Research Catalog

Title

Allo kafi gida : secret Qur'anic boards from northern Nigeria / Antoine Lema.

Author

Lema, Antoine

Publication

Milan, Italy : Five Continents Editions, [2019]

Supplementary Content

TOC

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

223 pages : illustrations (chiefly color); 35 cm

Summary

Secrecy is the common feature of the so-called allo kafii gida Qur'anic writing boards used by the Hausa of northern Nigeria. While on the one hand their owners share a barely concealed reluctance to reveal the auspicious epigrams decorating these artefacts, on the other they exhibit a clear desire to avoid displaying images of animals and human beings that might cause repercussions in an iconoclastic Islamic context. One need only consider that even today possessing an allo kafii gida incurs severe punishment by the most fervent Moslems, sometimes extending to the death penalty. Every board in this book would have been destroyed by Islamic fundamentalists if it had not somehow been saved at some time in the past. Those who made the decorations embellishing these Qur'anic tablets were not simply illustrators; they were nothing short of troubadours, painting on wooden panels the tales depicting the cosmic connections of the society in which they lived. Over the years, the cosmic ideas of distant foreign lands were incorporated in the Hausas' system of thought and these allo kafii gida have thus turned into cosmological time capsules impressed on wooden panels. In view of this challenging cultural context, the owners of these artworks can be described as 'curators' of these secret boards, which, in spite of serving the Islamic religion, actually record Hausa cosmology. The artefacts adorning the book are truly unique in the field of extra-European art and come from a private collection built over a period of twenty years of painstaking research.

Subject

• Qurʼan > Study and teaching > Nigeria
• Qurʼan
• Art, Hausa > Pictorial works
• Hausa (African people) > Religion
• Cosmology, African
• Islamic art and symbolism > Nigeria
• Islamic art objects > Nigeria > Pictorial works
• Art, Hausa
• Islamic art and symbolism
• Islamic art objects
• Education
• Nigeria

Genre/Form

Pictorial works.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-220).
• Includes bibliographical references.

Contents

Machine generated contents note: Alio and Mallam -- In the Trails of Three Story Tellers -- The Hausa, Islam and Qur'anic Boards -- Alio Design, Scripts, Production and Preservation -- Hausa Allo Iconography -- Five Distinctions -- Decoding the Graphics of Alio Kafi Gida -- Beyond Scripts and Graphics -- Taming the Challenges of Life -- Catalogue of Works.

Call Number

Sc+ G 22-42

ISBN

• 9788874398744
• 8874398743

OCLC

1121197156

Author

Lema, Antoine, author.

Title

Allo kafi gida : secret Qur'anic boards from northern Nigeria / Antoine Lema.

Publisher

Milan, Italy : Five Continents Editions, [2019]

Type of Content

text

still image

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-220).

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references.

Connect to:

TOC

Local Subject

Black author.

Research Call Number

Sc+ G 22-42