Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Access Nollywood

2017; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 34; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/07402775-4373310

1936-0924

Emily Witt,

Urban and Rural Development Challenges

The first of what real estate developers call “international-standard” malls to open in Lagos was The Palms, which was completed in 2005 in the neighborhood of Lekki. The Palms was low-slung and white, smallish compared to most American shopping centers, with an anemic selection of the eponymous palms placed in planters around the parking lot. Security guards checked trunks before letting cars into the lot and purses before letting shoppers through the sliding doors. The mall’s anchor tenants were the South African supermarket chain Shoprite and the South African superstore Game. The Palms also had a Cold Stone Creamery ice cream shop and a branch of the woman’s clothing chain Mango. The electricity was steady here, the climate controlled. The tiled floors shone. Outside was the informal economy: hawkers selling gasoline from jerry cans, windshield wiper blades, shrimp crackers, and newspapers to people in traffic jams. Security kept this part of the economy outside the mall—Nigeria’s upper classes shopped at the country’s open-air marketplaces too, but visiting the mall had the glamour of exclusivity to it. Inside the prices were fixed, the pace unhurried, the aisles uncrowded. The shelves of Shoprite gleamed with the internationally branded cookies and breakfast cereals that no one in Nigeria seemed to eat. The escalators rolled in seamless motion.Like most malls, The Palms had a multiplex. The Genesis Deluxe Cinema screened the latest Nigerian movies alongside the most recent chapters of James Bond, Star Wars, and X-Men. On weekend nights, it was also a preferred venue for red-carpet premieres of Nigerian movies. These pageants happened on a near-weekly basis, celebrations for the highest-budget productions, the ones with the biggest stars. On my second night in Lagos, I ascended the escalators of The Palms to attend the premiere of Road to Yesterday, a new drama starring Genevieve Nnaji.I had been advised, in advance, to bring high heels to Lagos, a city where tailors sew bespoke formalwear for the rich and the poor alike and where the latest trends in globalized fast fashion are recreated in wax-print textiles for the wealthy patrons of nightclubs. As in Milan or Paris, to attend a party in Lagos looking ordinary or mass-produced was seen as an affront, a wasted opportunity to bring joy via carefully selected adornment. For the premiere, the mall multiplex had been transformed with a red carpet, a photography scrum, and the lavish plumage of the Nollywood elite: Rita Dominic in a jaunty black pantsuit with rhinestone-studded heels; Funke Akindele in a short-sleeved red dress draped with golden spangles; Desmond Elliot in a blue dinner jacket with a pink silk handkerchief; Ramsey Nouah in a leather newsboy cap, a linen scarf, and blue jeans. The premiere’s attendees posed for photographs and ate canapés, adorned with paisley pocket squares, peplums, gold lamé, satin trains, high-waisted silk pajamas, fedoras, clear plastic Oxford shoes, Nehru collars, a red velvet smoking jacket. Genevieve Nnaji was a vision of purity, graceful in a floor-length white dress with billowy sleeves. Now in her late 30s, she had a regal bearing and a steady gaze, a tall, doe-eyed beauty whose shyness was tempered by a hint of aloofness. She posed for pictures, her face fixed in a slight, effortless smile.Oprah Winfrey once called Genevieve Nnaji “the Julia Roberts of Africa,” but the comparison does not suffice. The Nigerian film industry of Nollywood and the career of Genevieve Nnaji emerged almost simultaneously; she is its Julia Roberts and its Audrey Hepburn. When the matatu driver of Nairobi or the kelewele vendor of Accra or the bartender in a shebeen in Soweto think of Nigeria, they will likely think of Genevieve, the former face of Lux soap in Africa, a brand ambassador of Range Rover, the star of over 80 Nollywood movies. Nnaji has 2.9 million followers on Instagram. She has a white bichon-frise named Prince. She is unmarried but had a daughter as a teenager, a sensitive story she discusses only obliquely when she recounts her middle-class Igbo-Catholic upbringing in Lagos (“Everybody falls,” she said in one interview I saw. “That’s what makes us human.”) Below YouTube videos of her work are comments that proclaim Nnaji a luminary not only to Nigerians but to the continent at large. “Nnaji is Queen!! Damn!! Her carriage is everything. Am so proud to be a Nigerian,” they write. “I love u so much Queen Genevieve. U are the pride of Africa, a Super Shining Star.”Nnaji was born on May 3, 1979, and began acting at the age of eight on the Nigerian Television Authority soap opera Ripples. The show ended in 1993, when its creator, Zeb Ejiro, joined the exodus of local television producers who had started making straight-to-video movies and distributing them in the physical marketplace rather than over the airwaves. Nnaji followed many other television