The Queen and the Serpent: Mythic Structures and Archetypal Transformations in the Hausa Foundational Myth.

Abstract

This article offers a symbolic-hermeneutic reading of the foundational Hausa myth of Bayajidda and the Queen of Daura, within a Jungian and post-Jungian framework that foregrounds the dynamics of the collective psyche. Rather than treating the narrative as historical legend or ethnographic residue, it is analyzed as an ontological drama—a symbolic matrix in which unconscious forces are enacted, transformed, and ritually inscribed in cultural memory. This archetypal triad—the indigenous and chthonic queen, the serpent sarkì, and the foreign prince Bajayidda—situated at the threshold of the Kusugu well, enacts the transition from archetypal inflation to symbolic integration within the collective psyche. Methodologically, the study integrates depth psychology with symbolic anthropology and onto-ethnography. Drawing on Carl Gustav Jung, James Hillman, and Joseph Campbell, along with field research, it interprets central mythic figures not as folkloric survivals but as active archetypes within the symbolic economy of the Hausa collective psyche. The serpent, Queen Daurama, and the bòorii spirits are read as mediators of psychic thresholds and bearers of cultural memory. The paper frames the Islamization of Hausa society as a process of symbolic integration rather than external rupture. Islam is interpreted not merely as a historical or doctrinal shift but as a reconfiguration of the collective psyche. The sacrifice of the serpent and the founding of the Hausa sultanate represent the emergence of a new imaginal order grounded in both indigenous depth and Islamic cosmology. Finally, the study rethinks African Islamization as a mode of collective individuation, in which myth serves as the symbolic infrastructure through which a culture negotiates transformation, continuity, and ontological renewal.