Video Film Industry Research Articles

Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry ed. by Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome (review)

Reviewed by: Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry ed. by Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome Sheila Petty (bio) Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry Edited by Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome. Indiana University Press. 2013. $80.00 hardcover; $30.00 paper; $24.99 e-book. 371 pages. The genesis for this new volume on Nollywood video film dates back to May 2009, when coeditors Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome organized the “Nollywood and Beyond” conference at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. As the volume took shape, the editors solicited four additional essays from scholars in the field to round out what became an innovative and lively discussion of the pan-African and transnational influence and expansion of this world force in cinema, with its attendant cultural and commercial effects. This volume places the coeditors on the leading edge of Nollywood studies, foremost among scholars who are reevaluating the field’s and industry’s beginnings and then spotlighting the trends in their development. [End Page 159] The volume’s focus is on the diasporic influence of Nollywood: its immense global popularity but also the controversy it creates. The coeditors clearly state in the introduction that they are not concerned with a rehashing of the origins of Nollywood, as there have already been so many publications, films, and conferences devoted to the topic. Instead, they pose a number of questions for reflection: “Why is Nollywood so popular in Nigeria and beyond, and why is it so controversial at the same time? . . . What significance does this have for the study of Nollywood, African cinema, and African culture more generally?”1 After describing how Nollywood has been habitually positioned against African auteur, art house, or “Fespaco” films to explain their arguably lower-quality production values, Krings and Okome are quick to caution that the boundaries are not as firm as some might think. For example, many auteur filmmakers employ Nollywood marketing or production strategies; more women work in the Nollywood industry than in the African art-house film industry; and ultimately, “the ownership of Nollywood is African,” an important point of principle that auteur filmmakers still struggle to grasp.2 The volume is divided into four parts, each with two to five chapters. Part 1, “Mapping the Terrain,” includes two chapters. In the first, “From Nollywood to Nollyworld: Processes of Transnationalization in the Nigerian Video Film Industry,” Allessandro Jedlowski outlines how Nollywood, after an initial decade of success, began to experience a decline until around 2009–2010, when processes of transnationalism caused a “‘New Wave’ in Nigerian cinema, characterized by higher budgets, improved production values, and transnational collaborations.”3 Filmmakers and scholars Jyoti Mistry and Jordache A. Ellapen offer a less enthusiastic view of Nollywood’s popularity in their contribution on Nollywood’s transportability. Taking the position that the Nollywood model challenges the canon of African cinema, they explore the complexities and “productive contradictions” of an industry positioned as an alternative to established filmmaking practices on the continent. They also draw a comparison between the Nollywood model and emerging South African video-film practices. The main challenge (read: drawback) for these authors is how to reconcile the principles of social commitment and creative expression (read: auteurist African third cinema) with Nollywood’s commercial imperative.4 The chapters in part 2, “Transnational Nollywood,” explore Nollywood as “a transactional cultural anchor . . . where migrant subjects meet the homeland in different ways,” to use Krings and Okome’s delightful phrase.5 In “The Nollywood Diaspora: A Nigerian Video Genre,” Jonathan Haynes, a leading scholar in Nollywood studies, provides a lively discussion of films set partly or entirely in the diaspora. He [End Page 160] compares and contrasts films such as Dubai Runs (MacCollins Chidebe, 2007) which use film-library stock shots to establish diasporic settings, with films such as Missing in America (Sola Osofisan, 2004), which is clearly shot in New York. Haynes deftly teases out his argument by demonstrating that many films in this new genre have moved away from the occult or supernatural focus of much continent-based production.6 Sophie Samyn in chapter 4 and Claudia Hoffmann in chapter 5 examine works by...

Showing the Unshowable: The Negotiation of Homosexuality through Video Films in Tanzania

A flourishing video film industry has produced a new platform for the negotiation of love and sex(uality) in Tanzania. Video film’s melodramatic and shocking aesthetic is marked by transgressions of local understandings of morality. With reference to Popobawa and Shoga , which for the first time have homosexuality as a topic, I show how video films are challenging the limits of what can be shown and point to the aesthetics of showing what used to be unshowable. In making homosexuality visible, the film Shoga provoked a reaction from government censors, the national guardians of morality. The act of censoring, after which the film and the performance were discussed in the media and on the Internet, brings to light how homosexuality is currently discussed in Tanzania.

