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LAGOS—Wednesday, December 15, 199611:00 am. In the cramped sitting area oMurpnis Jazz, on Adeniran Qgunsanya Stree;at Surulere, the scene is set for the preview oq four-hour home movie,Owo Blow . It isthe quintessential Lagos story: Femi,whose social-crusader father has beenthrown in jail because of his egalitarian

id outspokenness, and whose; every

driftsFrom

views ana outspokenness, anequally forthright mother battsort of domestic upheavaaimlessly in the cruel metropomotor park to drug joint to red lightdistrict, he ambles along with life,and ends up becoming the leader of atough robbery cjang except that heDpssesses a soul, and this complicatesTIS trial when he finally runs short ofhe law. Qwo Blow is produced by Wale

Fanu and directed by Tade ogida!,. for m«nyyears a producer with the Nigerian Television Authority, (NTA). Fanu who runs Cinekraft,was the cameraman for the popular television soap opera, Mirror in the Sun, while

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Videomarketerson the brood.© GlendoraReview

Tunde Kelani, the current head ofMainframe Productions, another motionpictures outfit, was the cinematographer.That teledrama was produced anddirected by Lola Fani-Kayode in the mid-1 980s. The screening at Surulere goeson for so long I cannot wait to determinewho the tail-credit lists as scriptwriter; butthe presence at the venue of ReverendM.A. Aderinkomi, author of the Yorubadrama Gbewiri (another story of astreetboy who becomes a pickpocket inthe 1970 Lagos), signposts a continuingnarration of city lives.

Forging A TraditionTo attempt a four-hour screen

narration suggests more than an artisticintegrity that would rival Satyajit Ray's orAkira Kurosawa's; it also awakens theviewer to the prevalent reality in the filmindustry which, in the real sense of theterm, existed only in name. There wasactual demand for the kind ofunmitigated pathos that Owo Blow servedits audience, and if it didn't create anextraordinary rave, it was due less to an

intrinsic flaw in the product than to thefact that just about every corner in Lagosor Onitsha was the location for a newhome movie with a similar ambition, onlydifferently marketed. In 1996, the motionpicture in Nigeria (largely in the southernpart of it) was in dubious bloom, the sortthat, in part fueled the epic ambition ofFanu's movie.

Of course, the country was in the gripof the Sani Abacha terror, and theeconomy, crippled since who-knows-when, now lay supine or prostrate. TheStructural Adjustment Programme (SAP),"had done its worse," as Lagosians wouldsay. Moral codes having long broken intogleaming smithereens, or having failedto take roots once Nigeria did, rulers andthe ruled were involved in just any scamthat could secure the next day. The sagaof advance fee frauds, called 419 afterthe relevant section in the penal code,had put Nigeria's name on the map ofthe world of iniquities; it was the time ofGbd/ue ('browbeat any idle face'), ofMugun (the fall guy) and 'the Guy,' (the

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Forthcoming in ltaruba Ideas Vol. l No 2> Esilofeun KinniOIusanyin on the prominence of women in

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Bisi Ogunsina on the notion of women in Yoruba proverbs

Afeintunde Abinyemi on invocation through orifei

Rev. Fr. Ilesanmi on a critique of Ifa

Dele Layiwola on Yoruba tragic drama

Lloyd Weaver on speak of the devil

Ayo Opefeyintimi on immortalising Awolowo throughpanagyrics

Adeboye Babalola on Ogundele (Lagbodoko)

Mabinde S. Olanrewaju on the place of indigenous languageliterature *

Reuben Abati on Awolowo and Abiola

Dipo Irele on Yoruba logic in Yoruba Language

Plus interviews with Professor Lambo and Suzzane Wengcr

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smart-aleck.) In passing, it should be notedthat a movie entitled Gbd/ue came out atthis time, and was screened at the NationalTheatre where viewers discovered that thestory had nothing to do with that title!Abacha and his family and friends werestealing public funds on what we can nowconfirm was an hourly basis; citizens sold'pure' water inside traffic jams—anything,just anything to beat the devil of hungerand intractable want.

