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6
Extravagant Aesthetics
I NS TABI LITY A ND TH E EXC ESSIV E WORL D
OF NI GE RIA N F ILM
IN THE LOGIC OF MODERNIZATION THEORY, media were expected to

be the technologies that effected the labor of making Nigerians mod-
ern. Mobile film units were to be “mental tractors,” to borrow Siegfried
Kracauer’s (1952a: 13) apposite agricultural metaphor, breaking the hard
ground of tradition to plant the seeds of progress. The developmentalist
task of colonial films was taken up by the new medium of television, where
their generic forms and political prerogatives fed into the emergence of
television dramas. In contrast to these media, commercial cinema rose
in popularity along with an urban Nigerian leisure class that flocked to
Copyright 2008. Duke University Press.
cinemas, imitating the cowboy swagger and gangster slang of Hollywood

stars. In the 1990s, these two cinematic traditions collided and were mutu-
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Extravagant Aesthetics of Nigerian Film
29. Hausa video films on sale at Kofar Wambai market, Kano.

Photo by the author.
ally transformed by the rise of a wholly new genre of media called Nige-
rian video films or Nigerian film.1 These are feature-length fiction films
shot, distributed, and exhibited on video and home digital technologies.
Standing outside of the existing structures of urban cinemas, on the one
hand, and television, on the other, these filmmakers take advantage of the
technical and cultural possibilities of videocassettes to create a film form
and an institutional structure that is wholly new in Nigerian history. Video
films collapse the divide between state and commercial media, between
Nigerians and foreigners, and between uplift and escapism. The result has
been the emergence of a series of quite distinctive generic forms rooted in
the extravagant, inflated world of melodrama (see figure 29).
Contemporary Africa is marked by the erosion of accepted paths of
progress and the recognition of a constant fight against the insecurity of
everyday life. This insecurity is a generalized condition that drives a range
of seemingly disparate domains of African life: the collapse of state econo-
mies and the rise of informal markets, the rapid spread of new religious
movements such as Pentecostalism and Islamism, the powerful resurgence
of religious and ethnic conflicts accompanied by frequent outbreaks of
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Chapter Six
violent conflict, the deep concern in many societies with issues of witch-
craft and ritual abuse, and more widespread social disruptions brought
about by the presence of oil economies and the rise of “fast capitalism.”2
In African studies, these domains are often examined separately, some-
times split between different disciplines, so that the study of informal
economies, for instance, commands a wholly different literature and set
of concerns than analyses of Islamism and Pentecostalism. These can be
seen though, as reactions to the disembedding of Africans from a world
economy and the collapse of traditional routes to security such as edu-
cation and the civil service. What links these disparate phenomena is the
realization of the instability of everyday life, the need for new networks
for advancement, new conceptual schemas that explain the suffering of
people, that proffer a means for escape and represent a yearning for justice.
AbdouMaliq Simone (2001) has argued that the need to provide security
has led to a certain sensibility among urban Africans, one he describes as
a constant state of preparedness, a willingness to experiment in situations
of poverty to achieve some measure of stability and control. This insecu-
rity is economic, social, and spiritual, and it is a world of instability and
experimentation that provides the grounds on which Nigerian films feed
and grow (see also Okome 2002).
At the same time, these films indicate urban Africans’ skill at constantly
innovating new forms of cultural production—much of it woven into the
fabric of religious movements—that generate their own experiences of
pleasure and play and are coterminous with this experience of insecurity.
Each epoch generates aesthetic forms that are sites of symbolic intensity
where peoples’ experiences of political and economic life are brought into
being and made vividly legible. Africans do not merely exist in a state of
permanent crisis, the crises themselves generate modes of cultural pro-
duction and forms of self-fashioning that address widespread feelings of
vulnerability—sometimes proffering modes of escape, sometimes exagger-
ating and distorting these insecurities for dramatic effect, and sometimes
ignoring insecurity altogether. In photography, fashion, music, and film,
the constant invention and experimentation of urban Africans are played
out in public and are as constitutive of urban experience as the forms of
crisis they address.
Nigerian films evoke their world’s constantly shifting sands. The doctor
who murders his brother to prevent being revealed as a thief, the wife who
betrays her husband for another man, the con man who pretends to be in
love to steal money, the grandmother who is part of a coven and seeks to
170
ensorcell her granddaughter, dramatize the predicaments of an unstable

and ultimately unknowable world. Here people who appear to be one way
are revealed to be completely different. In Nigeria, the family provides cru-
cial economic support, the closest affective ties, and, for many people, the
only means of advancement. Yet perhaps because of this, in Nigerian films
the family is often the source of the deepest treachery, and family members
are represented as corrupt, cheating people of money and betraying them
as well as offering love and support. As much as the family offers secu-
rity, it threatens destruction. These fears are refracted in the vivid, brightly
imagined world of melodrama where the struggle for everyday survival
is depicted in extravagant, fantastic form. They compress politics, wider
social conflict, and material inequities into relations between people. In
this way they “moralize political economy” (Marshall-Fratani 2002) and
use the stark moral polarities of melodrama to explore and interrogate the
inequities of everyday life. The Indian cultural theorist Ashis Nandy (1998),
writing about popular cinema in his country but in ways directly relevant
to Nigerian films, argues that the repetitive storylines, grandiloquent dia-
logue, and outrageous plots represent a world of fantasy and myth that
was supposed to atrophy with the rise of a modern, rational world. To
study them is to examine the part of Indian life supposedly rejected by
modernity. It is “the disowned self of modern India returning in fantastic
or monstrous form to haunt modern India” (7). While Nandy’s evocation
of a field of cultural and religious alterity unaffected by Westernization
may be overstated, his observation that these “traditional” sides of life were
often marginalized by the discourse of modernization and development is
insightful. Nigerian films draw on the sides of African life that were down-
played in the colonial period, in the nationalist era of independence and
in the discursive concept of African cinema. As independence loomed,
both colonialist and colonial subject alike emphasized the modern, edu-
cated, developed aspects of Nigerian life. Nigerian films, however, draw on
themes of corruption and betrayal, naked desire for material goods unre-
strained by ties of loyalty or love. They dwell on the witchcraft and sorcery
that were shameful to nationalist elites and, more than that, they examine
them in lurid technicolor without a trace of cultural embarrassment. They
take the sides of Nigerian life associated with tradition and backwardness
and mix them with the Toyota Land Cruisers and mobile phones, bank
managers and oil executives of contemporary Nigeria. In these films, crass
consumer desire bumps up against a spiritual realm that is manifest in
everyday life, and African alterity sits cheek by jowl with Western moder-
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nity. Through these fantastic desires and outrageous plots the utopias and
dystopias that dramatize the struggle and experimentation of contempo-
rary Nigeria are formed and aired.
Nigerian films are the unintended consequences of the stuttering evolu-
tion of cinema in Nigeria. They are unthinkable outside of the urban world
of leisure and experience that cinema brought, but at the same time they
could never be thought of through the institutional and conceptual terms
that traditional theories of African cinema constructed. In this chapter, I
analyze the melodrama of Nigerian films—both English-language films in
the South and Hausa-language films in the North—as a fantastic response
to the insecurity and vulnerability of everyday life. Northern and Southern
films differ from each other and are themselves made up of varied genres,
from comedy to romance, horror, and religious films. But all of them re-
fract and magnify, sometimes in lurid terms, the experience of contem-
porary urban life in Nigeria. In the case of Southern Nigerian films, or
Nollywood, one mode of this melodrama takes the form of what I call an
aesthetics of outrage, where the narrative is organized around a series of
extravagant shocks designed to outrage the viewer. In the North, Hausa
films most often represent insecurity through the unstable and changeable
world of love. To do this, Hausa filmmakers have drawn on the equally
vivid melodramas of Indian film, from which they borrow heavily and
sometimes copy explicitly. Both Southern and Northern films provide a
metacommentary on the place of “culture” in contemporary Nigerian so-
ciety, offering a world that is thoroughly linked up to religious and cul-
tural flows, at the same time as they casually and frequently revel in the
difference and uniqueness of Nigerian society. Nigerian culture, here, is
figured in the traditional religious culture of the jujuman, only exaggerated
and distorted to become a stock caricature sold to a Pentecostal audience.
With every lip-sync and every dance step, Hausa actors bodily enact Indian
film—with all of its complicated hybrid history—within the stories and
desires of Hausa society. In a society recently turned to Islamic law, this
generates controversy, making these films, like their Southern cousins, ob-
jects whereby the meaning and shape of contemporary Nigeria is brought
to life and debated.
Cumulatively, Nigerian films represent the aesthetic reaction to the new
political, economic, and social architecture of contemporary Africa. When
Frederic Jameson (1991) identified postmodernism as the cultural logic of
late capitalism, he warned of the danger of periodizing hypotheses that
obliterate difference and ambiguity. He responded to this by identifying
172
postmodernism as a “cultural dominant” which while powerfully expres-

sive of shifts in economic and political formations also allowed for a range
of competing cultural and political forms. It seems to me that Nigerian
films now occupy just such a space in that they express and constitute cul-
tural and political subjectivities in Nigeria. They do this through aesthetic
form—the films themselves—but also through their economic mode of
production and distribution. Nigerian films represent the waning of state-
based visual media (from mobile film units to television dramas) and their
ideologies of progress and uplift and represent the shift to privatized media
forms, mimicking the larger transformation of Nigerian society. Both form
and industrial organization represent a radical reworking of the basis of
African cinema and visual culture. Aesthetically, these films dramatize
structural transformations brought about by the architecture of insecu-
rity in melodramatic terms, by objectifying and reifying an idea of culture
(Nigerian culture, Hausa culture, Yoruba culture) as a sign. In this chap-
ter, I examine the dimensions of the insecurity which mark contempo-
rary Nigeria by examining two cultural forms—Southern English-language
Nigerian films and Northern Hausa-language ones. In the case of Southern
Nigerian films, I focus on the powerful theme of corruption—financial,
sexual, spiritual—that crosses genres, generating the sense of betrayal and
insecurity. For Hausa films, I examine the logic of love and romance, inten-
sified by the intertextual presence of Indian cinema, as privileged domains
that inscribe social transformation. On a surface level these films appear
to adopt very different registers, but ultimately they explore the relation
of cultural form to political and social transformations and provide occa-
sions in which the drama of postcolonial Nigeria is both represented and
enacted.
The massive success of these films does not obliterate the presence and
dynamism of other forms of cultural production in Nigeria, and their
popularity should not hide the substantial critique of the films inside Nige-
ria from both conservative and progressive critics concerned about sexism,
gross materialism, the bastardization of culture, and the move away from
political and cultural ambitions. And while dominant themes, neither cor-
ruption nor love and romance exhaust the diversity of Nigerian film.3 These
do, however, represent two of the themes that most powerfully shape the
public perception of these films. Often emphasized by filmmakers as nec-
essary to their films’ success, these themes have drawn the most fire from
critics fearful of their effects, making them culturally resonant sites for
analysis.
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NI G ERI AN FI LMS
Since their introduction in the early 1990s, Nigerian films have transformed
the media landscape not just in Nigeria but all over Africa, becoming one
of the most dynamic media forms in African history.4 These films do get
to the cinema and on television, and with the rise of the Africa Magic sta-
tion they are also available by satellite, but the driving force of the market
remains the purchase and rental of videocassettes and VCDs.5 Now more
than five hundred films are released in Nigeria each year in three main lan-
guages: English, Yoruba, and Hausa. The English-language films dominate
other Anglophone nations from Sierra Leone and Ghana to the west, to
Kenya and South Africa in the east and south, and they are beginning to
cross over into Francophone Africa. Yoruba and Hausa films are dominant
in their own linguistic communities, which extend well outside of Nigeria
into Niger, Ghana, Benin, and Cameroon. The strength of this industry has
turned Nigeria into one of the largest film producers in the world (in terms
of sheer numbers). The distributor Charles Igwe points out that six hun-
dred thousand VCDs are pressed each week and that “crates and crates”
of VCDs and videocassettes leave Lagos every day by plane for distribution
across Africa.6 This makes Nigeria an emerging force in producing digital
media content and in innovating modes of distribution and exhibition.
Because of its reach into every corner of Nigerian society, the film indus-
try has spawned a range of ancillaries that ride the waves of its popularity
and are themselves becoming key parts of Nigerian urban cultural life.
The fact the film boom coincided with the mass penetration of personal
computers and design software into Nigeria, for instance, combined to
generate a revolution in African graphic design. The thousands of Nigerian
films released each year and the posters that go with them have produced
a new visual vernacular—a constant experimentation in photography,
coloring, and font design that permeates markets all over Africa, covering
the counters of shops and papering the walls of urban areas (see figures
30 and 31). Similarly, the abundant use of song and dance sequences in
Northern films means that film music has come to dominate the Hausa
music industry (see Adamu forthcoming), just as the popularity of films
has spawned a magazine industry geared to reporting on the stories and
stars of the industry (figure 32). Cumulatively, the scale of the industry is
large. It employs actors, directors, writers, musicians, designers, artists,
and choreographers, as well as those employed in sales and distribution. Its
ubiquity and international presence means that the Nigerian government
174
30 and 31. Posters for
Hausa video films. Photos
by the author.
Chapter Six
32. Advertisement
for Albarka from
the back of the
Hausa film maga-
zine, Fim.
is beginning to recognize films as a major symbol of private initiative and

