Culture:
Nollywood versus South Africa Inc.
Nigeria’s exceptionalism includes the deep continuities of indigenous cultures. South Africa’s exceptionalism has included the rapid pace of Westernisation. Two African countries – deep in history, rich in culture, and diverse in demography – have revealed comparative destinies of the African experience and contrasting visions of the African condition.1 – Ali Mazrui, Kenyan intellectual
Nigeria exports ‘Nollywood’ – its indigenous film industry – as an authentic African cinema. South Africa exports an American-style mall culture, which represents its deep Western influences. Nigeria is the most indigenously diverse country in Africa; South Africa the most Westernised state on the continent.
American scholar Joseph Nye defined ‘soft power’ as non-military resources which countries can deploy to influence others to follow their lead and to desire what they want.2 Many examples abound of ‘soft power’ exercised by Nigeria and South Africa in Africa and its diaspora. Both countries continue to educate elites from neighboring regional states at their universities. Nigeria’s film industry – Nollywood – is a veritable source of ‘soft power’, which has expanded its values across the continent creating an authentically African cinema in the process with which many populations in Africa and its diaspora can identify.3 World-class Nigerian footballers in European leagues and the national football team, the ‘Super Eagles’, who won a gold medal at the 1996 Olympics, also play a similar role. So do renowned writers such as Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, Booker Prize winner Ben Okri, and Orange Prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili; actors of international acclaim like Chiwetel Ejiofor and David Oyelowo; the musician and composer Fela Anikulapo Kuti; and singers such as Asa, Don Jazzy, Wizkid, and Davido.
South Africa has similarly spread its ‘soft power’ through Nobel peace laureates Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and F.W. de Klerk and Nobel literature laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. The country successfully organised Africa’s first football World Cup in 2010; hosted and won Africa’s first rugby World Cup in 1995; and has become a magnet for tourists from Africa and around the world. South African-born Charlize Theron became the first African to win an Oscar – for best actress – in 2004; while the South African film Tsotsi won the best foreign film Oscar in 2006. Musicians like Hugh Masekela, Lira, Black Coffee, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, and Abdullah Ibrahim have bolstered South Africa’s ‘brand’ abroad. The country’s ubiquitous fast-food chains such as Nando’s, Steers, and Spur as well as its American-style ‘mall culture,’ which has been exported across Africa, are further signs of the country’s ‘soft power.
Nigeria: From FESTAC to Nollywood
Within the Nigerian context, culture is an underexamined but important part of the country’s domestic and foreign policy. Here we focus on two issues: Nigeria’s hosting of the pan-African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, and the phenomenal rise of Nollywood, Nigeria’s prolific film industry, which has attracted devotees all across the continent and among Africans in the diaspora.
FESTAC involved a redefinition of pan-Africanism by an increasingly self-confident nation that had long seen itself as ‘the giant of Africa’. The festival drew thousands of artists from across Africa as well as members of the diaspora from the Caribbean, South America, North America, and Australasia. American scholar Andrew Apter observed: ‘Nigeria emerged as the unequivocal leader of the new black world. Spending lavishly on its global citizens, the Nigerian state accrued political capital as master of ceremonies while recasting the nation in indigenous terms as the fons et origo of virtually all black cultural traditions.’4 FESTAC involved events like durbars, regattas with war canoes, and traditional dances, as well as the exhibition of elaborate works of art and the construction of a stunning national theatre and sprawling festival village. Apter places the festival in the context of imperial spectacles such as London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851) and America’s Columbian Exposition (1893), noting that such ‘cultural productions’ reveal connections between empire and knowledge. FESTAC was a celebration of Pax Nigeriana: a national showpiece staged by a self-confident elite to mark the arrival in the leadership ranks of the nouveaux riches of the world’s largest black nation and to promote African culture as a sign of cultural equality with the West, which had often denigrated the continent’s cultures. The event marked the celebration of aparty that Nigerians assumed would never end.
Interestingly, some Nigerian born-again Christians date the start of the country’s decline to the ‘demonic’ masks and gods unleashed by FESTAC, 5 while many continue to regard the event as a profligate ‘Festival of Awards and Contracts’ during the wasteful era of the oil boom when the problem, according to Nigerian head of state General Yakubu Gowon was not the money, but how to spend it. The decision to build a brand-new capital in Abuja by 1991 with spectacular highways, conference centres, and religious buildings – it now hosts the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) secretariat as a potent symbol of Nigeria’s regional leadership – was also taken during the euphoric days of the oil boom. Abuja’s street names reflect a pan-African identity, and the Nigerian capital has served as the centre of many continental peacemaking initiatives in respect of conflicts in such countries as Liberia, Sudan, and Togo.
It is, however, the phenomenon of Nigeria’s prolific film industry – Nollywood – that has attracted the most recent positive international attention for the country. Nollywood produces over 2,000 films a year, which is more than Hollywood, but less than Bollywood, making it the world’s second-largest film industry in 2017. The industry is thought to employ about one million people, including production and distribution, making it the second-largest employer in the country with annual sales estimated at $250 to $350 million.6 The production of Nigerian movies started in 1992 with a blockbuster film called Living in Bondage about a man who gains wealth and power by killing his wife and repenting after her ghost haunts him. The themes of ritual murder and redemption, human desire, breaking of social taboos, and the quest for wealth and luxury run through many of these movies. They have spread like wildfire in video parlours throughout African societies in which superstition and born-again Christianity are very much part of daily life. Other popular titles have included Glamour Girls, The Battle of Love, Thunderbolt, Sango, Rituals, Survivors, Goodbye Tomorrow, Mortal Inheritance, Agogo Eewo, She Devil, The Prostitute, and The Strange Women.
The films have mostly been shot in the Nigerian megalopolis of Lagos, a city of entrepreneurial spirit and indefatigable endeavor. They are still mostly recorded on videos and DVDs and are thus widely available to both rich and poor not just in Nigeria but across West, Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa. Many of the films are available in cities like Accra, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Kinshasa, and Johannesburg, and are widely watched in the African diaspora in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. Nollywood has also massively increased the role and visibility of women in African cinema. As veteran Nigerian movie producer Tunde Kelani noted: ‘Our movies are definitely African. Their popularity shows that Africans have a lot in common socially, culturally and politically.’7 Nollywood films have sparked demonstrations in Ghana and Tanzania against crass materialism and ‘voodoo-mongering’.8 Some Ghanaians also blamed a number of serial murders that occurred in their country on Nigeria’s Igbo community in Ghana because of the resemblance of these incidents to the fictional accounts gleaned from Nollywood movies.9
Critics like John Afolabi have described the films as reinforcing Western stereotypes of African primitivism and underdevelopment. The National Film and Video Censors Board of Nigeria similarly criticised the ‘repellent subjects’, ‘fetishism’, ‘ritualistic killings’, ‘devilish Spiritism’ and ‘homosexuality’ of Nollywood films.10 Chukwuemeka Chikelu, Nigeria’s then minister of information and national orientation, recognised the importance of Nollywood in telling its producers and editors in 2003: ‘I invite you my friends to see your work as an integral part of a Renaissance Project. The Renaissance of a great nation, the renaissance of a great people. Your work is an ambassador from Nigeria to the world. It is an international diplomat requesting no accreditation. The content of your work is the only credential that is presented for Nigeria in the living room of millions of people around the world.’
The Eagle And The Springbok by Adekeye Adebajo
Category: Non Fiction / Essays
Year of Publication: 2018
303 pages
