Mainstreaming Hausa

I had a conversation earlier today with a few friends about Hausa representation in Dare Art-Alade's new video for "Ba Ni Kidi."



My friend took issue with Dare's "weird" Hausa (the title is grammatically incorrect, he thinks), but I'm more concerned about the circus, the monkey, the magic... it just felt a bit too Aladdin's Genie for me. It is almost like the singer forgot the song was in Hausa, and decided to go Arabian Nights route instead.

I only mean to make an observation -- and not pick on Dare Art-Alade -- when I say that this video has me thinking about Hausa people and their place in Nigeria's mainstream culture. The only thing even remotely Hausa about me is my name, but it's worth lending a thought to the representation of the Hausa -- or lack thereof -- in Nigerian pop culture. And no, I don't mean somebody saying "Nagode Jesu" in church songs, or Style Plus singing a hook to a song in the language.

In addition to being, according to some observers, the least likely to be educated in Nigeria, Hausas have been left behind in Nigeria's popular culture. The artist Zaaki never did get other Hausas to come to the fore in Nigerian music. I am not aware of any major Hausa actresses in Nigerian films who identifies with being Hausa the way Funke Akindele and Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde do with being Yoruba, or Genevieve Nnaji, Patience Ozorkwor (sorry if I'm butchering it), Stephanie Okereke and Rita Dominic are so obviously Igbo. Hausa films are much younger an industry than Yoruba and Igbo ones, but I wonder about their distribution in Lagos; if they only get around in Kano and Kaduna, it will only strengthen Hausa's isolation from Nigeria's mainstream. I am Yoruba, and the people and culture are so thoroughly a part of pop culture that one cannot but notice Hausas' absence when one compares. Couple this with the power Hausa elites have in Nigeria's polity, you get a lot of room for resentment and misrepresentation aided by silence of the group in the mainstream.

And then there's this video.

What makes the video so repellent to me is the near voicelessness of the people whose language and image is used in this song. I know Dare probably just means to put together a fun, interesting music video, but I know that if someone put together a not-so-flattering/ even slightly mocking video on Yorubas, there'd be more of a reaction across followers of Nigerian music. I wonder what a Hausa person would think seeing this, and how they will feel about their inability to affect the way they are being depicted in the popular culture of their own country.

Next thing you know they'll turn Anne Frank into a Comic Book

And did they ever!

Spokeswoman Annemarie Bekker said the publication was aimed at teenagers who might not otherwise pick up Anne Frank's diary, the most widely read document to emerge from the Holocaust.

"Not everyone will read the diary," she said. "The one doesn't exclude the other."

There has to be some connection to this pervasive anti-intellectualism in modern pop culture and a constant need take big, weighty solid topics/stories/histories and juice it up into baby food easily digestible for those amongst us who don't want to pick up a real book.

You know, with words on it. In less-than-12 not-Comic-Sans font.

I really shouldn't mock too much. I understand the desire to bring impressionable youngsters into a reality and time much grimmer than their own, and make them see what can happen when we forget the wages our humanity. It makes sense to try to make Anne Frank as accessible as possible -- cool, even -- to everyone. And still, it feels wrong to me.

It's not like this hasn't been done before. Maus was also an autobiography of someone who lived through the holocaust and was turned into a graphic novel for much the same reason. Anne Frank, I contend, is different, because many people have actually read the book, and thus have something to compare it to. I don't have the same concerns about the graphic novels with its images reaching the wrong audience, my concern is more for whether a graphic novel can plumb the same emotional depths that a novel or a film or play can. Graphic novels, by their design, drive home the fiction of the stories they tell, whereas the point of depicting lives of those that lived who through the Holocaust is to drive home the point that it happened here, not too long ago, in this universe. Human beings like us did this to other human beings. This, for me, is the key difference between the graphic novel and, say, a play or film, where we can make the connection to this world, and this time, and that point can be made more clearly. I cannot imagine a graphic novel doing for the story what Martin Sherman's 'Bent' achieved as a play, or Ellie Weisel's 'Night'. Heck, not even 'Schindler's List.'

The main problem I have with turning Anne Frank's diary into a graphic novel is this need we seem to have to evangelize that which we hold in high esteem by any means necessary, even at the risk of stripping out the core that makes the story to poignant in the first place. Are we going to turn Homer's 'Illiad' into a picture book? Beowulf into a rap song? This should be funny, but it really isn't -- the Bible is already available in picture-book form for goodness sake!

Does everything need to be made accessible?