a key force to counter Nigeria’s international reputation for corruption and
violence, offering a more positive vision of Nigerian culture and industry.
Nigerian films are distinctive in their development of an aesthetic and
an infrastructure radically different from the legacy of “African cinema.”7
But in doing so, they have generated considerable controversy. African
cinema is not just a body of work but a critical cultural project with roots
in the early independence era in Africa and the struggle against cultural
imperialism (see Cham and Bakari 1996; Diawara 1992; Pines and Wille-
men 1989; Ukadike 1994). The early generation of filmmakers sought, first
of all, to repudiate the stereotypes of Africans in Hollywood and ethno-
graphic films by revealing the depth of Africa’s cultural heritage. From this
matured a more complex film practice that was aesthetically and politi-
cally avant-garde, and opposed to the universalizing dominance of Holly-
wood cinema. The aim was to create alternative narrative and visual forms
176
that were distinctly African (such as a “griot” mode of narration). This tied
African cinema into the wider effort to combat cultural imperialism and
build a “new world information order.” As the filmmaker Gaston Kaboré
put it: “The ability to picture oneself is a vital need. . . . A society daily
subjected to foreign images eventually loses its identity and its capacity
to forge its own destiny” (cited in Pfaff 2004: 2). The theorist Mbye Cham
summarizes this position well: “These filmmakers deny conventional and
received notions of cinema as harmless, innocent entertainment, and in-
sist on the ideological nature of film. They posit film as a crucial site of the
battle to decolonize minds, to develop radical consciousness, to reflect and
engage critically with African cultures and traditions for the benefit of the
majority” (Cham and Bakiri 1996: 2).
Cham’s arguments are representative of the intellectual and political
effort undergirding the concept of African cinema. This effort draws on a
deep legacy of Third Worldist thought that was politically cosmopolitan—
in that it made alliances with similar minded film movements in India,
Latin America, and elsewhere—but reached that cosmopolitanism by pre-
senting African difference. In parallel with Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s (1986) cri-
tique of cultural borrowing as “apemanship and parrotry,” African cinema
was originally intended to create a space of cultural alterity, made in ver-
nacular languages, where African culture would be bolstered, supported,
and protected from foreign cultural domination. Nigerian films, as we
will see, share neither the political ambition nor the cultural effort of this
earlier generation of film production. The presence of African languages in
the films is as much driven by the market advantage of vernacular as by any
cultural nationalist ambition. Filmmakers like Kenneth Nnebue quickly
dropped Igbo for English when they realized the greater market potential,
and since that time English-language films have been the largest and most
successful of the genres. Nigerian films effortlessly and unselfconsciously
borrow from a wide range of cultural forms and start with an assumption
that the audiences and subjects of the film are familiar with and take part
in a global mass culture. Culture in these films is as likely to appear as a
reified stereotype, part of the backwardness and corruption of a traditional
past holding Nigeria back, as it is to be seen as a valued and cherished part
of Nigerian society (see Meyer 2003b). Because of this, Nigerian films have
been criticized by other filmmakers and in Nigeria itself for concentrating
on the underside of Nigerian society—on precisely the sorts of images of
witches, ritual abuse, and magic that colonialist documentaries were ac-
cused of fixating on. Critics argue that the video films are technically poor,
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repetitive, and cheaply made. From the point of view of directors trained
in film schools, they are a vulgar, populist entertainment with none of the
political or aesthetic skill of their celluloid cousin, the lack of technical
ability the video filmmakers exhibit making their productions an embar-
rassment. Jonathan Haynes (1995) has pointed out the lack of an overt
political critique in many of the films, contrasting this with the progressiv-
ist ambitions of African cinema. To celebrate the films uncritically would
be to ignore these issues and silence the voices of more independent and
culturally activist filmmakers. But as many other filmmakers recognize,
Nigerian films have engaged a popular African audience in a way that Afri-
can cinema never has. As an art cinema, funded by international and na-
tional government grants, African filmmakers never had to win an audi-
ence. Their films, while dominant in international film festivals and at the
prestigious FESPACO festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, have rarely
been shown in African cinemas or watched by African audiences outside a
narrow, elite band. The irony of African cinema is that it refers to the films
Africans produce rather than those they watch. Many powerful, artistically
excellent films are rarely played for audiences, even in their own nations.
Nigerian films, by contrast, receive no outside funding and rely solely on
success in an African marketplace, with all the advantages and disadvan-
tages that brings. Charles Igwe, the distributor and producer, commented
that, in the beginning of the industry, the first aim of Nigerian filmmakers
was not technique or quality but to generate narratives that sold well in the
marketplace. Whatever else one can say about Nigerian film, he continued,
“we possess the Nigerian audience. There is no question about that.”8
I NSECURI T Y AND MEL O D RAMA

African studies has seen a recent burst of work, in many different arenas,
that is trying to comprehend the widespread insecurity in contemporary
Africa and the emergence of new means of dealing with that insecurity.
A great deal of this sense of vulnerability results from the economic and
political reordering of African life and is expressed by the forms of so-
cial order and imagination of the self that such restructuring generates.
Structural adjustment programs, with their forced privatization, hastened
the shift of African economy away from state control and salarization and
toward what Achille Mbembe (2001) terms “private indirect government.”
In the early postcolonial period, many African nations were organized
around the state and its forms of taxation and employment. Salaried labor,
178
as a civil servant or a parastatal employee, was prestigious, lucrative, and

secure. In countries like Nigeria, public-sector employment swelled gi-
gantically during the oil boom. The state’s role as employer was supple-
mented by its continual intervention in the economy through subsidies
to key commodities (food, gasoline) in response to pressure form popular
political action. As Janet Roitman (2005) and Mbembe (2001) have argued,
the economic role of the state, represented in the form of the salary—the
monthly wage from which subsistence and development originated—was
as much a political technology as it was an economic one. It became the
way African subjects were constituted as citizens, drawing them into a
political contract with the state. It became less about paying people for
completed work and more about rewarding them as clients. Over time,
as African economies entered into crisis, the logic of the salary began to
mutate. Rapid inflation reduced the purchasing power of salaries enor-
mously, government workers were subject to weeks and months without
pay, and the public sector went into decline and lost prestige. Workers who
could leave for private companies did so, and those who remained were
often compelled to supplement government salaries with private income.
As the public sector began to teeter over the abyss, it was given a push by
structural adjustment programs that forced African governments all over
the continent to reorganize the state sector, privatizing large sections of
government and reducing the inflated number of workers. Government’s
role as provider of employment and salary was overtaken by its role as
awarder of contracts, the political technology par excellence whereby eco-
nomic accumulation, political allegiance, and social hierarchy have been
constituted in contemporary Africa.
The consequence of these economic changes has been the shift of large
numbers of workers from the public to the private sector. The move away
from salary has been one toward ever increasing forms of risk, where one’s
stability and the routes toward that stability have to be forged outside older
networks of education, regular employment, and the salary and within new
networks that progressively delink Africa from the official world economy.
These networks often rely on what AbdouMaliq Simone (2004) has termed
worldliness, the necessity of mobilizing external networks of support, be
these religious networks, NGOs, foreign corporations, or wealthy patrons,
in an effort to gain some semblance of stability at home. The rise of the in-
formal economy depends on (and generates) an architecture to make this
work, which in turn calls into being new forms of community, revalorizes
ethnic and kin-based modes of belonging, and constitutes African subjects
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Chapter Six
33 and 34. Stickers found on buses, cars, shops, etc. Collection of the author.
in their relation to the state, the economy, and each other. Where a few
decades ago wealth in Nigeria was produced through the production and
export of agricultural commodities such as ground nuts, cotton, cocoa,
and palm oil, now the creation of wealth has been concentrated largely
in the single commodity of oil. As a result of corruption, the awarding of
fake contracts, and the siphoning off of funds from government depart-
ments, the logics of oil capitalism have created a new symbolic regime of
power where wealth is separated from production and seems to appear
without effort. It is not won through hard work but seems to derive from
an opaque source. The successful in society seem to gain wealth instanta-
neously, without slow accumulation or even effort, from their connections
to mysterious networks (A. Apter 2005; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000).
The paths to wealth and security are now unclear, and in that obscurity a
range of cultural beliefs has flourished.
One trajectory in recent scholarship has examined how these transfor-
mations have fostered belief in the work of the occult operating under-
neath the surfaces of the observable world.9 The perceived rise in the pres-
ence of witchcraft in everyday life, the widespread beliefs that new elites
are part of secret cults, and the urban fear of occult violence demonstrate
the intensity of these fears. Religion, whether through the guise of witch-
craft or Pentecostal prosperity gospel, has emerged to become the idiom
explaining why vast sections of society live in poverty while a tiny elite
accumulate fantastic sums of money (see figures 33 and 34). The fear is
that behind the operation of this unstable new economy, powerful occult
forces are at work. Adam Ashforth (2005) has felicitously coined the term
180
“spiritual insecurity” to refer to the sense of danger and exposure to in-

visible forces that many contemporary Africans feel. Jean and John Co-
maroff (1999) have used the overarching term “occult modernity” to char-
acterize how the occult is used as a contemporary idiom through which
dislocations in global capital are experienced.
The insecurity that this work identifies needs to be examined as part of
a wider register of vulnerability that is at once spiritual, material, physi-
cal, political, and social. In Nigeria, for instance, widespread concern in
urban areas about the kidnapping of children and their dismemberment
in rituals articulates with similar anxieties about the prevalence of armed
robbery, ethnic clashes, and religious rioting.10 The dynamic rise of reli-
gious movements such as Pentecostalism and Islamism should be seen
in the same vein. Like witchcraft, Pentecostalism and Islamic revitaliza-
tion movements seek to impose meaning and order on the insecurities
of everyday life. Both are part of symbolic economies that represent in-
justice in the world and promise a means of redress. Certainly, the intro-
duction of shari’a law in the North drew popular support because of the
belief that shari’a would finally bring a measure of justice to a profoundly
unequal political and economic system. Both Pentecostalism and Islam-
ism are, in their way, radically destabilizing themselves, in that they try to
subordinate competing forms of belonging (whether to a family, an ethnic
group, a nation) to a transnational spiritual community. Both thrive on
vehemently attacking older forms of religious practice, most especially
traditional African religions but also alternative forms of Islam and Chris-
tianity, from Sufism to Catholicism (see Larkin and Meyer 2005). Pente-
costalism and Islamism, while strikingly different in many respects, both
provide narratives that moralize political economy, explaining the roots of
insecurity and offering a measure of action to combat it (Marshall-Fratani
2002: 85).
AbdouMaliq Simone (2004) argues that contemporary urbanism is
marked by an intense provisionality and uncertainty. His interest is in
the experiential effects of economic insecurity and Africans’ innovative
responses to it. As education and industrial labor have been removed as
sources of advancement and security in the world, urban Africans are
operating with a “more totalizing sense of exteriority” (Simone 2001: 17).
To survive, they have to mobilize resources that might exist. Life in poverty
becomes a constant state of experimentation, with no clear pattern for
success. The anthropologist Conerley Casey (1997, 1998) makes a related
argument in more psychological depth in the context of Northern Nigeria.
181
Chapter Six
She explores the psychological consequences of living in a society where

