Martial arts films, like the aforementioned Hausa-Bollywood films, have inspired audiences that were not content to just watch and turned to film production. In Sokoto, the small city in the Northwest corner of the country, a martial arts school went one step further and created their own Kung Fu to…
March 2012. We find serene lodging in the Mabera section of Sokoto, not far from the place where the two foreigners were executed in a botched rescue just a week prior - a slight stain on an otherwise spotless city. Unsurprisingly, few people mention it, either suspecting we know, and…
Bollywood, the multimillion-dollar industry of Hindi film, has a presence in the most far-flung corners of the world. The prodigious output of musical film is second perhaps only to martial arts (more on this later). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the North of Nigeria, where audiences are not…
Isa lies at the end of a highway, the terminus of a newly paved road laying across parched scrub land of Northern Nigeria. Geographically, it lies not far from the border of Niger, and exudes some of that qualities of border towns: the squinting stares of merchants, the turned heads…
Dayhiru - Kumsa The town lies in the shadow of a giant rock. Bulbous granite, the mountain seems to have risen out of the ground, sprung like a prehistoric mushroom. The tiny village nestles up against the cliffs. Some even build their homes from the same stone stuff like the…
Coming of pre-coup Bamako in February Little Axe's Warren Hill and myself headed into Boko Harem Northern Nigeria to work on an upcoming Hausa record. We recorded lots of music, met a lot of producers, and spent a lot of time in police interrogations. Updates coming soon. In the meantime,…