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14 “How They See It”: The Politics and Aesthetics of Nigerian Video Films Akin Adesokan The diversi¤cation of the media of expression for the Traveling Theater troupes no doubt re®ects, among other things, the commodi¤cation of popular artistic and cultural expression in order to exploit the cultural and psychological needs of the newly citi¤ed masses for entertainment, diversion and even escapism. —Biodun Jeyifo (1984, 76) KKK is the unselfconscious popular abbreviation of Kodun, Kopo, Kope (Beautiful , Surplus and Lasting1 ), the title of a Nigerian video ¤lm2 released in June 2002. It is the two-part (as of December) story of Chief Rhodes, a multimillionaire who wills half his wealth to the child of his pregnant daughter. The shock of her father’s sudden death results in Mope losing her baby. Desperate for a child, Tunji Daniels, an otherwise supportive husband, engages in extramarital affairs, with unforeseen consequences for Rhodes’s legatees as well as his extended family. KKK advertises itself as a “super modern Yoruba ¤lm,” is subtitled, and engages an eclectic cast that pits Alhaji Kareem Adepoju, the famous Baba Wande of Yoruba traveling theatre,against Shan George,who speaks accented Yoruba and has appeared in English-language video ¤lms. It is so cutting edge in topicality that a character would, for an outrageous example,invoke Osama bin Laden and America as a metaphor for the tension between himself and his mistress. These, then, are two distinctive features of Nigerian video ¤lms as an extremely popular art form: an imaginatively willful, even reckless stitching together of extensive references to local and global events, personalities, images, and—not the least in this particular case—the abbreviated popular title, KKK, which blithely references a traumatic historical event abroad—an equally willful ideological ambivalence. I underscore this shortcoming only to the extent that it enables a more productive viewing of the ¤lms. The ambivalence represents a paradoxical space for critiques of power, as Karin Barber (1986, 27) sug- gests regarding Yoruba popular theatre (one of the form’s antecedents), but it is also being productively explored in a distinctly artistic manner in some of the video ¤lms. I will examine the socioeconomic context of the form’s emergence and discuss how this context is responsible for the political and aesthetic choices that frame the ¤lms as artistic products. In the early 1990s, popular drama, hitherto presented on the stage, television, or the cinema as the work of actor-producers of the Yoruba traveling theatre (excepting English-language teledramas), took on a new life as ¤lms that were shot on video and digital cameras, exhibited, and mass marketed. Offspring of the traveling performers still constitute a major force in the video ¤lm practice and their works still retain fragments of the troupe character, but the hitherto crucial system of guild association has given way to “caucuses,”a different form of organization that acknowledges competition and collaboration with Igbo traders and English-language ¤lmmakers. Re®ecting on the economic environment that impoverished the celluloid¤lm but accelerated the explosion of the video ¤lm, Bernard Belasco ponders the enormous power of international ¤nance capital under which the local entrepreneur had to work. It was a context in which the imperatives of global oil demand short-circuited the role of the entrepreneur in Nigerian development (Belasco 1980,193).Although Belasco does not directly address the theatre troupes, the position the groups occupied as entrepreneurs and their close association with the world of urban masses as actors on the margin of externally controlled economic systems framed them into the picture. Filmmaker Ola Balogun had been drawn to collaborating with traveling-theatre artists (Hubert Ogunde and Adeyemi Afolayan) by the popularity of the genre in which they worked; there was a ready market for their supernatural stories of devious witches, magical transformations, and sundry Manichean themes and, to all appearances, a ¤lm industry was taking root in Nigeria. It still constitutes what is often referred to as the golden era of the Nigerian cinema, roughly the period between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s, during which, to varying results , trained ¤lmmakers such as Balogun, Francis Oladele, Eddie Ugbomah, and Ladi Ladebo shot feature ¤lms in Yoruba and English in 35mm and 16mm formats. Popular though they were, the ¤lms of this period constituted little more than “¤lmed theater,” “characterized by a purveyance of mediocrity as genial art . . . a practice [that] negates the original code of traditional Yoruba traveling theater” (Ukadike 1994, 149). Apart...

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