Diversity Within Yoruba-Language Video Films

After two decades of prolific growth, Nigeria’s video film industry, commonly called Nollywood, has garnered significant scholarly attention. The emergence of Nollywood studies is indebted to several seminal surveys, including Jonathan Haynes and Onokome Okome’s Nigerian Video Films (2000), Foluke Ogunleye’s African Video Film Today (2003), and Mahir Saul and Ralph Austen’s Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (2010). What is called for today, however, are investigations focused on the great diversity among the myriad titles that appear for sale across West Africa every year. Language has offered a natural means of categorizing these videos. It is true that a Yoruba-language film follows a distinctly different social life from screenplay to first screening compared to, say, one of Kannywood’s Hausa-language films. But more important, each film responds to and carries forward a particular cinematic tradition. In the case of contemporary Yoruba-language video film, Wole Ogundele has argued convincingly that we might find its antecedents in the alarinjo traveling folk opera of the recent past. The films reviewed here—Olu Olowogemo’s Bosun Omo Yankee (2011), Funke Akindele and Abbey Lanre’s Omo Getto (2011), and Tunde Kelani’s Ma’ami (2011)—complicate the notion that Yoruba video film represents a monolithic body of videos. In the rapidly changing environment of Nigerian video film, what has emerged is a splintering of productions, differing in production value, financial investment, target audience, and aesthetic form. While the films selected here demonstrate the diversity of Yoruba-language video film today, they do share a thematic preoccupation with Nigeria’s place amidst the wider global cultural economy. We might ask how each constructs its narrative and positions its viewers around images and ideas of global and local culture, especially popular cultural forms like music and sports.

Written, produced, and directed by Olu Olowogemo, Bosun Omo Yankee is the director/actor’s only film to date. Bosun (Olu Olowogemo), once a destitute young artist plucking his guitar by the roadside, now returns from America as an international pop star, bringing with him unimaginable wealth, an American swagger, and an ostentatious sense of pride. He refuses even to perform for his own community and rejects his family’s ultimatum to build a home in the village or remove Amubieya, the family name, from his own. Indeed, Bosun gladly renames himself according to his stage persona, Omo Yankee (Yankee Boy), donning sunglasses, flashy gold necklaces, and an American flag tee-shirt. Meanwhile, Bosun’s childhood friend Olanrewaju is deported from America under suspicion of fraudulently appropriating $15 million. With little proof or due process, the Nigerian authorities detain Lanre for the crime and even charge him with “tarnishing the nation’s image abroad.” Lanre’s mother and wife are unable to convince Bosun to post bail for his friend and must enlist the help of a sympathetic detective who fights for Lanre’s release. Bosun’s meteoric rise and Lanre’s demise suggest the film’s melodramatic aesthetics, whereby reality is recast as a moral struggle between virtue and vice. We learn that Bosun’s wealth and fame are the fruits of an occult pact with a sorcerer, whereas Lanre’s faith in prayer only grows with his time in jail.

When all hope for Lanre’s freedom seems lost, two representatives of the Harejan Company in America fortuitously arrive to acquit him of all charges, having discovered a phone message between Bosun and Lanre that implicates Bosun in the disappearance of the $15 million. Lanre is to be exonerated and restored to his former position with the Harejan Company. This triumph of virtue is paired with the downfall of Bosun. The police interrupt his highly anticipated public performance to apprehend him and bring him before...