Languagle #37: Hausa
Hakuri maganin duniya
"Patience is the world's medicine."
What it means
Patience cures everything. Hakuri, patience or forbearance, is one of the most valued virtues in Hausa culture, and this saying presents it as the remedy for the world's troubles.
What kind of saying it is
Oral tradition. In Hausa, a karin magana. Passed down by word of mouth. Sayings like this have no single author.
About the Hausa language
Hausa is a Chadic language, part of the Afroasiatic family, spoken as a first language by over 50 million people and as a second by tens of millions more. It is the lingua franca of much of northern Nigeria and southern Niger and is widely used in trade across West Africa. Today it is written in the Latin alphabet (called boko), with hooked letters such as ɓ and ɗ, but it also has an older Arabic-based script, ajami.
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