a seemingly ordinary quarrel between individuals might at any moment
grow into a larger argument between groups, then explode into rioting
between ethnic or religious blocs. Casey focuses on the consequences of
this sort of provisionality, the everyday, low-level anxiety and preparation
for the fact that at any moment, the world might be turned upside down.
Simone examines how the growth of Islamic orders from Tijaniyya to
Mourides has been fostered by their promise of a measure of economic
and social support. Paul Gifford (2004) and others have examined a similar
dynamic in the growing power of Pentecostalism. Together, these very dif-
ferent registers of informal economy and Pentecostalism, trading networks
and Islamism, witchcraft and capitalism, are trying to represent and in
some ways ameliorate the expanding sense of vulnerability and exposure
that many Africans feel.
The success of Nigerian films lies in their ability to probe the fault lines
of this insecurity in contemporary African urban life and to transform
them into cultural productions based on pleasure and play as well as on
anxiety. These films are full of stories of the economic dishonesty of elites,
of business partners who betray one another, of the sexual corruption of
pastors, of the promise of Pentecostal deliverance, or of the malevolence
of witches, all of which bear public witness to the ambivalent and un-
stable nature of urban Nigeria. But in telling these stories, the narratives
revel in the costumes and the outrageous transgressions of characters, in
the fancy houses and the nouveaux riches who live in them. Comedy is
as important a part of this genre as violence, and the inevitable moral at
the end of the story cannot quite overcome the sense of play that takes
place before. These films wage a political critique through the language of
melodrama. Melodrama is excessive, frequently fantastic, and works, as
Peter Brooks (1985) has argued, by taking the basic material of reality and
charging it with a larger significance, exaggerating it so that the essential
moral polarities that underlie everyday life are made clear. Brooks argues
that melodrama arose as a genre in postrevolutionary France, when the
moral anchors of social stability—church and monarchy—were thrown
into abeyance by the rise of a secular republic. By staging moral dramas
in excessive terms that reveal the primal ethical forces underlying society,
melodrama makes ethics public and dramatically concrete.
Nandy (1998) explores similar issues in an argument compelling for
Nigerian films when he asserts that the fantastic and excessive stagings
of melodrama have become the dominant political idiom of the popular
182
classes. Nandy argues that Indian masses are marginalized and no longer
believe in the false modernism of progressive politics as couched by the
state. As politics declines, political action is expressed in a language of
fantasy and myth. This language, while vulgar and blatant, is never triv-
ial, he argues. Touching on life’s fundamental instabilities, it accounts for
people’s tremendous emotional identification with films.11 Nandy develops
his argument by exploring how Indian films, for all their blatant exaggera-
tion and seeming simplicity, are anchored in key tensions of contemporary
life. Indian films, he argues, represent a slum’s view of society in that both
slums and the films “show the same impassioned negotiation with everyday
survival combined with the same intense effort to forget that negotiation”
through fantasy and escapism (2). Under the ideals of Nehruvian rational-
ist development, popular Indian films were culturally disowned in favor
of a politically oriented, realist cinema. Like slum dwellers, Indian films
were ever present but socially marginal in the urban landscape. The prob-
lem with this, Nandy argues, is that art cinema, in attempting to critique
modernity, used the same enlightenment rationality and thus could never
find a critical vantage point from which to question modernity’s assump-
tions properly. Popular melodramas, by contrast, because their stories and
worldview are rooted in the myths and fantasy of Indian society, offer a
critique of modernity from “the point of view of eternal India” rather than
from progressive politics (235).
Precisely because it is organized around morality, melodrama offers a
means with which to speak about tensions in African society that mimics
the idioms of Pentecostalism, Islamism, and witchcraft. It does not ignore
questions of the economy, it offers moral justifications for them and ex-
plores the changing basis of a society that allows economic insecurity to
coexist with fantastic wealth. And it does so in a formal style, never rep-
resenting life as banal or everyday but always as intense and excessive,
mixing formal playfulness with emotional realism. In different ways this
is clear in English-language films from Nigeria’s Christian South and in
Hausa-language films from the Muslim North.
“N O LLYWO O D” AND THE AESTHETI CS O F O U T R AGE

Southern Nigerian films, controversially named “Nollywood,” exhibit the
qualities that Ravi Vasudevan (2000) associates with the cinema of “tran-
sitional” societies negotiating the rapid effect of modernity. Here the cine-
matic address is to an urban class living in a world governed by kinship
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relations. Plots are often driven by family conflicts, melodrama predomi-

nating, with its emphasis on moral polarities, excessive situations, and
exaggerated acting. There is a strong element of the grotesque in elites’
extreme sexual and financial appetites, their willingness to betray friends
and family to gain wealth that they will display in the surface expressions
of houses and interior decoration, rich clothing, and beautiful cars. The
grotesque, as famously defined by Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) and examined in
relation to Africa by Achille Mbembe (2001), is a system of signs whereby
the sensory life of power is both depicted and transgressed. It depends
on exaggeration, hyperbole, and excess made palpable through rapacious
bodily appetites. For Bakhtin, the open mouth, the swollen penis, the defe-
cating anus, and enlarged breasts are all used as a way of ridiculing and
parodying the elites of society, commentating on their lust for wealth.
Mbembe agrees about the importance of these bodily metaphors but ar-
gues that in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, under the control of dictators,
these are the metaphors used by state power itself—this is how elites ritu-
alistically perform their power through a logic of excess. The sheer scale
of postcolonial corruption, the outrageous amounts of money stolen from
state coffers, the extravagant houses elites build, and the wild rumors that
circulate about their sexual proclivities combine not to critique elites but
to form the world of meanings whereby power is dramatized. Where Bakh-
tin and Mbembe come together again is in their sense that the grotesque
is not just a system of signs, a collection of images, but a cultural analytic
whereby the order of society is made manifest and can be viewed (see also
Stallybrass and White 1986).
Southern Nigerian films take the grotesque away from the figure of the
postcolonial dictator and place it back inside the family, making it more
like melodrama. There the grotesque plays out within and between family
members, and the dense political field Mbembe identifies is sublimated
into personal relationships. Unlike in Bakhtin’s discussion of François
Rabelais, there appears to be little irony, with all the distancing and re-
flexive metacommentary that implies. The films should be seen not as
parodies of elite behavior, but as a witnessing to them. They dramatize
elites’ actions to create a form of ethical evidence that highlights key moral
conflicts in society. The grotesque here is harnessed to what I call an aes-
thetics of outrage, a narrative based on continual shocks that transgress
religious and social norms and are designed to provoke and affront the
audience. To give one brief example, the character Helen in the film Glam-
our Girls (1994, dir. Kenneth Nnebue) is a prostitute who is picked up from
184
35. Cover of Glamour Girls,

1994.
the street and offered as a sexual prize for Martin, an out-of-town guest
of a wealthy young Lagosian (see figure 35). When the host goes to fix a
price with Helen, he is so overwhelmed by her sexual attractiveness that
he strips and makes love with her there and then. Her excessive beauty is
brought home because the host is short, and when he appraises her he is
eye level with the breasts he is gazing at. When Helen hugs him she seems
to overwhelm him. Later, when he goes back to tell Martin it is his “turn,”
he apologizes for taking so long saying, “I couldn’t resist her attraction.
She is a mermaid.” He also warns that he wants to return once Martin has
finished. Martin enters and sees Helen lying semi-naked on the bed, her
face turned away from him in semi-sleep. He stoops to kiss her leg and the
camera slowly pans up her body as Martin moves up. When she turns to
him he shrieks and she jumps up and bolts from the room. A long close-up
reveals Martin’s stunned reaction. His friend enters to ask what is going on
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and Martin stutters, “My sister, my only sister,” the camera moving into an
extreme close-up of him shaking his head.
The aesthetics of outrage is a composite of different elements key to
which is the intense transgression of moral and religious norms, often
heightened by exaggeration and excess. This scene depicts the casual im-
morality of the Lagosian elite, who can pay for sex as a simple gift to an out-
of-town guest, but swells this dramatically with Martin’s (and his friend’s)
recognition that the sexual turn-taking they were planning was incest. It
is a mode of address designed to outrage and provoke the viewer. When I
saw this scene with a Nigerian family, it provoked gasps of astonishment,
horror, and thrill at the men’s open sexism. The negation of morality in the
film is designed to stimulate it in the audience, vivifying social norms and
making them subject to public comment. The aesthetics of outrage uses
spectacular transgression, luridly depicted, to work on the body, generating
physical revulsion. Linda Williams (1995) has famously argued that certain
genres of film—horror, pornography, tearjerkers, comedies—are designed
to stimulate what she calls “spasm,” which may take the form of shudders,
arousal, tears, or laughter. Glamour Girls provokes agitation at the severe
moral breaches in which Helen is involved, randomly tricking innocent
men and making the viewer both witness to the outrage and helpless to do
anything about it. This outrage provides a public witnessing to the sorts of
activities people in society are involved in and, through the bodily reaction
to them, enacts a moral commentary on society itself. Formally this wit-
nessing is located in the extensive use of the reaction shot. When Martin
discovers that the prostitute is his sister, the camera moves into an extreme
close-up of his shaking head. After he tells his friend, another close-up re-
veals the friend’s horror at having just had sex with Martin’s sister. The re-
action shot is used in a number of ways in these films, as we see characters
react to the elites’ fancy houses and décor, their wonderful clothes, their
physical beauty, but it is most common in response to moments of trans-
gression, where it stands in for the audience’s judgment, and heightens
the sense of the transgression itself. In dramatizing the ways fundamental
norms of society have been abrogated, the aesthetics of outrage makes
public stark, ethical conflicts at the heart of society12 at a time when the
moral basis of society is in transition. Nigerian films thus represent the
instability of modern Nigerian life, but, more than this, they dramatize it,
distorting it and transforming it into spectacle, making it something to be
bodily experienced and lived.
The experience of the film is what moves these stories from being merely
186
a referent of an external reality. These films are intimately involved in rep-

