VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

condition, the Nigerian videos’ melodramatic imagination represents “the drama of morality” thatthe collectivity has to face once the ideal of a linear and progressive modernity has collapsed.Incidentally, it is important to underline here that, by the use of the dichotomies“collective/individual” and “religious/secular” I do not intend to reproduce mystifying dualismswhose use in African studies has been widely criticized (see for instance Piot 1999: Introduction). Irefuse theoretical schemes based on an evolutionist conception of time (from collective toindividual, from religious to secular), according to which the return of the “religious” and the“collective” at the centre of social organization would symbolize a step back on the linear itineraryof progress. My intention, on the contrary, is to underline how, within a highly modern context suchas the Nigerian one, the ideal of modernity itself can progressively be dissociated from the aspectsthat are often considered to be its key attributes, that is, secularism and individualism. As muchscholarship on African modernity has shown, the large propagation of ethnic conflicts, occultpractices and Pentecostal believes in contemporary African societies does not represent the “end” ofmodernity in the continent, or its radical failure (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 1993 and 1999;Geschiere 1997). It represents instead the fact that, with the failure of state-driven initiative ofmodernization, the ideal of modernity has become, if possible, more complex, hybrid and pluralthan ever.In relation to this debate, it might be useful to underline that the differences between Europeanmelodrama and Nigerian videos' melodramatic imagination that I just outlined find a confirmationin the analysis of the videos’ contents and aesthetics produced by two major analysts of the videophenomenon, Onookome Okome and Brian Larkin. Both of them connect their analysis of Nigerianvideos’ film language and narrative structure to the specificity of the Nigerian post-Structural-Adjustment, and more generally post-colonial, reality. In Okome’s terms (2004a), Nollywoodvideos revolve around a radical sentiment of “anxiety”, which is the result of the postcolonial urbanexperience. Paraphrasing Chinua Achebe, Okome identifies anxiety as the defining condition of theAfrican man, 119 and the postcolonial city as the locus of anxiety par excellence. In most video filmsthe city is the universe of limitless possibilities, but also of limitless frustration. Within the city, thepostcolonial subject faces the modern consumerist world but he is positioned (in most cases) on itsmargins, deprived of any purchasing power. Thus comes the anxiety that characterizes this119 In his essay on “Africa and her writers” Achebe writes that the condition of the “anxious African […] is the sourceof all our [of African people] problems” (1982: 27 quoted in Okome 2004a: 316). According to his analysis Africans areanxious because “Africa has such a fate in the world that the very adjective ‘African’ can still call up hideous fears orrejection” (ibid).158