“As there are hyena-men and panther-men …”: Chris Abani, Pieter Hugo, and the shocking life of images

This article looks at the combined work of South African photographer Pieter Hugo and of “global Igbo” author Chris Abani in the volume Nollywood (2009). In their creative work both artists usually strive to see beyond established aesthetic and ethical paradigms and to bypass conventional modes of representation, in order to zoom in on adventurous and often shocking areas of existence in both life and art in Africa. In his collection of photographs known as the Nollywood series, Hugo engages with the Nigerian video film industry in collaboration with local actors and make-up artists in order to recreate the workings and general atmosphere of Nollywood films. Their cooperation produces a series of violently surreal, hallucinating tableaux. The volume features an introduction by Chris Abani which aptly evokes Nollywood’s history and production, and provides a key to reading Hugo’s creative rendition of the phenomenon. Marked by an incessant effort to move beyond the limits of both literary and cultural representation, Abani’s work is a highly appropriate contribution to the artistic experimentation in the collection. This article argues that the visual and textual works of Hugo and Abani both revisit and remove – through sometimes disquietingly violent aesthetical intervention – the borders that are kept in place by societal control on culture and the arts.

Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome, eds. Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. viii + 371 pp. Figures and Illustrations. Preface and Acknowledgments. List of Contributors. General Index. Film Title Index. $80.00. Cloth. $30.00. Paper. $24.99. EBook.

Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome, eds. Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. viii + 371 pp. Figures and Illustrations. Preface and Acknowledgments. List of Contributors. General Index. Film Title Index. $24.99. EBook. - Volume 57 Issue 3

Global Nollywood: The transnational dimensions of an African video film industry (African expressive cultures)

Global Nollywood: The transnational dimensions of an African video film industry (African expressive cultures)

Global Nollywood: the transnational dimensions of an African video film industry

Preface and Acknowledgments Nollywood and Its Diaspora: An Introduction Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome Part 1. Mapping the Terrain 1. From Nollywood to Nollyworld: Processes of Transnationalization in the Nigerian Video Film Industry Alessandro Jedlowski 2. Nollywood's Transportability: The Politics and Economics of Video Films as Cultural Products Jyoti Mistry and Jordache A. Ellapen Part 2. Transnational Nollywood 3. The Nollywood Diaspora: A Nigerian Video Genre Jonathan Haynes 4. Nollywood Made in Europe Sophie Samyn 5. Made in America: Urban Immigrant Spaces in Transnational Nollywood Films Claudia Hoffmann 6. Reversing the Filmic Gaze: Comedy and the Critique of the Postcolony in Osuofia in London Onookome Okome 7. Nollywood and Postcolonial Predicaments: Transnationalism, Gender, and the Commoditization of Desire in Glamour Girls Paul Ugor Part 3. Nollywood and Its Audiences 8. Nollywood in Urban Southern Africa: Nigerian Video Films and Their Audiences in Cape Town and Windhoek Heike Becker 9. Religion, Migration, and Media Aesthetics: Notes on the Circulation and Reception of Nigerian Films in Kinshasa Katrien Pype 10. African Movies in Barbados: Proximate Experiences of Fear and Desire Jane Bryce 11. Consuming Nollywood in Turin, Italy Giovanna Santanera 12. Nigerian Videos and Their Imagined Western Audiences: The Limits of Nollywood's Transnationality Babson Ajibade Part 4. Appropriations of Nollywood 13. Transgressing Boundaries: Reinterpretation of Nollywood Films in Muslim Northern Nigeria Abdalla Uba Adamu 14. Karishika with Kiswahili Flavor: A Nollywood Film Retold by a Tanzanian Video Narrator Matthias Krings 15. Bloody Bricolages: Traces of Nollywood in Tanzanian Video Films Claudia Bohme List of Contributors Index

Taking Nigeria to the movies: The innovative regulatory role of the National Film and Video Censors Board

Abstract The double-faceted nature of film as both a cultural and an economic good means that the direct involvement by the state in the film industry can often be guaranteed. Such state involvement worldwide is largely expressed through function-specific organs, whose powers and functions tend to vary. The National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB) of Nigeria, as one of such organs, has powers that go beyond film classification and censorship. This has been manifested especially through its attempt to regularize film distribution in Nigeria through the introduction of a distribution framework. Many resented this attempt by the NFVCB. They considered it as needless interference, especially since the Nigerian video film industry had grown without any assistance from the government. But the NFVCB stated that it was merely exercising its mandate. This article examines the various issues involved and seeks to throw some light on a body that has been little studied.

