By GREGORY AUSTIN NWAKUNOR
Nollywood is one of the fastest-growing film industries in the world, and one of the largest, too, in terms of output, alongside Bollywood, based on UNESCO’s survey conducted a few years ago. Nigeria produces a staggering 2,500 films a year. Onookome Okome, Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a leading expert on Nigerian films, tells GREGORY AUSTIN NWAKUNOR that the attempts to ghettorise the film industry is wrong.
YOUR assessment of Nollywood?: He looks up and smiles, “it has sustained itself. There’s a lot to be said about the industry; this is why it is seen everywhere, I can tell you, from my last count, that there have been two full-length documentaries on Nollywood. I was interviewed in the latest one. Even though I object to the title of the film, I still believe that it is good for the industry. The title of the documentary is Nollywood Babylon, which I’m not fond of.”
He draws a deep breath and remarks, “but the point that is made is crucial, for me that people are beginning to take proper and serious interest in the cinema culture, which is very, very Nigeria, though it is now global, it is also pan-African; there’s element of pan Africanism in Nollywood that it cannot be ignored at all. These elements you will find in the connection that Nigerian filmmakers are having with people in Kenya, Malawi, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, in terms of reception and consumption, also Africans in the Diaspora, in St. Lucia and the Caribbean, the films are very popular, in many ways, we can say that Nollywood is very much alive and it is really a great honour to Nigerians at the point where it all began.”
Okome says with pride, “since we started writing seriously about the industry, I mean since our very first serious essay on Nollywood, which I did with Prof. Jonathan Haynes of Brooklyn College, Long Island University in New York, a lot of people have started working seriously about it. But some of them are working from a very ethnographic point of view. And it seems to me that those people working in that area have tended to see the films as a replication of the lives that we live in Nigeria; this is not true. It is a representation, not the real thing. And because of this misconception about the film culture and the way it represents the society, there is the tendency for a certain discourse to build around it, which emphasises the very common thing such as there is juju, women are maltreated, oh, it is full of repetitions. These are becoming some kind of stereotypes in its discourse, which is not good for the academic side of the industry because it is very diverse.”
The film expert says, “there are stories that are civilised and also there are stories that do not have anything to do with magic; there are all kinds of stories. Nollywood is not just one thing, it is many things.”
For Okome, what is called Nollywood today is a general name for a larger cinema culture that has subsidiaries: including Yoruba, Hausa, Edo, Igbo and Urhobo. “They are part of the cinema culture, and anybody who is trying to deny that is just trying to make a fragmentation out of nothing.”
Living in Bondage (1992), a classic credited with kick-starting the industry, was made in Ibo but later dubbed into English.
As the industry grew, movies were made in Pidgin, a broken English that Nigerians with different mother languages use to communicate. And that has made the films accessible to all of Africa.
He says, the main industry began in Lagos, and has influenced other productions. “Nobody is going to tell me that Nollywood that began in Lagos did not influence the Ghanaian video films. Nobody is going to tell me that it did not influence the film industry coming up in Kampala.”
The University of Alberta professor explains, confidently: “I have just been invited to give a talk on the industry and its influence in Africa. I co-convened a conference last year at the University of Mainz, Germany, the title of the conference was Nollywood and Beyond and what we tried to do at that conference was to define the film culture inside and outside Nigeria, we found from the papers presented its influence on the continent.”
He adds, “we found out that we cannot reduce the industry into one thing: that it is juju, or that it is made in three or four days, these are the kind of impressions that don’t have anything to do with the practice itself. If you encourage that kind of discussion, you are minimising the artistic input that these filmmakers inject in the making of the films. You just cannot do that. That is the reason I don’t like the documentary called Nollywood Babylon, by trying to mobilise the idea of the industry as Babel, it is like ghettorising the wonderful cinema practice that it has been doing from time to time. Ghettorisation is something I object to. It is not a ghetto cinema, it is a people’s cinema defined by Nigerians and kept afloat by Nigerians.”
While saying the industry evolved from grassroots as a way of documenting social events, Okome points out that it reflects issues in society like television. “It is a popular culture.”
He notes as technology evolved and grew more affordable, the industry exploded. Despite the cheap budgets, its quality is improving from its rudimentary, home-video-style beginnings. “They are Nigerian stories. Perfect Nigerian stories. These are the stories Nigerian people want to see. Story about a man beating his wife, story about a man cheating his wife. A man going to jujuman in order to make money. These are our stories. In the America frontier films, the Wild, Wild, West films, they are stories about the American macho, masculine man conquering the frontiers: killing the red Indians in order to expand American interest. That’s their story, this is our story. These are the stories told by the filmmakers and it cannot be anything else.”
While admitting that the way the stories are told is actually the problem, the film scholar says, "The scripting is getting better, the actors are getting better."
He says distribution is a structural problem in the industry. “What is happening here, let us contextualise this, is that the distribution of Nollywood films have now moved up. It is advancement. When Nollywood started, it was okay for the marketer to just distribute their films to the stores. But that is no longer the case as Nollywood has gone global. It has gone transnational and as such, requires a different format for distribution.”
For him, the industry should set standards on distribution not government. “This what happens in every film culture.”
The academic, who will be home from July for the next one year to carry out more research on the industry is the convener of an international workshop titled Nollywood: A National Cinema? which holds at Kwara Hotel/Kwara State University, Malete, Ilorin, Nigeria from July 7 to 10, says the workshop will answer, inevitably, questions asked about how the social and cultural veracity of the art of Nollywood coalesce into one grand probe. According to him, “this workshop interrogates the intersection between the nation as a narrative entity and the uses of Nollywood as agent of this act of narrativity.”