In the midst of all this, a curiouspractice that began surreptitiously in 1986when a once-upon-a-time cartoonist,Muyideen Aromire, unsuccessfullysubmitted the video cassette of his drama,Ela/n (Tiger), to the National Film CensorsBoard for vetting had captured the streetimagination. Since the cost of making afilm in the regular 16mm celluloid gaugehad precluded filmmaking as the booksand Hollywood stipulate, adventurous orenterprising filmmakers now resorted torecording their stories in video cassettesand selling them as mass products. Thatwas the format in which Ekun was recorded.The late Hubert Ogunde, then a memberof the censor's board, reportedly said thatsuch a video would pass as film over hisdead body. Ogunde died in April 1990;from 1991, when Nek Videos Limitedreleased the video Aje N)ya Mi (My MotherIs A Witch), the march of video movies tothe Jerusalem of filmdom becameunstoppable. The most telling success ofthis turbulent revolution resides in thetransformation of the name of the censor'sboard: it is now known as the NationalFilm and Video Censors Board. Is thegeneral public taking note?

That was the impetus for Fanu'scommendable extravaganza. In fact, bythen, the arbiters of tele-visual tastes atthe NTA, who would insist on sponsorshipfrom Lever Brothers or Patterson Zocchonisbefore a soap opera could get on the airin the age of commercialisation, weremanning the last ramparts against thevideo onslaught. A few days after thatscreening at Murphis Jazz, AdeyemiAfolayan (Ade Love) died. He was one ofNigeria's foremost filmmakers, havingstarted his craft in the early 1970s withOla Balogun. One of his colleaguesattributed his demise to a heartbreak over

the displacement of celluloid films by thevideos. The 1990s were the decade ofthe video movie. In two works—Ti OluwaNi lie (Tunde Kelani, 1994) and Violated(Amaka Igwe, 1996), the Yorubatraveling theater and the university-baseddepartments of theatre arts, the twodominant traditions in the home videophenomenon, came together. Thisalignment signaled the initiation of thestandards by which what now passes asfilmmaking will be measured. I willexplain this in due course.

Traditions have a way of creepingonto the throne. The entrenchment of atradition, like a historic moment, doesnot always require drama and heraldry.The video movie, in spite of the socio-economic conditions surrounding itsemergence as a clearly second-rate form,is actually a plausible moment in a long,dynamic, self-reversing history of visualculture production in Nigeria. WhenOgunde swore to suppress the bug, hewas delivering a moral duty to the film aform that had secured his career andthose of others. But he was not alert, aspeople working through history scarcelyare, to the irony of his situation. The filmmedium in Nigeria, at least as itshowcased the works of Ogunde, IsolaOgunsola, Adeyemi Afolayan, LerePaimo, Moses Olaiya Adejumo (BabaSala), Oyin Adejobi and others in theYoruba film group, was itself anoverlapping movement in stages. Therewas the movement from the stage to thetube, to the radio, to the recording disc,and on to the photoplay series (Atoka).The nature of work in the 1970s throughthe 1980s was frenetic. This pulsatingenergy was reflected in the assortment ofmedia in which work was done. Forexample, Baba Sola's comedies camein all manner of styles and formats: theAlawada magazine series or the NTVcomedy half-hour on Wednesdayevenings. Such was the pace that thesepractitioners thought that it was natural,that all snakes were edible.

These, after all, were exponents andinheritors of the proud legacy of the-Yoruba Traveling Theater, a sixteenth-century tradition of itinerant performersthat, in spite of the diligence of the

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missionaries in the early twentieth-century,came back with vigor when Ogundeestablished his Folk Opera Party in 1944.From the 1940s through the 1960s, thispractice witnessed a real golden age due,at once, to sustained urbanization inYorubaland and the enthusiasm of thecultural anthropologists to undo thedemolition work of colonialism andChristian evangelism. Under the directionof the Great Troika—Hubert Ogunde,Kola Ogunmola and Duro Ladipo—theYoruba dramatic art became a tradition.It had institutional support from the largelyurbanized clientele whose experience itdramatized. There was prosperity in thepostwar 1970s, and even in the 1 980s.Before the advent of SAP, it was stillpossible to attempt to take the rushes toa studio in London and hope to recoupthe expenses by showing the film roundtheaters in Lagos, ibddan, Osogbo, anda few other places.

