Hollywood and the African: whither our culture

Even if the average African viewer tries to balance the portrayal of Africa in Hollywood sponsored movies against the information that might have been available to the movie makers, it still remains very obvious that the average Hollywood movie, deliberately or not, continuously portrays Africa in a distorted light.

It has become accepted norm for Hollywood to assign a singular, peculiar speech pattern and mannerism to the African character regardless of geographical origin. These movies also go out of their way to avoid modern Africa, choosing instead to lay emphasis on slums or build throw back African villages, images of what was obtainable a hundred years ago – It appears Hollywood allow for time shift in movies about the west but refuse to do same for those set in Africa.

One might try to trivialize this Tarzan and King Kong mentality, and argue that those movies about Africa stem from another era, but how does one explain the bastardization of traditional African society in recent movies like Wonderful World, Phat girls, Sahara, when the sun sets and the blockbuster Wolverine (though one might give Wolverine some kudus, it still toed that sour line).

One recalls with unabashed horror a housemaid, supposedly in urban Lagos, near the end of ‘Phat girls’, who conveniently couldn’t understand basic English, the official language of Nigeria for decades (she naturally should be able speak the common pidgin variant) and how the Lagos disappeared in ‘Sahara’ replaced by a dirty little sparsely inhabited islet – very insulting, methinks, to depict a very modern city with two airports, several harbours and millions of inhabitants, this way.
It gets worse, in ‘wonderful world’ where only a small airstrip with a single engine airplane represents Dakar airport, making one wonder if the crew could not get hold of a clip of the country’s international airport or even one of several local airports? Then, again conveniently, a single-room house represented a village in Senegal, how obtainable is that.

Then a five hour trip from Lagos to eastern Nigeria became ‘a two day trip’ in ‘Wolverine’ and the heroes of ‘Sahara’ managed to navigate by boat from Lagos to Mali through a Niger River that aside from being dammed in Nigeria, is wildly known to be not navigable after Lokoja in central Nigeria, at least by a boat the size they used – Makes one wonder if the director bothered to surf the net to find out stuff about Nigeria at all or if as usual it was just convenient to portray Africa through the West’s eye, no apologies given.

Some of the constant goofs Hollywood make about Africa, aside from being hurtful, appear to be somewhat deliberate, as if Hollywood is saying: ‘we don’t have to be factual when portraying you because you don’t really matter.’ Why else would they spend millions of dollar making sure sundry props are up to date and as factual as possible, but yet depict Africa constantly like post stone age society. I am not talking about racism and other like prejudices here (that will come), but simple truth about African realities and lifestyle.

Somehow Hollywood seems to derive a lot of joy – and money – making the world believe that Haggard, H. Ryder’s ‘King Solomon's Mines’ Africa existed and do still exist. Plain stupid or acute laziness, be the judge of that.

Most people in the west know next to nothing about Africa and seem to enjoy this ignorance. Perhaps it allows them to continue to see us as those half nude savages their history books tells them we are.

As a writer with a little online presence, one has had his fair share of stupid questions. A college graduate from the US once asked me how I managed to cure my guinea worm infection and dodge been drafted as a child soldier. It took all my strength to control my ragging anger and educate him a little. Apparently all he has ever heard about Africa were negative. The fact that I have never seen guinea worm firsthand or and knows nothing about child soldiers baffled him. But you live in Africa? He asked. Yes, I replied. But in Nigeria there are no child soldiers and I live in a modern city where Guinea worm does not exist.

This overgeneralization where Africa is concerned brings me to the issue of unabashed racism that the west seems to have inculcated into Hollywood movie culture. I recently watched the controversial Hollywood sponsored movie ‘District 9’ and came off feeling numb. For a movie set in Africa and directed by an African – presumably – there was very little about Africa on display aside from place names and black faces. As a Nigerian I was peeved at the constant referral to ‘Nigerian gang’, and wondered why the director wanted to make sure that tag stuck to the viewers mind. As a black man, I was also bothered by the fact that that future South Africa appeared to be the dream land the Afrikaners had wanted, the one with black servants, factory workers and white rulers.

Also, this movie very much followed the usual Hollywood cultural script (do little or no research about the Africans characters you portray) as the so-called Nigerian gangs spoke South African languages which Western ears will definitely hear as Nigerian languages. No wonder the movie got the nominations it did (I hear it just got nominated for both the Hugo and nebula.). Seems like Neil Blombank is receiving a lot of kudus for this rape of Africa in a movie where, for me, he killed the chance to really tell and African tale, at least a political correct one.

As for Hollywood, it is time they stop portraying us as ignorant savages that should be poked fun of in movie after movie. The producers and directors should spare a little expense on creating factual African characters that are synonymous to real life figures, just like they do for western characters. It is time Hollywood accepts that we do have home grown heroes here in Africa.

