Nollywood's Evolution and Staying Power

Nollywood Associations and Guilds 1

Source: afromixent.com

1. Actors’ Guild of Nigeria (AGN), Emeka Ike/Ibinabo Fiberesima, 08033256486, 08062777777
2. Alliance of Nollywood Guilds and Associations (ANOGA), Comrade Victor Ashaolu, 08067314252.
3. Arewa Film Makers Association (AFMA), Aisha Halilu,  aisha.halilu@gmail.com
4. Association of Itsekiri Performing Artistes (AIPA), Prince Young Emiko, 08023213980
5. Association of Movie Producers (AMP), Zik Zulu Okafor, zulufilms@yahoo.com
6. Association of Nigeria Theatre Arts Practitioners (ANTP), Comrade Victor Ashaolu, 08067314252.

The Feminine Mistake

Artwork by Lorna Simpson; source: more.com

(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)--I first knew there was such a thing as blue mascara because of Aunty Chinwe. She came to visit my mother one Saturday, her braids held sleekly at her neck, her caftan’s silver embroidery gleaming and her lashes the bright color of a crayon. Against her dark skin, they were striking.

“Aunty, your lashes are blue!” I said.

I was 11.

“Yes, my dear. It’s blue mascara,” she told me with a smile. She was always smiling, eyes crinkled, teeth very white.

I liked most of my mother’s friends—funny women, kind women, brilliant women, and there was the one soft-spoken man—but only to Aunty Chinwe would I say something like that. Aunty, your lashes are blue!

She had an air of endless tolerance, of magnanimous grace; she turned every room she entered into a soft space free of the thorny possibility of consequences. With children, her manner was that of an adult just about to hand out lavishly wrapped gifts, not for a birthday or Christmas but simply because children deserved gifts.

I sneaked into the parlor whenever she visited, and sat in a corner, and eavesdropped on her conversations with my mother. Because she drank Fanta elegantly from a glass, I eschewed bottles and began to drink my Coke from a glass. I loved simply to look at her: petite, graciously fleshy, with a dark-dark complexion that made people think she was from Ghana or Gambia or somewhere not Nigeria where beautiful women had indigo skin. At her clinic she gave injections with the gentlest touch.

Raised Catholic, Inspired by Pope Francis

Holy Trinity Cathedral, Onitsha, Nigeria; source: Reuters

(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)--As a child, I loved Mass, its swirl of music and rituals. My family went every Sunday to St. Peter’s, the Catholic chapel at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. It was full of perfumed people: gold pendants at women’s throats, their headscarves flared out like the wings of giant butterflies; men’s caftans crisply starched; children in frilly socks and uncomfortable clothes. Mass was as much social as spiritual—an occasion to greet and gossip, to see and be seen, and to leave consoled. I loved watching the priests sweep past, all certainty and majestic robes, behind the sober Mass-servers holding candles. The choir sang in Igbo and English, each song a little plot of joy. I loved the smoky smells, the standing and sitting and kneeling, the shiny metal chalice raised high in air charged with magic and ringing bells. The words of the liturgy were poetry.

Campus Love

Nnenna Omali; source: bellanaija.com

(E. C. Osondu)--I’ll tell you about love.

I know more about this four letter word than you’d expect. On an unrelated note, maybe not totally unrelated, I have always had a little pet peeve. You know I have never liked those musical boys groups like Boy’s To Men and Backstreet Boys crooning on and on about love and loving and winning and losing and running away and coming back to love. What do they know? What have they experienced in their young lives? It is a different thing when a battle-scarred lover like BB King is groaning out such a song. You can tell he’s been there and done that, got the scars, authentic scars to show for it and he’s keeping it real y’all.

Anyway, where was I ?

Yes, as I was saying I was chased out of the university that I attended for one year because of love. I had to take the university entrance exams for a second time to get into the second tier university from which I eventually graduated. This particular kind of love was not the whispering kind. It was rather the kind that screamed and grabbed one by the shirt collar and commanded— follow me. My story is a little bow-legged, but I will uncrook it’s leg for you.

Oriki for Onitsha Market Literature

Source: ecx.images-amazon.com

(Ikhide R. Ikheloa)--Someone once asked me to respond to the interesting question: Is Nigerian English the same as Nigerian pidgin? 

My response: There is pidgin and many variants are spoken in Nigeria. And there is English and many variants are spoken in Nigeria. Debating the idea of one Nigerian English is as useful as saying that there is ONE recipe for cooking egusi soup (yes, soup, NOT sauce!). 

There are ways of speaking, and ways of expression that are distinct to various sections Nigeria. And it is often possible to tell where someone is from based on how they handle the English language. Some of the best masters of English are from Nigeria. And some of the worst are from Nigeria. What is mildly hilarious is that it is the latter that usually spends precious time correcting the former. There is something about some Nigerians and the attainment of knowledge or whatever; they like to wear it loudly like a Rolex watch,

Igbo People, Culture, and History

And Okonkwo Goes Viral!

(Pius Adesanmi)--Thank You, Millennials!

Despite sorrow, despite anguish, despite depression over Kogi state, Nigeria, today, I somehow had to find the strength to go and teach that introduction to African literature second-year class.

