What's in a name? Soyinka Rejects "Nollywood"

"What's in a name? that which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet..." Shakespeare asserts in Romeo and Juliet. Really? Well, Nigeria's Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka agrees, especially with regards to the enduring moniker, Nollywood, given to the Nigerian video-film industry in 2002 by The New York Times journalist, Norimitsu Onishi.

In his "Everything is Oversize in the Birthplace of Nollywood" Keynote Address at the FESPACO's CODESRIA-Guild of African Filmmakers workshop in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in February 2013, Soyinka lamented the '''N' word [that] constitutes a mutative explosion that I consider most unfair to others in the same creative field--the cinematic--more especially as there have been predecessors who impacted on our cinema world without burdening themselves with such a verbal albatross."

The Nobel Laureate further clarified his disappointment: "My complaint therefore is not against borrowings and adaptations as a principle, but against the lack of originality that translates as plain, unmediated imitation, or a tawdry, unenhanced borrowing that is conceived and delivered on the very edge of the pit of banality, and out of which it has no wish to clamber, once it has fallen in.  It indicates a pre-set mind, a basically unadventurous mind dressed up in castoff clothing, of which nothing can be expected except as a breeding ground, a reproductive automatism of its own kind--especially in taste."


"If only it stopped at subjective revulsion? However, there are more provocative questions, such as: Does the branding influence the product? If you give a product a deleterious name, does it affect, in advance, the consciousness of future producers? If, on the other hand, a propulsive, challenging name, one that even intimates more than it presently is, would that provoke in the artiste a tendency towards adventurousness, experimentation and originality? or are we merely indulging in self-flagellation? If the pioneers of 1966 had grouped itself around formulation--Dollywood--would we have produced today's Suleyman Cisse, Ola Balogun, Kola Olaniyan, Bello, and the rising generation of cineastes? Consider this, following the mentality at the base of this, FESPACO, because based in Burkina, would be Bullywood. Or perhaps, since that is so close to Bollywood--Bellywood.  Try and think--just once more!--of anything more ghastly, more ghoulish than the contribution from Ghana--Ghollywood! Well, you know where it all started. However, do the emerging Nigerian new breed still deserve to be associated with that commencing second-hand clothes market tag, or with an evolving designer cut production, catering, not for the lowest common denominator in taste but for more discerning audiences, and/or raising--and surprising--expectations in their limited scope.  Even a casual study of current film making indicates that the Nigerian film occupation is rapidly by-passing the stage of such retarded infantilism. So why should the films of such artistes continue to be classified under that unprepossessing monstrosity of a verbal shroud known as...Nollywood?"