| Title | Conversation with Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu |
| Interviewer | Dr. Mustapha Hashim Kurfi |
| Subject | His life story, works on Hausa Ajami, and how to best to sustain Ajami |
| Content | Abdalla Uba Adamu was born in Kano in 1956. He holds a B.Sc. in Education/Biology/Physiology, from Ahmadu Bello University (1979); an M.A. in Science Education from Chelsea College, University of London (1983); and D.Phil. from Sussex University, in Brighton, England (1988). He holds double professorships in Science Education (1997) and Media and Cultural Communication (2012) from Bayero University Kano, Nigeria. Married with children, Professor Abdalla’s main research focus is on transnational media flows and their impact on Muslim Hausa popular culture, especially in literature, film, music, and the performing arts. He is the creator of the Foundation for Hausa Performing Arts (Kano, Nigeria) whose main concern is to archive the traditional performing arts heritage of the Muslim Hausa. Professor Abdalla has also developed courses on digital cultures and promotes ethnography as a research methodology for documenting Hausa media ethnographies. He is the chairman of a research cluster on Visual Anthropology based at Bayero University. From 1991 to 1992, he was a Fulbright African Senior Research Scholar, in residency at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley. This led to his first major book, Reform and Adaptation in Nigerian University Curricula, 1960-1992, (Edwin Mellen Press, 1994). In 1993, he was also awarded a residency in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Resident Fellows program in Bellagio, Italy. Professor Abdalla is the immediate past Vice-Chancellor of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). In this interview, Professor Abdalla traces the history, relevance, and success of Hausa Ajami. He identifies the forces that keep Hausa Ajami, and Ajami in general, from achieving certain desired goals in contemporary society. He offers practical solutions to those challenges. Professor Abdalla currently engages in a number of pragmatic ways to promote the values of Hausa Ajami, including in modern media arts. |
| Language | Hausa |
| Script | Hausa Ajami |
| Location | Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu’s Company Office Kano, Nigeria |
| Pedagogical content/application | Includes relevant linguistic, stylistic, and cultural skills as identified in our assessment guidebook/ ACTFL guidelines |
| Access condition and copyright | These materials are subject to copyright and are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. For use, distribution or reproduction beyond these terms, contact Professor Fallou Ngom (fngom@bu.edu). |
| Contributors | Fallou Ngom, Jennifer Yanco, Mustapha Kurfi, Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Alison Parker, and Frank Antonelli. |
| Required citation information | Fallou Ngom (PI), Jennifer Yanco, Mustapha Kurfi, and Daivi Rodima-Taylor. 2023. “Conversation with Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu.” https://sites.bu.edu/ria/hausa/hausa-unit-5/ |