resenting the structures of insecurity in Nigerian society, congealing in
themselves the ruptures in the social and economic order, but they cannot
just be seen as signifiers for events happening elsewhere. The aesthetics of
outrage, aimed at bodily stimulation, represents an experience of film in-
tegral to the film itself. It is a temporal and corporeal sense of living in and
with the film, and it represents the singularity of film over and above politi-
cal and economic contexts. While films draw their charge from these wider
contexts, they cannot simply be reduced to them as if they were neutral
referents of a situation outside of the film. The aesthetics of outrage force
people to live the film so that external realities are intensified, vivified, and
made sensate through the mediation of film narrative itself.
Glamour Girls was one of the earliest “blockbuster” Nigerian films and
has had a seminal role in establishing many of the films’ key formal fea-
tures. The narrative of the film revolves around the lives of four “senior
girls” who have sex with rich businessmen and politicians to support their
extravagant lifestyle. The film opens with one of the girls, Sandra, moving
from the East of Nigeria to Lagos to find her friend Doris, to see if she can
help her get ahead. Sandra meets Thelma by mistake, and Thelma takes
her to Doris’s fancy new house. This early scene is key in setting up the
formal and thematic conventions of the film. The scene in Doris’s house
opens with an establishing shot of heavy cream damask curtains, which,
after the bell rings, we realize are covering the front door. Sandra enters,
looks around, and the camera slowly pans to reveal the furnishings from
her point of view. Ruched cream curtains hang over every wall in the room.
In front of them are a Louis XIV style sofa and chairs, also in cream da-
mask, with gold leaf legs and arms. A reaction shot of Sandra shows her
in awe, taking in the finery and beauty of her friend’s house. She sits and
tells Doris that life is miserable. She works hard but has no money, has fed
and cooked for men, but after a while they leave her for younger women.
Framed against the cool cream curtains, Doris and Thelma nod in recogni-
tion of men’s inconstancy and then change the subject. Doris reveals that
she has “joined the payroll” of Chief Obie, a “multimillionaire” who has
given her money to redecorate her boutique. They laugh. Thelma observes,
“The old, rich men are more generous than the younger ones.” She then
tells the story of her breakup with a younger man: “When I discovered that
the naira was not flowing, I told him bluntly that we don’t eat handsome.
Handsome men are those with naira power.”
Doris and Thelma are representing a world in which relations are not
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based on love or attraction but on financial gain. Traditional routes to suc-

cess, such as hard work, are revealed to be a waste of time, and security
through love is inherently fragile due to the inconstant nature of men.
Doris tells Sandra that the only route to success is through a patron, “You
can’t achieve the quality of life you want without help,” and that “a hus-
band is no longer the prime issue in a woman’s life. . . . Once you become
rich you can buy yourself a husband.” Thelma agrees, saying that even
though she has a husband in the United States she still sees wealthy men.
“Men who go abroad are all heartbreakers,” she observes. “If something
goes wrong, I’ll have something to fall back on.” Sandra cannot believe the
outrageous statements her friends are making. When Thelma talks about
handsome men being those with money, the camera cuts to a close-up of
Sandra looking away, rolling her eyes in disgust at this materialism. But it
is a complicated scene. Doris has become wealthy only by relying on the
favors of rich patrons. But Sandra herself asks Doris to be her patron, and
Doris obliges, making Sandra a “Glamour Girl” and putting her on the
payroll of Chief Obie, who makes Sandra rich overnight.
Doris and Thelma trade sexual favors for financial reward and openly
flaunt the traditional roles open for Nigerian women. The camera dwells
on the surfaces of Nigerian life, the rich décor and beautiful clothing, and
emphasizes these through pans, close-ups, and reaction shots that gener-
ate a sense of symbolic intensity. What this scene depicts is the admixture
of pleasure, even admiration, that often accompanies the portrayal of dis-
gust. The furnishings of Doris’s house and the lifestyle she leads are deeply
attractive to many besides Sandra, and the independence and authority the
glamour girls reveal in the film (where Doris does buy a young husband,
shown in one particularly outrageous scene carefully washing and hanging
her underwear before serving her dinner) is a powerful inversion of gen-
der relations that offers particular pleasure. This pleasure indicates a level
of complicity that accompanies outrage, a complicity frequently justified
in the text itself, and which is the reason moral condemnation does not
harden into overall political critique.
Glamour Girls depicts a post–oil boom Nigeria where the developmen-
talist routes to success are bankrupt. Education, even family, are empty
of their ability to provide support and protection. The only recourse lies
in alternative patrons obtained through sexual favors.13 This is a world in
which people compromise themselves to avoid the suffering of everyday
life. It is a world marked primarily by corruption: sexual, political, spiritual,
and familial. Indeed, corruption is the single most powerful force under-
188
lying the aesthetics of outrage that the films rely on. The film propels view-
ers through a series of shocks that constantly provoke them with excessive
betrayals. Jane finds love only to betray her partner Desmond for Alex,
who turns out to be a con man who deceives her and steals her money;
Thelma deceives her husband in the United States; Doris treats her much
younger husband Daniel like dirt; Sandra betrays her friend Doris and is,
in turn, betrayed by Dennis. Helen is a trickster figure. Wholly outside
the main narrative about the glamour girls, she is periodically inserted to
inject sexual havoc and bursts of sheer outrage. The first time we meet her
she is flagging a car to ask for a lift. After the man does her a good turn
and stops to drop her off she begins screaming and slapping him, draw-
ing a crowd shouting that the man “booked her” for two thousand naira
and now, after sleeping with her, only wants to pay fifteen hundred naira.
The innocent man denies this but is confronted by a notoriously unstable
Lagos crowd and hands over the money. There is no narrative logic here but
shock at her behavior.14 There is intense moralizing but it is unclear what
the alternative is in an unstable and treacherous world. The film presents
what the women do as wrong, but ultimately, as Moradewun Adejunmobi
(2002) has argued, their actions are justified as necessary responses to the
violence of everyday life. They express an implicit recognition of society’s
failure to provide for its people. Like Sandra, the glamour girls began their
activity because of poverty and suffering. Even Helen is revealed to have
turned in this direction when, as a high school student, she discovered her
father was sleeping with her girlfriends and lavishing his money on them
while at the same time refusing to properly support her.
By motivating characters’ choices, Southern Nigerian film grounds
hyperbolized events in very real, everyday situations of poverty. It often
presents characters faced with a difficult situation forced to make a choice.
The 2005 film about 41915 con men, The Master (dir. Andy Amenechi),16
follows the fortunes of a market trader, Dennis, who is defrauded of all his
money by a con man and after this comes to join the gang himself and rise
as a 419er. Outrage works through a mechanism of distancing: characters
are involved in actions so horrible that one cannot identify with them.
But at the same time, it depends on similarity: characters come to their
actions by choices made to alleviate real hardship. These films present a
world of glamour, wealth, and privilege that is wholly foreign to all but a
tiny minority of Nigerians, but this is a fantastic response to the adversity
that is common to millions. When Helen arranges to stay with a man for
a week and bargains up the price by reminding him that she will have to
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“boycott lectures” and harm her studies, she reminds us that she is making
do in a world where the rationalist path to success—education—is now
only serviceable as a means of gaining access to powerful male patrons.
The scandalous world of Nigerian film is often erected over the much more
quotidian struggles of everyday life, and it is the contrast of one with the
other that gives these films their charge.
Nigerian films represent a world where modernity is present in the slick
material surfaces of Mercedes Benz sedans, large bungalows, stereo equip-
ment, fancy furnishings, and sumptuous dress rather than the world of
learning, science, and organization. Society, as it is depicted, is comprised
of people who appear to be one thing and are revealed to be something else,
where nothing is stable and fortunes can rise or fall in an instant. Nigerian
films rely on the generation of excess—sexual, financial, material—that
can never be assuaged or fulfilled. It is an excess often born of despera-
tion and a surfeit of desire. This tendency to dwell in life as it is lived at its
most heightened is melodramatic, but where Western films often cannot
cope with the intensity of melodrama and keep it at arms length through
irony and stylized references, Nigerian audiences take melodrama seri-
ously, heeding its moral messages and soaking up its emotional impact.
Like horror films, which many films mimic, Nigerian films aim at not just
reflection but stimulation. In Doctor Death (dir. Fidelis Duker), Morris is
egged on by his wife to murder his older brother so he can take over his
hospital and then becomes obsessed with seducing his brother’s widow,
even bewitching her so that she will cast her children out of the house
(figure 36). To gain magical powers that will allow him to make his fortune,
Amos, one of the main characters in the Nigerian/Ghanaian film Time
(2000, dir. Ifeanyi Onyeabor) is shown sticking a knife into the stomach
of a pregnant woman, then disemboweling her and removing the fetus
for a sacrifice (figure 37). These images and narratives are provocations
designed to scandalize and disgust. Through that bodily reaction moral
reactions are provoked and social ethics publicized. These films work not
as realist reflections of society but as inflated, exaggerated imaginings that
nonetheless deal with underlying truths. This truth is experienced through
the bodily response of revulsion. These are genres designed to generate
physical effects. Like the Holy Spirit, they come in to take over your body.
At the heart of many films, crossing genre boundaries of family drama,
political thriller, and religious film, is the ever present force of corrup-
tion. Corruption is presented as an evil force eating away at the decent
ambitions of people trying to get by in life, but also as the prerequisite
190
36. Cover of Dr. Death, 2000.
37. Cover of Time, 2000.
Chapter Six
for success. Sandra in Glamour Girls has to use her body to gain money,
Dennis in The Master has to become a 419er and cheat people, Morris in
Dr. Death murders his brother, and it is only after this turn toward corrup-
tion that success comes. Behind this is both a commentary on the failure of
modernization in Nigeria and an explicitly Christian logic. In The Master,
Dennis is robbed by a 419 man who, when he later realizes that Dennis is
educated, offers him money to become part of his gang. Dennis at first
refuses. His girlfriend argues with him, reminding Dennis, “that man can
make you rich.” When she leaves, Dennis soliloquizes on his various op-
tions. At the end, he becomes a 419er. Similarly, in an even more overt
scene in Time, the impoverished bank manager Francis makes a pact with
a witch. He is offered a pot and told if he drops it and breaks it he will be-
come rich, but as he does so his wife will sicken. Francis is horrified and
rejects the offer, running away in fear and desperation. But as he does so,
the pot keeps magically appearing in front of him. Spirits materialize and
begin to assault him. He panics and keeps running as the maniacal sound
of the witch’s laughter resounds around him. Finally, he tires. The pot ap-
pears at his feet and he picks it up and smashes it on the ground.
In these key scenes, characters are faced with a fundamental choice.
Their decision, however motivated and justified, is still a decision they have
the moral volition to make, and the audience witnesses them making the
wrong one. Like Faust’s bargain, these scenes represent an explicit turn-
ing away from morality and from God, and we need to see the characters
wrestle with that decision to understand the deeply volitional and, in some
cases, diabolical, nature of the choice. Corruption here is the force that
diverts pilgrims on life’s journey, eating away at their resolve, leading them
into temptation. In Christian films like Time, the forces of darkness can
only be controlled by becoming born again and using the Holy Spirit to
gain protection (see Meyer 2003b, 2006; Ukah 2003).
Corruption in Southern Nigerian film also addresses the failure of mod-
ernization in Nigeria and the atrophying of developmentalist routes to
success. Unlike mobile film units or television dramas, Nigerian films are
not aimed at producing a rationalist subject—they are about stimulation
not cultivation. These films depict a world in which the rationalist figures
of the world economy, the bank manager, the politician, and the corpo-
rate executive are revealed to be illusions—a system of signs that mask
an underlying reality. In Super Warriors (2004, dir. Prince Emeka Ani), a
businessman, Ugochukwu, runs into difficulties and goes to see his patron,
Chief John, to help get them sorted out. Chief John says he can help him,
192
38 and 39. Nigerian stickers. Collection of the author.
as he has in the past, but that the reason he can is that he belongs to
a “family” of “prominent citizens of this country,” which he urges Ugo-
chukwu to join. The “family” refers to a secret cult involved in “fetish”
worship from which members derive magical powers necessary for suc-
cess in the business world. Ugochukwu tells the Chief, “I made my money
through hard work and not through rituals.” Later, he adds that this is
against his Christian faith. Chief John reveals to him that all of his success
was the result of the cult’s powers, not hard work, and that the Chief, too,
is a “strong Christian.” Hard work, gradual accumulation, success through
one’s ability, and the recognition of individual merit—the verities of the
colonial education system that have palpably failed many Nigerians—are
depicted as a veneer that hides underlying forces of spiritual corruption.17
Value is derived from more obscure means. The corruption characters in
Nigerian films are involved in replicates at the level of the family and the
individual the wider force of corruption as a dominant system of meaning
in society as a whole.
In mixing melodrama with horror and magic and linking spiritual with
financial and sexual corruption, Nigerian films have generated a social
world where instability is to be found in almost every area of life. Things
seem to be one way, and then change utterly for no apparent reason (see
figures 38 and 39). As Francis says to a hunter as he is trying to kill him-
self: “You don’t know how it is to be so rich and then to be so poor.”18 In
contemporary postcolonial West Africa, where the everyday suffering of
the vast majority stands in stark contrast to the gigantic accumulation of
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the small elite, the tropes of corruption, betrayal, and evil have provided
a powerful way to express the inequalities of wealth. They do so through a
process of cultural objectification. These films are about making the gro-
tesque public and something to be viewed.
HAUSA FI LMS
In the North of Nigeria, both filmmakers and their audiences have been
quick to identify the Christian roots of Southern Nigerian Films. Stories
about magic, ritual abuse, and witchcraft are less about the actual practices
of traditional Nigerian religion and more to do with the global spread of
evangelical Pentecostalism, one of the most dynamic forces in contempo-
rary Africa. Pentecostalism objectifies traditional African religious prac-
tice, arguing that the traffic with spirits that is such a key part of traditional
religion is nothing more than diabolism. These spirits, and the devil, are
said to be behind a range of phenomena in contemporary life, from the
failure of the state to modernize, to the inability of individuals to prosper
and get ahead. Security, in a world of spiritual and material anxiety, can
only come from the protection of the Holy Spirit, the acceptance of Jesus
Christ as one’s personal savior, and the combined efforts, through prayer
and charismatic powers, of church affiliation.19
Perhaps inevitably because of this, Hausa filmmakers have been wary
about making films that deal with issues of ritual abuse and witchcraft.
While fear about cult activities or about the negative effects of witchcraft
on everyday life are common in Hausa society, and films on this subject
are made (see Krings 2006), there is a sense that the un-Islamic nature of
these themes should not be objectified and circulated as cultural texts.
Both Southern Nigerian and Hausa films remain haunted by the ghost of
developmentalism, which hovers over them and provides a critical van-
tage point from which many of the films are judged. For the South, this is
manifest in repeated calls by the Nigerian Film and TV Censors Board for
films to stop focusing on “violence, rituals, voodooism and the like”20 and
in demands that they “project Nigeria’s image positively” so that “wrong
signals [are not] sent to the international community about Nigeria.”21
In the North, the ghost of developmentalism is most intensely felt in the
controversy over the influence of Indian film and its role (or not) in cor-
rupting Hausa society. The strength of these critiques indicate how deeply
engrained in the Nigerian imagination is the idea that a central function of
media is to “represent” culture and the nation in an objectified form. Even
194
while many are critical of the state and its ambitions, the idea that the state
should have a role in guiding media, and that media should have a role
in upholding cultural values, is widely shared. When I asked the director
Tijani Ibraheem why Northern films deemphasized magic as a theme, he
said, “as these are negative aspects of our culture,” that “we reflect on tra-
dition and the culture” and “pay attention to the type of society we wish to
mold.”22 The Hausa response to the perceived Christian roots of Southern
films has been to innovate an entirely different genre of filmmaking that
does not exist in the South, one that deals with similar issues of insecurity
and which adopts a comparable logic of excess. But it does so from a very
different tradition, rooted in the songs, dances, and love stories of Indian
film.23
In Northern Nigeria, the instability of everyday life has been sublimated
into the quite different melodramatic arena of romantic love. Love is a
profoundly individual emotion but unsettling, potentially excessive, over-
whelming people’s judgment and sometimes involving them in actions
against their will. It is the site of key tensions between individual desire
and respect for a social order in which marriages are expected to be ar-
ranged, and where individual desire runs up against the ideal of obedi-
ence to parents and to the social order. Emmanuel Obiechina (1971), in
his exemplary work on the rise of Onitsha market literature, identified
the fascination of these writers with themes of love as one of the most
powerful indicators of social change and social transformation in Nigeria.
Obiechina argued that the idea that people are mutually attracted to each
other, that it is legitimate to pursue that attraction and develop intimacy
without any interference, and that marriage should develop from this, are
ideas wholly without precedent in traditional society. For him, the writers’
popularity indicated how transnational cultural flows offer people alter-
native sets of values (he saw it as Westernization) which they can use to
challenge existing social hierarchies. In my own work on Hausa romance
fiction (Larkin 1997), I make substantially the same argument: that love has
become a key arena in the North where hierarchies between generations
are being fought over and revised, a point emphasized by Abdalla Adamu
(forthcoming-a, forthcoming-b) in the most sustained analysis of Hausa
films so far. Instead of seeing romantic love purely through the prism of
an expanding Westernization, though, I look at the mediating influence of
Indian film. For decades, Indian film has, for Muslim Hausa, constituted
the most sustained cultural form dealing with the tensions around love.
If, in Southern Nigeria, films have been marked by melodrama and excess
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based on an aesthetics of outrage, Hausa filmmakers have drawn heavily

