A Tribute Long Overdue: RFI Hausa Set to Honor Kannywood Veterans in Grand Kano Festival

In the autumn of Kannywood's fourth decade, a French broadcaster is preparing to do what the Nigerian state has too often failed to stop, look back, and say thank you.

Radio France Internationale's Hausa service, one of the most listened-to international broadcasters in northern Nigeria and across the Hausa-speaking Sahel, has announced it will hold its inaugural "Grand RFI Hausa Kano Festival 2026" a landmark cultural event that places the celebration of Kannywood's veteran practitioners at its very centre. In doing so, RFI Hausa is making an argument, implicit but unmistakable, about the relationship between media, memory, and cultural custodianship: that the people who built a film industry from scratch, sustained it through censorship campaigns, moral panics, and political persecution, and carried the stories of tens of millions of Hausa speakers deserve to be seen on their own terms.

The Broadcaster and Its City
RFI's demographic is deeply rooted in northern Nigeria's socio-political, cultural, and sporting landscape, driven by a highly engaged following that tunes in through shortwave radio, Facebook, and TikTok. The station reaches millions of listeners both on radio and online, with an active Facebook followership of over 1.6 million almost a million of them from Kano alone.

That number is not incidental. Kano is not merely one of RFI Hausa's largest audience bases; it is the cultural engine of the Hausa-language media world the city where Kannywood was born, where the censorship board battles that nearly destroyed the industry were fought, where Zoo Road became the unlikely nerve centre of a creative economy employing tens of thousands of people. The festival is part of RFI's effort to strengthen its engagements with its audience and partners, including the Kannywood film industry.

The event will feature activities designed to connect with listeners and celebrate the Kannywood film industry, with two major programmes planned in Kano. One of the programmes, scheduled to take place at the Afficent Centre on Sultan Road, Kano, is "Rayuwata," which will focus on issues affecting women and children.

The choice of the name "Rayuwata” meaning "my life" in Hausa is telling. It positions the festival not as an industry showcase but as a personal reckoning: with what Kannywood means, who built it, and what stories it has told. That the focus falls on women and children speaks directly to the genre of film the domestic drama, the social commentary, the maternal narrative that the veteran practitioners of Kannywood have spent their careers perfecting.

The Industry They Built
To understand why honoring Kannywood veterans matters, it is necessary to understand what they built and the conditions under which they built it.
The 1990s saw a dramatic change in Hausa-language cinema. Eager to attract audiences who found Bollywood more appealing, Kannywood emerged as a cinematic synthesis of Indian and Hausa culture that evolved and became extremely popular. Turmin Danya ("The Draw"), 1990, is usually cited as the first commercially successful Kannywood film, quickly followed by others like Gimbiya Fatima, In Da So Da Kauna, Munkar, Badakala, and Kiyarda Da Ni. New actors like Ibrahim Mandawari and Hauwa Ali Dodo became popular and set the stage for the emergence of superstar female actresses later on.

By 2012, the industry had grown to include over 2,000 registered film companies in Kano State alone. It had become, in the words of analysts who track Nigeria's creative economy, "the third leg of the national tripod" after English-language Nollywood and Yoruba-language cinema supporting a commercial hub that had spread far beyond northern Nigeria into the Hausa-speaking diaspora of Niger, Chad, and across the Sahel.

But the road was marked by rupture. In 2003, with the rise of the Izala movement and the coming to power of Ibrahim Shekarau, the ultra-religious government of Kano initiated an iconoclastic campaign against Kannywood. Numerous films deemed irreligious were censored and some filmmakers were jailed. In 2007, when the sex tape of a popular actress became public, it led to a severe backlash: Shekarau went on to appoint a Director General for the censorship board, and with the support of conservative Islamist organizations, Kannywood and the equally popular Hausa romantic novel industry were severely censored, actors and actresses were jailed by the state government, and books and media materials were burned by the governor himself.

The veterans who survived those period and continued making films did so at considerable personal and professional cost. Their endurance is the story that deserves to be told.

The King of Kannywood and His Generation
No figure embodies the generation RFI Hausa seeks to honor more completely than Ali Nuhu. Ali Nuhu Mohammed, born March 15, 1974, is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential actors of all time in Hausa cinema and has been described as the most successful Hausa film actor in the world. Since January 2024, he has served as the Managing Director of the Nigerian Film Corporation.

