ABUJA (Sundiata Post) Once in a while, I stray into some areas of facebook that I find unsettling or surprising. The first category is that of the pages of some Muslim individuals who are apparently deeply invested in loyalty to their Islamic sect or to their favourite cleric. The discourse on almost all of such pages is conducted in Hausa and each of the individuals has a network of facebook friends who subscribe to a similar ideology. What I find unsettling while reading through the posts and comments is the enormous amount of intolerance and hate expressed against the followers of other Islamic sects and non-Muslims. The beliefs of other sects are viciously condemned and their clerics and followers infidel-ised with all the venom that could be mustered.
Many of the pages have near 100% religious content and it is obvious how deeply such individuals are invested in what they do. Most of them belong to a major subgroup of the Islamic world which I have identified but won’t name in order to avoid inviting hostility and sectarian debate. Because the language of such pages is Hausa, the discourse in them doesn’t attract attention at the national level. But I wonder what is the long term effect on the nation of the activities on these parts of what I’ll call the “deep facebook.” Young impressionable minds who regularly hear a dog being given a bad name may ultimately feel like hanging it.
The second category that I’ve come across is that of pages of a sexual nature – those that either promote licentious heterosexual activity or gay and lesbian ones. Although many of them may be fake accounts with the identities of their true operators hidden, there are nevertheless many apparently genuine accounts of young northerners openly professing to be gays or lesbians in Hausa while inviting potential partners. The lesbians among them may have “les” or “less” included in their names probably as a sort of call sign for alerting their fellows about their sexual orientation. So, if you happen to meet a certain Fati Les Tudun Wada, you have been briefed!
Have you encountered any unusual facebook pages before?
Source: Facebook