.
Tunde Kelani and Onookome Okome, Nigeria

 :: Nigerian Popular Videos :: Thunderbolt  

Screenings: Thursday, Oct 16 at 6.00 p.m. & 
Saturday, Oct 18 at 6.30 p.m
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The Directors:

In 2003, we are featuring one of the best known and most experienced Nigerian video directors: Tunde Kelani (left), with his film Thunderbolt (see below). Accompanying Tunde will be the Nigerian popular culture expert, Dr Onookome Okome (right), who has made an in-depth study on the social significance of popular video films in Nigeria. He is co-editor with Jonathan Haynes of Cinema and Social Change in West Africa (Jos: Nigerian Film Corporation, 1997) and author of numerous articles. He is working on a book-length study: The Anxiety of the Local and the Video Film in Nigeria. A peripatetic scholar, Dr. Okome has spent the last 10 years tracking the careers of video film makers in Nigeria and Ghana; he currently holds a position in the Department of English, University of Alberta, Canada. 

The Films:

Nigerian Popular Videos

What most people think of as ‘African cinema’ is, by and large, film from the countries of francophone West Africa. There are various reasons for this: France’s desire to maintain its cultural influence in its ex-colonies, which has led to opportunities for training and production financing; related to that, the siting of the biennial Pan-African Film Festival (FESPACO) in Burkina Faso, a francophone West African country; and the positive response of western art-house audiences to the camerawork and narrative style and pace of many of the films, have all meant that these are the films which have come to characterise ‘African cinema’.

Ironically, however, apart from FESPACO, and due partly to problems of distribution, such films are little seen in Africa itself, circulating mainly in festivals in Europe and the USA. Meanwhile, films from anglophone Africa have a much lower profile, although South Africa in particular is putting effort into building a film industry. In two countries – Nigeria and Ghana – economic collapse has meant conventional film-making has become prohibitively expensive. In this climate, artistic and financial entrepreneurship has taken off in a new direction: popular video.

Where ‘art-house’ films with international financing function independently of the marketplace, Nigerian video, in contrast, is wholly intended for and financed by a local mass market. It is estimated that last year alone over 600 features length videos were produced in Nigeria; one distributor reports selling over 500,000 tapes a year. The new Nigerian video industry is without doubt one of the most vibrant new developments in world cinema today.

Videos are cheap to produce; with budgets as small as $4,000, shooting rarely lasts more than ten days or two weeks. The break-even point is 10,000 units sold and a successful title can sell over 100,000 copies. Videos are treated like any other commodity, with over 30 stalls in the Lagos central market devoted to them, where they sell for between 300 and 400 Naira (US$2.25 - US$3.00). The majority of cassettes reportedly are bought by "housewives" affluent enough to afford a VCR. The poorer majority of Nigerians see these productions in video theatres, originally little more than a spare room in someone's house but with the advent of video projection, discrete facilities.

Given the conditions of their production, it is hardly surprising that what results is hastily produced, inexpensive popular entertainment rather than art films. There is a heavy influence from soap opera and a focus on the Lagos elite, simultaneously ogling their material success while deploring their corruption. Infidelity and supernatural intervention figure prominently, often together. With its big producers, cut-throat competition and stars who command a huge following, the video phenomenon has been dubbed ‘Nollywood’ in some quarters. The emergence of a vital and prolific popular cinema in Nigeria could be regarded as an important African response to the encroachment of Western pop culture in this age of global information flows. Rather than aping foreign models, however, it is closer to an earlier tradition of indigenous popular performance such as the hugely successful Yoruba Traveling Theatre of the 70s and 80s. It is a window into a particular contemporary African society, offering fascinating insights into how people see themselves, their aspirations and fears, including the desire for material well-being and status, and the value attached to pleasure and entertainment in an uncertain post-colonial world.

Thunderbolt (2000)

Country: Nigeria
Running Time: 110 mins
Language: English
Genre: Feature

Thunderbolt is distinguished from many of the more sensational video stories by attempting to treat a political theme - national unity - important unfinished business for Nigeria in the aftermath of the brutal Civil War of the 1960s.

The first half of the film is in a sense a retelling of the Othello story - except the protagonists are not Abyssinian and Venetian but Yoruba and Ibo. Yinka and Ngozi met in the National Youth Service Corps; Ngozi is finishing her stint as a teacher in a village while Yinka already works as a construction engineer in a nearby city. The seeds of jealousy are planted when a friend of Yinka, like Iago in the Shakespeare play, suggests that Ngozi is having a secret affair because "Ibo are untrustworthy." Adding to Yinka's suspicions, Ngozi has recently inherited some money and so is a financially independent woman. In this half, as in the Shakespeare play or any standard Western melodrama, the action is propelled entirely by psychological motivations.

In the second half of the film a distinctly West African emphasis on the supernatural comes to the fore; curses and ritual cleansing take the place of psychological explanations. An old man (possibly the spirit of her grandmother) warns Ngozi that her death is imminent and will strike her like a thunderbolt. We later learn that Yinka has placed the curse of magun upon her, a curse reserved for those suspected of infidelity. Magun is described as "African AIDS"; any man who has sex with a woman infected with it will die - but not before crowing like a rooster, doing somersaults or vomiting blood. On the other hand if the woman does not have sex within nine weeks she will die. It is interesting how some knowledge of AIDS transmission seems to have been appropriated into popular folk beliefs.

Despite her skepticism Ngozi undergoes a long and painful treatment by a herbalist. This introduces a subsidiary theme in the film - the efficacy of traditional African medicine. A scene is interposed where a doctor scandalizes his colleagues by suggesting that the West has been arrogant in rejecting the wisdom of traditional healers. As the time for Ngozi's death approaches, neither her husband nor an old lover can be induced to have sex with her. She finally convinces Dimeji, a doctor who had previously offended her with his advances. He is immediately stricken and only saved by the herbalist. Ngozi and Dimeji are reconciled and will apparently become a couple and live happily ever after - despite her former antipathy and marriage. Ironically the curse has forced Ngozi to become what she was falsely accused of being - an adulteress - yet this is certainly poetic justice for the perfidious Yinka. Dimeji says he hopes Ngozi will not think all Yoruba men are cads; she replies with the moral of the story: "there are only two tribes, good and bad people."

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