A Proposal for Legalizing Small-Scale Physical Copyright Piracy: Book Publishing, Video Films and Music in Developing Countries

The paper looks at the formative phase of media systems particularly in developing nations. It finds that copyright piracy in those situations serves a purpose not only in providing access to knowledge and creative works to audiences who would otherwise be excluded but also as the original accumulation of media infrastructures, know-how and capital that over time leads to the establishment of original forms of creative expression and legal media industries. Looking at the examples of the publishing of books by foreign authors in 19 th century USA, the emergence of the video film industry in Nigeria and briefly at the popular dance music in northern Brazil it shows the beneficial effects of piracy. From a public policy point of view, the paper then considers the benefits of copyright piracy and its harms, the most severe ones of which are caused by its illegality. In order to balance benefits and harms, it concludes by proposing to legalise small-scale physical copyright piracy in developing nations.

At the Threshold of New Political Communities: Some Notes on the History of Nollywood's Epic Genre

In this article, I argue that “Nollywood” – Nigeria’s English-language video film industry, which emerged in the early 1990s – is possible because of both the postcolonial nation-state’s subjection to global capital and the various networks to which a system of global capital gives rise. Processes like these have been operating concurrently in Nigeria since at least the time of the transatlantic slave trade, but they have surfaced in Nigerian cinema culture rather unevenly. At certain historical moments, subjection to capital has played a largely determining role in filmmaking and film policy; at other times, links to transnational networks have been more instrumental. I trace what Fredrick Copper refers to as the “territorializing” and “deterritorializing” processes of global capital by looking at the role that different vectors have played in the development of a particular genre, the epic, and by looking at either side of the historical moment in which a Nigerian motion picture expert, Pete Edochie, made the transition from state motion picture production to the video film industry.

Diversity Within Yoruba-Language Video Films

Olu Olowogemo. Bosun Omo Yankee. 2011. Nigeria. Yoruba, with English subtitles. Nigeria. High-Waves Video Mart. 275 min. No price reported. Funke Akindele and Abbey Lanre. Omo Getto. 201 1 . Nigeria. Yoruba, with English subtitles. Olasco Films Nigeria Ltd. 174 min. No price reported. Tunde Kelani. Ma'ami. 201 1 . Nigeria. English, Yoruba, with English subtitles. Mainframe Productions. 92 min. No price reported. After two decades of prolific growth, Nigeria's video film industry, commonly called Nollywood, has garnered significant scholarly attention. The emergence of Nollywood studies is indebted to several seminal surveys, including Jonathan Haynes and Onokome Okome's Nigerian Video Films (2000), Foluke Ogunleye's African Video Film Today (2003), and Mahir Saul and Ralph Austen's Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (2010). What is called for today, however, are investigations focused on the great diversity among the myriad titles that appear for sale across West Africa every year. Language has offered a natural means of categorizing these videos. It is true that a Yoruba-language film follows a distinctly different social life from screenplay to first screening compared to, say, one of Kannywood's Hausa-language films. But more important, each film responds to and carries forward a particular cinematic tradition. In the case of contemporary Yoruba-language video film, Wole Ogundele has argued convincingly that we might find its antecedents in the alarinjo traveling folk opera of the recent past. The films reviewed here - Olu Olowogemo 's Bosun Omo Yankee (2011), Funke Akindele and Abbey Lanre 's Omo Getto (2011), and Tunde Kelani's Ma'ami (2011) - complicate the notion that Yoruba video film represents a monolithic body of videos. In the rapidly changing environment of Nigerian video film, what has emerged is a splintering of productions, differing in production value, financial investment, target audience, and aesthetic form. While the films selected here demonstrate the diversity of Yoruba-language video film today, they do share a thematic preoccupation with Nigeria's place amidst the wider global cultural economy. We might ask how each constructs its narrative and positions its viewers around images and ideas of global and local culture, especially popular cultural forms like music and sports. Written, produced, and directed by Olu Olowogemo, Bosun Omo Yankee is the director/ actor's only film to date. Bosun (Olu Olowogemo), once a destitute young artist plucking his guitar by the roadside, now returns from America as an international pop star, bringing with him unimaginable wealth, an American swagger, and an ostentatious sense of pride. He refuses even to perform for his own community and rejects his family's ultimatum to build a home in the village or remove Amubieya, the family name, from his own. Indeed, Bosun gladly renames himself according to his stage persona, Omo Yankee (Yankee Boy) , donning sunglasses, flashy gold necklaces, and an American flag tee-shirt. Meanwhile, Bosun's childhood friend Olanrewaju is deported from America under suspicion of fraudulently appropriating $15 million. With little proof or due process, the Nigerian authorities detain Lanre for the crime and even charge him with tarnishing the nation's image abroad. Lanre 's mother and wife are unable to convince Bosun to post bail for his friend and must enlist the help of a sympathetic detective who fights for Lanre 's release. Bosun's meteoric rise and Lanre 's demise suggest the film's melodramatic aesthetics, whereby reality is recast as a moral struggle between virtue and vice. We learn that Bosun's wealth and fame are the fruits of an occult pact with a sorcerer, whereas Lanre 's faith in prayer only grows with his time in jail. When all hope for Lanre 's freedom seems lost, two representatives of the Harejan Company in America fortuitously arrive to acquit him of all charges, having discovered a phone message between Bosun and Lanre that implicates Bosun in the disappearance of the $15 million. …

