Abdalla Uba Adamu (pronunciationⓘ) (born 25 April 1956) is a Nigerian academic, educator, publisher, filmmaker, ethnomusicologist, and media scholar.
He was Fulbright African Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley, 1991-1992.
In October 1985 he became the first Kano State indigene to be awarded the British Commonwealth Scholarship [8] which enabled him to proceed to Sussex University where he studied for his D.Phil.
In 1991, Adamu was appointed Fulbright African Senior Research Scholar and given a place at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley.
[9] During the year he was at Berkeley, was mentored by Sheldon Rothblatt, the Director of the Center at the time, and Martin Trow, who both encouraged his residency and intention to write about the transnational nature of Nigerian Higher Education by incorporating him into the History of the University cluster.
During the Berkeley Residency he wrote a monograph, Reform and Adaptation in Nigerian University Curricula, published by Edwin Mellen Press, New York, in 1994.
During the Rockefeller Residency, he developed a monograph on the introduction of the American-style course unit system into the academic structure of Bayero University and the challenges such process faced.
In 1991 he participated in a UNESCO project on Planning science education provision in general secondary schools directed by Françoise Caillods with Gabriele Göttelmann-Duret and curated by Keith Lewin.
[11][12][13] A censorship regime was instituted in 2001,[14] and in 2007 a 'book burning' event was held in Kano to 'cleanse' the romantic fiction of its perceived immorality, Newly written story books with moral themes were given out instead to school girls, from whom the burnt novels were seized.
By then, the Islamicate public in Kano had started noticing the transformation of the Hausa popular cultural industries from its staid traditional orientation with focus on African Muslim traditional family values, to an emergent variety that was increasingly become transglobal, with Hindi films[15] strongly influencing the Hausa entertainment forms, especially in music, literature and video film production.
This was because the term Kennywood has spatial roots in Kano, northern Nigeria which was the center for the production, censorship and distribution and consumption of Hausa films.
With the availability of internet and greater involvement of Hausa communities in Congo, Cameroon, Chad, Togo, Ghana and Niger Republic actively producing Hausa-language films, the term Kannywood therefore becomes anachronistic.
[18] Subsequently, he embedded himself into the community of novelists, scriptwriters, producers, directors, actors and cinematographers in Kano, getting an in-depth perspective of their art and craft as part of what Victor Turner and Edward Bruner refer to as the "anthropology of experience".
[19] From 1999 he started his foray into discourse on media and cultural communication through documenting Hausa prose fiction, commonly referred to as Kano Market Literature.
These pioneer writers who turned into film makers and subsequently gave Hausa Cinema its ethnographic focus included Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino, Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, Bala Anas Babinlata and Ɗan Azumi Baba Ceɗiyar ƴan Gurasa.
The Center also published the proceedings of the conference as Hausa Home Videos: Technology, Economy and Society, which presents the first academic study on indigenous language films in Nigeria.
His research started gaining visibility with an invitation to participate in The Media and the Construction of African Identities conference held in Kenya in 2004.
His presentation on Islam and censorship opened up debates in northern Nigeria about the role of media in Muslim affairs, especially as it affects women and cinematic representation.
Based on his research outputs, in 2012 the Bayero University Council appointed him Professor of Media and Cultural Communication – some fifteen years after his first professorship in Science Education in 1997.
[27] During his tenure in NOUN, he focused attention on raising the visibility of Open and Distance Learning especially for the disadvantaged and disenfranchised members of the Nigerian public.
[28][29][30] At the end of his tenure in February 2021, spent a Sabbatical year at the Kaduna State University (KASU), Department of Mass Communication, returning to his Department of Information and Media Studies, Bayero University Kano at the end of his Sabbatical year in 2022 where he continued his teaching and research activities.
It was released as a modified Etincelle font originally created for SIL by Becca Hirsbrunner Spalinger who graduated from the MATD program at the University of Reading in 2015.
Support in the project was rendered by Abdullahi Abba Dalhatu who converted the Hausa translation of the Holy Qur'ān by Abubakar Mahmud Gumi into the Alƙalami Warš version.