“Drop me at the Plaza.” “Meet me at the El Dorado.” These casual directions highlight the role of cinema theaters as built spaces in the urban geography of Kano, northern Nigeria. Large, hulking buildings punctuate Kano topography. There, buses stop, taxis load-up, motorbikes deliver people in a constant circulation from home to work to market and back again. Most of these travellers have little interest in films or the theater but have internalized the demarcation of public space marked out by cinema theaters, mosques, the post-office, the Emir’s palace, and other landmarks of urban infrastructure. Outside the theaters merchants, prostitutes, idlers, mechanics, customers, and films fans depend on the particular social space created by cinema for their livelihood and leisure. Around the back and on the sides boys play football against the large dark walls. Men squat and piss against a wall painted with large letters “AN HANA FISARA A NAN” (Don’t piss here).

This chapter is an examination of the materiality of cinema theaters. It is about the fantasy space of cinema but by this I do not mean the magical worlds that cinema transports viewers to. Rather, I view fantasy as the energy stored in the concreteness of objects, especially the commodified elements of everyday life (see Benjamin 1978). These are not just the products people buy but constitute the total sensory experience of urban living. I examine the architectonics of cinema theaters and the arena for social interaction they create as symbolic and physical emblems of the imposition of colonial urbanization and the experience of modernity for urban Hausa in northern Nigeria.

In Kano, the introduction of cinema theaters inaugurated a series of controversies: whether the practice of showing films was a diabolical, unIslamic technology; over where theaters could be located; and over the regulation of who was allowed to attend. As a result of these controversies cinema became a symbolically unruly place. It upset gendered and racial divisions of public space by creating new modes of sociability. It offered new, Western derived forms of leisure based on a technological apparatus that was religiously questionable. The controversies it produced can be seen as moments of struggle in the reterritorialization of urban space, the attempt to reassert and redefine Hausa moral space in the face of an encroaching colonial modernity. Cinema is a technology whose place in Hausa social life had to be defined. Its mass, stories and rumors about cinema, and the words used to refer to the technology itself all contain traces of the history of colonialism and urban experience. They tell us about the way that cinema as technology entered into Hausa space and took hold in the Hausa imagination.

In African postcolonies like Nigeria, a trip to the cinema has always been trans-local, a stepping outside of Africa to places elsewhere ^[1] . To step from the foyer into the dark night of the cinema hall was to be magically transported into a universe where American realities, Indian emotions, and Hong Kong choreography have long occupied Nigerian cinema screens. But cinema theaters are peculiar kind of social spaces marked by a duality of presence and absence, rootedness and transport, what Lynne Kirby (1997) refers to as the paradox of travel without movement. Cinema is distinctively modern because of this ability to destabilize and make mobile people, ideas, and commodities. This can be threatening by eroding "the cultural distinctiveness of place," (Watts 1996:64) but it can also reaffirm and intensify forms of belonging by providing a cultural foil against which local identities may be hardened.

Cinema, the phenomenology of the surface and colonial modernity

Objects that were once new and once symbolized modern life but whose historical moment has passed become inadvertent but dense signifiers of transformations in social structure. Walter Benjamin built a powerful hermeneutics around these sorts of objects, around the interrogation of obsolescence – objects swollen with the force of history, but whose significance had ebbed with transformations in social and economic structure. According to his friend Adorno, Benjamin created a “petrified...or obsolete inventory of cultural fragments” that provided concrete embodiments of historical process or “manifestations of culture” (cited in Buck-Morss 1989:58). Benjamin shared this evocative theorizing of material culture with Siegfried Kracauer who also pioneered the historico-philosophical interrogation of the marginal, the momentary and the concrete. Like Benjamin, Kracauer was interested in surface phenomena and argued that their marginal, mass produced nature was revelatory of the social order. “The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined...from an analysis of its unconscious surface-level expressions,” he wrote in his essay ‘The Mass Ornament’ arguing that these “expressions...by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things (Kracauer 1995:75).

