VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

Pentecostal churches’ Sunday services as tool of evangelization 25 and where they are broadcastedby local television with a voice over in Lingala (Pype, forthcoming). Their popularity also travelledacross the ocean, making them extremely successful in the United States (Ogundimu 2009), inCanada (Njoku 2009d) and in the Caribbean, where according to Philip Cartelli “at least 80 percentof the music or videos being sold come from Nigeria” (2007: 112). Nollywood films became alsopopular among the African diaspora in Europe, above all in England (Esan 2008), but also, as theepisode mentioned at the beginning of this introduction has shown, in Italy, France, Switzerland,Belgium and Germany. As Jonh McCall emphasised, because of its transnational success,Nollywood became “a primary catalyst in an emergent continent-wide popular discourse about whatit means to be African” (2007: 94). Nigerian videos, and the debate that they generated in the publicsphere of many African nations, participated in the creation of a popular discourse about thedefinition of African modernity(ies) which, as mentioned earlier, constitutes one of the areas ofinterest of this thesis.Nollywood as popular cultureAs I pointed out earlier, Nollywood has hardly been considered part of the “African cinema”tradition, and only recently scholars coming from this field of studies began to be interested in theNigerian video production. The video phenomenon has instead been interpreted in most of the casesas part of what is commonly described as popular culture (cf. Haynes and Okome 1998, Haynes2000; Larkin 2008), a set of cultural phenomena whose analysis became particularly relevant withinthe field of African studies in the past thirty years, thanks to the theoretical efforts of such scholarsas Johannes Fabian (1978, 1996), Biodun Jeyifo (1984, 1985), Ulf Hannerz (1987), Karin Barber(1987, 1997, 2000) and Christopher Waterman (1990). According to this perspective, popular artsand cultures are unofficial, informal, fluid and highly mobile. In Karin Barber’s wordsthey are arts that seem to exhibit a preoccupation with social change which is in effect theirdetermining characteristic, they do not merely allude to innovation or make occasional use of25 Even if today their number reduced, religious videos use to be the largest percentage of the Nigerian production. Theyare often centered on the radical contraposition between the Good and the Evil, and they are framed by rigid moralprinciples (see Meyer [2001, 2004] and Oha [2000, 2002]). They represent also interesting contrapositions betweenrural tradition, conceived as synonym of idolatry and sin, and urban modernity, conceived as the locus of conversionand emancipation from idolatry (see Wendl 2001, 2007).29