[For Akinwunmi Isola, raconteur, master storyteller and cineaste]
It seems so obvious now that it surprises me a lot that I did not readily or easily realize as I watched Nollywood films with Mama Sagamu that the producers and marketers of Nollywood do not make their films for people like me who do not talk back to or with the characters in their films. More pointedly, it surprises me now why, for a long time, I did not or could not answer Sade’s question with the simple but irrefutable answer that Nollywood filmmakers do not care one jot about people like Sade who ask what people see in their films. I mean, let’s face the fact here squarely: if hundreds of millions of people in Nigeria, Africa and around the world are watching your films and talking to characters in those films, what does it matter if cultural and social elites who do not talk back at films raise questions about the value of your films? As I see all too clearly now thanks to the humility that Mama Sagamu rather unknowingly taught me, this matter is like asking the makers of Hollywood blockbusters what the millions of filmgoers who flock to see their films see in their products. Terminator 1, 2 and 3 – what do the hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide who have seen and continue to watch them see in these films? Ask such a question if you wish, but both the makers and fans of these films are completely indifferent to the question.
I make this allusion to Hollywood blockbusters deliberately. There is a vast commercial, cultural and cinematic chasm separating the world of the big mega-studios that produce Hollywood blockbusters and the universe of the producers and marketers of Nollywood video films. For one thing, Hollywood studios spend vast sums of money to advertize, promote and “hype” their films. Moreover, they do have a more or less captive audience that was created over several decades. By contrast, Nollywood producers and marketers are still in the historic process of creating and consolidating their audience base. And if the truth must be told, they are as surprised as everybody else that people like Mama Sagamu love to watch their films. But having admitted these huge differences between Hollywood and Nollywood with regard to the creation and consolidation of audiences counted in the hundreds of millions, there are certain common features that both traditions share that throw considerable light on that question from Sade: “what is it that you and Mama Sagamu see in Nollywood films?” Let me explain.
It is a fundamental aspect of cultural modernity in every part of the world that capitalism seeks to create audiences for the arts, for music, for sports and almost all other forms of entertainment and recreation in their millions, indeed in their hundreds of millions. The key thing in this is to find the winning and repeatable formula that will keep the audiences coming and watching in their millions or in some cases even billions. It is thanks largely to Mama Sagamu that I came to realize that before our very eyes and without anyone knowing exactly how it all happened, Nollywood filmmakers have found the winning and repeatable formula that puts them far ahead and above any other national film tradition in Africa in terms of attracting audiences across the whole continent and the African diasporas in Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean. This is why in last week’s opening piece in this column I made the assertion that the single greatest historic and cultural significance of Nollywood is the fact that, for good or ill, it has completely replaced Hollywood and Bollywood films as the preferred traditions of films that Africans love to watch.
There is a theoretical or philosophical principle behind this achievement, but I have no room in this piece to explore it beyond merely identifying and stating it. This is the principle of the fundamental cultural, human and existential right and need of all the peoples of our common earth to self-representation. In plain language, this philosophical principle implies that as much as people everywhere in the world like to see and watch images of peoples from other lands and cultures, people everywhere prefer images and stories of themselves written and told by and for themselves. This is what Nollywood has achieved by massively displacing Hollywood and Bollywood as the cultural and commercial forces that for a very long time dominated the cinematic images that people in our continent could see. The interesting thing is why it was/is Nollywood which effected this “decolonization” and not any of the other national cinemas and video industries in Africa. Again, let me say that it was Mama Sagamu that made this perception very apparent, very clear to me.
Let me put these observations and claims in some very concrete terms. On the MNET-Africa Magic channels that are broadcast twenty-four hours round the clock, Nollywood films overwhelmingly dominate the films that are watched throughout the African continent. I do not have the exact figures, but it would not surprise me to learn that the dominance is as great as a factor of five to one in favour of Nollywood films compared with films from other African countries. More tellingly, Nollywood film stars are the best known and the most talked about in Africa, many of them being household names, names that show up in reports and even in comedy routines in many African countries. Speaking for myself, apart from a few Ghanaian actors, I do not know the names of any stars from South Africa or Tanzania or indeed any other country that command the attention, the allure of Nollywood actors. Thus, we arrive at the very intriguing fact that just as millions of audiences of Nollywood films talk back to the characters, so do millions also talk a lot about and are obsessed with the actors themselves. Above all else and more subliminally, it is becoming more and more apparent that a Nollywood content and style, a Nollywood formula of video filmmaking is beginning to creep into the filmmaking contents, styles and techniques of films from many of the other African countries.
This last point is about the most challenging task that we face in coming to some kind of critical and productive determination of Sade’s question that served as the catalyst for this series. If there is a composite Nollywood content, style or formula that has Mama Sagamu talking with and to the characters of Nollywood films in the intimacy of her own home or at the Ogunbiyis in Victoria Island, what is it? In the present context and as preliminary interpretive act, I can only provide a very broad outline of this Nollywood formula of filmmaking that has been so widely successful as to effect that “decolonization” of cinema in Africa from the dominance of Hollywood and Bollywood. Thus, first, a gripping melodrama of good versus evil is a constant factor in the scripts and storylines of Nollywood films. This is important if we bear in mind that melodrama is the most successful and popularizing genre of the modern era, especially in cinema. Secondly, there is the fact that Nollywood melodramas are acted with great, perhaps even exaggerated emotion, far more than films from other African countries. Thirdly, the same actors show up again and again in variations of the same melodramatic struggles of good against evil in Nollywood films. Moreover, these actors have so perfected their roles and routines that upon their very first appearance in a film, they elicit instant approving or enthralled responses from their adoring audiences. But then, there arises the question as to how this combination of content, formula and routines emerged and crystallize as the winning hallmarks of the Nollywood brand. I raise this point not as something to be explored in this series but as a topic for further reflection in a future series in this column.
Melodrama, in every genre and culture in the world, provides a charged but extremely over-simplifying presentation and “resolution” of the problems and crises of society and life itself. Nollywood video films have taken this tendency of melodrama to new, unprecedented levels of moral, spiritual and cultural darkness and depravity. The “solutions” provided in Nollywood films are often stunningly naïve and obfuscatory. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the overwhelming pervasiveness in Nollywood films of witchcraft and the occult as active determinants of human motivation, behaviour and fate. Indeed, it is doubtful if any other national tradition of filmmaking in modern times has been as deeply immersed in witchcraft and the occult as Nollywood films. This prompts the tantalizing question: Are Nollywood films so popular in the African continent because of, or in spite of their immersion in the occult?
A lot is happening to and within Nollywood. It is almost safe to project now that from its present continent-wide popularity as the “decolonizing” nemesis of the dominance of Hollywood and Bollywood in Africa that is however very contradictory in its contents and styles, scriptwriters and cineastes are at work in Nollywood who are using the popularity and the impact of the tradition to provide equally entertaining but more enlightened, subtle and progressive films. To one such person, one such visionary this concluding piece in the series is dedicated. He is Akinwunmi Isola. I do not know if Mama Sagamu has seen any of his films. But I shall be sure to make available to her a copy of Isola’s most recent film, Ofinga, a powerful, moving and also highly entertaining drama on how moral and legal squabbles within an extended family threaten the sense of right and wrong, of the just and the unjust and indeed the very humanity of all the characters in the film. If and when Mama watches Ofinga, I promise for once to join her in her accustomed running commentary on films!