For Kracauer and Benjamin, the quotidian landscapes of life--posters on the walls, shop signs, dancing girls, bestsellers, panoramas, the shape, style and circulation of city buses--are all surface representations of the fantasy energy by which the collective perceives the social order. This structure creates an interpenetrated analysis of urban culture in modernity, one in which strikingly different phenomena are structurally linked. The stained concrete of Nigerian cinema theaters, the open-air screens, their proximity to markets reveal knowledge of “the state of things” which in Kano refers to the imposition of a colonial, capitalist modernity. Cinema theaters were part of a much wider transformation of the restructuring of urban space and leisure practices under colonial urbanism (Martin 1995; Mitchell 1991; Thompson 2000). Like beer parlors, theaters, railways and buses, public gardens, libraries and commercial streets that preceded them, cinema theaters created new modes of public association. In a strict Muslim area such as Kano, for instance, where female seclusion was, and is, a defining moral characteristic of Muslim Hausa space, the institution of mixed -sex and mixed-race public spaces profoundly challenged existing gender and social hierarchies. Cinema theaters thus created new modes of sociability that had to be regulated - officially by the colonial administration and unofficially within local Hausa norms.

As a new mode of public association in the colonial arena, cinema theaters were unruly and often contentious social spaces but this disruption was not something that was restricted to colonial arenas. Scholars of early cinema have made the convincing argument that the rise of cinema must be seen in relation to the wider transformation in urbanism, employment, consumption and leisure that occurred during the fin de siècle (see, for example, Allen 1983; Bowser 1990; Chanan 1996; Friedberg 1993, Griffith 1996, Hansen 1991; Kirby 1997, Koszarski 1990, Kuhn 1988, Musser 1990, Tsivian 1994. For interesting work on cinematic space outside of the West see Armbrust 1998, Himpele 1996, Hughes 1999, Thompson 2000). Miriam Hansen (1991) argues that in the United States the rise of cinema generated considerable anxiety about the increasing presence of women in public practices of work and leisure.Cinema played a role in “changing the boundaries and possibilities of public life” especially for women whose “relations to the public sphere were governed by specific patterns of exclusion.”

The Built Space of Cinema

In its materiality, its reproducibility over space and time and its ubiquitous presence on metropolitan landscapes, the cinema theater appears reassuringly familiar, a self-effacing transnational technology that seemingly belongs to no particular country. The ontological security of theaters comes from the formal solidity of an auditorium that places audiences in a familiar spatial configuration: arranged in rows sitting beneath the ethereal spectacle of light and dark unfolding on the screen. In most parts of the world the theater has become second nature; we no longer query its existence or imagine a time when it could be queried, when its innovation brought with it a powerful transformative capacity. But this second nature is illusory and masks the process by which physical, public space becomes social: the forgetting of history in the creation of myth (Barthes 1986). The taken-for-grantedness of cinema theaters masks the historical conditions of colonial rule that made the technology possible.

The erection of cinema theaters in colonial cities created new social spaces of sexual, ethnic, religious and racial intermixing making them ambivalent institutions that often threatened existing hierarchies and boundaries about the public use of space. This ambivalence is seen very simply in the diverse ways colonies attempted to regulate the transformative capacity of these new institutions and reconstitute them within existing gender hierarchies. In India, for instance, separate entrances were built so that women could enter and exit without sharing the same social space as male cinema-goers (Arora 1995). In Damascus, by contrast, the same concern over female mobility and the threat of sexual intermixing was limited by reserving afternoon performances for women only (Thompson 2000). The same threat was contained in Lamu, Kenya, by making one night a week “ladies night” (Fugelsang 1994), and in northern Nigeria the immoral connotations of sexual intermixing were so intense that cinema theaters never became socially acceptable for women. This variety of structural and social regulations points to the necessity of interrogating the social space of the cinema theater, neither taking it for granted nor seeing it simply as a colonizing technology. Rather, cinema theaters are produced, and in the struggle over that production tensions over colonial urbanization are foregrounded.

In October 1937, the British colonial administration received an application from a Lebanese businessman for the construction of the Rex cinema, what was to become the first purpose-built cinema in Kano. The Rex was built as an open air cinema, what was known as a “garden cinema,” and consisted of two rooms as well as a bar which thebusinessman proposed “to build quite decently and with stones.” ^[3] This exhibition format was modified two years later when J. Green Mbadiwe, a hotel owner in Kaduna, the capital of Northern Nigeria, applied for a license to build a more formal and elaborate hotel and cinema complex in Kano. It was to include “all the latest amenities usually associated with first-class Hotels and Cinemas in the Aristocratic Countries of the world.” ^[4] His application was denied but his proposal gives witness to the conceptual construct of what constituted a cinema space in Nigeria at this time. In the proud insistence on the quality of construction material and the boast that Kano cinemas would be like “first-class” cinemas in the West, the applications signify the elite, European clientele that the owners intended to attract. The emphasis on first class quality found in “the Aristocratic nations of the world” promised reassuring familiarity for Europeans and created a spectacle of grandeur for local Hausa filmgoers. And the inclusion of a bar would have offered recreation other than the cinematic event itself intended for Europeans only who could “come out and enjoy the cool air and evening.” (Ibid) The design and social function of these early theaters was intimately associated with another public space of colonial modernity: the hotel. Like the hotel the cinema is a public space of anonymity, a transient coming together of people unconnected by relations of kin, religion or ethnicity. Making the cinema like a hotel means that the experience was not organized solely around watching a film but was part of wider complex of leisure activities that emerged for expatriate recreation.

