Maimuna Dada-Sare Abdullahi MON (1918–1984) was a Nigerian writer, nurse, teacher and journalist of Fulani descent.
Her controversial romantic relationship with Rupert East, a British author and educationist, challenged the cultural and social assumptions of Colonial Northern Nigeria.
Dadasare (a Fulfulde word for wife or mother of the house) was born into a fairly privileged family in Gola in the Bajama district of Adamawa.
[1] During a trip in 1929 to Gola with a relative, she was kidnapped on the orders of a British colonial district officer who desired a young Fulani girl.
Her older male cousin, with whom she had travelled to Gola with, was part of the planning and execution of her abduction She was only 11 years old at the time.
She further wrote that she was no longer the "child who had been unscrupulously carried off" and that "something had fundamentally changed and my horizon had widened".
[1] Dadasare quickly missed her life with her abductor as she had access to an exclusive colonial privileges and luxuries.
Rupert East was managing the upstart Northern Region Literature Agency (Gaskiya Corporation).
[3] Dadasare, in her memoir, explained her decision to move with Dr East, whom she called Jaumusare (Master of the house):This time I did not have to be kidnapped.
[5] She was the hostess of the home, where she entertained his guests which included writers, artists and government officials.
[3] He found her a teacher who taught her how to read and write in both English and Hausa using the Latin script.
[2] East treated Dadasare as his wife and she enjoyed all the privileges, prestige and power that came with being a spouse of a colonial official.
[5][6]In 1951, Rupert East returned to the UK with his new wife, Jacqueline de Neyer, later having two kids, but he still maintained communication with Dadasare.
Elliott, also in his memoir, recounts:I was still finding my feet in this exacting job when a message reached me one day urgently to call and see Dada Sare.
We learnt some days later that the DO had been killed and Rupert seriously injured in a train crash on the railway between Cairo and Tel Aviv.
She was a remarkable woman who became later an Education Officer and died, greatly respected, recently in her native Adamawa Province.
She once complained about the lack of clinics in the city of Zaria and its densely populated Tudun Wada.
[8] She worked closely with legendary Hausa-language writers and journalists like Abubakar Imam, who was the Editor, and Nuhu Bamalli.
However, a racist prayer which blamed the Fulani for enslaving Christians caused her to revert to Islam a few years later.
[10] It was during this period that Rupert East married his only wife, the Belgian artist Jacqueline de Neyer, whom he met in Gaskiya Corporation.