Jonathan Haynes: Biography
BIOGRAPHY
Jonathan Haynes taught English at Long Island University for many years.He also worked at various universities in the United States, Egypt, Ghana, and Germany. Likewise, for more than three years, he was an American Fulbright scholar in some federal universities in Nigeria, cutting across almost all the geo-political zones. His academic interests are in English Renaissance literature, film, African Studies, and postcolonialism. He is well-versed in Film Studies from the Global South, especially the rise of the Nigerian film industry, Nollywood. Haynes received and benefited from the Guggenheim Fellowship. His books include Cinema and Social Change in West Africa (1995) andNollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres (2016).
For Jonathan:
In our guest house, there are humans,
At every arrival, we sing the songs of masquerades,
We learn rituals of dance; we dance again at your welcome
Under the vast sky, where birds flaunt their feathers
Jonathan, you will break kola nut with us,
You will drink with us; you will tell our children
Tales about your home, you will sleep in our beds.
They say the earth does not end; the bird does not die in its nest,
May your life never know the sorrow of our world and your world
Today and after today, we will bring you well-wrapped gifts,
And as you go to other lands, may you never lose the flavor of life,
The wealth of knowledge and your smile that will be buried in our
Hearts for a long time….
(TF, Dec. 3, 2020)
The Interview
Toyin Falola:
(1)You claimed that Nollywood deserves credit for its role as chronicler of social history, taking on a didactic posture with cultural relevance to Nigeria’s essence and being. How has this informed and triggered your research into Nigerian Film? Who helped you to achieve this uncommon goal?
Jonathan Haynes
When the video films first appeared in the early 1990s, I was struck by how much of Nigerian life was visible through them. I was new in Nigeria then and fascinated by the country—as I still am—and this new medium gave me a way to focus my interest. It was a new medium, whose point of view was yet to be explored critically. In every sense, the video films emerged out of the Structural Adjustment Program crisis. I don’t want to flatten out the meaning of the films—many different things were going on in them—but one central thing was Nigerian society expressing its revulsion at the corruptions sponsored by military rule, a reaction mounted on the basis of a complex moral, social, and political heritage for which I came to have a good deal of respect.
Individual films were almost always framed in moral terms rather than social-historical ones, as were the discourses that emerged around the films. Interpreting the films as a chronicle (and a product) of social history was my move as a critic and cultural historian. It came naturally to me since that was the kind of work I had been doing in the first phase of my career when working on English Renaissance literature and theater. Just before I abandoned that career and came to West Africa, I’d written a quietly Marxist book about Elizabethan drama called The Social Relations of Jonson’s Theater (Cambridge UP 1992), which tried to interpret features of the theater than Ben Jonson (and Shakespeare) worked in as the product of a multifarious heritage and responses to immediate social pressures. When I moved physically and intellectually to West Africa, my intention was an utter change in my mental landscape. Still, as the Roman poet Horace said, those who rush across the seas change their skies, not their souls… though it took a long time before the similarities in approach between my old project and my new one became apparent to me.
Biodun Jeyifo’sThe Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria (1984) was a revelation, the book that gave me an orientation I could use to think about the videos, and then Karin Barber’s work on the African popular arts, which also came out of the Marxist tradition—in her case, Birmingham cultural studies, to which I felt especially close.
Photo:Panel with Anouk Batard and Carmen McCain, University of Lagos, 2011
Toyin Falola:
(2) Your scholarship is noted for insisting upon framing African literature and cinema as not based on Afropessimism and the narration of poverty porn prevalent in most Africanist scholarship presently. What do you think scholars should do to narrate Nigeria as a dynamic and multicultural nation to which t Africans in the diaspora should contribute as well.
Jonathan Haynes:
Another reason I had for choosing to work on the video films was that, in the midst of the catastrophic destruction of so many things in early 1990s Nigeria, something new was being born, and it was vigorous and strong and full of life. Ever since, I’ve listened to people complain about the terrible situation of the industry—with reason!—but all the while, the industry has grown by leaps and bounds.
