Black Film Center/Archive

Akin Adesokan is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. Audrey T. McCluskey, Director of the BFC/A and Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, interviewed Dr. Adesokan in January, 2006.

Audrey T. McCluskey: Akin, in the last decade or so, the Nigerian film industry has become one of the fastest growing film production centers in the world. What accounts for this tremendous growth?

Akin Adesokan: It's true that films made in Nigeria have caught world-wide attention only in the last ten years, in fact mostly after 2000. This happened to coincide with the change in the country's political fortunes, following a string of nasty military dictatorships. But in fact, the growth has only accelerated due to this and other factors, like the phenomenal changes in the technology of filmmaking, the fact that there are many more Nigerians and other Africans living outside the continent than in, say, 1985. These are important things to keep in mind, because what seems so remarkable now, the popularity of Nigerian films, has been in process for a long time. We have to think back to the mid-1980s, which is itself a short time-span. When the military government of the day began implementing the script of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by removing subsidies from public services, devaluing the naira (the Nigerian currency), and so forth, it just became impossible to do so many things from a commercial point of view. It was what we call SAP, an acronym for Structural Adjustment Program. It wasn't limited to Nigeria, by the way. In South America, the Caribbean (as you see in the film Life and Debt by Stephanie Black), South-east Asia, it probably went by different names, but everywhere it was the neoliberal economic agenda of controlling other markets and bringing them in step with the World Trade Organization. In Nigeria, filmmakers like Ola Balogun, Eddie Ugbomah had always thought of themselves as being in league with Ousmane Sembene or Euzhan Palcy. They used to do post-production in the US or in England. Under the economic arrangement I'm talking about, such an undertaking became a financial risk. Nigerian cinema halls used to show mostly pictures from India, although there were periodic screenings of some local films. SAP introduced a pervasive social dislocation which hasn't been fully accounted for, such that filmmaking, film exhibition, in fact, the entire system of cultural production-music, live theater, book publishing, and so on-totally collapsed.

But this period of disintegration also happened to be the time of a fascinating inventiveness. It's a paradox, really. I'm giving a long response, but that's the best way to grasp what's going on. Yes, the neoliberal 'deregulation' of many economies also brought about changes in the uses of technology, especially of the digital kind, which is open to reformatting in quite imaginative ways. When you live at the mercy of these global economic and political calculations, you tend to be inventive, keen to improvise, bend tools to serve your purposes. The Nigerian films came out of that context. People had to do things to survive. If you couldn't make films like Sembene, with complex gadgets, elaborate crew, patient planning, and you had a video or digital camera, blank tapes, and several television monitors, you coaxed these tools and produced something similar to the television dramas which were imported from Mexico City or Los Angeles. The same goes for public transportation. So there were no more new mini-buses from Germany for mass transit, and people started using motorcycles, they started selling packets of 'Pure Water' because the public water corporations were privatized. The national television authority was commercialized, and television producers had to look elsewhere for work. One way I've tried to describe these spectacular changes is to say that, for the same reason that a Lagos fast-food chain, Tastee Chicken, is primed to give McDonald's a fight if and when the need arises, a Nigerian film now ensures that the next Hollywood import would have a stiff competition.

ATM: The Nigerian film industry is often called "Nollywood," and compared to a genre of Indian films called "Bollywood." Is this a fair comparison?

AA: The first time I saw that term, 'Nollywood', three years ago I believe, I experienced a feeling of dread. It was the kind of naming that you knew wouldn't do justice to what it was talking about, but you also knew that it was most likely to stick. It's serviceable-Hollywood, Bollywood. And now, Nollywood. It put Nigeria in the same league as the US and India, so to speak. But what people forget is that these two prior systems are better organized. They are, if you want, integral to the economic system of their respective locales. That's not the case with what we have in Nigeria. I agree that in terms of annual releases, popularity, and the amount of money it generates, and that sort of thing, Nollywood may compare. But the investment base is not there at all, and filmmakers are still not assured of substantial bank loans. They depend on big men, oftentimes lousy big men, and (which I find disturbing) the patronage of non-governmental organizations. If you were prepared to make a film with HIV/AIDS as theme, then you could receive funding. How can a film industry depend on that as a base for capitalization? Let's not forget that on a technical level, in terms of how the language of cinema is used to enunciate ideas, Nollywood is still very rudimentary, close to drama, soap operas. This is a major difference. Yet 'Nollywood' the expression is alive and well. It's the name of a fortnightly tabloid in Lagos, and it's also a dotcom.

ATM: What are the distinguishing features of Nigerian films?

AA: As I've said, they're closer to television drama than to cinema, properly speaking. I'd like to quickly add that there are at least five tendencies in filmmaking in Nigeria, in cultural-linguistic terms. So, I want to hint at internal differentiations even when I'm speaking about generic features. Others would criticize an average film as wordy, but I prefer to say that they are narrative. There has to be a story which is explicitly told, and a film is most likely to run into two or three parts, if it's popular. This is the case with Living in Bondage, which holds the record as the breakthrough film, back in 1992. You will notice that the camera is still more of a photographic tool, that it's there to record these people interacting, rather than as part of a complex apparatus. The films are also didactic-they try to pass unambiguous messages. Again, others might talk of this as melodrama, but it can be described in more challenging ways. Once, when I suggested an alternative ending to a director, he looked at me and smiled. Then he said, 'We don't want to send out wrong signals.' He meant that audiences preferred to see evil punished and good rewarded. This is true, for the most part, but then there's another feature that I find to be very imaginative. And that is that the available models are also proliferative-the films extend imaginative possibilities in cinema. It's what you will notice about the films in this series. They range from farce to a sublime meditation on trust and jealousy. In other words, if a filmmaker dares to question the rule about what the audience wants, and she is successful at it, that is in terms of financial returns, others will take up this model, and run with it.

ATM: Why should an American or non-Nigerian make an effort to see these films?

AA: I know that in spite of globalization a cultural product, even, or especially, cinema, requires translation, what one might call capacity for travel. It helps a lot if a film is intelligible to a viewer outside the cultural context from which it has arisen. Nigerian films are quite popular among Africans, both within and outside the continent. About a month ago, the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, asked its listeners to say what they liked about Nigerian films. The responses were amazing, though not unanimous. There were Nigerians who didn't think much of the films. A Zambian confessed to being hooked on them. I think that if non-Africans relate to these films as stories of everyday human decisions in unpredictable circumstances, they will understand them better. This is far from easy, I know, and even the sexiest foreign film is sometimes a curiosity in the US. But the world is changing in unprecedented ways, and the resilience of people living at the mercy of globalization is highly recommended for Americans whose social security is now under siege from their own government.

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