Nigerian prof tells black SA f

Nigerian prof tells black SA filmmakers to “wake up from their slumbers”

Nigeria has a massive film industry, Nollywood, which is exclusively local and not at all in the shadow of the former colonial powers. They want the South African industry to wake up.

Nigerian prof tells black SA f

South African filmmakers, especially black ones, got a loud wake up call from Nigerian filmmakers who urged them to ‘wake up from their slumber’ post apartheid and get cracking making films that tell their true story.

At the seventh international annual African Film and Social Change conference at Westminster University in London, filmmakers from as far afield as Canada, Norway, Nigeria and Namibia gathered to chew the cud over whether film was making any imprint on social change in their countries.

The theme of the conference was how, having moved on from colonialism, authentic African culture was being depicted now. Cinema is, after all, a very viable tool to attack society. Nigeria, famous for Nollywood, the world’s third largest film industry behind Bollywood and Hollywood, has conquered former colonial influence by making films for their own people within an industry worth more than US $250mil, shooting seven days a week and producing more than 1,000 films annually.

At the conference, Perivivi John Katjavivi from UCT gave his address “Black Film, White Mask”, about how South African films tend to be made by white filmmakers depicting the black character, like the Oscar winning Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood and District 9 directed by Neil Bloomkamp.

“South Africa still has an anxiety of depicting black anger,” Katjavivi said. “My primary concern is cinema’s depiction of black masculinity as hyper violent, one dimensional, poor, diseased, unduly sexual and antithetically opposed to white mainstream examples of “goodness”. It isn’t accurate. The black gangster image and violence is over-saturated in South Africa. It isn’t accurate.”

Hardly had the words left his mouth before the row broke out.

“‘You just have to do it and you guys should wake up from your slumbers,” countered Prof Ralph A Akinfeleye of the University of Lagos, Nigeria. “You shouldn’t just blame the white man. Just get out there and do it. Just make your films, whatever it takes. Wake up from your slumbers!”

Other filmmakers joined his opinion. After the dust had settled, the professor told me how in Nigeria relevant, good films had been made on mobile phones and handheld cameras.

“‘You’ve got to get out there and tell your story about your people, not wait around and conform to a funding model provided by the authorities. Just get out there and tell your story,” he said. “Make films that help and reflect your culture. Film is there to help the culture. It should be the vanguard of social change.”