Unlike foreigners’ coverage of Africa, the industry has never purveyed poverty porn, in spite of all the melodramatic suffering that fills so many films. Nollywood is a dream factory, and it inherited a nearly obligatory optimism—the Censors Board requires that crime be punished by the end of the film. I heard the director Lancelot OduwaImasuen, the central figure in the documentary Nollywood Babylon, complain about the shots of garbage piled up in the streets of Lagos at the beginning of that film. Such images are apt to strike foreigners like the film’s directors (or me) as essential to understanding the ground from which Nollywood comes, but Lancelot felt incensed as a Nigerian at the propagation of this view of his country, saying he would have refused to have anything to do with the film if he’d known it would include such demeaning images.
These days, I think the danger is less poverty porn than an uncritical celebration of the current high life and the arts and culture and entertainment scene in Lagos, which is, objectively, fabulous. Not just films, but music, fashion, fine arts, and tech startups… it’s all happening, and it’s integrated with the diaspora and transnational circuits of capital and media, so this side of the national reality is well-publicized, perhaps especially outside the country.
Racism and the imagery of Africa and Africans that it produces are stubbornly deep-seated, but don’t mind them. Nigerians have won the battle over their own representation where it matters. Some of the contemporary Nigerian culture allows itself to be trapped in a neoliberal bubble of affluent young professionals inhabiting certain parts of Lagos, which sometimes seems like its own nation-state, with the surrounding desperation reduced to an attractive grittiness—the raffish charm of “Lasgidi.” But generally, Nollywood is reasonably good at remembering what country it lives in, though it is not as politicized as one might wish.
Toyin Falola:
(3) If I am correct, you are one of the first wave of Africanists to note that African film and literature function as social imprints, like maps on our hands, for the complex cultural life of Africa. Can you suggest ways in which literary writers and film producers can use this function on behalf of the reconstruction of Africa?
Jonathan Haynes
I like “like maps on our hands.”I’ve never seen it as my job to tell African artists what to do. I follow their work because I learn things I could never have suspected on my own. The same goes for the business side of the film industry, for that matter. My only advice is: be the best artist you can be! Which means never stop working at your craft. And always look for fresh material, for the stories that have not yet been told, the realities that have not yet been described.
But having said that…. Personally, I’ve always regretted that Nigeria didn’t have a more coherent leftist or at least opposition movement and a culture aligned with it. #EndSARS was an enormously hopeful moment, and I hope it turns into a durable movement. Filmmakers might ask themselves how their work contributes to this upheaval.
Toyin Falola:
(4) It has been noted that most Nigerian filmmakers spend too much energy chasing after foreign recognition, especially during film festivals, rather than making films the Nigerian market will support. What do you think the resultant effect of this preference will be on the image of Nigeria?
Jonathan Haynes:
In the last ten years, since the “New Nollywood” permitted by the new multiplex cinemas allowed filmmakers an escape from the low-budget, fast-paced grind controlled by the “marketers,” a new generation has come up whose conception of what Nigerian cinema is or can be owed more to foreign models than to the old Nollywood, which in many cases they were not much exposed to while growing up. I’m thinking of people like Kenneth Gyang, Daniel Oriahi, Abba Makama, Kemi Adetiba, Dare Olaitan, and EmaEdosioDeelen. They often don’t even bother with the disc market, and even the multiplexes, which cater to a far younger, more affluent, educated, and Hollywood-oriented audience than the national average, are often too cautious to support their films. But they are successful at international festivals, and now they are getting deals from Netflix.
Is this bad? I should confess that I know and like and admire some of the filmmakers I’m talking about, and I like their films, which I see as valuable additions to the images of itself that Nigeria is creating. I don’t see their films as inauthentic or alienated, though doubtless,I’m not the best judge of this. Most of them pay their bills by cranking out cheap films or serials for iROKO’s ROK Studios or MultiChoice or Mo Abudu’sEbonyLife, which guarantees that they stay in touch with the commercial center of the industry.
