sources of hausa literature

Columbia University Libraries

Hausa language and culture acquisitions at columbia: home.

• Grammars, Phrasebooks, and Textbooks
• Linguistics
• Drama, Folktales, Novellas, Novels, Poetry, Readers, and Short Stories
• Biography, Culture, History, Proverbs, Religion, and Society
• Related Works in Arabic, English, French, and German

This bibliography on the Hausa language --to be frequently updated-- represents highlights from the last fifty years of library acquisitions at Columbia University. In addition to full-length novels, plays, poetry, and short stories, the Hausa literature collection includes a selection of Adabin Kasuwar Kano or "Kano market literature". These inexpensively-printed, short works of fiction appeared during the mid- to late 1990s and are mostly all love stories or soyayya . A few titles are non-fiction: pamphlets on better living, a good marriage, or Islamic values. The guide also includes many biographies, histories, cultural and linguistic studies, religious works, and other non-fiction published in Hausa. Titles in Arabic, English, French, and German listed here deal primarily with aspects of Hausa language, literature, biography, history, religion, the arts, film, music, culture, and society.

Part of: African Studies at Columbia

Reference -- Dictionaries & Glossaries

• Abraham, Roy Clive. Dictionary of the Hausa language . Second edition. London: University of London Press, 1962. (992 p.)
• Awde, Nicholas. Hausa-English/English-Hausa dictionary. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1996. (454 p.)
• Awde, Nicholas. "21st century" Hausa : an English-Hausa classified word list . London : Centre for African Language Learning, 1987, c1986. (168 p.)
• Baba, M. G. Hausa dalla-dalla : the Hausa learner's handbook . Kano : Aybee Printing & Publishing, 199-?] (25 p.)
• Baki, Issah Alhassan. al-Qāms̄ al-ʻaṣrī : Injilīzī-ʻArabī-Hawsūī = Kamus na turanci da Larabci da Hausa = Modern dictionary of English, Arabic and Hausa . Zaria, Nigeria : Hudahuda, 1997. (235 p.)
• Bargery, G.P. A Hausa-English dictionary and English-Hausa vocabulary.   With some notes on the Hausa people and their language by D. Westermann. London; New York: Oxford University Press, 1934.(1226 p.)
• Bross, Michael and Ahmad Tela Baba. Dictionary of Hausa crafts : a dialectal documentation = Kamus na sana'o'in Hausa : bincike kan karin harshen Hausa . Drawings by A.T. Sati. Köln : Köppe, c1996. (275 p.)
• Caron, Bernard and Ahmed H. Amfani. Dictionnaire français-haoussa: suivi d'un index haoussa-français . Paris: Karthala ; Ibadan: IFRA-Ibadan, c1997. (412 p.)
• Dikko, Inuwa and Usman Maccido. Kamus na adon maganar Hausa . Zaria: Northern Nigerian Pub., 1991. (118 p.)
• Gimba, Maina and Russell G. Schuh. Bole-English-Hausa dictionary and English-Bole wordlist . Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2015] (388 p.) --See also: E-book [Columbia only!]
• Hanyar tadi da Turanci, a dictionary of English conversation for Hausa students . Norla, Zaria, Longmans, Green and co. [1957]
• Hausa metalanguage = K̳amus na keb̳ab̳b̳an kalmoni . Sponsored by the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council and compiled by the Hausa Studies Association of Nigeria (Kungiyar Nazarin Hausa) ; edited by Professor D. Muhammed. Ibadan, Nigeria : University Press ; Yaba, Lagos : Nigerian Educational Research & Development Council, 1990.
• Herms, Irmtraud. Wörterbuch Hausa-Deutsch . Leipzig : Verlag Enzyklopädie, c1987. (187 p.)
• Lexique Hausa and Zarma : démocratie et développement à la base : terminologie essentielle . Niamey, Niger: Démocratie, 2000. (168 p.)
• Majinguini, Abdou. Karamin kamus na hausa zuwa faransanci = Dictionnaire élémentaire hausa-français . 2d éd. Niamey, Niger: Editions GG, 2003. (752 p.)
• McIntyre, Joseph and Hilke Meyer-Bahlburg; assisted by Ahmed Tijani Lawal. Hausa in the media : a lexical guide : Hausa-English-German, English-Hausa, German-Hausa . Hamburg : Helmut Buske Verlag, c1991. (289 p.)
• Moussa-Aghali, Fatimane. Lexique des néologismes en hawsa du Niger . Napoli : Istituto universitario orientale, 1999. (91 p.)
• Newman, Roxana Ma. An English-Hausa dictionary . New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, c1990. (327 p.)
• Newman, Paul. A Hausa-English dictionary . New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, 2007. (243 p.)
• Newman, Paul and Roxana Ma Newman. Hausa dictionary for everyday use : Hausa-English, English-Hausa = Kamusun Hausa na Yau da Kullum Hausa-Ingilishi, Ingilishi-Hausa . Kano : Bayero University Press, 2020. (627 p.) --See also: E-book
• Schön, James Frederick. Dictionary of the Hausa language . With appendices of Hausa literature. 1st ed. London: Church Missionary House, 1876. (142 p).
• Skinner, Neil. Hausa comparative dictionary . Köln: Köppe, 1996. (337 p)
• Skinner, Neil. Hausa-English pocket dictionary = Kamus na Hausa da turanci . Ikeja: Longman Nigeria, 1985, c1968. (107 p.)
• Skinner, Neil. Hausa lexical expansion since 1930: material supplementary to that contained in Bargery's dictionary, including words borrowed from English, Arabic, French, and Yoruba . Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin, African Studies Program, [1985] (54 p.)
• Skinner, Neil. Kamus na Turanci da Hausa = English-Hausa dictionary: babban ja-gora ga Turanci . Zaria : Northern Nigerian Publishing Co., 1973, c1965. (166 p.)
• Taylor, F.W. A Fulani-Hausa vocabulary . Taylor's Fulani-Hausa series; 4. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927. (136 p.)

