Kaduna, Nigeria
$100 - $5000 / Day
Request QuoteSada Malumfashi is a writer and freelance journalist living in Kaduna, Nigeria and an awardee of the 2018 Gothe Institute/Sylt Foundation Writing Residency in Germany and a 2019 Fellow of Reporters Without Borders Germany. He is the Founder of the literary arts collective, Open Arts. His journalistic works have appeared in The Africa Report, Saraba Magazine, This Is Africa, Asymptote and Music in Africa amongst others. His topics include uncovering sexual abuses and gender based violence as well as a focus on feminism in conservative Northern Nigeria. He was the first journalist to report on the #ArewaMeToo uprising in Northern Nigeria on the tide turning for men who have grown accustomed to abusing women with impunity, where recently activists against sexual violence continue to face increasing backlash from diverse camps that seek to silence the conversation to tackle sexual violence in Northern Nigeria with threats of violence. He also examines cases of pleasure and sex in Northern Nigeria, and the influence of queer culture inflected and influenced by local conditions and cultural nuances, by investigating representations of queerness in Hausa literature. He was also a contributor from Northern Nigeria to the Music in Africa Connects project, an initiative aiming to support the music sectors of African countries affected by conflict focusing on religion and music in Northern Nigeria where fundamentalists generally consider art and entertainment sinful as well as religion and music censorship and crackdown by the religious police, Hisbah on Hausa pop musicians, with further interest in music and religious violence in Northern Nigeria. He was shortlisted for the Kofi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction administered by Writivism in 2017 and was among the participants in the Goethe Institute Nigeria-Cameroon Literary Exchange Program.
Nigerian writer Sada Malumfashi relates an encounter with his friends, while hunting a key in Berlin’s night. After roaming through the city, learning and re-learning Berlin, Sada, Nkiacha, Johann, and Pa Tanka find themselves in the apartment of Bonaventure. They share unending conversations, talking about their contemporaries, and in that moment shaping the city with a black perspective.
The case of pleasure and sex in Northern Nigeria is not a matter of forced conservatism or a robotic followership to a certain doctrine. It is an in-built self-censorship mechanism, and the people are comfortable with it as a way of life.
Northern Nigeria is made up of diverse identities and cultures. It has a dominant Muslim population, but music entertainment in Northern Nigeria predates the economic contact with the Arabs, or the reforms of the Islamic promoter and founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, Usmanu Danfodiyo (1754-1817).
It has long been recognised that music has political power in Northern Nigeria. The political landscape of the region has often been characterised by activists who pass messages to their audiences through music and song. Hausa songs (songs in the dominant language of the region) are therefore powerful tools for activism, political education and propaganda.
Since the return of democracy in 1999, Nigeria’s burgeoning youth population has made the headlines come election time. This year’s election, the sixth in the current 20-year-long democratic dispensation, has highlighted the role of the youth in deciding who rules Africa’s most populous nation more than ever before.
Is the tide turning in Northern Nigeria for men who have grown accustomed to abusing women with impunity? asks Sada Malumfashi.
Production Support
Miscellaneous