Papers by Jonathan Haynes
African Studies Review, 2014
favor, Madame refuses!” Then the scene continues with the immediate problem of Dominique’s affair... more favor, Madame refuses!” Then the scene continues with the immediate problem of Dominique’s affair rather than pausing to pathologize homosexuality or abortion. It is quite rare and refreshing to find nonhysterical references to homosexuality or to abortion in West African films. On this score, the film contradicts long-standing generalizations about innate African aversions to such matters. In other ways the film wallows in clichés. The character of Dominique, for example, is written like a cliché of a middle-class housewife. His life consists of staying at home all day, fussing emptily over his wife when she returns from work, and going out socializing with his friends. Occasionally he takes up a new Chinese exercise routine, but for the most part he is rendered as a lazy house spouse who is too lazy, in fact, to venture any farther than the neighbor’s house to find a secret lover. The film ends on a curious note. The second husband proposition was, as Dominique divined early on, just a lesson. In the closing moments, after Dominique has shot up the house and the quartier, Sekou is revealed to be nothing more than one of Mina’s cousins from the village. Sekou has grown quite comfortable in Mina’s lovely home and would prefer to remain and turn the ruse into reality. But Mina will have none of it. He must go back home, having accomplished the assigned mission, while she will stay in the city with her philandering husband. Dao Abdoulaye reassures us at the end that there will be no civil war of the sexes. Everything is still under control. Abosede Georges Barnard College New York , New York doi:10.1017/asr.2014.77 [email protected]
The Nigerian film industry known as "Nollywood" was shaped (and even created) by profound weaknes... more The Nigerian film industry known as "Nollywood" was shaped (and even created) by profound weaknesses of the Nigerian state, but it inherited and carried forward one of the state's major accomplishments: the creation of a national culture on and through television. This mission was reinterpreted in the context of a lowbudget feature-film industry grounded in the informal sector of the economy. Twenty-five years on, governmental failures continue to structure the industry, even as new distribution technologies and the transnational corporations that have entered with them have created a whole new sector of production alongside the original one and have fractured the audience along class lines, adding to original linguistic and cultural divisions. Still, through its storytelling, Nollywood remains a powerful unifying cultural force on the national and Pan-African levels. In this context, Nigerian Pidgin is more important than ever as a linguistic medium of communication and as a symbol of national, regional, and Pan-African unity and communicability.
African Affairs, Oct 1, 2002
Jonathan Haynes is Associate Professor, Humanities Division, Southampton College, Long Island Uni... more Jonathan Haynes is Associate Professor, Humanities Division, Southampton College, Long Island University, New York. His relevant publications include Cinema and Social Change in West Africa (Nigerian Film Corporation, 1997), co-authored with Onookome Okome, and an edited ...
Columbia University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2016
Rapid developments in the period from 2007 to 2015, tied to the global economy, are reshaping the... more Rapid developments in the period from 2007 to 2015, tied to the global economy, are reshaping the Nigerian film industry and challenging its original popular, grassroots character as transnational corporations have come to dominate the international distribution of Nigerian films and have begun to produce their own original films and television serials. The direction or directions the film industry will take is unclear, but its whole cultural and ideological character is at stake. The same or parallel global and national developments are also reshaping Nigerian cities. This chapter focuses on how the representation of Lagos has changed as Nollywood explores the city’s new neoliberal penumbra. In Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media. Eds. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb. New York: Wallflower/Columbia UP, 2016. 59-75.
