Early Kannywood Cinema as Cultural Memory through Moral Communication, Audience Reception and Practitioner Perspectives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62569/fijc.v3i3.278Keywords:
Early Kannywood cinema, Cultural memory, Moral communication, Audience reception, Hausa film, Practitioner perspectivesAbstract
Early Kannywood cinema represents an important site of cultural memory in which Hausa traditions, moral values, and communal identities are reproduced through audiovisual narratives. This study investigates how early Hausa-language films function as instruments of cultural memory through their narrative conventions, moral messages, and culturally embedded aesthetic practices. The study employed a convergent mixed-methods design combining content analysis of 20 early Hausa films, a structured survey of 400 undergraduate students from five universities in Kano State, Nigeria, and semi-structured interviews with 16 experienced film producers and directors from Kano, Kaduna, and Jos. Quantitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics and relevant association tests, while interview data were examined through reflexive thematic analysis. Findings from the three data sources were integrated to identify convergences and divergences between cinematic representations, audience recollections, and practitioner accounts. The findings reveal that early Kannywood cinema employed proverbs, traditional costumes, familiar communal settings, elder-mediated conflict resolution, and explicit moral dialogue to communicate cultural values. Audience recognition was particularly strong regarding the promotion of Hausa norms (90%), traditional entertainment styles (85%), and the educational character of narratives (84%). Practitioner interviews further indicated that limited production resources and institutional expectations shaped both aesthetic choices and didactic storytelling conventions. Early Kannywood films functioned not merely as entertainment but as communicative resources through which cultural knowledge and moral expectations were reproduced and remembered.
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