The economic situation conspired withthree structural problems to show whatweak foundation the emergent filmindustry stood on. First, the brilliant ideaof a National Film Corporation,established by a decree in the dying daysof the first military incursion, did not getbetter than a bureaucracy: a joke. Withits promise of establishing a film institute,a laboratory and a fund for filmmakers,it was the first official attempt to reallysupport the industry beyond the old

colonial preoccupation with mereordinances. But nothing majorhappened: under the controversialchairmanship of the filmmaker, EddieUgbomah, the corporation funded anumber of films, but these were mainlythe chairman's own products. It tookmany years to build the film laboratoryin Jos; equipping it has taken manymore. These days, under the directionof Dr Hyginus Ekwuazi, himself a filmscholar, the Nigerian Film Institute hastaken over the duty of coordinating theindustry as a government parastatal. Inshort, the films of this period, fromFrancis Oladele (Bullfrog in the Sun)through Ogunde (Aropin n'fen/a) toAfolabi Adesanya [Ose Sango), weremainly products of personal toil. Thevarious cinemas dotting the Lagosmetropolis—Pen Cinema at Agege,Jebdko and idera at Mushin, Metro atOnipadnu, King's at Obalende, Casinoat Yaba, Roxy at Apapa—did no betterthan feature the steady stream of Indianmelodramas distributed by Lebaneseand Nigerian merchants since the early1950s. The situation in Ibadan, withOdeon at 6ke-Ado and Scala atAdamasingbd, is not substantiallydifferent.

The Alarinjo FactorOne other structural problem was the

character of the dominant Yoruba

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theaters. From the Eegun Alannjo phase,each company was run on the principleof the Renaissance Italian commediadell'arte whereby the head of the actingcompany was also the lead actor, thedirector, producer, manager and the chiefaccounting officer. He married his femaleactors, or his wives became part of theactors; visiting friends were also draftedinto rehearsals. While this practice wasgood for cohesion and a sense of solidarityin an industry still open to social stigma,it was not so good for business. Theexperience of Moses Olaiya, whose rushes(or finished product) were stolen in transit,was very dramatic and catalytic in anunfunny way. He later made out of theordeal a film (Mosebolatan) celebratinghuman assertion, but most industrywatchers agree that Baba Sola's loss overOrun Mooru dealt a major blow to thecareer of that most accomplishedperformer. (He's trying to return througha weekly slot on MITV sponsored by themakers of Ajinomoto seasoning, but thisis no longer the Baba Sala of the "SellingHeavily!" phase.)

The third problem is somehow relatedto the preceding one. As Kelani pointedout in a recent article on the uses of thevisual arts for the motion picture industry,this generation of filmmakers, mainlytransiting from the stage, only extended"their stage traditions to the screen,oblivious of the fact that [the] motionpicture is a totally different form." Theyentered the wilderness of the film, stilllargely uncharted despite the works ofOladele, Ugbomah and Balogun, with thesame set of ideas they had found usefulon the radio or on stage. There is littledoubt that this confusion over formincapacitated the filmmakers in theirattempts at adapting to the new medium,reaching beyond their cultural base andbroadening the appeal of the medium.Much of the aesthetic shortcoming of thecurrent home videos by Yorubaprofessionals—particularly the

perpetuation of tradition even at the levelof theme and treatment—is rooted in theseproblems. In part, it is responsible for whatOnookome Okome, writing about thevideo phenomenon (Loud in Lagos), hascritiqued as 'close identification [with] a

