Censorship

The censor Abubakar Rabo Abdulkarim (called Rabo by the filmmakers) balanced secular and Islamist discourse in his accusations against the filmmakers. Following the 2007 sex scandal when a private sex video of a popular Hausa actress was leaked, the governor of Kano appointed Rabo, the former deputy commander of the sharia enforcement group the hisbah, as head of the Kano State Censorship Board (KSCB). Only the year before, Rabo had been arrested by federal police who charged him and the commander general of the hisbah with treason and subversion of the government and with operating ‘an unlawful society known as the Hisbah’ (Ige Reference Ige2006; Rabiu Reference Rabiu2006). Although he had eventually been released and charges of treason dropped (Last Reference Last2008: 53) in 2007, he took to ‘sanitizing’ the film industry with the same zeal he had given to pulling women off motorbikes.

Yet the official releases and Rabo’s discussions with the national press are filled with dry bureaucratic language that imitates the language of the ‘secular’ national government. In Rabo’s first press release after being appointed head censor, he suspends film activities in Kano for six months, but there is little talk about religious reasons for the ban. Instead, he writes about tax clearance certificates and required office equipment (Abdulkarim Reference Abdulkarim2007). In a 2009 interview with me, he similarly couched the right of the censorship board to operate in federal constitutional law (McCain Reference McCain2009). Sounding much like the theorists of third cinema who strove ‘to purify the forms of popular expression’ (Bakari and Cham Reference Bakari and Cham1996: 21), he spoke of ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘societal ideals’ and denounced cultural imperialism. ‘Culture’ rather than religion is given as a major reason for censorship. In fact, when I asked about whether the censorship law was part of sharia, he denied it, claiming (incorrectly) that when the law was implemented in 2001, ‘There was nothing like sharia implementation in Kano.’Footnote ⁵ Thus, he attempts to draw validation for the application of censorship from a kind of universal secular law. In the interview and elsewhere, he argued that the censorship law in a multi-religious state protects Christians and Muslims equally from sacrilegious films.

Rabo was aware of the complex religious and political stage on which he was speaking. Articles and interviews with southern papers or with a Western journalist, even the official publications of the KSCB, seem designed to appeal to secular sensibilities; however, his interaction with northern Nigerian audiences appealed more directly to religious sensibilities. ‘Film censorship guidelines’ posted on the KSCB website directed that films must ‘conform with the tenets of the Islamic Shari’ah and the good norms of our cultural heritage’.Footnote ⁶ Yet, his interpretation of censorship was harsher than that of his predecessors at the KSCB. Musa Ibrahim claims that Rabo represented an intolerant Izala perspective on popular culture that had become dominant in the government of Ibrahim Shekarau (Ibrahim Reference Ibrahim2017: 98). In a 2008 press briefing, he argued that ‘religion, culture and public dignity cannot be compromise [sic] by any good government in the name of Economic interest’, since it is ‘entrusted by our people to this administration which operate within the tenants [sic] of Shari’a legal system’ (Abdulkarim Reference Abdulkarim2008).

The KSCB reported that, from 2007 to 2011, over a thousand people associated with the entertainment industries were arrested.Footnote ⁷ Most were taken to a mobile court attached to the censorship board, where, often within a few hours and without a lawyer present, they were sentenced to months in prison or given large fines. Although the stated goal of the KSCB was to guard the masses from corrupting influences, Rabo zealously attempted to ‘expose’ the sins of the film industry. In addition to arresting filmmakers and marketers, Rabo travelled around the north, going on radio to warn parents not to let their children read contemporary Hausa novels or watch films. Not only did he characterize filmmakers as sinners, but in the exclusionary political language of indigeneity often used in Nigeria, both he and then Kano governor Ibrahim Shekarau pointed to the non-Kano origin of some of the artists. Shekarau claimed that ‘some of the artistes and producers of the Hausa movies are not indigenes of the state’ (Kwaru Reference Kwaru2007: 2).Footnote ⁸ Just as the initial ban on filmmaking had done, these public statements otherized filmmakers, presenting them as outsiders to Hausa Muslim society, who were, as Rabo told me in an interview, corrupting the ‘clean and respected clan’ of the Hausa-Fulani. On air in the more liberal city of Kaduna, he told radio and television audiences that they should ‘throw them out of Kaduna State in the same way we threw them out of Kano’. The KSCB also took out full-page ads in newspapers reproducing privately taken photographs of Hausa actresses in skimpy clothing that had circulated on the internet. Ironically, the censors were doing the same thing that the filmmakers claimed to do – showing bad behaviour in an attempt to change it. Yet in attempting to ‘expose’ the sins of filmmakers, publishing the photographs in the newspapers exposed even more Hausa speakers to them, seemingly violating the very reasons for which the censorship board had been founded: to guard society from exposure to negative influences.

