Last week, I travelled from my base in Ottawa, Canada to
Johannesburg, South Africa. It was one of those dreadfully long trips that I
have grudgingly come to accept over the years as an inevitable feature of my
professional calling as a peripatetic man of culture.
As I boarded the first flight in Ottawa, I made a mental
map – as I always do – of how to fill up the void of time. I had an hour ahead
of me to Washington DC, nine hours from Washington to Dakar, and another nine
hours from Dakar to Johannesburg.
Ain’t funny! Add to the distance the fact of not knowing
how and where the pendulum of the international writing prize that was taking
me to South Africa would swing. Only the thought that I would reunite with my
bosom friend, Temitope Oni, a successful medical doctor in Durban whom I hadn’t
seen since the end of our Titcombe college days in 1987, made the distance
bearable. Tope Oni would redefine the meaning of brotherhood, human bond, and
loyalty for me in ways that I am still too positively emotional to talk about.
He is a subject of another essay. Another day.
Suffice it to say that in such long-flight situations, I
usually oscillate between nap time, reading time, writing time (my laptop’s
battery allowing), movie time, and alcohol time – with strong emphasis on the
last. This time, I wish I had skipped movie time and concentrated on alcohol
time. That would have spared me the agony and anger that did not abate until I
landed in Johannesburg.
My problem started when I picked up my assigned copy of
the August 2010 edition of Sawubona, the in-flight magazine of South
African Airways, to check the menu of movies.
As is the case with in-flight
magazines, the movies and their summaries were classified under all kinds of
genres and sub-headings. I noticed a subheading for South African movies and
smiled in satisfaction. I had just found a reason to avoid Hollywood movies! I
would watch all six South African movies in the package. At an average of two
hours per movie, that should eat up enough hours of the trip to avoid boredom. For
a second, my mind went to Goodluck Jonathan’s fleet of nine presidential jets
and uncountable helicopters and I chuckled, half-wishing that our rulers would
at least have the decency to have an in-flight magazine proudly advertising
Nigerian movies to the President and the usual suspects who burn our money on
trips with him. But that would be expecting too much from those fellows. They
are usually not into such minor issues as promoting brand Nigeria unless there
are contracts to be awarded.
Two titles in the South African movies rubric of Sawubona
immediately got my attention. Call it the itch of familiarity or the whiff of
home. Call it the eponymous stirrings of recognition. Something about those
titles gave me the sensation of a Molue conductor whose senses of smell and
taste rev into action within a one-kilometre radius of a paraga seller: “My
Last Ambition” and “Endless Tears”. Those titles screamed Nollywood, oozed
Nigeria. I mean, if a movie’s got vaulting ambition in its title, we are either
talking Kanayo O. Kanayo or Jim Iyke, right? If a movie says the tears are
endless, there’s got to be Stella Damasus somewhere around the corner, right?
If it is love with a Harlequinish tinge, you expect Ramseh Nouah, Mike
Ezuruonye, Van Vicker, Majid Michel, Desmond Elliot, Ini Edo, Genevieve Nnaji,
Omotola Jalade Ekehinde, Chika Ike, Oge Okoye, Stephanie Okereke, and Uche
Jombo, right?
I made a mental note that I did not know that our South
African friends had caught the bug of Nollywood-sounding titles. Then I watched
the first movie, watched the second movie, as if in a trance, unable to believe
what was going on right before my eyes. They were 100% Nollywood films alright.
Not just Nollywood films. Original Nollywood flicks of the “Nnamdi Azikiwe
street, Lagos and Iweka Road, Onitsha” variety. What the heck were they doing
in the South African films rubric of Sawubona and being, in fact,
introduced to the Washington-Dakar-Johannesburg passengers of South African
Airways as part of that airline’s combo of South African films? My unease and
displeasure were further compounded by the fact Hollywood and Bollywood films
got their due recognition of apposite categorization in the same magazine.
Of course I have spent too much time in the scholarship
and politics of cultural appropriation and mainstreaming to dismiss what was
going on as a simple case of ignorance on the part of the publishers of Sawubona.