• Abdullahi, Shehu Umar. Gaskiya dokin k̳arfe . Kano, Nigeria : Mai-Nasara Printing, 1985. (127 p.) [In Hausa, essays on Hausa culture, Islam, social change, politics, & development in Nigeria under colonialism and in the post-colonial era.]

• Asma'u, Nana. Collected works of Nana Asma'u, daughter of Usman dan Fodiyo, (1793-1864). [Edited by Jean Boyd and Beverly B. Mack.] African historical sources; no. 9 . East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, [1997] (753 p.)  [English analysis, with Hausa texts & English translations.] --See also: E-book [Columbia only!]

• Baba, of Karo. Labarin Baba: mutuniyar Karo ta kasar Kano . Transcribed and translated by Mary Smith ta rubuta; ta tsara da taimakon Neil Skinner.  Madison, Wis.: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, c1993. (89 p.; originally published in English in 1954)  [An autobiographical account in Hausa, with sociological insights.] --See also: 1981 English ed. ; Law Library copy of 1981 ed. --Plus: 1964 English ed. ; 1955 English ed. --And: 1954 English ed. ; Burke Library copy of 1954 ed.

• Balewa, Abubakar Tafawa. Shaihu Umar . Zaria : Northern Nigerian Pub. Co., c1966. (49 p.) [In Hausa, a historical novella set in the era of slavery & the slave trade in 19th century western Africa.] --See also: 1989 English translation --Plus: 1967 English translation

• Chekaraou, Ibro. Mù zânta dà harshèn hausa . Let's speak African language series. Madison, Wisc. : NALRC Press, 2008. (393 p.) [English & Hausa]

• Duniyar hausa 3 . [Edited by] Jaharu Sule. [Niamey, Niger] : Ministère de l'Education Nationale; Groupe Sanecom, c2008. (185 p.) [A Hausa reader, volume 3 in the series.]

• Edgar, Frank. Hausa readings: selections from Edgar's Tatsuniyoyi . [By] Neil Skinner. Madison, Wis.: Published for the Dept. of African Languages and Literature by the University of Wisconsin Press, 1968. (278 p.)  [Selections in Hausa & English from Frank Edgar's Litafi na Tatsuniyoyi na Hausa , a three-volume work originally published between 1910 & 1913.]

• Furniss, Graham. Poetry, prose and popular culture in Hausa . Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, c1996 (338 p.)  [English analysis, with Hausa texts & English translations.]