Research in African Literatures, Sep 1, 2001
Critical interventions, 2011
The Founder Kenneth Nnebue’s central role in the early history of Nigerian video films is well es... more The Founder Kenneth Nnebue’s central role in the early history of Nigerian video films is well established (Ayorinde and Okafor, Haynes and Okome, Shaka, “Nigeria’s Emergent”). The first Nigerians to shoot feature fictional films on video were artists from the Yoruba traveling theater tradition, who turned to video when making films on celluloid became prohibitively expensive as the result of Nigeria’s catastrophic structural adjustment program. Nnebue, an Igbo dealer in electronic goods and blank cassettes, made a business of selling such video films as cassettes as opposed to screening them using video projectors, the practice of the Yoruba filmmakers. He financed a number of Yoruba films that he sold in this manner, and he hung around the productions, participating in various ways and learning about movie making. These were very low budget films: the first of them, Aje Ni Iya Mi (1989) he made for N2,000 (about $200); it was shot on an ordinary VHS camera and edited on two VCRs (personal communication, Kaduna, April 1997). In 1992 he made a video film in Igbo, Living in Bondage. This was the mythic founding moment of the Nigerian video boom. Again the budget was very low, and some of the actors he called refused to take part because “they thought it was a local thing” (Nnebue). A few informally reproduced videos had been made in Igbo before, but with this film Nnebue established the national market for commercially packaged Nigerian video cassettes, with full-color jackets wrapped in cellophane that made them look equivalent to imported foreign films. He “scoured the soaps” (Madu Chikwendu, personnel communication, Los Angeles, June 2006) for television actors with familiar faces. Nnebue lost money on this film because of piracy, but he quickly made a sequel with a larger budget and released it through a better-organized distribution system. After another Igbo film, Dirty Deal, in 1994 he made the first video film in English, Glamour Girls. Living in Bondage and Glamour Girls together laid the foundation for the video industry that would come to be called “Nollywood.” For much of the 1990s, Nnebue, through his company NEK Video Links, was the most powerful player in the business: NEK had more machines to dub copies of films than anyone else and had the largest network of distribution points. Living in Bondage and Glamour Girls also established Nollywood’s essential themes: the corruption, moral turbulence, and pervasive anxiety of the post-oil boom era; the garish glamour of Lagos; titillating and dangerous sexuality; melodramatic domestic conflicts; and immanent supernatural forces including both dark cultic practices and Pentecostal Christianity. In this essay I want to consider Nnebue as a creative artist. His art suffers from the faults and limitations of Nollywood as a whole: his dialogue can be dull and mechanical, the realization of his vision rather lifeless. His great strength, which is also Nolllywood’s, stems from his proximity to the popular imagination. He works from what he reads in the newspapers, hears on the radio, and picks up from the conversations around him NNebue: the ANAtomy of Power
Journal of African Cultural Studies, Jun 1, 2010
The main purpose of this review of the published academic literature on Nigerian and Ghanaian vid... more The main purpose of this review of the published academic literature on Nigerian and Ghanaian video films is to foster self-awareness in this new field of study. This literature has been produced on three continents and out of many academic disciplines; in consequence, scholars tend to make few references to others working in the field, debates have been rare, and there has been a great deal of repetition. African Cinema studies, as it had already been constituted, has been slow to recognize and adapt to the video revolution, and film studies in African universities has suffered from the decline of those institutions. Anthropologists have done much of the groundbreaking work in describing the video phenomenon, though Nigerians from a variety of disciplines have also made valuable contributions. Theoretical analyses, cultural interpretations, reception studies, and detailed, extended readings of particular films are all on the agenda for the future.