The Rise of Nollywood: Creators, Entrepreneurs, and Pirates

The rise of Nollywood illustrates the revolutionary potential of digital technologies in Africa. Nollywood, or the Nigerian video film industry, reflects technology leapfrogging that is increasingly prominent in Africa today. Such leapfrogging, however, may raise significant issues with respect to legal and other institutions. Film production had largely ceased in Nigeria by the end of the 1980s. Despite this absence, in the early 1990s, Nigeria started on a path that has led it to become the top producer of digital video films in the world. Nigeria is, however, an unlikely locale for the development of a major film industry. In addition to lacking fundamental infrastructures for the development of a film industry, Nigeria has not historically had robust intellectual property enforcement. As a result, Nollywood may be seen as a natural experiment for creativity in the relative absence of intellectual property. This Nollywood natural experiment reflects the actions of varied and at times overlapping roles, including creators, entrepreneurs, and pirates, all of whom have contributed to the growth of Nollywood and Nollywood distribution networks. The viral spread of Nollywood films has thus far been a key element of Nollywood successes. Nollywood films are watched, for example, throughout Africa and in African immigrant communities in Europe and the United States. The Nollywood example suggests the need for more nuanced understanding of the interaction between intellectual property and cultural production and greater recognition of potentially varied ways that intellectual property may influence the shape of cultural production. The unauthorized distribution of Nollywood films is part of wider patterns of increasing unauthorized dissemination of content in the digital era. Such unauthorized distribution has led to pervasive labeling of certain types of copying as piracy. Analyzing the rise of Nollywood can contribute to existing global intellectual property debates and highlight relevant business issues in contemporary contexts of cultural production. Further, consideration of Nollywood’s current growing pains suggests that, as Nollywood continues to grow, industry participants must separate the distinct yet interrelated problems arising from piracy from those emanating from Nollywood’s informality in doing business. This article suggests that in addition to intellectual property enforcement strategies to contain piracy, Nollywood participants must adopt business strategies that monetize piracy by extracting value from wide-reaching Nollywood distribution networks.

Mainstreaming Homosexuality in Nollywood: The Efforts and the Challenges

A critical analysis of the attempts by Nollywood, the melodramatic video-film industry in Nigeria, to address and mainstream the notion of homosexuality in Nigeria and across the continent. Using the cultivation theory and the inter-group contact theory, the study explores the notion of mainstreaming of homosexuality by the very popular medium across Africa. How has this particular medium address the issue of homosexuality in society through characterization and plot? Since Nollywood is a highly didactic medium, what messages about homosexuality are being presented and how do these messages contribute to or erode from existing conceptions and misconceptions about homosexuality in Nigeria? Has the medium, in its portrayal of homosexuality, contributed to the moral panic on the issue or help deflect the moral panic? The analysis is done against the backdrop of the ongoing legal, social and political homophobic rhetoric currently engulfing Nigeria and other African nations. The focus of the study is the frequency of reference to homosexuality in the society, the characterization of homosexual persons in the video-films and the narratives of the homosexual person in relation to heterosexuals in the society. The video-films examined are: Emotional Crack (2003); Men in Love (2010) and Mind Game (2010). The results indicate that while more plots and characterization is being done by Nollywood to make homosexuality salient to the society, the characterizations of homosexuality is unsympathetic at best and even dubious in certain circumstances. In the one instance where a strong and sympathetic characterization is employed, the plot is undermined to restore the mainstream socio-religious homophobic discourse.
 