Cultural producers in northern Nigeria responded to this censorship regime by appealing both to their rights as citizens in a secular state and to the religious tenets of Islam. Ultimately, the interaction with the censorship board seems to have pointed filmmakers outwards to a cosmopolitan unity with other Nigerians and international connections in filmmaking. Kannywood star Ali Nuhu believed that ‘[t]he ban may have been a blessing in disguise’, since Kannywood filmmakers who had ‘never thought of leaving their comfort zone until now’ had their eyes opened to ‘a whole new world of ideas’ (Aminu et al. Reference Aminu, Alao and Tijjani2008). Similarly, controversial filmmaker Sani Danja said: ‘So for these very unnecessary rules they have set for the actors in Kano, most of us have decided to take our talent elsewhere.’ He mentioned that they were filming in other places in Nigeria and even Dubai. ‘So you can see that we are expanding even outside the shores of Nigeria’ (Alhassan and Aliyu Reference Alhassan and Aliyu2010: 19). At the same time, many filmmakers began attending professional development workshops in Abuja, Jos and Lagos and going to training seminars in India and the United Arab Emirates. The filmmakers largely attempted to defend themselves through recourse to their identity as Nigerian citizens, who, according to the National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB), could make and show their films in the thirty-five other states of the nation.

Yet, they also made religiously inflected arguments, defending their identity as Muslims. They claimed that they used their profession to teach audiences about how to live as good Muslims and denounced the hypocrisy of their critics who sought to damage their reputation. Musicians working with the film industry responded to censorship with subversively critical films and fiery songs, which mocked the censorship board and challenged its claim to the moral authority of both sharia law and Nigerian law. One of the most popular was a song called ‘Hasbunallahu’, after the prayer for comfort narrated by Ibn Abbas as being first recited by the Prophet Ibrahim in the face of his enemies: ‘Hasbunallahu wa ni’mal wakil’, meaning ‘God is sufficient, the best disposer of affairs’.Footnote ⁹ This Arabic prayer was interspersed as a chorus between twenty-two verses in Hausa that called on God to punish those who kept artists from their livelihoods. The song claimed a persecuted Muslim identity for the artists against antagonists they represented as evil-doers. Although the Kano State government responded by banning eleven such songs and arresting several musicians, the bans simply gave them more publicity in a technological environment where the internet and Bluetooth made physical censorship very difficult. Finally, as if the prayers of the musicians were answered, the head of the KSCB, Rabo, was himself embroiled in a sex scandal. With the change of political administration in 2011, the crisis largely came to an end, at least for a year or so.

Iyantama’s Kurkuku (Prison)

With the change in political administration in 2011, several films and music videos about the crisis appeared. I will focus here on the four-part docudrama Kurkuku (Prison) produced, directed by and acted in by Hamisu Lamido Iyantama (see Figure 1). The filmmaker was imprisoned for three months by the KSCB on the accusation that he had released an uncensored film, Tsintsiya, which featured a romance between an Igbo Christian and a Hausa Muslim.Footnote ¹⁰ After a long legal battle, he was cleared. In Kurkuku, Iyantama presents his perspective on the story of his arrest and the subsequent court cases, as an exposé of the injustices filmmakers suffered under the KSCB and the state government. The film depicts these local institutions as oppressive and unenlightened. By contrast, Iyantama portrays himself and other filmmakers as citizens in two frameworks that are larger than their antagonists. First, they are citizens of Nigeria, whom he argues have the right to sell their films in all thirty-six states of the nation. Second, they are citizens of the cosmopolitan Muslim ummah, a global spiritual community under God’s rule. Citizenship in these two realms gives them recourse to a justice that is greater and more powerful than the corrupt local implementation of laws specific to Kano State. The film suggests that if Nigerian courts cannot bring them justice in this lifetime, God’s court will bring them justice in the hereafter, when the hypocrisy of the oppressor will be exposed on the final day of judgement. As stated in Surah 69:17 of the Qur’an, ‘On that Day you will be exposed – no concealed act you did will stay concealed’ (Bewley and Bewley Reference Bewley and Bewley2011: 579). In staking these metaphysical claims about citizenship and justice, Iyantama aligns filmmakers with ordinary people who suffer in an unjust environment and warns the government of the consequences of injustice in both this life and the next.

