African Video Film Arts Festival, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

Abstract

October 28-31, 2007 I was invited to be a discussant at this two-day conference held at Nigeria's Obafemi Awolowo University, the 140-acre campus near the brownroofed, medieval town of Ile-Ife. All screenings and panels took place in the spacious, cool auditorium of Oduduwa Hall, a beautiful, gargantuan building of black and white architecture, built in 1960 with round holes cut into large flat walls set amidst floating, wide, cement staircases and multiple terraces. This conference was targeted to be the first in an annual series, focused on African video and film arts. Though work from other countries on the continent was screened, from the outset opinions clustered around the muchmaligned, much-adored Nigerian video industry, also known as Though twenty years old, the Nigerian video industry is a frontier world and poses remarkable possibilities around economies, national identity, and a new renaissance of the film industry working with today's destructions, reconstructions, and technologies. The conference looked beyond Nollywood. It called up an examination of consciousness with open questions about identity, art forms, and colonial impact. Younger people vocally challenged the idea of a precolonial character that could be found intact. The welcome address by conference organizer, Dr. Foluke Ogunleye, set a practical, enthusiastic tone. She encouraged a new perspective of this video industry, currently Africa's largest-as a foundation on which to rejuvenate cinema. The Nigerian video world is very profitable, very multiple in its sources, production values and quality, and is very international, exporting around the world. It is an in-house national product, which finances its own pictures and recycles its profits quickly. Its major backers are scrap-metal businessmen, so its economy is hands-on and financially canny. Ogunleye pointed out that art already exists in these popular videos as well as messages of Africanness and that, easy as it is to dismiss the videos as shallow and poorly made, they nevertheless hold the seeds of a future African, specifically Nigerian, cinema, one both lucrative and artistically successful. The indigenous structures of identity and prosperity are there: many of these videos are in languages (Yoruba and Hausa), many are built on traditional folktales or on the young men's fiction of the 1950s Onitsha market literature, and the industry itself arose from the illustrious Yoruba theater, whose players needed work when the economy (and the theater) collapsed in the 1980s and so turned to video acting. It also owes much to the Mexican and Brazilian soaps that have engrossed television viewers for decades. This makes the Nigerian video industry a special mishmash of global culture, oral and epic folk culture, routine culture, television culture, and new culture. Many contemporary features and documentaries from Senegal, Kenya, Ghana, and Uganda as well as classic Nigerian videos, such as Tunde Kelani's Thunderbolt (2001) were screened. The students loved the torrid Ghanaian youth soap opera Caravans of Dreads, made by twentysomething director, Sam Atsu Akbo, as both amusing and hip, and, equally loved and hip, the gentle Mee (2006), a spiritual documentary on finding one's self, by Ugandan nun, Sister Dominica Dipio. Ogunleye wanted students to see films on a large screen and in a large audience as few had experienced this. In most countries, movie houses are almost nonexistent, often too difficult or dangerous to get to, too costly and not worth the hassle of leaving home when a TV screen will do. This important detail allowed the phenomenon of film history and its reliance on the big screen to hover in the conference. In every approach to a revived film industry were debates about identity per se, about identity as the basis for new cinema, about Yoruba, Hausa, or Igbo traditions as the crux of a Nigerian film culture, and about the future of celluloid versus digital or video. …