Nollywood

The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres

Jonathan Haynes

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780226387956
  9780226387819
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226388007
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: African History

Nigeria's Nollywood has rapidly grown into one of the world's largest film industries, radically altering media environments across Africa and in the diaspora; it has also become one of African culture's most powerful and consequential expressions, powerfully shaping how Africans see themselves and are seen by others. With this book, Jonathan Haynes provides an accessible and authoritative introduction to this vast industry and its film culture.

Haynes describes the major Nigerian film genres and how they relate to Nigerian society—its values, desires, anxieties, and social tensions—as the country and its movies have developed together over the turbulent past two decades. As he shows, Nollywood is a form of popular culture; it produces a flood of stories, repeating the ones that mean the most to its broad audience. He interprets these generic stories and the cast of mythic figures within them: the long-suffering wives, the business tricksters, the Bible-wielding pastors, the kings in their traditional regalia, the glamorous young professionals, the emigrants stranded in New York or London, and all the rest. Based on more than twenty years of research, Haynes's survey of Nollywood's history and genres is unprecedented in scope, while his book also vividly describes landmark films, leading directors, and the complex character of this major branch of world cinema.

* Part 1 *

Chapter 1

Creating Nollywood:

Conditions and Foundations

Cinema in Africa and the Video Revolution

Africa had been integrated into international cinema circuits since the beginning of cinema—there were film screenings in Lagos in 1903 (Ekwuazi 1991). But Africa was integrated on the worst possible terms. Cinema was a one-way street: Africans watched films but could not make them for lack of capital to fund productions and because of the complex and expensive training, infrastructure, and technical apparatus celluloid cinema requires. The films that were imported were chosen to appeal to the colonial elite or because they were the cheapest thing that could be dumped on the market. They were often racist and were always estranged from African realities. As Brian Larkin puts it, “Until recently, in African postcolonies like Nigeria, a trip to the cinema has always been translocal, a stepping outside of Africa to places elsewhere” (2008, 124). Onookome Okome relates that when he was growing up in Sapele, in the Niger Delta, the Pidgin phrase “na cinema be dat” (“that’s cinema”) meant that something was unreal, impossible. Nevertheless, Africans were and are avid filmgoers. Cinemas were one of the prime attractions of urban modernity. Hollywood movies sank deep into the popular imagination. Africans were subjected to a second kind of film, besides the commercial imports: the instructional and propaganda films created for African audiences by the British, French, and Belgian colonial film units, which were taken by mobile cinema vans into villages and neighborhoods that had no other experience of movies. Usually these films were unbearably condescending, but they left an important legacy: postcolonial African governments and many filmmakers continue to conceive of cinema (and television) as a tool for modernizing and shaping society (Larkin 2008, chapter 3; Garritano 2013, chapter 1).

In the scholarship on African cinema, the contrast between French and British modes of support for cinema in the colonial and postcolonial epochs is a familiar theme (Martin 1982; Diawara 1992; Ukadike 1994; Shaka 2004). The French restricted African film production during the colonial era but afterwards vigorously provided financing, technicians, and noncommercial distribution channels, resulting in a strong if small corpus of feature films but very little filmmaking infrastructure on the ground in Africa. The African filmmakers in this system (which is no longer overwhelmingly French, but still dominated by Europe) have needed not just the technical and aesthetic education necessary to make films but also the sophistication to negotiate this complicated international system. They are perforce members of the intellectual elite, conscious of managing a scarce resource and burdened with the full set of responsibilities that African intellectuals carry.

Their films are seldom seen by Africans in Africa because film distribution in Africa has always been dominated by foreign companies that make money by importing third-run Hollywood or Chinese movies, which are far cheaper than African films that need to recoup their production costs. Shut out of the distribution circuits, African cinema has never been able to reach African populations in a sustained manner and so has failed to become a real industry that makes films from the profits of previous films. It has always been clear that a celluloid film industry would be nearly impossible in Africa without substantial government support, which has never materialized.