Before there was Nollywood, “African cinema” (as constituted around the FESPACO film festival and foreign art house circuits) consisted mostly of films made with support from the French government or other European sources of funding, which resulted in a situation of dependence on those foreign donors. Africans in Africa had almost no chance to see these films, and African filmmaking was not building towards commercially viability on the continent, and so filmmakers seemed permanently subject to the tastes and technical requirements of Europeans. Some of their films were met with indifference from African audiences, who didn’t understand or didn’t like what the filmmakers were trying to do. This situation was clearly bad and wrong, and it was one reason why I was so delighted when Nollywood came along.
But at first, the strong consensus among the Nigerian educated elite was that Nollywood was bad precisely because of its directly commercial nature and its consequent reflection of a popular mentality. Filmmakers were expected to be motivated by the high purposes of cultural nationalism and nothing else, and no actually existing filmmaker passed this test besides Tunde Kelani. That attitude was kind of ridiculous, and was one of my motives for arguing that Nollywood should be taken seriously as an expression of Nigerian culture and society.
But I wouldn’t want to argue that commercial viability is an infallible measure of cultural authenticity or value to the nation or anything like that, especially given that the commerce is always necessarily in the hands of particular people with particular tastes and interests. I’ve always been interested in the work of avantgardes and peripheries.
There may well be cases where filmmakers are so busy chasing after recognition by foreign festivals that it impairs the quality, or the truth, or the relevance to Nigeria of their films, but no examples spring to my mind immediately. What I find much more troubling is, for instance, when Mo Abudu, as she was launching her massively successful EbonyLifeTV satellite channel, bought a franchise to the American “Real Housewives” series, which involved promising to maintain the look of the show, and she instructed her employees to make this the model for the new channel. There’s been a massive influence of transnational (mostly American) forms and genres across contemporary Nigerian culture—everything from game shows to standup comedy to hip hop. Mostly the forms become Nigerianized through a creative syncretic process, though there certainly is a real debate to be had about how much Nigerian culture is getting lost along the way.
In an excellent recent essay, Connor Ryan argues that some of the crime films that have played recently in Nigerian multiplexes have less to do with responses to things that are happening at the moment in Nigerian society than with ambitious directors experimenting with foreign genres. He implies that the dynamic of Nigerian society generating original genres as an organ for discussing its issues, which I describe in Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres, is over, or at least has been suspended in this particular context. I agree: he’s nailed something that I was observing.
What worries me more than directors experimenting with foreign forms is changes in ownership, as foreign direct investment pours into the Nigerian (and African) media sector. I certainly don’t want Nigeria to remain in autochthonic poverty: the audiovisual sector needs massive investments (somebody builds more cinema theaters, please!), and Nigeria should be connected to the global media environment. But this means bargaining with immensely powerful players, and the old Nollywood guild structure is not showing itself to be up to the task.
But I don’t despair about any of this. The same Mo Abudu, who did so much to transnationalize Nigerian commercial popular culture, also decided that she wanted to sponsor a film that could go to the Cannes film festival, and gave Kenneth Gyang the means to make Oloture, which is an excellent film. I think this is an excellent moment for Nigerian filmmaking, when all kinds of new opportunities and new talents are emerging. I wouldn’t want to restrain anybody with a creative idea from pursuing its realization, through whatever means. The wider the ambit of modalities of cultural expression Nigeria has at its disposal, the better.
Toyin Falola:
(5) What are your current projects?
Jonathan Haynes:
I’m fascinated by Lagos… cities have always interested me, and I want to be working in the space where film studies, urban studies, and social history overlap. I’ve already written some things about Lagos on film and plan to write more.
Recently I’ve become involved with a new journal published in Hong Kong, Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Image, and am collaborating with a brilliant young Indian academic, Akshaya Kumar, on a comparative study of crime films set in Mumbai and Lagos, which is an extension of a large project,African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies, organized by Lindiwe Dovey at SOAS. For a few years now, some colleagues I listen to with careful attention, notably Lindiwe, MoradewunAdejunmobi, and Carmela Garritano, have been arguing that African film studies suffer from insularity, not to say declining financial and intellectual support, and that therefore we need to seek out a wider field of interlocutors. In practice, I always felt that there was a tremendous amount of basic work to be done on Nollywood and to build Nollywood studies as a field, and that I should get on with those projects… but now I find myself taking my friends’ advice and am glad for the fresh air. But Nollywood is always going to be at the center of things for me.