Anne Frank held my imagination when I first read her diary at age 12, and still does. I would love for the whole world to read it as a reminder of how to step outside of ourselves and regard humanity, but having met a lot of people, I don't want that. Part of me wants Anne Frank to stay in a book, in severe font, atop a bookshelf. Part of me, a large part, wants her to stay accessible only to those who care to reach for it on the top shelf, and read it. Maybe if you feel like you can only read Anne Frank in an uber-cool graphic novel, then you don't deserve to read it. You're not doing her a favor by reading her diary. If anything, it's the other way around.

A New Movie on Child-Witches

So they're making a new movie of the child-witches phenomenon brewed by crackpot Nigerian pastors who convince parents to turn their backs on their own children. 234Next was at the screening.

“The Fake Prophet” is a concept film created and funded by Stepping Stones Nigeria (SSN), a non-governmental organisation, to promote awareness about the plight of the so-called ‘child witches’.

According to the organisation, the issue of “child-witches” grew out of the Niger Delta in the 1990s as many powerful pastors began accusing children of plotting to supernaturally harm their families and communities. Children were often coerced into confessing their ‘crimes’, following which their families were charged money for lengthy and sometimes painful exorcism rituals. Thousands of children - an estimated 15,000 in Akwa Ibom State alone - were blamed for their family’s misfortunes, shunned by their communities, and abandoned.

According to a report in the British press, before being pushed out of their homes many of these children were beaten, slashed with knives, thrown onto fires, or had acid poured over them as punishment or in attempts to make them “confess”. Many of those branded child-witches were murdered - hacked to death with machetes, poisoned, drowned, or buried alive - in an attempt to supposedly drive satan out of their soul. Once on the streets, many of the children became prey to child traffickers.

“We decided to make this film because we realised that the proliferation of Nollywood movies that focus on issues of witchcraft, specifically child witchcraft, was leading to the spread of the belief,” said Gary Foxcroft, SSN programme director. “We needed a counter to that.”

I want to be optimistic about the movie, but I'm still smarting from how woefully, laughably terrible this one movie I watched on a Liberian refugee who moved to Lagos was. And not for lack of talent -- the movie starred Omotolade Jalade Ekeinde and Ramsey Noah, so two of the biggest names in the biz right there. But hey, that was two years ago. Maybe I'll give this one a shot. For more on child-witches, click here, here, here and here. And here's a video from a short UK Guardian documentary on the issue.

Aiding and Abetting Fake outrage

When my friend sent me this article on sexual abuse in Lagos, my two-word emailed response was "Na today?"

“The truth is that the whole thing has made me begin to distrust anybody that is not a close friend or relative around my daughters,” said Ifeoma Akanwa, a banker and mother of three. “I used to have a house boy, and since he left last year, I have been reluctant to get another help, despite that my youngest child is just a year old. I prefer taking her to a crèche, or even locking her up with my eldest child (aged 10) at home at times.” Uwadiegwu Otisi, a sociologist holds the opinion that this portends a dangerous trend, and might fracture the fabrics of Africa’s familial culture if left unchecked.

I find that I say this a lot, but to reiterate, can we stop acting surprised when certain things happen? I know I heard so many stories like these from the weekly Yoruba show Feyikogbon to NTA news. This isht is not news. Stop acting like it is and do something about it. Sensitization exercises. Organize hotlines with Starcomms or MTN, so young girls can text you free and you can call them free of charge. Ads in the paper. Talk in schools. Something.

A Lie is Oversimplification in Drag

Pankaj Mishra has a devastating piece on Ayanna Hirsi Ali's newest book "Nomad". A taste:

“Nomad” is unlikely to earn Hirsi Ali many Muslim admirers. Neither will her recent support for the proposed French ban on face veils and the Swiss referendum outlawing minarets. In denouncing Islam unreservedly, she has claimed a precedent in Voltaire—though the eighteenth-century scourge of the Catholic Church might have been perplexed by her proposal that Muslims embrace the “Christianity of love and tolerance.” In another respect, however, the invocation of Voltaire is more apt than Hirsi Ali seems to realize. Voltaire despised the faith and identity of Europe’s religious minority: the Jews, who, he declared, “are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts,” who had “surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism,” and who “deserve to be punished.” Voltaire’s denunciations remind us that the Enlightenment was a much more complex and multifaceted phenomenon than the dawn of reason and freedom that Hirsi Ali evokes. Many followed Voltaire in viewing the Jews as backward, an Oriental abscess in the heart of Europe. Hirsi Ali, recording her horror of ghettoized Muslim life in Whitechapel, seems unaware of the similarly contemptuous accounts of Jewish refugees who made the East End of London their home after fleeing the pogroms.

Or this.

