Nollywood’s incursion into African Cinema Studies

In honour of my new slightly more academic focus, this week I write on the latest news in “Nollywood Studies”: the release of a special issue of the Journal of African Cinemas (Volume 4, Issue 1), guest edited by pioneering Nollywood scholar Jonathan Haynes and focused on Nollywood. This is not the first special issue […]

In honour of my new slightly more academic focus, this week I write on the latest news in “Nollywood Studies”: the release of a special issue of the Journal of African Cinemas (Volume 4, Issue 1), guest edited by pioneering Nollywood scholar Jonathan Haynes and focused on Nollywood. This is not the first special issue of its kind. Indeed there has been a proliferation of “Nollywood” special issues of academic journals, including Film International and Postcolonial Text, and forthcoming issues of Critical Interventions, Global  South and Black Camera. What seems significant about this issue of Journal of African Cinemas is that it follows Mahir Saul and Ralph A. Austen’s 2010 book Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution, in situating the study of Nollywood alongside studies of African cinema, a field that was initially dismissive of the video film. As recently as 2006, African film scholar Roy Armes, in his book  African Filmmaking: North and South of the Sahara, dispensed with the Nigerian film industry in less than a paragraph, opining that “[m]ost Nigerian video films have little artistic worth…”

The sort of thinking that would reduce Nollywood to a paragraph in a book about African filmmaking (the same year UNESCO was doing a study that indicated that Nigeria had the second largest number of film productions in the world) is hopefully on the decline. Indeed, Jonathan Haynes’ “Bibliography of academic work on Nigerian and Ghanaian video films,” which he included in this issue of Journal of African Cinemas, illustrates just how mammoth the field of research on the video film has become. According to Haynes’ bibliography, the first academic publications on the Nigerian video film to appear were in 1995 with Onookome Okome and Jonathan Haynes’ book Cinema and Social change in West Africa and Haynes’ article “Nigerian Cinema: Structural Adjustments.” Seventeen years later, the bibliography of academic work, which includes journal articles, book chapters, and books (though leaving out MA and PhD theses) runs to about 654 records on 33 printed pages. Haynes notes in his introduction to the journal that these scholarly works span the globe in “English, German, Hausa, French, Yoruba, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.” Although it is likely that there are some publications Haynes missed, the bibliography is evidence of a staggering amount of compilation work, and I would the volume of academic production and analysis rivals even that produced on African art cinema.

Along with the bibliography, the journal includes an introduction by Haynes, and four other articles, which, Haynes notes, extend previous research to “address the place of Nollywood in Nigerian society,” three of them working “explicitly (and the fourth perhaps implicitly) with the image and theme of Nollywood as providing a ‘mirroring’ or ‘reflection’ of that society” yet “producing more specific and sophisticated accounts than we have had of Nollywood’s position, its connection with its primary audience, its self-conception and its ideological functioning.” Reading over the articles together, I too felt they spoke well to each other in developing a historical idea of Nigeria’s popular cinema, the reception of its audiences, and the intentions of its filmmakers.

John McCall’s “The capital gap: Nollywood and the limits of informal trade” points out that Nollywood’s dependence on the informal economy for production and distribution means that, though it is commercial, it is not capitalist. He observes that not only have Nollywood filmmakers been able to appeal to Nigerian audiences with stories about their own lives, but they have also contributed to a form of “development without the state,” both directly through film industry employment and in supporting sectors “such as Nigeria’s printing industry that has been revitalized by demand for posters and video packaging.” He concludes by acknowledging that while Nollywood’s contributions via the informal sector are not recorded, the industry is beginning to enter the formal sector and fulfill the goal African filmmakers to produce “high-quality cinematic work that participate extensively and in a meaningful way in the cultures and lives of African people.”

In my own article “Video Expose: Metafiction and Message in Nigerian films,” I argue that through metafictions—that is films that are about the process of making films or which demonstrate a self-consciousness about recording technology—filmmakers in both an English-language Nollywood and a Hausa-language Kannywood respond to critics and theorize their roles as professionals and cultural mediators. In such films, there is often a tension between the idea of exposing secret corruption and that of maintaining an image of a glamorous celebrity culture. While the English and Hausa films I analyze respond to critics in similar ways, the films reveal differences in economic and cultural context that have resulted in an increasingly upwardly mobile Nollywood, while Kannywood has remained closer to the grass roots.

In  the next essay  “Hustlers, home-wreckers and homoeroticism: Nollywood’s Beautiful Faces,” Lindsey Green-Simms argues that while Nollywood is one of the world’s first film industries to be “produced from below,” the films do not necessarily present progressive politics. She examines campus drama films, particularly Kabat Esosa Egbon’s 2004 film Beautiful Faces, to show how social anxieties about “male violence and militarization” are shifted to “concerns about female sexual transgressions.” Women, particularly women who engage in sexual activity of which the community disapproves, are shown in such films as scapegoats for much larger socio-economic problems. Nollywood may challenge corruption and some forms of power, but it also often acts in conservative ways to “police cultural citizenship.”

The final article before Haynes’ long bibliography is Akin Adesokan’s “Nollywood and the idea of the Nigerian cinema.” Adesokan shows the importance of the Nigerian cinema and television of the 1970s and 1980s to the development of Nollywood, demonstrating that Nollywood video films inherit both aesthetic and thematic elements from earlier Nigerian productions. He analyzes Tade Ogidan’s 1996 Hostages I and II as an illustration of how the “generic Nigerian film” advances the ideas of the nation-building and cultural ambassadorship that earlier cinema attempted to put forward, while moving them in new global directions .

Taken together the articles demonstrate a Nollywood that is structurally more connected to older and more formal forms of Nigerian media than is often recognized, while still being a flexible and innovative part of the informal economy, contributing in unseen ways to developing wealth in Nigeria. While the video film is a popular media form that reflects the dreams and fears of society, it is also self-consciously mediated by filmmakers, who are usually intentional about their artistic and interpretive goals.

Unfortunately, as with most of these special issue journals on Nollywood, the Journal of African Cinemas is behind an internet pay wall that makes it inaccessible to most Nigerian scholars. But if you are a scholar who knows how to operate the informal economy of academic texts, you should be able to hustle up some copies.