Glowing Conscience

Evolution of Kannywood   By Ibrahim Musa In my understanding, the evolution of Kannywood as a nomenclature can be traced to the period when media picked an interest in the Hausa home video industry. Just like the Hollywood, it is a sort of tribute to a place where the film industry is situated. This metonym was propagated by celebrity magazines such as Ibrahim Sheme’s Fim and Tauraruwa. In one way or another these magazines derive inspiration from the Stardust and the Filmfare magazines of Bollywood of yore. However, by no means this was the beginning of the odyssey. To his credit, Ibrahim Mandawari and his cohort of “ Tumbin Giwa” were the first to have taken the seemingly an arduous task of transiting from TV (drama, soap opera etc) to commercial. Not many would now remember Turmin Danya (the acclaimed first Hausa Home video), which apparently flopped at the box office (up to now there is no clear way of tracking films footprints in such a rudimentary setting). One...

Literary Fraud of the Millennium: Dissecting Cyprian Ekwensi’s An African Night Entertainment and John Tafida’s Jiki Magayi By Ibrahim Musa   In the literary world, Cyprian Ekwensi is a household name. This holds true particularly for the volume of work he churned out within the corpus of African literature. He was a very good story teller, especially of the urban tale, that many people see him as a better story teller than the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka or even the more famous novelist, Chinua Achebe. In a stark contrast, John Tafida can be considered a nonentity. He is not even popular in the region (northern Nigeria) where he was born and bred, and where Hausa, the language he wrote in is the unofficial lingua franca. The world knows very little about Tafida who lived in the obscure Wusasa quarters in Zaria, and wrote, perhaps, only one book in a vernacular. All these disadvantages robbed him of a chance to popularity and even a recognition for Pulitzer or Booker P...