Nollywood: Prisms and Paradigms

The emergence in the 1990s of Nollywood, the iconoclastic Nigerian popular film culture, was met with ambivalence, even derision, in normative African cinema circles partly because of its rough-and-ready production practices, stylistic mélanges, humdrum soundtracks, stilted dialogue, prevalent technical lapses, chaotic straight-to-video distribution, commerce-driven ethos, and proclivity for melodrama, the supernatural, and occult horror.¹ However, in melding various film genres and establishing diverse representational registers, narratives, and themes; by exploring global popular cultural forms but emphasizing stories that ordinary Africans can identify with; and by allowing wellsprings of talent to emerge and develop, it has created critical spaces and reference points for the reappraisal of African cinema, of its history and future.

Remarkably, without critical sustenance, plaudits in Western festival circuits, government support, or international funding schemes, Nollywood’s eclecticism has inspired a renascent filmmaking movement across Africa, as illustrated by the number of “woods” springing up across the continent: for example, Riverwood (Kenya), Ghollywood (Ghana), and Bongowood (Tanzania), all enkindling prospects for national cinemas.² Deeply plugged into the dynamics of contemporary African cultural formations and eschewing orthodox expectations, in establishing thriving continental and global markets, Nollywood has transcended a long-standing challenge for African cinema.

Whether seen as a touchstone or a scourge for African cinema, Nollywood is a complicated cultural, artistic, commercial, and transnational phenomenon. Whereas African cinema emerged during the era of anti-colonial nationalism, Nollywood, in a “postcolonial” milieu, embraces “globalized” popular cultures, creatively linking them to local concerns and purposes and engendering vibrant hybrid cultures and identities.³ In breaking the mold of African cinema, through the formulation of unique, vernacular grammars of representation, Nollywood challenges conceptualization of the former through erstwhile, ostensibly inviolate categories, even approximating Djibril Diop Mambety’s vision of films de poche (pocket films).⁴

Emerging out of a tense Nigerian social milieu and heady entrepreneurial culture, Nollywood’s commercial pressures engendered, in a self-reflexive way, an enduring palimpsestic framework; in its formative era, unsold VHS copies of Nollywood films were simply taped over, and proven formulas, or successful narratives, still see seemingly endless cycles of repetition and permutation. The focus in this essay is on the institutional, social, and economic configurations that shape its creative thrusts, modes of production, and consumption; as Nollywood, given the relentless dynamics that drive it, is always in a state of flux, constantly reworking proven formulas and reformulating conventions of the “popular.”

Not surprisingly, Nollywood’s breakout production, Living in Bondage (Chris Obi Rapu, 1992), with its pact-with-the-devil premise, is a melodramatic narrative about social ambiguities, cultural and moral fragmentation, juxtaposed to elements of Pentecostalism, the arcane, and critiques of materialism that laid tracks for a popular cinema culture that attracts and sustains its audiences by exploring the shadows and paradoxes of the quotidian.

It merits underscoring how decades of social, cultural, and political upheavals provided ready indexes and a nexus for Nollywood narratives and offered frameworks of engagement with the complicated tangents and trajectories of the everyday. These narratives, whether spurred by the rise of the tabloid press in Nigeria or rumors and gossip floating in the social imaginary, were often presented as “true stories” or “based on a story.” With such intertextual resonances, the narratives’ relationship between “the real” as source or inspiration and its reworking—with dramatic twists or even commentary—is very significant. Nollywood’s penchant for the quotidian and its focus on life lessons inevitably intervene in the social and political imaginaries not just through its narrative premises but also in terms of how its narratives unfold as bearers of meanings. Its practitioners and producers, aiming for profit, often abdicate intricacies. Remarkably, no sooner had an Ebola outbreak in West Africa been reported in March 2014, and the abduction of school girls in Chibok, Nigeria, by Boko Haram a month after, all causing global consternation, than some Nollywood titles ostensibly on the subjects emerged, even though neither issue had been resolved and that some Nollywood practitioners joined the ensuing wave of social activism.

The contemporary was and continues to be integral to Nollywood diegetic realms, even though one...