Nollywood The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres
by Jonathan Haynes
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Cloth: 978-0-226-38781-9 | Paper: 978-0-226-38795-6 | Electronic: 978-0-226-38800-7
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.001.0001
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Nigeria’s Nollywood has rapidly grown into one of the world’s largest film industries, radically altering media environments across Africa and in the diaspora; it has also become one of African culture’s most powerful and consequential expressions, powerfully shaping how Africans see themselves and are seen by others. With this book, Jonathan Haynes provides an accessible and authoritative introduction to this vast industry and its film culture.

Haynes describes the major Nigerian film genres and how they relate to Nigerian society—its values, desires, anxieties, and social tensions—as the country and its movies have developed together over the turbulent past two decades. As he shows, Nollywood is a form of popular culture; it produces a flood of stories, repeating the ones that mean the most to its broad audience. He interprets these generic stories and the cast of mythic figures within them: the long-suffering wives, the business tricksters, the Bible-wielding pastors, the kings in their traditional regalia, the glamorous young professionals, the emigrants stranded in New York or London, and all the rest. Based on more than twenty years of research, Haynes’s survey of Nollywood’s history and genres is unprecedented in scope, while his book also vividly describes landmark films, leading directors, and the complex character of this major branch of world cinema.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jonathan Haynes is professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is coauthor of Cinema and Social Change in West Africa and the editor of Nigerian Video Films.
 

REVIEWS

“A superb work of scholarship—and of love. This is the very first book on Nollywood to give the needed detailed account of the genres unique to it. Haynes gives those genres a careful and convincing assessment, linking them to their sociocultural and political contexts in Nigeria’s turbulent, chaotic, but ultimately buoyant and optimistic encounter with modernity.”
— Biodun Jeyifo, Harvard University

“Nollywood has rightly been recognized as one of the most dynamic forms of cultural production in Africa, one that opens up larger questions about the emergence of new film platforms that are of interest far beyond Africa. But until now no book has described in cohesive form the basic genres, major directors, and structural conditions of this film industry. In Nollywood, Jonathan Haynes does exactly this in a definitive text that will establish the scholarly study of Nigerian film for a generation. Written in a clear, engaging style, this is a book that can be read by newcomers and specialists alike. Nollywood represents the distillation of twenty years of research that reflects Haynes’ deep connections to Nigeria and Nigerian film. Its profusion of insights and comprehensive coverage promises that Nollywood will be the entry point for anyone interested in this innovative and vibrant film industry.”
— Brian Larkin, Columbia University

"What Haynes accomplishes with his latest book, then, is not just a blow-by-blow account of the history of Nollywood, its inner workings, and some of its canonical texts, but a convincing rationale of why the films produced by the industry matter."
— Pual Ugor, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars

"Jonathan Haynes’s Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres offers researchers and cinephiles alike a fitting template toward further elucidation and expansion on this atypical, chaotic, and consequential arena of world cinema."
— Film Matters

