It is difficult to ignore Nollywood - Onookome Okome

In the last couple of weeks, Vanguard’s Arts has been running series of interviews on scholars on the Nigerian Nollywood. This effort is in line with our commitment to bringing an intellectual focus on one  of the nation’s most vibrant popular cultures. In today’s edition, we share with you another revealing statement about the engaging nation’s movie industry by the Nigerian born and University of Alberta, Canada based film scholar, Onookome Okome. Okome was one of the very first Nigerians to start a curious scholarly effort in this direction, when he was still on the teaching staff of Theatre Arts Department of the University of Calabar, Nigeria. In this e-interview, he frankly opened his heart and his brain. Excerpt:



YOU have carved an international niche for yourself in the area of film scholarship and criticism. But since you left Nigeria, except for a few of us who have keenly followed your progress, many people have not heard about you again. Can you remind the Nigerian audience about who Onookome Okome is? What you have been doing since you left the country?

I am still very well known in Nigeria. I left the country only a couple of years ago, and as you may know, I keep coming back to the homeland. I find any excuse to come back home and I do so at least two times a year. I am still on the academic list of the University of Calabar. When I came to the University of Alberta in 2002, I had the vision of continuing what I had done in Calabar, which is to advance scholarship in the areas of film criticism and African popular literature. In Calabar, I began teaching Nollywood long before anyone else did. Femi Shaka also took this on and is doing a brilliant job of it at the University of Port Harcourt. But my interest in film studies actually began when I took the M.A courses at Ibadan.

It began with the late Professor Joel Adeyinka Adedeji who was the first African professor of theatre studies in Nigeria. I took his MA class on performance criticism. After one of my seminar papers, he asked if I wanted to go into cinema criticism. I did. After his tutelage, I went under the intellectual wing of Dr. Hyginus Ekwuazi who later became the Managing Director of the Nigerian Film Corporation. He was deeply instrumental to my career as a film scholar. He was a huge inspiration. He did not only supervise my Ph.D thesis, he encouraged me a great deal.

 My Ph.D was on the cross-over from the popular Yoruba travelling theatre into short lived Yoruba cinema, which became the natural extension into what we call Nollywood today. Before I left for Canada, I taught at the University of Calabar for about 13 years. Indeed, I got to Calabar as soon as I got out of graduate school at the University of Ibadan. At the University of Calabar, I taught courses mainly in theatre performance and cinema.

It was great there. I still go back there from time to time. But it was Ibadan that actually provided the literary enthusiasm for me and those of us who graduated in Ibadan in the 1980s, it was a period of excellent intellectual and mentorship camaraderie.

We were fortunate to have very interesting writers and scholars with us at that time. It was great fun to be in the company of Odia Ofeimun, Harry Garuba, Emewvo Biakolo as it was to be in the creative wings of such excellent dramatists such Bode Sowande and Femi Osofisan. In a nut shell then, since I left for Canada, I have been teaching and researching the African cinema and popular literature. Nollywood has been at the bridge-head of my research and teaching of African cinema here in Alberta but I have also been active researching representation of women in the more orthodox African cinema. Last fall, I taught a film course, which focused on the representation of women in African cinema.

The Nigerian film has really become a global phenomenon, and very few persons considering your base and activities can talk more competently than you regarding how the outside world perceive the Nigerian film. What is the impression of the outside world about the Nigerian film industry?

Truly, Nollywood has become a global phenomenon. But this needs to be qualified. It is global phenomenon because the outside is beginning to pay attention to it. While there is no doubt in my mind that Nollywood is a big industry, which has attracted a lot of attention in the last 10 years, it is still unclear why this is the case outside  Nigeria. In Nigeria, Nollywood is popular because it speaks to aspects of social life that many people live. It speaks to and debates social and cultural anxieties the way no other media had done before.

 It gestures to political discourses in very surreptitious manner. It invests the individual, especially the individual living in the city, with a new sense of person. But outside the country, I must say that Nollywood is a mere curio. In 2003, I was invited to the Berlinale Film Festival in Berlin, Germany. A number of Nollywood people were also invited. Jetta Amata made a very impressive presence at this Festival. Nollywood was part of the cinematic show-case at the Festival. Beginning with the programme announcing the bit dealing with Nollywood, I got the impression that it was considered as just another curiosity from Africa - a flash in the pan so to speak.

Indeed. A lot of the ordinary people who are curious about Nollywood in North America and Europe do so because it appeals to the sense of the noble savage - that picture of the African running around in circles in the jungle or beside the river waving frantically at Europe’s steamer on the river banks. I think this is a deliberate misreading, which is why the emphasis on juju, magic and witchcraft are some of the tell-tale signs of the way Nollywood is seen and consumed outside Nigeria. I do think Nollywood is much more than this. Nollywood is a “speech.” It's mode of discourse, albeit a popular mode of discourse that has its own regime of social meaning that we must pay attention to. I am not sure a lot of us have even begun contemplating this.

It seems to that the impression of Nollywood outside Nigeria is
still one of curiosity. Attention is put mainly on the exotic. I follow the activities in the industry closely. I teach Nollywood here in Alberta and I have done so from the perspective of popular arts. I see Nollywood forming as a viable discursive arena in our social history, which is why it is painful to me that no one has tried to collect and archive Nollywood films the way scholars have archived Bollywood and Hollywood.

