Anticipating Nollywood: Lagos circa 1996

Abstract

This essay discusses the Nigerian film Owo Blow (1996), as a way to examine an aesthetic tendency that is largely missing in Nollywood, and to explore the relationship between media and the city, particularly in regard to Lagos. I use this film to propose three issues that are worth highlighting for a productive engagement with the relationship between media and urbanity. First, I argue that the current global interest in Nollywood is highly mediated, isolating the English‐language‐accented, popular genre‐formatted sub‐genre as the Nollywood film. Secondly, this process of mediation has tended to a kind of totalisation because it emphasises the commercial as the primary identity of the cinematic practice. Thirdly, I argue that the possible globalisation of Nollywood is undercut by limitations on how well the generic type can travel. Although recent and longstanding bureaucratic exhortations of Nigerian filmmakers to promote positive images of the country are often derided, Nollywood already fulfils this expectation by default because a systemic, ideologically explicit critique of Lagos as an urban city, for instance, is hard to come by in the films. I contrast this with Owo Blow, which attempts one such critique, a multi‐layered analysis of Lagos as a case study of the postcolonial incredible.

Keywords:

• Lagos
• urbanism
• Nollywood
• didacticism
• the 1990s

Notes

1. However, citing the geographers Sallie Marston, Keith Woodward and John Paul Jones, the critic Jonathan Haynes has argued that Nollywood be seen ‘not as an example of scalar models of hierarchical relationships (the dominant model in globalization), which would inevitably find Nollywood to be a defective imitation of Hollywood, but as an example of specifically situated, localised social activity, networked with other sites that produces something fundamentally different from Hollywood in production, distribution, consumption, and aesthetics’ (Haynes 2007, p. 133).

2. I think that this is why the sense of achievement felt by Nollywood directors and producers (‘We have created an industry without the support of the government’, etc.) and the fascination of foreign journalists and documentary filmmakers suggests a mutually reinforcing relationship.

3. Recent attempts to grapple with the city include scholarly essays (Gandy 2005); journalistic essays (Packer 2006, Bures 2008); the project on Lagos by the Harvard‐based architect Rem Koolhaas, formalised in the film Lagos Wide and Close (2005); the coffee table book Lagos: A City at Work (Tejuoso and Atigbi 2007); and most recently the BBC documentary Welcome to Lagos (2010). Although concerned specifically with Nollywood, the documentary This is Nollywood (2007) would count in this body of commentaries because of both its focus on the city, and the similarity of its overall aesthetics to the BBC documentary, for instance.

4. Wole Soyinka's Opera Wonyosi (1981), first performed in 1977, remains a lively satire of this fanciful period. For a recent scholarly revisiting of the FESTAC as an expression of Nigeria's transcontinental cultural aspirations, see Apter 2005.

5. Kwasi Wiredu (2000, p.185) has written: ‘A communalist society is one in which an individual is brought up to cultivate an intimate sense of obligation and belonging to quite large groups of people on the basis of kinship affiliations. This inculcation of an extensive sense of the human bonds provides a natural school for the enlargement of sympathies, which stretches out beyond the limits of kinship to the wider community.’

6. For examples, see Naficy and Gabriel 1993, Chow 1995.

7. The title is untranslatable; it is a famous alias poetically derived from the protagonist's last name, and freely used for anyone called Owolabi which, apart from other dramatic considerations, is why each part has an English subtitle. The first part is subtitled ‘The Genesis’ and the remaining two parts are subtitled ‘The Revolt’ and ‘The Final Struggle’.

8. ‘Area Boys’ is a generic term for street hoodlums who accost people in the street with a mixture of aggressiveness and importunity. The term derives from ‘Area’, the section of Lagos where the late Fela Anikulapo‐Kuti's nightclub was located before the infamous attack of February 1977 – the point being to characterise the aggression as a feature of Fela's counter‐culture crowd. In the film, some of the characters use the expression ‘Alright Sir’ to describe the ‘Area Boys’.

9. Kole Ade‐Odutola, the film's assistant director, said in a personal communication that the inspiration for the script was M.A. Aderinkomi's Gbewiri, a Yoruba‐language play published in the 1970s. The playwright, a reverend, was present at the film's premiere in 1996. This line of thinking was quite widespread in the 1970s among Nigerian leftist intellectuals, and literary texts depicting the menace of armed robbery, like Femi Osofisan's Once Upon Four Robbers and TU Nwala's Justice on Trial make this argument strongly. The ’70s saw the introduction of execution of convicted armed robbers by public firing squad, one of the ills satirised in Soyinka's aforementioned play (see Note 4 above).

10. On ‘Nigerian English’, see Bamgbose et al. (1995). For the coinage ‘Yorubanglish’ see Adelugba (1978).

11. For an extended reflection on piracy and Nigerian films, see Brian Larkin (2008), especially Chapter 7. The paradoxical relationship between the problems posed by piracy and an intellectual commitment to global access is poignantly underscored in Jean‐Marie Teno's documentary film, Sacred Places (2008), when the filmmaker encounters Burkinabe youngsters screening a pirated version of Idrissa Ouedraogo's Yaaba in an Ouagadougou neighbourhood. More recently, leading Nigerian filmmaker Tunde Kelani has spoken distressfully about the impact of piracy on the industry, going so far as to say that ‘[t]he popular Nollywood industry is under great threat and may already be experiencing its death throes’ (Wood 2010, p. 35).