TABLE OF CONTENTS

- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0001
[Nigerian television;video;Yoruba traveling theater;media piracy;informal economy;Living in Bondage;African popular arts;aesthetics]
Video technology and the neoliberal deregulation of media environments permitted a true revolution in African filmmaking, overcoming the obstacles that have faced and limited celluloid African cinema. Nollywood had two principle precursors: the Yoruba traveling theater, an African popular art that extended into television and filmmaking; and the Nigerian Television Authority, arguably the most powerful force in creating a Nigerian national identity. In personnel and aesthetics, Nollywood sprang primarily from television serials, as illustrated by the inaugural Nollywood film Living in Bondage. This film appeared in 1992, a moment of crisis for the audio-visual sector and for Nigerian society generally. As Nigerians increasingly depended on the informal sector to get by, the “infrastructure of piracy” (Larkin) devised to service VCRs became the basis for marketing Nigerian video films on video cassettes. (pages 3 - 17)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0002
[Living in Bondage;money ritual;Igbo films;Pentecostalism;occult;melodrama;informal sector;West African markets;capitalism;business culture]
Living in Bondage opened the market for Nigerian video films. It founded the “get rich quick” theme and the money ritual genre (which remain hallmarks of Nollywood), grafting stories of predatory occult practices onto the idiom of domestic melodrama and the theme of ideal marriage. Its sturdy popular moral discourse blends Igbo social values and Pentecostalism. The film’s principle collaborators symbolize the basis of the new industry: they were Kenneth Nnebue, an informal sector marketer, the television director Chris Obi-Rapu, and Okechukwu Ogunjiofor, an unemployed writer/ producer. The circumstances of the production illustrate the connection between life in the informal sector and the film’s discourses on money and values. Nollywood is based in West African marketing, not in capitalism, and its ideology and aesthetics are marked by the disjunctions of Nigeria’s insertion into the global economy. The film also inaugurated a brief efflorescence of video filmmaking in the Igbo language. (pages 18 - 58)
This chapter is available at:
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- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0003
[Kenneth Nnebue;gender relations;professional women;sex trafficking;English language;Igbo language;video;aesthetics]
Glamour Girls (1994) was the first Nollywood film in English—a shift that allowed Nollywood to become the national and international giant it quickly became. Kenneth Nnebue, establishing himself as a filmmaker in his own right as well as the most powerful marketer in the young industry, continued some of the themes of Living in Bondage, notably relations between the sexes and the unprincipled scramble for wealth in Lagos, but now in a more secular context. His inventive formal strategies permit surveying of an extensive social space. “Glamour girls” (or “senior girls”) are professional women living outside of patriarchal control—scandalous figures in the Nigerian social imagination, associated with prostitution and danger. The sequel, Glamour Girls 2: The Italian Connection, features the international trafficking of sex workers, extending the themes to the exorbitant, the unnatural, and the supernatural. (pages 59 - 76)
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- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0004
[Genre;African family;women;women filmmakers;supernatural;melodrama;companionate marriage;romantic comedy;television serials]
The “family film” is the most common Nigerian film genre, its prominence related to the importance of women as consumers of Nollywood films. The family film’s melodramatic mode infiltrates other genres. Nollywood’s initial framing of the genre focused on the prosperous urban middle class nuclear family—a particular form of the African family, in tension with more extended versions. Often a Christian companionate marriage is under siege from extended kin or threatened internally by adultery. Betrayal by intimates is the most prevalent of all Nollywood themes. A close reading of Amaka Igwe’s Violated illustrates Nollywood’s typical reformulations of transnational forms of romantic comedy and television serials: fertility issues trump all others, and interest is deflected from the moment of romantic choice to threats to already constituted marriages. Various supernatural forces that may manifest themselves in this genre are catalogued: ghosts, divination, sorcery, spirit possession, and Pentecostalism. (pages 77 - 112)
This chapter is available at:
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- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0005
[Tunde Kelani;Yoruba;Yoruba traveling theater;auteur criticism;Nigerian cinema;literature;African arts;morality;music]
Tunde Kelani is Nigeria’s leading film director and the one most naturally approached through auteur criticism. He works independently and his films embody a consistent vision. Kelani gained experience in all of Nollywood’s precursors: the Yoruba traveling theater tradition, Nigerian television, and Nigerian celluloid cinema. He stands apart from Nollywood and from the Yoruba-language film industry but is an inspiration to both. His fierce commitment to preserving Yoruba culture as a living force in the present, his moral commitment, and his progressive, ecumenical vision of Nigeria make him a central figure in contemporary Nigerian culture. His pioneering video film Ti Oluwa Nile was a collaboration with Yoruba traveling theater artists; most subsequent films are based on literary works or collaborations with writers, using actors that evoke a variety of Nigerian cultural sectors. His cinema is a total art form incorporating music, dance, and other African arts. (pages 113 - 138)
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- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0006
[Cultural epic;African history;historical representation;Igbo kingship;ideology;Achebe;royal;Nollywood actors;precolonial Africa;tradition]
The cultural epic genre is set in the “traditional,” precolonial past. The genre was cofounded by The Battle of Musanga, which conceives of Igbo history in the manner of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Igodo, which is legendary and archetypal. The genre is ambivalent in its interpretation of the past, presenting it alternately as a source of cultural richness and righteous order, or as a nightmare of tyranny and dark spiritual forces requiring intervention by Christian missionaries. Epics normally center on an igwe (an Igbo king), though historically Igbo societies were seldom monarchies. The king is also an ambivalent figure, either a virtuous priest/king ensuring harmony or a tyrant. The genre was launched at the end of military rule and was originally preoccupied with political and spiritual issues, but romance became increasingly important. The genre of “royal films” with contemporary settings springs from epics about romances in royal families. (pages 141 - 164)
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- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0007
[Nigerian politics;village;violence;crime films;vigilantes;press;popular justice;occult;shrines;Igbo;rumor]
