This episode traces the life of one of the most remarkable women in African history - a scholar who wrote in four languages, advised caliphs, documented wars in poetry, and then, in the aftermath of civil war, built an educational network for women that no empire, no colonial power, and no government has ever been able to destroy. The Yan Taru — "those who congregate together" — sent trained women teachers walking across the Sahel with nothing but memorized poems and a distinctive straw hat, reaching thousands of women in villages scattered across territory the size of Western Europe.

In 1838, while Asma'u's teachers were walking between villages in the Sahel heat, women in England could not attend university and teaching an enslaved woman to read in the American South was a criminal offense. This is not the history most people know.

Drawing on the scholarship of Jean Boyd and Beverly Mack, the works of Usman dan Fodio, and Asma'u's own surviving poetry — including her elegies for the fallen and her extraordinary "Sufi Women" poem — this episode follows the arc from a child's experience of revolution to the creation of an institution that women in Sokoto still use today, nearly two hundred years later.

Content Warning: This episode discusses warfare, displacement, and the deaths of historical figures, including descriptions of fleeing battle zones.

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