The Learner

Marriage is vital. I am a product of marriage and have been married for over a decade. However, we must teach our daughters that there are other achievements besides or in addition to getting married.   While looking for a second wife, a friend met a girl. However, upon realising that she was not his type and that she "accepted" him only because she was idle and had no other suitor, he promised to help her start a business and return to school.   He first gave her a small amount of capital to restart the snacks business, which she said she had once done. Months later, she did not do anything. He, in fact, realised that she had most likely wasted the money. He was angry and sad but didn't give up on his mission to better her life.    Since she left secondary school without sitting for the senior secondary school examination (SSCE) due to family issues, he gave her money to register for this year's WAEC/NECO examination. As I type this, she has not done so yet. She onl...

  By Muhsin Ibrahim   Language  is   one  of the most amazing things in the world. We often overlook  its  influence  in our lives  because  it is  mundane . W e all use a language ,  verbally   or non-verbally ,  daily. We acquire language , i.e.,  we   grow up speaki ng  effortlessly. Thus, we don't care much about its profound  impact and influence   on how we interact with others, think about and view the world .   We had international conferences on Africa in  Cologne, Germany and San Francisco, United States.  This short piece is about something other than  the many academic papers  presented; it is about  how hearing someone speaking our language  or a local language   we are familiar with  in a foreign country attracts our attention.   In both Cologne and San Francisco, I observed a pattern. People speaking the same language form a circ...

Muhsin Ibrahim muhsin2008@gmail.com University of Cologne   The article was written for, and published by, the BBC Hausa service. Here is a link to a slightly different Hausa version published on their webpage:  Fina-finan Kannywood mafiya shahara a shekarar 2020. The year 2020 is unlike any other in recent history. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world. We now have lockdown in countries; we also have to keep social distancing, wear a facemask, among other protocols. The virus batters the entertainment industries from Los Angeles to Lagos, Mumbai to Mombasa, Cairo to Kano, forcing several cinemas to shut down. Thus, shooting and showing films had to stop. Nevertheless, that boosts TV and video on demand (VoD) content and opens a gate for new ‘genres’ of YouTube series and serials. In northern Nigeria, these include Kwana Casa’in , Gidan Badamasi , Labarina , Izzar So , A Duniya , Na Ladidi , among many others. Kannywood began the year auspiciously with a box-offi...

Muhsin Ibrahim muhsin2008@gmail.com   After breakfast on the morning of November 2, 2020, I turned on my phone’s Wi-Fi. I received several notifications from my email and social media accounts, particularly WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. Thanks to End SARS protest, I have been unusually active on Twitter recently. It’s more engaging and has become the battleground for socio-political, cultural and religious battle among Nigerians. However, the End SARS protest heightened this debate, especially between northerners and southerners who, arguably, differ on the issue. Unlike the previous days, today’s top trending topics are not about SARS at all. They are about a Kannywood star, Rahama Sadau. Although she’s not new to controversies, that of today is, I must say, provocative. It led to the creation of incendiary hashtags such as “Assistant Allah.”   Ms Sadau, this time, shared her photos on Instagram and Twitter the night before. She wears a tight, backless long sleeve...

Gidan Badamasi : A Short Review of the Hausa Sitcom   Premiered in 2019, the defining criterion for the popular sitcom, Gidan Badamasi , is comedy. However, it tells much more such as several socio-moral lessons. That is not a surprise as Kannywood, the film industry whose members wrote, produced, directed and acted in Gidan Badamasi , are known for promoting such causes. An oft-repeated raison dêtre of Kannywood, some of its members argue, is to teach morality, promote Hausa culture and Islam, among other related goals. Whether or not they do that is debatable and, of course, outside the scope of this short review. The title, Gidan Badamasi [ Badamasi’s House ], implies where the drama takes place – the house of Alhaji Badamasi. He is a wealthy, wheelchair-bound businessman who had multiple marriages from which he got several children. As he ages, becomes more frail and sickly, he asks most of them – he doesn’t know all of them – to come for a crucial meeting. After their ar...

By Abubakar Isah Baba The article  named above was written by Muhsin Ibrahim, and published in the 2019/2020 edition of KAKAKI: Journal of English and Literary Studies ; (11) 81 - 98.   The first time I watched the drama Dadin Kowa I felt at ease, for it is highly natural, exciting and yet unusual. The soap opera displays the quintessence of Hausa cultural mores; the fictional town of Dadin Kowa reveales the typical, densely populated urban area, mainly crowded with dirty, run-down housing, poverty and social disarray of the Hausa people. There you watch actors as if in reality, mingle with the stray of goats, sheep and chickens. All these are what make the soap opera attractive for it brings the truth before our eyes. Dadin Kowa is enriched with compelling and relevant topics that are within the present condition of its setting, such as insurgency, drug abuse, domestic violence, Almajirci , girl-child education, to name but a few. This is, perhaps, w...

Muhsin Ibrahim @muhsin234 A few years back, I barely noticed the passing of my birthdays. A few years later, during my postsecondary school days, I began to get a lone reminder of the days: SMS from my bank. That is no longer the case. The day comes with a lot of buzz and fuss. A plethora of “Happy Birthday” messages trickle into my phone, email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc inboxes and timelines. Some close friends call; others walk into my office to express their wishes and prayers. What a change! I am heartily grateful, ladies and gentlemen. But that was not my (our?) culture. It gradually becomes so due to the “sameness” effect of globalization, which conjoins cultures. Today, people go to the extent of writing “Happy birthday to myself” on social media! Celebrating birthday that way is rather a new culture, at least so I believe. It is a novel culture we are willingly adopting today; it was not imposed on us by anyone, lest you think that. Therefore, I don’t outri...

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim @muhsin234 Without digging deeper into the history lane in the Nigerian politics, many people know that last-hour relinquishment, nay betrayal, by swayers in a political journey often results to the success or failure of a particular candidate. For instance, Kano people saw that in 1999 when a comparatively more popular Engr. Magaji Abdullahi lost governorship election to Engr. Rabiu Kwankwaso. There was a similar scenario in 2011 at the presidential election. General Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) entered into an ill-advised alliance with Action Congress of Nigeria  (ACN) at the last minute of the eleventh hour . It didn’t work as feared. ACN and its south-western supporters dumped CPC and the party’s candidate, too, Nuhu Ribadu for President Goodluck Jonathan (and his party, PDP). Yesterday, a well-informed Yoruba friend of mine posted on Facebook that an experienced friend of his feared that opposition might yet again giv...

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim Bayero University, Kano @muhsin234 (Twitter) Introduction As students of Theatre and Film Studies here in India, we watch drama and films from across the globe, and of all genres. We encounter no hurdle or trouble in getting the movies as the internet has today simplified much access to them, broken many boundaries to any nation, any community, and any film industry except in a few cases. I must, however, admit that only very little is known about Africa or the films produced therein. Despite this, I often ‘boast’ saying my country, Nigeria, is the most populous African country, and its film industry is the third-biggest in the world. But a snag comes up when asked to bring forward the films; I couldn’t, for I shouldn’t just give them any films, for Nigeria’s being a unique country due to its sharp cultural and ethno-religious divide between the North and the South. This becomes necessary because the perceived national films do have little or no bear...