Cultural Persistence and Technological Transition: Hausa Love Expression through Oral Tradition and Digital Media

• Aliyu Uba Ph.D.

  Adeyemi Federal University of Education, Ondo.

  Author

This paper explores how love is manifested in Hausa culture and how the traditional oral communication has persisted and evolved to the new digital communication. The study is based on Symbolic Interactionism and Performance Theory, which focus on the social construction, symbolic mediation, and performance of love as a construction through the prism of cultural, moral and gendered norms. Data were gathered based on qualitative ethnographic design with the help of oral texts (waƙoƙi) (waƙoƙi proverbs, folktales), oral interviews with elders, performers, married couples, and youth, and through samples of ethically anonymized digital communications. Thematic and comparative studies uncover that the traditional manifestations of love are based on symbolism, mediated courtship, and moral control with the gendered expectations influencing emotional revelation. Digital technologies have brought in new privacy, immediacy, coded articulateness, and voice notes, enabling young people to bargain intimacy and still be culturally proper. The paper brings out the preservation of traditional symbols in the online world, the redefinition of oral aesthetics in the online world, and the contradictions between cultural values and practices in the modern world. Results show that there is a generational divergence in romanticization with the older generation preferring mediated and community-based forms of romanticization, and the younger generation adapting the traditional norms to the digital environment. The study adds to the Hausa cultural and communication studies by showing how continuity is dynamically interrelated with technology innovation, and as well as providing information on how gender, morality and identity can be negotiated in the expression of emotions. The research also gives a structure upon which interdisciplinary studies can be conducted on the topic of African digital culture and indigenous communication practices.

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