on the narrative models and formal styles offered by Indian cinema. To
understand the nature of Hausa melodrama, then, it is first necessary to
explicate the place of Indian cinema in Hausa society.
I ND I AN FI L MS AND NI G ERI AN L O V E R S
Indian films saturate the popular culture of Northern Nigeria, creating a
landscape of desire and spectacle and a site for public memory and nos-
talgia (see figure 40). Ever since the late 1950s, the stars, songs, and stories
of Indian film have been the dominant cinematic form in Northern urban
areas. These films are popular all over Nigeria, but in the North there has
been a special relationship recognized by Southerners and Northerners
alike. It has made the imaginative, spectacular world of Indian film an
intimate part of Nigerian Hausa popular culture. If one considers African
media to be not only what Africans produce, but also the media that they
consume, that enter into everyday life and become the public register for
desire and anxiety, identification and difference, then Indian films must be
considered part of the African cinematic world.24
The iconography, sounds, and images of Indian films constitute a vibrant
visual and aural part of Hausa urban life. Stickers of Indian stars emblazon
trucks, cars, and bikes (figure 41). Famous actors are given Hausa nick-
names, such as Sarkin Rawa (King of Dancing) for Govinda, or Ɗan daba
(Hooligan) for Sanjay Dutt. Many Hausa youth adopt Indian names, and
young men try to walk like Sanjay Dutt and talk like Shah Rukh Khan.
The powerful nature of this identification was brought home to me one
day in a conversation with Lawan Ahmed, a religious young man who lived
in the Muslim neighborhood where I lived. He said the reason he liked
Indian films was that unlike American films, they had so much “tradi-
tion.” By “tradition,” Ahmed was referring to an objectified religious and
cultural practice that was distinct from Westernization and which, while
different from Islam, offered a parallel to Hausa society. Because Ahmed
was devout, he commended the fact that in Indian film men and women
hardly ever touch and never kiss, consonant with Islam’s prohibitions on
sexual intermixing. “The devil is always behind us,” Ahmed argued, and
the sexual demureness of Indian films (at least in comparison to American
ones) placed Indian cinema within the Islamic pale.
Ahmed echoed his statement in another conversation I later had with
him and a group of his friends. They were vociferously attacking the rising
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40. Nigerian poster of Indian film stars. Collection of the author.
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41. Indian and Hausa film posters at a motor park, Kaduna. Photo by the author.
popularity of romantic books in Hausa society (Adamu, Y. 2002; Furniss