Discussions came to the cultural and contextual bases of similes, metaphors, and other figures of speech. I take an example from Things Fall Apart:

"During this time Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan"

A Shocking Death and the Will of God

Oluchi Anekwe; source: jide-salu.com

(Simon Kolawale)--How do you respond to the electrocution of a promising university undergraduate, a first-class material at that? You can say "it is God's will" — as it is our custom in Nigeria — or you can say that once again, another light has been dimmed in clearly avoidable circumstances.

Oluchi Anekwe, a 300-level accounting student of the University of Lagos, was killed on Tuesday when a naked wire fell on her from an electric pole. Since there was no natural disaster such as a storm, you get the sense that the deadly cable had been hanging dangerously for a while. It was somebody's responsibility, I guess, to maintain those cables. The "somebody" failed in his duty and there are no consequences. Life goes on. We await the next electrocution, the next "God's will".

The Violence in the Sacred

Source: js.emory.edu

(Rene Girard)--“Religion in its broadest sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds man’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventive means against his own violence.... This obscurity coincides with the transcendental effectiveness of a violence that is holy, legal, and legitimate successfully opposed to a violence that is unjust, illegal, and illegitimate….

Religion, then, is far from ‘useless.’ It humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands, transforming it into a transcendent and ever-present danger to be kept in check by the appropriate rites appropriately observed and by a modest and prudent demeanor….

[Religious] prohibitions serve a basic function. They maintain a sort of sanctuary at the heart of the community, an area where that minimum of nonviolence essential to the survival of the children and the community’s cultural heritage—essential, in short, to everything that sustains man’s humanity—is jealously preserved. If prohibitions capable of performing this function actually exist, one can hardly attribute them to the beneficence of Nature (that good angel of complacent humanism, the last relic of those optimistic theologies engendered by the deterioration of historical Christianity).

Nigeria, Ethnicity, AND Nationalism

Source: tourbrockersinternational.com

(Pius Adesanmi)--Pan-Nigeria does not ask you to forget your ethnic, religious or other identities. It asks you to sacrifice nothing. In fact, pan-Nigeria cannot even exist as a philosophical concept without those differences.

What I want you to know you cannot even be a good Nigerian if you are not a fantastic Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw, etc. So start by being very proud of your ethnic and cultural identity and specificity. Then, apply yourself to understanding the history and cultures of your ethnicity’s ancestors.

You see, ethnic hatred in Nigeria is borne out of crass ignorance of the humanism and philosophical generosity of the ancestors of the federating ethnicities.

I have studied the cultures of Africa long enough to understand their deep humanism which should form the basis of an extension of the self into others, a projection into them to respect them in their own distinction and specificity.

So, understanding the story of humanism in your Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani or Ogoni history and culture is the road to the pan-Nigerian humanism I envision. Go back to your folk tales and listen attentively to what happened to the tortoise whenever he undermined the dignity of his own people or of neighbouring peoples.

The fundamental humanism in our ancestral stories is what we have not been able to properly integrate into the modern project Nigeria.

Of Mmonwu and Spirits of the Living-Dead

The Ancestors and the Dialogue of Religions

Source: timeslive.co.za

"My father was a man of few words, and I have always regretted that I had not asked him more questions. But I realize also that he took pains to tell me what he thought I needed to know. He told me, for instance, in a rather oblique way of his one tentative attempt long ago to convert his uncle.

It must have been in my father’s youthful, heady, proselytizing days! His uncle had said no, and pointed to the awesome row of insignia of his three titles. “what shall I do to these?” he had asked my father. It was an awesome question. What do I do to who I am? What do I do to history?

An orphan child born into adversity, heir to commotions, barbarities, rampant upheaveals of a continent in disarray: was it all surprising that he would eagerly welcome the explanation and remedy proffered by diviners and interpreters of a new word [i.e., Christianity]?

And his uncle Udoh, a leader in his community, a moral, open-minded man, a prosperous man who had prepared such a great feast when he took the ozo title that his people gave him a unique praise-name for it: was he to throw all that away now because some strangers from afar came and said so?

Those two—my father and his uncle—formulated the dialectic which I inherited. Udoh stood fast in what he knew, but he left room also for his nephew to seek other answers. The answer my father found in the Christian faith solved many problems, but by no means all.”

Chinua Achebe (2009: 37), The Education of a British-Protected Child

Onitsha, Balconies, and Gists

(Uzoamaka Doris Aniunoh)--I lived in Onitsha with my parents and siblings in a four-story building. My father was the landlord and going downstairs was against his many rules, so I always stayed on the balcony, watching things happen. In Onitsha, the height of a building was an indication of its owner’s wealth. (For some reason, it was mostly the bungalows that had badly spelt signs in red paint that read DIS HOUSE IS NO FOR SELL.) My father owned our building, so it was only natural that we lived at the very top.

Our fourth floor living quarters had four balconies: one in our flat, two in our father’s flat and one separating the two flats.

In Pursuit of Happiness

Source: pintrest.com

“In that Christ had suffered, and had suffered voluntarily, suffering was no longer unjust and pain was necessary. In one sense, Christianity’s bitter intuition and legitimate pessimism concerning human behavior is based on the assumption that over-all injustice is as satisfying to man as total justice. Only the sacrifice of an innocent god could justify the endless and universal torture of innocence. Only the most abject suffering by God could assuage man’s agony. If everything, without exception, in heaven and earth is doomed to pain and suffering, then a strange form of happiness is possible.”

Albert Camus (1956: 34)

The Rebel