Abdalla Uba Adamu () (born 25 April 1956) is a Nigerian academic, educator, publisher, filmmaker, ethnomusicologist, media scholar and former vice-chancellor of National Open University of Nigeria. He hold double professorships in Science Education (1997) and Media and Cultural Communication (2012).
He taught media and science education courses in many Nigerian universities and around the world; including serving as a European Union Visiting Professor at University of Warsaw, Poland, in 2012, visiting professor at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and visiting professor at University of Florida in 2010. He was Fulbright African Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley, 1991-1992.
In his contribution to the development of Hausa language in modern era, he developed 'hooked' Hausa language character font sets (ɓ Ɓ ɗ Ɗ ƙ Ƙ), which were not present at the advent of the word processors in Nigeria in the 1990s. He named them 'rabi'at' (after his mother, Rabi'at Muhammad) and 'abdalla' (after himself, as he could not think of any name at the time).
Adamu was born in Daneji, Kano city, Kano State, on April 25, 1956. He received his undergraduate B.Sc. (education) degree in education, biology and physiology in 1979 at Ahmadu Bello University. He did his National Youth Service at a high school in Umoarkrika, Imo State, teaching biology and agricultural science.
He was employed as the first graduate assistant in science education in Bayero University Kano in July 1980. After a year, he was sponsored by the Kano State Government to study for M.A. science education at Chelsea College, University of London from 1982 to 1983. At Chelsea College, he was tutored by direct students of Karl Popper and subsequently became influenced by Popper's theories on the Philosophy of Science. On return to Bayero University, he re-oriented his Science Education classes towards Popper's theories, in particular falsification and conjectures and refutations. He subsequently developed both undergraduate and postgraduate courses on History and Philosophy of Science in the Department of Science and Technology Education where he domiciled at the time. He served as Head of Department of Education (1995-1998, 1999-2001), Head of Department of Science and Technology Education (2010-2013). Additionally, he served as director, management information systems (MIS) in Bayero University Kano from 1999 to 2004.
In October 1985 he became the first Kano State indigene to be awarded the British Commonwealth Scholarship which enabled him to proceed to Sussex University where he studied for his D.Phil. in Science Education with focus on Human Resource Development under the tutelage of Keith Lewin. Titled Science, schooling and manpower production in Nigeria: a study of Kano state science secondary schools, 1977-1987, his research explored the role of Science Education policies in national development. He returned to Bayero University in 1988 and continued to raise up in academic ranks.
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. 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. The monograph explores the transfer of educational influence and structures from the United States to Nigeria, and the substitution of British educational system in Nigeria in the process. He was also Resident at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Resident Fellows program at the Bellagio Study Center, Bellagio, Italy, October to November 1993. 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. Thus, his main focus in Education were comparative higher education, curriculum and indigenous science education and science policy development.
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. The project led to the publication of a series of policy monographs targeted at Ministers of Education of various countries published by International Institute of Educational Planning. Adamu's contribution was Operation, efficiency and desirability of special science schools at secondary level: the Nigerian experience.
Adamu become professor of Science Education and Curriculum Studies in 1997. In 2004 he presented his Professorial Inaugural Lecture, Sunset at Dawn, Darkness at Noon: Reconstructing the Mechanisms of Literacy in Indigenous Communities to the University community in which he explored the use of Arabic alphabet as Hausa language literary device—the resultant script being labeled 'Ajami' (non-Arabic). He was listed in Who's Who in Science Education Around the World (International Council of Science Education/Unesco, 1991).
From 1996, the public Islamicate culture in Kano started voicing out concerns and criticisms about the new wave of Hausa prose fiction that has started to become popular, particularly among Hausa school girls and married women in purdah. The fiction, similar to Mills & Boon romantic stories were referred to as Littattafan Soyayya (Romantic Fiction). The Hausa romantic stories had started being written since 1980 and it took a decade for the Hausa public culture in Kano to note their overwhelming popularity. The novelists were accused of promoting immoral behavior because of their romantic themes. Predominantly popular, the genre became dominated by women writers with stories to tell about domestic lives of fairly typical Hausa married women. A censorship regime was instituted in 2001, 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.
Having felt saturated in studies in Education with its main focus on policy dialogues, Adamu had, by 1996, switched his research interest to interrogating the interface between the new Hausa entertainment media forms and the Hausa Islamicate public culture. 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 strongly influencing the Hausa entertainment forms, especially in music, literature and video film production. This transformation was spearheaded by the Hausa prose fiction romantic writers who eventually migrated and formed the Hausa video film industry that was officially and commercially launched in March 1990 in the city of Kano, thus earning it the sobriquet of 'Kannywood' in 1999. This became the first label of an indigenous film industry in Africa. In 2020 the term entered into The Oxford English Dictionary as a legitimate word. The other term connected to Nigerian cinema, Nollywood, was coined in 2002 by Norimitsu Onishi of The New York Times.
While Kannywood refers to Hausa Cinema, Nollywood refers to Nigerian Cinema in the official English Language of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Adamu is therefore one of those advocating for Hausa Cinema rather than Kannywood. 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.