Features
Remembering my late sister: Hajiya Salamatu Ajiun Abdulrauf
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Features
Northern Nollywood, Southern Distorted Mirrors: Nollywood and the Rest of Us
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By Abdallah Uba Adamu
Recently, an extremely prestigious academic journal requested me to review a film made by a Nigerian. I was surprised as that is Muhsin Ibrahim’s forte. Further, I really don’t watch Nigerian films, aka Nollywood, personally preferring African Francophone directors. Nevertheless, I agreed to do the review. However, the link they sent for the film was password protected. I informed them, and they requested the filmmaker to send the password. Being a request from a highly prestigious journal, he sent the code and I was able to get in the site and watch the film online. I was surprised at what I saw, and decided to delve further into these issues. Before doing that, I wrote my review and sent it off. The film, however, set me thinking.
Like a creeping malaise, Nollywood directors are rearing their cameras into the northern Nigerian cultural spaces. Again. The film I reviewed for the journal was “A Delivery Boy” (dir. Adekunle Adejuyigbe, 2018). It was in Hausa language. None of the actors, however, was Hausa, although the lead actor seems to be a northerner (at least from his name, since an online search failed to reveal any personal details about him).
Nothing wrong with that. Some of the best films about a particular culture were made by those outside the culture. Being ‘outliers’, it often gave them an opportunity to provide a more or less balanced and objective ‘outsider’s perspective’ of the culture. Alfonso Cuarón, a Mexican successfully directed “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004) while Taiwanese director Ang Lee did the same with “ Brokeback Mountain” (2005), even earning him an Oscar.
In 2006 Clint Eastwood, an American, directed “Letters From Iwo Jima.” The cast was almost entirely Japanese and almost all of the dialogue was in Japanese. It was very well-received in Japan, and in fact some critics in Japan wondered why a non-Japanese director was able to make one of the best war movies about World War II from the Japanese perspective. Abbas Kiarostami, an Iranian filmmaker, directed his film, “Certified Copy” (2020) in Italy and contained French, Italian, and English dialogue, starring French and British actors.
British director Richard Attenborough successfully directed Ben Kingsley in the Indian biopic Gandhi (1982). The film was praised for providing a historically accurate portrayal of the life of Gandhi, the Indian independence movement and the deleterious results of British colonization on India. It took away eight Oscars. American director Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) on a German, Oskar Schindler, was equally a powerful portrayal of auteur genius by “non-native”. The film won seven Oscars.
In each of these examples, the directors approached their subject matter with clean, fresh and open mind that acknowledges the cultural sensitivities of the subject matter. My point is that a person, outside of a particular cultural context can make sensitive films that portray the culture to his own culture as well as other cultures. That is not, however, how Nollywood plays when it focuses its cameras on northern Nigerian social culture. Specifically, Muslims.
I just can’t understand why they are so fixated with Muslims and the north. If the purpose of the ‘crossover’ films (as they are labeled) they make is to create an understanding of the north for their predominantly southern audiences, they need not bother. Social media alone is awash with all the information one needs about Nigeria—the good, the bad and the ugly. You don’t need a big budget film for that. Or actors trying, and failing, to convey ‘Aboki’ accents in stilted dialogues that lack grammatical context.
Yet, they insist on producing films about Muslim northern Nigeria from a jaundiced bigoted perspective, often couched with pseudo intellectual veneer. To sweeten the bad taste of such distasteful films, they pick up one or two northern actors (who genuinely speak the Hausa language, even if not being mainstream ethnic Hausa) and add them to the mix believing that this will buy them salvation. For southern Nigerians, anyone above the River Niger is ‘Hausa’.
They started in the early 2000s, and people just ignored them. The directors then included Oskar Baker (Ɗan Adamu Butulu, Abdulmalik), Yemi Laniyan (Makiyi, Uwar Gida), Tunji Agesin (Halin Kishiya), Matt Dadzie (Zuwaira), I. Nwankwo (Macijiya) and many others. These came on the heels of the massive success of “Sangaya” (dir. Aminu Muhammad Sabo, 1999) when this particular film opened up the northern Nigerian film market. These Nollywood producers jumped in to cash on the popularity of Hausa films and made their own for northern markets. For the most part, these early ‘crossover’ films that I refer to as ‘Northern Nollywood’ were fairly mild, and evoked no reaction. They were still rejected, as the Hausa can be the most discriminatory people you can come across. If you are outside their cultural universe, you remain there. Forever.
