Baba, of Karo, 1877-1951 (Personal Name)

Her Baba of Karo, 1954.

Baba de Karo, c1969: t.p.

Dictionary of African Biography, accessed December 8, 2014, via Oxford African American Studies Center database: (Baba of Karo; Baba Hasetu Dantsoho; home economist; born c.1890 in Karo, Nigeria; was an intelligent Hausa woman of Karo village, Zaria Province, northern Nigeria; all that is known about her is based on interviews she granted to Mary Smith, the wife of Michael Smith, a Jamaican social anthropologist who did field research in northern Nigeria (1940s-1950s); the interviews were recorded in Hausa verbatim as dictated by her and were later translated and published in English as an autobiography, Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa; she started work at an early age, selling a variety of processed foods for her mother; her father arranged her first marriage (1904) when she was fourteen years old; later divorced; married three more times; engaged in spinning and weaving of coarse cotton and in food preparation; had no children of her own; helped in the delivery of her relatives' children; her story helped to understand many aspects of precolonial Hausa society; her autobiography indicates the pervasive Islamic influence in twentieth-century Hausa society; died 03 June 1951 in Nigeria)