Flourishing Nollywood opens window on Africa in Vancouver

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      At Conie’s African Market in Burnaby, two customers watch Ahonhom Bone, a movie in the Akan language of northern Ghana. The viewers utter a collective sigh as African scenery is blacked out by the rolling credits. Although they may feel pangs for African landscapes, the store owner, Comfort Sam, notes that her movie customers are from all over Africa and the Caribbean, and are sometimes people who have family members of African descent.

      “All of them are our favourites,” Sam says about the Nollywood movies in her store. “They remind us of home. Here, we are homesick.”

      Nollywood is Nigeria’s multimillion-dollar movie industry, which produces more than 1,000 titles a year. It’s the world’s third-biggest, after Hollywood and Bollywood. Nollywood movies—offering fictional representations of Africans in their homelands with dialogue in African languages, English, or French—are shot straight to DVD and distributed internationally. They’re made on a tight deadline, two weeks or so of shooting, and an even tighter budget, up to a few thousand dollars. They’re often poorly shot, using digital cameras, and badly edited, with substandard sound quality, but these are Africans “telling our own stories our own way”, as director Bond Emeruwa says in the 2007 documentary This Is Nollywood.

      Nollywood exploded into being with the 1992 production of Living in Bondage by director Chris Obi Rapu. But this was not the first movie made in Nigeria. The Nigerian film industry had existed since the ’60s but had not made much headway due to the high expense of production. In 1992, businessman Kenneth Nnebue needed to get rid of several thousand blank VHS tapes when the opportunity to make a movie became available. Living in Bondage was dubbed in widely spoken pidgin English and made cheaply available.

      Movie production in Africa by Africans is now a quickly growing business. Diane Idun, of Diane’s African Entertainment in New Westminster, explains by phone that Nollywood is much bigger in the U.S. than it is in Canada and is becoming increasingly popular in countries like Jamaica and even China. The movies she sells are mostly in English, but she also offers movies in Twi, a Ghanaian language.

      At the B&B African General Merchandise store in Burnaby, owner Alhaji Funke Dalogun mostly stocks movies from Nigeria in English and sometimes Yoruba. Dalogun says his customers want to know what’s happening in Africa from sources other than the North American mainstream media covering HIV/AIDS, war, guerrillas, safaris, tribalism, desertification, lack of education, and water. These movies, which are sometimes based on true stories, provide an alternative.

      Movies depicting bigamy, for instance, might not be as shocking to an African audience as they would to a North American one. The very popular Osuofia in London, directed by Kingsley Ogoro, stars Nkem Owoh as Osuofia, who leaves his village in Nigeria for London to inherit millions of pounds from his recently deceased brother. He returns with the brother’s English fiancée, Samantha (Mara Derwent), as his second wife; she schemes to disinherit him of his newfound wealth. The hilarity of this movie lies in how language and cultures translate and transcend (or don’t).

      Entertainment and escapism aside, for Olga Ojelel, a Burnaby native of Ugandan descent, it is important that the Nollywood movies have a moral lesson. Most often Nollywood movies are associated with superstition, ritualistic killings, sex, violence, zombies, and demonic dramatizations of traditional practices, what director Zina Saro-Wiwa, in Pieter Hugo’s book Nollywood, calls the “juju horror”, involving black-magic stories, and “extreme soap”. Some filmmakers, particularly the Ghanaian ones, according to Sam, are now moving away from juju horror and concentrating on genres such as romance, action, drama, religious, and political documentary.

      With Nollywood leading the way—and with stars like the previously mentioned Owoh, Francis Duru, Genevieve Nnaji, Majid Michel, Nadia Buari, and Gabriella Mutia—African films no longer need to emulate Hollywood. The booming African movie industry provides made-in-Africa cinematic successes that have long been lacking in Black History Month celebrations.

      So where would one find an African movie to buy for about $10? Why, wherever there is an African business, of course.

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