The British Colonial Film Units did create a filmmaking infrastructure in Africa, including the training of a cadre of African technicians, but from the 1950s on the British did little or nothing to encourage feature film production. The Nigerian government founded the Nigerian Film Corporation amidst cultural nationalist rhetoric about strengthening, defending, and propagating African values and the national image but, like the British, effectively left feature filmmaking to the commercial sector (Ekwuazi 1991).

This situation changed abruptly in the 1980s and 1990s. The “video boom” in West Africa springs from two intersecting developments that radically altered media environments around the globe: the advent of new video technologies and the neoliberalization of media environments. “Small media”—videocassette recorders, video cameras, video projectors, satellite television receivers, DVD players, and computers—are far beyond the capacity of African governments to control. Moreover these governments, which previously had tried to control the media tightly out of some mixture of anti-imperialist cultural nationalism and political paranoia, were now distracted by the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s and were under pressure from bodies like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which had acquired enormous leverage in those crises, to liberalize their media environments.

The result was an uncontrolled deluge of imported media of many kinds, from Julia Roberts movies to Pakistani recitations of the Quran. Suddenly African audiences had a very wide choice of what to watch. The foreign content is, for the most part, not being foisted on them by transnational corporations. It is being pirated, which annoys the transnational corporations when they bother to think about the African market. Audience choices are mediated through small-scale African entrepreneurs who pirate what they judge their clientele will pay for.

The same situation that allowed for the flood of imports also created the possibility for an eruption of African popular culture into the realm of recorded audiovisual media. Video is cheap and easily operated and so fits the model of the “African popular arts” as defined by Karin Barber: art forms created by small-scale entrepreneurs who need little equipment, training, or capital (Barber 1987). But the possibility has been realized unevenly in different places, depending on contingent factors.

Nigeria created the behemoth of African entertainment for specific reasons. First and foremost is size. A quarter of the whole population of sub-Saharan Africa lives in Nigeria, giving it an enormous internal market and therefore the same advantages that have worked in Hollywood’s favor: bigger audiences allow for bigger budgets, which allow for higher production values, which attract bigger audiences in a self-reinforcing spiral towards dominance.

The Yoruba Traveling Theater

Nigeria’s Yoruba traveling theater tradition (Clark 1980; Jeyifo 1984; Barber 2000) provided a ready-made basis for the video film industry. On stage since the 1940s, this syncretic theatrical form commanded a broad popular audience wherever Yoruba was understood. The performances mobilized deep Yoruba cultural forms—religious mythology, historical themes, the highly prized verbal arts, traditional drumming—as well as electric guitars, microphones, and topical contemporary subjects. By the 1960s, Nigeria supported a hundred traveling theater troupes. As soon as television was introduced in Nigeria (1959), they were on television. When celluloid film production began in the 1970s, they made movies. The Yoruba actors found their way around the problem of being shut out of the cinema distribution system by continuing to travel as they had always done, setting up in schools, city halls, and hotel courtyards as usual, but now they showed their films rather than put on live performances (Ricard 1983). Sometimes they worked with trained directors to produce the most distinguished and popular Nigerian films of the celluloid era. Often they were justly accused of simply pointing a camera at their stage plays. In any case, they demonstrated their ability to adapt to one medium after the other, reorganizing themselves each time. Each time they brought their loyal fans along with them.

