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Vertaal:
              De schrijvers, Filmmakers tarten Censors
Zondag, 14 September, 2008 IPS | „ik verkoop geen cocaïne,“ zegt de videoverkoper in de markt van Rimi van Kano wanneer ik om de muziek videoCD Bahaushiya van Adam Zango's vraag. Hij verwijst niet naar het witte poeder, maar in plaats daarvan een nieuwe onwettige substantie - de films Hausa die niet door de Staat hebben overgegaan Kano censureert Raad. VideoCD ik vraag om is een vooral hete drug: een reeks van zes muziekvideo's die corrupte oude mensen hekelen, fickle meisjes betreuren, en dansende meisjes Hausa kenmerken. De musicus, Adam Zango, ook een acteur en een directeur in de Hausa filmindustrie, werden gearresteerd en werden gevangen gezet drie maanden voor het vrijgeven van de inzameling tijdens een verbod bij het filmmaking Hausa in Kano. De censors schepen in de noordelijke Staat Kano in van Nigeria werden ingesteld in 2001 na de controversiële implementatie van Islamitische shari een' wet in Staat Kano. Film-maakt werd eerst helemaal verboden, maar de de filmmakers' vereniging van Noordelijk Nigeria (MOPPAN) stelde een „overzichts“ raad als een compromismaatregel voor, die de industrie toestond om, niettemin met bepaalde beperkingen op taal, kleding en „het dichte dansen tussen mannen en vrouwen voort te zetten.“ (Vijf van de tien wetten werden specifiek betrekking gehad op de kleding of de interactie van vrouwen met mannen.) De censors schepen in en de filmindustrie onderging een dramatischere transformatie in Augustus 2007, toen een privé mobiele telefoonvideo van populaire actress Hausa en haar minnaar die geslacht hebben aan het publiek werd gelekt. Actress, Maryam „Hiyana“, en de man die surreptitiously de video onmiddellijk hadden geregistreerd gingen in het verbergen. Binnen dagen, rekenden honderden zwarte marktondernemers in Kano, het centrum van de hausa-Taal filmindustrie, duizenden naira aan om te zien wat „eerste Hausa blauwe film“ werd genoemd. De verbolgen godsdienstige en politieke leiders verzochten een onbepaalde opschorting van de Kano filmindustrie en de massauitwijzing van andere uitvoerders verondersteld van „ongepast“ gedrag. Tegen recent September, had de Raad van de Censuur van de Staat Kano, onder de leiding van zijn nieuwe Directeur -generaal, Abubakar Rabo Abdulkarim, nieuwe, striktere richtlijnen aan zowel filmmakers als schrijvers in de staat uitgegeven. Artikel 97 van de censuurverordeningen geeft op dat „wie… openbaar om het even welk onfatsoenlijk stadium tonen of prestaties tentoonstelt, toont het spel of om het even welk of prestaties die openbare moraal neigt te bederven, maken zich schuldig aan een inbreuk en zijn aansprakelijk aan opsluiting 3 maanden of aan een boete of aan zowel dergelijke opsluiting als boete.“ De opsluitingsclausule is meerdere keren uitgevoerd. Besides Adam Zango, who was imprisoned in September 2007, pioneering Hausa director and former Kano State gubernatorial candidate Hamisu Lamido Iyan Tama was jailed after copies of his film Tsintsiya were impounded from a video shop in Kano in May 2008. He was accused of not registering his company Iyan Tama Multimedia with the censorship board. (A court case reveals that the company had, in fact, registered and paid the required fees.) Ironically, the director was arrested the day of his return from the Zuma Film Festival in Abuja where Tsintsiya had won an award for Best Film on Social Issue. The new censorship regime has had the effect of suppressing Hausa filmmaking in Kano, Northern Nigeria’s largest city. The exact size of the industry is hard to determine, but a 2002 study by the national censors board counted 133 Hausa films produced between January and August of that year, making the Hausa film industry second in size only to Yoruba. Although filmmakers are still doing post-production in Kano, locations have been moved to neighboring states, the majority now being shot in neighbouring Kaduna State. Filmmakers bypass the Kano State Censors Board by marking “Not for sale in Kano” on their films and selling them in other states. Following the exodus of the Hausa film-making scene from Kano State, Malam Rabo, the director general of the censors board, turned his attention to the writers in the state. On Friday, Aug. 8, pamphlets from a mysterious “Organization for Islamic Values Protection” were distributed in the mosques around Kano claiming that writers in Kano State are agents of foreigners in a plot to destroy the Islamic upbringing of children and promote immorality. The flier specifically called for the restraint of Ibrahim Sheme, an award winning Hausa novelist to be “restrained”. According to his blog, Sheme has also received anonymous death threats. The standoff between writers and the censorship board is escalating. A letter directed to the five writers’ organisations in Kano dated Aug. 12 confirmed a request first made in Jun. 5 for each writer in the state to register individually with the board before they can publish or distribute writing. The requirements included submission of a comprehensive list of association membership, bio-data and past publications of every member, and individual subject files to be created for each author. In response, the writers’ associations, under the leadership of Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino, chairman of Kano Association of Nigerian Authors, went “on strike” for three weeks. The strike ended on Aug. 16, with the writer’s associations promising, in a general communiqué, that “by next week new titles would flood the market.” In an email update to the Association of Nigerian Authors, Dr Yusuf Adamu called on members to demand Rabo’s sacking. “Write in the papers please, people write… Those of you from the north should please write to your State Governors and complain about it.” After an Aug. 25 meeting with both state and national leaders of the ANA, the censorship board agreed to require registration of writers’ associations rather than individuals. Novelist Sa’adatu Baba speaks passionately against the censorship board, “I want the governor of Kano State to sack Malam Rabo from his seat. We need a reasonable person, a person who respects literature, a person who can judge us both writers and filmmakers, because I know that if we have somebody who loves literature, he cannot do this to us.” Her passion is echoed in the responses of other artists, from Kano ANA chair Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino, who has said in a radio interview that the government should build a new wing of the prison for writers, to Nazir “Ziriums” Hausawa, a hip hop musician who recorded a song requesting God to send plagues of piles to those who keep them from producing their art. Adam. Zango has responded to his 2007 imprisonment with a new song calling Rabo a donkey. Such songs are banned from the radio, but pass virally from handset to handset. The suppression of creativity in Nigeria is hardly a new phenomenon. Writers have been imprisoned and even executed like novelist and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. However, the popular imagination combined with the subversive possibilities of such new technologies point to the impossibility of the task undertaken by the Censorship Board. Filmmakers travel out of state to film and bring the digital tapes back in to edit, taking them back out of state to market. Writers, kept from publishing articles in local newspapers, repeat sentiments on blogs and pass digital photos of correspondence with the censors via email listserves. Bus drivers plaster the windows of their ramshackle vehicles with stickers of “porn-star” Hiyana. Young people cite watching movies as inspiration for using their phones to record conversations with corrupt lecturers and authority figures who they then expose as hypocrites. In the Clarendon lectures given at Oxford University in 1996, formerly imprisoned Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o theorised that whereas the state seeks to silence alternate stories, “art tries to restore voices to the land. It tries to give voice back to the silenced”. In Northern Nigeria , despite state-sponsored bans, book burnings, and imprisonments, it is becoming difficult to silence those voices in the first place. (END/2008) Have Your Say: Writers, Film-makers Defy Censors Please read our posting guidelines before posting. Alternatively you can discuss this report here. Related News
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