124 african appropriations
The government did not ban songs. You can sing. Even in Hausa culture
there is singing and dancing, but moderately. W hat the government did
say is: you cannot have male and female dancing of this kind, dancing
that is being shown in our movies. That kind of dancing where you see a
lady half naked dancing with her breasts shaking—it’s not allowed.... So
the government said: no male and female dancing of such kind—useless
dancing I am talking about. If you do that in your film, we will ask you to
remove that. (personal interview, February 4, 2003)Censorship was considered “sanitization,” aiming at eradicating alien cul-
tural elements from Hausa video films. Besides film content, it was also
the practice of video production as such that caused considerable doubt
among conservative Muslims. Kany wood offered nubile girls many op-
portunities to become financially independent of their parents, not only as
actresses or studio singers but also as scriptwriters, caterers, and costume
and makeup designers. Public opinion was at odds with this deviation
from traditional female roles. To prevent them from entering into illicit
sexual relationships, girls were (and still are) expected to marry at an early
age. If a girl attends secondary school, her parents expect her to marry as
soon as she graduates. Unmarried girls and divorced women working in
the industry earned a living wage, which allowed them to prolong their
adolescence and unmarried period of life, respectively. Their economic in-
dependence and interaction with men on the film sets—that is, in nonpub-
lic and therefore socially uncontrolled spaces—as well as their exposure
in video films meant that these girls and women were likened to karuwai,
“free women,” or prostitutes.
Under the conditions of sharia law, movie shoots often took place in
secluded locations and became imbued w ith heterotopian qua lities. They
constituted the quintessential “other spaces” (Foucault 1986) where con-
straints that governed male-female interaction in everyday life lost their
validity. To shoot their films, well-to-do admirers of their craft often pro-
vided the film crews with whole houses. Others rented hotel suites for
a few days and turned them into film sets. W hen I went on location in
April 2003 with a Kano-based producer who was shooting in a hotel in
Jos (see figure 4.1), the cheerful atmosphere that the film crew created on
and off set struck me in particular. Male and female crew members were
constantly teasing one another, engaging in sexual innuendo. During the