• Hausar yau da kullum : intermediate and advanced lessons in Hausa language and culture . [Compiled by] William R. Leben, Ahmadu Bello Zaria, Shekarau B. Maikafi, and Lawan Danladi Yalwa. [Palo Alto, Calif.] : Published for the Stanford Linguistics Association by the Center for the Study of Language and Information, c1991. (153 p.)

• Imam, Alhaji Abubakar. Magana jari ce . 3 vols. Zaria [Nigeria] : Gaskiya, 1960. [Short stories based on Hausa folktales.]

• Imam, Alhaji Abubakar. Ruwan bagaja . Zaria : Northern Nigerian Pub. Co., c1966. (44 p.) [Short stories for young people featuring the main character Alhaji from Kontagora and his adventures.] --See also: English translation (1971)

• Ingawa, Ahmadu. Iliya ʻdam maikarfi . Zaria : Northern Nigeria Pub. Co., 1970. (50 p.) [A collection of folk adventure stories in Hausa.]

• Kagara, Muhammad Bello. Gand̳oki . Zaria : Northern Nigerian Pub. Co., c1968. (48 p.) --See also: English translation (1971)

• Kano, Aminu. Rayuwar Ahmad Mahmud Sa'adu Zungur . Zaria: Northern Nigerian Pub. Co., 1973. (17 p.)  [A short biography of Sa'adu Zungur, Nigerian nationalist.]

• Magé, Souley. Gidan mace . Niamey : Editions Gashingo, 2014. (159 p.) [A novel in Hausa.]

• Maje, Sule. Da wa za' a yi? . Niamey, Niger : Editions Gashingo, [2015] (120 p.) [A novel in Hausa.]

• Rattray, Robert Sutherland (ed. & trans.) Hausa folk-lore, customs, proverbs, etc . 2 vols.  Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1969. [Hausa texts, in Arabic script (or àjàmi), with Roman transliteration & English translation.] --See also: 1913 ed. ; Burke Library copy --Plus: E-book [Columbia only!]

• Rayuwar Hausawa . [Compiled by] Cibiyar Nazarin Harsunan Nijeriya, Jamiʾar Bayero = Bayero University. Centre for the Study of Nigerian Languages. Lagos : Thomas Nelson (Nigeria) Ltd., 1981. (46 p.) [On Hausa history & culture.]

• Wusasa, J. Tafida. Jiki magayi . Zaria : Northern Nigeria Pub. Co., 1955. (51 p.) [A novella in Hausa.]

• Zab̳ab̳b̳un wak̳ok̳in da da na yanzu . [Edited by] D̳andatti Abdulk̳adir. Ikeja, Lagos : Thomas Nelson (Nigeria), 1979. (191 p.) [An anthology of Hausa poetry.]

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Hausa

• Background Sources on Islam
• Background Sources for the Hausa
• The Arrival of Islam
• The Fulani Jihad
• The Colonial Impact on Islam
• The West African Scholarly Setting
• Hausa/Fulani Scholarship
• Qurʾanic Translations into Hausa and other Qurʾanic Studies
• Hausa Participation in the Hajj
• The Bori Spirit-Possession Cult
• The Many Roles of Malamai
• Marriage, Wife Seclusion, and Daily Life
• Religion in the Hausa Diaspora
• Islam and Slavery in Hausa Settings
• Competing Options in Education
• Material Culture of Hausa Islam
• Islam and Change in the Hausa Setting
• The Boko Haram Challenge
• Popular Culture in Modern Hausaland

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Hausa by Margaret Saunders LAST MODIFIED: 26 October 2023 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195390155-0305

Introduction.