Yoruba traveling theater actors made most of the roughly one hundred celluloid films produced in Nigeria between 1970 and 1992 (Balogun 1987; Ekwuazi 1991; Adesanya 1992; Okome and Haynes 1995; Haynes 1995). The others were a hodgepodge: Wole Soyinka’s unsuccessful (as he admits) experiments (Kongi’s Harvest (1970), Blues for a Prodigal (1984)); a few government-sponsored projects like Shehu Umar (1976), from a Hausa novel by Nigeria’s first prime minister, Tafawa Balewa; Eddie Ugbomah’s commercial thrillers (The Mask (1979), Death of a Black President (1983)), modeled at least in part on the American Blaxploitation films of the 1970s; Ladi Ladebo’s ameliorative social dramas (Vendor (1988), Eewo (1989)); the Adesanya brothers’ search for a formula that would combine authentic African culture with commercial viability (Vigilante (1988), Ose Sango (1991)). Nigerian celluloid film production was almost entirely detached from the Pan-African institutions of African cinema, such as the biennial FESPACO film festival and the filmmakers’ organization FEPACI, and from the European support that was so crucial in Francophone Africa. The exemplary career of this period is that of Ola Balogun, a French-trained director who was the most prolific of all African film directors, making some ten feature films between 1973 and 1984. He both worked with Yoruba traveling theater artists, which was lucrative but irritating since the theater people had their own ideas about how to make films and were not sufficiently respectful of Balogun’s expertise, and shot his own projects, which reflected many of the more advanced artistic and ideological tendencies of the period but languished for lack of an audience and a distribution system (Balogun 1987).

The Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) of the mid-1980s brought a precipitous devaluation of the national currency, the naira. Anything involving hard currency was suddenly beyond any filmmaker’s budget, including importing film stock and going to London to process footage and do postproduction work, neither of which could be done in Nigeria. At the same time, most of the cinema houses closed. Armed robbers terrorized the night, a strong reason not to go out to the movies, and the theaters were sliding into ratty disrepair. And there were other reasons for the demise of cinema houses. The ascendance of both Pentecostal Christian and Islamic fundamentalism sharpened social disapproval of the culture of the theaters, strongly associated with disreputable young men smoking marijuana; when the electricity went off, as it did more and more often, and the theater’s generator wore out or ran out of fuel, which was also increasingly likely, the audiences tended to vent their rage on the infrastructure they could get their hands on, the theater itself; the unsettled political climate made the behavior of the censors board dangerously unpredictable; and frequent political crises and other forms of unrest made scheduling the premier of a new film risky (Uchenunu 2008).1 Public life was under general assault. Video permitted a retreat into private spaces. Celluloid film production ceased in 1992, the same year video production took off.

The professional celluloid directors rejected the advent of video filmmaking with bitter vehemence. Actors passed easily from one medium to the other—it had never been possible to define oneself as primarily a film actor, given the low level of film production; actors always made their livings from television and the stage. But apart from the Yoruba traveling theater element (and Tunde Kelani—see chapter 5), there is little continuity between Nigeria’s celluloid and video directors.

The Yoruba traveling theater artists forged on through the downward spiral, finding ways to make do. They discovered a cache of reversal film stock (which produces a single, unreproducible positive print rather than a negative), and they used it up, though the unique prints would soon wear out, dooming the films to rapid oblivion. Hyginus Ekwuazi notes “the disenchantment by the audience at this kind of film that always got stuck in the projector” (2008b, 138). The next shift born of desperation was to shoot on video and transfer the films onto 16 mm celluloid. Video projectors arrived in the nick of time. The filmmakers were now operating in an all-video environment. The honor for first Nigerian video film seems to be shared between Ade Ajiboye (“Big Abass”), who made Sonso Meji (Two Pointed Ends) in 1988, and Muyideen Alade Aromire, who shot Ekun (Tiger) in 1986 but did not screen it until 1989 because he had taken it to the Nigerian Film Censors Board, where, according to reports, the legendary founder of the traveling theater Hubert Ogunde, who had turned to filmmaking and been named a member of the board, told Aromire that a video would be given the status of a film over his dead body. As Akin Adesokan dryly observes, “It turned out to be an exact, if unintended, prophecy: Ogunde is no more, and videofilms are here with us” (2008).

These films were still screened in improvised venues. The audience for the first film shown with a video projector, Ekun, rioted, but finally everyone had to settle for what they could have. In spite of the volatile behavior of spectators gathered in theaters, many observers have noticed that Nigerian audiences care about the story a film is telling above all else—if they are happy with that, they will ignore all kinds of technical and other deficiencies.