Figure 1. Poster for Iyantama’s film Kurkuku, a docudrama about his imprisonment by the KSCB. Used by permission of Hamisu Lamido Iyantama.

The film presents evidence that was not accepted in court and exhibits archival photographs, newspaper articles and court records, as well as Iyantama’s certificate and receipts proving the legitimacy of his business, which had been questioned in court. The filmed court cases are re-enactments of court transcripts. Iyantama, FIM Magazine editor Aliyu Gora and other Kannywood stars play themselves as ‘witnesses’. They speak about the suffering they faced during the censorship crisis to journalists and researchers inside the diegetic space of the film, sometimes directly to the camera, as if to a court of popular opinion. These scenes showing injustices against filmmakers are paralleled with scenes where ordinary citizens complain about poverty induced by the government.

The narrative arc of the four-part film is balanced: parts 1 and 2 show the triumph of the KSCB as it sends the Hausa film industry into a deeper and deeper crisis; in parts 3 and 4, roles begin to reverse as filmmakers seek justice and their antagonists find their power fading. Part 1 mostly focuses on Iyantama’s arrest and initial trial. Part 2 picks up in pace, showing arrests of video-gaming centre employees, singers and video marketers, and a meeting where well-known Kannywood figures vent their frustration at how their names are being tarnished by the censors’ propaganda. In parts 3 and 4, Iyantama’s lot improves as the director general of the KSCB begins to face the judgement of his superiors and the general public, who are affected by the economic woes caused by the crackdown on the film industry. Iyantama gets out of prison, travels to Hollywood, and sues the director general. The director general finds himself reprimanded by the Nigerian minister of information, representatives of the NFVCB and other members of the Kano State government for his unprofessionalism and injustice. The narrative arc of the film contrasts the provincial and corrupt ways of the board with the cosmopolitan, sophisticated and good Muslim filmmakers.

The appeal to a Nigerian identity runs throughout the film. Kurkuku follows and comments on the film for which Iyantama was arrested, Tsintsiya, with its message that Nigerians of various ethnic and religious backgrounds should come together. In Kurkuku, an Igbo trader attending a community meeting observes the xenophobic rhetoric of the censorship board, which framed its activism in terms of ‘protecting culture and religion’: ‘He wants us to go. He wants us to leave his own state. But we have our rights as Nigerians. We also have our national certificates to do business anywhere in this country.’ A human rights activist, Princess Emmanuel (a ‘Christian’ name), is shown researching Iyantama’s case throughout the film. The ‘local’ antagonists are contrasted with cosmopolitan Nigerians. The film portrays the censorship board, despite its claims of being aligned with the goals of national censorship, as being backward and the enemy of progress in a multicultural, multi-ethnic nation.

The second, and higher, judgement comes in the form of God’s judgement, as hinted at in the curses the filmmakers and other people affected by the censorship crisis rain down upon the censorship board. This sort of connection is made in the multiple song performances, which reprise throughout parts 2–4 of the film. One of the songs, which features Iyantama and his family lamenting the injustice that has been done to them, takes place shortly after a scene that show thugs invading Iyantama’s house and threatening to assault his wife. The visuals intercut between Iyantama’s family at home and Iyantama in chains in prison. The song speaks to the instability of life in Nigeria, where innocent people suffer alongside criminals and justice is not done. This discussion of temporal injustice is contrasted with the eternal justice of the universe in which God will eventually reward the righteous and judge the hypocrite. The intercutting between the domestic setting, in which Iyantama’s family sings about how they miss him, and the prison, where Iyantama sits, visually reminds the audience of the injustice done not just to him but to his innocent family, who become a kind of synecdoche for the ordinary people being treated unjustly by the government. It associates the government with rapists and thugs who have made Iyantama – ideally, the protector of the sacred private space of the home – helpless behind bars, while the family is left to God’s protection. Iyantama’s most direct attack on the unnamed censor is in verses 22–24.

