Indigenous Language and the Glamorisation of Ethnic Identity in ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

British Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 29October 2013, Vol. 10 (1)Fourth, the position of Lagos as a British colony in 1862, and later federal capital, now commercial capitalof Nigeria, dominated and surrounded by Yorubas, allowed the flocks of immigrants from the other ethnictribes to understand the language by associating with the native speakers. This contributed immensely to thenumber of speakers of the language and obviously translates to the number of Yoruba language movie fans.Fifth, the spiralling number of speakers made Yoruba language movies successful in a Nigerian context, thusluring some movie producers who were not Yoruba native speakers to revert to movie productions inYoruba language (Haynes 2000). Even some of the elite that shot their movies in Yoruba language did sonot as a result of the rich vocabulary of the language, but for the large market, which the Yoruba languageproduction attracts. In a catalogue of feature movies produced between 1977 and 1993, indigenous Yorubalanguage movie productions obviously top the list (Ekwuazi 1992).The success recorded in the use of tribal languages and tribal stories in movie making enhanced cinemaproductions like never before. Artists, such as Hubert Ogunde, Eddie Ugbomah, Ade Afolayan (Ade Love)and Moses Adejumo who had been performing on stage or sporadically on television for decades, as well asthose who do not have formal knowledge of movie production embraced the medium. These artists wentback to their roots to explore tribal stories, in tribal languages, in tune with the doctrine of FESTAC. Thetribal story phenomenon afforded these artists the opportunities to adapt their stage plays into movies. Thisdeluge into filmmaking is substantiated by Ukadike (1994).The dominant form of Nigerian cinema takes the form of theatrical adaptations originatingfrom the Yoruba travelling theatre (whose main exponents are Hubert Ogunde, MosesAdejumo and Ade Love). [And that] Nigerian cinema neither owes little to Western modelsnor does it derive its style from any national cinema, East or West. […] these films makeinvigorating use of popular traditions such as those found in Yoruba fairy tales, magic andsuperstition.This large scale of tribal languages in production of films in a country with over 250 tribal languages puts ashroud over the search for a national cinema. Some of the other major tribes tried unsuccessfully to make amark or at least match the Yorubas in film production. Irrespective of the fact that these movies did not yieldthe maximum profit expected of movie releases, the producers trudged on as long as some of them managedto recoup their investments. The influence of the FESTAC language seminar on indigenous languages inmovie production in Nigeria cannot be measured more so, when Obasanjo (1977), berated artists or group ofartist who cannot work in their indigenous language form, of conforming a built-in handicap. The reasonwhy people could not work or do not want to work in their indigenous languages was inconsequential to thecultural revivalists, that made the clarion call. They neither heeded the effect of colonialism, which hadforced one official language over the multi-lingual society, nor learnt any lesson from the Tower of Babel inthe Old Testament of the Christian Holy Bible (Genesis).Obasanjo‘s criticism no doubt found the ears of Yoruba artists who churned indigenous language featurefilms in their numbers. This was a very significant period in the history of Nigerian cinema, because ofincrease in indigenous film productions, even though this was not the beginning of the slow development ofindigenous full-length film productions. There are two pioneering figures, Francis Oladele and particularlyOla Balogun, (who was the unsung director behind the popularity and development of the Yoruba folkloricmovies of Hubert Ogunde), Ade Afolayan and Moses Adejumo, the stable from which the Yorubafilmmaking tradition emerged. The haphazard nature of Nigerian cinema posed some form of challenges tocritics who are sometimes confused on the exact qualification of Nigerian films. There actually were twofilmmaking cultures, the first which goes by so many different names: the folkloric, mythology, mytho-ritualand metaphysics and within it are two mode of filmmaking: the serious and the comic. This filmmakingculture is not based on any world known filmmaking convention. Its aim, by accident or by design was© 2013 British Journals ISSN 2048-1268
British Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 30October 2013, Vol. 10 (1)geared towards cultural revival according to Ekwuazi (1992). Referencing Ferid Boughedir he writes that thefilms did not just idealized folklores, but as a bold statement against Western cultures and with greatauthenticity, it resorts to restoring the ways of life of the African popular masses. The narrative is basedlargely on myth, legend and superstitious cultural beliefs. The narratives, tied to the Yoruba travellingtheatre is favoured and popularised by this large Nigerian tribe. The second filmmaking culture isperpetuated particularly by film scholars trained in Western film schools. They have their narrativesexecuted along the line of mainstream movies dealing with social and current realities. Depending on thestories and the commercial attraction, the production language of this second filmmaking culture oscillatesbetween English and Yoruba.Themes, Genre and the Pains in Language MoviesWhat eventually evolved from the Yoruba Travelling theatre were two genres of movie productions — thosethat deal with serious issues, and those that parody those serious issues. In all, two elemental worlds areprojected — the world of reality and the world of fantasy. In the movies, Man is pitched against numerousforces which belittle him. Some of the forces are caused by his unavoidable mistakes, by fellow men or bynature. In the process of struggling to overcome these belittling forces, there is a long ―chain of animatednature‖, (Ekwuazi 1992), in monstrous human forms, scary animal forms, or plants. This chain of fantasieslinks his real world to his cosmos world, or the worlds of the underworld. It is a world believed to be inexistence by particularly Africans. Those who harbour this belief are of the opinion that nothing happens bychance, even natural occurrences. A man‘s failure is attributed to either evil machination from his enemies,or a curse from the gods, or dead ancestors‘ displeasures. Ancestral existence play prominent role in Yorubacosmology, as a result, the treatment of this subject permeates the Yoruba arts. From Duro Ladipo‘s ObaKoso, Amos Tutuola‘s The Palmwine Drinkard, Wale Ogunyemi‘s Langbodo to Wole Soyinka‘s Death andthe King’s Horseman, and an in depth appreciation of Kongi’s Harvest, the imagery of death, and reverencefor ancestors, and the projection of the extra-terrestrial world dominate the composition of the plays. ObaDanlola‘s poetic lines in Kongi’s Harvest, which broke into sorrowful ―last dance‖ when the prison waderstopped the royal drums from playing, is a testimonial to how the imagery of death shows up, no matter howbrief in narrative composition of the Yoruba dramatists. The facial gestures and the dance steps taken byOba Danlola and his chief were not of this earth. There is a kind of imaginary transition to the world beyond.In the movies produced by the Yoruba travelling theatre practitioners, these issues very often are takenbeyond the terrestrial world to the worlds where these powers emanates. The presentation of these inNigerian movies are slightly different from those in Greek mythology as exemplified in Clash of the Titans(1980), in which the success and failure of every human activity in the terrestrial world, is subject to thecontrol of the gods. Due to the fact that the Yoruba travelling theatre movies are built along this line ofnarrative, with a long historical tradition and ownership of stories and performing troupes, the problems ofauthorship of movies tends to show up. Some critics neglect the conventional method where the maindirector is associated with the authorship of the movie in line with (Stoddart 1995) analysis of AlexandreAstruc‘s initial argument. The director is seen as an equivalent of a literary artist and in like manner, themovie affords him the ‗means of personal expression‘ and as such should be credited with the authorship ofsuch works he presided over. Swayed by the posters that parades the names, or companies of the theatrepractitioner‘s, many critics disregarded this theory reiterated by Françoise Truffaut, which emphaticallystates that the real artists, or ‗auteurs‘, of the cinema, were its directors, not its ‗scenarists‘ (screen playwriters). Very much unlike Hollywood where the big studios bears the responsibility of filmmaking, thestructure of Nigerian cinema is different, and poses a complex situation of authorship particularly whenreferring to the movies in which the filmmaker is the soul of the production that can hire and disband. Theyare the chief executive officer (CEO). The onus of financing the project lies on them. They write the filmscript irrespective of how imperfect it may be. They hire every other filmmaking personnel including the© 2013 British Journals ISSN 2048-1268
Page 3: British Journal of Humanities and S
Page 8 and 9: British Journal of Humanities and S

Indigenous Language and the Glamorisation of Ethnic Identity in ...

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?