I am reposting this comment from a current thread here because I believe it is pertinent this discussion:

Subject: RE: 11 Hausa songs banned in Kano, Nigeria
From: Azizi - PM
Date: 12 Jun 09 - 01:01 AM

If you do not care for the loss of freedom that other creative people are experiences, you should at least realize that you are laughing and sneering at information such at this at your on peril. What is occurring in this Islamic province of the multi-religious nation of Nigeria, is a sign of what could occur in other nations if people are not pro-active and vigilant. For instance, were a fascist government headed by the BNP ever to achieve real power in Britain or other parts of the United Kingdom, they would target song composers, musicians, film makers, vocalists, actors and other creative people just as is now occurring in that one particular area of Nigeria.

This excerpt of that 2008 "Nigerian Writers, Film-makers Defy Censors"
article that Guest Felipa alerted us to should serve as a warning of things to come:

"Kano State government officials have burned books they say promote immorality...

The imprisonment clause has been put into effect several times. 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...

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."

http://ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=43857


-snip-

We Mudcatters should be standing in solidarity with the creative people in that Northern province of Nigeria instead of making stupid jokes about them. Isn't that what movements such as Folk Against Fascism is all about? Or is the concern about creativity being potentially stifled and actually stifled only there when it comes to White people?