Review Essay
Theorizing the Transformative and Invisible in Lagos Never Spoils: Nollywood and Nigerian City Life by Connor Ryan
University of Michigan Press, 2023
The modern global city has always held great fascination for urban geographers, city planners and managers, but also cultural producers such as novelists, filmmakers, fine artistes, other creative workers, and scholars across various disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. This imaginative and scholarly captivation with the city is not only because the urban space is a site of the convergence of many political-economic and cultural forces. As a technologically built and intensely surveilled space, the postmodern global city is also imbued with enormous centripetal force, mostly because of the concentration of a plethora of economic and other opportunities. These features of urbanity account for the demographic explosion often associated with cities. It is the intense coalescence of political, economic, and cultural forces, combined with demographic explosion and ethnic diversity in the city, that has made it a recurrent site of scholarly and aesthetic contemplation. Intellectuals such as George Simmel, Friedrich Engels, Roland Bathes, Walter Benjamin, Michel De Certeau, Henri Lefebvre and Jonathan Raban, have all written on the different constitutions and remakings of Euro-American urban spaces such as Paris, London, Manchester, New York, Berlin, Vienna, and Chicago.[i] Africanist scholars have also theorized the unique social-spatial dimensions, identity politics, and power relations in African cities such as Johannesburg, Lagos, Ibadan, Accra, and Kinshasa.[ii] The impression given by these theorists of the global city, whether in the West or elsewhere, is that it is a physical site of rapid technological, architectural, and demographic transformation as well as a place of sociocultural exchange, thus making it an active discursive arena where, as Roland Barthes notes, “subversive forces, forces of rupture, ludic forces act and meet.”[iii] This idea of the city as a physical and socio-cultural site enveloped and shaped by varied energies, but also one constantly in the making, always being reconstituted by its inhabitants, is what Connor Ryan explores in his book, Lagos Never Spoils: Nollywood and Nigerian City Life (2023).
He does so by focusing on the aesthetic figuration of Lagos, Africa’s mega city, in Nollywood cinema, one of Africa’s most popular modes of cultural expressions and social contemplation. Nollywood is the quintessential city genre. It was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and then spread like a contagion to other cities in Nigeria, across Africa, and the black diaspora. Like the filmmakers of Francophone Africa that Francoise Pfaff examines in her essay on cities in African cinema,[iv] Nollywood filmmakers are also city dwellers themselves and most of their stories, like most African popular arts, are about city life and its various nightmares, contradictions, disruptions, potential opportunities, fleeting successes, and occasional extreme pleasures. Connor Ryan turns to Lagos and Nollywood as central discursive paradigms in his work for good reasons. Lagos city, as he notes, possesses “a collection of shared reference points” for most Nigerians and “Nollywood remains one thing that the twenty million people in Lagos hold in common.”[v] Lagos is not just the hub of cultural production in Nigeria, but also the entire continent, generating and defining the cultural codes that influence everyday life across the continent and beyond. In theorizing Lagos as a cinematic text, Ryan positions and approaches the city “as a crossroads of cultural flows that provide the city’s film industry with an array of commodities, tropes, sentiments, aesthetics, and concepts with which to apprehend historical shifts in city life.”[vi] Lagos Never Spoils vociferously challenges and bypasses some of the canonical views on the African city, arguing that Eurocentric views on urban space and life have created a calcified vision of the city as a well fabricated spatio-temporal edifice and a set of recognizable social experiences that ignore and “exclude the particularity of cities in the Global South and the place of screen media within them.”[vii]
In inserting African cities in the global discourse of the politics of urban life or existence, especially the representational works that function to fashion the idea of the city in the national imagination, Ryan insists that beyond the realities and imageries of social disfunction, occasional infrastructural improvements and perennial decay, unrelenting misgovernance, and short-lived moments of prosperity and abundance, there is nothing certain or fixed about the city as such; that it is always in the making and holds something for almost everyone, whether at the fringes or the epicenter of the city’s heartbeat. Lagos Never Spoils thus suggests that screen media is an appropriate platform to look out for, gauge, and understand the vast and often invisible and quiet voices and energies that continually reconstitute and define African cities. Combining old-style British empiricism, rigorous and insightful textual analysis, and riveting North American high-power theoretical fireworks, the book argues that Lagos is always being reconstituted by its inhabitants and that “Lagos never spoils because residents work continually to ensure the city sustains something for them and that Nollywood—the industry and the body of films—both embodies and represents this continual urban transformation.”[viii] The broader point the book makes, and with compelling evidence, is the view that amidst seeming political-economic chaos and social crises, lives are still being lived, personal ambitions are still being pursued and at times, fulfilled, and moral choices are still being made that serve to buttress the decency and goodness of humanity. Lagos Never Spoils thus attests to how Nollywood, as a form of African popular expressivity, bears witness to these quotidian urban activities that are indicative of social and cultural transformations that transcend the physical spatial changes in urban spaces in Africa.
The book’s argument of course draws and builds on previous scholarly work reflecting on the discourse of the city in Nollywood cinema, which has always pointed to the ways in which Lagos is both the nodal point of Nollywood production and a recurrent leitmotif in the industry’s visual narratives.[ix] But Lagos Never Spoils deepens that analysis, where Lagos serves as the main heuristic device to capture and hypothesize the endless imaginative work and subtle but effective acts of individual and collective reconstitutions of the urban sphere in Africa. Unlike the previous Africanist scholarship on Nollywood and the city, Lagos Never Spoils proposes fresh and different methods of reading Nollywood films as socially-loaded cultural texts “inscribed by—rather than merely reflecting—conditions in Lagos and generates interpretations that push the formal analysis of Nollywood into new terrain.”[x] The book uses Lagos as a poignant metaphor to capture and direct readers to a wider pattern of cultural and social (re)negotiations unfolding in African cities. As a site of constant (re)modification, Ryan uses Lagos to suggest a malleable and reinventable social sphere. What Nollywood films show us about Lagos, he argues, is that like many other cities in Africa, it is “a place where many things are possible and where Nigeria’s tremendous capacity for creativity, ingenuity, and cultural accommodation is on full display.”[xi]
