The Department of African Cultural Studies is pleased to announce that Abubakar Muhammad and Samira Wu have been awarded the Ebrahim Hussein Fellowship, which supports graduate student research in African literature.
Through interdisciplinary approaches that combine fieldwork, textual analysis, and performance studies, both scholars examine how African communities produce meaning, identity, and political expression through everyday cultural practices.
Abubakar Muhammad: Informal Soccer, Youth Culture, and African Urbanism
Abubakar Muhammad’s project, Underground Soccer and Sporting Identity among African Urban Youth, investigates how informal soccer shapes sporting identity, leisure, and urban life in African cities.
Focusing on Nigeria, Muhammad examines how youth transform streets, neighborhoods, and informal gathering spaces into vibrant sites of play, sociality, and community formation despite limited formal infrastructure. Drawing on concepts such as “people as infrastructure” and do-it-yourself urbanism, his work argues that informal soccer is not simply recreational activity, but a creative and collective way of remaking the city from below.
Combining fieldwork in Kano, Bauchi, and Jigawa states with literary and film analysis, Muhammad explores how underground soccer operates as both a form of leisure and a challenge to official understandings of urban space, sport, and public life. His project examines not only gameplay itself, but also fan culture, improvised equipment and jerseys, neighborhood tournaments, media practices, and rituals of spectatorship that emerge around the game.
Through this work, Muhammad contributes to broader conversations about African urbanism, youth culture, globalization, and the social meanings of sport in contemporary African societies.
Samira Wu: Theatre, Embodiment, and Community Performance in Nigeria
Samira Wu’s project, Embodied Archives and Community Performance: Field Research on Tess Onwueme’s Theatre in Nigeria, explores how Nigerian playwright Tess Onwueme’s theatre transforms oral traditions, ritual practices, and women’s collective expression into forms of political mobilization and historical memory.
Drawing on African Cultural Studies, feminist historiography, and performance studies, Wu introduces the concept of the “embodied archive” to examine how knowledge is created and transmitted through rehearsal, improvisation, gesture, audience engagement, and community participation. Her research argues that Onwueme’s theatre shifts attention away from singular national heroes and toward collective struggles grounded in the lived experiences of women and local communities.
This summer, Wu will conduct fieldwork in Abuja and Zaria, Nigeria, where she will carry out interviews, archival research, and performance observation in university and community settings. Her work includes engagement with directors, performers, audiences, and scholars connected to Onwueme’s productions, as well as documentation of rehearsal and performance practices that cannot be captured through textual analysis alone.
By focusing on the social life of performance beyond the written script, Wu’s project offers new insight into African theatre, community dramaturgy, and the role of embodied cultural practice in shaping political and historical consciousness.
Together, the projects of Muhammad and Wu reflect the breadth of graduate research in the Department of African Cultural Studies and demonstrate the importance of African literature as a site of creativity, negotiation, and social transformation.
The department congratulates both recipients on this well-deserved recognition and looks forward to the impact of their research in the years ahead.
Graduate opportunities are made possible through the generosity of alumni, donors, and friends. We invite you to support graduate research in African Cultural Studies.