NEED FOR MASK NARRATIVES IN NOLLYWOOD
There is a critical need in Nollywood, the Nigerian video film industry for mask narratives and oralist strategies, which as a matter of fact, have been known to give cinema in Africa an authentic signature. It is not in an apish imitation of Hollywood themes and styles that our stories are best told; rather, by returning to paradigms of indigenous performances, cultural producers can project a truly African vision and identity.
Nollywood’s relevance in contemporary global world, it is affirmed here, should be seen in a creative use of indigenous mask narratives by film directors and script writers within a context of professional craftsmanship and innovative technology. The originality of African cinema is best affirmed in its privileging of the performance traditions and practices from which it emerges. Oral poetics and indigenous performance forms are crucial indices that give filmmakers on the continent alter-native cinematic languages for the mobilization of their film-texts.
A scholar like Manthia Diawara, in his discussion of popular culture and oral tradition in African film, has argued that the form of African cinema is influenced by its traditional content. He insists that understanding the role played by the oral tradition in African film “enables the critic to see how the film-maker has transformed this tradition into a new ideology.” For him, the recourse to oral aesthetics by African filmmakers has changed the cinematic language of the West. He concludes that the African director “makes conscious and unconscious references to the griot's narrative techniques” that came before him.
Diawara’s views are further given a critical vehemence by another critic, Stephen Zacks who has proposed that the criticism of the African film should be situated within a theoretical framework that contemplates Africa’s indigenous systems of knowledge productions, philosophies and peculiar performance idioms.
Stephen Zacks’ reengagement of the theoretical foundations of the discourse on African Cinema contemplates a paradigm in which African film and its criticism are mindful of the “vernacular traditions” of the continent. Zacks, therefore, erects his arguments of an Africanist-generated critical model for cinema upon the epistemological base of African philosophy. This need to jettison “categories and conceptual systems” dependent on a Western epistemological imperative is thus advanced by the renowned Africanist scholar, V. F. Mudimbe; Mudimbe hopes that, with renewed vigour, Africans can extrapolate from their traditional systems of thoughts explications of Africa’s variegated experiences, which are reconstituted in cultural artifacts like film-texts. To advance these arguments, it is the submission in this work that it is in the mask that African filmmakers, like other producers of cultural texts on the continent, have found a most fascinating inspiration.
In his “Theatre in the Niger Valleys”, Afrobeat Scholar and present Director of the University of Ibadan Media Centre, Dr. Sola Olorunyomi explains that the “celluloid expression of West African mask narrative comes in diverse forms”; he gives Ola Balogun’s Magic and Issa Traore’s Gombele as examples of the mythic reconstruction of the mask in cinema.
Besides, there are studies that give credence to the centrality of the mask in the signifying practices and cultural performances that emerge from the continent. For instance, Harry Garuba, poet and critic, has explained that the mask, in relation to African cultural texts, constitutes a “discursive system,” which when foregrounded as the primary genre can lead to the construction of a dramatic genre, or in this case, a cinematic genre, from its code. He insists that the structural signification of the mask is “a kind of langue capable of generating an infinite number of paroles”. One of these “paroles” is a genre of Nollywood that draws its major inspiration from its rootedness in the masking and ritual hermeneutics of African traditional performances.
The mask is a commentary on the existence of the past in the presence; a validation that there exists a link between the worlds of the dead, the living and that of the unborn. It is through the mask, and attendant ritual and festival performances in which it is relieved, that man (re)claims his metaphysical self. In the masked theatres and performances of many African societies therefore, what is evident is a “performative dialogue” between (wo)man and the forces of being and existence.
A good example is the Yoruba Masque Theatre, popularly known as the Alarinjo, which is the traditional traveling theater of the Yoruba with origins in the Egungun masquerade cult of ancestor worship. In this masquerade theatre, the performer is at once a site of ontological past as much as a cultural site for the sourcing of personal and collective history. In terms of content and style, this tradition has been variously explored and maximised in Nigeria, for instance, for both literary avant-gardism and theatrical experimentations. Its reconstitution in the Nigerian film gives film narratives a temperament unique to popular Nollywood themes.
Though constructed in a metropolitan centre, Kunle Afolayan’s The Figurine is thus implicated in this film tradition, which appropriates the mask aesthetics. Following the Yoruba travelling theatre tradition, with its rootedness in the mask code, Afolayan’s films, Irapada and The Figurine, have both appropriated diverse forms of African performances, including the narrative structures of the griot traditions and the utilisation of elements like dance and music. The scene from The Figurine on Agere masquerade performance in Lagos is also noteworthy in this direction. This is a further extension and validation of the AlterNative vision in Nollywood. Whereas Afolayan calls it “the new Nollywood”; it is maintained that it is an approach to cinema grounded in an electronic and digital reconstruction of the mask, which was initiated in the I980s in Nigeria by stage-turned-screen veterans like Duro Ladipo, Oyin Ogunjobi, Moses Olaiya and Lere Paimo, all belonging to the travelling theatre tradition of Yoruba performance practices. In this deployment of film, there is a further “technologising of the mask” consistent with Diawara's insistence that the originality of African cinema is tied to its incorporation of the oral codes and mask aesthetics.
A content analysis of films like Tunde Kelani’s Arugba and The Figurine shows that this project of cultural reaffirmation as well as the re-nuancing and projection of indigenous values threatened by global capitalism and a postmodern reevaluation of cultural orthodoxies are critical to the cinematographic interventions of Tunde Kelani and his former disciple, Kunle Afolayan.
Written by Yeku James