The novel tells the story of a Rabi, a woman married to a stingy, womanizing business man, Alhaji Abdu. Although she has nine children to take care of, her husband only gives her five naira a day to prepare their meals, while he spends over ten naira a day on restaurants and entertaining other women.  (Beyond literary value, the novel is also useful for tracking the inflation of the past twenty years!) Rabi pays for school fees from the money she makes cooking and selling food and takes care of Alhaji Abdu’s daughter from another marriage as if she were her own. Alhaji Abdu’s decision to marry an old prostitute as a second wife, however, brings Rabi’s misery to a climax. When the women quarrel, Alhaji Abdu throws Rabi and her nine children out on the street. The rest of the novel traces the decisions Rabi makes in her newly independent life, her daughter Saudatu’s marriage, and the continuing drama as Alhaji Abdu continues to alienate friends and family on behalf of his new ungrateful wife.

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Karshen Alewa Kasa, follows Mailoma, a disenfranchised Maguzawa youth whose return from the city sparks a violent collision with Hausa-Fulani authority. Rooted in ethnographic detail, the novel traces Mailoma’s descent into organized crime and insurgent self-education as a response to systemic marginalization. Gagare interrogates traditional emirate power, class injustice, and cultural erasure, channeling Marxist critique into a community-centered portrait of resistance. Part novel and part social manifesto, it dramatizes how exclusion and state complicity breed rebellion while preserving fragile cultural identities. It remains widely studied and influential today across Hausa literary studies and cultural history scholarship.

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Rahma Abdul-Majid’s novel Mace Mutum (2006) follows Godiya from a remote Hausa village into city life, tracing how gendered expectations, forced marriage, and economic precarity shape her choices. Through episodic scenes and intimate detail the narrative exposes domestic violence, social hypocrisy, and limited legal recourse, while attending to women’s networks of care and quiet resistance. Abdul-Majid blends cultural ethnography with realist storytelling to critique patriarchal norms and child marriage. The novel’s panoramic scope and empathetic focus on everyday labor make it a pivotal work in contemporary Hausa women’s literature, frequently translated and studied.

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