“As there are hyena-men and panther-men …”: Chris Abani, Pieter Hugo, and the shocking life of images

Abstract

This article looks at the combined work of South African photographer Pieter Hugo and of “global Igbo” author Chris Abani in the volume Nollywood (2009). In their creative work both artists usually strive to see beyond established aesthetic and ethical paradigms and to bypass conventional modes of representation, in order to zoom in on adventurous and often shocking areas of existence in both life and art in Africa. In his collection of photographs known as the Nollywood series, Hugo engages with the Nigerian video film industry in collaboration with local actors and make-up artists in order to recreate the workings and general atmosphere of Nollywood films. Their cooperation produces a series of violently surreal, hallucinating tableaux. The volume features an introduction by Chris Abani which aptly evokes Nollywood’s history and production, and provides a key to reading Hugo’s creative rendition of the phenomenon. Marked by an incessant effort to move beyond the limits of both literary and cultural representation, Abani’s work is a highly appropriate contribution to the artistic experimentation in the collection. This article argues that the visual and textual works of Hugo and Abani both revisit and remove – through sometimes disquietingly violent aesthetical intervention – the borders that are kept in place by societal control on culture and the arts.

Keywords:

• literature
• photography
• Nigerian video films (Nollywood)
• Chris Abani
• Pieter Hugo

Notes

1. The occult, according to Haynes, is “a crucial function of the video films” (2007, 144). For in-depth analyses of the Nollywood phenomenon, see, among others, Barrot ([2005] 2008); Haynes (2000, 2007); Krings and Okome (2013); Okoye (2007); Ugor (2007).

2. Zina Saro-Wiwa states: “The story of Nigerian agency encoded in the story of the industry is a powerful and important narrative in itself for Nigeria and Africa. In a country where the petroleum-led economy has made trillions yet has improved scandalously few lives, Nollywood has allowed Nigerians, Africans and the world to observe an African-led industry offer creativity, remuneration, community development and even stardom to anyone with flair and an entrepreneurial spirit. It is a phenomenon with powerful implications for the cultural and ultimately economic development of Africa” (2009, 26).

3. AfricaLab is a production company dedicated to re-imagining Africa through visual media, principally film and art. In 2010 it curated an exhibition called Sharon Stone in Abuja (Location One Gallery, NYC, 5 November 2010 – 17 January 2011), again a kind of homage to Nollywood culture.

4. Founded in London in 2004 around the work of Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka and as a forum for scholars, students and readers: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WoleSoyinkaSociety/.

5. A comprehensive survey of contemporary South African photography is provided in the catalogue of the exhibition Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, curated by Tamar Garb and Martin Barnes and held at the Porter’s Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 12 April – 17 July 2011 (Garb 2011).

6. For an insightful analysis of Benetton’s “pedagogy of representation” and cultural politics in relation to the group’s advertising campaigns and COLORS Magazine, see Giroux (1993).

7. Jonathan Haynes argues that the Nollywood industry began with artists from the

Yoruba traveling theater who produced films in the 1970s and 1980s. This form of theater emerged out of Egungun groups that were meant to “cleanse Yorùbá communities from physical and psychological disorders” (Haynes 2007, 286). The performances featured dwarfs, hunchbacks and albinos and the actors used grotesque masks to represent “physical, psychic, and social aberrations as leprosy, goitre, club foot, small-pox, drunkenness, insanity, and prostitution” (Kerr 1995, 12).

8. I wish to thank Pieter Hugo for kindly allowing selected photos from Nollywood and from The Hyena & Other Men to appear in the present article.

9. Here Hugo significantly captures a distinguishing trait of Nollywood video films, the interweaving of Christian iconography and stories with local magical and supernatural elements.

10. These are the characters we encounter in Abani’s GraceLand (2004), Becoming Abigail (2006), The Virgin of Flames (2007) and Song for Night (2007).

11. “To me to do the portraits of people that are eyeless is just not appealing” (Hugo 2014). An interesting comment on the question of the eye/gaze in Hugo’s work can be found in Makhubu, who also notices the “inability to converse” of Hugo’s work: “While photography in relation to film inherently carries a certain silence or inarticulateness, characters in Hugo’s photographs seem to function outside of language” (2013, 56). The South African art critic’s attempt to come to terms with “the politics of the strange” in Nollywood produces one of the few sustained interpretations of the series, which, however, diverges significantly from the one proposed here.