1996; Larkin 1997). As they saw it, these books “spoiled” women, encour-
aging them to be sexually active. Indian films, by contrast, “have respect,”
as one man stated loudly, and several of his friends expressed agreement.
He argued that Indian films have kunya, an ideal Hausa quality of modesty
and a sense of shame. This was especially true for older Indian films, where
you could see that “Hausa culture and Indian culture are just the same.”
In Northern Nigeria, the common statement that Indian culture is “just
like” Hausa culture expressed perceived similarities in custom, fashion,
iconography, and formal style. Indian films place kinship at the center of
narrative tension. Traditional dress is similar to that of Hausa: men dress
in long kaftans similar to the Hausa dogon riga, over which they wear long
waistcoats much like the Hausa palmaran. Women dress in long sarees
and scarves that veil their heads in ways that accord with Hausa moral
ideas about feminine decorum. Indian films, particularly older films, ex-
press strict division between the sexes and between generations. Hausa
Muslims are not familiar with the main tropes of Hinduism, but they rec-
ognize it as a domain of “tradition” that they see as opposed to “Western-
ization.” This is what Hausa mean when they say that Indian films “have
198
culture.” Britain, the United States, and, in a different way, Southern Nige-
ria are the structuring absences here, the foils against which Hausa can
define themselves and their relation to Indian films.
For Hausa viewers, Indian films offer a mode of traditional life similar to
their own, and, at the same time offer a vision of modernity different from
the West. What is more, they dwell on the tensions involved in moving
between the two and, as they do so, create a powerful space with which
Hausa viewers can engage. This tension is at the heart of Nandy’s analysis,
in which he recognizes that in the grandiloquent excesses of melodrama a
core critique of contemporary society can be found, one that represents the
frustrations and ambitions of a society in transition. Indian films are based
on the tension of preserving traditional moral values in a time of profound
transition (see also Vasudevan 2000). “The basic principles of commer-
cial cinema,” Nandy (1995: 205) writes, “derive from the needs of Indians
caught in the hinges of social change who are trying to understand their
predicament in terms familiar to them.” Commercial cinema tends to “re-
affirm the values that are being increasingly marginalized in public life
by the language of the modernizing middle classes, values such as com-
munity ties, primacy of maternity over conjugality, priority of the mythic
over the historical” (202). Characters in Indian films have to negotiate the
tension between traditional life and modernity in ways with which Hausa,
in a similar postcolonial situation, can sympathize. The choice of wearing
Indian or Western-style clothes, the use of English by arrogant upper-class
characters or by imperious bureaucrats, even the endemic corruption of
the postcolonial state, are all familiar situations with which Hausa viewers
can engage.
The circulation of Indian film to Nigeria offers Hausa viewers a way of
imaginatively engaging with forms of tradition different from their own
at the same time as conceiving of a modernity that comes without the
political and ideological significance of that in the West. Indian films offer
Hausa viewers a fantastic means of imaginatively engaging with the reali-
ties of another culture as a part of their daily lives (see figure 42). It creates
a third space, apart from a reified Hausa tradition and an equally objecti-
fied “Westernization,” from which to imagine other cultural possibilities.
When Hausa youth rework Indian films in their own culture by adopting
Indian fashions, copying the music styles for religious purposes, or using
the filmic world of Indian sexual relations to probe the limitations in their
own cultural world, they can do this without engaging with the heavy ideo-
logical load of “becoming Western.”
199
42. Nigerian poster of Indian film and cultural icons. Collection of the author.
Nandy’s position draws its strength from his recognition that Indian
cinema represents and interrogates the tensions of a society in the midst
of rapid social and cultural change. This has clear resonances for schol-
ars analyzing Nigerian films as a whole and specific textual overlaps with
Hausa cinema in particular. Yet its weakness, at least as far as Hausa films
are concerned, is its dichotomizing split between tradition and modernity,
indigeneity and Westernization. The rapacious intertextuality of Indian
films, which themselves combine elements from Islam and Hinduism,
from different regions of India as well as from national and international
popular culture, should make one pause before asserting a hard distinc-
tion between a Indian subaltern mythos and a singular, rational Western
modernity (Kaur and Sinha 2005; Singh 2003). In Hausa films, the heavy
intertextual presence of Indian filmic elements exists in a marketplace in
which Southern Nigerian films, transnational Islam, and Hollywood films
and their perceived Westernization also compete. Here there is no clear
opposition between West and non-West but a series of nodes, each with
its own cultural influence. Something as seemingly constitutive of Hausa
society as Islam on close analysis is revealed to be much more contested.
Islam, not surprisingly, is at the heart of the definition of what constitutes
Hausa culture and is seen as such not only by Hausa but by other Nigerian
ethnic groups. At the same time, however, Islamic reform movements use
the term culture to refer to the survival of pre-Islamic cultural and reli-
gious practices.25 When they do so, Muslim reformers are using culture
not as the socially valued set of practices that need to be preserved—the
best that has been thought and said about Hausa society—but as what is
not Islamic and should be driven out in the name of a purer Islam.26 In
this way, Islam in Northern Nigeria rests on its claims to authenticity and
to deep roots in Hausa society while at the same time representing an ag-
gressive, transformative modernity (see Kane 2003). For some Nigerians,
new Islamic movements are as much a part of new modernities as Western
cultural values and are just as vigorously resisted. When Hausa audiences
engage with Indian films by copying them in their books and films, in their
fashions and forms of talk, in their relations between the sexes and genera-
tions, this is only one cultural and religious source they draw on to create
a complex field of cultural and social possibilities—a field that is shorn of
its richness and complexity when reduced to series of binaries between
West and non-West, modernity and tradition, corruption and authenticity.
Hausa draw on Indian films to make sense of the changing foundations of
the world around them. They translate Indian forms and aesthetics into
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their own lives as a way of defining the boundaries of Hausa culture and
the shape it is to take in the future. In this, they play a role along with in-
fluences from the Middle East, the West, Southern Nigeria, and a host of
other cultural and religious centers of influence, but this borrowing gives
witness to the experimental and shifting ways Hausa fashion cultural
forms to interrogate the basis of everyday life.
WASI LA
In 2000, the Hausa film Wasila (2000, dir. Ishaq Sidi Ishaq) was released
onto the Northern Nigerian market, where it sold over two hundred thou-
sand copies and became one of the most influential Hausa films of its time
(figure 43). Wasila was not the first Hausa film to adopt song and dance
sequences from Indian cinema, but its success confirmed the position of
its star, Ali Nuhu, as the romantic leader of Hausa film. As Adamu (2005b)
argues, after its release the inclusion of song and dance sequences modeled
after Indian films became almost obligatory for a film’s success.27 Wasila is
therefore a good text through which to look at the influence of the Indian
film form on Hausa cinema, an issue of considerable controversy in Nige-
ria, where such borrowing is often attacked for undermining cultural and
religious values (Adamu A.U. forthcoming-b; Ado-Kurawa 2004). Most
visually and aurally striking in this borrowing are the song and dance
sequences, which provide the strongest generic contrast with Southern
Nigerian films (where songs are absent) and the clearest mimicry of Indian
ones. I also want to emphasize another aspect of borrowing which has
been noted by some scholars but is the subject of less public cultural de-
bate: the representation of love, romance, and sexual interaction, perhaps
the area where Indian film has had the most sustained cultural influence in
Nigeria (Adamu forthcoming-b; Furniss 2005; Larkin 1997). I am particu-
larly interested in the way in Northern Nigeria love is the idiom whereby
the issues of betrayal and insecurity, which found expression in Southern
Nigerian film through the tropes of corruption and magic, are formed and
aired in Hausa society. Love presents the familiar representational terrain
whereby people who seem one way turn out to be something else. It offers
the same vertiginous rise and fall, where someone who has so much can
lose it immediately. Its instabilities are the basis of film form and content,
and through it social change and the vulnerability of society is reified and
set to music.
Wasila follows the fortunes of a young husband, Jamilu (Ali Nuhu), and
202
43. Cover of Wasila, 2000.
his wife, Wasila (Wasila Ismail), who, as newlyweds, share an intense love
for each other. Trouble starts when Wasila awakes in tears from a dream
that Jamilu has had a car accident. Her friends realize this is indicative of
the depth of her affection, and they question whether it is reciprocated. To
find out, they encourage Wasila to pretend she is sick and send for Jamilu,
to test his emotional response. Jamilu rushes home from his business and,
seeing his lover apparently sick, collapses to the floor with grief and is
rushed to hospital. The second half of the film switches gears as Wasila
encounters an old flame, Moɗa. Moɗa first approaches her at a shop while
Jamilu is inside and she roughly sends him away. But later, Moɗa comes to
the house and this time, instead of sending him on his way, she encourages
him to come in. When he is reluctant, she teases him and leads him inside
the house and then into the bedroom. Jamilu returns unexpectedly to find
Moɗa lying on his bed. He is devastated, but remains calm as Moɗa leaves.
For a while, he tries to put the incident behind him, but he cannot abide
being near his love and withdraws from her to Wasila’s great angst. As the
film comes to its end, they argue and Jamilu recites the saki uku, the pub-
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lic announcement of divorce which, when uttered three times by a man,

