African Video Movies and Global Desires. Carmela Garritano
for rationalizing” the attractions of global modernity in the face of the extreme poverty and distress that signal Africa’s exclusion from the status of modernity (Adejunmobi 2010, 114).
In this book, I draw from and build on this research to more closely examine the pleasures the movies offer and the ambivalence they generate. Statements about audiences’ responses to video movies are grounded in extensive ethnographic research conducted over a ten-year period during numerous stints in Ghana, which included formal and informal conversations with ordinary Ghanaians, as well as with producers, distributors, marketers, and others involved in the video industry. Film reviews and commentary published in local newspapers have also contributed to my understanding of audiences’ responses. In close readings of the videos, I have tried to pay attention to the televisual and cinematic codes that suture the spectator to a particular point of view or subject position. In other words, I think it is crucial to attend to the subject positions created by the video-text in our attempts to understand the responses of real audiences and to acknowledge the role of the unconscious in pleasure and identification. Although I do not draw directly on psychoanalytic film theory to elaborate on the functioning of the unconscious, this theory informs my analyses. My use of the word “desire” in the title and throughout the book is meant to signal the interpenetration of the psychic and the sociopolitical in the formations of pleasure, anxiety, and aspiration.
Addressing spectators similarly marginalized by global modernity, the videos offer a multiplicity of pleasures derived from the oscillations between mimesis and fantasy, proximity and distance, desire and revulsion. Audiences imaginatively experience the fantasy of a glamorous lifestyle far removed from their everyday experiences. They identify, too, with a character’s struggles to escape poverty and suffering and disidentify with the immoral practices that the same character engages in to get rich. Again and again, the videos generate profound ambivalence; they issue strong moral condemnations of greed and the immoral attainment of wealth and yet position the spectator as a consumer, one who gazes on and desires the movie’s extravagant commodity displays. They criticize the dehumanizing impulse of capitalism and, simultaneously, produce spectator-subjects who desire the luxuries exhibited. Daniel Jordan Smith (2007) identifies similar expressions of ambivalence in Nigerian witchcraft accusations and stories of the occult. On the one hand, they articulate discontent with the appropriation of wealth and power by a privileged few and illustrate “the continuing power of moralities that privilege people and obligations of social relationships above the naked pursuit of riches” (Smith 2007, 138). On the other hand, they “highlight the intimate connections between popular condemnation of the unequal accumulation of great wealth and the widely shared fantasies about being rich” (142). Here, I argue that a split between narrative condemnation and visual desire commonly structure the movies. Narratives denounce and punish the greedy or selfish protagonist, engaging the spectator as a moral witness, while a visual economy of pleasure that aestheticizes consumption addresses the spectator as a desiring subject. Produced and consumed under circumstances of dire shortage and scarcity, video movies narrate and domesticate the desires and anxieties engendered by Ghana’s incorporation into the global cultural economy. They are fertile ground for the growth of an “imaginaire of consumption” (Mbembe 2002, 271) and of a morality that is highly critical of materialism and capitalistic values.
Ghallywood and Its Global Aspirations
About fifty miles outside of Accra on a vast track of land that sits beside the Tema-Accra highway, Ghanaian videomaker William Akuffo has been constructing a movie production complex called Ghallywood, which he hopes will become the creative center for video movie production in Ghana (see figures I.1 and I.2). When I traveled to Ghana in 2009, I drove out to Ghallywood to call on Akuffo, whom I had first met in 1999, and to tour this most ambitious project. Crossed by streets named after Ghanaian actors and filmmakers, the complex houses Akuffo’s large office and editing studio, a restaurant, and a classroom building. Pushing through the tall grass were the foundations of several other structures, which, when complete, will be the housing units for actors and production crews. Akuffo’s plans also include the construction of a studio, several film sets, and an outdoor movie theater.
Of particular interest to me was the name Ghallywood, which like its predecessor Nollywood, aligns this marginalized, African video movie industry with Hollywood and Bollywood. During this trip to Ghana, I was struck by how often I heard the term Ghallywood, or another variant of it (Gollywood or Ghanawood), used by movie producers to refer to the Ghanaian commercial video movie industry. The name had also appeared in numerous movie and entertainment publications and, on one particular occasion, inspired a provocative debate among members of FIPAG, the Film and Video Producers’ Association of Ghana. Among those reluctant to adopt the label was Richard Quartey; he voiced the minority opinion that Ghallywood is inappropriate to Ghana’s movie industry because it is imitative. “Shouldn’t we tap into our unique cultural reserves to find a better name?” Quartey asked. “Maybe Sankofa?” Supporters of adopting Ghallywood as the official name of the industry argued that imitation was precisely the point. Videomaker Socrate Safo answered, “We have Hollywood, then Bollywood, now Nollywood. Why not Ghallywood, too? We can be as good as those!” This sentiment was echoed by many others. Safo’s adamant support for the label Ghallywood, like Akuffo’s substantial investment in the creation of a Ghanaian movie production center, demonstrates the reach and intensity of the aspirations of moviemakers in Ghana. For those who have adopted the label, Ghallywood is a call to be taken seriously in the global arena of commercial cinema. Quartey’s reluctance replays a concern familiar to African cultural producers, a concern about maintaining African authenticity and originality. James Ferguson has noted that the authenticity of African aspirations to be modern have consistently been called into question out of fear “that the [African] copy is either too different from the [Western] original or not different enough” (2006, 16). In both configurations, Africa is the shadow of the West, its distorted and empty projection. In his book called Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (2006), Ferguson insists on a different way of reading Africa’s shadowing of the West. He torques the metaphor to show that a shadow is not only a distorted double; it also “implies a bond and a relationship. A shadow, after all, is not a copy but an attached twin. . . . Likeness here implies not only resemblance but also a connection, a proximity, an equivalence, even an identity” (2006, 17). This conceptualization of shadowing glosses Safo’s proclamation: “We can be as good as those,” reading it not merely as an attempt to imitate or assimilate to the Western model, but as an expression of a desire for proximity, a desire to attain the status and success of global film industries and to stand beside those global media industries as equal partners. The difference is worth elaborating on. To dismiss the ambitions of Ghanaian videomakers as iterations of cultural imperialism means disregarding their efforts to overcome their marginalization and participate fully as producers of their own cultural forms in the field of global culture.
Borrowing from the conceptual vocabularies of Ferguson, Achille Mbembe, and Sarah Nuttall, this book treats African popular video as a practice through which Africans articulate “worldliness.” Worldliness, as defined by Nuttall and Mbembe,
has to do not only with the capacity to generate one’s own cultural forms, institutions, and lifeways, but also with the ability to foreground, translate, fragment, and disrupt realities and imaginaries originating elsewhere, and in the process place these forms and processes in the service of one’s own making. (Nuttall and Mbembe 2008, 1)
As cultural forms and commodities, popular video movies, like other forms of African popular culture, embrace foreign influences as sources of newness and singularity (Barber 1987). Their appeal is linked to their enormous capacity to recontextualize and localize forms and styles associated with global mass culture, and much as in the African urban environments in which video movies circulate, it is the meeting of the local and the global that generates the energies and uncertainties that drive their production and consumption. As modern African cultural articulations, they participate in the “worlding” of Africa (Simone 2001) and the “indigenizing” (McCall 2002) of global technologies, styles,