Hausa has a rich literature in poetry and song. In terms of the texts, there is really no difference between poetry and song. Hausa has a single word, waka (plural wak’ok’i), for this type of linguistic artistic expression. All wak’ok’i have certain things in common:

Sung oral presentation: Artists compose their works for sung performance. One never hears spoken recitation typical of oral performance of European poetry, and silent reading of poetry is essentially unheard of except perhaps in certain modern intellectual circles.

Composition following strict metrical patterns: Hausa wak’ok’i always follow fixed rythmic patterns. A text not following such patterns, such as the “free verse” of nearly all modern English “art” poetry, would not be wak’a. The basis for metrical patterns in Hausa is syllable weight (or “long” and “short” syllables). Click on the links above for more information.

One can broadly distinguish two co-existing traditions in Hausa poetry and song. The Hausa terms for these traditions are wak’ar baka ‘oral song’ and rubutacciyar wak’a‘written poetry’. These terms are a bit misleading since both types are intended for oral performance, but the former is composed in oral form and would never be written down by the artist, whereas the latter is generally composed in written form, then read or performed from memory on the basis of a written text