With an estimated population of up to 50 million, Hausa make up one of the largest people groups practicing Islam. Despite settlement of today’s Hausaland in the central Sudan by the early 1000s CE , the use of “Hausa” (often spelled Haoussa in French, with Hawsa now official in Niger) for its inhabitants is absent from early records; the word first appears as a geographic term in the 1500s. Islam reached this area even before the name, with early Ibadite/Kharijite influences from North Africa, followed by the arrival of Malikite Islam by the 1400s. Groups of non-Muslim Hausa speakers known by terms such as Maguzawa, Arne, or Azna still exist today, their religious practices influenced by Islam while some traditional beliefs have also influenced Muslim Hausa practices. The Fulani-led jihad of 1804–1812 led to major political as well as religious changes in Hausa city-states and added a Fulani element to the population now called Hausa. From rural villages to large cities with long-standing trade with North Africa and the forest belt to diaspora communities, Hausa speakers present a wide range of lifestyles, in which the Hausa language and the practice of Islam are shared elements. Major research topics included here begin with the history of Islam in Hausaland and Hausa/Fulani participation in a West African “core curriculum” of Islamic scholarship, especially as it developed following the jihad. The material culture of Islam is explored in the archaeological record, in mosque architecture, and in scholarly practices. The many roles of Hausa malamai from Qurʾanic education to medicine to rituals of daily life are discussed, as are practices such as the seclusion of married women. European colonization by Britain and France at the turn of the twentieth century impacted the role of Arabic literacy, education styles, Hausa participation in the hajj , and other aspects of religious practice. Political uses of religion, including the role of the major Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya brotherhoods, are another topic of interest, both within Hausaland and in communities in the Hausa diaspora. Recent developments in Hausa Islam include the Yan Izala reform movement and the Boko Haram movement now associated with terrorism. It may be helpful to begin with a brief selection of background sources on Islam and on Hausa.

History of Hausa literature 3600-3-AF2-WLH1

I. Introduction to the course (problems of ethnogenesis and short history of the Hausa people; main categories of the Hausa literature). II. Oral literature (Hausa fable - classification, function and origin; myths and legends; riddles; proverbs; tongue-twisters; praise epithets; praise songs; popular songs-admonitions; wedding songs and others; formal and metric features of the oral poetry). III. Genesis of the Hausa writings (factors contributing to the development of writings in Arabic characters; literary output in Arabic; Arabic prose of the Fulani jihad; the beginnings of written Hausa literature). IV. Religious poetry (homiletic poetry - inspiration, contents and style of the homiletic poems, genre representatives; praise poems - inspiration, contents and style, genre representatives, secular tendencies; biographic poems; poems on religious duties; ascetic poems; astrological and numerological poems; historical and political poems; elegies; poetic techniques and versification forms - metre and rhyme, information values of ramzi). V. On the borderline of oral and written traditions (historical chronicle - genre representatives, structure and special features; Abuja chronicle as an example of the historical prose; chronicles written in the Hausa diaspora; historical value of the Hausa chronicles; historical and ethnographic stories). VI. The beginnings of contemporary prose (material basis of the development of writings in the Latin script (boko); first novels as aftermath of a literary competition; post-war novels - realistic and fantastic streams, picaresque novel, first science-fiction novel; social and political problems in novels written in 1980.; autobiographies, biographies and memoirs; travel descriptions, political pamphlets). VII. Dramaturgy output (dramaturgy traditions in the Hausa country; the beginnings of the written dramas; marriage and family problems; problems of children and youths upbringing; history and tradition in the Hausa drama). VIII. Contemporary poetry (precursors of the secular poetry; the poetry of the most prominent poets; poetry in the mass-media). IX. The phenomenon of the Kano market literature (genesis, the most important authors, the problems dealt with, film-making on the basis of love novels). X. Evaluation of the Hausa literature (Hausa criteria of evaluation of the literary work; Hausa literature as compared with some other local literatures; translations and adaptations into Hausa of the world-known literary pieces).

Bibliography

" Furniss G., Bibliography of Hausa Popular Fiction 1987-2002,Köln 2004. " Furniss G., Poetry, Prose and Popular Culture in Hausa, Edinburgh University Press 1996. " Hiskett M., A History of Hausa Islamic Verse, London 1975. " Piłaszewicz S., Historia literatur afrykańskich w językach rodzimych. I. Literatura Hausa, Warszawa 19872. " Said Babura Ahmad, Narrator as Interpretor. Stability and Variation in Hausa Tales, Köln 1997. " Szczegłow Ju.K., Sowriemiennaja litieratura na jazykach tropiczieskoj Afriki, Moskwa 1976.

Additional information

Additional information ( registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system:

• Description of 3600-3-AF2-WLH1 in USOSweb

Hausa Language Literature

Hausa Language Literature is a rich and varied tradition that has been developed over centuries by the Hausa people. It...

