African Video Movies and Global Desires
A Ghanaian History
Carmela Garritano
Ohio University Research in International Studies
Africa Series No. 91
Athens
Dla Mikołaja i Bartka, moich kochanych
Acknowledgments
Research for this project has been supported by grants from Michigan State University, FLAS, Fulbright IIE, the West Africa Research Association, and the University of St. Thomas. The professors I worked closely with at Michigan State, including David Robinson, Jyotsna Singh, and David Wiley, deserve special thanks for their help and encouragement. The support of the African Studies Center at MSU, and especially of John Metzler, was instrumental to obtaining the funding necessary to complete a significant portion of the research on which this project is built. I am grateful to Tama Hamilton-Wray, my boss at the African Media Center, who was a bright light during my time at MSU. Keyan Tomaselli, whom I had the pleasure of getting to know when he was briefly at MSU, has helped me along in various ways over the years.
I owe my deepest debt of gratitude to my advisor and dear friend Ken Harrow. His guidance and support have been my fortune. As a mentor, activist, and scholar, his is an example I hope to follow.
Since 1998, Socrate Safo has been a close friend and colleague. His gumption and creativity drew me to the industry of which he is a founding member, and he has been an unwavering source of support and encouragement. I thank him for sharing his knowledge and expertise with me these many years.
This work would not have been possible without the help of friends and colleagues in the Ghanaian film and video industries. For their generosity and patience, warm thanks to George Arcton-Tetty, Mark Colemen, Veronica Quarshie, and Bob Smith, Jnr. I am also grateful for the cooperation of Mustapha Adams, William Akuffo, Ashangbor Akwetey-Kanyi, Mohammed Al Hassan, King Ampaw, Fred Amugi, Emmanuel Apea, Nat Banini, Alex Boateng, George Bosompim, Nii Saka Brown, Munir Captan, Nanabanyin Dadson, Pascaline C. Edwards, Shirley Frimpong-Manso, Steve Hackman, Martin Hama, Rev. Dr. Chris Hesse, H.M., Idikoko, Ramesh Jai, Alfred Kumi-Atiemo, Albert Kuvodu, Albert Mensah, Vera Mensah, Mr. Mettle, Saul Mettle, Abdul Salam Munumi, Haijia Muzongo, Samuel Nai, Samuel Nyamekye, Samuel Odoi-Mensah, Helen Omaboe, Kofi Owusu, Albert Owusu-Ansah, Regina Pornortey, Brew Riverson, William Sefa, George Williams, and Moro Yaro. I remain indebted to Godwin Kotey, a talented friend who left the world too soon.
Many thanks to my hard-working research assistants: in Ghana, Adu Vera and Joseph Koranteng; in Nigeria, Oluchi Dikeocha; and in St. Paul, Nana Yiadom. Time spent in Ghana has been enriched by Lydia Amon-Kotey, Francis Gbormittah, Elijah Mensah, and Sam Nyeha. During the Fulbright year, I was privileged to have JoAnn Brimmer as a friend and intellectual interlocutor.
I thank Ato Quayson, who was generous enough to read several chapters of the manuscript while it was very much in process. I also thank Carmen McCain, who offered helpful comments on the introduction. I am indebted to the many colleagues and friends whose provocative responses to papers I have given at various conferences, in particular at the African Literature Association and African Studies Association conferences, have helped me reconsider and sharpen my ideas. I want to thank Lindiwe Dovey and Teju Olaniyan for their expressions of support. Thanks are due to Jean-Marie Teno for the rough cut of Sacred Places and talking with me on several occasions. Thanks, too, to fellow video movie researchers Moradewun Adejunmobi, Africanus Aveh, Jonathan Haynes, Ono Okome, and John McCall. I look forward to all that is yet to come! Jon Haynes deserves a special expression of gratitude for publishing my first article on Nollywood and, since then, supporting my work in countless ways. I thank him especially for his incisive and generous comments on this manuscript. I also wish to express my gratitude to the anonymous reader whose discerning and detailed comments made this a better book and to Gillian Berchowitz at Ohio University Press for her patience and assistance.