African Studies Review, Mar 14, 2022
Kemi Adetiba debuted as a feature film director with The Wedding Party in 2016 (see my review in ... more Kemi Adetiba debuted as a feature film director with The Wedding Party in 2016 (see my review in ASR 60.3), a blockbuster rom com and comedy of manners that smashed all Nigerian box office records. King of Boys, her subsequent film, followed this success with a spectacular demonstration of auteurist willfulness and ambition. Adetiba wrote, produced, and largely selffunded it in addition to acting as director. Crime films represent a genre that is viewed warily by the multiplex cinemas which have acquired enormous clout over the high end of the Nigerian film industry, and this film was twice as long as a normal film, meaning the theaters that showed it would sell half as many tickets. After Lagos was already festooned with banners and electronic billboards advertising the film, its release was delayed while, succumbing to pressure, Adetiba cut out half an hour, leaving a film that still runs nearly three hours. However, it doesn't seem so long, because it moves so quickly and is full of variety. Adetiba cites as inspirations the 2002 Brazilian film City of God (directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund), for its Third World grittiness and tropical color, and Coppola's The Godfather, for its psychological depth as a biopic and crime family chronicle, and for its scope as a study of the intersection of organized crime and politics. We meet the protagonist, Eniola Salami (Sola Sobowale), at the pinnacle of her power, as she celebrates her birthday in her Lagos mansion with a lavish party, attended by the elite from the governor on down. She slips away to take care of business in a back room, personally doing hideous violence to a thug who has betrayed her. We are never under any illusions about the source of her power. Flashbacks scattered throughout the film supply Eniola's backstory; she ran away from a violently abusive father when she was barely an adolescent and turned to prostitution to survive, eventually marrying a drug-dealing crime boss and inheriting-through violence-his business and his seat at the head of the table of Lagos crime bosses. Now she wants to cash in on her
African Studies Review, 2017
The Wedding Party is the state of the art in Nigerian film entertainment: a big, slickly professi... more The Wedding Party is the state of the art in Nigerian film entertainment: a big, slickly professional, colorful rom-com with a social comedy heart. It shattered Nigerian box office records and streams on Netflix. A blockbuster by design, it comes from The Elfike Film Collective, a super-production outfit assembling four of the new corporate powers in the land: Koga Studios, Inkblot Productions, FilmOne (the production and distribution arm of the ambitious multiplex cinema chain FilmHouse), and EbonyLife, the satellite channel that brought us the 2015 hit Fifty, a glossy, sex-and-the-city feminist ode to the lives of successful Lagosian professional women. EbonyLife’s Mo Abudu (executive producer) is the guiding spirit, and she has the Midas touch. Kemi Adetiba, an accomplished director of music videos and advertisements, makes her debut as a feature film director. (Another of Adetiba’s current projects is King Women, a series of interviews with distinguished Nigerian women from various walks of life. These interviews achieve startling intimacy and depth. If Mo Abudu has been making good on her proclaimed ambition to be “the Nigerian Oprah” as a media personality and mogul, Adetiba has Oprah’s genius for evoking emotional revelation.) The plot is conventional. Dunni (Adesua Etomi), daughter of a Yoruba oil magnate, is marrying Dozie (the musician Banky Wellington), son of an Igbo electronics magnate. They ride to the reception in a Rolls Royce. The mothers are locked in a status competition. The Yoruba parents (Alibaba Akporobome and Sola Sobowale) are warm and a bit buffoonish, but the husband is hiding business problems. (Rest assured: the film is spoilerproof.) The Igbo couple is elegantly sophisticated and bitterly estranged: the husband (Richard Mofe-Damijo, decades into his acting career but handsome as ever) is a philanderer, and the wife (Fifty’s Iretiti Doyle) has withdrawn into cold arrogance. The bride has vowed to remain a virgin until her wedding night; the groom has signed on to this but is haunted by his past as a legendary womanizer. This past manifests itself as Rosie, the ex-girlfriend from hell, with her entourage of mean girls. The bride will run
Research in African Literatures, 2001
This is a powerful and ambitious book, impressive in the depth and breadth of its learning and in... more This is a powerful and ambitious book, impressive in the depth and breadth of its learning and in the clarity of its intelligence. It works through closely reasoned critiques of a long series of significant thinkers: Theodor Adorno, Eric Hobsbawm, Anthony Giddens, Samir Amin, ...
Research in African Literatures, 2016
... character. The cast included a number of people who were or would become central figures in t... more ... character. The cast included a number of people who were or would become central figures in the Nigerian the-ater, cinema, and even academic life (eg, Pa Orlando Martins, Wale Ogunyemi, Femi Johnson, Dapo Adelugba). ...
