Losing our beauties in the ‘Woods’
It wasn’t just the fact that the weekly detective series (The Avengers, Charlie’s Angels, Macmillan and Wife etc) and their romantic counterparts (Love Boat and the Indian epics) we watched on our black- and- white TV screens, were very captivating; it was also that we had a lot of film-related literature in my family home […]
It wasn’t just the fact that the weekly detective series (The Avengers, Charlie’s Angels, Macmillan and Wife etc) and their romantic counterparts (Love Boat and the Indian epics) we watched on our black- and- white TV screens, were very captivating; it was also that we had a lot of film-related literature in my family home that the film industry really commanded my interest.
Being a younger sibling to a trained film-maker (my eldest brother Alhaji Sule, studied film production at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles) meant seeing lots of big books about Hollywood productions and the people who acted them. These books were generously illustrated with photos of movies stars in action or on still portraits. Thus, long before I was old enough to know what most films were about I was familiar with the names and faces of so-called screen legends like Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davies and Marilyn Monroe.
In those books you read nothing negative about the film industry, they only served to reinforce the belief that out there was a world of nothing but beauty and glamour. The first inkling I had that there might be some dark side to the movie world was when I read ‘The Valley of The Dolls’, a novel by Jaquelline Susanne which was based on the private lives of so-called movie goddesses. There, I read about the greed, immorality and desperation that rule the world of Hollywood stars in particular and show-biz in general.
Despite being alarmed by the discovery, I was still able to get over it and push it to some remote corner of my mind because these were people who were distant from us, were largely of a different race and spoke a different language. To me, it was safe to assume that though they kept the world entertained and secretly led dirty and immoral lives, they could not possibly affect us with their depravity since they lived a world away. Well, that was then. Today, thanks to globalization, duplicate copies of Hollywood have sprung up around the world, the most prominent being Bollywood, the Indian version, then Nollywood, the Southern Nigerian movie industry and of course, Kannywood- the Hausa movie counterpart. A new upcoming movie wood is the Ghanaian version known as Ghannywood.
The versions come complete with the dark sinister sides of the original. Just like Hollywood at the beginning of the last century, these new ‘Woods’ are busy attracting beautiful young women who want an easy way to earn money and fame. They do this mostly at the expense of virtue and a decent life, and at great pains to parents and siblings. A few years ago when traveling to Kano from Abuja, I stopped in Kaduna for a meeting. At the end of the meeting, Hajiya Farida of FOMWAN Kaduna invited me to the home of her late parents-in-law to pray.
The very accommodating house-keeper, who attended to me, couldn’t wait to share her tale of woe, the moment she heard that I was on my way to Kano. She told me about a niece who ran away from home in Katsina, just ahead of her wedding to join the Kano movie industry. She said she watched every new film out of Kannywood with the hope that her niece will be seen, and the family could remain assured that she was safe, but had no such luck. I sympathized with her and hoped that one day her niece will return home.
Luckily for her, one of my missions in Kano on that trip was an interview appointment with Kannywood superstar Ali Nuhu. When I met him on the set of a movie at the Farm Centre film location in Kano, a few days later, I told him about this house-keeper’s niece and asked what they do about runaway girls who leave home to join their trade. He said that they never accept any girl in the industry unless she brought a parent or guardian to signal their acceptance of the girl’s choice of a vocation. Ali also narrated other measures they take to ensure that such girls are protected against immorality and danger.
I don’t know how well the measures he talked about were working, but it wasn’t a year after our interview with him that the Maryam Hiyana scandal broke out. This incident shook Kannywood so much that then Kano state government had to react quickly by trying to sanitise the industry. It introduced measures that included setting up a censorship board that screened all products coming out of Kannywood. While one still can’t exactly gauge the effectiveness of the Shekarau government censorship initiatives, now that it is over, beautiful young women are still trooping to Kano, abandoning studies and parental authority, and taking up a life of easy money and fame in Kannywood.
The recent scandal bedeviling the industry is the one related to new rising star, Nafisa Abdullahi. Details about the scandal are sketchy but in its own attempt at self-censorship, the movie industry has suspended the young actress from acting for the next two years. Whether this could deter others from taking the immoral path that led to Nafisa’s punishment is not clear but evidence abounds that these young Northern actresses are leading lives that are far from the ideals and norms of our society and culture.
The exposure they get from their movie roles emboldens them to engage in further indecent adventures even outside the industry, in the larger society. It is a well-known fact that unscrupulous politicians and other bad big men in the society patronize the company of such young actresses and reward them with expensive gifts and money. A few years ago, one Ummi Zee Zee told journalists about her five luxury cars and the man who gave them to her though they had fallen apart then. The same young lady flouted her relationship to a Southern Nigerian singer with whom she posed in numerous pictures.
Others boast about how they can get a million naira or more into their bank accounts with just a phone call to some top politicians and businessmen, all courtesy of their license from Kannywood. It is obvious that the menace of our young beauties’ attraction to the movie industry is something we have to face now or live to regret forever when more and more of them abandon studies and decent lives to take to acting.
The sad end of most Hollywood actresses was a life of lonely old age without families to care of them. Some, like Norma Jean Doherty died in their prime, of frustration and drug abuse. Despite having the world at her feet, a president for a lover and diamonds as her ‘best friends’, Norma took her life through drug overdose in her early thirties. The world, of course, knew her as Marilyn Monroe.
Our young Kannywood stars hardly know this negative side to the ‘Woods’ they have chosen to tread, it is up to us as parents and societal role models to educate them to opt for a better life. Otherwise their sin will consume us all, as they do the societies around Hollywood.