The breakdown of law and order in Nigeria created general terror. A series of scandals linked violence, political power, and occult forces: rumors of money rituals practiced by the elite caused rioting; a vigilante group, the Bakassi Boys, armed themselves with spiritual weapons; many politicians were exposed as clients of a corpse-littered shrine. Nollywood reacted to these scandals, renewing its key symbolic complex, the money ritual, and creating the new subgenre of vigilante films. Villages are the preeminent imagined community for these dramas, seen as the crucial arena for struggles over governance and for spiritual conflicts among traditional, Christian, and predatory occult forces. The village genre localizes these struggles in a dense social fabric. Other kinds of crime film arose at the same time, around 2000; they show various foreign influences, but Nollywood’s crime genre is distinct, family melodrama and spiritual interventions largely displacing detective work. (pages 165 - 191)
This chapter is available at:
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- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0008
[Nigerian politics;ideology;political films;African popular culture;military rule;Sani Abacha;contemporary Nigerian history;melodrama;traditional rulers]
Nollywood has a reputation for avoiding political issues, but a genre of “political films” emerged after the end of military rule in 1999. Nollywood extended strategies it had already developed to represent the workings of power in society. Traditional rule by kings and chiefs becomes an allegory for national politics in Kelani’s Saworoide and Agogo Eewo. The money ritual film is a vehicle for analyzing mechanisms of political predation in Nnebue Rituals. The family film, whose melodramatic mode is suited to the highly personalized forms of power in Nigeria, turned to the political elite, as in Dark Goddess and Stubborn Grasshopper, which tells the story of the dictator Sani Abacha. Given the un-ideological character of Nigerian politics, the moralism that Nollywood shares with African popular culture effectively addresses much that matters in governance as well as expressing the grassroots desire for justice. (pages 192 - 213)
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- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0009
[Film comedy;Nollywood;Asaba;Onitsha;Nollywood marketers;Pidgin;Mikhail Bakhtin;rogue;Nkem Owoh;village;history]
Major shifts in Nollywood shortly after 2000 included greatly increased power for the marketers, a shift of filmmaking and financing to the Igbo cities of Asaba, Enugu, and Onitsha, a crisis of overproduction, and comedy emerging as a prominent commercial genre. The figure of the rogue or trickster is central in the Nigerian comic tradition, as is Pidgin, a contact language associated with unofficial laughter, truth-telling, the lower classes, and what Bakhtin called dialogism and the grotesque. Unlike other Nigerian film genres, comedy is weakly associated with a specific location or plot form, often parodying or sharing themes with other genres.. Some films by Nkem Owoh, the greatest Nollywood comic actor, have village settings and perspectives. Issues that cause stress in other genres are treated with confidence in the resilience of communities, but difficulties in the politics of development are presented with sober clarity and complicity. (pages 214 - 234)
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- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0010
[Nollywood;diaspora;African immigrants;Nigerian expatriates;genre;London;United States;film aesthetics]
A genre of films about Nigerians living overseas has been produced through collaborations between the Nollywood industry and African immigrant communities in Europe, North America, Brazil, China, and elsewhere. The point of view ranges from that of settled expatriates to one grounded at home in Nigeria. An extension of Nollywood film culture, the genre has a typical setting, story arc, moral and psychological themes, and formal features. Under the harsh conditions of undocumented immigration, the protagonists must make contact with an African expatriate community, which normally becomes their principle horizon. Often they are forced into drug dealing or prostitution. Betrayal and the question of what one is willing to do for money are common themes. The genre explores opposing sides of the national character as Nigerians conceive of it, in both harrowing and comic versions. (pages 237 - 256)
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- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0011
[Nigerian universities;students;campus cults;sexuality;women characters;audience;demographics;youth;prostitution;crime]
The important Nollywood genre of films set on university campuses evolved to reflect the experience of the university graduates in the film industry and to target an emerging youth demographic in a new segmentation of the Nollywood audience. The campus is presented as a field for power struggles between individual personalities and cabals. Student cultism is an important fact on campuses and dominates the genre. Women’s cults are associated with prostitution and lesbianism. Strong women characters abound. Campuses are autonomous spaces; campus films are also devoid of fundamental structures of Nigerian society and themes of Nollywood film culture, including family, ethnic culture, traditional social structures and values, and a supernatural dimension. Many other non-campus films targeted at the younger audience and about youthful love or ambition, have the same decultured character. Cultural erosion is a major fact in contemporary Africa; Nollywood is on both sides of the issue. (pages 257 - 284)
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- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0012
[New Nollywood;Kunle Afolayan;multiplex cinemas;Nigerian nationalism;Yoruba films;film industry;film audience;auteur directors]
“New Nollywood” names a strategy by independent producer/directors to make films with larger budgets and of higher quality, suitable for screening in theaters. The strategy depends on the new multiplex cinemas in Nigeria, on screenings abroad, and on foreign DVD sales. The few screens available in Nigeria form a precarious economic basis, and the films must target an elite demographic in Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora. Kunle Afolayan is the leading director of such films. His situation and strategies are inscribed in his first three films. Aesthetically and thematically, Irapada is close to the Yoruba film tradition in which his father Adeyemi Afolayan was a major star. The Figurine is sophisticated and cosmopolitan, designed to appeal to both foreign and Nigerian audiences. Phone Swap, a light romantic comedy, continues Afolayan’s vision of the Nigerian nation, unified across ethnic, cultural, and class divisions. (pages 285 - 300)
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- Jonathan Haynes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.003.0013
[Nigerian economy;Lagos;telecommunications;multiplex theaters;cinemas;capitalism;film industry;popular audience;African diaspora]
In the last decade Nigeria’s growth rate has been impressive and Lagos has emerged as an important business center. But Nigeria’s basic political, economic, and infrastructural problems (notably electricity supply) have not been solved. Nollywood also is in a moment of structural changes, uncertainty, and crisis, but several factors suggest a bright future. The Internet can now be policed, promising higher revenues from overseas; broadband is slowly arriving in Nigeria; cell phones are emerging as an important platform; and multiplex theaters proliferate. Potentially most important are plans to build many community theaters serving a vast popular audience. This would produce greater and more reliable profits while encouraging better productions suitable for theatrical screening. Government and corporations, which increasingly dominate the cultural landscape, are exploring linkages with Nollywood, but movie production remains detached from the capitalist formal sector. (pages 301 - 312)
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