Abstract
Nollywood, or the Nigerian film industry, is often perceived as a low-cost and fast local production centre for movie videos that has yet to be seriously treated by mainstream media communities. Nollywood still appears mysterious in this increasingly connected global world and beyond our knowledge system. Jade Miller’s book Nollywood Central finally offers us the first-hand information and a comprehensive overview of Nigeria’s video film industry that is long overdue.
Placing Nollywood in the context of global media flows and tracing its birth, development, industrial and marketing structure, Nollywood Central provides an in-depth and all-around investigation into the burgeoning Nigerian movie industry that has taken off in sub-Saharan Africa and the diaspora. The book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 traces the rising and development of Nollywood, from Yoruba Travelling Theatre, to the arrival of new technologies like the Video Home System (VHS) and Videocassette Recorder (VCR). Centring on Lagos as a creative city, the author concludes that being periphery to the dominant global system offers space and room for Nollywood to grow and enjoy more freedom and entrepreneurial flexibility and creativity. Chapter 2 analyzes the unique production and distribution mechanism of Nollywood – the core and the heart of the industry: physical distribution of hard copies of Nollywood titles in open-air marketplaces. The author highlights the key to understand Nigerian film industry as ‘informality’, which includes five elements ranging from not documenting sales, no legal contracts, to not using agents, not pursuing copyright violations, and privileging undocumented financing and distribution networks. The author believes these five elements render Nollywood as predominantly informal as opposed to the fragmented informality that characterizes many other global media industries. Chapter 3 discusses Nollywood movies’ style, format and audiences, deciphers it settings, genres and themes. From epics, black magics, to urban dramas, romances and comedies, Nollywood movies convey culturally specific content and reflect Nigerian and African values on faith, duty, fidelity and marriage. Chapter 4 reveals the governing bodies and state intervention in the film industry. The author argues that Nollywood is largely self-regulated, self-organized and self-governed. The major role for government should be strengthening infrastructure on a national level. Any direct government intervention and attempts to ‘formalize’ the industry are likely to seriously derail it. Chapter 5 surveys Nollywood’s global production input and distribution system, and the roles of two major companies, iROKOtv and MultiChoice’s Africa Magic. Most of Nollywood’s global networks are similarly informal and opaque, and its global trade is marked by informality and unofficial deals. Nevertheless, Nollywood is connected globally via an alternative system. The author predicts that this informality and its associated elements will remain dominating Nollywood in the foreseeable future.
The book’s most important argument is precisely related to the uniqueness and core of Nigerian film industry: informality, quasi-legality and opacity, which function as a resistant force to being integrated into global Hollywood. As such, the author contends that Nollywood ‘offers a window through which to examine the rise of a cultural industry, peripheral to dominant networks but central to alternative networks’ (p. 150). The case study of Nollywood and this main argument therefore bear significant theoretical implications.
The author engages three major media theoretical perspectives. One is Michael Curtin’s media capital. The author argues that a cultural economic and geographic study of Lagos as a hub of media production can help answer the question of why and how media come to concentrate on this specific city, thus advancing our understanding of global media flows. Nollywood provides a model of ‘alternative media capital’, ‘one that exists with few to no connections to major multinational media corporations’ (p. 155) and networks, one is self-sustained and self-organized.
The second theoretical perspective is Daya Thussu’s Contra-flow. The author contends that many contra-flow industries have been in fact integrated into dominant global networks via their ownership structures, co-production agreements and investment relationships. The book’s main argument is Nollywood can be considered emblematic of an industry that truly stands ‘contra’ to dominant global cultural industry networks: an industry with extremely limited incorporation into those dominant networks and an industry unlikely to be incorporated into them in any significant way in the near future. (p. 153)
As such, the popularity of Nollywood is ‘an example of the multi-polarity of global networks and multi-dimensionality of flows in the cultural industry … an industry born and continuing to function largely outside dominant global cultural industry networks’ (p. 154).
The third theoretical perspective is Manuel Castellas’ ‘Fourth World’. The term refers to those places that rise from the ashes of the ‘Second World’ and the ‘Third World’, which have considered by many as ‘an increasingly meaningless grouping’ (p. 22) with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The ‘Fourth World’ includes those places that are excluded from dominant network society, yet maybe central to alternative global networks (p. 22). According to the author’s definition, the ‘Fourth World’ is not nation-state based; they can be region-based or even neighbourhood-based, existing in the gaps of connections in the networked society. Nollywood can be regarded as an example of the ‘Fourth World’.
Through the case study of Nollywood, and especially through turning normally considered negative part of Nollywood – informality – into positive part of resistance, agency and alternative media capital, the author offers an innovate angle and provides new meaning to the Nigerian film industry. The industry is seen as an alternative to dominant global force and the Networked society, and as a self-sustained media capital. Its existence is therefore a striking example of local and regional response to the force of globalization and the seemingly untrammelled power of runaway capital.
It would be interesting to explore the hidden connection between this alternative film production centre Nollywood and the dominant movie industry of the Western world, and see if at all possible the dominant network might annex or integrate Nollywood into its world. A well-written and innovative book Nollywood Central thus presents a significant and excellent case study for global communication.