In this discussion of justice, Iyantama indirectly references the shameful exposure by the media of the censor’s own sex scandal. The censor who persecuted him is judged in two ways: first, the humiliation of his sins being exposed in life. He sings: ‘God has exposed you and will surely expose your allies’ – a just punishment for the false accusations he has made against the filmmakers. But this first judgement is only a foreshadowing of the final day of judgement, when everything will be laid bare before God. The song warns the censor and his allies that ‘God is waiting for you’. In a previous verse, he also sings: ‘May Allah judge them on the day of reckoning, where the guilty and the non-guilty will be known.’ As opposed to hypocrites hiding behind religion – a category of people denounced strongly in the Qur’an – Iyantama emphasizes that God’s justice is on the side of filmmakers, contrasting the ‘enlightenment’ performed by the filmmakers with the deeds hidden in the shadows by their antagonists. By shedding light on the corruption of the board, the filmmakers perform a precursor to judgement day, when sins that have not been exposed in this lifetime will be brought out into the open. These sorts of calls for judgement are also found in the aforementioned song ‘Hasbunallahu’, which had been banned by the censorship board and which Iyantama reprises at structurally important moments in the film. After Iyantama’s court appeal in part 3, the following verse from ‘Hasbunallahu’ is sung over a montage of Iyantama being placed in chains and transported back to prison:

In the film, it is after ‘Hasbunallahu’ is performed that the fortunes of the censorship board begin to reverse and the head censor begins to suffer humiliation at the hands of his superiors. In the space of the film, at least, he begins to see the consequences of unjustly persecuting the innocent. The appeals to God are seen as working through the official operations of the Nigerian state. By reaching outside the film and pulling in the banned song, the filmmakers give ‘Hasbunallahu’ a narrative function as a prayer that is answered over the course of the film. They also rebelliously indicate the end of the censor’s power that enabled the release of the film in the first place. This is reinforced when the two singers who were arrested over the song, Aminu Ala and Bashir Dan Dago, are shown performing it at a Kannywood party at the end of the film, illustrating the triumph of the filmmakers over the KSCB.

In the party at the end of the film, prominent members of the Hausa film industry celebrate alongside members of the Igbo and Christian communities who had supported them during their travails with what has been portrayed as a backward and ethnocentric government. The human rights activist Princess Emmanuel speaks to Nigerians about their rights before handing over the microphone to filmmakers and musicians arrested during the crisis. The ending is reminiscent of a similar party at the end of Iyantama’s film Tsintsiya, the film for which he was arrested, where Hausa Muslims celebrate alongside Igbo Christians. The final film song of Kurkuku presents a cosmopolitan and pluralistic vision of Nigeria. Praise singers sing that Iyantama ‘believes in unity lies our strength … Peacemaking, condemning violence and law enforcement should be our civil duty. He sees Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba as one without feeling superiority over the other.’

Iyantama’s film Kurkuku thus makes use of the concept of exposure to refer both to judgement (the exposure of sins) and to the ideal state of an educated society (exposed to the world). The antagonists of the filmmakers are exposed as sinners, while a cosmopolitan Nigerian society becomes a stand-in for paradise on earth. Against longstanding tensions in the north between Muslims and Christians and, at that time, a recent history of election violence that occurred after Goodluck Jonathan won the Nigerian presidential elections in 2011, Iyantama sees unity and good citizenship in the nation as complementary to his citizenship in the Muslim ummah. He expresses no qualms about being what Murray Last has called a ‘dual citizen’ in the nation state of Nigeria and the ‘worldwide Muslim ummah’ (Last Reference Last2008: 59). Kurkuku was just one of many texts that used the discourse of exposure to appeal both to divine justice and to a cosmopolitan identity, but its docudrama style references actual events as evidence an audience can hold on to.

Christian responses

While Iyantama shows good relationships between Christians and Muslims in his triumphant ending, he portrays those Christians as southerners and does little to combat perceptions of a Muslim north and Christian south. Although he pushes back against the exclusionary language of Shekarau’s government, he does not challenge the assumptions in Hausa Muslim society that a Hausa identity is synonymous with being Muslim. Such assumptions, Moses Ochonu (Reference Ochonu2014) points out, developed with the Sokoto jihad and were reinforced by British colonial rule. Nicholas Omenka (Reference Omenka2010) contends that representations of a ‘Muslim north’ and ‘Christian south’ are rooted in colonial policy, which upheld laws to disallow missionaries from evangelizing in the northern emirates, and in Biafran propaganda, which portrayed the civil war as a conflict relating to ‘a Christian state facing a Muslim Jihad’ (Walls quoted in Omenka Reference Omenka2010: 389). Yet, as Shobana Shankar (Reference Shankar2014) observes, at the time of the colonial occupation of the north, both Islam and Christianity were spread among the Maguzawa, the rural people who had resisted jihadist conversion and sometimes also Hausa-Fulani rule. By the time of the civil war, there were not only large migrant Christian communities across the north but also indigenous Christian communities, particularly in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region and the north-east. Whether or not these Christians were ethnically Hausa – and some of them were – they spoke Hausa in church, in evangelism and in daily life. Muslim and Christian populations, especially in rural regions, have often intermarried and lived peacefully together.

