Nollywood: A Dark Horse Dreams of Becoming the Black Swan

Abstract

NollywoodA Dark Horse Dreams of Becoming the Black Swan Tade Ipadeola (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Named after Hollywood and Bollywood, Nollywood—Nigeria's motion-picture industry—began on VHS tapes, literally gained altitude as in-flight offerings in the 1990s, and now has films streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime. Nigerian poet and lawyer Tade Ipadeola traces this rise of the industry, along with its rising scrutiny. To begin where we are, as the poet Czesław Miłosz exhorts, is a great piece of advice when it comes to Nollywood. Born ostensibly on the wrong side of the tracks and named after more famous cousins, Hollywood in the United States and Bollywood in India, Nollywood stubbornly climbed into some reckoning as a motion-picture industry. When the word "Nollywood" began to gain currency in the early 1990s, it was as some kind of insider joke. At the time, the motion pictures from Nigeria were not big-budget celluloid affairs but VHS home videos. They were produced daily. The quality, for the most part, was so abysmal that purists could not but object to their description as films. The Nollywood "films" nevertheless began to sell, and soon the African diaspora began to patronize them. Nostalgia has its uses. And then, by and by, the world took notice. When King of Boys, a film by Kemi Adetiba, premiered in 2018, it went on to win a brace of awards at the Africa Movie Academy Awards. It was a modest commercial success and was followed by a sequel, King of Boys 2, in 2021. There is something of the je ne sais quoi of Nollywood in the story [End Page 30] of those works and in the story of their producer. Very few movies from Nollywood have mastered social topics in the way that the film and its sequel did. The works held a serious mirror to the face of Lagos—and Nigeria—deftly navigating the power blocs of a vibrant and protean society. All these things the film did in the guise of a thriller with a vixen at its heart. The first films in Nigeria were made and directed by men, but women have more than made up for starting out of the block late. And they are leveling up as actors and producers every passing day. King of Boys is available on Netflix. Living in Bondage, produced by Ken Nnebue in 1992, followed by a sequel in 1993, is widely regarded as the first true Nollywood blockbuster. In the way that serendipity often finds its moments, Nnebue happened upon a glut of magnetic media that was soon to be superseded by superior digital technologies and capitalized on his moment. One remarkable thing about the work today, when compared with contemporary productions, is how basic and rudimentary the production was. The grain and texture of these pictures are somewhat quaint and can be sampled on YouTube. Coming after the age of celluloid film productions had ground to a halt in Nigeria, Living in Bondage, made in the Igbo language (with subtitles in English), was distributed mainly as VHS tapes to a worldwide audience. The story, not the technique, was the ultimate magnet. Between 1996 and 1998, Tade Ogidan produced Owo Blow, a Yoruba Nollywood trilogy. The cast of that production, most of them making their cameo appearances at the time, are now big-time actors and central figures in Nollywood. The production was a critical success, and the ambition it demonstrated has since been imitated in innumerable films from Nollywood. Nigeria at the time was the subject of many economic sanctions due to the peculiar barbarity of Sani Abacha, the military ruler in charge. Abacha ran death squads, hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa, a notable Nigerian writer and screenwriter—alongside eight of his Ogoni brothers—for protesting the oil pollution and ill treatment of Ogoni land. The shoestring budget of Tade Ogidan for the production dictated a number of decisions he made to get the script unto the screen. If James Agee made films, some of them would be in the mold of Owo Blow. Swallow, a film by...