actors into the video movie industry. She starred in her first Nollywood movie, Most Wanted, in 1998, at the age of 19. Her fame grew with such hits as Sharon Stone (2002), a morality tale in which Nnaji, as Sharon Stone, uses wealthy men as her sexual pawns. “I’ve decided to pay men back in their own coin,” she says, after sleeping with three of them in a single day. Things don’t end well for Sharon Stone. The men discover they’ve been used, and conspire to trick her in return. One man proposes marriage, then fails to show up to the wedding. “Lagos traffic?” suggests an optimistic marriage registrar as Sharon Stone realizes she has been jilted. The abandoned bride drives the wedding car to the groom’s house, balloons flying, where she finds him playing checkers and drinking beer with the other two men. They make a sarcastic toast to the bride. She faints to the floor in her white gown. Fade to black.Nnaji no longer stars in movies like Sharon Stone, Sharon Stone 2, or Sharon Stone in Abuja. She has stopped making the low-budget, straight-to-video melodramas that built her career, in part because the industry changed. When Nnaji began acting in movies in the late 1990s, the spontaneous and accelerated growth of Nollywood was happening in a country with virtually no movie screens. For its first few years of existence, even The Palms lacked a movie theater. Lagos is a city of 21 million people that as recently as 2004 had no cinemas at all. This wasn’t always the case. Lagosians who grew up in the city in the 1950s and 60s will reminisce about watching Lawrence of Arabia, Sinbad the Sailor, Hollywood westerns, and Bollywood musicals in neighborhood movie theaters. After independence in 1960, Nigerians started making their own celluloid films, classics like Kongi’s Harvest (a 1970 adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s play). Nigerian directors such as Hubert Ogunde, Jab Adu, Ola Balogun, Adeyemi Afolayan (known as Ade Love), and Eddie Ugbomah made popular movies, some of them drawing on the narratives of traditional Yoruba and Igbo theater, some of them telling more contemporary stories.This cinema culture collapsed in the 1980s. Some people claimed the problem began as far back as 1972, when General Yakubu Gowon issued an “indigenization decree” that nationalized foreign-owned businesses—including cinemas, many of which were owned by Lebanese immigrants. Others blamed the structural economic adjustment program imposed on Nigeria by the International Monetary Fund in 1986, which devalued the local currency and made it difficult to import goods, including films and film stock. The year before, the Nigerian government adopted sweeping economic reforms after plunging oil revenues left the country unable to service its debt. With guidance from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the Nigerian government implemented policies meant to encourage private-sector development. Nigeria lifted agricultural price controls, deregulated the banking system, privatized infrastructure, revoked import licenses, and cut government jobs. Exchange rate reforms were especially dramatic—the real effective exchange rate of the naira declined 80 percent between September 1986 and the end of 1992.The structural adjustment program hit the urban middle class particularly hard, and led to immediate increases in inequality. In 1980, the government estimated that 28 percent of the population was living in poverty, while by 1986, this number had climbed to more than 43 percent. The perceived decline in security also affected film culture. Middle-class city dwellers did not want to get robbed, so they stayed home and watched movies on VCRs instead. Nollywood began as a video-only industry: For the first 20 years, its movies were shot and distributed on VHS tapes, and later video-CDs. By end of the 1980s, Nigeria’s cinemas had mostly disappeared.If the emergence of Nollywood could be presented as a positive outcome of structural adjustment, it is the rare success story—the Nigerian economy remains heavily over-dependent on oil revenue and continues to import more merchandise than it exports. According to OPEC, petroleum exports account for 90 percent of the country’s total exports, and oil and gas make up 35 percent of Nigeria’s GDP. Cinema in Lagos reappeared in the new century, with the country’s return to democracy in 1999, with its economic revival, with security improved, and with the construction of malls, but it took years before the industry that was churning out thousands of movies on discs started releasing them on the big screen. And with population growth outpacing economic expansion, movie tickets are still a relative luxury. As promising as the return to democracy has been for the country, in 2016, the official poverty rate was over 61 percent.The first multiplex cinema in Nigeria was the Silverbird Galleria on Victoria Island, which opened in 2004. The founder was a businessman named Ben Murray-Bruce, who earned his undergraduate degree in marketing from the University of South Carolina and has since become a senator. Murray-Bruce thought that if there could be movie theaters in Shanghai