 
 

A Break with the Past: The Nigerian Video-film Industry in the Context of Colonial Filmmaking

This article examines the Nigerian video-film industry from the perspective of the country's colonial past. It begins with the premise that the development of the video-film industry can be seen as part of a decolonisation process. It therefore seeks to establish what links, if any, exist between the present day video-film industry and colonial filmmaking. It posits that the growth and success attained in the industry reflect an overcoming of the strictures which, thanks largely to the legacy of colonialism, had held back the growth of African cinema.

Nollywood on the Internet: A preliminary analysis of an online Nigerian video-film audience

The prolificacy of the Nigerian video-film industry, tagged Nollywood, has attracted wide attention and won the acclaim of a large cross-border audience. The success of the video-films is largely attributed to their nature as popular art, created by the people for the people. Popular art is noted for its openness to novelty, and the accessibility of the video technology has had an important role to play in the development of this industry. This same openness to technology can be applied to the audience of popular art, which, given its greater involvement in the performance, holds a key position in the promotion of such culture. The development of new information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, has led to an increased participation of audiences in general. This has brought about new considerations in terms of audience research. This article takes a preliminary look at the online presence of the Nigerian video-film audience with the goal of determining whether the Internet has brought about any changes in this popular art audience. It concludes that the use of the Internet has not changed the characteristics of the popular art audience, but has enhanced them, giving this audience a greater visibility.

A prequel to Nollywood: South African photo novels and their pan-African consumption in the late 1960s

This article interrogates the history of the photo novel in Africa with particular reference to African Film, a magazine of almost pan-African circulation, published between 1968 and 1972 in South Africa. Featuring the adventures of Lance Spearman, an African crime fighter, the magazine was read widely across Anglophone Africa, from Nigeria and Ghana to South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. After a brief introduction to the history of the photo novel, the author discusses the production, content, reception, and legacy of the Lance Spearman photo novels. It is argued that Lance Spearman may be understood as a crossover of James Bond and Philip Marlowe, and several influences from contemporary Western popular culture are traced. Contemporary readers cherished the visual modernity of the photo novels and readily identified with their stylish and street-wise main character. It is argued that African Film magazine played an important (today almost forgotten) role within the history of visual media in Africa. It was instrumental in spreading the new format of the photo novel to many Anglophone post-colonies, where it subsequently was ‘vernacularized’. Photo novels served as surrogates for films, as a means to tell almost film-like stories, at a time when commercial African cinema was not yet invented. In terms of its commercial orientation, its readiness to borrow from Western popular culture, its transportability, and its almost pan-African circulation, African Film magazine may be called a distant forerunner of the current commercial video film industry of Nigeria.

Video Film and African Social Reality: A Consideration of Nigeria-Ghana Block of West Africa

Today, video film as a form of media production is very popular in Nigeria and indeed in much of Africa. Nigerian video films, especially those produced in English; enjoy considerable patronage in Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia, Kenya Zimbabwe, England, USA, Italy and many other places. Along with this growing acceptance are questions as regards the video film evolution in the West African sub region. Against this backdrop, the paper adopts the historical, descriptive and analytical approaches as its method of reflecting on how the video film phenomenon emerged in Nigeria, what issues the Nigerian video films busy themselves with, what sort of reception is granted these films in Ghana and why. It concludes by canvassing that governments and other stakeholders in the West African sub region should explore the huge potentiality of the video film industry in creating employment opportunities and redressing contemporary social challenges.