It just isn’t possible that the publishers and editors of a magazine of
Sawubona’s standing wouldn’t know the difference between South African
films and Nollywood. I also was not of a sufficiently generous disposition to
heap all the blame on that innocent and hard-working apprentice called Printer’s
Devil as we always do in Nigeria.
I decided to draw very heavy conclusions from that
instance of the misclassification of two Nollywood films. After all, between
South Africa and Nigeria, nothing is ever innocent. There are always
patrimonial egos at work, endlessly playing out in the form of a will to
continental dominance, especially in the arenas of politics and culture. The
two countries are locked in enactments of identity underwritten by the desire
of each to be Africa’s synecdoche. In the context of the pathologies shaping
relations between Nigeria and South Africa, I couldn’t even put it beyond our
friends from Nelson Mandela’s kraal to expect the Nigerian cultural
establishment to be grateful that they considered two Nollywood films worthy of
classification as South African films and, above all, worthy to be shown on the
trans-Atlantic flights of the continent’s most prestigious national carrier.
Were the South Africans to go this arifin (contempt)
route, they would be well within their rights. Sadly. I don’t think we have
mouth to talk – pardon that Yoru-English, it conveys the seriousness of the
situation. After all, if the obtuse characters running your country prefer to
organize a harem of nine presidential jets for themselves after running Nigeria
Airways aground (Ethiopian Airlines has a fleet of ten jets for long range
passenger services), who are you to complain if the South Africans decide to “help”
by showing your films in their own national carrier albeit with a flagrant,
in-your-face gesture of cultural appropriation?
The August 2010 edition of Sawubona that is at
issue here was of course also in service on the Lagos-Johannesburg route of
South African Airways throughout the month of August. Think of how many
Nigerian state governors, senators, federal reps, and ministers would have
flown South African Airways to Johannesburg in their endless money-guzzling
jamborees to that country – where they learn absolutely nothing. Think of how
many of them go a-partying in Lucky Igbinedion’s mansion in Johannesburg (by
the way, has Dimeji Bankole been on one of his ill-reflected jamborees to that
location lately?). None of them noticed that Nollywood flicks were being
advertised as South African movies in Sawubona? No, not one? Imagine
what would have happened if Nigeria had a national carrier with an in-flight
magazine proudly displaying Zola Maseko’s fantastic flick, “A Drink in the
Passage”, as a Nigerian movie! There would have been hell to pay. South African
officials in Nigeria would have claimed that the sky was falling. You see, they
come from a part of the world where officials of the state understand the
importance of culture.
The antipathy to Nollywood and its considerable powers of
cultural inflection that enabled this instance of appropriation by Sawubona
is, of course, not limited to Nigeria’s obtuse rulers and the political élite.
The Nigerian public’s engagement of Nollywood – at a certain informed level of
national cultural conversation - is often so massively overshadowed by
ubiquitous complaints of mediocrity that I have been given to think that Nollywood
has no greater enemy than the Nigerian culturati. Much of the endless prattle
about mediocrity – underdeveloped plot and storylines, platitudinous acting –
is not borne of a constructive urge. The prattle of course ignores the fact
that, unlike Hollywood and Bollywood, Nollywood arose singularly from the
genius of the Nigerian people and the devastating grind of the Nigerian street,
in spite of the Nigerian establishment and not because of it. The Nigerian
state is always an impediment to the genius of the Nigerian people. You build
Nigeria against all the odds thrown in your path by our friends in Abuja.
To have given the world the third largest movie industry
right out of the poverty of Nnamdi Azikiwe street and Iweka road, with zero
support from the looters in Abuja; to have created the greatest single cultural
force that has not only remapped ways of seeing the continent (apologies to
John Berger) in a manner not seen since Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
reshaped ways of seeing Africa in the 1960s; to have opened up avenues for
global black diasporic communities to plug into the continent via the power of
the image – people no longer have to wait to die one bright morning in the
Caribbean for their souls to fly away home to Guinée; Nollywood brings that
ancestral home to them while alive; to have inflected and changed the nature of
transnational black politics while editing films in rundown shacks illuminated
by “oju ti NEPA” (thanks to Dr Ola Kassim of Toronto for bringing this device
to my attention); this is what Nollywood has given the world out of nothing.
The South Africans certainly know what they are appropriating. And why.
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