Language & Literature

Hausa language textbooks

Welcome to the Hausa Language: A Beginner’s Guide and Language Resources

How are you doing in Hausa

The problem is that Hausa language is like Arabic not English. Meaning that Hausa have many gender pronouns unlike English. For example, in English “How are...

Hausa Alphabet

Hausa has 23 to 25 consonant sounds, depending on the speaker. The Hausa alphabet consists of 29 letters, as shown below: In the standard Romanized Hausa...

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Maryse Condé, prolific ‘grande dame’ of Caribbean literature, dies at age 90

FILE - French writer Maryse Condé reacts after being awarded the New Academy’s Literature Prize at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 9, 2018. Condé, winner in 2018 of an “alternate” Nobel Prize, died Monday night at a hospital in Apt, outside Marseille. (Christine Olsson/ TT News Agency via AP, File)

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NEW YORK (AP) — Maryse Condé, an acclaimed French-language novelist from Guadeloupe who in novels, stories, plays and memoirs imagined and redefined the personal and historical past from 17th century New England to contemporary Europe, has died at age 90.

Condé, winner in 2018 of an “alternate” Nobel Prize, died Monday night at a hospital in Apt, outside Marseille. Her longtime editor, Laurant Laffont, told The Associated Press that she had suffered from a neurological illness that impaired her vision to the point of having to dictate her final novel, “The Gospel According to the New World.” But she still enjoyed a 90th birthday celebration, in February, when she was joined by family and friends.

“She was smiling, she was joyous,” said Laffont, who otherwise remembered her as a woman of uncommon intensity and generosity. “It was a wonderful farewell, a truly great sendoff.”

Condé, who lived in Luberon, France in recent years, was often called the “grande dame” of Caribbean literature. Influenced by Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and other critics of colonialism, she was a world traveler who probed the conflicts between and within Western culture, African culture and Caribbean culture, and the tensions between the desire for liberation and what the author would call “the trap of terrorism and simplistic radicalisation.”

With her husband, Richard Philcox, often serving as her English-language translator, Condé wrote dozens of books, ranging from historical explorations such as “Segu,” her best known novel, to the autobiographical stories in “Tales from the Heart” to fresh takes on Western literature. She reworked “Wuthering Heights” into “Windward Heights,” and paired a West Indian slave with Hester Prynne of “The Scarlet Letter” in ”I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.”

“A historian is somebody who studies the facts, the historical facts — somebody who is tied to what actually happens,” she explained in an interview included in the back section of “I, Tituba,” published in 1992. “I am just a dreamer — my dreams rest upon a historical basis. Being a Black person, having a certain past, having a certain history behind me, I want to explore that realm and of course do it with imagination and my intuition. But I am not involved in any kind of scholarly research.”

The mother of four children (with first husband Mamadou Condé), she was nearly 40 when she published her first novel and almost 50 when “Segu” made her an international name. “Segu,” released in French in 1984 and in the United States three years later, was set in an 18th century African kingdom and followed the fates of a royal advisor and his family as their community is upended by the rise of Islam and the expansion of the slave trading industry.

“In the past all a man needed was a bit of willpower to keep wives, children, and younger brothers in order,” observes one family member. “Life was a straight line drawn from the womb of a woman to the womb of the earth … But now the menace of new ideas and values lurked everywhere.”

She continued the story in “The Children of Segu,” but rejected additional volumes, explaining to one interviewer that her spirit “had journeyed to another world.” Over the following decades, her fictional settings included Salem, Massachusetts (“I, Tituba”), Jamaica (“Nanna-Ya”) and Paris and Guadeloupe for “The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ilana.”

Condé received numerous awards over the second half of her life, among them the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, the U.S.-based Hurston & Wright Legacy Award and the New Academy Prize for literature, an informal honor presented in 2018 in place of the Nobel, which was sidelined for the year amid allegation of sexual harassment by prize committee members.

“She describes the ravages of colonialism and the post-colonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming,” New Academy judge Ann Pålsson said at the time. “The dead live in her stories closely to the living in a … world where gender, race and class are constantly turned over in new constellations.”

In the mid-1990s, Condé joined the faculty at Columbia University as a professor of French and Francophone literature. She also taught at the University of Virginia and UCLA among other schools before retiring in 2005, around the same time French President Jacques Chirac named her head of the French Committee for the Memory of Slavery.

