Ouagadougou continued: Lessons from a pirate
Through them, I met with the Sarkin Hausawa and another representative of the Hausa community in Ouagadougou. “Is there a place I can find Hausa films here?” I asked Kabiru Cisse, a trader. He responded that there was, but… he said hesitantly, “they are all pirated.” “That’s ok,” I said. “I just want to see […]
Through them, I met with the Sarkin Hausawa and another representative of the Hausa community in Ouagadougou. “Is there a place I can find Hausa films here?” I asked Kabiru Cisse, a trader. He responded that there was, but… he said hesitantly, “they are all pirated.” “That’s ok,” I said. “I just want to see what is available.”
So, on the next to last day of the festival on a Friday, I spent my morning at the market with Malam Kabiru as my host. Being with him and the other Hausa traders, after nearly a week of struggling through the streets with my wretched French, was a relief. I felt I could relax—as if I were with family. Malam Kabiru told me that his grandfather had come from Zaria and settled in Ouagadougou. He had spent some time in Nigeria with his father’s relatives as a young man. Here in Ouagadougou, he operated two shops, one for inexpensive “modern” jewelry and another for more traditional jewelry made of bronze and beads. After looking around his shop and making some purchases, I went through the market in search of Hausa movies.
Considering how excited the traders had been to meet Gidigo and how well they seemed to know the names of Kannywood stars and seemed to have seen the latest hits, I didn’t find as many films as I expected at the video shop I stopped at. I found a video compilation of Fati Nijar’s songs, and comedy clips from a Gidigo film. There was another pirated dvd compilation of Hausa films that looked like it had come from China.
The video seller agreed to speak with me through a translator but only on the condition that I not use his name or his location. No, I couldn’t take photographs, he said, not even just of the films he had on display. Burkina Faso is apparently very serious about piracy, at least of their own materials. Although the bulk of his material were pirated Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Hollywood films dubbed over in French, and a few television dramas/video films in French from Cote D’Ivoire, he also sold legal music CDs from Burkina Faso. They were far more expensive than the pirated films, between N1,500 and N3000, and came with holographic stickers that could not be reproduced. “You can take photos of these,” he told me. “These are legal. You see most of these videos from outside are pirated, but try to find this music pirated anywhere in this country. You will not find it. If they catch you with pirated material from Burkina Faso, they will send you to jail.”
I found myself buying movies that I would never watch to keep on file. Ghanaian films dubbed over in French and Cote D’Ivoirian television drama in French, of the sort that had been playing on the bus from Cotonou to Ouagadougou. The video seller explained to me how his business worked. He would prefer to sell legal copies of the films, he claimed, but he didn’t know how to get them. When he went to Lagos, he would go to the market and buy films from the marketers. He didn’t know how to contact the producers personally. He had one legal copy of a Ghanaian film that the filmmaker had brought personally to Ouagadougou, which sold for three times as much as a pirated film. He went to Lome to buy pirated films brought from China, and if there was a video, such as a recording from a television programme, that he wanted more copies of to sell, he would take it to Lome. From there it would be taken to Lagos and reproduced there.
His bestselling films were Ghanaian films dubbed in French. I couldn’t tell whether it was the filmmakers or the pirates who were responsible for the dub over. Pirated Hausa films were sold mostly to the Hausa speaking community, he told me. When I asked him what I thought would make them sell better, he told me that they would sell best if they were dubbed over in French, like other Nigerian films. This reminded me of what Salewa Jide Thomas, a legal Nollywood marketer based in New York had told me. Although he was selling Iyan-Tama’s Hausa film Tsintsiya in his Brooklyn shop, when I asked him how it was selling, he shrugged telling me he had bought it from a Hausa friend. “We didn’t really push it. I’ve had that since it came out, months ago.” He explained that though, he personally, liked the idea of promoting Nigerian language films, his mostly Caribbean immigrant market wouldn’t buy them because they didn’t like reading subtitles. He would be interested, he mentioned, in a cost-sharing marketing, where producers would go into business with him and split the costs rather than having to take all the risk of selling them on his own. Another marketer I spoke with several years ago Hauwa Alhassan, of Hausamovies.com, had expressed an interest in dubbing over Hausa films and marketing them to the large Somali population in the U.S., who shared a Muslim culture more similar to that in Hausa films than those in southern Nigerian populations.
From both these legal movie marketers and from the Burkinabé marketer, who was self-admittedly engaging in piracy, I took away several lessons. 1) If Hausa filmmakers would consider dubbing their films into English and French, they might possibly reach a wider market than they would with subtitles, 2) Pirates seem to be reaching much wider markets than the current legal distribution networks have been able to reach. If there were some way for producers or legal marketers to partner with the pirates and turn their business legal, they would instantly reach a far wider audience than they currently have access to. Burkina Faso’s model of the holographic seal (which the National Film and Video Censor’s Board in Nigeria is also trying to implement) is one way to go. On the one hand, this seems positive, that the artists are actually seeing the profits and not struggling with pirates. On the other hand, I wonder if the lack of piracy limits the proliferation of their product to other markets in Africa, and if the dramatically different price between the legal and the pirated materials discourages people from purchasing legal copies.
From the market, on that second to last day of FESPACO, as I headed from the market to go see a few more films, I was left mulling over questions of popular video films and language and distribution—questions not that different from those which have plagued African cinema since its existence.