136 african appropriations
will always be assured of Allah’s miraculous help. During his sermon, he
frequently quotes from the Koran in Arabic. These verses from the Koran
usually follow and legitimize a statement, and are translated into Hausa
immediately after they are spoken. The imam ends his sermon by stress-
ing Allah’s promise that those who die during jihad will enter paradise
immediately without having their good and bad deeds weighed against
each other. Finally, the imam and his audience shout Allahu akbar! and
the sequence ends. W hat is significant about this particular showstopper
is that diegetic references are made only at the beginning. Since the major
part of this four-and-a-half-minute sequence remains free of references to
the filmic narrative, the viewer is encouraged to transfer the meanings of
this sermon to any extra-filmic context he deems fit.
MORE DANCING GIRLS, MORE TIGHT DRESSESThe wa’azi conversion genre was only short-lived. The video films
were not successful enough to encourage Hausa filmmakers to continue
producing them. In his monthly column in Fim magazine, Dan Azumi
Baba—the director and producer of Judah!—relates the frustrating ex-
perience of having invested almost one million naira (about 7,000 U.S.
dollars at the time) into a religious film that flopped (cited in Adamu
2008). Likewise, films without song-and-dance sequences, which some
filmmakers attempted, proved far less successful than those still featuring
such showstoppers.
In 2003, the video market crashed. Too many newcomers had dabbled
in film production; as a result, the total number of films released by Kany-
wood each week had climbed to about seven. Since more films in a limited
market meant fewer returns for each, a number of production companies
had to stop doing business. According to Abdalla Uba Adamu (2008),
this development marks a crucial moment in the history of Hausa video
film, for it was at this juncture that a number of video film dealers, whose
task had formerly been limited to duplicating and selling the movies, as-
sumed the role of producer as well. With a keen knowledge of the types of
films that would sell, these dealer-producers invested only in those movies
that promised returns, leaving less room for anything beyond the main-