Alhaji (Sir) Abubakar Tafawa Balewa remains the only Nigerian Head-of-Government to have written and published a novel (novella), Shaihu Umar: A Novel About Slavery in Africa.
As a teenager, Tafawa Balewa was never interested in politics. He wanted to be a teacher and novelist. In 1933, at the age of 20, his novella, Shaihu Umar written in Hausa, came third in a literary competition organised by the colonial education department in Zaria.
The novella is a bildungsroman that parallels Shaihu Umar’s journey amongst an enslaver’s caravans across the Sahara Desert with a person’s journey through life from birth, wedding, child-nurturing to death.
This 144-page novella (the author’s only major literary work and a bestseller in British Northern Nigeria) was first published in 1955, in Hausa, and then translated and published in English in 1967, a year after he was assassinated in Nigeria’s first military coup.
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