particular ethnic group'.Yet, while it lasted, from the 1971

production of Wole Soyinka's Kongi'sHarvest produced by Oladele to early1990 when the last celluloid films werecommercially screened at the NationalTheater, Iganmu, film as a form had agood run. So much so that Ogunde'spersonal projects in the last decade ofhis life were carried out on the screen.This was the basis for his confidentdismissal of the video format, the orphanform. Part of Ogunde's (and the otherfilmmakers') concern was the video'ssusceptibility to piracy, and the difficultyof arresting it—problems that havecontinued to dog the industry ever since.In spite of this, however, or even as aresult, the video became the acceptedformat early in the '90s. It is alsoresponsible for the emergence of a newproduct: the Igbo language video movie.Prior to this time, there were no featurefilms in Igbo language. But the field wasoverloaded with heartbreaking andexcruciatingly poor products. Hand-heldcameras, hole-in-the-wall studios,primary-school-end-of-the-year story lines:these were the prevalent artisanalmethods of film production that damagedthe talents of otherwise astoundingperformers. Aromire (Alade on the screen),whose dubiously historic first product wasbirthed from these tools, was notoriousfor taking a set of actors to a location(usually some rich man's sitting room—no exterior shots!), and recording betweentwo and three videos without so much asa change of costumes. This state of affairshas persisted, to a great extent; the Igbo-language home movie was caught in itupon arrival, and a clearly clueless videolike Living in Bondage (Nek Videos, 1992)was enthusiastically received largelybecause it spoke to a community with noartistic anchor for its contemporaryexperience.

The involvement of Kelani and Igwechanged the industry in veryunimaginable ways. This is how ithappened. Kelani, an experiencedcinematographer who worked closely withFani-Kayode on the soap Mirror in theSun and the film Iwa (an adaptation ofAdebayo Faleti's Idaamu Paad'i Mikailu),

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collaborated with Alhaji Karimu Adepoju(who as Baba Wande in Oyin Adejobi'stelevision series, Kootii Asipa had anestablished career of acting) to write andproduce a three-part story, Ti Oluwa Nilie. The story dramatizes land-grabbingand official corruption, and does this withan expert medley of Yoruba film actors anduniversity-trained ones. In that film,Adepoju acts opposite Golda John whohad studied drama in Ibadan. There wasOmbo Gogo Ombo of Chuck Mike'sPerformance Studio Workshop, there was(now Oba) Wole Amele, CouncillorBalogun of the Village Headmaster fame.There was Dele Odule, Ayo Mogaji, Bature

Eleso, lya Ngba Life, Jide Kosoko,Lekinson, Oga Bello, Olofa-lna, andAderupoko, all brand names among theYoruba video patrons who knew theactors only by their stage/screen names,and trooped out whenever one happenedto be passing by their neighborhood. Theresult, mediated in admirablecinematography and fine directing, wasa story that led somewhere and appealedto anyone who understood Yoruba orcould read English subtitles. It launchedKelani's career big-time, one of the mostforceful in the industry at the moment.He has followed this with the two-partAyo NiMo Fe, Koseegbe (an adaptation

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of a Yoruba play by Akinwumi Isola), 6Le Ku (another adaptation of Isola's novelof the same title), Saworoide and, mostrecently, Thunderbolt, 'a cross-over' videothat cuts across ethnic and cultural lines.

With Igwe, the story is somewhatdifferent. A graduate of Theatre Arts fromthe University of Calabar, she was ascriptwriter who in the early 1990sproduced and directed the popular soap,Checkmate, which shared the airwaveswith mushy Mexican soaps like The RichAlso Cry and Wild Rose. English-languageteledrama has had a very strong presencein Nigeria, beginning with the old WNBC-WNTV's broadcast of Wole Soyinka's play,My Father's Burden, in 1960. It wentthrough a period of real activity, with aformidable list of successful middle-classseries and serials: W/age Headmaster (oldand new), Cockcrow at Dawn, Sura deTailor, Winds Against My Soul, NewMasquerade, For Better for Worse,Icheoku, and from the 80s, Mirror in theSun, Victims, Basi & Company, Samanja.The list is longer.

