Bandiri Music, Globalization and Urban Experience in Nigeria

Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of the working of a musical form: bandiri. Bandiri is a musical genre performed by Sufi adepts in northern Nigeria who take popular Hindi film songs and change the words to sing praises to the Prophet Mohammed. In doing so they are involved in a complicated process of taking a profane genre and sacralizing it. I argue that bandiri is the result of the convergence in Kano, northern Nigeria, of three very different sorts of transnational cultural and religious networks: the long presence of Sufi brotherhoods in the north, the recent emergence of an anti-Sufi Islamist movement; and the continuing popularity of Indian films and songs. As an urban centre Kano is made up of overlapping sets of cultural, religious and economic networks that constitute its particular configuration. These networks create structural preconditions that provide the raw material from which urban experience might be fashioned.

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