Puppet Theatre of the Hausa (Nigeria)
The Hausa puppet theatre, locally known as Karin Murya (“imitating voice”), is a mobile, open-air performance tradition in northern Nigeria. Led by itinerant performers, often from griot lineages, these shows involve hand-carved wooden puppets (some life-sized), music, improvisation, and biting humor. They mix morality tales, social critique, and playful improvisation, delivering ethical commentary while entertaining diverse, intergenerational audiences.
Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence
The Hausa puppet theatre operates at the intersection of humor, ritual, and ethical pedagogy, echoing Foucault’s vision of subjectivity as something not merely received, but actively crafted through practices of truth, ethical stylization, and public self-reflection.
In The Care of the Self, Foucault draws attention to ethical aesthetics: how a person’s conduct, gestures, and even speech are subject to an aesthetic regime—a cultivation of the soul in line with social ideals. In Hausa puppet theatre, the puppeteer’s voice serves as a powerful “technology of the self.” It is through polyvocality—speaking as multiple characters, animals, elders, tricksters—that the performer dramatizes the plurality of the self.
But these voices are not solipsistic. They are offered to a public of listeners, who are expected not only to laugh but to contemplate. The theatre, therefore, becomes a critical mirror—the audience sees itself reflected in the puppets’ foolishness, vices, and wisdom. In this way, the puppet theatre enacts parrhesia—truth-telling as a public act, grounded in vulnerability and courage, cloaked in humor.
Foucault’s thought also places emphasis on resistance to normalization. Hausa puppeteers challenge political authority, religious hypocrisy, and class arrogance, not through direct protest, but through satirical detour. Here, the joke is a form of subversion, the puppet a mask of truth, the laughter a ritual of ethical realignment.
Finally, the theatre invites the audience to re-examine conduct—whether marital relations, intergenerational respect, corruption, or spiritual practice—not through abstract theory, but embodied storytelling. This is precisely what Foucault meant by aesthetics of existence: the crafting of one’s life as a work of art, through performances of ethical imagination.