Nollywood is one of the fastest-growing film industries in the world, and one of the largest, too, in terms of output, alongside Bollywood, based on UNESCO’s survey conducted a few years ago. Nigeria produces a staggering 2,500 films a year. Onookome Okome, Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a leading expert on Nigerian films, tells GREGORY AUSTIN NWAKUNOR that the attempts to ghettorise the film industry is wrong.
YOUR assessment of Nollywood?: He looks up and smiles, “it has sustained itself. There’s a lot to be said about the industry; this is why it is seen everywhere, I can tell you, from my last count, that there have been two full-length documentaries on Nollywood. I was interviewed in the latest one. Even though I object to the title of the film, I still believe that it is good for the industry. The title of the documentary is Nollywood Babylon, which I’m not fond of.”
He draws a deep breath and remarks, “but the point that is made is crucial, for me that people are beginning to take proper and serious interest in the cinema culture, which is very, very Nigeria, though it is now global, it is also pan-African; there’s element of pan Africanism in Nollywood that it cannot be ignored at all. These elements you will find in the connection that Nigerian filmmakers are having with people in Kenya, Malawi, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, in terms of reception and consumption, also Africans in the Diaspora, in St. Lucia and the Caribbean, the films are very popular, in many ways, we can say that Nollywood is very much alive and it is really a great honour to Nigerians at the point where it all began.”
Okome says with pride, “since we started writing seriously about the industry, I mean since our very first serious essay on Nollywood, which I did with Prof. Jonathan Haynes of Brooklyn College, Long Island University in New York, a lot of people have started working seriously about it. But some of them are working from a very ethnographic point of view. And it seems to me that those people working in that area have tended to see the films as a replication of the lives that we live in Nigeria; this is not true. It is a representation, not the real thing. And because of this misconception about the film culture and the way it represents the society, there is the tendency for a certain discourse to build around it, which emphasises the very common thing such as there is juju, women are maltreated, oh, it is full of repetitions. These are becoming some kind of stereotypes in its discourse, which is not good for the academic side of the industry because it is very diverse.”
The film expert says, “there are stories that are civilised and also there are stories that do not have anything to do with magic; there are all kinds of stories. Nollywood is not just one thing, it is many things.”
For Okome, what is called Nollywood today is a general name for a larger cinema culture that has subsidiaries: including Yoruba, Hausa, Edo, Igbo and Urhobo. “They are part of the cinema culture, and anybody who is trying to deny that is just trying to make a fragmentation out of nothing.”
Living in Bondage (1992), a classic credited with kick-starting the industry, was made in Ibo but later dubbed into English.
As the industry grew, movies were made in Pidgin, a broken English that Nigerians with different mother languages use to communicate. And that has made the films accessible to all of Africa.
He says, the main industry began in Lagos, and has influenced other productions. “Nobody is going to tell me that Nollywood that began in Lagos did not influence the Ghanaian video films. Nobody is going to tell me that it did not influence the film industry coming up in Kampala.”
The University of Alberta professor explains, confidently: “I have just been invited to give a talk on the industry and its influence in Africa. I co-convened a conference last year at the University of Mainz, Germany, the title of the conference was Nollywood and Beyond and what we tried to do at that conference was to define the film culture inside and outside Nigeria, we found from the papers presented its influence on the continent.”
He adds, “we found out that we cannot reduce the industry into one thing: that it is juju, or that it is made in three or four days, these are the kind of impressions that don’t have anything to do with the practice itself. If you encourage that kind of discussion, you are minimising the artistic input that these filmmakers inject in the making of the films. You just cannot do that. That is the reason I don’t like the documentary called Nollywood Babylon, by trying to mobilise the idea of the industry as Babel, it is like ghettorising the wonderful cinema practice that it has been doing from time to time. Ghettorisation is something I object to. It is not a ghetto cinema, it is a people’s cinema defined by Nigerians and kept afloat by Nigerians.”
While saying the industry evolved from grassroots as a way of documenting social events, Okome points out that it reflects issues in society like television. “It is a popular culture.”
He notes as technology evolved and grew more affordable, the industry exploded. Despite the cheap budgets, its quality is improving from its rudimentary, home-video-style beginnings. “They are Nigerian stories. Perfect Nigerian stories. These are the stories Nigerian people want to see. Story about a man beating his wife, story about a man cheating his wife. A man going to jujuman in order to make money. These are our stories. In the America frontier films, the Wild, Wild, West films, they are stories about the American macho, masculine man conquering the frontiers: killing the red Indians in order to expand American interest. That’s their story, this is our story. These are the stories told by the filmmakers and it cannot be anything else.”
While admitting that the way the stories are told is actually the problem, the film scholar says, "The scripting is getting better, the actors are getting better."
He says distribution is a structural problem in the industry. “What is happening here, let us contextualise this, is that the distribution of Nollywood films have now moved up. It is advancement. When Nollywood started, it was okay for the marketer to just distribute their films to the stores. But that is no longer the case as Nollywood has gone global. It has gone transnational and as such, requires a different format for distribution.”
For him, the industry should set standards on distribution not government. “This what happens in every film culture.”
The academic, who will be home from July for the next one year to carry out more research on the industry is the convener of an international workshop titled Nollywood: A National Cinema? which holds at Kwara Hotel/Kwara State University, Malete, Ilorin, Nigeria from July 7 to 10, says the workshop will answer, inevitably, questions asked about how the social and cultural veracity of the art of Nollywood coalesce into one grand probe. According to him, “this workshop interrogates the intersection between the nation as a narrative entity and the uses of Nollywood as agent of this act of narrativity.”
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