Yoruba Video Comedies: You Don’t Know Lagos

It is surprising how little writing one finds on comedy in African cinema. If we recall that African cinema has historically defined itself by its “seriousness” of political, cultural, or artistic intent, we might understand why, for that tradition, comedy is viewed as indulgent or undignified. But for Nollywood, comedy has been standard fare for some time. In fact, one of the highest grossing video films, Kingsley Ogoro’s Osuofia in London (2004), a farce about a bush hunter who travels to London, is considered a classic Nollywood blockbuster. The film is a variation on the perennial story of the village fool who travels to the city only to find himself comically bewildered by urban life. In the films under review here, London is replaced by Lagos—no less a global metropolis—but the humor is much the same. In Femi Adebayo’s Jelili, the town trickster is banished to Lagos, where ironically he finds himself the victim of big city tricksters. In Tope Daramola’s Ipaja si Idumota ninu BRT (Impaja to Idumota on the BRT), a pair of scoundrels are run out of town, and though one finds work as a ticket collector on the Lagos bus (Bus Rapid Transit), his antics remain unchanged. The protagonist of Muyideen Ayinde’s O o M’Eko (You Don’t Know Lagos) is not a trickster, but a naive fool who is framed for murder and flees to Lagos where he falls in with a gang of Area boys.

Each of these films turns on the scene of the protagonist’s arrival in Lagos, which opens onto all manner of slapstick humor. These scenes work to cast the country bumpkin as an illiterate, unable to decipher the city’s incoherent spaces, inscrutable social networks, and unspoken laws. The protagonist’s estrangement reflects the general alienation one never ceases to feel in a city like Lagos, where uncertainty has become a generalized condition of everyday life. The village fool is humorously tormented for not being “in the know,” and yet his clowning around defamiliarizes what the urban viewer already knows all too well. That is to say that comedies of this sort are as revealing as they are distracting. Of course, as a genre, comedy produces its levity by distracting viewers from the potential gravity of its subject matter. And yet it is perhaps precisely for this reason that comedies are able to probe the most controversial fault lines of Nigerian society.

In the postcolonial African city, innumerable lifeways converge and diverge in the “incessant provisionality and innovation” that Abdou Maliq Simone says is characteristic of urban Africa (1998:76). Improvisation is necessary in all dimensions of daily life where no condition is permanent. In Lagos one provides for one’s own water, electricity, and security, a fact that led the geographer Matthew Gandy to quip that Lagos, a city characterized by political and economic instability, petro-capitalist development, and a severe contraction of the public sphere is a “self-service city” (2006:388). For those living in Lagos, this translates into a shared sense of personal vulnerability and apprehension about the uncertainty of what is to come. Onookome Okome calls Lagos “the anxious city,” noting that the metropolis “is anxious about its own status in the global tide of goods and services and other kinds of exchange, and its citizens are insecure and anxious of their place within it” (2004:71). This all makes Lagos a rich site within the popular Nigerian imagination.

The comedies in question play on this popular vision of the city. Jelili opens in a small town that is quickly...