The Relevance of Religion and Culture to Commercial Accumulation: Fieldwork on Muslim Hausa Exchange and Agricultural Trade in Northern Nigeria

During 1976, I began research in rural sociology while still a lecturer in contemporary history and social science at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, northern Nigeria. The intellectual source of my interest was the keen international debate in Marxist political economy concerning the causes of economic underdevelopment. But my personal reason for choosing rural sociology was my desire, after six years enjoying the company of city Nigerians, to experience life in the countryside, where most Nigerians lived. In economic anthropology, I had been greatly impressed by the empirical depth of Polly Hill’s study of inequalities in a Hausa-speaking village of northern Nigeria (Hill, 1972). In agricultural economics, I had read David Norman’s analysis of land and labour, and input-output, relationships in three villages near Zaria (Norman 1967, 1970, 1973). These studies left a gap in our knowledge of agricultural marketing in Hausaland. While Henry Hays had recently published his study of the ‘performance’ of grain marketing between Norman’s three villages and Zaria township, it used a methodology in agricultural economics based on large-scale random samples of farmers and each ‘marketing intermediary’ in the rural—urban link, and a questionaire technique (Hays, 1975). There was still room for participant observation of the social relationships linking Hausa farmers and traders to be gained from living in a village.