Celebrating Haynes, diligent chronicler of Nollywood

I am indeed extremely pleased and honoured to be celebrating the work of a scholar of towering international reputation whose patience, persistence, hard work, and thoughtful and methodical research has secured legitimation for a field of study now called Nollywood Studies,” scholar, Paul Ugor, began at the 8th iREP International Documentary Film Festival last week.

Ugor, an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Illinois State University, US, was referring to Professor Jonathan Haynes, of Long Island University, New York, who has been diligently documenting the Nigerian video film industry, otherwise known as Nollywood, for over 20 years.

The occasion, one of the early events of the festival themed Archiving Africa II: Frontiers and New Narratives, was the presentation of Haynes’s latest book, ‘Nollywood: The Creation of Nigeria Film Genre and the venue was Freedom Park, Lagos Island.   Though published in 2017 by the Ibadan, Oyo State-based Bookcraft, Day One of the festival that held from March 22 to 25, was the formal unveiling of the 375-page book.

Introducing the author and his work at the occasion, Ugor, Haynes’s mentee as a young film scholar, continued: “To get a sense of Haynes’s scholarly achievements, it is important to remember that only a few years ago, Nollywood was a cultural industry disparaged by elite scholars in established fields such as film studies, post-colonial literature, and English Studies. Today, it is at the heart of such prestigious scholarly fields such as global media studies, popular culture, film/video studies, African popular arts, Anthropology, English, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and other such elite disciplines in the humanities.”

On what made his mentor write the book, Ugor said it was perhaps the failure by Nigerian scholars to heed his calls to accurately chronicle the history of Nigeria’s video film industry.  What Haynes offers in ‘Nollywood…’, the US-based lecturer said, “is an unprecedented insight into the complex ‘world that Nollywood films emerged from, the rough cement, the turbulent, disrupted circulation of vehicles, electricity and trade goods…the whole mass of motives, high and low, that brings the films into being’ and the aesthetic implications of low budgets on the industry’s filmic outputs. Haynes leaves no one in doubt that he is a first-rate cultural historian, a consummate scholar with an eagle-eye for detail.”

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Apart from the blow-by-blow account of Nollywood’s history, Ugor added that the author gave a “convincing rationale of why films produced by the industry matter.”

The academic, who likened Haynes’s efforts in Nollywood Studies to that of the renowned Professor Karin Barber in African popular arts three decades ago, further submitted that the author showed in the work that, “Nollywood cinema is an incredible history of a dynamic nation constantly in the process of  reinventing itself, and doing so in the face of near impossible conditions of survival mostly brought about by a mean global neo-liberal political-economic order and the crass idiocy and ineptitude of local ruling elites in Nigeria. What his works on Nollywood unravel is significant, for not only does it tell us there’s more to come from this modest film industry built by the hard work, creativity, patience and dedication of ordinary people, but that he creative power of a dis-empowered people, however feeble, should never be underestimated!”

In his brief remarks at the occasion attended by players in the film industry and government representatives, Haynes said that “Nollywood deserves credit for its roles as a chronicler of social history, as an organ of cultural and moral response to the extreme provocations and dislocations of contemporary Nigeria, and as the bearer of a true nationalism.”

He appealed to all concerned to give Nollywood the enabling environment to thrive and for works of filmmakers to be properly documented.