Culture, Film And The Nigerian Video Producer: Some Production Implications

At the very heart of Africa's entertainment ambience is a huge and thriving audio-visual culture popularly referred to as the video films. These are “dramatic features shot on video and marketed on cassettes (and even Cds), and some times also exhibited publicly with video projectors or TV monitors”. In Nigeria, this bourgeoning art has become a platform for social debate, a carrier of culture, a means of evangelizing and a veritable means of social entertainment. But this new audio-visual art form suffers from intense critical knocks especially from the academia and the media. Central to the debate about the video is how it misrepresents the people's culture and worldview. Producers/ directors are at the very center of these accusations. This paper examines these debates, casting it against a global canvas of film as a strong means of cultural showcasing. In the process, it provides a panacea for the Nigerian video producer/director as a way of improving his art. KEY WORDS: Culture, Video Film, Production, Producers, implications. Global Journal of Humanities Vol.3(1&2) 2004: 63-6

2-14 Rethinking Truth Commissions and the Restorative Justice Paradigm in Africa

Chair: Philippe Frowd, University of Ottawa Bonny Ibhawoh, McMaster University ([email protected]) Theorizing Truth Commissions in Africa: The Politics of Regime Legitimization and the Mandela Complex Mesut Yilmaz, McMaster University ([email protected]) & Melike Yilmaz, McMaster University ([email protected]) Land Restitution for Restorative Justice in Africa Serges Djoyou Kamga, Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute ([email protected]) The TRC: A Bridge to Advance Human Rights or to Denial Justice - Lessons from South Africa Paul Ugor, Illinois State University ([email protected]) Creative Imaginaries of Truth and Reconciliation: Nation and Narration in Antjie Krog\u27s Country of My Skull Meeting ID: 995 1938 531

Afro-Superheroes: Prepossessing the Future

In ‘Popular Arts in Africa’, published in 1987, Karin Barber made passing reference to the syncretic use made of Marvel Comic superheroes alongside figures from Twi folktales, in comics produced in Accra and Kumasi in the 1970s (1987). In these comics, Marvel superheroes and folklore figures, she wrote, have in common their special powers, and a past that stretches beyond the lives of everyday Ghanaians. In the explosion of these figures into the lives of ordinary people, their special powers offer political transformation and access to an otherworldly (sometimes, but not always, ancestrally supported) ability to change this world. The increasing visibility of African superheroes (or what Adilifu Nama has termed so memorably ‘Super Blacks’, 2011) might look, from a certain point of view, like evidence of the increasing infiltration of transnational consumerism into youth cultural forms in African contexts. The papers in this collection on Afro-superheroes argue the opposite: Afro-superheroes, the authors show in their analysis of their often arresting material, are embedded in contemporary political and social contexts and provide us with ways of understanding the emergent present