When an individual’s morality and personal preferences trended in a region more than a tragedy that killed its people on the very day, you know there’s a problem. It’s even more so when this is discussed as though the subject of controversy, Hausa actress Rahama Sadau, owes the critics a certain responsibility for her perceived transgressions.
I didn’t know Ms. Sadau, and in fact I pronounced her surname wrongly the first time she became our topic of discussion. She was in the news for appearing in a music video as love interest of a certain bilingual singer known as Classiq, where she’s seen “smooching” the singer.
It was against the moral precepts around which Kannywood, of which the actress is a member, revolves. It’s okay for the morality police to dissent with the choices of Ms. Sadau, what’s unacceptable is the barrage of personalized attacks that have trailed her appearance in the video, as though she had ever announced herself as moral model of the bitter critics.
I still have not watched any movie by the actress, but it’s hard to miss her activities when one tracks some fashion pages on Instagram, which was where I learnt of her existence and got to know what she does for a living.
That a people expected her to “train” their kids, afraid of her influence in the age of internet, is a paranoia taken too far. And now that it’s obvious she’s unwilling to play that role, why can’t we let her be who she really wants to be and concentrate on ourselves – and sins?
A region as socially and economically messed up as ours should have bigger issues to debate, and the explosions in Maiduguri today are one of a million. And there’s no way we can ever achieve this unless we learn to tolerate our differences and harmless personal choices and stop minding businesses that aren’t ours.
This is the same mentality we exhibited in dismissing the idea of a Film Village in Kano State, ignoring what such a venture ought to have brought to the region. It doesn’t matter that for most of the last decade, Kano also topped the lists of youth unemployment based on data serially released by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics. A recent survey from the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency presented a horrifying reality of drug abuse in Kano, Nigeria’s most populous state. That 37% was involved in “illicit drug trafficking or drug use”–the highest in the country.
It’s these same critics of Sadau who killed the salvaging idea, powered by emotions. But between their opposition to the idea and the government’s inability to offer them proper orientation and necessity of such project, I still don’t know which is more unfortunate.
Pointing to moral decadence promoted by entertainers, a group of clerics mobilised their robots against the government initiative then. Online and offline, this influential group recruited and formed a strong force that has succeeded in defeating the project. In the case of Ms. Sadau, it was a cleric asking her to decline an invitation to United States of America extended to her by American music star, Akon.
They have only made a star out of Ms. Sadau, and she’s definitely not going to fade anytime soon, especially as she’s never paraded herself as ambassador of the values she’s expected to exhibited.
And I wonder, in the age of telecoms that every Danliti and Talatu accesses pornographic materials with just N100 data from Adamawa to Zamfara, unhindered, it’s ironic that activities of the region’s growing film industry is registered as the threat to the people’s moral existence.
The clerics only need to look in the mirror to see those actually responsible for the moral mess that is the north of Nigeria, a region thick with fear and hatred of one another based on their hateful and polarising public preaching. Their unregulated preaching poses more danger to the region than the products of this film industry.
The misconception of what a film village is, still disturbs me. They confused modernisation for westernisation because they didn’t realize how easy it may be to employ the same industry to propagate the values they wish to entrench or maintain in the society. They also haven’t really told themselves that the modern civilisation as we find it today isn’t an effort of the West alone.
What saddens me about this demographic of reactionaries is, we see Ms. Sadau as an actually big threat to our social existence in a society dominated by boundlessly “amoral” Indian movies. There’s no household in the north where Bollywood movies haven’t infiltrated, and we have not heard of any official ban of Aishwarya Bachchan and Priyanka Chopra. Herein lies the hypocrisy. Because, no matter what anyone thinks, these vilifications of Ms. Sadau is much ado about nothing. We have given her an influence, and attention, she doesn’t deserve. May God save us from us.
