Contextual Cinemas: Screening Everydayness of Africa in Nollywood

Abstract

African video-films, like performances generally capture the complexity of people’s everydayness. Apart from challenging formerly held stereotypes about the continent, they reveal the identity of Africa by underpinning key circumstantial experiences of her people. The thrust of this paper is to explain this everyday experiences in the context of a new wave of video-filmmaking culture and representations across the continent, starting with Nigeria and Ghana. By means of textual analysis as a methodological approach, it critically examines two video-films: Uziga (2008, Andy Nwakalor) from Nigeria and Enemy Within (2013, Pascal Amanfo) from Ghana to conceptualise the nature of this situation across the continent. At the end, it recommends that the present model of new cinemas across Africa be considered an alternative audio-visual prism (as against mainstream western stereotypes) for home grown truths that Africans can easily identify with.