Salaam all
I am responding to the initial posting by Kamil Auwal, particularly his reference to BUK lecturers! I happen to be one, and I don't think Kamil has painted an inaccurate picture of ICT and Internet development in BUK and in Kano. I don't know if he was a student of the university or a visitor, but the fact is that BUK has been on the internet since 1997, through a gateway provided by the Nigerian Universities Commission. Indeed all Nigerian universities have a whole unit called Nigerian Universities Network (NUNet) which had full Federal Government backing.
Kano is one of the most internet-aware cities in the north, second only to Abuja, with as many as 20 cafes all over (located along Beirut Road, Civic Center, Sabon Titi, Club Road, and Sabon Gari), and more coming up, according to a recent survey.
On the BUK campus there are three large cafes - the one run by NUNet (using dial-up access), another by Sammy Davis (an ISP in downtown, via wireless), and NetZone, a student-union initiative with also wireless broadband internet access (at modest 11kbps, but good enough), and about 17 access points operating 24 hours a day.
Thus Kamil's posting gives an impression of unawareness of Internet and its functions among Kanawa. Yet a lot of the materials on
www.kanoonline.com and
www.dandali.com were uploaded to the internet from BUK since the last two years.
Kamil also seems to ignore the fact that Internet development in Nigeria is a recent phenomena, with only Nitel providing ISP services, and few others concentrated in the Lagos area. It was only when Nitel started a Kaduna POP access that it became possible for Internet to be available in Kano in 1999. GlobalSpace (Zoo Road), the first independent ISP in Kano came into operation in early 2000 using leased lines from Lagos under partnership agreements with Sammy Davis (another Lagos-based ISP, and located in Beirut Road Kano). ECNX another ISP owned by Samanja Electronics (Race Course Road) only started operating last year.
And even now, when you access a Nitel dial-up internet service from Kano, you are actually dialling to the leased line in Kaduna, and therefore paying for a trunk call! This is extremely expensive, as it limits the time you can afford to stay online. Plus, not many people have phones in their houses due to the sheer wahala in getting a phone line. So no phone, no internet.
So it is not as if people in Kano are not interested in Internet: the facilities were simply NOT THERE for them to use. Most people who jumped on the internet bandwagon too recently are not aware of the historical and technical problems faced in getting even the dial-up access to Kano which are serious limiting factors in getting online.
I don't know exactly when Kamil became aware of the internet himself, but this is a medium that has been in Kano for quite sometime and has been quite useful to students and lecturers alike and many activities are held in BUK Kano to support it.
Last last week (Oct 10 -11 2002) the Center for the Study of Nigerian Languages held a workshop on translating and standardizing new terminologies in various disciplines. One of these was computing and internet where about 150 terms were translated into Hausa language. One common coinage for the internet, which I created, was Giza-gizan Sadarwa na Duniya, which has been long since been adopted by VOA, BBC and other international news agencies broadcasting in Hausa. If you are interested in the full paper, you can download it from:
http://www.gumel.com/BUK/Giza-gizan%20Sadarwa.pdfThe MacArthur Foundation of US has also been supporting a series of initiatives to provide full-blown independent internet access to the Bayero University campus in a partnership agreement which will be in place before Christmas.
One point we need more discussion, though, is our interaction with the Internet, and I think Kamil is trying to draw our attention to the need to be more active. We spend more time DOWNLOADING information, than UPLOADING it.
Kamil and others are also excited about the amount of "free information" available on the Internet, without realizing that NOTHING is free; it has an ideological fee. When you access documents on the Internet, you are accessing someone's thoughts and further entrenching those thoughts. You are inadvertently, adopting somoneone's ideology and mindset. That is quite expensive. And frightening. The only defense is yourself; you have to make your own voice heard, you presence felt, overwise you will drown in the spill-out of other people's ideas.
We therefore need therefore more forums, bulletin boards, websites and other avenues to educate the world about Kano and Hausa culture, rather than allowing orientalists to continue doing the job for us.
Abdalla
