Video boom

Abstract

"The last fifteen years have seen the spectacular eruption of video films in Nigeria and Ghana—feature films that are shot cheaply on video and sold or rented as video cassettes or video compact discs.2 Hundreds of these videos have been made in Ghana, and Nigeria now produces more than a thousand of them every year (Abua). They are broadcast on television all over Anglophone Africa and are shown in theaters, small video parlors, and even in rural villages where itinerant exhibitors make the rounds with televisions, video cassette players, and generators. From a commercial point of view, these video films are the great success story of African cinema, the only instance in which the local media environment is dominated by local producers working in direct relationship with an African audience entirely outside the framework of governmental and European assistance and of international film festivals that has structured so much of African cinema. From a cultural point of view, the videos are one of the greatest explosions of popular culture the continent has ever seen (Haynes and Okome). Video film production began almost simultaneously in Ghana and Nigeria in the late 1980s, in both cases as the result of general economic collapse that made celluloid film impossibly expensive. A sharp increase in violent crime in Nigeria was also making it dangerous to go out at night to a cinema. In Ghana, the way was led by people like Willy Akuffo, a film projectionist, and Socrate Safo, who was studying to become an auto mechanic. Self-taught as filmmakers, they were outsiders to the Ghanaian filmmaking establishment, but their tales of witchcraft and sentimental romance immediately struck a chord with their audience."