From NUTAF to Nollywood: Prospects for Nigeria’s Identity and Image Question

Abstract

In this age of heightened globalization, a critical discourse of the current status of an industry which grew out of sheer ingenuity, creativity and resilience on the part of the practitioners, and its perspectives on re-imaging Nigeria has become imperative. Although its emergence in the early 1990s in the ancient historic but uncelebrated sleepy community of Meiran, a suburb of Lagos, was greeted with anything close to enthusiasm, Nollywood's identity and creativity have been linked to emerging urban popular culture (Okome and Haynes). In this paper, 1 aitempl a synoptic engagement of the literary tradition of erstwhile NUTAF playwrights I dare to declare as a bloc of the Post-Osofisan generation of writers, vis-a-vis the influence of the film technology on their aesthetics, the reality of their conceptual and negotiated or [ailed identity, and dramatic codification of angst in defiance of the older generation who did not want 1o leave the ‘stage’. I shall place this against the backdrop of the history and the continued development of Nigerian Nollywood yearning for digitalization as a phenomenal symbiosis of the theatre, film and the home video and the popular clamour for rebranding the image of twenty-first century Nigeria. The question of whether film can help be a crucial weapon of imaging a nation is not however laid to rest: it takes on a newness brought about by the reality of the day.