Toyin Falola:
Thank you very much
A scene in Lagos. Some of the people you see in the photograph, according to a belief, may not be human beings but temporary visitors from the outer world!
PART B
INTERVIEW ANALYSIS AND REFLECTIONS BY TOYIN FALOLA
Toyin Falola, acting in Kayode Animashaun’s”Ilu-Le”
In the conversation with Jonathan Haynes, most of his responses show a scholar who understands the African world from social, cultural, and even economic perspectives. His open-mindedness and ability to understand Nigeria’s social workings concerning film, culture, and art allow us to understand the notions of universalism, African diaspora, political mobilization, and most importantly, the idea of group identity, self-definition, and the multi-ethnic state. Hence, through a critical analysis of his responses, this essay is divided into two parts: first, the world of Nollywood and its connection to Africa and the rest of the world; second, an analysis of how the Nollywood sector helps in the nation-building of Nigeria.
PART 1:
Nollywood and Diverse Human Entity
African art is essentially a committed one laced with utilitarian tendencies. It is born out of the society in which the artist resides. In other words, art in Africa and African society are inextricably linked. This fact can be deduced in Jonathan Haynes’s response to how the Nigerian film industry contributes to the connections between African art and society and how the Nollywood world manifests the different layers of commitment in its movie productions. In his reply, he notes that movies produced in 1990s Nollywood deserve credit for shaping the average Nigerian into a morally upright and law-abiding citizen after the military era’s rot and decadence. It is expedient to note that the drift into visual art, which is the video film,has helped to reform the corrupt Nigerian mind since the early 1990s, and it became apparent that movies in that period acted as an x-ray for social problems stemming from moral adherence of Nigeria’s immediate post-independence era. Thus, Haynes describes through his replies and has proved that corruption is not only located among the political leadership in Nigeria but, ironically, that it also engulfed even the average Nigerian citizen during military rule (1966-1999).
Additionally, coming to the 1990s, Nollywood films began to take a more pro-African focus on a critical denunciation of corruption, tyranny, religious hypocrisy, materialism, and the ultimate destruction of the values and cherished integrity of Nigerians. Haynes argues that most of the films born out of the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) crisis in the 1980s condemned the materialistic attitude of the political and economic class.The movie producers used satire and comedy, and affluent characters depicted a lifestyle that critiqued the corruption and embezzlement of funds during the military era. As a result, it can be said that most of the movies werefashioned to reshape the Nigerian citizen and purge them of moral decadence. This turned many producers into committed chroniclers of their society. In Haynes’s response, he notes how this expansive field of Nollywood and its didactic function is worthy of scholarship coupled with how other critical works on African culture have helped shape him. Haynes also comment on his work abroad before diverting to scholarship on Nigerian films, revealing a sort of universalism of literature through featured similarities in function despite differences in their inner workings.
Furthermore, Haynes appropriates the need for an image that is presentable and not Afropessimistic in nature, which should be an artist’s goal, whether in literature or film. The zeal of the new Nigeria in the early days of celluloid film projects a Nigeria that works and a Nigerian citizen who is morally upright and trusted by an international audience,as well asdisplaying an environment that is healthy and beautiful. These essential features and representations of Africa are intricate; many social artists or critics use Africa for strictly aesthetic purposes or obtain a larger Western audience by presenting a negative image of the continent. With this, the cinema genre should be able to project, present, and establish proper representations of life in Africa in sufficient detail to avoid having stereotypes from non-Africans about Africa. As a result, these stereotypes tend to suggest that many African countries lack the wherewithal to manage their resources. In the film industry, Hollywood plays a significant role in this erroneous portrayal of the continent. Haynes notes that there are flaws in representations in movies set in Africa; there is often a sharp disconnect between what is portrayed on the screen and reality. There is also apersistent stereotype of Africa as a continent of exotic qualities and, more disheartening, as one where violence, poverty, and other Afropessimism totems are abundant.
