Africa Shoots Back with Exploding Video Film Industries
Horror films being produced in Tanzania. Pentecostal films being produced in Kinshasa. Films on corruption in Nigeria. South African Bollywood being shot in Durban. These are just some of the things I learned at an international conference that took place in Mainz, Germany @ Johannes Gutenberg University to explore the explosion of Nollywood in a conference titled, "Nollywood and Beyond: Transnational Dimensions of an African Film Industry.
For four days, I was among about 30 scholars who worked in cinema studies, anthropology, African studies, and several other fields, but who specialized in studying the Nigerian video film industry or Nollywood, and its impact on Africa.
This conference reinforced that the latest research on Africans, and those of its diaspora explore them as producers and active users of media and new media. This is a shift from the traditional focus on representation. Though representation is still a critical facet of media studies, the switch stresses an area of research that looks at how marginalized voices become parallel contenders in creating the global media landscape. As well, this was an excellent intense introduction on how African popular culture is formed.
The Nigerian film industry is commonly known as "Nollywood." However, this is just a generic title that is currently being debated due to the other film industries that emerged at the same time of Nollywood or slightly before (like Ghana films or Hausa films in Northern Nigeria).
Since films that have been noted as "Nollywood" have grown exponentially, and have become the third largest film industry in the world, "Nollywood" is a household name throughout Africa and in African migrant communities who are dispersed outside of their native homes. This is impressive to say that this industry really ignited in 1992, less than twenty years ago.
Nollywood borrows heavily from Hollywood, Bollywood and Latin Novelas, but is distinct in many ways. One of the most salient differences is that it turned a post-colonial survival strategy into a cultural phenomenon and a thriving economic system that has given millions of people a way to sustain throughout the contient.
In the early 80s, Aglophone African filmmakers who were trained to use celluloid films started to experiment with video cameras to make movies. This experimentation had many reasons, two of them being that celluloid films were too costly to make and nightlife in Nigerian cities were virtually wiped out due to a collapse in the national economy. The exploding violent activities when the sun went down (and especially when the power was out) also eliminated a cinema culture that could not show in the evenings due to safety, but also, no one could afford to go see movies.
In Nigeria, using video recorders was a cheaper method. It also was the best way to distribute films in Nigeria since most Nigerians still owned dated VCRs or devices that played CVDs (a machine that plays CDs and compact videos). Some people say that the overwhelming number (as compared to other African countries) was due to Asian countries dumping old technology into Nigeria, but also, this country carries the legacy of having the first national television network system in Africa that catered to a number of citizens who owned technology due to the oil boom of the 50s & 60s. These factors and more created fertile ground for a viewing audience.
The spread of Nollywood throughout Nigeria in the early 90s, then quickly to the rest of Africa marked an unpredicted cultural, economic and media explosion where African people are employing new age technology in the most remote of areas. I even heard the story of a local medicine man in Igbo state Nigeria who used a Nollywood film to show an apprentice the different stages of madness.
Also, I learned that this film industry is so popular that it is translated in French for Francophone countries, and has served as a model to create other film industries like Mollywood (Mali), Kollywood (Kano State in Northern Nigeria), and an emerging industry in Uganda.
In Tanzania, video filmmakers used Nollywood to create a horror film industry that fuses vampires and mythological creatures from their traditional history to talk about the blood-sucking corruption and HIV/AIDS. In South Africa, those of the Indian Diaspora create a genre that heavily relies on Bollywood, but captures some Nigerian video film elements of pop culture.
Overall, it was very interesting to see how one group uses media and the technology then apply it to their own cultural and economic realities. The conference was just the beginning of connecting the dots to an untapped mediascape, Africa.