Shankar (Reference Shankar and Soares2006) also points out that the borders between Hausa-speaking Muslims and Christians, at least in the early twentieth century, were porous and often policed more by colonial governments than by ordinary Christians and Muslims. British legislation about who could travel where, and early distinctions encouraging an identity defined more by exclusion than by what was shared, no doubt influenced the politicization of religious and ethnic identity today. Iheanyi Enwerem (Reference Enwerem1995) describes how the roots of the association that would eventually become the political interest group CAN began in the mid-1960s when northern Christian leaders felt that they needed to come together to resist the Islamization campaign by the Sardauna of Sokoto Ahmadu Bello, Nigeria’s first premier. Other tensions came with the rise of the aggressive Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN) and Nigeria’s entrance as the forty-sixth member into the then Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) during the Babangida regime (Falola Reference Falola1998: 95). A divisive statement – ‘If Christians do not accept the Muslim leadership, then we have to divide the country’ – was attributed in the Nigerian Standard Newspaper on 16 October 1991 to influential Salafist teacher Shaykh Abubakar Gumi, whose teachings are followed by the ‘Yan Izala (quoted in Ikenga-Metuh Reference Ikenga-Metuh1994: 84). Perhaps the greatest conflict between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria has arisen out of the years of campaigning for and finally the implementation of sharia law.

Brandon Kendhammer points out that a language of ‘religious rights’ developed in the late 1970s from attempts to establish a federal sharia court of appeal in drafts of the constitution (Reference Kendhammer2013: 295). This language of ‘rights’ to practise religion was commonly posed by Muslim politicians and intellectuals against Christian protests about the ‘secular’ ideals of the constitution and fears that, as minorities in the region, they would be disenfranchised and mistreated. Acrimony between the two groups grew increasingly violent, especially in the years following the implementation of sharia criminal codes in twelve statesFootnote ¹² across Nigeria. Political instigation led to recurring spasms of religious and ethnic violence in the Middle Belt regions, particularly in Plateau and Kaduna States. The 2011 election of Christian president Goodluck Jonathan also led to widespread violence against Christians across the north.

With the rise of Boko Haram at about the same time, many Christians associated terrorism with mainstream Muslim institutions. After Christmas day attacks in Jos, Abuja, Damaturu and Maiduguri in December 2011, then president of CAN Ayo Oritsejafor, a southern Pentecostal pastor based in Warri, Delta State, placed newspaper adverts addressed to the ‘Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs’ blaming them for the violence and threatening to ‘respond appropriately if there are further attacks on our members, Churches and properties’ (Oritsejafor Reference Oritsejafor2011). Christian magazines headquartered in the Middle Belt city of Jos, such as the ECWA (Evangelical Church Winning All) church publication Today’s Challenge, drew parallels between Islamist violence in the Middle East and Boko Haram attacks on Christians.

There were, however, some Hausa-language Christian musicians and music video producers whose responses to Boko Haram followed the pattern Hausa filmmakers had used in their response to the censorship board. Christians regularly work on Kannywood productions in Jos and Kaduna – and Muslim Kannywood directors such as A. G. M. Bashir work on Christian films in Kano. The Jos-based National Film Institute serves both Christians and Muslims, and one of its most famous graduates, Kenneth Gyang, has made films with the Hausa-language Kannywood film industry in northern Nigeria as well as with the English-language Nollywood film industry in the south. The Christian media productions in Jos that I discuss here, however, are largely Christian affairs. While the Christian Hausa-language film and music video industries do not have the reach or prestige of the Kannywood productions, Jos has become a base for northern Christian culture and a centre of Christian Hausa-language media production.

