Want a feel-good story about an African middle
class with a Hollywood ending? It is set in Nigeria, the continent’s biggest
country by population, brashest by reputation and ballsiest by self-conception.
Outside its borders, Nigeria is defined by Boko
Haram hashtag campaigns, imploding mega-churches and the occasional piece about
political dysfunction. But as an entity (“country” does not quite fit the
description), led by the unloved Goodluck Jonathan and his People’s Democratic
Party (PDP), it marches towards a general election in 2015, and into a future
without certainties or precedents.
Inside, the mise en scene is somewhat more
complicated. No state that is home to 170m souls can ever be properly united;
it will always be a nation of nations. That is certainly the case with Nigeria,
which is riven by the tenth parallel, the line of latitude that separates the
mostly Muslim north from the largely Christian south. So many of Nigeria’s
problems, to say nothing of its indefatigable energy, are generated by this
division. But as the energy increases, it becomes more unstable at the core.
Regional observers worry that Nigeria will eventually explode into a cluster of
Balkanised mini-states.
That is the big picture. Nigeria is also home to
thousands—millions—of small pictures, the little stories so many African
countries have never been able to tell. In Lagos, the continent’s largest
megacity, we find some of Africa’s more vital and powerful cultural companies,
each an indication that within the tumult there are those willing to create,
pay for and consume stories. The most famous of the cultural industries is
Nollywood, the catch-all term for the Nigerian video-film phenomenon that gives
voice to upwardly mobile strivers.
Over 11% of Nigerian households, representing
almost 4.1m homes, are now middle class, according to a Standard Bank research
paper released in June: a 600% increase since 2000. This cohort found its shape
in a 2011 survey by Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank. The study
found that Nigeria’s upwardly mobile, those earning between $480 and $645 a
month, were well educated and gainfully employed. While 92% had earned a
post-secondary education and 38% ran their own businesses, they were still
desperately short of the trappings of middle-class life—the average number of
cars per household is 0.8, just 10% of households had two cars, only 42% owned
fridge/freezers, and a scant 8% owned washing machines.
In the same way that television developed in the
1950s alongside America’s bulging middle class, simultaneously defining and
refracting its aspirations, in the mid-1990s—when Africa and a local consumer
class began rising—the continent’s storytellers found a forum. The South
African media conglomerate Naspers promulgated the idea of a pan-African
satellite television empire, now a billion-dollar business beaming signals to
every corner of the continent. While over the years Johannesburg and Cape Town—to
say nothing of the English Premier League—have provided much of the content for
DStv and other Naspers platforms, it would not have become a fully realised
pan-African project had Nollywood not stepped into the breach.
Or, rather, had Naspers not gone looking for
content in Nigeria. Nollywood, legend has it, was born in 1992, during the rule
of Sani Abacha’s brutal military junta. Lagosians were largely housebound due
to the violence outside their doors, and the country’s once-proud indigenous
35mm film culture was reduced to a pale flicker. Social circumstances and
technology conspired to create a revolution.
An electronic goods salesman named Kenneth
Nnebue was sitting on a large consignment of videotapes for which he had no
use. Versions of the tale have him either coming up with the idea—or else
caving in to the badgering of self-professed “Mr Nollywood” and impresario
Okechukwu Ogunjiofor—to gather the big acting names of the day and shoot a tale
of a man who gets sucked into a nightmarish money ritual, in which sacrificing
loved ones leads to untold riches.
While the moribund National Television
Authority, locked in a dispute with talent over payment, programmed a slew of
Mexican telenovelas (soap operas), Mr Nnebue’s “Living in Bondage” became an
unprecedented smash hit on videotape. “To an extraordinary degree,” wrote the
film scholar Jonathan Haynes, “‘Living in Bondage’, the film that started the
Nigerian video boom, contains the seeds of almost everything that followed.”
After this early example of Nigerian video, sections of Lagos that once sold
video players and blank videotapes, most notably Nnamdi Azikiwe Street and
Ereko Lane in Idumota, became outdoor film markets and part of a boom as loud,
if not as deadly, as oil.
