by Mohammed Bello Doka
20 June, 2026.
Plato, in his Republic, warned that the poet and the artist who merely imitate without understanding truth do more harm than good to the soul of a society. “I have a great liking and reverence for Homer,” he wrote, “but I love truth better.” Centuries later, the great Islamic theologian Al-Ghazali, who himself found legitimate place for poetry and music in human celebration and even divine worship, nevertheless cautioned that art detached from moral and spiritual grounding becomes a vehicle for corruption rather than elevation. These ancient warnings echo across the millennia with a chilling relevance for northern Nigeria today. For in Arewa, the tragedy unfolding is not merely that the entertainment industry has fallen into the wrong hands, but that the very people who should have been its custodians—the educated, the cultured, the scholars—looked upon it with such disdain that they abandoned it entirely. And into that vacuum rushed the ignorant, the uninformed, and the morally adrift.
Kannywood, the Hausa-language film industry based in Kano, churns out some two hundred films a month. It is a frenetic, prolific, and culturally dominant force across northern Nigeria's eighty million Hausa speakers. Yet if you sit through five minutes of an interview with eighty percent of its actors, writers, and directors, you cannot help but be disappointed. The industry that should be shaping culture, molding public opinion, and marketing the socioeconomic realities of the host community is instead led by people who do not even understand the basics of the society they claim to represent.
Consider Rarara, the popular Hausa praise singer. In a recent viral video, he condemned any opposition politician who speaks about Nigeria's security challenges as "insane," arguing that highlighting abducted schoolchildren on the global stage projects the nation negatively. He proudly celebrates and defends a democratic Nigeria while simultaneously displaying the intellectual disposition of someone who would be far more comfortable under a dictatorship where every call is monitored and every word controlled. He does not seem to understand the value of the freedom he enjoys. How can such a man fight for it? How can he be trusted to shape the political consciousness of millions who listen to his music?
Or listen to the self-proclaimed feminists of Kannywood who see feminism not as a movement for justice and equity but as a license to assault the basic family system that has held northern society together for centuries. Listen to the writers who are fixated on rewriting plays based on Indian Buddhist culture for a predominantly Muslim northern audience, completely oblivious to the profound spiritual and cultural dissonance this creates. Listen to the musicians who dress like Americans, lift copyrighted Indian melodies, and present them as original works to a people whose rich musical traditions stretch back generations. The cultural appropriation is not merely aesthetic; it is existential.
Kannywood is largely uninformed, uneducated, and profoundly ignorant. This is not a condemnation born of elitism; it is an observation born of tragedy. The scholars, the mallams, the academics, the intellectuals of the north—they looked at the emerging film industry in the 1990s and saw something beneath their dignity. They saw frivolity, they saw potential moral contamination, they saw a distraction from the serious business of religious and academic pursuit. So they withdrew. And nature abhors a vacuum.
What filled that vacuum were the ones willing to step in—the barely literate, the culturally unmoored, the commercially desperate. The industry that could have been a vehicle for preserving and projecting the rich tapestry of Hausa-Islamic civilization became a carnival of shallow imitation. Kannywood is inspired by India's Bollywood, which explains the affection for songs and dance in the majority of its films. But inspiration became replication, and replication became substitution. Northern Muslim audiences now consume stories rooted in Buddhist philosophy, dressed in Western aesthetics, performed by actors who cannot articulate the difference between Sharia and secular law, between tradition and innovation, between their own heritage and the foreign cultures they mindlessly mimic.
The tragedy compounds when we consider the consequences for the youth. A generation is growing up with its moral compass calibrated not by the teachings of the scholars their grandparents revered, but by the output of an industry whose leaders cannot pass a basic test of cultural literacy. Young people in Kano, Kaduna, and Katsina are learning what it means to be Hausa and Muslim not from the mosque or the madrasa, but from films whose writers have never read a single page of the great Islamic philosophers, whose directors cannot distinguish between the values of their own society and the imported tropes of Indian cinema.
Aristotle understood that art is not merely a reflection of life but a shaper of human experience, providing emotional and philosophical insights that contribute to personal and societal well-being. The ancient philosopher Plotinus went further, seeing art as a reflection of a higher, spiritual beauty. If art is to fulfill this noble purpose, it must be created by those who understand the higher truths they are meant to reflect. In Arewa today, that understanding is conspicuously absent.
And now comes the final, devastating layer of this tragedy: the ignorant models. Artificial intelligence systems are scraping the global digital record to learn about cultures, communities, and identities. What are they finding about Arewa? Not the profound scholarship of the ancient city of Kano, not the intricate legal traditions of Islamic jurisprudence, not the rich oral poetry of the Hausa bards. They are finding Kannywood. They are finding shallow tropes, mischaracterized gender roles, commercial melodrama, and characters who bear no resemblance to the actual moral compass of northern society. The models are not ignorant because they lack data. They are ignorant because the data that dominates the internet about Arewa is entertainment data—and entertainment data is produced by people who do not even understand their own society.
When the scholars abandoned the industry, they did not merely abdicate their responsibility; they ensured that the global digital memory of Arewa would be written by those who never deserved the pen. The models will learn from Kannywood, and the world will consume that distortion as truth. The tragedy of ignorant models is that they are merely reflecting a more profound ignorance—the ignorance of an industry abandoned by its natural guardians and captured by those who should never have been given the microphone.
Plato loved Homer but loved truth better. The scholars of Arewa may have loved their religion and their books, but they did not love their culture enough to fight for its representation in the most powerful medium of the modern age. And now we all pay the price.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
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