Checkmate worked: it privilegedmiddle-class values and the worlds ofcorporate intrigues and supple romancein the 1990s, a period when GeneralBabangida's SAP had washed the countryin new bogus banks with implausibleinterest rates, dangerously flashy cars,and out-of-this-world architecturaldesigns. With Zeb Ejiro's Ripples cominga few months after Chedcmafe and alsoairing on prime time television, themultitude of stage actors trained in theuniversities' departments of drama andtheater could now find regular actingjobs. Hitherto, they had constituted anenthusiastic group growing out of theexplosion of live theater spawned by FredAgbeyegbe's Ajofest '86. But with thegeneral recession of the late 1980s, theirdreams of professionalism went intolimbo. The new soaps simply came to therescue. There was, of course, the termitecalled home video, steadily eating its wayinto reckoning. Igwe produced a storycalled Rattlesnake in 1995, then the two-part Violated in the following year, andbecame one of the most serious-mindedvideo movie makers in the country.Violated combines the glamor of televisionwith the realism of Nigerian life to tell the

story a young woman raped andabandoned by a rich man who continuesto harass her in public. Her attempt tosettle into normal life is resisted by therich and powerful mother of her boyfriendbut in the end love triumphs, or does it?

Videography: The EnemiesWithin

Between 1994 and 1996, scores ofvideo cassettes, ostensibly made for homeviewing, flooded the market withunexampled variety and aggressiveness.And with them came a generation ofdirector-producers: Amaka Igwe, FidelisDuker, Zeb Ejiro, Jaiye Ojo, Zachee Orji,Tunde Alabi-Hundeyin (Dudu), BayoSalami (Oga Bello), Jide Kosoko, ChicoEjiro, BimpeAdekola (Ireti), Opa Williams,Taiwo Hassan (Ogogo), AmezeImarhiagbe, Kenneth Nnebue, BayoAdewusi. In May 1996, the courtyards ofLloyd Weaver's Swift Studio on Oba AkranAvenue in Ikeja crawled with actors anglingfor a role in a supposedly big budget"video film" to be called Omen of Love.According to rumors then, AmbassadorOlusegun Olusola, one of the brainsbehind the original Village Headmaster,was a supporter of this project. Thefollowing year, Femi Lasode's Even-EzraStudio released Sango, a dramatizationof the Yoruba myth of the thunder god,and even screened it at the Pan African— Film Festival in Los Angeles in February1999. If you heard any announcementon the television in Lagos ending with"Eight Ebinpejo Lane, Idumota, Lagos,"or "Number Fourteen Edidi Lane,Idumota, Lagos," or "Nine Iweka Road,Onitsha", you knew at once that this wasa commercial for a new video. Until theglut, there was no company called InfinityMerchants. But there is one now, and it isa marketer of video movies. You'll alsohear of Contech Ventures, Bayowa MoviePromotions, Nek Videos Limited, besideold names like Mut-Muksons Limited.During this period, phone-in programshaving become fashionable on thetelevision, a rash of immensely popularshows broke out: L'Agbo Video, AbereOrin, Bayowa Half-Hour, Ardmbada,Video Half-Hour, and many more. Theywere the Nigerian equivalents of Actors'

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Studio, where professionals were broughtto answer informal telephone calls fromtheir fans. Some of these sessions got tobe as popular as a feature movie.

The video movie is also the impetusfor the establishment of the NigerianActors' Guild, and has kept the NigerianCopyright Council, NCC, extremely busy.The council now pays attention to morethan the question of collecting rights formusicians; it feels constantly called uponto reflect on the question of piracy, andother general copyright issues. Moreover,there is a tremendous change in the designof syllabuses in the old departments oftheater arts in the universities with morecourses focusing on writing and producingand acting for the electronic media. Thismay be a response to the privatization ofbroadcasting, but it is also a way ofkeeping in step with the video market. TheNigerian film has been reborn, thearistocratic offspring of a lowly orphan.