As the industry evolved the bankrolling took
shape. Much of the financing came from eastern-based “marketers”—more properly,
distributors. This endowed Nollywood with both its unmatchable vitality and its
potentially fatal flaw: salesmen doubled as producers churning out as many
films as possible as quickly as they could, with little thought to the filmmaking
craft, and none at all to the art. Technicians were drawn largely from the
Niger Delta region, and writers and directors, at least initially, from TV
serials and the Yoruba theatre tradition of south-western Nigeria. By the turn
of the century, after Mr Abacha’s death and the re-introduction of democracy in
1999, Nigeria was one of the planet’s more prolific centres of film production.
The video-film industry minted many new
middle-class aspirants. It also filtered their lives and dreams through stories
that seemed authentically Nigerian. A 2008 survey by the Nigerian film board
found that as many as 1,711 films had been produced that year. While the
industry has levelled off somewhat since, the best estimate is that in 2011
filmmakers were shooting 50 features a week, providing employment for 300,000
and generating anywhere between $286m and $600m a year in revenue, depending on
the study. The average Nollywood movie costs between $25,000 and $75,000 to
produce, takes as little as a week to shoot, and after a speedy turnaround
sells 20,000 to 200,000 units at $1.50 a pop.
Naspers bought entire libraries from marketers
to programme Africa Magic and other channels. The Nigerian middle class was
splashed across television screens in Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and
further afield, most of whose viewers were already in the know thanks to those
roving video tapes.
Over the years, the industry has evolved—some
might argue nowhere near enough. There is now a burgeoning indie wave, which
corresponds with American independent cinema, as well as a premium New
Nollywood, best evinced by the recent adaptation of Nigerian-born writer
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun”, starring Hollywood
luminaries Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton. But it is where these films are
consumed that is just as important. DStv still programmes them on Africa Magic
and other channels, and they are still sold across the continent as digital
video recordings. But in Nigeria, a cinema culture has re-emerged, tied to the
growth of mega-malls.
Filmmaking technicians have deep ties to the
Niger Delta. In 2013 Governor Seriake Dickson, of oil-soaked Bayelsa State,
made big commitments to an industry he sees as providing an alternative to the
violence and shame of oil. The governor’s masterstroke was the announcement of
a film industry trust fund with an initial disbursement of about $16m, which
would function in tandem with a pledge of just under $190m from the federal
government in Abuja. In addition to these initiatives, Mr Dickson promised to
build an underwater “imaging facility” and a film school for the training of
technicians within a larger Bayelsa Film and Arts City.
To insiders, the subtext was as obvious as a
Nollywood plotline. With Mr Jonathan, Niger Delta native and former governor of
Bayelsa, serving as president, Nigeria’s powerbase ran through the region like
a steel spine. Just as Hollywood players, almost without exception, are
associated with the Democratic Party in the United States, so too are Mr
Jonathan and Mr Dickson linked to Nollywood. The governor, considered to be
within the president’s inner circle, and the president are trying to consummate
a marriage between the PDP’s Delta element and Nigeria’s film cabal.
No living Nigerian embodies this relationship
with greater alacrity than Kate Henshaw. In 1992 Ms Henshaw was studying
medical microbiology at the University of Calabar in south-eastern Nigeria when
she auditioned for a modelling contract. Days later she became the African face
for Shield deodorant. By the mid-1990s she was making about $150 per film and
amassing dozens of credits, including an African Movie Academy Award in 2008.
But as the years wore on, Ms Henshaw’s outlook changed. “I try not to do too
many films these days,” she said. “I want to do quality work—after 20 years,
you have to be picky.” Her sights turned to radio, reality TV, music, and to
politics. In April 2014 she hitched her wagon to the PDP. She will run for
parliament in 2015 as a celebrity candidate fighting for the middle class and
their values: better growth, more stability, less crime, zero corruption.
From hastily made
movies played in ramshackle video clubs, Nollywood has evolved and raised a
stable of stars who are now coming into power. Many, like Ms Henshaw, will help
to influence not just commercial tastes, but political leanings. As Africa’s
largest cultural industry matures, it will increasingly become not just a
vector for middle class voices but something more—a portal into Nigeria’s
future, driven by a political class that grew up in front of the camera. Africa’s
biggest country by population and economy is defining trends that may last for
generations: actors who once played at being middle class in the movies, now
playing at being president in State House. It could happen. In Nollywood,
anything is possible.
Sources: Norwegian Council for Africa
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