NigeriansTalk

Nige­ria has always been a coun­try of fan­ta­sized great­ness since the col­lapse of the first repub­lic. But the rebrand­ing antics of the min­is­ter of infor­ma­tion have added a ris­i­ble dimen­sion to the fan­tasy ride. This is not because the brand­ing project is not nec­es­sary or even desir­able, but because the project is geared towards a mere white wash; a spread of pow­der over an intol­er­a­bly burnt face.’ Great nation, good peo­ple’. Yes we are good peo­ple but we are atro­ciously bad too, just like any other coun­try. So what is the depth of thought here? Mere cant will not do, the par­a­digms to be pushed off the slopes are all too vis­i­ble for any slo­ga­neer­ing cover up.

 Nige­ria cel­e­brated its last Inde­pen­dence anniver­sary under a pall of a series of explo­sive image-attacks. The ones that seemed most irri­tat­ing to the fire brand Mrs. Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion appear to be (a) the por­trayal of Nige­ria as a coun­try of fraud­sters in the Sony web­site ad and (b) the por­trayal of Nige­ri­ans as enter­pris­ing rit­u­al­ists in the Hollywood-South African movie, Dis­trict 9.Do not mind the intractable spate of arbi­trary and unex­plained assas­si­na­tions in the coun­try; nor the rot in the edu­ca­tion sec­tor ; nor the total col­lapse of secu­rity and econ­omy; nor the endemic cor­rup­tion among the ruling/ polit­i­cal class, and its corol­lary among the dis­pos­sessed youth– des­per­a­tion for quick wealth, a sit­u­a­tion that  makes Sony’s wise-assed slur pos­si­ble in the first place. I can­not be sure if the irony of it all struck Dr Akun­y­ili when the chair­man of her own brand­ing project com­mit­tee, the actor Pete Edochie, was recently kidnapped.

We could under­stand the minister’s espe­cial grouse with the movie: aside mak­ing a hash of her much refrained-branding project, her polit­i­cal bene­fac­tor and for­mer pres­i­dent of the coun­try, Gen­eral Obasanjo rtd., has had his per­sonal image mauled in the rit­ual mud  of  Dis­trict 9’s Obed­sanjo. But wait awhile: who was try­ing to impli­cate the for­mer pres­i­dent in the wiz­ards’ brew of some screen-created pagan Niger­ian exiles? Who had such audac­ity to tie the General’s name with his con­quered country’s maraud­ing dias­pora of alien flesh eaters? For those who do not know, the name Obasanjo is not really a com­mon Niger­ian name, not even in Egba from where the for­mer pres­i­dent comes. I think some­one had mis­chie­vously cho­sen that name for the leader of the Dis­trict 9 Nige­ri­ans to drive home a sly, rub­bish­ing point. See, why not Ade­sanjo, Olu­sanjo and other such ‘Sanjo’ muta­tions that are more com­mon? What, were they try­ing to paint the Niger­ian com­mu­nity among those aliens as a macro­cosm of Obasanjo’s Nigeria?

I did not see Dis­trict 9 until recently. In fact too recently, for it was on the same day that Mr. Segun Ajayi, Action Con­gress agent in Ido Osi, caused a com­mo­tion at the on-going Ekiti Elec­tion tri­bunal. The man, whose leg had been ampu­tated due to a gun­shot attack from the PDP thugs dur­ing the elec­tion, brought the putre­fy­ing rump before the sit­ting, as an exhibit (or a kind of evi­dence in case the PDP lawyers attempted to claim he had never really had a leg before the elec­tion). While the whole court went into an odour-attack from the moldy leg-evidence, a tragic image flashed through one’s mind, a sad, ironic asso­ci­a­tion of that ampu­ta­tion, a sym­bol of polit­i­cal vio­lence and rit­ual dis­mem­ber­ment, with the other– an alien dis­mem­bered limb thrust on Obe­sandjo in Dis­trict 9.And the tragic irony becomes more bit­ing when one remem­bers that for­mer pres­i­dent  Obasanjo was, by indi­rec­tion (no thanks to his  polit­i­cal credo of ‘do or die’ which his party took to heart in Ekiti), respon­si­ble for the vio­lent reduc­tion of  Segun Ajayi’s leg.

No doubt, as it has been famously expressed, that most of the dark impres­sions of Nige­ri­ans as a ritual-minded, scam-minded peo­ple get exported largely through the efforts of Nol­ly­wood movies. A Niger­ian reviewer of Dis­trict 9 sug­gested that the movie has bought into the sen­ti­ments of Nol­ly­wood cre­ations but with­out the con­text. For really who was the Dibia that divined the rit­ual poten­tial of the alien flesh to Obed­sanjo and co? There must be a Dibia, a Babal­awo, the Wise One, if the cre­ators of Dis­trict 9 had thor­ough digested the Wooden lessons of Nolly ventures.

I recently came across a series of Pieter Hugo’s pho­tographs on Time Online photo gallery, taken from a book about Niger­ian movie indus­try, Nol­ly­wood: The Stars of Nigeria’s Movie Busi­ness.  The pho­tog­ra­pher had asked the actors to ‘recre­ate Nol­ly­wood myths and sym­bols’ like they do in movie sets. The results of these re-enactments are a bit unreal, even for Nol­ly­wood movies. There is one odd pho­to­graph of a Escort Karma in Long Jacket, a comic mask and an axe, stand­ing on the mid­dle of a road with a cap­tured, fuzzy image of traf­fic about him. I think that pic­ture could well be taken from a scene of any Hol­ly­wood hor­ror film. A par­tic­u­larly hor­ri­fy­ing one fea­tures Gabazz­ini Zuo in a suit and tie, stand­ing over a dis­em­bow­eled cow in a rit­ual set­ting, hold­ing its bloody entrails to his chest– a rit­u­al­ist in suit: could you think of a more fit­ting oxy­moronic image of a sophis­ti­cated sav­age? Aside the fact that the names of most of the actors that posed for those pho­tographs are not eas­ily rec­og­nized in Nol­ly­wood, their bizarre rep­re­sen­ta­tions also stretch the imag­i­na­tion of the Nollywood’s cos­tum­ing really far.

Those pho­tographs are cap­tioned with insights that are no doubt from the book: ‘the plot revolves around sit­u­a­tions famil­iar with the audi­ence’ and these are listed, ‘witch­craft, bribery, pros­ti­tu­tion’. Also Nollywood’s pre­ferred aes­thetic is ‘loud, vio­lent and exces­sive’ and this aes­thetic is sup­posed to spring from our ‘rich oral and writ­ten story telling’ and ‘deeply rooted in the local col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion’. But Niger­ian story telling aes­thetic is not loud and vio­lent. Those Nol­ly­wood movies and their rit­ual tem­plates do not exactly rep­re­sent the real­i­ties of Niger­ian expe­ri­ence. Those barely lit­er­ate film mak­ers have no time for research or his­tor­i­cal truth, and they do not know the word aes­thetic; they are only inter­ested in cre­at­ing their own fan­tasies for pure com­mer­cial pur­poses. Nige­ri­ans of Dis­trict 9 are part of the dam­age Nol­ly­wood is inflict­ing on Niger­ian image.  Here we are, ye good woman of Brandingville.