Nationalism from Below: State Failures, Nollywood, and Nigerian Pidgin

Abstract

The Nigerian film industry known as “Nollywood” was shaped (and even created) by profound weaknesses of the Nigerian state, but it inherited and carried forward one of the state’s major accomplishments: the creation of a national culture on and through television. This mission was reinterpreted in the context of a low-budget feature-film industry grounded in the informal sector of the economy. Twenty-five years on, governmental failures continue to structure the industry, even as new distribution technologies and the transnational corporations that have entered with them have created a whole new sector of production alongside the original one and have fractured the audience along class lines, adding to original linguistic and cultural divisions. Still, through its storytelling, Nollywood remains a powerful unifying cultural force on the national and Pan-African levels. In this context, Nigerian Pidgin is more important than ever as a linguistic medium of communication and as a symbol of national, regional, and Pan-African unity and communicability.