constitutes legal divorce under Islamic law. Wasila sings a keening lament
and the film finishes.
Wasila’s fame in Northern Nigeria comes from its being one of the first
films to openly use Indian film aesthetics. Early Hausa videos borrowed
from Indian film but mainly for plot themes and in the way they depicted
relations between the sexes. Films such as Gimbya Fatima (parts 1 and 2,
1994, 1995, dirs. Tijani Ibraheem and Aminu Yakasai) and In da So da
Ƙauna (1995, dir. Ado Ahmad) depict open, teasing relationships between
lovers who share emotional time together, spend leisure time walking with
one another, and declare their love openly, all of which, in many ways, were
foreign to Hausa gender relations. In traditional Hausa society, a woman
was supposed to stay silent in the company of her marriage partner, to
keep her eyes averted and not look directly at him (a common practice
of respect), and to leave the presence of men as soon as possible. Men
and women would spend leisure time with members of their own sex, and
courtship was supposed to take place in the presence of chaperones. The
political scientist Barbara Callaway (1987: 34) points out that as late as
the early 1980s “relationships between unrelated young people of equal
status but opposite sex [were] nearly non-existent,” and commonly, mar-
riage decisions were the prerogative of parents, not children. Even after
marriage, men and women continued to live highly segregated lives in the
same house, with men sitting outside or in the zaure, a room at the front of
the house where men receive visitors, and women controlling the domestic
interior of the compound. This was brought home to me in a conversation
with a married Hausa friend who grew up watching Indian films in the
1970s. He was complaining about their negative influence on Hausa cul-
ture, which startled me, as I knew him to be a big fan of the films. When
he was young, he said, he used to like Indian films because of their com-
mitment to the family and the cultural values they showed, but most of all
because he liked the way lovers interacted. By this he meant that Indian
lovers talk about their problems, they share an emotional life and support
each other. The man declares his love for the woman, she declares her love
for him, and they embrace. When my friend got married, this was the sort
of relationship he was expecting and wanting from his wife, but when he
returned home and tried to talk to her, she would turn away, answer as
briefly as possible, and then leave. She was acting with the modesty that a
good Hausa wife should have, but he wanted the relationships he had seen
in Indian films. Because of this he had many problems early in his mar-
204
riage, and this was why he argued that Indian films were harmful. Indian
films, he said, inspired ideas about marriage and relationships that Hausa
culture could not support.
In an earlier essay on romance literature (Larkin 1997), I argued that one
of the reasons Indian films are so popular is that they provide an imagina-
tive template from which the tensions over arranged marriages and love
marriages can be imaginatively explored and critiqued. It is this critical
edge that gives Hausa literature and film their emotional charge and sense
of social purpose (see also Adamu forthcoming-b; and Furniss 2005).
Abdalla Adamu (forthcoming-b) has argued that among the genres that
dominate Hausa film—comedies, thrillers, gangster films epics—the two
most popular are those about auren dole (forced or arranged marriage) and
those which plot the tension between wives in a polygynous family. The
popularity of issues of love and family reflects the importance of women
for the industry, since they are the audience to which most films are aimed.
It also helps us understand why so many films are shot in the confines of a
house, why domestic interiors dominate, and why shot selection is marked
by the dominant use of the two-shot and shot/reverse conventions. This
formal style and the settings it depicts pack the wider tensions of Hausa
life into the domestic arena and into familial interaction between lovers
and among family members. Love is an unruly emotion, representing indi-
vidual desire, often somewhat out of control, and it is frequently in ten-
sion with a wider social order. Love prioritizes individuals over the needs
and wishes of family members. Abdalla Adamu (forthcoming-a) argues
that underlying Hausa film is the rebelliousness of youths resisting the
“tyranny” of the Hausa traditional marriage system, which denies them a
choice of partners. This is particularly true for women, for whom marriage
is a much larger part of their lives and whose ability to control and shape
life within a marriage is more limited. Because of this, fantasies and fears
about love and its wayward effects probe the fault lines of social conflict in
Hausa society. Struggling for control over love and marriage is one of the
few socially legitimate ways that women have agitated for greater indepen-
dence; when Hausa films dramatize changing sensibilities about relations
between the sexes, and about romance, they are pushing at the boundaries
of social norms and social order.
Hausa romance literature dramatized the theme of love and the social
conflicts around it in powerful ways that partly account for the burst of
popularity of Hausa fiction in the 1990s.28 But the medium of print in-
volved a much greater process of translation and mediation as Indian films
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came into Hausa novels. What is different about Wasila and the films in
its tradition is that by including song and dance sequences they make the
relation between Hausa and Indian films directly and viscerally present,
leading them to seem much more transgressive in a conservative Hausa
context.
Like so many other Nigerian films, Wasila opens with a scene in the
front room of a nice house where Jamilu’s parents have come to greet Wa-
sila’s. The foursome comment on what a fantastic love the couple share
and promise to work together to make sure the couple’s marriage succeeds.
In a series of shot/reverse shots, the scene sets out an almost ideal sce-
nario. We find out the marriage was a love marriage, driven by the couple
themselves, but the parents’ obvious delight suggests that this is one of
those rare occasions where parental control and individual desire hap-
pily coincide. We cut to another interior, this time that of a school, where
three of Wasila’s friends carry on the previous conversation, remarking
on the amazing love that the couple share. As they do so, a camera zooms
into close-up on one of the friends, blurs, and we switch from the diegetic
world of the narrative and into the fantasy space of a song. Three girls in
identical African dress dance in a line as three boys wearing matching
black and white Western clothes dance along with them. Jamilu and Wa-
sila appear and all the dancers are on top of a roof, creating a vista and
a sense of space falling away behind them, mimicking the hillsides and
mountain ranges favored in dance sequences from Indian film. Sometimes
the couple dance in synchrony with the backing dancers, but mostly they
wind around one another, singing a teasing song to each other, compar-
ing who can love the best. Nearly twenty minutes into the film, this is the
first time we see the main characters, as before their presence has been
refracted through the tributes to them by friends and family. It is impor-
tant that their first appearance in the film is a pure declaration of love
embodied in song and dance. Songs in musicals are, of course, excessive
events that interrupt narrative; they appear in films as proxies for strong
emotions that characters cannot speak themselves. As in Indian films, the
dancers’ costume changes during the sequence, emphasizing its distance
from realist narrative and its function as pure spectacle. At the time it
was released, this song sequence was electric in Nigeria and captured the
(then) still novel sense of transgression at seeing Hausa people perform-
ing like Indian film stars. The main star of the film, Ali Nuhu, said that the
success of the song, combined with a backlash against it, meant that for a
while he could not go out in public to meet his fans.29
206
Wasila made Nuhu into an enormous star, tying his persona to song
and dance sequences and to the narratives of Indian film. Mujadala (2001,
dir. Tijani Ibraheem), released not long after Wasila, was another huge hit
for Nuhu, with a plot this time wholly lifted from an Indian film, Dil Lagi
(1999, dir. Sunny Deol). The films tell the story of two brothers brought
up after their mother passes away. Both become involved with the same
woman. The elder, responsible son (Sunny Deol/Ali Nuhu) falls in love
with a college student (Urmila Mantondka/Fati Mohammed) only to find
that she is in love with his younger brother (Bobby Deol/Ahmed Nuhu).
Complications ensue. Like Wasila, Mujadala cemented the public link be-
tween Nuhu and Indian film adaptations, in which his company, FKD Pro-
ductions, has come to specialize. These films seem far removed from the
spiritual insecurities of End of the Wicked or Time, or even from the casual
immorality of Glamour Girls, but they nevertheless are structured around
the same sense of vulnerability and impotence in the face of forces beyond
one’s control. Love is a classic theme of romanticist individualism, and the
ability to pursue love is a powerful indicator of individual ambition. But
the fact that love can take over one’s body and mind erodes that sense of
control. It leads lovers to make choices and take actions that go against
their judgment, and it leads them into situations of anxious instability. In
Wasila, love is represented as a form of possession. When we see Jamilu
injured in a car crash, we think it is part of the realist narrative of the film,
but it turns out to be a dream sequence that ends with Wasila falling to
the hospital floor in tears, only to wake and find herself rolling on her sofa,
shaking and crying in real life. This dream forces itself into her waking life,
clouding the boundaries between real and unreal. It indicates an excessive
love, something that is outside of her, controlling her. Similarly, when Ja-
milu rushes home at the news his wife is sick and sees her apparently ill, he
is so overcome by his emotions that he collapses to the floor and is himself
taken to hospital. These fits externalize love, taking it outside the body and
mind and making it a tactile, physical thing. They present love as some-
thing slightly out of control, unpredictable, and dangerous. This instability
is driven home by the central betrayal of the film, the seduction of Moɗa.
Wasila’s errancy comes without motivation: no hint of an ongoing love,
no argument to estrange Wasila and Jamilu, no justification of any kind.
The fact that the narrative of the film establishes a perfect love and then
portrays Wasila cheating with a much less attractive man heightens the
sense of instability. Although the film opens with a series of people talking
about how powerful the lovers’ feelings for each other are, the first time
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we actually see them is not within the realist narrative but in the alternate
fantasy of a song sequence. Abdalla Adamu (forthcoming-b) argues that in
Hausa films song sequences are often outside of the narrative, in surrealis-
tic flashback or dreamscape, emphasizing the intimacy between love and
forces outside of the everyday world, forces which enter into the body and
take it over.
Wasila is primarily about betrayal and the instability of life. If Francis,
in Time, could be broken by a world in which he is so rich and then sud-
denly so poor, Jamilu’s heart is broken by a similar vertiginous change. The
woman he loves most intensely betrays him completely. Wasila depicts a
world in which people are fundamentally unknowable, in which one is at
the mercy of forces beyond one’s control. Several scholars of melodrama30
have emphasized that the emotional force and moral power of the genre
rests on putting characters in situations of helplessness so as to heighten
the audience’s physical experience of “agitation.” As Peter Brooks has ar-
gued, melodrama represents a world where truth, justice, and ethics have
been thrown into question and where political conflicts are shifted onto
a personal plane and sublimated into domestic conflicts about love and
betrayal.
When Wasila and Jamilu dance on a rooftop in an intertextual evocation
of the hills and vistas used in Indian film sequences, or when their story
echoes the lives of generations of Indian lovers who preceded them, what
is revealed is the power and force of Hausa viewers’ imaginative engage-
ment with the world of Indian melodrama. Arjun Appadurai (1996: 53)
famously described the importance of this imagination in a deterritorial-
ized world in which “more persons in more parts of the world consider a
wider set of possible lives than they ever did before,” thanks to the move-
ment of cultural texts brought about by globalization. But in the case of
love, at least in contemporary Northern Nigeria, these imaginative invest-
ments produce shifts in gender relations and practices of courtship and
marriage. At their heart is real social change, manifest most starkly in the
movement away from arranged marriages in urban areas and toward a far
greater choice for youths in marriage partners, and a greater reluctance of
parents to force their choices onto unwilling partners. In an era of change,
when the boundaries and force of Hausa values are constantly being nego-
tiated through their interaction with the Islamic and Western worlds, love
and marriage are key arenas where Hausa social boundaries are stretched
and challenged. It is perhaps because of these real world changes that the
debate around the imagined connection of Northern Nigeria to India has
become so charged.
208
CO N TRO V ERSY
The enormous success of Hausa video films and their huge popularity
among women and younger men has, perhaps inevitably, led to a strong
cultural backlash that accuses the films of degrading and destroying Hausa
culture. One man in his early forties told me that the films were ridiculous
and the song sequences “very, very controversial.”31 He said the films show
lovers walking in the garden holding hands: “You never see a Hausa man
do that. It is totally against his culture, I can say.”32 This opinion is echoed
strongly by many academics, ulama, and sometimes, it seems, any male
over forty-five. Zulkifi Dakata (2004), in an essay titled “Alienation of Cul-
ture: A Menace Posed by Hausa Home Video,” makes this argument force-
fully. Hausa films at first seemed to promise something new, he argues,
but instead the films “unfortunately went on serving us with the same ele-
ments that have always threatened to degrade our culture. It is hereby
sad to note that instead of using our culture to promote and sustain our
indigenous development we take to copying. . . . No right thinking Hausa-
Fulani parent would permit their daughter to go to parks and bushes to
sing and dance with the boy she loves” (251).
In many respects, arguments like these replay earlier debates about the
nature of cultural imperialism and the perils of Westernization. They re-
veal the powerful hold of the public-service idea of film: that it should
“promote” culture and “sustain” development. This language reveals the
ghost of state-produced media hanging over the privatized world of Hausa
films. It is indicative of the existence of both Northern and Southern Nige-
rian films in a critical environment formed by an earlier epoch. This envi-
ronment expects films to be forms of cultural objectification and recog-
nizes that these objects circulate and create cultural and national identity
(Ginsburg 1994; McLagan 2002; Myers 2002). They are key arenas where
ideas of culture are formed and debated.
The clamorous attack on Hausa film came at the same time as the in-
tensification of religious identification leading to the imposition of Islamic
law in Kano state, the center of Hausa film production. Introducing shari’a
law inevitably involves a public discussion of the legality of a whole range
of cultural practices, but in Nigeria it shifted the direction of the critique
in a new way. Sheikh Ameen Al-Deen Abubakar (2004: 256), one of the
most prominent of Kano’s religious leaders, summarizes this point when
he questions whether copying cultural forms constitutes a promotion of
a different way of life, citing the hadith “Whoever imitates a given people,
he is considered to be with them.” Ibrahim Ado-Kurawa (2004) takes this
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point further, arguing that there is a deeper religious meaning to Indian

films that is carried over into Hausa society. This rests on the idea that
the dancing and, to some degree, the music in the films, have their roots
in religious tradition: “Each step [in the films] has its significance with its
own meanings. . . . All dances copied from Indian films are a form of wor-
ship for a particular god. . . . By copying the worship of Indian Gods the
Muslims are committing shirk” (118).
Because of this, he argues, Hausa producers are ignorantly spreading
the teachings of Hinduism: “In this respect Hausa home video are serving
as agents for the spread of Indian culture of love singing and worship of
Hindu gods in contravention of the teachings of the Prophet (SAW) . . . that
prohibit such actions” (ibid.: 117).
The fear that Indian films might promote Hinduism in Nigeria is a real
concern but, at this point, a minority one, as the vast majority of viewers
feel themselves to be deeply Muslim. To make this argument, though, one
also has to separate out the “Hinduness” of films from all the other textual
and cultural borrowings that make up Indian cinema. While the dancing
may have some Hindu roots, song sequences also have very strong Islamic
traditions woven into them, as whole sections of the Indian film industry—
most famously screenwriting and music—were dominated by Muslims.
The influence of Sufi qawwalis on Indian film music is perhaps the most
famous example of a wide-ranging set of influences that complicates the
identification of Indian films as essentially Hindu. This is not to deny the
films’ intimate involvement with Hinduism, but one must interrogate how
that influence works.
The issue of the religious status of Hausa films came to a head after film-
making was banned following the introduction of Islamic law in Kano state
in 2001. In preparation for this action the filmmakers drew up a memo-
randum to the Shari’a Committee advising it of their plans for the “Islami-
zation of the Film Industry” (Kano Film Industry Operators n.d.). What
is fascinating about this document is that it throws the traditional defi-
nition of cultural imperialism up into the air. In a commitment to make
filmmaking Islamic and stop the degradation of culture, the filmmakers
have to carefully parse the idea of “culture” in order to protect it from
itself. “Culture is a fabric of interwoven threads,” the document argues,
“some of which are original and conform with Islamic view while others
are alien and inessential.” To make Hausa films Islamic, one must not just
keep out influences from India which are easily recognizable, but also keep
out aspects of Hausa culture that are deemed to be un-Islamic, a process
210
potentially fraught with much greater controversy. The cultural imperial-

ism thesis, based on a dichotomy between indigenous and Western, has no
real way to take into account the complexity of Islam, which is both indige-
nous and foreign and which transforms culture into something to be pre-
served and to be protected from. It is only by realizing that Hausa society
is made up of Islamic and un-Islamic elements, the filmmakers conclude,
that “we shall be able to avoid the erroneous view of sanctity of our cultural
heritage. . . . consequently, this will allow us objective examination and
distinguishing between cultures with true Islamic roots (which are to be
promoted) and those alien that were added at a later date which are to be
. . . discourage[d] through the film or movie medium” (ibid.). Culture here
takes the figure of the witch or jujuman we saw in Time or the secret cult
in Super Warriors. What was once a constitutive part of cultural identity is
now revealed to be beyond the religious pale and reduced to the margins
of society. In Northern Nigeria, the slipperiness of the relation between
culture and Islam means that filmmakers can be castigated for not “repre-
senting the culture,” as Ado-Kurawa states, and equally critiqued for the
“error” of seeing cultural heritage as sacred.
The extreme self-consciousness about how films “represent the culture”
is a survival in Hausa video films of a pedagogical imperative that was
central to mobile film units, state-funded television, and the progressivist,
nationalist direction of the postcolonial state. It is present in the South and
certainly behind the campaign of the Nigerian Film and Video Censors
Board to reduce attention to magic and witchcraft in the film industry. In
the North, this modernist, nationalist progressive imperative is fueled by
the historical conflict between the largely Muslim Hausa-Fulani peoples
and the Christian groups of the South. Northern filmmakers, for all their
easy adoption of Indian film styles, are very conscious of their role in rep-
resenting religious and cultural values in their works and of the intense
reaction they could face if they overstep established boundaries. When I
asked the film star and producer Ali Nuhu why so few Hausa films are
devoted to witchcraft and ritual abuse, he responded that this was due
to the cultural difference between Southerners and Northerners. “Things
go on in their society,” he argued, that are not done in the North as “our
religion preaches against ritual sacrifice.”33 A film fan told me that South-
ern films reflected Southerners’ deep cultural traditions and their greater
reliance on spirits, while Islam “had been in Hausaland for so long” that,
while witchcraft existed there, “it was not so much.”34 These comments do
not simply indicate the perceived cultural distance between Northern and
211
Chapter Six
Southern Nigeria, they offer an idealized version of Hausa society. Indeed