As a product of a colonial ideology of transformation, the architectonics of the cinema theater expressed the particular historical conditions of colonial rule. Cinema as a social space helped create a new public, “the imagining of human beings as, in principle, an indefinitely extensible horizon of anonymous and interchangeable members” (Barber 1997:348). Kracauer referred to this public as a “mass” arguing that the spatial organization of the audience in patterns of “tier upon ordered tier subordinated the individuality of the audience member to the totality of the mass” (1995:79, see also 1998). The arrangement of seating in cinemas reflected the new bodily configurations of colonial rule, though of course could never be contained by them. The attempt at constructing an abstract and equivalent public was often frustrated by colonial and Hausa practices of hierarchy and distinction, for instance the creation of specific seating for whites only, that were embedded in the conception of cinematic space.

In the highly stratified colonial world one immediate problem of common public space was the potential of racial mixing. What were the possible consequences of mixed race audiences? In response to people’s fears the Lebanese owners of the Rex originally intended their cinema for European use and finally divided the exhibition schedule so that two nights a week were reserved for Europeans and Arabs and two for African audiences. This segregation was intentional but informal and was regulated mainly through the pricing of seats.^[5] J. Green Madiwe went further proposing to divide his auditorium into two discrete compartments, one for Europeans and one for Africans, which would be approached through separate entrances. The only connection was a fire door but this, he assured the authorities, “will be always locked.” (op. cit.) This attempt at encoding practices of racial segregation into the architectonics of the theater space reveals how the solid materiality of the cinema theater expresses local ideologies of (in this case) racial hierarchy. The Secretary of the Northern provinces who wrote to the Chief Secretary in Lagos with a response to fire safety regulations reveals stunningly how the physical space of cinema can be the outcome of a specifically colonial situation of racial prejudice.

As regards seating:- In view of the natural tendency of some Africans when in a crowd to be seized by panic at the mere rumour of danger it is thought that in Cinema halls in Nigeria much wider spaces should be allowed between fixed seats, wider alleyways and more and wider means of exit than as obligatory in England.^[6]

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The Evolution of Urban Kano

The spatial arrangement of cinema theaters in urban Kano was mapped onto a terrain that was already the site of intense confrontation.This tension began in 1903 when, after conquest, the British began to construct a modern city outside the mud walls of Kano.The British divided Kano into what was administratively, and symbolically a dual city divided between the walled birni (Old City) and a modern Township.The Old City was dominated by the political rule of the Emir and the economic importance of the trading families based around the Kurmi market, one of the major pre-colonial nodes in the trans-Saharan trade. In the old city pre-British custom remained strong and, under the principles of indirect rule, was actively protected from the transformations of colonialism. Missionization and Western education were restricted; families still lived in domestic compounds which were largely passed down through inheritance rather than rented or sold ^[8] female seclusion and strict sexual segregation was the norm to be aspired to; prostitution and the sale of alcohol were forbidden and the values of conservative Islam upheld.