"The piracy people are our biggestenemies. When we make a film, we prayto break even, and in fact we alwaysmanage to make our money from eachproduction. But we can do much better ifthere's a way that we and the governmentcan control the activities of the pirates andprotect our profession." In words to thiseffect did Salami reflect on the problemsof piracy, a phenomenon which, with poortechnical quality, poses some of thegreatest challenges to the motion pictureindustry. He was speaking at thevideotaped launch of the video movie,Imule Ife (Bonded Lovers), written andproduced by Ms. Adekola, and theceremony doubled as the "freedom" of theactor-producer from the tutelage of YinkaQuadri, also an actor and producer ofCorporate Pictures. (The recordingfeaturing this view on piracy served aspreamble for the film proper, while the hallfilled up.) As the audience sat to watchthe movie at its premiere at Satellite Onecinema at Shitta, a few blocks away fromMurphis Jazz where Owo Blow would laterhave its press screening, the enemies thatOga Bello spoke about had not gone towork. Usually, they study a particular videomovie's market prospects, and once it hashad the run of the theater, they set to work.Often, if the video is popular, as the worksof Igwe usually are, pirated copies begin

to appear in the market as soon as theposters make their appearance on thecity walls. The bug is harder to trace inthe Igbo and the English language movieswhich lack a tradition of public screening.In the same week in 1994 that OwuroI'Ojo, written and produced by BunmiOyinsan, began selling as a videocassette, I was on Ebinpejo Lane tointerview some marketers as an aspectof a story on the video phenomenon. Iwas astounded to see copies of the newmovie being carted away by fast-movingbootleggers. Three years later, in a smalltown in Austria, I watched the two-partstory with some Nigerian friends, and thequality of the production was such that itcould only have been the pirated version.Later I asked Oyinsan if she knew aboutthis, and her expression was a mixtureof 'Search me' and 'It goes on'.

The question of piracy is a touchy onein this industry and, as the experience ofthe NCC has shown even with musicpiracy, it is not an easy one to deal with.The idea of rating the products by theNFVCB is one regular option; if a cassettecarries the board's rating approval tag,the buyer is guided in her choice ofproduct. But, like everything else, evenrating tags can be faked, as they indeedare. Moviemakers, through theirassociations (Conference of MotionPictures Producers is one), have devisedseveral means, the better known beingthe control of rentals by video stores. Butpolicing this measure has prove difficultin an industry riven with competition anduneven quality. Another effective deviceis the idea of instituting a raffle draw withtickets built into the cassette case, thereasoning being that, with the addedvalue of competing in the draws, a buyermight be tempted to opt for the originalcassette. Kelani has long taken theprecaution of giving the case a seal toauthenticate his own products. ZacheeOrji ran a popular competition with TrueConfessions in December 1995, andwhen Violated came out the followingyear, Amaka Igwe gave the distributionrights to Texaco filling stations across thecountry.

Piracy in the industry is a somewhatparadoxical development. The idea of thehome video itself in 1986 amounted to

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a certain class of fakery in an industrysuddenly caught in the wild economic andsocial storms of the age. To use ananalogy that should resonate in theNigerian context, the railing againstpiracy is like the case of a group of soldierswho shoot their way to power andpromptly outlaw any attempt to takepower by force of the gun. The caseagainst piracy is not even entirelywatertight. The norm in the sector beingmediocrity, it is often difficult for thediscerning buyer to tell a fake productfrom the original. Both are characterizedby poor cinematography, sloppy imagesand outright disregard for quality. In fact,it can be argued that the generalpredilection toward cheap productionmakes counterfeiting such an attractiveoption for those who engage in it. Not tomention the practice by video makers ofre-titling videos rejected by the board,then, re-submitting them in a zonal officeof the same censor's board, a devicewhich came to light sometime in October2000. Yet, the challenge ought to beembraced. While it is possible that moviemakers continue to self-correct andimprove the quality of their products, forcritical as well as commercial reasons, thesame cannot be said for the pirates whoseoperation is marked by an attitudinaldistrust of excellence.

