VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

CHAPTER VIThe openness of Nigerian video genres: Melodrama, realism and the creation of a pan-AfricanpublicIn the article he wrote for the special issue of Film International dedicated to the Nigerian videoindustry, the American anthropologist John McCall described Nollywood as one of the few populardiscourses that, in African recent history, can rightly be labeled as pan-African (2007). Since theearly twentieth century numerous artistic and political movements considered pan-Africanism, andthe shared conception of “African identity” that would come with it, as the prerequisites for theachievement of the cultural and political independence of the continent. The attempts that thesemovements produced remained in most cases unaccomplished, and diverging political, economic,ethnic and religious interests prevailed over the ideal of unity. However, what a strong ideologicaland intellectual commitment did not manage to achieve, seems today to be in the process ofhappening as the result of an autonomous and spontaneous dynamic. The pan-Africanism that isemerging from the continental circulation and consumption of Nigerian videos may not be, asMcCall underlines, “the monolithic ideology that pan-Africanists envisioned”, but it is undeniablyparticipating to the creation of a “continent-wide popular discourse about what it means to beAfrican” (2007: 94).The forms and contents that this discourse has assumed derive from the very specificity of itsgenealogy. This is in fact a pan-African discourse whose roots are based on a series of social andhistorical factors that have emerged in the past twenty years, such as the technologicaltransformations that revolutionized African infrastructures of communication; the intense processesof urbanization that traversed most African countries; the economic crisis that hit sub-SaharanAfrica since the mid-1980s; the tremendous demographic growth and the consequential increase ofthe number of youth on the average African population. Nigerian videos emerged from thesedynamics and created a formula that made videos able to “speak” these transformations, to narratethem giving them a format, a specific language and a recognizable look. With some degree ofsimplification, we can say that Nigerian videos incarnate a specific era of African social andcultural history, and this might well be the main reason for their continental success. But even if thissentence may be true, it keeps our analysis to a superficial level, and thus needs to be challenged bya number of more precise questions. What are the elements that made Nigerian videos travelthroughout the continent? How are they organized together? What narrative and aesthetic languagedo they speak and how did they manage to address a pan-African public?141