The owners of several production and distribution companies for Christian drama and music video compilations to whom I spokeFootnote ¹³ come from north-eastern Nigeria but told me that they base their headquarters in Jos. The city is a main market for Christian Hausa-language productions because of its history as what they characterize as ‘the centre of Christianity in [northern] Nigeria’. Although headquartered in Jos, these music video companies also have offices in other northern cities, including in the north-eastern states of Taraba and Adamawa, where there are large populations of indigenous Christians. These small independent production companies are not directly related to Kannywood, but they often take inspiration from Kano-based media production, including some ‘secular’ comedies that feature Kannywood Muslim comedians starring alongside lesser-known Plateau-based Christian comedians. More of these productions, however, are specifically Christian – from Christian evangelism dramas to music videos and YouTube channels.Footnote ¹⁴

The music videos produced range from traditional Hausa music with Christian themes sung by singers who style themselves ‘Shata’, after the famous Muslim musician Mamman Shata, to zumuntan mata women’s church choirs, to contemporary gospel music, to albums that imitate in costume and sound the Sufi praise singers often called ‘Yabon Annabi’ (Praise of the Prophet). As Boko Haram began to rise in the 2010s, Christian musicians started to perform direct responses to the extremist group.

The music video productions, for a variety of musical genres, invoke Christian traditions about the end times that overlap with Muslim teachings about judgement day. In these productions, prophecies about the end of the world, judgement day and Jesus’s second coming are regularly referenced, alongside visual clips appropriated from evangelical films showing flames raining down on earth and people being raised from the grave for the day of judgement. Here, the narrative of the end of the world both helps people make sense of the extreme violence and suffering and gives hope that their persecutors will be judged.

Similar to the way in which Iyantama directly addresses his antagonists in the film songs for Kurkuku and provides documentary evidence of the injustice that was done to him and the rest of the film industry, these productions address themselves directly to Boko Haram and to the government. They do so by pulling sometimes gruesome footage as evidence of Boko Haram’s evil from the group’s own propaganda videos in which Boko Haram demands that people convert to its extremist version of Islam or be killed. The musicians reverse the language of Boko Haram, calling on Boko Haram to repent or be judged.

Considering the sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims in the Middle Belt city of Jos since 2001, the number of songs stating the kinship of Christians and Muslims and calling for unity is somewhat surprising. Although CAN and other Christian voices have often emphasized the conflict between Christians and Muslims, in many of the music videos, musicians repeatedly recognize that both Christians and Muslims are suffering due to Boko Haram, and call on both to pray for an end to the crisis. In this way, they parallel the sort of rhetoric I heard from Hausa filmmakers who claimed a cosmopolitan Nigerian identity against the repressive forces of the state they claimed were wrongly interpreting sharia.

Some of the most striking albums come from the Christian musician Saviour Y. Inuwa, also known as Shatan Waka or Amir Jikan Shata. Inuwa is from Taraba State and looks and sounds very much like a Muslim ‘Yabon Annabi’ musician. In the music video productions of Muslim musicians, these singers usually dress in Arab-inspired dress, the keffiyeh and long white jalabiya for men, and the hijab and abaya for women – shorthand symbols for a cosmopolitan Muslim identity – as they sing praises of the Prophet in music video albums. The sound of the songs, however, is inspired by Indian film music, and the ‘Yabon Annabi’ singers sometimes overlap with the playback singers for the Kannywood film industry.

Inuwa’s music follows these models. In the music video for his song ‘Alaika Ya Rabbi’ (2018), for example, Inuwa and his backup singers are dressed in long white jalabiyas, wearing prayer caps and turbans. In this song, similar to the adaptation of ‘Hasbunallahu’ by Muslim artists in Kano, Inuwa uses an Arabic supplication to God, ‘Alaika Ya Rabbi’ – ‘Unto You Oh Lord’ – in a prayer of protection. He intersperses the Arabic appeal to God with Hausa-language biblical allusions and references to current events, alternating between using the Christian name for Jesus, ‘Yesu’, and the name ‘Isa’, which is more often used by Muslims. He even refers to Jesus as ‘Manzo’ or a ‘Messenger’, as Muslims would. Although Inuwa still references Christian experiences, his language and costume in this song and others blur the boundaries between righteous Muslims and Christians and appeal to an audience made up of both faith communities who are facing the threat of Boko Haram.

