A Revolution from Below: The Aesthetics of West African Videofilms

A REVOLUTION FROM BELOW THE AESTHETICS OF WEST AFRICAN VIDEOFILMS Ak in Ade sok a n D uring the third quarter of 2003 (that is, between June and September), there was a new and predictably controversial phen o m e n o n on African televisions, drawing applause and vitriol in equal measures. A reality TV show called Big Brother Africa was screened on network television across the continent. Eight youth from different African countries were sequestered in the purpose-built Big Brother Africa house in South Africa for 106 days and were set tasks in which one contestant after another failed until a beautiful Zambian woman, Cherise Makubale, emerged as the winner, taking all of $100,000. The popularity of a live show that focused on sex, money, and social intrigue can be imagined in a society in which youth constitutes more than half the population. But it was banned from public airwaves in certain countries for the same reasons that it was popularly received, and the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka described it as "a wanton celebration of banality, immorality," adding: "I'll rather spend an idle hour or two watching the most atrocious Nigerian h o m e videos than spend a minute watching the moral corruption called Big Brother Africa."^ I never saw the show, but if I were in Lagos, I would have watched every episode of it, provided there were no power outages. I am attracted by the kind of material force this show has generated, and this I find applicable to the circumstances surrounding the emergence of videofilms in West Africa. In terms of sheer impact, the videofilm practice has proved to be a case of disarming irony. It grew out of a benign form of piracy, and it took a while for even its earliest producers to acknowledge its legitimacy . In less than twenty years, though, the videofilm has all but changed the discourse of global cinema. Only the most enchanted American journalists still write about it as local curiosity. For the record, the term Soyinka used to describe this form—home video—is inappropriate; the conventional sense of the term does not address the pervasive public appeal, the public nature, of the videofilm form. The films are, first of all, commercial products; they are commodities. They are mass-produced and mass-marketed, but without the elaborate system of national or international distribution that the discipline of film studies has come to associate with "industrial cinema." In another sense, a sense that complicates Theodor Adorno's notion of the "culture industry," they are products of industry in places where there has been little industrialization. This absence of industrialization , which has prevented the formation of a proletariat on the nineteenth-century European model, means that the publics are not completely anonymous or undifferentiated, and this would 6 0 . N k a Journal of Contem porary African Art Fall 2007 Nka * 6 1 have enormous significance for the nature of the audience for videofilms. In their earliest, most rudimentary form, they were shot on video cameras and edited in makeshift studios with a couple of monitors; the entire process took place on a budget of about $4,000. Things have become more complicated now, due to increased demand and the sense of a burgeoning industry. The videofilmmakers are simultaneously businessmen /women and artists, who must produce things that would sell. They broaden the range of their audience, which includes them in a cyclical process of reception, production, and reproduction , by popularizing new ways of being in society in modes that large numbers of people can comprehend . The films are produced and consumed within West Africa, exhibited to teeming city and rural audiences, and in Nigeria alone, at the last count, they have generated revenues in excess of $300 million annually. They are providing jobs for hundreds of graduates of departments of drama and performing arts whose training for the stage or "Hollywood" has had to be streamlined to respond to the popularity of the videofilms. They are an indispensable aspect of the local economy. But this is not to say that they do not physically travel—they are viewed and reviewed by West African immigrant...