the film fan who argued that witchcraft was not so powerful because of
the North’s Islamic tradition promptly regaled me with a tale of a hakimi
(traditional royal leader) whose house had been burned down after he was
accused of making ritual sacrifices. A manager of one of the Kano cinemas
explained the difference: “The answer is culture. The culture is different.
It [witchcraft and ritual abuse] may happen in the North but it is not to
be seen by children.” Yoruba, by contrast, have no such qualms. “They will
play it out—they would like the world to know about it.” The manager is
here recognizing that these activities go on but that the crucial thing is
that they should not be represented on film and should not circulate as ob-
jectified representations of Hausa culture. Qasimu Yero, a famous Hausa
actor, said the same thing in explaining why Northern filmmakers do not
dwell on issues of ritual abuse: “These films go to the U.S. and elsewhere
and people say ‘this is our culture’”; Hausa filmmakers do not want to be
involved in depicting their culture in this way.
Northern filmmakers, audiences, and critics are well aware that South-
ern films depicting witchcraft and magic have a deeply Christian origin,
and while issues of magic and ritual abuse do not necessarily have to have a
Christian provenance, the generic ways in which these are formally repre-
sented in Southern films bear unmistakable traces of Pentecostalism.
Northern filmmakers share a concern for how films objectify and circulate
ideas about culture. This concern draws heavily on nationalist ideas of the
role of media in fighting cultural imperialism and marries that with an in-
tensified Islamic identity, resulting in a complex and sometimes contradic-
tory film practice. Stars like Ali Nuhu are controversial in Nigeria because
of their dependence on Indian film aesthetics. Although they are frequently
accused of destroying Hausa culture because of this, they still express clear
limits as to what they will borrow and what they will not. For all of his fame
as the “Shah Rukh Khan of Nigeria,” Nuhu adheres to a belief that films
have an important role in upholding, representing, and circulating ideas
about culture. Bashir Ɗan Muɗi, one of the leading cameramen in Hausa
film and a pioneer of the industry, explains this complexity when he argues
that Northern filmmakers realize “there is a lot of Christian missioniza-
tion” in Southern films. “Indian films are more close to Hausa culture,”
he notes, adding crucially that “because of language barriers people don’t
take on all aspects of Indian films. They borrow Indian clothes but do not
see it as Hindu. But since we have Christians in our community we see it
as a problem.”35 Indian films do not pose the same dangers as Southern
212
films because their distance makes them more of an imagined object and
less of an immediate presence. Cultural borrowing relies on the neces-
sary distance that allows one to reject certain elements and adopt others.
Hinduness, while controversial, is not the powerful competitor for Islam in
Nigeria that Christianity is. When the shari’a ban on filmmaking was lifted
and a new censorship body created, one of the panel’s first directives was
that there should be little use of magic and witchcraft—a clear reference
to anxiety about Christianity. As the filmmaker Ado Ahmad put it, “They
want you to believe in God in your script.”36
CO N CLUSI ON
In the Southern Nigerian film The Master, Nkem Owoh plays Dennis, a
man who, due to poverty, falls into the clutches of a 419 gang and becomes
one of them. The film opens with him waking in bed, brusquely ordering
his niece to go and buy him some food. When the niece asks for money,
he chastises her and sends her on her way. Later, his junior brother, whose
house he is staying in, comes into the bedroom and asks why he is not
at the market working, and why he blames his situation on other things
when really he is just lazy. Dennis replies that he works hard all day but
only earns a few naira and that it is not worth it. He then reminds his
younger brother that the only reason he is successful now is that Dennis
paid for his education earlier on. Dennis then explains that the reason he
is so poor, despite his education, is that he borrowed money so he could
emigrate and that when he was forced back to Nigeria he lost everything.
A few days later, in response to this, the brother returns, saying he has
borrowed seventy thousand naira to give to Dennis so he has some capital
to conduct business on a bigger scale and will not have to scrabble in the
market. It is a peace offering. Dennis embraces him saying he had felt so
all alone, but that now, wherever their parents were (in heaven) they would
know this is a real family. When Dennis is defrauded of this money by a 419
operation, leaving him broke and his brother in debt, he turns to criminal
means to survive.
This brief description sets up a family situation which is complex but
recognizable to many Nigerians. The film opens establishing Dennis as
a gruff, bullying figure, ordering around his niece and rejecting any idea
that he should go out and work for money. At this point Dennis is an un-
sympathetic figure and a familiar one in Nigerian society. From the junior
brother’s point of view, he has a senior brother staying in the household,
213
Chapter Six
leeching off of him and refusing to work. Family duty prevents the junior
brother from telling him to leave. It is a situation pregnant with conflict.
The film then gives us a backstory to Dennis, an educated man who has
worked very hard but who, through circumstances beyond his control, has
lost everything. The junior brother, while angry with Dennis, clearly listens
and is moved by the argument that he would be nowhere if it was not for
the fact that Dennis “suffered” to put him ahead. That he feels the moral
pull of this argument is embodied in the loan he takes out to help Dennis.
With the end of the salary as a stabilizing mechanism in Nigerian life, and
the reconfiguration of education—which remains crucially important but,
as in the case of Dennis, cannot guarantee security and success, Nigeri-
ans have been forced into relying on alternative networks in order to find
some measure of security in life. Chief among these in a world where hard
work and merit count for little is the necessity of finding a patron in order
to get ahead. In this world one cannot achieve by one’s own efforts—the
opposite of the ideal of America—but only through help. Dennis relies
on his junior brother just as his junior brother relied on him. His educa-
tion is recognized and rewarded, but by a criminal who sees that his good
English will be helpful in sending 419 letters to unsuspecting foreigners.
Packed into this domestic encounter are some of the larger tensions of
contemporary Nigeria: the failure of the state to provide employment, the
forced reliance on kin, and the rise of new economic networks (in this case,
criminal ones). These are situations that stimulate affective responses in
the characters: tensions within the family brought about by dependence, a
sense of despair and vulnerability, anger and sullen reprimands, the feeling
of “being so alone,” generosity and happy reunions, love and support. The
Master emphasizes, like so many Nigerian films, a world where individual
advancement and merits are useless unless backed up by a patron. In Super
Warriors, Ugochukwu only succeeds as a businessman because of the help
of Chief Obie who, in turn, derives his success from his participation in a
secret cult. The senior women of Glamour Girls likewise have foresworn
education and marriage as traditional routes to security in favor of culti-
vating patrons, men with “naira power” on whom they rely to get ahead.
These stories dramatize a fundamental shift in the economy and social
life of Nigerians. They are a cultural articulation of the transformation of
Nigerian political economy. However, these films do not just dramatize the
experience of contemporary urban life for many Nigerians, they evoke it in
their affective grasp on an audience. Films like these are not just referents
to wider realities, representations of conditions that exist elsewhere, they
214
replay these emotions as part of the narrative address of the film. They
evoke emotional responses, making people live the experience of charac-
ters and react to them with a mixture of empathy and revulsion. There is
a physical dwelling in the film, an immediacy and excess, that makes the
film not just a representation but a lived experience as well.
Mobile film units and television dramas, by contrast, addressed a de-
velopmentalist Nigerian subject through the logic of uplift and progress.
Dominated by the state, which set itself up as a protector of cultural values
(at the same time as it tried to transform them), mobile film units ex-
press the deeply political nature of the relation between media, state, and
subject. These values and aesthetics governed the cultural form of Nige-
rian television and, in certain respects, still do today. There, as the dis-
tinguished television actor Qasimo Jero said, you were always “executing
government policies.”37 As another former operative of the Nigerian Tele-
vision Authority put it, television was always involved in “political infor-
mation dissemination.”38 Nigerian films, by contrast, are loosed from this
control. Many filmmakers embody, in their own biographies, the transfor-
mation from state to private networks that the films represent. The late
Hausa director, Tijani Ibraheem, one of the pioneers of the industry, came
to it from a long experience working in television. There, he said, dramas
were intended to be pedagogical—to aid state development projects, or
to represent the interests of the sponsor. One drama series he directed
was sponsored by Allied Bank. While he was free to shape it any way he
wished, he had to show characters adopting modern banking methods. In
the film industry, by contrast, he remarked that “the idea is usually free”
and that “you are not tied up with a public enlightenment sort of thing.”39
Ibraheem’s trajectory is mimicked by several filmmakers in both Southern
and Northern films, especially by the pioneers of the industry. Filmmakers
like these embody the shift in Nigerian society from salaried work to pri-
vate independent contractors moving from project to project. Nigerian
films address a market-driven, liberalized, insecure Nigerian subject. They
engage questions of value—moral, financial, sexual—and the intangible
and unknowable ways value seems to appear and disappear outside of indi-
vidual or social control. The state as the arbiter of stability is largely absent.
In its wake is the Pentecostal church, the family, the lover, but all of these
threaten to betray as much as they promise to help. This is a late capital
world of risk, and Nigerian films are inscription machines recording the
sense of vulnerability that comes with that risk and rendering it in the
register of excessive, fantastic melodrama.
215
Chapter Six
Like Indian cinema, Nigerian films are based on the needs of a people
swept up in social change who are trying to understand their predicament
in terms that are familiar to them. Whether this is represented in the lurid
depiction of corruption and outrage in Southern Nigerian films, or in the
tensions between arranged marriage and love marriages in Northern ones,
Nigerian film has developed modes of melodrama that represent a society
at once rapidly modernizing and still deeply traditional, a society whose
religious traditions are as much a part of the globalized world as they are of
Nigeria itself. These films constantly attempt to comprehend the economic
and social insecurities of everyday life through a moral framework and, by
doing so, assert a place for moral and religious belief in the rationalized
world of corrupt politicians, 419 con men, and errant lovers. They do this
in a postcolonial society where bureaucrats are corrupt, justice is hard to
come by, and the family remains the economic, cultural, and emotional
center of peoples’ lives. In Nigeria, commercial cinema expresses the vul-
nerabilities, anxieties, pressures, and hopes that affect everyday Nigerians.
These stories dramatize the contradictions of a society in rapid change
through the central yet constantly uncertain presence of the family—the
family in Nigerian films is the force that raises you, that offers you the
closest bonds, but could bewitch you, betray your desires, or dominate
you. Southern Nigerian films probe this world through an aesthetics of
outrage, dramatizing and exaggerating the forces of corruption at work in
the world. Northern films do so through complex borrowing from Indian
cinema, using the melodrama of one to probe the world of another. They
represent the fantasy of playing with other forms as a way of interrogating
local norms. In this way, Nigerian films depict and embody the daily “ex-
periments” that constitute the practice of everyday urban life (Mbembe
and Nuttall 2004).
216

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I NS TABI LITY A ND TH E EXC ESSIV E WORL D

IN THE LOGIC OF MODERNIZATION THEORY, media were expected to

cinemas, imitating the cowboy swagger and gangster slang of Hollywood

29. Hausa video films on sale at Kofar Wambai market, Kano.

ensorcell her granddaughter, dramatize the predicaments of an unstable

postmodernism as a “cultural dominant” which while powerfully expres-

is beginning to recognize films as a major symbol of private initiative and

I NSECURI T Y AND MEL O D RAMA

as a civil servant or a parastatal employee, was prestigious, lucrative, and

“spiritual insecurity” to refer to the sense of danger and exposure to in-

She explores the psychological consequences of living in a society where

“N O LLYWO O D” AND THE AESTHETI CS O F O U T R AGE

relations. Plots are often driven by family conflicts, melodrama predomi-

35. Cover of Glamour Girls,

a referent of an external reality. These films are intimately involved in rep-

based on love or attraction but on financial gain. Traditional routes to suc-

38 and 39. Nigerian stickers. Collection of the author.

based on an aesthetics of outrage, Hausa filmmakers have drawn heavily

popularity of romantic books in Hausa society (Adamu, Y. 2002; Furniss

43. Cover of Wasila, 2000.

lic announcement of divorce which, when uttered three times by a man,

point further, arguing that there is a deeper religious meaning to Indian

potentially fraught with much greater controversy. The cultural imperial-

Southern Nigeria, they offer an idealized version of Hausa society. Indeed

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