Conde was married twice, most recently to Philcox, a British academic whom she met in the late 1960s in Senegal.

Born Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was one of six children (two others died) raised in a relatively prosperous and educated family, where French was favored over Creole and and the poetry of Victor Hugo over local folklore. Condé was a writer from early on, creating a one-act play at age 10 about her mother, reporting for local newspapers in high school and publishing book reviews for a student magazine in college, the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.

She was admittedly isolated as a young woman, and would remember how her family “prided itself on being picture perfect in public.” But in her teens, she became politicized after reading “Black Shack Alley,” a 1950 novel by Joseph Zobel about the coming of age of a boy contending with white oppression in colonial Martinique, a way of life Condé knew little about.

“Today, I am convinced that what I later called somewhat pretentiously ‘my political commitment’ was born at that very moment,” she wrote in “Tales from the Heart,” published in 1998. “Reading Joseph Zobel, more than any theoretical discourse, opened my eyes. I understood that the milieu I belonged to had absolutely nothing to offer and I began to loathe it. I had become bleached and whitewashed, a poor imitation of the little French children I hung out with.”

Like many young idealists in the 1960s, she moved to Africa, spending much of the following decade in Ghana, Guinea and other newly independent countries. She would discover, like many of her contemporaries, that African leaders could be as oppressive as colonial leaders, experiences she drew upon for her debut novel, “Heremakhonon,” published in 1976.

“When I was in Guinea, there was a department store with that name (Heremakhonon),” Condé told Howard University professor Francoise Pfaff during an interview that appears in Pfaff’s “Conversations with Maryse Condé,” published in 1996. “In theory, this store offered everything people needed, but it had nothing except Chinese toys of poor quality. For me it was a symbol of independence.”

Whether in Guadeloupe, Paris, Africa or the U.S., she often felt apart from the general population; the author liked to say that she didn’t write in French or Creole, but in her own language, “Maryse Condé.” She drew as much from oral history as from written history, navigating between the lost and dying worlds that oral tradition represented and the new world of mass media and what she called the “totally modern lifestyle.”

In 2023, she published “The Gospel According to the New World,” which she needed to dictate to her husband because of her neurological disorder. The book was a contemporary parable about a dark-skinned child in Martinique with grey-green eyes who may or may not be the son of God. Condé included an author’s note in which she called the book a “brief testament” to the faith and inner strength need to “change the world, though we might never achieve it.”

“Loving others seems to me to be the way, perhaps the only one, to make an impact,” she wrote.

Associated Press writer Barbara Surk in Nice, France contributed to this report.

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Maryse Condé, ‘Grande Dame’ of Francophone Literature, Dies at 90

She explored the history and culture of Africa, the West Indies and Europe in work that made her a perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize.

By Clay Risen

Maryse Condé, a writer from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe whose explorations of race, gender and colonialism across the Francophone world made her a perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Tuesday in Apt, a town in southern France. She was 90.

Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her husband, Richard Philcox, who translated many of her works into English.

Ms. Condé’s work, beginning with her first novel, “Hérémakhonon” (1976), came at a pivotal time, as the notion of French literature, centered on the canonical works of French writers, began to give way to the multifarious notion of Francophone literature, drawing from all parts of the French-speaking world.

Having lived in Guadeloupe, France, West Africa and the United States, Ms. Condé was able to imbue her work with a kaleidoscopic cosmopolitanism; she was equally at home with memoirs, novels set in 18th-century Mali and 17th-century Massachusetts, and even a book of food writing . Her sure-handedness won her acclaim as the “grande dame” of Francophone literature.

She was twice shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, given to novelists writing in languages other than English. After the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature was canceled in the wake of a sexual abuse scandal among the award committee, she received the New Academy Prize , created by a group of Swedish cultural figures as a temporary replacement — the first and last person to receive the award.

Like other writers grappling with the legacy of colonialism, Ms. Condé centered her work on broadly political themes, examining the formation of different individual and collective identities. But she stood apart in her adamant nonconformity.

