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ABSTRACT
This paper undertakes an interpretation of Biodun Jeyifo's writings on Nollywood in the light of his earlier work on Yoruba Traveling Theater. It approaches Jeyifo's reflections on Nollywood and Yoruba Traveling Theater as a basis for examining how scholars might address concerns about quality in assessments of African popular culture. In Jeyifo's more recent work on Nollywood, there is a tension between acknowledging that dissimilar forms of culture answer to unlike rubrics of quality, and a desire for Nollywood to aspire to the quality of African literary fiction and art cinema. This article suggests that Jeyifo's earlier work on Yoruba Traveling Theater offers a more dynamic template for discussing how scholars might deploy concerns about quality with respect to popular culture and as a lens for engaging popular culture forms on their own terms.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. This essay was subsequently republished in the second edition of Yemi Ogunbiyi's edited book, Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book (2014). A few sections of the 2008 essay were changed, but for the most part the sentiments and words from the earlier essay are barely modified. My quotations all come from the 2008 essay and reproduce sentences that also appear in the 2014 essay.
2. The fact that the essay was re-published in 2014 in Ogunbiyi's edited book, a seminal book on Nigerian performance, suggests that Jeyifo was still standing by his initial assessment six years after the initial essay was published.
3. “This writer” refers here to Jeyifo.
4. In the 2008 essay, Jeyifo offers a much more damning assessment of Nollywood. At that time, he wrote: “Nollywood… with its considerable bustle and self-confidence, is remarkably without any workable ideological and cohesive core or center; all is chaos, a cacophonous clash of systems of beliefs and perspectives, and directionless energy and optimism. This is a subliminal, cinematic image of the ideological emptiness of the Nigerian ruling circles writ large” ( 18). This passage was deleted from the 2014 republication of the essay.
5. Bongowood is another name for Tanzanian popular film.
6. The fact that the most popular Nollywood films at the Nigerian box office are romantic comedies confirms Jeyifo's earlier intuition about the popularity of comedy in the Yoruba Traveling Theater.
7. A once popular site, Nollywood Forever Reviews, but which has not been updated since 2013 sorted Nollywood films into four categories, and provided justification for placing films in anyone of the four categories: Watch? Most Definitely; Watch? Yes an OK Movie; Watch? Only if Bored; Watch? No, bin it.
8. Some of the YouTube channels dedicated to reviewing Nollywood films include The Screening Room, run by Adenike Adebayo, Nolly Reviews, which appears to concentrate on Yoruba-language films.
9. I am referring here to the 1976 film, Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese.
10. For example, dialogue in the film Invasion 1896 is almost entirely in English, though the narrative is supposed to represent life in the court of the last king of the Benin Empire in the late nineteenth century.
11. Wanuri Kahiu is the director of the science fiction short, Pumzi (Citation2009), while Jahmil X.T. Qubeka is director of the film, Of Good Report (Citation2013).
12. Consider for example that in his 2016 book, Jonathan Haynes (Citation303) quotes Chris Ihidero, an executive at Amaka Igwe Studios, who declared: “Yes, quality is key. But we should not stupidly, for the sake of quality abandon volume… Our inroad to the international market at this point is quantity.”
13. For more on New Nollywood, please see, Jonathan Haynes (2014), Adejunmobi (2015), and Connor Ryan (2015).
14. The manner in which and the extent to which a commercially oriented cinema will interact with a more artistic and experimental cinema in Nigeria remains to be seen. For film industries in Europe and North America, Wheeler Winston Dixon (Citation61) suggests that the gap is not wide as is often presumed. He writes: “The business of film production, distribution, and exhibition is still highly speculative. This is what many people simply don't understand: the runaway hits and new franchises always come from the margins, not from films that were designed as commercial enterprises.”
15. For more on the Lagos City to City Spotlight at the Toronto International Film Festival 2016, please see: Cameron Bailey, http://www.tiff.net/the-review/cameron-bailey-explains-why-tiff-16-has-put-the-spotlight-on-lagos-and/
16. The Abuja International Film Festival has for example a category for Best Experimental Film.
17. See for example, Joel Adedeji's 1978 article “Traditional Yoruba Travelling Theatre.” and Karin Barber's The Generation of Plays: Yorùbá Popular Life in Theater.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Moradewun Adejunmobi
Moradewun Adejunmobi is a professor in the African American and African Studies Department of the University of California, Davis. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of African Literature.