In his 2014 music video album Yan Chibok, responding to Boko Haram’s abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok, he sings in both English and Hausa. The opening track of the album begins with the singer dressed as he is in many of his other videos, in a ‘Muslim costume’ (a long white jalabiya and a white keffiyeh), yet kneeling in a Christian prayer position. He prays:

The adoption of the Yabon Annabi costume and sound speaks to the cultural overlaps and flows of influence between northern Muslims and Christians. It also demonstrates a conscious effort to adopt a unified front and a common belief in God’s justice against the destructive force of Boko Haram. Despite the assimilative gestures to Muslim Hausa neighbours, Inuwa firmly claims a Christian identity by kneeling in a Christian prayer position, praying to the Holy Spirit and inserting biblical allusions. Over the Arab-style keffiyeh, his backup singer wears a cross (see Figure 2). In this song, and in others on his albums Yan Chibok and Ni Bana Duniya Ba, he cites prophecies about the end times. Like the songs in Iyantama’s film, on both albums he invokes the day of judgement, which Boko Haram can escape only by repentance. Like Iyantama, he presents documentary evidence by splicing in actual footage of Boko Haram propaganda videos, including monologues by then Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau. He juxtaposes these with images of resistance – documentary footage of the ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ protests in Abuja alongside sequences where singers point at the screen, directly addressing their audience of victims and perpetrators.

Figure 2. Still from Saviour Y. Inuwa’s song ‘Yan Chibok’. Inuwa (right) wears a keffiyeh, while his colleague in the middle wears a turban and a cross.

Another parallel between Inuwa’s albums and Iyantama’s docudrama is the characterization of their antagonists as ‘local’ and unenlightened. Shobana Shankar argues that northern Christians have countered the ‘denigration, as racially and culturally inferior, by the British and Muslim Northern Nigerian authorities’ by taking on an identity as cosmopolitan ‘modernizers’ (Shankar Reference Shankar2016: 41). Saviour Y. Inuwa performs these claims of superiority, arguing that Boko Haram’s evil stems in part from its ignorance and its refusal of the cosmopolitan education that connects Nigeria to the rest of the world. He explores this position in verses 2 and 3 of his title song ‘Yan Chibok’:

Although Boko Haram has never expressed any qualms about using Western technologies for their insurgency, Inuwa argues, using rhetoric popularly used against Boko Haram in Nigeria, that the very tools Boko Haram uses to claim power – guns, mobile phones and cars – are a result of the education they attack. Whether accurate or not in their representation of the ‘illiteracy’ of their antagonists, both Iyantama and Inuwa claim the superiority of engagement in the world.

While Iyantama represents the sympathy of the NFVCB and his visit to Hollywood as demonstrating how, despite his persecution by the censorship board, he has gained the recognition of the world, Saviour Y. Inuwa finds comfort in a litany of countries around the world that protested against the abduction of the Chibok girls. As he sings, accompanied by images of world leaders and of worldwide protests, he poses the evil of an ‘illiterate’ Shekau against the outrage of the entire world:

By subversively inserting the statement that ‘The king of Mecca cried’ into his list of supportive world leaders, he once again draws a parallel between an international symbol of Islam, in the sacred site of pilgrimage of Mecca, and the cosmopolitan unity of the rest of the world. Although Inuwa invokes concepts specific to Christianity such as the ‘Holy Spirit’ and the primacy of Jesus in his album, he does not directly critique Islam or Muslims but rather argues that Shekau’s problem is his lack of education, presumably in the very religion that he claims. Finally, Inuwa stresses the unity of the north under shared symbols. In the final verse of the song, he not only acknowledges the suffering of northern Muslims under Boko Haram, but also points to Muslim traditional rulers, despite the historical resistance of Christians to the hegemony of Hausa-Fulani rule, as representatives of a shared culture.

To illustrate this verse, he includes a photograph of Kano emir Ado Bayero, a Muslim, standing with Christian president Goodluck Jonathan, further reinforcing the connections between followers of both religions (see Figure 3). The song thus becomes a message to Christians, such as the southern president of CAN (who associates all Muslims with Boko Haram), to Muslims (who might see Christians as foreigners in the region) and to Shekau that there is no justification in Islam for such killings. Inuwa’s message is ‘Repent. Judgement day is at hand.’

Figure 3. Still from Saviour Y. Inuwa’s song ‘Yan Chibok’, showing a photograph of the Muslim emir of Kano, Ado Bayero, with Christian president Goodluck Jonathan.