Regarding Matt Steinglass's response to my note to Steve Smith on my research in Nigeria. Matt, your story was (as far as I know) the first in the American press on the Nigerian video industry and was also the best I have seen.
As a long-winded academic I am always in awe of good journalism that can so effectively cover a complex topic in 1200 words. Idumota remains an amazing place. I've never seen a more densely compact, anarchic, and downright dangerous market anywhere else. And any Nigerian video that can be found at all can be found there. Matt's observation that the industry began in the west is correct. The Nigerian movies began as an offshoot of the movement of Yoruba popular theater to broadcast television. (Karin Barber documents this well in "The Generation of Plays," her marvelous book on Yoruba popular theater.) Once they began marketing these television productions as videotapes the new industry took off and spread to the east and other regions of the country. The Igbo are usually credited with pioneering English language movies. This created the possibility for a nationwide and ultimately continent wide audience. I am, however, beginning to try to get away from "ethnicizing" the various components of the industry. This is difficult because Nigerians themselves always talk about it in those terms. But the more time I spent with actual production teams the more I realized that they are becoming increasingly interethnic. Some of the actors insisted that the industry was actually a force for unity in Nigeria precisely because it brought people of different ethnic and regional origins together in the workplace. Matt's comparison to early Hollywood prior to the big corporate studios is also apt. I was fortunate to arrive right in the middle of the production moratorium when negotiations to professionalize the industry were in progress. The recess did lead to a consolidation of the professional guilds, and a tentative agreement to limit new releases to eight a week. But some of the other goals--like coming up with a good strategy to control piracy--remain unaddressed. It's a fascinating thing going on there in Nigeria. Speaking as someone who has studied the country for over a decade I think the movie industry is the most important development in a long time both culturally and economically. In the environs around Enugu it has become a common practice for production teams to repair the roads into villages in exchange for using them as shoot locations. Thus, along with creating jobs in various sectors, the industry is participating in the development of rural villages in exactly those areas where government is failing to provide. Nigerians complain about the movies all the time. The complaints are wonderfully familiar. They are the same complaints that Americans have about our own movies-- they are too violent, they are a bad influence on children, they use the same proven plots and actors over and over. But, as far as I can tell, virtually everyone watches them, particularly young educated Nigerians. Finally, to Matt who took the overland route into Nigeria, sorry if it seemed as if I was depicting journalists as a softer lot than us "rugged" anthropologists. You are clearly a veteran Africanist. John C. McCall ______________________________ John C. McCall Associate Professor Department of Anthropology Mailcode 4502 Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL 62901-4502 Phone: 618-453-5010 Fax: 618-453-3253 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: www.siu.edu/~anthro/mccall ______________________________ --------------------------------------------- This message was sent using SIU Webmail Server. --- You are currently subscribed to african-cinema-conference as: [archive@jab.org] To unsubscribe, forward this message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
