Ada Mbano in London dir. by Theodore Anyanji (review)

Released in late 2014, Ada Mbano in London (2014), directed by Theodore Anyanji, represents one of the latest contributions to the burgeoning genre of Nollywood films set abroad. However, despite the obvious overlap in the titles, Ada Mbano in London is not a sequel to the famous Osuofia in London (dir. Kingsley Ogoro, 2003). While the homage to Ogoro’s film is evident, this film takes the heroine, Adaure (also known as Ada Mbano), in her voyage from Lagos to London simply to “see more of the world”—to acquire a certain cosmopolitanism on the eve of her marriage to a worldly Nigerian senator. The character of Ada, as played by the Nollywood star Queen Nwokoye, is at the center of an expanding film series that started in 2012 with Anyaji’s Adaure, a nearly shot-by-shot Igbo-language remake of his largely English-language Levels Don Change (2012), which stars Uche Elendu in the familiar role of a self-serving village girl who moves to the big city under the pretext of enrolling in university. With the intense, raspy-voiced Nwokoye replacing the relatively restrained Elendu, Adaure shifts even closer to the template set in Funke Akindele Jé ní fà series about a “razz village girl” who goes to Lagos, gets a makeover, and finds herself in deep trouble. While this feminized village-to-city trajectory is certainly a hallmark of Nollywood movies, one that dates all the way back to the groundbreaking Glamour Girls (dir. Chika Onukwufor, 1994), Jé ní fà gave the trope a fresh spin, courtesy of its inspired antics, which revive and extend certain performance techniques familiar from the Yorùbá theatrical tradition. If Nwokoye’s performance style in Ada Mbano in London—the fifth film in the Adaure series—evokes that of Nkem Owoh (who played Osuofia), it does so through the mediating influence of the great Funke Akindele. However, where Jé ní fà ’s use of Yorùbá is entirely expected in the Yorùbá-language film, Ada’s occasional bursts of Igbo are presented as eccentric interruptions in the largely English-language Ada Mbano in London, reflecting the investment of Anyanji’s film in certain notions of Anglophone sophistication.

Like Osuofia, Ada is comically malapropism-prone. However, unlike her equally Igbo-identified counterpart, she is not interested in preserving the sanctity of the Igbo language or of Igbo culture. Neither is the film, which pivots around Ada’s acceptance of the “progressive,” emphatically Anglophone connections between Lagos and London. Anyanji gets considerable comic mileage out of the character’s abuse of the English language while appearing to chide her for her lack of linguistic skills; he often frames Nwokoye in close-up so that the spectator may observe how her mouth mangles various words and phrases, and he offers copious cutaways to characters who, unbeknownst to Ada, laugh at her failures—a laughter in which the spectator is invited to share. In striking contrast, in the Jé ní fà series the title character is regularly reminded of the beauty of her Yorùbá heritage and she is even punished repeatedly for her alleged transgressions, which include an eagerness to dress like a Western “video ho” with clothes acquired from an English-speaking retailer. In the original Jé ní fà, rural Yorùbáland is the place to which the character must repair in order to restore her dignity. For Ada, however, the Igbo-identified village—the character’s own place of origin—is an embarrassment.

Struggling to shed her provincialism, Ada must first work on her “bush English.” “I am dying of suspension!” she screams at one point, before mis-characterizing the British Consulate as “the British course mate,” and the United Kingdom as “the United Country.” Set to marry Senator Afam (Tony Chukwu), Ada is well aware of her shortcomings and willing to surmount them through education (a trait that links her more to Jé ní fà than to Owoh’s arrogantly self-deceiving...