On the RoadBecause this is art we are dealing

with, the ultimate solution will betechnical, but not necessarily in the senseof the word, as the elemental process oftechnology. As Ismael Kadare says ofcreativity in a totalitarian state, the realenemy of art is not so much censorshipas mediocrity. Aside from piracy, themedium's obsession with pseudo-modernity and cheap mysticism has boxedthe video movie into a dead-end andensnared it in its own contradictions.Whether in the mainstream Yorubagenre, or in the emergent Igbo category,which is now somewhat indistinguishablefrom the "English language video," aninability to structure the dialectics ofaudience expectation and social moralityis what frames the impasse. This opensthe professionals to charges of social

irresponsibility in their manner ofhandling supernatural themes in anatmosphere charged by the zealotry ofthe Pentecostal churches. No questions:the riotous, excessive exhibitionism of theposters of these home videos, with themonotony of primary colors, is visuallyfascinating at the first glance, andbecomes repelling with frequentencounters. Their lack of decorum aboutthe human body, and the simultaneousdisplay of magic and 'unhealthy' fantasy,may be a parable for a society where ritualkilling is rife, and the human body is reallynot respected. But the real movie, as art,does not necessarily amount to a seriouscritique of these social dislocations. If youmanage to sit through the standard two-and-a-half hours of melodrama, you'llhave forgotten what you are meant to dowith the experience by the time it is over.There have been very trenchantcondemnations of the ancillary drama ofadvertising the products, in which creatinga sense of urgency takes the form ofpsychological warfare. The driving forcebehind the explosion is commercial, andits exceeding popularity, thus, calls forcritical attention before the zealotry of thereligiously minded confuses the matterbeyond recognition.

Kelani's charge to visual artists to seetheir talent as crucial to the motion pictureindustry is only one kind of challenge tobe posed on behalf of the video movie.The need for script writers, directors,designers, graphic artists is equallycrucial. The motion picture industry is, orought to be, an art. In September 1996,I saw Ipade Ayo by Lere Paimo at theNational Theater, and in July 2000,1 satinside the auditorium of the Lagos StateBroadcasting Corporation at Alausa tosee the premiere of Jide Kosoko's AyeN'reti Eleya. In those four years, despitechallenges by the emergence of otherdirectors and other kinds of moviemaking, I saw nothing in the two videosto convince me of any real advance inthe Yoruba language motion picture.There is the same story whose logic hascollapsed before the end of ninetyminutes. You will find the predictablerecourse to the babalawo who is morenegative than not. There is the samepotentially enriching but oversimplified

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attempt to incorporate contemporary reality/execution byhanging in Paimo, and the AIDS upheaval in Kosoko, thesame Manichean division of all experience into good andevil — all reminiscent of Kola Ogunmola of the Atoka phase.The Igbo-English video is as sloppy and unambitious: actingis standard here. What happens is that most people whoget in front of the camera see the experience as, first andforemost, modeling. The glamor of the television is importedwholesale, and with it the slow, infra-kinetic pace of themedium. In every movie you are bound to see Tony One-Week and Saint Obi and Peter Edochie and Hilda Dokubo.A scriptwriter, Ebereonwu, told me in July, 2000: "Edochie isone of the reasons most of us are doing ethnic cross-overnow, because people are tired of seeing him in every movie."The stories are equally unvarying: the village is evil andbackward, the city is glittering and full of opportunities, but

there is no real attempt to go further. The mother-in-lawremains mean, because the daughter-in-law is still infertile.With this kind of staple, why bother to appreciate somethingas incidental as the make-up?

It seems a hardly realistic thing to say but it has to besaid: for the motion picture to make money and be what itspractitioners want it to be, it has to become less interested inmaking money and stop being what they want it to be, whichis, to use a Lagos parlance, a multi-billion naira industry. Ithurts Nigerian video-makers to be kept repeatedly at thedoor of the bi-annual FESPACO in Ouagadougou. But dothey think that video format aside, their products are reallyworld-class? Not yet: before they can become it, the"filmmakers" have to understand their work as art, first, andbusiness, second.

Is anyone still waiting on the government? GR

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'American and African literaryjournal, publishes original works by andcritical studies of black writers worldwide.The journal offers a rich mixture of fiction,poetry, plays, critical essays, culturalstudies, interviews, and visual art. Frequentannotated bibliographies, special thematic issues, and originalart and photography are some of the features of this highlyacclaimed international showcase of arts and letters. Specialissues on Haiti and on Puerto Rican Women Writers havereceived awards from both the Council of Editors of LearnedJournals and the Association of American PublishersProfessional/Scholarly Publishing Division.

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