Nuhu made his acting debut with the 1999 film Abin Sirri Ne. He is best known for his role in Sangaya, which is said to be one of the highest-grossing Hausa films at the time. He has featured in over 160 Hausa and 110 English movies. Crossing over to Nollywood, he has starred in blockbusters including Banana Island Ghost, Diamond In the Sky (a Netflix production), and Zero Hour. To hone his craft, he attended the Asian Academy of Film and Television in Delhi and the University of Southern California a commitment to professional development that was unusual in Kannywood's early years and has influenced a generation of younger practitioners.

His contemporary, Sani Danja, represents a different but equally foundational strand of the Kannywood story. Born Sani Musa Abdullahi on April 20, 1973, in Fagge, Kano State, Sani Danja has acted in, produced, or directed over 600 films. He has performed in more than 15 countries and was the first African artist to appear on the back page of The Wall Street Journal. He is the Chairman of the Guild of Artists in Northern Nigeria, a position that reflects his standing as the elder statesman of Kannywood rather than merely one of its performers.
His career began not with acting but with music. His transition to acting came in 1999 when Alhaji Rabi'u K/Wambai encouraged him to join the Hausa film industry. He debuted in Dalibai (Students), a film he co-produced and directed alongside his business partner Yakubu Muhammad. Within a year he had appeared in Adon Kishiya, Kwarya Tabi Kwarya, and the blockbuster Wasiyya, sharing screens with Kannywood giants like Ali Nuhu.

The story of Rahama Sadau, the woman the festival's Rayuwata programme most naturally evokes, is the story of what happens when Kannywood's conservative cultural architecture collides with an actress whose talent refuses to be contained by it. She entered the industry in 2013, introduced by Ali Nuhu, and debuted in the film Gani ga Wane. By 2016, she had been named "Face of Kannywood."

Later that year, the Motion Picture Practitioners Association of Nigeria suspended her from participating in Kannywood productions for appearing in a romantic music video with singer Classiq. The suspension was lifted in January 2018 following the intervention of Kano State Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje. In 2017, she launched her own production company, Sadau Pictures, and produced her debut film Rariya.

In 2024, Sadau's film Mamah was screened at the prestigious Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia the first Hausa movie to be showcased at that event. That achievement, earned over a decade of craft and controversy, is precisely the kind of milestone a festival like RFI Hausa's should amplify.

The Industry's Global Moment
The Grand RFI Hausa Kano Festival arrives at a moment when Kannywood is navigating its most consequential transition since its founding.
In 2024, Ali Nuhu was appointed Managing Director of the Nigerian Film Corporation, and the big-budget production Mai Martaba was selected as Nigeria's official entry for the 97th Academy Awards.

These are not isolated achievements but signals of a broader shift: Kannywood is no longer content to be northern Nigeria's internal cinema. It is reaching for international recognition, and its veterans are the ones who made that reach possible.

With some 80 million speakers of the Hausa language spread across West and Central Africa, not to mention the vast Nigerian diaspora, Kannywood's potential market is vast. The industry has produced a new, dedicated streaming service named Arewaflix, designed to stream northern films across Nigeria and beyond, with subtitles planned in English, French, and Arabic.

Yet the KILAF Festival Director Muhammad Galadima has flagged a persistent tension at the heart of the industry's international ambitions. There are concerns that Kannywood practitioners are not given adequate prominence at festivals designed to showcase them. Many practitioners tend to be occupied with work and are not always prepared to engage with formal cultural institutions. A further complication is that KILAF focuses on short films, whereas the Kannywood industry currently produces more feature-length films, limiting participation. That gap between what Kannywood produces and what its institutional recognition infrastructure celebrates is precisely what the Grand RFI Hausa Kano Festival is designed to bridge.

What Recognition Means
In cultures where oral tradition and communal memory have historically done the work of institutional memory, the act of naming and honoring practitioners on a public stage carries weight that goes beyond ceremony. For the veterans of Kannywood men and women who built careers under conditions of censorship, moral surveillance, and institutional neglect to be celebrated by an international broadcaster with 1.6 million Facebook followers is a form of redress.

It says, to the generation that came up under Shekarau's purges and survived them: we see what you built. It says, to the young actor or director in Kano wondering whether the industry has room for her: look at who the elders are, and what they endured to be here.

RFI Hausa's festival is, in this light, not merely a cultural event but a cultural argument that Kannywood's veterans are not footnotes to a story still being written, but the authors of a story already told, and worth reading again.
In the city of Kano, on Sultan Road, at the Afficent Centre, that argument will be made in public. And in Hausa.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.
International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP
mustysallama@gmail.com
+233-555-275-880

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