She supported African independence, but she was critical of the leaders who came after it, accusing them of corruption and empty promises. She was proud to call herself a Black writer, but she lashed out at movements like Negritude and Pan-Africanism, which she said replicated white racism by reducing all Black people to a single identity.

Much of her work was historical. Her breakout novel, “Segu” (1984), which sold more than 200,000 copies in France, traces the life of a royal adviser in the Bambara Empire of West Africa, which flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries but collapsed under pressure from European and Islamic forces.

Among her favorite books as a child was “Wuthering Heights,” and in 1995 she offered a retelling of Emily Brontë’s classic tale of obsession and revenge with “Windward Heights,” set in Cuba and Guadeloupe.

She had already done something similar with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel “The Scarlet Letter” and Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible,” drawing on elements of both works to tell the story of an enslaved woman caught up in the Salem witch trials in “I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem” (1986), which won the Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme.

Since then she was said to be a frequent contender for the Nobel Prize, though she professed a lack of interest in the results — or in the trappings of success generally.

“I am drawn to people ready to disobey the law and who refuse to accept orders from anybody — people who, like me, don’t believe in material wealth, for whom money is nothing, owning a home is nothing, a car is nothing,” she said in a 1989 interview with the journal Callaloo. “Those kinds of people tend to be my friends.”

Maryse Boucolon was born on Feb. 11, 1934, in Pointe-à-Pitre, a city in Guadeloupe, an overseas department of France. Her parents were both affluent educators: Her mother, Jeanne Quidal, ran a girls’ school, and her father, Auguste Boucolon, taught school before founding a bank.

The youngest of eight siblings, Maryse grew up protected, and isolated, by her parents’ relative wealth. Her parents did not allow her to attend the island’s ubiquitous street festivals or mix with people they considered beneath them socially, which she said also kept her ignorant of the worst impacts of colonialism and racism.

She began writing at an early age. When she was about 12 she wrote a one-act play as a gift for her mother on her birthday. But her political awakening came more gradually.

As a teenager she read “Black Shack Alley” (1950), a semi-autobiographical novel by Joseph Zobel about a poor Black boy in Martinique, another French Caribbean department. That book revealed to her the sort of experiences that most Black Caribbean people endured under colonialism.

When she was 16, her parents sent her to Paris to complete her education. They had told her the city was the center of reason and justice, but instead she found herself the object of racism and sexism.

She went on to study at the Sorbonne, and to mix with Paris’s Black intellectual circles. In 1959 she met a Guinean actor, Mamadou Condé, and they married a year later. But the relationship soon soured, and in 1960 she moved to Africa to teach.

Over the next 13 years she lived for long stints in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. The region was in the throes of independence and decolonization, and it attracted thinkers and activists from around the Black diaspora.

As she moved among them, Ms. Condé imbibed their heady mix of Marxism and Black Power, and she began to put those ideas into writing, first as a playwright and then, in 1976, in “Hérémakhonon,” which means “Waiting for Happiness” in the West African language Malinke.

Though she insisted it was not autobiographical, “Hérémakhonon” tells the story of a Black woman from Guadeloupe who lives for a time in Paris before going to Africa in hopes of finding herself — only to realize, in the end, that geography does not hold the key to one’s identity.

By then she had returned to Paris, where in 1975 she received a doctorate in literature from the Sorbonne. Long estranged from her husband, she had begun a relationship with Mr. Philcox. She finally divorced Mr. Condé in 1981, and she and Mr. Philcox married a year later.

Along with her husband, Ms. Condé is survived by three daughters from her first marriage, Sylvie, Aïcha and Leïla Condé; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

She held a professorship at Columbia University, and she also taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Maryland and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ms. Condé and Mr. Philcox returned to Guadeloupe in 1986 and lived there until a few years ago, when they returned to France so she could be closer to treatment for a neurological disease.

The disease left her unable to see. She wrote her last three books, all published since 2020, by dictating them, chapter by chapter, to her husband.

She was first shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2015 for the body of her work. She was shortlisted again in 2023, when she was 89, for her final book , “The Gospel According to the New World,” about a dark-skinned boy in Martinique who may or may not be the son of God.

Though she did not win the prize — it went to Georgi Gospodinov for his book “Time Shelter” — she did achieve the distinction of being the oldest person ever shortlisted for a Booker.

Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk. More about Clay Risen