Yoruba films also began to be sold as videocassettes, though usually as an afterthought to public screenings. Yoruba society had a strong tradition of going out to see films, often in families, and screening of films continues to be an important aspect of the Yoruba video film business and culture. Opening a new film at the National Theatre has been a standard practice. Aromire, who did not come out of the traveling theater (he began as a writer and cartoonist (Adesokan 2008) and later opened a television station), appears to have been the first to make cassette sales the primary means of releasing his films, though his sales were modest.

It was Kenneth Nnebue, an Igbo electronics dealer who imported and sold videocassettes, who fully grasped the potential market for Nigerian films on video. Though he did not speak Yoruba well himself, in 1989 he produced a film with Yoruba traveling theater troupe leader Ishola Ogunsola, Aje Ni Iya Mi/My Mother is a Witch, shooting with an ordinary VHS camera and editing with two ordinary VCRs. Aje Ni Iya Mi cost Nnebue ₦2,000 (less than $200) to make, and he turned a profit of hundreds of thousands of naira. He immediately produced a string of similar Yoruba-language video films.

Television

The most important factor that enabled and shaped Nollywood was Nigerian television. Nigeria had the first television station in sub-Saharan Africa, WNTV (later named NTA-Ibadan when it was taken over by the national network, the Nigerian Television Authority), on air since 1959, an initiative of the progressive Yoruba political leader Obafemi Awolowo. After independence in 1960, Nigeria set about constructing by far the largest and strongest television network in Africa. At first a television set was something only the elite could afford, but by the early 1980s television was no longer a novelty and had spread through the middle class. Oluyinka Esan writes that it “became the focal point in homes.” In 1984 the NTA boasted 30 million viewers per night (Esan 2009, 129); fewer than 50,000 were in the cinemas (Olusola 1986, 163). By 1991 the national NTA had twenty-four production centers and there were fourteen state-owned television stations, all managed and operated by Nigerians (Esan 2009, 130).

The NTA was arguably the single most powerful force in creating a sense of Nigerian identity. In 1983 an Organization of African Unity study found that Nigerian television had the lowest percentage of foreign content of any nation in Africa (cited in Lasode 1994, 166). The national news, watched simultaneously all over the vast country, has been an obvious unifying force, no matter how stultifying it usually was. In the early 1960s, the Nigerian artistic community was relatively compact and the surge of creative energy accompanying independence produced a cross-fertilization of cultural forms and a golden age of the performing, visual, and literary arts. Television was hungry for content, and much of this cultural efflorescence found its way onto the airwaves. All the most famous Yoruba traveling theater actors and their troupes appeared on WNTV in Ibadan. What happened at WNTV paralleled and intersected with what was going on across town at the University of Ibadan School of Drama, where—in a kind of cross-class collaboration that has become rare (Jeyifo 1984, 57)—the traveling theater artist Kola Ogunmola was invited for a residency during which he created a landmark stage production of Amos Tutuola’s novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard, which was broadcast. Actors and writers associated with the University of Ibadan provided WNTV with regular dramas in English. A full roster of Nigerian writers had their work adapted for television: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, J. P. Clark, Cyprian Ekwensi, Bode Sowande, Adebayo Faleti, Akinwumi Ishola, D. O. Fagunwa, Abubakar Imam, Elechi Amadi, and Umaru Danjuma, to name some (Adesanya 1990a).

Segun Olusola, the most important Nigerian television producer, points out that, unlike in most of the rest of the world, in Africa television production did not follow (and follow from) cinema production, it preceded it; even more remarkably, he claims that “In this country, it was television that provided the impetus for the flowering of the modern theatre.” The Yoruba traveling theater artists did not merely appear on television—some of the most important ones (including Duro Ladipo) got their first exposure and developed their art in the studios of WNTV and NBC-TV.2 Olusola continues with a contrasting example from the early days of the elite/literary English-language dramatic tradition: “Experimentation and learning with the new medium were foremost in the minds of the motivators of the first ever television play—My Father’s Burden—written by Wole Soyinka, when it was televised live mid-1960” (Olusola 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects