Callodine Camodeca-Schmitz

GGS350 Gender and Sexuality in Africa

Professor Ndubueze Mbah
11/3/21
Allah Made Us Chapters 5-7 and Epilogue

The latter half of Gaudio’s study of the yan daudu, building on his field work developing

a tentative snapshot of yan daudu life at a certain place and time, is in many ways about stepping

back from that work, and discussing the ways in which yan daudu life, and discourses

concerning it, interact with the broader contexts in which that certain time and place are

contained. All of these contexts, from domestic Nigerian politics, to international flows of people

and ideas in the Islamic world, to the asymmetrical relationship between gay rights organizations

and the individuals for whom they ostensibly advocate, are, to widely varying degrees, terrains

which both emperil yan daudu lives, and provide concepts and lexicons indispensable to the

production of yan daudu identity. This ambiguity of social positioning is perhaps typical of

gender and sexual minorities, produced and shaped by societies which at times menace them, and

reflects one of the central, apparently contradictory realities with which Gaudio wrestles in this

section; that the act of naming, giving shape, and providing identity, is so often also an act of

limiting, threatening, and isolating.

Chapter 5, Playing with Faith, neatly bridges the transition into this discussion by

beginning first with a study of the uses of orthodox Islamic linguistic forms, such as standard,

formalized prayers, or interjections recalling God, in unorthodox ways by the yan daudu, an act

which positions the speaker both firmly within the Islamic world, and at an ambiguous, at times

uneasy, distance from the dominant norms within that world. What this chapter (particularly the

section titled “Laughing about Arabs and Hausa Muslim ‘Big Men’”) demonstrates with regards

to these uses, is that they are governed by nothing so much as yan daudu self preservation and
self expression. This might seem obvious, but as Gaudio demonstrates time and time again in

Allah Made Us, it is all too common for those outside yan daudu communities, especially

Western audiences, to view the yan daudu as living embodiments of Western preconceptions of

the Islamic world which posit an essential contradiction between their playful, loving, lively

world, and an Islam supposedly inhospitable to any such way of life. This gaze, denying the

reality of yan daudu self-identification as Islamic men, necessarily reduces the motivation for

any irreverence or unorthodoxy to transgression for its own sake, limiting the capacity of the

Western audience to appreciate the wide variety of expressive impulses that motivate and inform

yan daudu life. The reality, communicated in Chapter 6, of bikis, the conventionally feminine

social events put on by yan daudu and other residents of the bariki which can (as chapter 7

shows) be targets for the ire of social conservatives employing an Islamic vocabulary, serving the

yan daudu who put them on as vehicles for the accumulation of status and wealth necessary to

establish themselves as normative Islamic men with normative family lives. In other words, the

potential for a perceived transgressive, un-Islamic valence of these bikis is not only incidental to

their purpose according to the yan daudu, but in fact directly counter to that purpose.

With this context, the narratives contained in Chapter 7, Lost and Found in Translation,

of social events hosted by men who may or may not privately identify as “homos” or shirted yan

daudu, targeted by bigoted local authorities seeking to bolster their position in both domestic and

international politics, and subsequently identified and labelled as gay men by international gay

rights organizations seeking to produce evocative images for domestic consumption, appear to

the reader as acts of tragic, violent irony. These stories, which embody on multiple levels the

violence at times carried out by acts of naming, are ones in which the victims’ desire to put on

social events which function as vehicles for the attainment of autonomy and respectability leads
them to be stripped of both, labelled in ways which contravene both their right to

self-identification, and any hope harbored of attaining a respectable public face within their

communities. Neither of these acts of labelling, by either domestic conservatives or international

liberals, reflect anything more than the interests of those groups, and transform the men being

labelled into rhetorical products sacrificed for the aggrandizement of the speaker. It is this kind

of dynamic, and the treatment given to it by Gaudio, which encapsulates the tension inherent in

the very kind of anthropological work in which Gaudio himself is engaged; how does one render,

for an international audience, an intelligible picture a community which in its rhetoric, dress, and

forms of interpersonal relationships is so deeply invested in discretion and controlling the

circumstances of their legibility, without committing a grievous act of violence? It is a weighty

question, and Gaudio’s resistance to pretending he has the answer is part of what makes Chapter

7 such a theoretical high point of the book.

In the Epilogue, the material urgency of this question comes crashing into the narrative

with sobering force, as Gaudio lists, in heartbreaking fashion, the steady erosion of his social

networks in Hausaland by HIV/AIDS, government pressure, bigoted murders, and migrations

between the region’s major urban centers. Many, if not all, of these phenomena, unfold in a

process deeply intertwined with issues of secrecy, disclosure, and interpretation. Gaudio’s final

anecdote, wherein a man asks about whether there are women like the yan daudu in America,

highlights the omnipresence of external gazes, whether Hausa or American, in yan daudu lives,

and in so doing reminds the reader of how their own gaze may equally veil and reveal those

lives, with possibilities and dangers in both outcomes.