An enclave of disrepute

The Moral Aura of Cinematic Space

From their inception, cinema theaters in Kano were saturated with the moral ambience of the areas in which they were located, mainly Sabon Gari and Fagge. The first film screenings took place in Sabon Gari, in irregular venues such as dance halls, such as the Elsiepat, where they were sandwiched in as entertainment between dances and prize-giving ^{[ 14]} By 1934, however, cinema had become popular among enough that the British Resident's of Kano could report that films were being shown "with considerable frequency"^{[ 15]} and within three years the first purpose-built cinema, the Rex, was opened.The Rex, showed four films a week in an open-air theater adjacent to Sabon Gari market. Initially, performances were informally racially segregated with two nights reserved for non-Africans (Europeans and Syrians) and two for African audiences. A garden bar was established and during the early days, alcohol was served, but the British authorities were unsure how to restrict the sale of alcohol to Africans while permitting European consumption^[16] Consequently a formal ban was placed on the sale of alcohol at cinemas which exists up until today. The Rex cinema was situated on the edge of Sabon Gari, placing it in an area that for Hausa was culturally out of bounds. Despite this, or perhaps because of it cinema quickly became popular among poor Hausa youth and indeed by the mid-1940s cinemagoing was stereotyped as a cheap, poor man’s entertainment, to be avoided by people in positions of respect. "The local outlook is as follows," wrote one colonial official in the early 1950's. "The intelligent and educated malams (Muslim religious teachers) simply do not go....They disapprove of the sort of low-type Hausa that revels in the cinema....” ^{[ 17 ]}The low class, mixed sex nature of the cinema theater meant that it became socially unacceptable for most Hausa women.Those who did attend were seen as karuwai (‘independent women/prostitutes’), and their presence added significantly to the illicit nature of the arena.Sexual availability and sexual activity within the cinema meant that pleasure and desire were to be found both on and off the screen, the erotic pleasures of one context feeding off of the other. Cinemagoing became established as a social activity, an experience that was always much more than the viewing of the film itself. "Among a large youthful class of Kano City, Fagge and Sabon Gari," the Kano Resident Featherstone remarked in 1948, "it has become quite the thing to go to the Cinema quite regardless of whether they understand what they see or hear or not.”^[18] Featherstone's paternalistic disapproval of Hausa audiences misses the importance of cinemagoing as a social, as well as a visual, event.One viewer told Featherstone that although he did not always understand the films being shown, "he went regularly to the cinema to be seen and to see his friends" (ibid.).This social activity was taking place in a particular social space that drew its moral aura from its social and moral place on an urban landscape in the process of transformation.One educated Hausa man who went regularly to the cinema in the late 1940s told me that cinemagoing involved leaving the safe confines of the old city and crossing from a moral to an immoral space (the Sabon Gari). For him this was an intentional act that involved a radical attitude toward Hausa authority and Islamic orthodoxy.Defined as undesirable by the values of orthodox Hausa Islam, the pleasure of going to the cinema was thus highly local, an intimate experience of illicitness that framed the spectacle of watching the film and which derived from the peculiar nature of Hausa colonial urbanization.

The spatial and social context of the emergence of cinema theaters in Kano created an illicit aura which dovetailed nicely with conservative Hausa distrust of European technologies.

The Palace, El Duniya, and the Maintenance of Hausa Moral Space

The introduction of cinema theaters in Kano intervened in an ongoing conflict over the moral definition of urban space under colonialism.^[23] How cinema theaters were to be built, what they were to show, and whether they could sell alcohol were all issues of formal regulation by which the transformative spatial and social ideologies of colonialism were embodied and enacted.Conflicts within the Hausa community over where theaters were to be located and who could attend them are best seen as attempts at the moral reterritorialization of an urban space that was rapidly expanding outside of Hausa control. Appadurai (1996) has referred to this process as the "production of locality” which, he argues, involves the assertion of socially organized power over places that are potentially chaotic.The mediation of cinema as a moral space was an attempt to reassert the Muslim basis of Hausa life in opposition to the encroachment of non-Muslim (both European, and southern Nigerian) cultural and religious values. Cinema theaters became markers of neighborhoods, embodying the moral qualities that allowed those neighborhoods to exist.For urban Hausa the cinematic experience was (and is) embedded in the history of ongoing debate over the nature and regulation of urban public space. In 1949, a Lebanese cinema distributor wrote the Resident, Kano Emirate, asking for permission to build a cinema, The Palace, within the old city, in Jakara quarters, next to Kurmi market. When the application for the Palace was received, cinemagoing was well established in Kano; many Hausa regularly left the old city to travel to one of two cinemas located outside in Waje.The uniqueness of this application was that the Palace was to be the first cinema theater constructed within the confines of the old city.I can date the application and the opening of the Palace from the colonial archives in Kaduna that contain copies of the application file.However the story of the Palace I engage with rests on rumors, and prejudice, stories and memories that do not provide an objective history of the Palace as much as they reveal the social place that it and other cinemas occupy in the social imagination.Rumors about cinemas, stories that have come down from parent to child, are a form of local hermeneutics.They are quasi-religious allegories by which people divine the ‘real’ motives underlying phenomenal events.

