Video Boom: Nigeria and Ghana1
Jonathan Haynes
Long Island University
The last fifteen years have seen the spectacular eruption of video films in Nigeria and Ghana—feature films that are shot cheaply on video and sold or rented as video cassettes or video compact discs.2 Hundreds of these videos have been made in Ghana, and Nigeria now produces more than a thousand of them every year (Abua). They are broadcast on television all over Anglophone Africa and are shown in theaters, small video parlors, and even in rural villages where itinerant exhibitors make the rounds with televisions, video cassette players, and generators. From a commercial point of view, these video films are the great success story of African cinema, the only instance in which the local media environment is dominated by local producers working in direct relationship with an African audience entirely outside the framework of governmental and European assistance and of international film festivals that has structured so much of African cinema. From a cultural point of view, the videos are one of the greatest explosions of popular culture the continent has ever seen (Haynes and Okome).
Video film production began almost simultaneously in Ghana and Nigeria in the late 1980s, in both cases as the result of general economic collapse that made celluloid film impossibly expensive. A sharp increase in violent crime in Nigeria was also making it dangerous to go out at night to a cinema. In Ghana, the way was led by people like Willy Akuffo, a film projectionist, and Socrate Safo, who was studying to become an auto mechanic. Self-taught as filmmakers, they were outsiders to the Ghanaian filmmaking establishment, but their tales of witchcraft and sentimental romance immediately struck a chord with their audience.
In Nigeria, the first into the field were artists from the Yoruba traveling theater, who had been working on television for decades and had produced scores of celluloid films in the 1970s and ’80s. Video projectors allowed them to continue screening their work in the informal venues that they had been hiring for film shows. Kenneth Nnebue, an Igbo businessman who had been dealing in electronic goods and imported video cassettes, had the idea of selling films on cassette rather than charging admission for screenings. He began by producing several films with Yoruba traveling theater artists, in Yoruba, but then in 1992 he wrote and produced an Igbo-language film, Living in Bondage. It was a sensation in the Igbo community; an English-subtitled version and a sequel quickly followed as Nnebue realized there was a national market for this kind of product. Suddenly there was a horde of Igbo film producers where none had existed before, nearly all of them untrained in filmmaking and working with tiny budgets. In 1994, Nnebue launched into English-language production with Glamour Girls. Once again, he immediately had many imitators. This was a particularly cash-starved moment for Nigerian television production, and many television personnel, including the soap opera director Amaka Igwe and her stars Richard Mofe-Damijo and Ego Boyo, moved into the video market. In northern Nigeria, videos in Hausa began to be made by amateur theater groups and by the authors of a kind of pamphlet literature often called “soyyaya” (love) because of its frequently romantic themes (Larkin, “Hausa Dramas” and “Indian Films”; Y. Adamu).
By the mid-1990s, Ghana was producing about 50 video films a year and Nigeria about 500 a year. In both countries the video boom was met with great hostility from the cultural establishment, which was appalled and embarrassed both by the low technical quality of the films and by the mentality they displayed, dominated by witchcraft and other forms of magic and by the imitation of the low, foreign, melodramatic form of the television serial. Because of the large capital investments required, celluloid cinema had always been closely regulated and sometimes supported by authorities, first colonial and then national, who were nervously concerned about the power of the medium and harnessed it to project cultural nationalist ideology and a favorable image of the country. Video production, in contrast, was possible as an informal sector activity, requiring only cheap technologies that were already widely available, and so it flourished as a form of popular culture in perfect indifference to what the authorities thought (Larkin, “Hausa Dramas” and Media). Market women are said to be at the demographic center of the video audience; the films are hawked in markets, motor parks, and even to motorists stuck in traffic jams, as well as by vendors with crude wooden shelves set up on the streets or in shops in popular neighborhoods that also sell pirated American, Indian, and Chinese videos and audio cassettes. In Ghana, a truck carrying a highlife band may be hired to parade through city streets to attract attention to a new film while a small army of hawkers in matching tee shirts tags along to sell cassettes.
The basic structures of the video business are similar in Nigeria and Ghana. The marketer/distributors, based in Opera Square in Accra and in Idumota Market in Lagos, with other Nigerian centers in the Igbo cities of Onitsha and Aba and the Hausa city of Kano, have effective control of the market. They are the main source of capital, as banks and other formal sector institutions are wary of the film business. Most...
1 An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Nigerian Daily The Guardian. The version appearing here is rewritten for Postcolonial Text.
2 For an overview of the video industry in Ghana, see Aveh and Meyer, “Ghanaian Popular Cinema”; for Nigeria, see Haynes, Nigerian Video Films, Barrot, Okome and Haynes, and McCall, “Nollywood”.
