only WhatsApp group.
I had been silently observing in the group, Oum Hairan World, for months. The prose was explicit, using Hausa words for body parts that would never survive the region’s Islamic censors. The group of Muslim women responded in kind, in a hilarious, emoji-laden discussion of who could handle the king’s appetites.
“His Majesty’s great staff is what impresses you all,” posted Oum Hairan, the author, teasing her readers.
Then, just as the story reached a tantalizing climax, she slammed the paywall down.
“You will pay 300 naira (about 20 cents) for the regular group,” she wrote. V-VIP access cost 1,500 naira.
The author, Fauziyya Tasiu Umar, 31, is no longer hiding. In her village of Garun Malam, she enjoys almost celebrity status. “They say we are helping spoil culture and religion in society,” she told The New York Times. “But I see erotic writing as vital in society. That’s what happening, so through the writing, people learn about it.”
In 2021, the Hisbah morality police called her in. “They told me I was committing a very big sin,” she said, laughing. When they admitted they had read her books, she explained her philosophy. “I told them I couldn’t promise to stop, and they let me go.”
Meanwhile, the censors admit they have little power over WhatsApp. “There are things you just have to overlook,” one official said.
For now, the king’s reign continues — one 20-cent chapter at a time.
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Continuation of New York times article on hausa exotica writers by Ruth Maclean.
Still, few other Hausa erotica writers are as open as Mrs. Umar.
One is a nurse working in a hospital in northern Nigeria and moonlighting as a successful erotica writer under the pen name Oum Aphnan.
“My only courage is I’m not exposed,” she said, speaking on condition we use only her pen name and slotting an interview in between patients in a consultation room by a busy ward.
Oum Aphnan started writing erotic books during the pandemic as a way to pass the time, she said, and quickly found a hungry audience with enough money to give her a significant second source of income.
“It’s far above my salary,” she said.
She uses her erotica earnings for her living expenses, she said, and saves her nurse’s salary. Her sister, another well-known erotica writer who goes by the sobriquet Maman Teddy (because she likes teddy bears), said she spent hers on hijabs and phone credit for her husband.
The biggest worry for both sisters is that their father will find out.
The books explore themes including “sugar daddies,” polygamy, insatiable sexual appetites, the sex lives of Islamic scholars and, sometimes, child abuse and rape.
Some write about same-sex encounters, a highly taboo topic in northern Nigeria and just the sort of thing that falls under the Kano Censorship Board’s remit.
At the board’s office in an echoey government building, where Islamic scholars examine burlap sacks full of confiscated books, Abba Al Mustafa, the board’s executive chairman who is a well-known movie star in Kano’s popular film industry, described how he “checkmates” offending writers and works.
He pulled out a copy of “Queen Primer II,” a small, old-fashioned book of rhymes read by generations of Nigerian primary-school children, 55,000 copies of which he said his team had recently impounded.
On a page of rhymes about bees in trees, a doll called Poll and a ball in a hall, the verse in question read: “Ben and Tom may jump in the hay/ Is this the way? Yes, let us be gay.” (The book was first published in the late 19th century, when “gay” was mostly used to mean “happy.”)
Mr. Al Mustafa sat back in his office chair, looking satisfied with a job well done. When the verse was discovered, “trouble started to penetrate the state,” he said. “We just had to intervene.”
“Queen Primer II” is now banned from Kano schools, and he said that they planned to publicly burn the books.
He admitted that when it came to social media and online content like the erotica writers’, the board had very little power. “There are things that you just have to overlook,” he said. “But at least you can control the little you have.”