vice and videos 147seats on the board, explains Carmen McCain (2013), further elucidating
the unlikely goings-on between politics and filmmaking in the following:
The events had a mixed-up poetic justice that seemed to come straight out
of a Hausa film: the governor who first banned film in Kano came back
promising the salvation of the film industry; the censor appointed after a
sex scandal to “sanitize” a film industry was disgraced by his own sex scan-
dal; an actor imprisoned by the censors board was appointed to the board
in the next political tenure. A public discourse that idealized politicians’
promises to use Islamic law to protect culture moved toward indignation
over how those same politicians abused Shari’a to hide their own corrup-
tion. (236)A CONTESTED TASTE OF DIFFERENCEVideo technology provided Hausa cultural entrepreneurs with a tool
to develop and shape their fantasies of what localized versions of other
possible lives would look like. In terms of form and content, these versions
were strongly influenced by Indian films, which had brought northern
Nigerian audiences into contact with visions of a “parallel modernity”
(Larkin 1997) since the 1960s. For many years, Indian films were valued
for their very difference from Holly wood productions and their proxim-
ity to local experience. In light of the trope of “contact and copy,” it is
significant that the critical debate began only when self and other became
intertwined through localized copies of Bolly wood movies. Indian films
as such were not considered problematic, for they were thought to por-
tray “Indian culture”; yet their appropriation and localization by Hausa
authors and filmmakers sparked considerable controversy. Mere contact
with other possible lives, as portrayed in foreign media, was not neces-
sarily disturbing. Copying them, however, could prompt a debate. In this
sense, it is also significant that for the better part of the censorship debate,
pirated copies of foreign films (from Holly wood, Bolly wood, Hong Kong,
and southern Nigeria) were left untouched by the censors and remained
on sale in Kano video shops, despite the fact that many featured far more
female (and male) nudity than Hausa videos; this fact was considered
particularly unjust by Kany wood filmmakers, who kept arguing that their