We seem to be repeating the silly history of neglecting the production and consumption of popular culture in Nigeria and indeed Africa. We often hear and read about intellectuals in Nigeria berating forms of popular expressions, which they often accuse of “spoiling” our youth and culture. For me, the question has always been: If popular arts are so powerful that they can actually “spoil” our youth and denigrate our culture, why treat them as stupid and unimportant? I think it is about time we changed tactics.

Professor Emmanuel Obiechina warned us long ago about the attitude of the intellectual class to the appreciation of the Onitsha market pamphlets in the early 1970s. Now, Nigerians have to go to the University of Kansas or the University of Alberta to study pamphlets from the Onitsha market that were produced in Onitsha, Anambra State in the 1950s and 1960s.

Clearly, Nollywood is not the first of the various forms of
popular culture in Nigeria but it is competing very well with the imported cinema culture which we inherited from B-rate Hollywood and those cheap martial art films from Hong Kong and China. More than anything else, it is “our cinema.”

As Nigerians, can we boldly declare that we have an authentic film industry? You are one of the few inspired and qualified people who have lavished scholarly attention on the Nigerian film. Are you really convinced that the Nigerian film deserves your kind of academic study?
If I am not convinced about the social and cultural worth of Nollywood, I won’t be writing on Nollywood. I would have taken the advice of a former professor of mine and gone into discussing the meaning of Christopher Marlow to playwriting in Nigeria.

I won’t waste a career dealing with Nollywood. Another professor once told me in Nigeria, “You will be stupid to spend your life on these fetish things they do in these things they call films.” I find this condescending. Once again, I draw your attention to those who say that Nollywood is nothing. If it is nothing how come it is able to destroy our culture? How? I consider Nollywood a serious industry.

 It is a serious business. It produces culture as it produces society and in turn society influences its social and cultural markets. It offers explanation to things we do in the dark. It is eloquent about the life we live but would not speak about in public. For instance, we know that cinema-activities as leisure in Nigeria in the early part of the 20th century was a purely masculine affair. Women were vigorously excluded. It was not very long ago that we considered women who frequented the cinema halls as whores and “goodtime women” for the reason that the halls were not so “respectable.”

Nollywood has changed all those, which may account for the reason why women are said to be the most avid consumers of the cultural products of Nollywood. Isn’t this a positive thing - to have women talk with and to society the way they have never done before, to be part of a public sphere? There is no denying the fact that women now play a crucial role in Nollywood. It may not be “glory” yet for them but the leap is good, enthusiastic.

For those who compare Nollywood to Hollywood, I only need to remind them that Hollywood was not “respectable” in the early part of the 20th century. It was peopled by those the American society described as “rough neck and tax evaders.” Nollywood is a long way from the 100-year history of Hollywood. In any case, there is no need for any comparison between the two industries except, of course, for intellectual purposes.

One of the main objectives of this project is to see to what extent we can intellectualize the appreciation of the Nigerian film, beyond whatever kind of assessment it may have elicited, popular culture-wise. One of the first bold steps towards achieving this is to institutionalize the study of film in the Nigerian environment. As an expert, can you propose a scheme for this venture?

To some extent, this has been done. I taught Nollywood at the University of Calabar in the early 1990s. The theatre programme then was very robust. Professor Kalu Uka saw to it that the practice of theatre is not limited to “theatre administration” as it is the case in Calabar at the moment. Far sighted and intellectually astute, Professor Uka saw to it that emphasis is given to “performing” before the camera as it was on stage.

A very interesting film component was encouraged in the 1990s.
All that has changed now. Before me, Dr. Ekwuazi set out the map for the intellectual recognition of film as social text with his book on the history of Nigerian cinema. That book, Cinema in Nigeria, is still “the book.” What remains to be done is what Dr. Femi Shaka is trying to do at the University of Port Harcourt-to set up an independent department of Film Studies as it is done elsewhere in the world. I think we shall soon get there.

Even those who think little of Nollywood cannot ignore it. I know of a highly placed civil servant who has nothing good to say about Nollywood. We met in an airplane in Nigeria last year. He wondered why I came all the way from Canada to research Nollywood. Emphatically, he told me he never watches video film. In the course of our conversation, he started talking about the theme of one of the video films.

I remember him saying how well Genevieve Nnaji performed in it. I laughed to myself. He is one of those who see video films in the “dark” and denounce them in day light. I should also say that a number of scholarly papers and books on Nollywood have been coming out steadily in the last ten years. I think the first to be published in the North America is the collection of essays, Nigerian Video Film, which was edited by Jonathan Haynes.

Professor Haynes teaches at Brooklyn College of the University of Long Island, New York. I was part of that project. Only recently, I did two special editions on Nollywood for the journal, Postcolonial Text based in Canada and Film International based in London. My book on Nollywood, The Cinema of Nollywood, is due out next year. It is a long way from the 1970s when Dr. Ekwuazi had to fight tooth and nail to get his dissertation on the history of film in Nigeria approved in the Department of Theatre Arts.

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