With this edited volume, Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome present exciting new research on the transnational movement and influence of Nollywood, the name popularly given to the English-language commercial movie industry based in Nigeria. Contributors offer extensive and detailed ethnographic case studies of the transnational dimensions of Nollywood and analyze recent movies made in and about the diaspora. Global Nollywood represents the most up-to-date research on Nollywood as a transnational cultural practice and is a must-read for scholars and students of African screen media.
The editors have organized the book’s fifteen chapters into four sections, each covering a different aspect of transnational Nollywood. The first section, “Mapping the Terrain,” presents an overview of the transnational dimensions of the Nollywood industry. Alessandro Jedlowski’s chapter, “From Nollywood to Nollyworld: Processes of Transnationalization in the Nigerian Video Film Industry,” offers a historical analysis of the transnational processes the industry has participated in, describing the shift from the “informal transnationalisms” of the 1990s to the more formalized circuits created by Nigerian producers and distributors in the last ten years. Jedlowski, following Brian Larkin and the more recent work of Roman Lobato, attends to the materiality of Nollywood’s migrations and development, and his chapter is one of the most compelling, in part because it looks beyond the context of African screen media to situate Nollywood within the radical transformations in world media ecologies fueled by globalization. In “Transnational Nollywood,” the second part of the volume, contributors turn their attention from the industry to the particulars of the texts, analyzing movies set and produced in the diaspora as a distinct genre of Nollywood films, which, according to Jonathan Haynes, share “a typical story arc, moral and psychological themes, and formal features” (73). In his chapter, an overview of recent diaspora movies, Haynes refers to a sample of more than twenty movies to lay out the formal and thematic “regularities” (90) of the genre. This careful delineation becomes a reference point for the chapters that follow.
Sophie Samyn’s “Nollywood Made in Europe” looks at a small group of Nigerian immigrants living and making films in the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium to determine “how these immigrant filmmakers negotiate the various cultural and national boundaries they cross” (100). To this end, Samyn provides biographical information about each filmmaker and details the motivations that inspire their movies. Like their Nigeria-based counterparts, the diaspora producers hope their stories “are a source of information and moral insight” (103). Her comparative discussion of individual movies identifies the thematic and aesthetic affinities between diaspora Nollywood and “domestic Nollywood” that are derived from the material and human links that join them.
Taking up, although not specifically referencing, Samyn’s observation that “the cities where the Nigerian immigrant filmmakers live are often more meaningful in their work and lives than the country itself” (113), Claudia Hoffman examines the representation of the city in three Nollywood films set in New York: Missing in America (dir. Gabrielle Savage Dockterman, 2005); This America (dir. Bethels Agomuoh, 2014); and God’s Own Country (dir. Arun Kumar, 2014). Her chapter, “Made in America: Urban Immigrant Spaces in Transnational Nollywood Films,” demonstrates that “cinematic New York represents consumerism and freedom that immigrants want a share of, the point of entry from which they must find their way—an alienating urban jungle that can make or break them” (126). Hoffman’s analysis is noteworthy because it attends not only to plots and themes, but also to the camera and its construction of perspective and meaning.
The last two essays in this section of the volume, by Onookome Okome and Paul Ugor, respectively, spotlight what each considers a pathbreaking diaspora movie. Both authors—Okome directly and Ugor by implication—set out to challenge critics who have dismissed Nollywood as a frivolous, profit-driven cultural form. For Okome, Osuofia in London (dir. Kingsley Ogoro, 2003) is a postcolonial parody that “reverts the narrative gaze typical of colonial discourse by taking over and insisting on the retelling of the archetypal story we find in empire films” (144). He examines the film’s deployment of popular comic idioms to tackle “serious social, political, and cultural issues” (155). According to Paul Ugor, Glamour Girls 2 (dir. Christian Onu, 1996), the final installment of a two-part film set in Italy, brought to light “the hidden transcripts of a global sex market” (160) long before sex trafficking had attracted international attention as a human rights issue. He treats the text as “a graphic social portrait” (173) that “provid[es] concrete details of how the industry operates” (160), but unfortunately says little about the aesthetic and narrative dimensions of the movie that make possible its representation of the real.
The third section of the volume features analyses of Nollywood’s transnational audiences. Building on original ethnographic research in a variety of locations, including South Africa, Namibia, Congo, Barbados, Italy, and Belgium, contributors investigate Nollywood’s appeal outside of Nigeria. Heike Becker, for example, concludes that for young upwardly mobile spectators in Cape Town and Windhoek, Nollywood is part of a global archive of cultural forms from which they fashion individual stylizations of urban African modernity. A Nollywood audience in the Caribbean, in the words of Jane Bryce, “responds simultaneously to both the familiar (‘black like us’) and the exotic (not ‘like us’)” (234). Giovanna Santanera’s interviews with Nigerians living in Turin suggest that Nollywood delivers “a familiar rhetorical country” (251) in a context of “semantic uncertainty” (250). These chapters also describe the agents and networks that facilitate Nollywood’s migrations. Katrien Pype expertly tracks the movement of media between Congo and Nigeria and describes the intermediaries who not only make possible the movement of Nollywood movies into Kinshasa, but also “localize” them through their interpretive interventions. Most fascinating is her discussion of the “dubbers,” the men employed by television stations to “perform simultaneous translations” of Nollywood narratives (216). Together these contributors enrich our understanding of transnational flows and circuits that bypass the West and instead travel between countries (and cities) in the global South. As Pype notes, attention to these global networks is crucial because it serves “to correct persistent ideas about African migration, which is not always South–North oriented” (199).
