vice and videos 121the legislation of Kano state in 2001, and advocating an Islamic purifica-
tion of local cultural practice, conservative factions of society eyed films
suspiciously that overtly mediate between a local and a foreign life-world.
A fter all, such movies establish contact between things that according
to the religiously inspired cultural policy, are better kept apart, such as
unmarried women and men, or Hausa and Indian “culture.” In the critics’
eyes, blueprints of other possible lives, as provided by Hausa video films,
threaten the moral upbringing of young people, and therefore need to
be kept in check or even forbidden. Since the evolution of Kany wood is
intimately linked to the proliferation of video technology, the controversy
over Hausa video films exemplifies the challenges cultural globalization
and the proliferation of small media technologies may pose to Muslim
societies in Africa and beyond. W hile the young especially value the cre-
ative, communicative, and economic possibilities digital media provide,
others condemned these phenomena as the devil’s work. “With video
technology,” Abubakar Rabo (2008), the former director general of the
Kano State Censorship Board, said, “the devil has been piped into the
home and corruption is only a click away.”
I have organized my discussion of “Kany wood under Duress” more
or less chronologically. It covers a time span of roughly a decade (2001–
2011). The first section sets in with the reintroduction of sharia law and
the implementation of censorship in Kano state in 2001. This is followed
by an exploration of the relationship of Hausa videos to Bolly wood films
by analyzing Khusufi (2003), a Hausa video “remake” of the Indian film
Ta a l (1999). Then I discuss how in around 2003, Hausa filmmakers, in
reaction to censorship and a growing critique of their films, reinvented
filmmaking as a kind of preaching. Later on they resorted to the standard
crowd-pleasing song-and-dance formula, using footage of girls in tight-
fitting Western-style clothing. The last section starts with the Hiyana sex
scandal of 2007, a turning point in the short history of Kany wood that was
followed by a ban on video production for six months, the emigration of
leading production companies to neighboring states, and the reorganiza-
tion of the Kano State Censorship Board. Director General Rabo began
to hunt down filmmakers in an operation he labeled “Fire for Fire.” This
last section ends with Rabo’s own fall in 2010 and his loss of power in 2011
due to a change in state government.