David Kaiza
4 February 2008
column
AT ONE POINT, IT WAS second only to Hollywood in the sheer volumes of films it produced before the Indian industry, Bollywood, pulled ahead.
At its peak in 2007, it is said to have produced nearly 1,200 films, a figure that is probably unreliable, but when you see them in shop windows and on street corners, it seems that Nigerian films are produced by the million.
It's like the pull exerted by a passing planet, warping economics, personal lives, accents and world views.
"They are based on African stories, so people like them," a proprietor at CD Electronics on Luwum Street in Kampala says. "Some 50 per cent of the movies we stock are Nigerian."
Nollywood has its galaxy of stars, the Jide Kosokos, Ini Edos, Osita Ihemes (of Aki and Pawpaw fame), around whom rumours are rife, their lives avidly followed by fans Hollywood-style.
Like Bollywood, Nollywood is formula stuff: Predictable, racy plots that start and end in tension. There is witchcraft, raffia skirts, men and women in agbadas. Christianity clashes with tradition. African culture clashes with European life.
Exploration and contemplation are definitely on the agenda. They ask audiences to think. Thinking ruins the drama.
It is mostly low budget, low quality work, making full use of the sensational themes - sex, crime, drugs and broken homes.
But it is what it is doing to building the black self-image that makes Nollywood perhaps the most powerful cultural project since the coming of Christianity. The black face becomes the action face; the hero with the rounded life at the centre of a completely black world. This contrasts sharply with the condescending treatment of black people in Hollywood. Obviously, the millions who tune in to Nollywood daily feel something they don't get in Hollywood.
The future impact of this is beyond what Pan Africanists a generation ago would have dared dream: Almost at one stroke, these films have ring-fenced the African world. Once, not too long ago, scholars looked at the African world as a fractured existential context in which Africans craved for Western objects by which to present themselves. Film was one important conduit by which pale skin, long hair and other objects of the West translated into bleaching and straightening of hair in Africa.
IT SEEMS LIKE A PARADOX, FOR in the world of states, Nigeria should not be capable of doing this; it has several times over been the definitive failed state. But entering its fifth decade as an independent country, certain aspects of Nigeria are beginning to line up into a pattern:
The impact of a uniquely Nigerian style has been undeniable in the past 40 years in literature, sports, fashion, crime and now cinematography.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when European cultural imperialism seemed to have triumphed over Africa, and Shakespeare was the definitive playwright and Dickens the great novelist, Nigeria gave us Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.
From the 1970s, Nigerian dress started to spread across the continent and the Atlantic as the defining black couture.
In the mid-1990s, Nigerian footballers initiated an invasion of European stadiums, which keep getting blacker by the day.
In this decade, the pre-eminence of Hollywood in Africa has been undermined just when it appeared to have finally triumphed, with its fourth cultural invasion in as many decades.
A large population, oil, the Niger River and fertile soils have all been put forward as having contributed to this creative energy. But West Africa as a whole retains a rich cultural heritage that in other colonies was destroyed.
The summing-up of colonial rule half a century ago also came with the rise of African literature. The sprouting of names like Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Okot p'Bitek, Mongo Beti, Christopher Okigbo, Nuruddin Farrah, Ayi Kwei Armah, was simultaneous. But before the 1960s were out, it was increasingly obvious that the hard-hitting authors were coming from only one country.
Where Kenya or Uganda sent a name or two at most to the front, Nigeria had Achebe, Soyinka and Okigbo with a Gabriel Okara to spare, a JP Clarke on hand.
The complexity that emerged from Soyinka put him not just at the very frontline of African writing, but of global literature itself; his practised references to Oshun shrines, the colourful language interweaving drama, comedy and tragedy.
Were they more gifted? No. They had the advantage that the pre-colonial cultures their peoples developed remain, to this day, intact and wholesome. Along the length and breadth of Nigeria, annual cultural festivals provide a rich heritage of types, symbols, language, narratives and drama that creative Nigerians dip into time and again.
The ancient capital, Ile Ife, retains a great deal of the prestige, colour and ceremony that was to be found across old Africa. The processions of the Oonis - the Kings of Ife - are an awesome retinue of retainers, drummers, flute players, of dress defining rank and status.
The colourful guards at the Emir of Zaria's palace, the ranked masked forms of the Eyo Masqueraders are more than passing curiosity. The theatrical art is old in Nigerian - taking Amanikpo Puppetry as a precursor to Soyinka's dramatic work.
NIGERIA HAS A VERY RICH cultural heritage that is represented in our daily activities; the way we live, the way we relate in our various ceremonies; we are very proud of it," says Ahmed Abubakar, acting High Commissioner to Kampala.
Africa from Cape Town to the northern borders of East Africa suffered from the most virulent agent of colonialism - the settler. Uprooted from Europe, they sought to turn the "new world" into a version of Yorkshire. This meant putting an end to "satanic" rituals. The Christianising was heavy. Traditional metal work was brutally suppressed. Masses of youth who in West Africa stayed on the land to learn old agriculture, art and craft and carry on religious tradition, became, in East and Southern Africa, farm labourers.
Lower south, the presence of the mines in countries like Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa, Zambia dealt African traditions an even worse blow by not just diverting attention from social life, but by destroying it.
The literature and cinema that emerge from East and South Africa reflect, not celebration, but abject struggle. In our collective memories, we are to be found working as servants in white homes, to find work in this mine scrambling, and that farm, our tearing at our self-confidence.
What Africa used to be, as preserved in West Africa, is indeed pleasing to the eye. Benin bronze sculptures are today a blackmarket item across the world. The casting technique, known as the "lost wax" process, widely used in hi-tech industries to create intricate parts for use in jet engines, for instance, appears to have been pioneered on the Southern coast of West Africa. The terracotta figures of southern Nigeria hold their place with the best anywhere else.
More often than not, the film makers, actors and producers themselves passed through these rituals and have embedded in them, the world view these traditions erect.
It is a case of technology meeting tradition. The production of a Nigerian film, at between $10,000 and $20,000, is the cheapest anywhere. It is estimated that on average, three films are released per day.
ESTIMATES VARY AS TO HOW much money they make, but it is put at $200 million. Nollywood insiders say that with illegal sales taking place the length of Africa, with London and New York said to be some of the bigger markets, the whole affair is worth some $3 billion.
The Nigerian entrepreneurial spirit has ensured that their films are a commercial success. But the multiplication of cheap digital technology, which cut out the expensive film suite, the cumbersomeness of the brilliant 35mm film, has made it possible to shoot a film in just 10 days or so.
It has made it possible to go "direct-to-video," as the industry describes it. Shoot the film and hand over the master copy to a marketer who mass producers the material, prints jackets and posters, and looks after distribution. Bingo!
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