The Emir’s decision to allow the construction of the Palace cinema provoked a strong backlash in different sections of the Hausa community. Kano ulama (religious leaders) were outraged by the penetration of this disruptive, sexual arena into the Islamic space of the old city. The more conservative among them issued a fatwa (religious teaching) forbidding the showing of films and citing the religious injunction on the creation of images as evidence that the technology itself was kafirai (pagan). According to a story I was told, this fatwa was overruled when it came before the Emirate council despite the fact that the Kano Emir at the time, Abdullahi, was widely known to be socially conservative.Abdullahi’s decision then sparked its own set of rumors including one that Abdullahi was forced into the decision as a result of pressure from the British Resident. ^{[ 24 ]} In 1951, while the controversy over the Palace was raging, but before the cinema was actually open, matters were brought to a symbolic head when the El Duniya cinema burned down killing 331 people ^{[ 25 ]} in an audience of 600. The government enquiry that followed established that the cause of the fire was flammable nitrate films that caught fire in the projection room and spread along the ceiling. Hausa complicity in the tragedy was reinforced by the fact that 82 percent of the cinema audience during the afternoon performance were Hausa, not Southern Nigerian or European.The youngest was only nine years old.

The rational, functional explanation of the colonial state for why the disaster occurred was accepted by Hausa as explaining how but not why the disaster occurred.In the context of the growing controversy over the Palace it was widely believed by many that the fire was direct divine retribution for Hausa participation in illicit and immoral activity.The tragedy became seen as a judgement about the growing Westernization of Hausa society and a series of rumors emerged to explain the tragedy. Most common, and still widely believed, was the accusation that the film being screened that night in the El Duniya contained the image of the Prophet Mohammed, the colonial technology of representation being harnessed for blasphemous ends.  Others believed that during construction of the theater people passing every day cursed (tsine) the theater and the theater was engulfed not just by flames but by the combined magical force of these curses. ^{[ 26 ]}

In a religious society such as Kano, where God’s divine intervention in the material world is an everyday occurrence, rumors and stories become part of a critical discourse in which everyday events are interrogated.Stories about the El Duniya represent conflict and ambivalence about the Western cultural arena that was infiltrating the Hausa moral world.  They underscore the profane nature of cinematic representation, making it guilty of the heresy of representing Mohammed.  These rumors grew so strong that the colonial government was forced to take official notice and counter them over the radio.  Twice daily for two days in four different languages, the Radio Diffusion Service announced there was no truth to the stories that the people handling the bodies of El Duniya victims died, or that Native Authority Warders who helped in the tragedy had all gone mad, or that prisoners from Kano prison (who helped in handling the corpses) could not eat for days afterwards.^[27] Stories about the El Duniya became part of the informal moral economy that regulated the evolution of cinema in Kano.

On the July 2, 1952, a year after the El Duniya burned down, the Palace finally opened after months of controversy. When the opposition to the cinema turned violent, the Emir was forced to call in the police to arrest youths who were demonstrating against the opening. ^{[ 28]}Three months later, the British Superintendent of police reported that ever since the Palace opened, youths outside the open-air theater had been regularly stoning patrons inside.What was worse, he complained, was that the alkali (Muslim judge) to whom the cases were being reported was letting the youths go free and that it was difficult for the police to ensure "good order" during cinema performances.^[29]Ironically, or perhaps inevitably, the Palace became the immoral social space that its opponents feared.It became a notorious place where, as one friend said to me, men would go to drink alcohol, take drugs and engage in sex with women and other men (“There! There! Right there in the seat next to you!”).In the early 1980's the governor of Kano State, Sabo Bakin Zuwo, who came from Kano’s old city and who was a veteran of the anti-Palace campaign, closed down the cinema and, in a grand populist gesture, converted it into a hospital clinic.Since that time no cinema theater has been opened in the old city^[30] and to this day hundreds of Hausa youths travel nightly through the mud gates marking the city’s boundaries to cinemas that lie outside in Sabon Gari, Fagge and Nassarawa.

The attempt to resist the construction of the Palace cinema represents an effort by Hausa Muslims to re-establish the moral, spatial equilibrium of urban Kano society.The growth of a metropolis outside of what formerly constituted the city, the shift in economic and political balance from the Old City to the Township and Waje, and the rise of a substantial migrant population of "native foreigners" who owed little allegiance to existing political structures (some of whom openly mocked local religious and cultural practices), helped to create a situation where the assertion of Hausa control over a political and social world under threat became increasingly important.When the Palace as a foreign, immoral, and potentially irreligious institution was built within the Old City, it threatened to erode the carefully produced social, religious and political division between the Old City and Waje, collapsing two very different moral spaces and making protest almost inevitable.