introduction 23their original’s fame. Like most of the copies I discuss in this book, they
are commodities which have been produced and distributed by African
cottage culture industries. To boost sales, and sometimes also an ideol-
ogy or belief promoted by their products (the Musoma Adventist choir’s
apocalypticism, for example), cultural producers may tie their own prod-
ucts to a foreign best seller. They hope that their products thus partake of
the popularity and fame of the original, which may also translate into eco-
nomic gain. Finally, by snitching film sequences from Cameron’s “original
copy” and intercutting these with their own material, the producers of the
Nigerian remake and the Congolese clip also connect with Cameron’s
Titanic quite physically.
American film, however, is by no means the only foreign cinema Afri-
can cultural producers appropriate. Films made in Kany wood, the Kano-
based video industry of northern Nigeria, which I discuss in chapter 4, are
frequently inspired by Bolly wood movies. Such feature films, shot in the
Hausa language, provide glimpses of a local Islamic modernity modeled
after Indian films, in which lovers negotiate the opposing forces of their
individual desire and traditional social norms, as in the case of fixed mar-
riages. In the musical sequences of Hausa videos, women and men dance
together, occupying the same visual space. This stylistic device, which is
likewise inspired by Indian films, has sparked considerable controversy.
Against the backdrop, over the past decade, of northern Nigeria’s Islamic
revitalization, which advocates an Islamic hygiene of local social practice,
films that overtly mediate between a local and a foreign life-world are eyed
suspiciously by conservative factions of society; after all, such movies
establish contact between things that according to the new local cultural
policy, should remain separate, including unmarried women and men,
and Hausa and Indian “culture.” Copies of other possible lives may have
polluting effects on local youth, or so goes the Islamic rationale—this
is the quintessence of local critique. My discussion of Kany wood under
duress focuses on the consequences of this critique, such as censorship,
the burning of videocassettes by clerics, and two total bans on video pro-
duction for several months during the past decade. Within the overall
theme of this book, chapter 4 shows that the contact implied by a copy is
not always v iewed in a positive light; it may also be considered dangerous
and therefore highly contested.