The Emerging Video Film Industry in Nigeria: Challenges and Prospects

MOTION PICTURES WERE REPORTEDLY FIRST SCREENED IN NIGERIA in August of 1903, when Nigerian nationalist Herbert Macaulay, in association with the Balboa film company of Spain, introduced the new medium to an audience assembled in Glover Memorial Hall in Lagos (Owens-lbie). Over five decades later, the first film production companies, Latola Film (founded in 1962) and Calpeny Nigeria Limited (1970), were established in Nigeria (Amobi). In addition to Latola and Calpeny, members of the Nigerian theater community promoted film culture as well. In fact, the current video film industry in Nigeria owes a huge debt to the pioneers of Nigerian theater, particularly practitioners of the Yoruba Traveling Theater, who branched off from mainstream theater to experiment with celluloid. While the introduction of mobile cinema by the British during colonial times may have created awareness and interest in film, the medium was used primarily to educate Nigerians about such issues as health, sanitation, and nutrition. In the late 1960s, dramatists Hubert Ogunde, who recorded his plays on celluloid, Moses Adejumo (alias Baba Sala), and Duro Ladipo were responsible for elevating the cinema to a popular art that also contained social commentary (Ekwuazi 9). The legacy of those indigenous filmmakers was bequeathed to Ola Balogun, Ade Love, and Eddie Ugbomah-prolific filmmakers of the 1980s who extended the pioneer efforts of the early dramatists and ushered Nigerian moviemaking into the modern age. The collapse of movie-theatergoing culture in the 1980s, caused by the incessant harassment of innocent citizens by criminals, the country's economic downturn, and various problems affecting celluloid film production, gave rise to the video film-a less powerful but more convenient [form of] film making utilising UMatik, super VHS and ordinary VHS cameras (Dike). Video films, known in Nigeria as home movies, are a new initiative in popular culture, though their impact is already phenomenal. Although many productions preceded it, Kenneth Nnebue's successful Living in Bondage (1993) is credited with jumpstarting the video film industry. Since the early 1990s, the industry, now stylishly called Nollywood, has churned out thousands of titles and brought many producers, marketers, actors, and technicians into the limelight. The video film is a household word in contemporary Nigeria and has become a popular form of audio-visual entertainment. The industry has also become too significant for the world to ignore. According to a press release for a 2005 international convention on Nollywood held in Los Angeles, it has been estimated that the industry produces an average of fifty movies per week, though this is surely an exaggeration (Bequette). Video films gross an estimated 200 million dollars a year and Nigeria has been ranked the world's third-largest film industry, after Hollywood and Bollywood (India) (Vasagar). Video films are not only popular in their native Nigeria and other African countries, but in less than twenty years they have attracted the attention of many media practitioners, film festivals, and some American and European universities. In fact, DSTV (Digital Satellite Television), a digital satellite service in Africa, features Africa Magic (Channel 102), a channel devoted to Nollywood films. Nollywood films are popular in Nigeria because they have Indigenous content and address issues relevant to a mass audience. Through an amalgam of Nigerian narrative techniques (African storylines) and Western technology, these films document and re-create sociopolitical and cultural events that occurred within and beyond the country's borders.1 The industry has also saved poor Nigerians the cost of procuring expensive films from the West (the price per film ranges from N200 to N400-about $2.50). Ogunleye contends that with the global world united under the sway of visual culture, the emergence of the video film in Nigeria is timely and crucial as it serves as the voice of its people and responds to the drudgery of a socioeconomic existence characterized by high unemployment and dwindling opportunities (ix). …

Reading Wealth in Nigeria: Occult Capitalism and Marx's Vampires

Examines the growth of the video film industry in Nigeria, focusing on the production & consumption of horror films & their depictions of occultism & the accumulation of wealth. Karl Marx's use of the 'occult aesthetic' in his analysis of the allocation of wealth under capitalism is reviewed, & parallels are drawn to the supernatural nature of wealth accumulation depicted in one Nigerian horror film. The relationship between such imaginative productions & material conditions in Nigeria is demonstrated, also revealing reasons for the wide appeal of this film genre to Nigerian audiences, particularly those of the middle & lower strata. Data from a questionnaire survey conducted in Jos, Plateau State, reveal the predominance of attitudes toward Western society (specifically, the US & UK) as 'lands of opportunity' where work is rewarded, unlike their own society, where wealth is so out of reach for the majority that it is more likely to be attributed to 'supernatural' intervention.

Relevant Education for Sustainable Human Development in Nigeria: Nollywood’s Advocacy in Selected Video Films

In human development, conscious efforts are made to enlarge people’s choices to enable them live a healthy and prolonged life, acquire knowledge, and have access to resources needed to earn a decent living. Obviously, sustained improvement in African human development still falls short of those experienced in other regions. Progress in African human development is majorly driven by education as against the experience of other regions where other factors dominate. Nollywood, the Nigerian video film industry, has played an active role in advocating the need for relevant education for all ages in Nigeria. This work attempts a discussion of Nollywood’s education advocacy for sustainable human development through the reading of selected films. The concept development communication is relied on for conceptual foundation; while the theory of knowledge gap hypothesis is adopted for theoretical backing. The methodology adopted involves documentary research and extensive viewing of relevant films which culminated in content analysis of the viewed films. It is observed that Nollywood has not performed so poorly in advocating education as the major sign post for human development in Nigeria. Yet, a lot more still need to be done. It is recommended that Nollywood filmmakers pay serious attention to the sociology of their craft. Government and the educational sector should sponsor educational films through concept placement options. The general public, particularly the academe, should see and explore the positive aspect of Nollywood rather than continue to treat the industry with contempt as was the case with the Onitsha market literature – the consequence of which we are still facing.