or Johannesburg there could be movie theaters in Lagos. It took him 10 years to convince the banks that if they financed a theater, the people would come. The first feature to show at the first multiplex in Nigeria was Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. So eager were Lagosians to watch Jesus being flayed with barbed whips on the big screen that the city gave the movie its highest-grossing opening weekend in Africa.The Palms got its multiplex in 2008. At first the Genesis Deluxe, like the Silverbird, showed only foreign films, mostly from Hollywood. Local theater chains began screening Nigerian movies only in 2009 (or at least screening them the normal way—producers could rent screens for private parties and premieres from the outset). The argument against screening Nigerian movies commercially was that nobody would pay 1,500 naira (about $7.50 in 2015) to watch something they could buy on the street on a disc for a tenth of the price, especially if the sound warbled in and out and production values looked like those of a used car salesman’s ad on late-night television in Milwaukee. The format of early Nollywood movies fell somewhere between a soap opera and a feature film. Because they were meant to be watched on a television rather than in a movie theater, the production values didn’t need to be high, and standardized movie conventions were ignored. One movie might be four hours long, divided into two or three chapters that were sold first as separate tapes and later as discs.Things have changed: Murray-Bruce said that he now considered the future of the Nigerian multiplex to be in Nollywood movies, not Hollywood. The cinema-going audience is still only a fraction of the Nigerian population, but in a country of 180 million people a fraction is significant. Between 2000 and 2014, the middle class grew roughly 600 percent, and now constitutes around 11 percent of the total population. In Lagos, going to the movies has become a good way for middle-class professionals working on the city’s islands to wait out the traffic to the mainland at the end of the day, when endless lines of trucks and buses inch across the Third Mainland Bridge. On the mainland, at the Ikeja City Mall, the theaters are packed on weekends, and in recent years a new chain, Film House, has been experimenting with offering a more affordable cinematic experience, with tickets for 500 naira in the mainland neighborhood of Surulere, a third of the going price in the wealthier enclaves of Lagos.Running a multiplex in Nigeria comes with a unique set of challenges. The night of the Road to Yesterday premiere, I was introduced to the chief executive director of Film House, an enthusiastic 32-year-old in a tuxedo named Moses Babatope. Babatope said his company, which now has 11 multiplexes in Nigeria, must fend off competition from pirates and deal with infrastructural shortcomings like unreliable public transportation and constant power outages. Still, “it’s a population of 180 million-plus people, there are less than 20 cinemas, less than 120 screens, for people that churn out two [or] three thousand titles a year,” he said. “I thought it was too compelling not to come here, to try and grow it, to double the number and even beyond that.” The numbers are still small, but growth has been steady, with 2016 breaking all previous box office records for Nigerian cinema movies, and nearly 30 percent of the $11.5 million box office total coming from local movies. Moreover, with Nigeria expected to become the world’s third-most-populous country by 2050, the audience is only expanding.The rise of the multiplex in Nigeria also encouraged the improvement in Nollywood production values. The cameras have gone high-definition, the boom mic is less likely to creep into the frame, and the editors no longer include two-minute shots of people exiting Toyota Camrys and walking uneventfully into houses. To differentiate the better-produced, made-for-cinema movies from their VHS predecessors, these movies are often referred to as the “New Nollywood.” Because such movies are also sometimes made by foreign-educated young people from Nigeria’s economic elite—a relatively new trend—there is occasionally talk of a “gentrification” of Nollywood. As actors such as Genevieve Nnaji have pursued bigger-budget movies with cinema releases, one prominent Nollywood director accused her and other actors of “biting the fingers” that fed them.The New Nollywood movies aspire, like the malls in which they are screened, to be “international-standard,” to rank alongside Hollywood, Bollywood, and the soap operas of Latin America or Korea in networks of global distribution and international audiences. They tend to clock closer to the standard 90 minutes in length, and their plots tend to be less sprawling than the old Nollywood movies. But it is the lower-budget movies, with their folklore and their flaws, that earned the affection of African audiences in the first place, and these older format movies are still produced by the hundreds each year. However one chooses to characterize the schism, there is a recognizable divide between the movies on sale five