Gastvortrag: ‘We are immune from censorship’: Contestations among Hausa-Muslim Kannywood audience on YouTube

02.12.2022 11:00

by Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim

(Institute of African Studies and Egyptology University of Cologne, Germany)

Freitag, 2. Dezember 2022, 11.00 Uhr c.t.

Seminarraum 2, Institut für Afrikawissenschaften

The Hausa-Muslim northern Nigeria is known for many things, including religious orthodoxy and conservativism. Since Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999, twelve of its nineteen northern states established Sharia. Consequently, the government of Kano, Nigeria’s most populous state and the epicentre of Kannywood, founded a censorship board. The board, whose staff members are primarily Muslim scholars and culturalists, debate, negotiate and even clash with filmmakers, artists and writers over what is permissible and what is not. However, the emergence of the internet and the subsequent exponential popularity of social media has made the board a proverbial toothless barking dog. It now has neither the jurisdiction nor apparatus to control what the citizenry watches in their private spaces on their mobile electronic devices. Thus, viewing uncensored, free, and “explicit” content has become more accessible and commonplace. To examine this recent development, the paper surveys selected popular YouTube channels with content on topics like sex and intimacy hitherto considered taboo. Thus, mainstream filmmakers either avoid them like the plague for fear of the censorship board or film them in an indirect, euphemised rendition. Therefore, these “provocative” contents of this “other” wood generate tense debates on religion, culture and morality among the audience. To make matters worse, the independent filmmakers and artists are arguably Hausa – and Muslims. This identity further infuriates many of their audience, while others are unfazed or supportive. The paper uses the online religion and reader-response theoretical concepts to examine these reactions from a Hausa-Muslim ethnoreligious point of view.