The few Kannywood actors eager to be seen on ‘national stage’ allowed themselves to be used to deconstruct Islam and Muslims on the altar of filmmaking in subsequent Northern Nollywood films. Let’s not even talk about character misrepresentation, which Muhsin Ibrahim has written extensively about. In these scenarios, the usual tropes for northerners in Nollywood films is that of ‘Aboki’ (a term southern Nigerians believe is an insult to northerners, without knowing what it means), ‘maigad’ (security), generally a beggar. If they value an actor, they assign them an instantly forgettable role, rather than a lead. Granted, this might more of astute and realistic marketing than ethnicity because it would be risky to give an unknown Hausa actor a significant role in a film aimed at southern Nigerians. Few of these types of portrayals in Nollywood included Hausa speaking actors in films such as The Senator, The Stubborn Grasshopper, The World is Mine, Osama Bin La, Across the Border and The Police Officer.
When Shari’a was relaunched from 1999 in many northern Nigerian States, it became an instant filmic focus for Nollywood. A film, “Holy Law: Shari’a” (dir. Ejike Asiegbu, 2001) drew such a barrage of criticism among Hausa Muslims due to its portrayal of Shari’a laws then being implemented in northern Nigeria that it caused credibility problems for the few Hausa actors that appeared in it. With neither understanding of Islam or its context, the director ploughed on in his own distorted interpretation of the Shari’a as only a punitive justice system of chopping hands, floggings, and killings through foul-mouthed dialog. As Nasiru Wada Khalil noted in his brilliant essay on the film (“Perception and Reaction: The Representation of the Shari’a in Nollywood and Kanywood Films”, SSRN, 2016) “the whole story of Holy Law is in itself flogged, amputated and killed right from the storyline.”
“Osama bin La” (dir. MacCollins Chidebe, 2001) was supposed to be a comedy. No one found it funny in Kano. Despite not featuring any northern actor, it was banned in Kano due to its portrayal of Osama bn Ladan, then considered a folk hero. The film was banned to avoid reaction against Igbo merchants marketing the film. I was actually present in the congregation at a Friday sermon at Kundila Friday mosque in Kano when a ‘fatwa’ was issued on the film. Even a similar comedy, “Ibro Usama” (dir. Auwalu Dare, 2002), a chamama genre Hausa film was banned in Kano, showing sensitivity to the subject matter.
The reactions against crossover films seemed to have discouraged Nollywood producers from forging ahead. They returned in the 2010s. By then northern Nigeria has entered into a new phase of social disruption, and Nollywood took every opportunity to film its understanding of the issues—sometimes couched in simpering distorted narrative masquerading as social commentary—on a society and culture they have absolutely no understanding of.
In “Dry” (dir. Stephanie Linus, 2014), the director developed a sudden concern about ‘child marriage’ and its consequences. Naturally the culprits of such marriage, as depicted in the film are sixty-year old men who marry girls young enough to be their granddaughters. The director’s qualification to talk about the issue (which was already being framed by child marriage controversy in the north) was that she has ‘visited the north’ a couple of times. With the film, if she could get at least “one girl free and open the minds of the people, and also instruct different bodies and individuals to take action, then the movie would have served its purpose.” The ‘north’ was living in darkness, and it requires Stephanie Linus to shed the light of ‘civilization’.
“A Delivery Boy” (dir. Adekunle Adejuyigbe, 2018) that I reviewed was about an ‘almajiri’ in an Islamic school who was kidnapped to the school to begin with, and repeatedly raped by his ‘Alamaramma’ (teacher). The almajiri somehow acquired sticks of dynamite to create a suicide vest and vowed to blow himself up—together with the teacher. The Alaramma in the film lives in an opulent mansion, far away from the ‘almajirai’. In this narrative universe, the ‘almajiri’ do not learn anything and are unwilling rape victims of their teaches who actually kidnapped them and forced them into the schools.
“The Milkmaid” (dir. Desmond Ovbiagele, 2020) evokes the idealistic picture of a Fulani milkmaid, and became a basis for a Nollywood film. Instead of focusing on the political economy of Fulani milk trade, the film focused on the trope of terrorism. “The Black Book” (dir. Editi Effiong, 2023) touted as ‘Nigeria’s John Wick’ shoots a significant portion in ‘the north’ – with ‘Islamist’ hijab-wearing females touting assault rifles hidden underneath their hijab. “Jalil” (dir. Leslie Dapwatda, 2020) visits the recurrent theme of kidnapping for ransom. In the north, of course.
Then came the latest, “Almajiri” (dir. Toka McBaror, 2022). Claimed to be a true-life story (although not clear on whether it happened to specific people or based on what the director believed to be a common event), it featured muscle-bound badass types of thugs with guns and dreadlocks as Almajirai. The film reinforces the southern Nigerian trope of any beggar in the north being an Almajiri. Such ‘almajiris’ are kidnapped and sold into virtual slavery and horribly abused. The idea is to blame parental irresponsibility of northerners.