Black Camera, 2014
“New Nollywood” is a phrase being used to describe a recent strategy by some Nigerian filmmakers ... more “New Nollywood” is a phrase being used to describe a recent strategy by some Nigerian filmmakers to make films with higher budgets, to screen them in cinemas both in Nigeria and abroad, and to enter them in international film festivals. This is a major structural shift in the Nollywood model of film production and distribution. Kunle Afolayan exemplifies this trend: his restless experimentation as a director and producer reveals the current structure of opportunities, and his situation as a filmmaker informs his films culturally and thematically. There are practical limits to the current possibilities of New Nollywood, and there is less to its apparent convergence with the rest of African (celluloid) cinema than meets the eye, but New Nollywood is likely to prove to be an invaluable preparation for coming transformations in the Nigerian film industry as Internet streaming and the construction of movie theaters in Nigeria displace the sale of films on discs as the central mode of Nollywood distribution.
Africa Today, Dec 1, 2007
Nollywood-the Lagos-based Nigerian film industry-has become the third-largest film industry in th... more Nollywood-the Lagos-based Nigerian film industry-has become the third-largest film industry in the world, and it is by far the most powerful purveyor of an image of Nigeria to domestic and foreign populations. It consists of many small producers working with tiny amounts of capital; it therefore has not been able to build its own spaces-studios, theaters, office complexes-and remains nearly invisible in the Lagos cityscape, apart from film posters and the films themselves, displayed for sale as cassettes or video compact discs. Material constraints and the small screens for which the films are designed shape the images of Lagos that appear in them. Nigerian videos differ markedly from typical African celluloid films, both in their "film language" and in their handling of the city. They present Lagos as a turbulent and dangerous landscape, where class divisions are extreme but permeable, and enormous wealth does not buy insulation from chaos and misery. They show supernatural forces permeating all social levels, particularly the wealthiest. A shared realism, born of location shooting and common strategies for imaging the desires and fears of the audience, creates a considerable coherence in the representation of Lagos, despite the size and variety of the city and the industry. Concurrent with the rise of the Nollywood video film industry has been a new visibility, on certain intellectual horizons, of the Lagos metropolis-or "megacity," as it has been dubbed, as its population approaches 15 million. (It is projected by the United Nations to reach 23 million by 2015-which would make Lagos the third-largest city in the world.) The city owes its new visibility to its serving as an example and case study in discussions of the world's urban future. On the one hand, there is a genre of lurid descriptions of Lagos as urban "apocalypse"-a term that foreign visitors seem to find unavoidable, as they find in it the ultimate expression of anarchic urban catastrophe, environmental destruction, and human misery; its "crime, pollution, and overcrowding make it the cliché par excellence of Third World africatoday Nollywood iN lagos, lagos iN Nollywood Films
University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2016
The International Encyclopedia of Communication, Jun 5, 2008
Politique africaine, 2019
Africa, 2003
Nigerian video films are often characterised as apolitical. A rare and significant exception is G... more Nigerian video films are often characterised as apolitical. A rare and significant exception is Gbenga Adewusi'sMaradona(also known asBabangida Must Go), which was released in 1993 in response to the annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election by the military ruler Ibrahim Babangida. The film is a fierce denunciation of the annulment and of the whole political regime, employing a number of Yoruba and transnational cultural forms: the chanted poetic formewi, skits by artists from the Yoruba travelling theatre tradition, the televisual forms of music videos, news broadcasting and call-in shows, and the resources of print journalism. This film demonstrates the political potential of the video film, but also the limitations of the video distribution system.
Africa Today, 2018
Abstract:The politicized paradigm that has historically informed discourses on African cinema has... more Abstract:The politicized paradigm that has historically informed discourses on African cinema has been seriously challenged, and, since the recent intervention of transnational corporations into the production and distribution of Nigerian media, the model of the African popular arts is still necessary but no longer sufficient for framing the study of Nollywood. The corporate intervention is related to a shift in media platforms: the sale of discs is being overshadowed by internet distribution and television broadcasting, and smartphones and multiplex cinemas supplement home viewing. New inequalities and class divisions have opened up. A formal sector now coexists alongside Nollywood's older, informal sector. The levels, kinds, and accessibility of information about these sectors are spectacularly uneven, and the intellectual paradigms and disciplines to be brought to bear on them and the wider field of African screen media remains an unsettled issue.
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Papers by Jonathan Haynes