The Women of Peter Hugo’s Nollywood
Many Nigerians tend to have a close
special bond with their mothers. The bonds are perhaps forged from the intimacy
of shared suffering, and in some instances, abuse of mothers and children by
the perversion that Nigerian patriarchy has become. Sadly, it would appear that
in Nigeria, male children survive their abuse only to occupy a place in the
pantheon of perversion where instead of ending the abuse, they dutifully
perpetrate it in the name of African tradition and culture. I pine for real and
enforceable laws and men and women of character to protect the truly vulnerable
from what is happening in Nigeria today. Do not look to our churches and
mosques for relief; they wittingly and unwittingly preach that women and
children should blindly subjugate themselves to the authority of men because,
of course, the holy books decree it. Suffering is overrated and Nigerian women
and children know it from bitter experience. Nollywood offers clarity on one
issue: For many of our women, Nigeria is the patriarchy from hell.
My
mother, Izuma-of-the-stout-bush-that-cannot-be-felled, is on my mind. My mother
has lived all her life in survival mode. She has not rested one day. Growing up
with her was a spiritual undertaking. Like a fierce hawk, my mother would stop
at nothing to protect her offspring. There were malevolent spirits everywhere.
They had to be threatened, cajoled, bribed to both protect and help us, or to
leave us alone. Their couriers were imams, pastors, diviners and assorted master
(MBAs) bullshit artists willing to help my mother for a modest fee. These MBAs
may now be found thriving it appears in Pieter Hugo’s awful coffee table book
and on the squalid sets of Nollywood.
Nigeria’s
intellectuals ought to reflect on what Nollywood means for us as a people and
what it says about how our society treats women and children. I have been
concerned about this for a long time and in my spare time have actually been
trawling the Internet searching for books and essays on the subject. I was therefore
thrilled to spy a coffee table book on the subject.
The
first time I picked up Peiter Hugo’s coffee table book, Nollywood, I was angry.
I railed at what I saw as racism and condescension of its pictures in the dark.
In despair, I yelled at the Nigerian writers Chris Abani and Zina Saro-Wiwa for
contributing essays to a dung-heap of poorly taken pictures of their own people
posing in various stages of parody. In anger, I flung the book into the darkest
recesses of my room and swore never to open its racist pages again, ever. The
other day, I calmed down enough to revisit the book. It is still an awful book,
housing prejudices and plain awful photography. The only good thing about the
pictures is that they remind me that the artist Victor Ehikhamenor, one of our
own, is a better photographer than Victor Hugo.
Nollywood
is a bad coffee table book that does not belong on your coffee table, but I
would recommend the brilliant essays of the writers Abani and Saro-Wiwa. They
are brainy, eclectic, and charming commentaries on the enigma that has become
Nollywood, with a good piece of the history of Nigerian cinematography thrown
in. What is remarkable however, is how these two writers of Nigerian extraction
are virtually silent on how Nollywood views Nigerian women. Except for a throw
away sentence by Saro-Wiwa, you would think that Nigeria is inhabited only by
narcissistic men. I would ignore Stacy Hardy’s essay titled Nollywood
Confidential, a thoroughly mystifying stream-of-consciousness babble about not
much that is related to Nigeria and Nollywood. I guess Hugo was trying to fill
up the pages of his awful book.
There are over
forty gory and freak pictures all sorts, shot in Asaba and Enugu – macabre
magic realism and women mercifully feature only eight times. These pictures
presumably depict Nollywood actors and actresses in costume. Let’s see, there
are men wearing horns and sheep’s fur, a man dressed in a suit, leaning on a
dead cow, carrying its heart dripping blood, there is a nude woman miraculously
alive with a knife through her heart, and not to be outdone, there is a
puzzling shot of Peiter Hugo himself dressed in his underwear, wearing a mask
and brandishing an axe. Ye gods, give Nigeria a break! In Hugo’s Nollywood,
Nigeria is one huge freak show and women should neither be heard nor seen.
Nevertheless, I don’t blame Hugo much, in his world, the characters in his
pictures exist only in freak shows and circuses traveling the seamy side of
America. Many seasons ago in the depths of my despair, I dreamt of a giant
searchlight that would beam to a shocked world in real time the black on black
crime that Nigeria has become in the hands of democracy. Today, that dream
lumbers slowly to reality with colourful dispatch riders called Google Earth
and Skype. Slowly by slowly, we are being liberated from ourselves by external
agents. Is this the second coming of colonialism?
