11.5: Conclusion
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- Jade Miller
- University of California Press
The functioning of Nollywood as an industry is inseparable from its location in Lagos, in Nigeria, and from a place of disjuncture with dominant formal global entertainment industry production and distribution networks. Alaba’s rise to regional centrality in the outskirts of the urban core mirrors Nollywood’s rise in a state of disjuncture with formal media industry networks and domestic government oversight. In both settings, a functioning industrial order emerged from an architecture that would be inhospitable to corporate formality. In Alaba, we can see individual fixes through the individual mobile phone towers and the sea of personal generators blanketing the previously barren landscape on the side of the highway from central Lagos to Benin. In Nollywood, we can trace this thread throughout the industry. Financing, for example, is usually done by the eventual distributor in the absence of reliable sales estimates or accountability. Production relationships are built on trust, not contracts, and entry to the industry is rarely through formal schools, as apprenticeships acquired through personal connections rule.
Another commonality is that both Alaba and Nollywood share deceptively organized governance. While both have been mostly ignored by Nigeria’s and Lagos’s actual government, 31 both are indeed governed: self-governed. In Alaba, we can see this through the libraries, firehouses, and schools built by the massive collective of small merchants housed in the market. These merchants are held together by the urge for self-preservation as well as the Nigerian tradition of group organization. In the same way, we see Nollywood’s marketers (some of whom are the very same small-stall owners of Alaba) controlling the industry with the firm hand of confident self-organization. They maintain star salaries at a manageable level, control gluts, create stars, and maintain distribution networks that rapidly disseminate new cultural products to the most remote of Nigeria’s hamlets. Unlike the precarity defining the work of most of Nollywood’s labor, the opaque organization of Nollywood’s marketers means they enjoy relative stability, as they themselves control the industry. Although they are threatened by “illegal” distribution practices, they are also strengthened by them, particularly those of their own genesis, and they have recourse to their non-movie side businesses, including electronics trading.
At the same time, it is important not to overromanticize the informal. While the marketers are happy with the current system, those on the industry’s creative side as well as foreign and government forces have made and continue to make significant efforts to delimit the industry’s informality in favor of an industrial structure with room for bigger budgets, theatrical screenings as a norm, and wider global recognition—in short, an industry in which they could achieve their artistic visions while still selling to their core domestic audiences. Yet we can see the current brand of informality that marks Nollywood as closely linked to the environment from which it was born: an environment that encourages small-scale enterprises with opaque business practices, meant to avoid notice by government officials. This informality thrives particularly well in areas characterized as both the urban and the global margins, even as they may be central in their own alternative networks. In this way, we can see the specificities of the local ingrained in the everyday realities of media labor in Nigeria’s internationally popular movie industry.