For southern Nigerians, especially the Nollywood crowd, an ‘Almajiri’ is a beggar, a product of a failed education system, a terrorist, a bandit, and an ‘aboki’. They use concocted figures bandied about by alphabet soup agencies to proclaim ‘over 10 million almajiri are out of school’ and therefore twigs of the terrorism inferno. How can someone who is part of a system of education for over half-a-century be considered out of school? But for Nollywood, if it is not ABCD, then it is not education.
“Northern Nollywood” films are the precise reasons why there will ALWAYS be different film cultures in Nigeria. Kannywood talks to its publics, happily churning out now TV shows that address issues it deems relevant—in its own way. Both the northern and southern parts of the country (covering the three major languages) were actively engaged. However, they were mutually non-legible to each other. This was essentially because they operate on virtually opposing cultural mindsets – making the emergence of a truly “Nigerian cultural film” impossible.
Quite a few writers seem to suggest that Kannywood is a ‘subset of Nollywood’ and indeed many would prefer for the term Kannywood (created in 1999 by a Hausa writer) to be dispensed with and replaced with Nollywood (created in 2002, created by a Japanese Canadian writer). It is to protect our cultural representation in films that I stand as a lone voice in advocating for a ‘Hausa Cinema’ to reflect the cultural universe of the Hausa.
Abdallah Uba Adamu is a professor of communication and cultural studies Bayero University Kano and former Vice chancellor National open university of Nigeria from 2016 to 2021
Features
Governor Abba Yusuf Revolutionizes Kano’s Healthcare: Major Hospital Renovations and Free Pediatric Services Mark First Year in Office
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Through the expansion of healthcare infrastructure, an amplification of healthcare accessibility and the liberating provision of essential medicines across all health care facilities in the state, Governor Abba has substantially elevated the overall health and vitality of Kano people across the 44 local governments.
At the same time, the establishment and reconstruction of health care facilities as well as the revitalization of social programs in the state.
It was within his one year period that his administration took decisive action by confiscating and renovating the Hasiya Bayero Pediatric Hospital. This facility now stands as a strong pillar in providing health care services for children in need of medical care.
Over 200,000 children have received free medical services at the renovated hospital, ensuring that no child is left behind.
Part of his prioritized agenda to ensure the modernization of healthcare infrastructure in the state, Governor Abba has achieved general renovation of Sir Sanusi General Hospital, Nuhu Bamalli Hospital, and BELA General Hospital which have significantly improved patient care. These hospitals now offer state-of-the-art facilities, with better equipment, and enhanced services.
The ‘Abba Care Program,’ launched at the Kano State Ministry of Health, is another giant achievement in one year of his office that focuses on improving healthcare services related to sickle cell anemia.
Through awareness campaigns, early detection, and specialized care, Governor Abba ensured that the program aims to alleviate the burden of this genetic disorder across the state.
He equally ratified the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Murtala Hospital Emergency Department in an attempt to strengthen emergency healthcare services. The hospital now actively operates efficiently, providing critical care to patients during emergencies.
His administration also championed the legislation mandating premarital health screening for all prospective couples. This proactive approach not only ensures healthier families but also reduces the burden of hereditary diseases.
Within his one year in office, the state government facilitated the supply and installation of modern ICU equipment and other essentials. This is an investment that enhances critical care services, saving lives and improving patient outcomes.
Features
Tribute To Late Justice Ahmad Belgore
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By AbdurRaheem Sa’ad Dembo
Death is an inevitable
visitor. When it strikes its victims it’s usually the end of an era. It was in the morning of Eid-l-Fitri, which was 10th April, 2024 I read the news of the demise of Justice Ahmad Olanrewaju Belgore, who died the previous night. He was a star in the judiciary because of his piety, consistency and fairness.
Many prominent Nigerians have sent their condolences to his family, Ilorin Emirate and Nigeria judiciary. One significant thing about late Justice was the fact that his life as a judge was filled with face of humanity.
Emir of Ilorin Alhaji (Dr) Ibrahim Sulu-Gambari and Chairman of Kwara State Traditional Rulers Council in his condolence message described the demise of Justice Belgore as a big loss to the Ilorin Emirate and the Nation at large.
According to the Emir “Belgore was one of the finest justices that the Ilorin Emirate had ever produced, who contributed in no small measures to the growth and development of the judiciary in particular and humanity in general.He prayed that Almighty Allah accept his good deeds, forgive his shortcomings and admit
him into aljannah firdaus.
The Turaki of Ilorin Emirate, Senator Saliu Mustapha has also expressed grief over the death of the legal luminary, described him as a renowned jurist who lived and served the country with his knowledge of the law as an examplary member of the bench.