to a video CD in the great markets of Lagos and those that play to a wealthier audience in the cinema.Road to Yesterday begins with a plane landing on the tarmac at Murtala Mohammed Airport in Lagos. Victoria (Nnaji) has returned to Nigeria from London to attend the funeral of an uncle and confront the ruins of her marriage. She arrives home to Izu (Oris Erhuero), her estranged husband. The scene is bleak: The shades of their home are drawn; Izu is sprawled in front of a table filled with empty bottles and glasses. They spend the night avoiding each other, then get in their Land Rover to travel to the funeral.Trapped in a car for many hours, they confront the history of their relationship. It is a story told in flashbacks: the instantaneous connection of their first meeting, the infidelities committed by both, the paternity crisis that ultimately divided them (their daughter has sickle cell anemia, but Izu had tested negative for the gene). They argue, they cajole, they berate, they apologize, but eventually they reconcile in a boutique hotel.Except . . . it was all a dream! Victoria suddenly awakes at Izu’s bedside. He is in the hospital, attached to a beeping heart monitor, mangled from a car accident that happened the night of her arrival. The road to yesterday was traveled only in Victoria’s imagination. It is too late for apologies, for explanations, for forgiveness. The monitor redlines and Izu is dead.At the premiere, the audience laughed in recognition when Victoria and Izu got pulled over at a police checkpoint, and whistled when Izu lied about his extramarital affair. “I have no evil intentions toward you,” said Izu, on screen. “So they always say, Papa!” heckled a member of the audience. And then, when the couple finally reconciled, in a steamy shower scene, “Please don’t make no cut!” When the plot twist of Izu’s untimely death was revealed, Chioma “Chigul” Omeruah, a comedian sitting next to me who played Victoria’s jolly best friend, wiped away genuine tears.Road to Yesterday happens in a very particular Nigeria, in the creamy leather interior of a Land Rover as glossy as a seal just out of the water, in the spacious halls of a mansion where a child’s bedroom is a carefully manicured landscape in pink. It is a Nigeria of wealthy couples with repressed emotions, of nannies sweeping children from the room when arguments begin, of helicopter shots of a luxury car speeding down an unimpeded highway. The vision of spare elegance breaks only once, when the couple stops for lunch at the fast-food chain Chicken Republic and a few street vendors can be seen out of focus in the background, milling around outside. The erasure of poverty from the movie could be read as a willful optimism, where Nigeria is presented as it could be without its problems; or a willful ignorance, where the rich ignore the problems of the poor. Or, perhaps, the intention is simply escapist fantasy.The first wave of post-independent African cinema in the 1960s and 70s often had an ideological mission: to correct the misrepresentation of African history and African life and to confront the legacy of imperialism; to affirm the value of specific African cultures, heritages, and identities. Since then, the world has changed, and African cinema has as well. As the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has written, “Because the time we live in is fundamentally fractured, the very project of an essentialist or sacrificial recovery of the self is, by definition, doomed. Only the disparate, and often intersecting, practices through which Africans stylize their conduct and life can account for the thickness of which the African present is made.” Nollywood marks this phase of self-writing, where the assertion of Nigerian identity is not conducted in opposition to the forces of globalization and multiculturalism, but within them. Nollywood movies not only address the specificities of the Nigerian experience: They project an African identity outward into the globalized flow of popular culture, that transcendent sphere from which a teenager in Atlanta learns Nigerian pidgin slang, or a movie director in Lagos takes a cue from Scorsese.There is a revealing joke in the Nigerian movie Taxi Driver, a dark comedy about a naïve newcomer to Lagos who has left his hometown to inherit his dead father’s taxi. The movie takes place almost entirely at night, when Lagos is shadowy, its streetlights tinged blue. In addition to Scorsese, the director was inspired by Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, and the sensibility here could be described as art house. The film integrates certain tropes of Nollywood into a more globalized cinematic vision, where a story is not meant to teach a lesson but rather to produce a mood, to capture the subtle visual reality of a particular place. In this paradigm, Hollywood is not synonymous with cultural imperialism, but simply another site of production, one of many in competition with others around the world. After arriving in Lagos, the protagonist learns his father named his taxi “Tom Cruise.” For a moment, he looks perplexed. “Tom Cruise,” says Adigun. “Isn’t he an Indian actor?”