Jonathan Haynes

A literature review: Nigerian and Ghanaian videos

The main purpose of this review of the published academic literature on Nigerian and Ghanaian video films is to foster self-awareness in this new field of study. This literature has been produced on three continents and out of many academic disciplines; in consequence, scholars tend to make few references to others working in the field, debates have been rare, and there has been a great deal of repetition. African Cinema studies, as it had already been constituted, has been slow to recognize and adapt to the video revolution, and film studies in African universities has suffered from the decline of those institutions. Anthropologists have done much of the groundbreaking work in describing the video phenomenon, though Nigerians from a variety of disciplines have also made valuable contributions. Theoretical analyses, cultural interpretations, reception studies, and detailed, extended readings of particular films are all on the agenda for the future.

Nnebue: The Anatomy of Power

The Founder Kenneth Nnebue’s central role in the early history of Nigerian video films is well established (Ayorinde and Okafor, Haynes and Okome, Shaka, “Nigeria’s Emergent”). The first Nigerians to shoot feature fictional films on video were artists from the Yoruba traveling theater tradition, who turned to video when making films on celluloid became prohibitively expensive as the result of Nigeria’s catastrophic structural adjustment program. Nnebue, an Igbo dealer in electronic goods and blank cassettes, made a business of selling such video films as cassettes as opposed to screening them using video projectors, the practice of the Yoruba filmmakers. He financed a number of Yoruba films that he sold in this manner, and he hung around the productions, participating in various ways and learning about movie making. These were very low budget films: the first of them, Aje Ni Iya Mi (1989) he made for N2,000 (about

The humanist as traveler : George Sandys's Relation of a journey begun an. Dom. 1610

200); it was shot on an ordinary VHS camera and edited on two VCRs (personal communication, Kaduna, April 1997). In 1992 he made a video film in Igbo, Living in Bondage. This was the mythic founding moment of the Nigerian video boom. Again the budget was very low, and some of the actors he called refused to take part because “they thought it was a local thing” (Nnebue). A few informally reproduced videos had been made in Igbo before, but with this film Nnebue established the national market for commercially packaged Nigerian video cassettes, with full-color jackets wrapped in cellophane that made them look equivalent to imported foreign films. He “scoured the soaps” (Madu Chikwendu, personnel communication, Los Angeles, June 2006) for television actors with familiar faces. Nnebue lost money on this film because of piracy, but he quickly made a sequel with a larger budget and released it through a better-organized distribution system. After another Igbo film, Dirty Deal, in 1994 he made the first video film in English, Glamour Girls. Living in Bondage and Glamour Girls together laid the foundation for the video industry that would come to be called “Nollywood.” For much of the 1990s, Nnebue, through his company NEK Video Links, was the most powerful player in the business: NEK had more machines to dub copies of films than anyone else and had the largest network of distribution points. Living in Bondage and Glamour Girls also established Nollywood’s essential themes: the corruption, moral turbulence, and pervasive anxiety of the post-oil boom era; the garish glamour of Lagos; titillating and dangerous sexuality; melodramatic domestic conflicts; and immanent supernatural forces including both dark cultic practices and Pentecostal Christianity. In this essay I want to consider Nnebue as a creative artist. His art suffers from the faults and limitations of Nollywood as a whole: his dialogue can be dull and mechanical, the realization of his vision rather lifeless. His great strength, which is also Nolllywood’s, stems from his proximity to the popular imagination. He works from what he reads in the newspapers, hears on the radio, and picks up from the conversations around him NNebue: the ANAtomy of Power

Nollywood: The Video Phenomenon in Nigeria (review)

The first full-length study of George Sandys Relation, one of the most interesting and important travel books of the English Renaissance.

Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (review)

to Lacan, Foucault, Kant, and Deleuze, Beggar’s discussion draws from some sixty secondary sources that include psychoanalysts, philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and literary critics. In the first section, “Béance et instinct de mort,” Bouraoui’s works Tremblé, Retour à Thyna, and La pharaone are discussed in light of the thematic of martyr and victim, and characters contesting “historical destiny,” while “re-creating” it. Beggar notes the author’s subversion of the classic linearity of historical novels, where the past determines a hero’s present actions. The second part, “Béance et altérité,” demonstrates how Bouraoui negotiates aspects of Otherness related to the marginal spaces of mental and physical handicaps. “Béance et nomaditude,” the third section, draws attention to ideas of self and cultural re-creation, to creative drive as a liberating force, as discussed in Bouraoui’s collection, Transpoétique. Eloge du nomadisme (Montréal; Mémoire d’encrier, col. “Essai,” 2005). This thin but remarkably dense essay (with index) is accessible to those with a working knowledge of psychoanalytic criticism, and Beggar’s analysis aptly captures the essence of Bouraoui’s literary and critical corpus.

Nigerian video films

This is a powerful and ambitious book, impressive in the depth and breadth of its learning and in the clarity of its intelligence. It works through closely reasoned critiques of a long series of significant thinkers: Theodor Adorno, Eric Hobsbawm, Anthony Giddens, Samir Amin, David Harvey, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Christopher Miller, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Edward Said, and C. L. R. James. This form Lazarus has chosen risks collapsing into a series of book reviews, but his ability to cut through intellectual clutter and the strength of his purposes keep his argument moving. The book is “intended as a self-consciously Marxist contribution to the academic field of postcolonial studies—one capable of suggesting a credible historical materialist alternative to the idealist and dehistoricizing scholarship currently predominant in that field in general,” which Lazarus sees as “paying a huge price for its [. . .] premature repudiation of systematic theory” (1, 9). Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory is this book’s obvious rival; Lazarus differentiates his book from Ahmad’s polemic by his commitment (rather in the spirit of Fredric Jameson) to give the authentic insights and advances generated by postcolonial criticism their due even while demonstrating the superior conceptual reach of Marxism. The first chapter, “Modernity, Globalization, and the ‘West,’” mounts a tenacious and sophisticated defense of a basic Marxist tenet: the categorical primacy of capitalism as the enduring, systematic force behind the three terms of the chapter title. Theories that privilege these terms over capitalism, Lazarus argues, suffer from one or another form of idealism and a tendency to overestimate the restructurings of the present, which in turn sponsors exaggerated or merely sensationalistic philosophical riders. The heart of the book is the second chapter, “Disavowing Decolonization: Nationalism, Intellectuals, and the Question of Representation in Postcolonial Theory,” and at the center of this chapter is a battle over the legacy of Fanon against (on one side) the tendentious poststructuralist appropriation of Fanon by Bhabha and (on the other) Miller’s argument that Fanon’s speaking of and for Africans is an ethnocentric imposition hardly better than that of colonialism itself. Lazarus mounts his own searching critique of Fanon’s “intellectualism,” but is careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water: far worse is the “intellectualist anti-intellectualism” (101) that prematurely rejects any representation and so collapses all nationalisms together, regardless of their ideological differences or consequences, and disables the proper and indispensable work of intellectuals. Lazarus likes to bring the charge of “empirical insufficiency” against those claiming to advance readings too subtle and sophisticated to fit within a comprehensive framework such as Marxism, and he regularly and tellingly