Senator Mustapha while commiserating with the Nigerian Bar Association on the death of Justice Ahmad Belgore noted that the late jurist contributed immensely to the development of his community and the state in general. Recalling his years of service in the judiciary where he worked with utmost dedication and bowed out in glory last year.
The Senate Committee Chairman on Agric production and Services condoled the Belgore family, The Emir of Ilorin, Ilorin Emirate Descendants Progressive Union, the people of Balogun Fulani Constituency, Associates and friends of the deceased over the demise of illustrious son of the Ilorin Emirate.He prayed Allah to overlook Justice Belgore misdeeds and grant him eternal rest.
Meanwhile, Kwara state Governor,AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq equally expressed sadness over the death of Justice Belgore who passed on Tuesday night.The Governor sent his heartfelt condolences to the entire Ilorin Emirate, and to the Belgores who have lost a rare gem.His Excellency prayed to Allah to forgive justice Belgore of his shortcomings, and admit him to aljannah firdaus.
The Nigerian Bar Association,The Lagos Lawyers and other prominent Nigerians have also mourned the late Ilorin born jurist, but mentioning all of them may not be necessary.
It is imperative to say that late Justice Ahmad Belgore was an incorruptible judge as he retired meritoriously last year.This was aptly captured by the words of Shehu Bashir,Esq “Justice Ahmad Belgore was a jurist with decency of conscience.He journeyed the delicate profession of adjudication with distinction and came out unblemished.
He was an incredibly tolerant, calm, generous, religious and extremely patient man.His propensity to generosity would almost make you think he had more than he was giving,yet he was undoubtedly incorruptible. And he would never make public his generosity to a third party.He was such a responsible gentleman.”
According to a retired judiciary staff who craved for anonymity, disclosed that in 2015 when his benefit has not been paid,he reached out to late Justice Ahmad Belgore and he gave him 120,000 naira as at that time.
Significantly,the late Justice has been described by many as an embodiment of humility, generosity and accessibility. In the words of Pharm Munirat Bello “He was a great icon of peace and beacon of hope to the less privileged, reliably a dependable pillar of support. His act of kindness could be likened to the scent of the natural musk, very calming yet so impactful. No life hardly gets in contact with him and fail to progress. He was gifted with a divine heart of generosity. An upright jurist to the core, an impeccable symbol of Islam. I have never for once seen him angry to the point of passing derogatory words, he could be stern but in a loving way”
Sheikh Saidu Ibrahim Maimasa is a close associate of late Justice Ahmad Belgore and he is also the Public Relations Officer of Markaz, recounted how helpful he was to him and other friends.He said describing his magnanimity and generosity would be inexhaustible.
He cited a case of a person whose house was forcefully taken and he approached Late Justice for possible redress at the Court of law.He explained that the justice told the man not to go to court, because there was no point going to court and win, and thereafter he lost his life.He later ensured that another house was erected for the man from his personal purse.
Furthermore,A family source disclosed that anything that has to do with Belgore’s family, the late Justice Ahmad Belgore was always at the forefront.Meaning he had imbibed the sunnah of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) in uniting the family.
In unraveling his unwavering support for the less privileged, a young man was said to have gone to his GRA residence and appealed to him that he wanted to go to school but he had no sponsor.The late Justice embraced him and sponsored his education throughout.
Parts of the traits of great men are humility and accessibility. If you are the type that cannot render help to people until an influential person in the society recommends them, then you may be far from circle of great men.Your door should be open for help , that is when you would be able to identify those whole truly need succour .
Justice Ahmad Belgore was never a religious bigot,According to Sheikh Saidu Ibrahim Maimasa “He had an open door policy, because he was very accessible.His security orderly was a Christian from Oyo State and he did not only sponsored his wedding but he was also there in person.He did not discriminate”
He was born on April 18,1953, Belgore studied Law at the prestigious Ahmadu Bello university (ABU),Zaria, where he bagged LL.B (Hons.) with specialisation in Islamic Law 1975 to 1978.He attended the Nigerian Law School, Victoria Island,Lagos between 1978/1979 session.
He was the presiding Justice of the Ilorin Division of the Court of Appeal before his retirement in April,2023.He was also former Chief Justice of the Gambia.Justice Ahmad was younger brother to former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Alfa Belgore.
There is no doubt about the fact that late Justice Ahmad Belgore had lived a life worthy of emulation.He was a regular reciter of holy Quran and a great scholar in his own class.He was the president of Darul-Uloom Alumni Association.
Perfection, they say, belongs to God. I pray Allah forgive his shortcomings and grant him aljannah firdaus.
abdurraheemsaaddembo@gmail.com
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