Islamic fundamentalist groups have long terrorized many Muslim countries, especially those, such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, that were ravaged by blowback from the Cold War and the war on terror. These extremists, who now assault the West as well, have always lacked popular support within their own countries. The anarchic vivacity of contemporary Muslim societies—featuring such figures as Ali Saleem, Pakistan’s cross-dressing television host, and Cairo’s hijab-wearing sex therapist Heba Kotb, whose talk show is beamed across the Arab world—does not quite match Hirsi Ali’s description of an incurably medieval people busy devising ever-harsher laws for themselves while plotting mayhem for the infidels. In recent years, Islamist movements, led or assisted by women activists, have helped democratize Indonesia and Turkey; innumerable Muslims, such as Asma Jahangir, in Pakistan, and Shirin Ebadi, in Iran, fight to defend the rights of women against both Islamic fundamentalists and secular autocrats.

I am under no illusions as to the horrors done in the name of Islam on the African continent and elsewhere. I am most certainly not ever going to depict Mohammad, but the most anyone who chooses to will get out of me is an irritated sigh -- I cannot fathom raising a hand, much less a gun or a knife, at someone for not adhering to my beliefs. Still, not everyone accepts this.

Islam is an equalizing religion in many ways. In Nasfat, where many members of my family go in Lagos, everyone wears the same white garments. You probably wouldn't know who's rich from who's not until its time for everyone to go home and you can see who's driving a jeep and who's getting on a beat-up Peugeot. People pray on the floor -- there are no hierarchies in the mosque. You're either a mullah/Sheikh who gives the service, or you're in the populace, sitting down like everyone else. Well, if you're a woman your ass is seating way in the back. You know, so the preacher doesn't get distracted by your beauty or anything. Still, equalizing nonetheless.

Religion in general is what people tend to hold on to when stripped of everything. In countries where so many have so little, it takes on immense importance. The reason I am not consumed by religious belief is because I consume so much else, and allowed so much else. I do not have just one place where I go to get a certain level of respect. I have not needed religion to keep me going in times when everything else I had was taken from me. In short, I am not overly religious because I don't need to be. I don't need to be because I have so much.

Beneath the oversimplification of complex issues from Israel/Palestine to fundamentalist Islam is the need to paint people/beliefs/entities/nations as good and evil, designations that typically defy nuance and reject the idea that actions carried out by said people can be understood. For something to be understood, after all, it has to have a certain logic to it, and for it to have logic acknowledged is to acknowledge the humanness of he who has carried out the action. This is where I part with people like Ali; Understanding an issue is not the same as providing excuses. I may understand the logic of why a boy stole money -- he was hungry and he'd been fired from his job, perhaps, and maybe had a family of 4 to feed and couldn't go home with nothing -- but that does not mean that stealing is right. I may understand the reason for believing in a religion, but may not agree that religion is necessary in my own life. I can understand the grievances that drive someone kill, but that does not mean that I believe that murder is ever justified.

To illustrate my point on lack of nuance, here's a story in Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on How to Tell When a Mid-East Expert Is Lying:

1. The Expert knows with certainty which of the two sides - only one - is responsible for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and which - the same one - for the failure of Mideast peace efforts.

2. The Expert treats the civilian victims of violence on one side as individuals, but assesses collective responsibility for the violence on the whole of the other side.

The Expert speaks as though the entire civilian population of the other - call it the Dark - side, were directly, actively, complicit and thus accomplice to whatever excesses were committed in its name, and therefore deserves whatever sanction, condemnation, or reflexive collective punishment the Dark Side civilian population is about to experience.

3.Field Guide

Dark Side: Commits atrocities, war crimes, crimes against humanity. Expert's Side: Exercises its right to self-defense.

Dark Side: Violates peace deals with impunity. Expert's Side: Cannot move forward in light of Dark Side's bad faith.

4. The Expert hints, implies, or states outright that the actions of the DS are comparable to those of the Nazis.

5. The Expert begins, "The conflict is fundamentally very simple."

6. The Expert advocates a One State Solution, but doesn't come out and say so.

I don't always succeed in doing this, but I think that the best way to approach sensitive issues is to seek those tangled lines of historical happenings that confound us, because therein, I believe, lies our humanity. In short, if it lacks nuance it's probably a lie. By refusing to delve deeper than her own experiences and by turning a blind eye to faults of the Western civilization she hurried to embrace, Ali has shown herself time and again as someone who cannot be taken seriously by anyone with an understanding of history. By painting the West as wholly good and the East as needing to be abandoned wholesale in order for one to achieve any measure of freedom, she strips both the West and the East of their humanity.