However, it is important to state that the portrayal of various erroneous and wrong assumptions about the social, cultural, and historical lives in Africa has stemmed from Westerners’ movies and documentaries, which has also been backed up by numerous studies. That is why the notion of “obligatory optimism” is important in movies produced in Nollywood. However, Haynes cites examples of how major movie producers in Nigeria portray a terrible image of the nation and how censor boards take a stand in its reconstruction. The use of documentaries and festivals on the Nigerian state has helped reconstruct these false misrepresentations, and the contribution of those in the diaspora is important as well. Thus, Haynes maintains that Nollywood has helped create a new identity in Nigeria and Africa, where Nigerians are showcased as successful in every sphere from music to film and fashion. It has helped create more African identities such as the afrocapitalist, afropolitan, afroekletic, and the like andtop models in several countries in the developed world. This has come to the fore due to the altruistic presentation of the Nigerian image by some movies from Nollywood. On the other hand, the appropriate praise should be awarded to Nollywood for portraying Lagos in major movies by balancing the so-called Lagos life (Lasgidi) and Nigerian identitymore broadly.
Overall, the major effect of these projections of poverty porn mediums and Afropessimistic tendencies is heavily burdened on Africans in other regions and various parts of the world. The African place and characters are heavily stereotyped, marginalized, and treated inferior in the countries where they found themselves or call home. Concerning this, and as it may sound, these portrayals in Western movies are perceived and naturally imbibed by the primary audience, who cannot critically examine or analyze these racially toned movies. This false consumption of erroneous assumptions will automatically encourage them to relate in an unwelcoming manner to strangers trying to find a home in other lands.
In Haynes’ responses about the function of literature and filmmaking, he points to the importance of creativity and how filmmakers can be original and culturally conscious of helping in Africa’s reconstruction. Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to Africa’s wealth and diverse nature, and creative sensibilities. The age of social media is filled with so-called digital natives who are undoubtedly the new generation of Africans gracing the creative industry and popular culture. These digital natives, as opposed to the digital migrants, are more vibrant, and they have formed a new version of work and professional duties as they have created a niche for themselves in various capacities that were not paid much attention to in previous years. These vibrant and enterprising young Africans make waves in social media, literature and pop-culture and the likes. They are filled with creative sensibilities that are channeled to the reworking and better understanding of the media culture. The pop-culture scene, primarily through movies and music in Africa, is laced with creative-filled ideas used in tackling prevalent issues facing the continent. In other words, the diversity and insightfulness of these young Africans are noteworthy, significant, and inspiring to future creatives in Africa. All these new realities and stories that have not yet been told are only achievable by artists who never stopped believing in their craft, which Haynes supports as well. However, he envisions a Nigeria in which filmmakers would support leftist movements such as the #endSARS movement, which will also help reconstruct society and the nation at large.
Critically examining Haynes’s discussions on his Nigerian subjects and how he has gained a lot in the country, it is essential to note the centrality of the concepts of restorative practices and critical multiculturalism, necessary for mobilizing change in this century. Haynes notes that during his days in Nigeria as a Fulbrighter, he encountered many teachers from different parts of the country in the various universities in each region. This has helped him be a better Nigerian himself even though he is not a national, and it has helped him better understand the education, films, and festivals of the country.
Overall, Haynes response and narration of the movies produced in the early 1990s in Nigeria, which is very important to how he became a scholar in Nollywood films, showcasing the essence of a strand of critical multiculturalism compatible with the practice and values of professionals working in communities with which they are unfamiliar,as with the case of Haynes during his Fulbright. It is a concept that embraces diversity and helps in subduing racial tensions, and this practice strives for a more inclusive future. The names of professors and teachers Haynes mentioned, all of whom are part of his success in understanding Nollywood, have engaged in the critical multicultural practice, and participated in systemic change. Thus, Haynes argues that modern learning across cultures and engaging change simultaneously through global levels is crucial to good living, a model the average Nigerian embraces. As a result, there should be a collaboration to ensure a nation’s development, which must be aided with mutual respect, leading to identifying various methods for substantial capacity building. The commitment to valuing unique cultures and identities is the backbone for building civic space. The dismantling of borders within communities and across rural and urban communities can create webs of change.
Photo:Freedom Park, Lagos, 2018: Photo display of authors published by Bookcraft