My Thoughts Exactly Year Two in Review
For Christmas 2011, I wrote about bombs that went off in a Jos football viewing centre. Christmas morning, St. Theresa’s Catholic Church, Madalla, Niger State, was bombed, the first church bombing in Nigeria. Unfortunately, it was the first of dozens. The most recent church bombing was at St. John’s Catholic Church in Bauchi on 23 […]
For Christmas 2011, I wrote about bombs that went off in a Jos football viewing centre. Christmas morning, St. Theresa’s Catholic Church, Madalla, Niger State, was bombed, the first church bombing in Nigeria. Unfortunately, it was the first of dozens. The most recent church bombing was at St. John’s Catholic Church in Bauchi on 23 September. Although there were brief glimmers of hope in the “Occupy Nigeria” movement in which thousands of people took to the streets in peaceful protest against the fuel subsidy removal, my plan to write about the participation of Kannywood in the Occupy Nigeria protests was abruptly curtailed with the massive terror attack on Kano on 20 January, which resulted in the deaths of over 200 people. I wrote “It felt as though writing about celebrities, even activist celebrities, or the pleasures of film and literature would somehow betray the high seriousness of this horror-story in which we find ourselves—in which anyone might die by bomb or bullet for being on the wrong street, the wrong church, the wrong office at the wrong time.” Not long after, I wrote about the bomb at COCIN headquarters church in Jos, which went off close to where I had been that morning. In later columns, I also wrote about the bombing of St. Finbar’s Catholic Church also in Jos, the Easter-day street bombing in Kaduna, attacks on the media in Abuja and Kaduna, and the attack on churches meeting on Bayero University campus in Kano, other bomb blasts and shootings in Maiduguri, Bauchi, Zaria, Kaduna, Damaturu, including those at mosques; attacks on villages in Plateau State, the multiple Ramadan month attacks in Borno, Yobe, Sokoto, Kano, Kaduna, and Kogi States. The attacks were so frequent I stopped writing about them—a sad indication of “tragedy fatigue.”
I also wrote on other tragedies in Nigeria and around the world: the Dana air crash in Lagos, the destruction of historical monuments in Mali by the rebel group Ansar Dine, the attacks on a Sikh temple in the United States by a white supremacist. Most recently, I wrote about the hateful anti-Islamic video “Innocence of Muslims” and the ensuing protests around the world. I also devoted several columns to the Plateau State government’s destruction of “illegal structures” in Jos.
I grasped at opportunities to write about peace: the launching of Dr. K. A. Korb and Rev. Yakubu Pam’s book Fighting for Peace: Learning from the Peace Heroes Among Us (2012) that tells true stories of ordinary Christians and Muslims who are working for peace in Jos. I wrote of Muslims and Christians speaking out against violence, breaking fast together during Ramadan, and donating relief materials to those of the other religion affected by floods and crisis.
Since the original focus of my column had been on arts and culture, I often felt as if I were racing to get in another entertainment piece before the next disaster occurred. After columns on terrorism and peace, perhaps the most consistent focus of the column was on film. In 2011, I wrote on the documentary Equestrian Elegance (2009) produced by Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu, which portrayed the five days of pageantry during Kano’s Sallah celebrations—a timely film seeing as these celebrations were cancelled in 2012. I also reviewed Kingsley Ogoro’s production Across the River (2004), on the Biafra War, which was featured in the November 2011 edition of the Plateau International Film Festival; Emem Isong and Uche Jombo’s production Nollywood Hustlers (2009); and Daniel Ademinokan’s film Unwanted Guest (2011) set in New York City. I reviewed five short films by Ghanaian-British filmmaker Julius Amedume and waded into the controversy over casting British actress Thandie Newton as the character Olanna in the “Hollywood” version of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Biafra war novel Half of a Yellow Sun. I also wrote about experiences on the set of an Andy Amenechi film in Benin City and compared improvisatory techniques used by Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini and French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard with those used in Nollywood. In keeping with my desire to promote Nigerian language films, I reported on the Kano premier of the Hausa film Duniya Juyi Juyi (2011), which portrayed the lives of almajirai and was directed, shot, and acted in by almajirai themselves. I also interviewed US-based founder of Hausafilms.tv Mahmud Fagge; Tiv filmmakers, John Agbaingya, Ralph Ogbaje, Kenneth Iornumbe, and Shadrach Ukuma in Makurdi; Edo filmmaker Andrew Osawaru in Benin City; and Lagos-based filmmakers Emem Isong and Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen about the films they are making in Ibibio and Edo. One of my saddest entertainment pieces was an obituary for my friend Hausa filmmaker and comedian Lawal Kaura.
On musical topics, I took issue with Dbanj’s collaboration with Snoop Dogg on the narcissistic music video “Mr. Endowed,” which objectified women and was crassly materialistic. By contrast, I interviewed upcoming musician XDOGGinit, who raps in English and Hausa and whose music videos are creative and fun.
On literary topics, I reviewed Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir One Day I Will Write About this Place (2011), Helon Habila’s novel Oil on Water (2010), and Abidemi Sanusi’s novel Eyo (2009). I wrote about the 30th edition of the Association of Nigerian Authors convention, which was held in Abuja in December 2011. When two of my friends, writers Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and Elnathan John, were not able to represent Nigeria at the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing workshop in March 2012 because of visa issues and Nigeria’s yellow fever immigration row with South Africa, I pronounced my partial boycott of South Africa. I later questioned Caine Prize chair of judges Bernadine Evaristo’s directive that African writers should “move on” past writing tragic stories. On the occasion of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s death, I meditated on some of my favourite science fiction novels.
As part of my attempts to focus more on scholarship, I wrote a review of the November 2011 “Nollywood and Theatre for Development” conference at Ahmadu Bello University, mentioned the May 2012 “Nollywood, Women and Cultural Identity” conference at Benue State University, and reviewed the August 2012 special Nollywood issue of the Journal of African Cinemas. The past two weeks, I have written about online resources that make academic research easier.
Other miscellaneous pieces include several articles in honour of my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary and responses to articles by fellow Weekly Trust columnists. I challenged Bala Muhammad’s denigration of the professional abilities of women and Aisha Umar-Yusuf’s denial of both 9-11 and the Holocaust.
I was lucky to host a few guest columns this year. Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu of Bayero University Kano wrote about the December 2011 Freedom-Fasaha Contemporary Hausa Music Championships in Kano. Cinematographer and lecturer Benjamin Tarachi responded to my article, “Fellini, Godard, and Training Nollywood,” with his own philosophy of film. Dr. Alessandro Jedlowski wrote about the production crisis in Nollywood and what effect this may have on local language films. In response to public discourse about the possibility of dividing Nigeria, Dr. K. A. Korb of the University of Jos traced the sobering history of other nations that have split in the past twenty years. Poet Gimba Kakanda wrote of his experience, gathering Muslim youth to protect a church in Minna. After the attacks that killed over one hundred people in Plateau State, I reprinted Martin Luther King Jr’s 1963 funeral sermon “Eulogy for the Young Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church” bombing.
If you missed any of these articles, you can check them out on the Weekly Trust website. I hope this year will bring more encouraging stories. Please bear with me as I plan to take a slightly more scholarly turn in the upcoming year while I finish writing my PhD dissertation. Feel free to drop me an email to let me know how I am doing.