On a lighter note, one thinks Africa has come of age; we don’t need western heroes saving us movie after movie.

Nollywood, their Hollywood

Nollywood: What’s name got to do with it?

Growing up in the north central city of Kaduna, I had many dreams. Mostly, they came and went, replaced by something newer or more interesting. Time has probably dimmed memories of many of these childhood dreams; but I still recall some that stayed awhile longer than others like my adolescent crush on Jennifer Capriati who made me pay serious attention to tennis, a sport that was as alien to my peer group as Atilogu dance would have been to an American teenager, then there was that great plan to start a music group that would rival Boys 2 Men, But the strongest of all these, and also much more vivid, was my desire to become an actor.

Of all these desires, this latter one was the only one that seemed real, near at hand, or realisable – at least it was the only one I seriously practiced, that is if standing in front of my stepmother’s mirror, mouthing catch phrases from popular movies, can be termed ‘practice’. At that time, ‘Living In bondage’ and ‘Rattle snake’ held millions of my fellow countrymen enthralled, effectively shifting our attention from western movies and the musical Indian ones.

My dream of pursuing an acting career seemed fresh and real because unlike the Hollywood and Bollywood stars that previously graced our TV screens, the new stars the home grown movies brought to our homes looked like us and spoke English with the same sort of accents we do. The movies too, were set in cities we have either visited or heard about, and the stories they told were ones we could relate to. In summary, that could easily be our lives that scrolled past the TV screen.

Like other dreams before it, the big screen longing died, replaced by another that had lain for years under the surface – evidenced by my mad craze for anything readable and my desire to make words sing as I couple them together. This new desire later overshadowed every other one, but my interest in the Nigerian home movie industry did not falter, well not at first, not totally.

Perhaps it wasn’t the interest in books that directly killed my acting desires, I think it had more to do with how predictable the movies became and the fact that bandwagon effect became the norm – if a romance movie sells, producers rushed to shoot romance movies; if a movie with occult leaning sells, the same thing happens. The movies become boring and repetitive. Understandably, some of us went back to watching western movies, only turning back to the home grown home movie once in awhile when a very interesting movie turns up as they are want to.

Surprisingly, the Nigerian home movie industry grew, not really in quality, but in seer volume, producing a staggering 872 movies a year to become the third largest movie industry in the world. Overtaking big players like Japan and china — it has, as of 5th may 2009, overtaken Hollywood and closed the gap on India, the global leader in the number of movies produced each year, according to a new United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report.

It was a well deserved even if overblown hype, since the Nigerian movie industry had over the years endeared itself to most countries south of the Sahara and even Hollywood had to take notice.

Many western producers marvelled at the two week time frame that Nigerian producers worked with as well as the ability of the actors and actresses to work on two or three projects at a time, shuttling between different movie sets where they at times play lead roles.

That was the golden age of the Nigerian movie industry, way before the copycat name change. The stars needed to work hard and they did. Some were living the life, big cars and houses, appearing on prime time TV and whatnot. Some even became demigods, especially when it was discovered that the storylines were not selling movies anymore, when a face or several faces in combination made a movie a must watch.

Yes, because of very bad scripting production, viewers turned to some established stars that were believed to be rich enough to turn down any role they find unpalatable. All was not rosy, but the industry crawled on.

Then the name change.

Many people have asked where the name nollywood stemmed from, apparently no one really knows, someone used it somewhere and it stuck.

Without gainsaying, that name is synonymous with everything that is wrong with the Nigerian movie industry, the copycatism, the bad scripts, the hasty editing, the recycling of cast, the misrepresentation of cultural values, etc, etc. The list could go on and on, but it will serve no real purpose here.

The big players in the Nigerian movie world are apt to point out the latest misplaced giddy heights that the Nigerian movie industry occupies in the UN classifications. They think third in the world behind Bollywood and Hollywood mean they have finally arrived, but they fail to understand that they are only third in terms of production, not quality of production. They are third, but it is a very distant and lonely third, especially when countries that are at the tenth position make better movies and are better rated in terms of quality of movies, sales, distribution and earnings.

Granted, westerners invest a whole lot of man hours and capital into the movies they churn out, but who says we cannot do the same? Must we wallow in a pit filled with movies that so lack in intellectual quality they cause the viewer headaches? Not to mention how lazy scriptwriters and tight fisted producers and directors have effectively re-created our traditional values and culture. Why must our movies have kings in every nondescript village, when in the reality, kings and such are alien to the culture that those movies are supposed to portray? How many Nigerians know what an herbalist’s home looks like? Believe me it is nothing like what most of our no-research movies portray.

Nigerians have billions of stories to tell, you only need to listen for a minute, you only need to write the truth, you only need to re-enact the truth, you only need to invest in the truth, only that way can you have the next big Nigerian movie. Some are listening, some are doing it right. One only wished they did earlier than this.