The Portrayal of Hausa norms and Values in Kamal’s Hausa Girl

Abstract

The paper examines the perception of Hausa values, norms, and culture as presented in Kamal’s Hausa Girl, in which the author distorts the nature and basic norms and values that extensively frame the socio-cultural and religious attributes of the Hausa community. This is aimed at achieving a predetermined resolution, using the actress as bait to blacken the image of the Hausa movie industry as culturally and religiously destructive. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how the actress becomes a dupe of textual deception, rather than being created by it. The paper deploys the ideas of Cultural Materialism in its analysis of the text. It concludes that Hausa Girl is replete with overrefinement, contradictions, and misrepresentations of the socio-cultural and religious norms of traditional Hausa society, which had a preconceived objective. It also manifests how historical factors, political dynamics, and power struggles between the religious class and the Hausa film industry shaped the form and content of the text.