The final chapter in this section, by Babson Ajibade, takes an entirely different approach to audience-based research. The question of whether or not there are Western audiences for Nollywood drives Ajibade’s study of Western spectators’ responses to Nollywood videos. While a graduate student at the University of Basel, Ajibade organized groups of friends, all of whom he describes as Westerners, to watch Nollywood movies with him and to complete a survey that required them to quantify their responses to what they had seen. The survey asked viewers to specify if they found the videos “easy to understand” or “hard to understand” and if they were “interesting,” “uninteresting,” or “amusing.” The results of the study, compiled from the surveys and including observations recorded during the movie screenings, are not surprising, but interesting nevertheless. Respondents found the movies amusing and easy to understand but indicated that they would not purchase Nollywood films and do not think the movies would appeal to Western audiences because of their low production values. Ajibade then recut a Nollywood movie to align it more closely with Western expectations. Specifically, he removed scenes he described as repetitive or unnecessary to the plot to quicken the tempo of the film. In the end, a twelve-hour, four-part feature was edited down to one hour, and as predicted, audiences found the abridged version more appealing. Ajibade intends for his findings to be useful to Nollywood producers and directors who, he assumes, seek a Western viewership. The chapter would also be effective in a class or unit on Nollywood in a North American or European university, where students are not familiar with Nollywood aesthetics or conventions. It offers students a way to understand their own reactions to Nollywood so that they might move beyond evaluating it or regarding it as strange and instead begin to analyze the movies and the contexts of production and distribution from which they come.
The last section of the volume, “Appropriations of Nollywood,” contains three strong chapters that analyze practices that reimagine and remake Nollywood across cultural boundaries. These fascinating contributions illustrate the inadequacy of the binary model of the cultural imperialism thesis for appreciating the complexity of contemporary African popular culture. First, Abdalla Uba Adamu examines the Hausa movie Auduga (dir. Abba El-Mustapha, 2004), a remake of the Nollywood blockbuster Dangerous Twins (dir. Tade Ogidan, 2004), which “seeks to Hausanize and Islamicize” the Nollywood original (297). One of the strategies it relies on to localize the Nigerian movie involves incorporating Bollywood conventions, an act of double cultural appropriation through which Aduga domesticates two non-Western global forms. Equally absorbing is Matthias Krings’s chapter, “Karishika with Kiswahili Flavor: A Nollywood Film Retold by a Tanzanian Video Narrator.” This piece centers on King Rich, a video narrator who translates Nollywood movies into Kiswahili. These oral performances, which are performed live or recorded and sold as individual cassettes, constitute a “new narrative genre” (311) remarkable, explains the author, because it “remediates” (317) the Nollywood film, domesticating it for local audiences. And finally, “Bloody Bricolages: Traces of Nollywood in Tanzanian Video Films,” by Claudia Böhme, details “Nollywood’s traveling aesthetics” as reimagined in Tanzanian horror movies. The brief chapter is packed full of valuable information. Böhme provides a history of the Tanzanian movie industry and describes the ambivalent reception Nollywood has received in the country. It is partly through efforts to distinguish themselves from Nollywood videomakers that Tanzanians have created their own “bricolage” style of horror movie, which draws on popular narratives and also appropriates elements of Hollywood and Bollywood.
This volume’s most significant contribution is that it details and maps Nollywood’s transnationality and demonstrates its global reach. Nollywood narrative forms, genres, and aesthetics as well as the Nollywood production model have been reimagined and remade across borders, in different locations and in conversation with a variety of translocal cultural forms. The most provocative insights found in the essays come into view when researchers adopt theoretical perspectives that are as worldly and adventurous as Nollywood itself. Perhaps the volume’s only weakness is that these theoretical nuggets are too few. I wanted more theorizing that was transnational, transdisciplinary, and perhaps a little transgressive to complement the fine-tuned close readings and ethnographies and that, like Nollywood itself, crossed boundaries to sample and remake ideas and concepts in different contexts. To my mind, it is these approaches that hold the most promise for future research. Nollywood studies, which remains grounded in an African studies paradigm, has too rarely engaged with critical or theoretical work in film and media studies and has dialogued too infrequently with research on other global, non-Western film and media industries. Though there are important exceptions, I still maintain that we in Nollywood studies focus our optic too tightly on Africa and talk only to ourselves. We therefore miss opportunities to participate in conversations with scholars who work in other fields or who specialize in other media industries and to invigorate our analyses with new creative energies and conceptual vocabularies. More crucially, we forego chances to share our knowledge broadly and to challenge critical discourses that generalize about world cinema, postcolonial cultural production, or transnational media without accounting for the singularity of Nollywood.