Laura Dagustino deserves huge thanks for helping with childcare and more during several very long and difficult years. If not for her, I would not have been able to complete research for this book. I am also grateful to my parents for the assistance they provided in St. Paul during a summer I spent in Ghana. I have benefitted in countless ways from Padmaja Challakere’s brilliant mind and caring heart.
Finally, to my beloved Bartek, unending appreciation.
Introduction: African Popular Videos as Global Cultural Forms
The emergence of popular video industries in Ghana and Nigeria represents the most important and exciting development in African cultural production in recent history. Since its inception in the 1960s, African filmmaking has been a “paradoxical activity” (Barlet 2000, 238). Born out of the historical struggle of decolonization and a commitment to represent “Africa from an African perspective” (Armes 2006, 68), the work of socially committed African filmmakers has not generated a mass audience on the continent. Under current conditions marked by the international hegemony of dominant cinema industries, the dilapidated state of cinema houses in Africa, and the prohibitive expense of producing celluloid films, African filmmakers have become locked in a relationship of dependency with funding sources and distribution networks located in the global North. As a consequence, African films remain “foreigners in their own countries” (Sama 1996, 148), more likely to be found in Europe and North America on film festival screens and in university libraries than projected in cinemas or broadcast on television in Africa.
Though the film medium has failed to take root in Africa, video has flourished. An inexpensive, widely available, and easy to use technology for the production, duplication, and distribution of movies and other media content, video has radically transformed the African cultural landscape. In perhaps its most consequential manifestation, video has allowed videomakers in Ghana and Nigeria, individuals who in most cases are detached from official cultural institutions and working outside the purview of the state, to create a tremendously popular, commercial cinema for audiences in Africa and abroad: feature “films” made on video. Freed from the requirements for cultural and economic capital imposed by the film medium, ordinary Ghanaians and Nigerians started making and exhibiting their own productions in the late 1980s. In Ghana, the tremendous success of William Akuffo’s Zinabu (1987), a full-length feature shot with a VHS home video camera, sparked what those working in the Ghanaian video industry call “the video boom.” Local audiences, who had been watching scratched and faded foreign films for years, responded to Akuffo’s video movie with enormous enthusiasm. They crowded into the Globe Theatre in Accra for weeks to watch the video on the large screen. In a few years, film projectors in all of the major film theaters were replaced with video projection systems and hundreds of privately owned video centers, of various sizes and structural integrity, sprung up throughout the country to meet the growing demand for video viewing. Within ten years of the first local video production in 1987, as many as four videos in English were being released in Ghana each month, and over twenty years later, in 2009, Ghanaian movies appeared at the rate of approximately six per week, one in English and five in Akan, a Ghanaian language spoken across the country.
The Nigerian video industry, which began to take shape around the same time, soon became the economic and cultural power of the West African region. Now one of the largest movie industries in the world, the Nigerian industry releases a staggering 1,500 movies each year (Barrot 2009). Nollywood, the name popularly used to refer to Nigerian English-language movie production, speaks to the size and ambitions of the industry, but also obscures its diversity. Large numbers of Nigerian movies are also made in Yoruba. In fact, more Nigerian movies are produced in Yoruba than English, and in the city of Kano in Northern Nigeria, there is a well-established and prolific Hausa-language industry, called “Kannywood.” Small numbers of Nigerian movies are also produced in Nupe and Bini (McCain 2011). Based on the models established in Ghana and Nigeria, budding industries in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Cameroon have emerged. Produced transnationally and broadcast on television, streamed over the Internet, distributed and pirated globally in multiple formats, African video movies represent, in the words of Jonathan Haynes, “one of the greatest explosions of popular culture the continent has ever seen” (2007c, 1).
The