The sheer difficulty of identifying sequels, cycles, and genres in African cinema is surely attributable, at least in part, to a certain modesty of publicity. While studios and associated marketing firms have long sought to profit from any number of connections (both real and imagined) among Hollywood products, advertising has always been a luxury for films made in Africa. The signal exceptions, of course, are Nollywood movies, which have famously benefited from the efforts of distributors operating throughout southern Nigeria (but mainly in the markets of Idumota and Onitsha), and which have lately entered the matrix of online publicity—an ever-shifting matrix that, despite persistent claims to the contrary, only adds to the difficulty of defining these movies as generic or cyclic constituents. As a popular industry, Nollywood is invested not in the auteurist upholding of an exceptional art object, but in the manufacturing of “flow”—providing a sense of stylistic and ideological continuity among thousands of films. Subtle distinctions inevitably emerge, however, and it remains important, for instance, to differentiate among the acting strategies of stars who, despite or perhaps because of their iconic familiarity, often introduce fresh techniques into their performances.

One such Nollywood star, Nkem Owoh, is undoubtedly best known for the role of Osuofia, which he played in Kingsley Ogoro’s Reference Ogoro2003 hit comedy Osuofia in London. So successful was Ogoro’s film—and so central is it to scholarship on Nollywood—that Owoh is now firmly associated with its title character, to the point of losing his own identity in popular and academic writings. Indeed, “Osuofia” now describes not simply a fictional character but also a professional performer, one whose diverse skill set is often subsumed under the totalizing tendencies of Osuofia fandom. This blurring of distinctions between performer and role is perhaps part and parcel of the star phenomenon (although it is arguably more common in relation to lesser known thespians), and there appears at first glance to be nothing untenable about the reflexive conflation of Owoh and Osuofia. Upon examining this conflation more closely, however, it is possible to perceive the elements of a certain Eurocentrism, whereby Western performers are firmly identified as individuals and as professionals while African actors are denied agency and artistry—reduced, that is, to their film roles. While “Osuofia” conceivably operates in an honorific capacity, in keeping with the griotic cultures out of which Nollywood emerges and to which it contributes, it conceals Owoh’s professionalism, in contrast to the use of the nickname “Mr. Prolific” that does not occlude the talents of the director, Chico Ejiro. Indeed, it would appear unseemly if Ejiro, rather than receiving a title that points to the impressive immensity of his output, were instead made to bear the name of his most famous film.

There is another problem with the popular construction of “Osuofia” as a catchall for Nkem Owoh’s persona, and it relates to the taxonomic obstacles outlined above. Since the production of Ogoro’s Osuofia in London in 2003, the name “Osuofia” has been attached not only to Owoh himself, but also to several of the star’s films, appearing in various titles in such a way as to suggest a succession of sequels. Similarly, websites that stream Nollywood movies, such as iROKOtv and Dobox, have used the name to suggest the existence of a bona fide filmic cycle—even a genre unto itself, in which the character of Osuofia functions as the only connective thread. For those who have not actually watched these movies, it may seem as if Osuofia in London has generated sequel after sequel—which is not the case. In this essay I review several recent films whose titles and narratives take obvious inspiration from Osuofia in London, but which do not actually feature the character in the title. In fact, far from satisfying consumers by offering, as iROKOtv puts it, “more of Osuofia,” these films have provoked criticism from those who find that they are misleadingly titled and classified. Indeed, a survey of user comments collected beneath streaming versions of these films on iROKOtv suggests that annoyance is the most common response among those led to expect “more of Osuofia.” For such consumers, Nollywood filmmakers and diasporic webmasters are equally guilty of seeking to exploit Osuofia fandom by imposing character-driven consistency on a series of narratively unrelated films. The opportunism that drives this imposition is not difficult to discern, whatever one’s critical background. Simply put, Nollywood fans are smart enough to know that Nkem Owoh is, in fact, not Osuofia, and they would appreciate the sacrificing of the latter for the sake of the former, rather than the other way around—as, no doubt, would Owoh himself. Despite his increasingly diverse accomplishments as an actor, Owoh is still pigeonholed as Osuofia—forced to occupy a discursive position that he himself helped to establish over a decade ago.

Ironically, it is a measure of Owoh’s talent—of the persistent vividness of his fictional creation—that the actor is so often aligned with Osuofia, but such an alignment increasingly serves the interests of marketers who, in familiar Nollywood fashion, simply want to duplicate past successes, regardless of plausibility. What’s worse, the artificial application of “Osuofia” to film titles and online offerings infantilizes both Owoh and his fans, and it further obscures the actual sequels that characterize the interconnected Nollywood landscape. Whether due to the desperate, trivializing efforts of online marketers or to simple scholarly inattention, Nollywood movies are often erroneously grouped together. It is consequently necessary to disentangle the discrepant films that bear the label—and thus the burden—of Osuofia in order to assess their separate techniques, and also to reintegrate them under a new rubric. If “Osuofia,” as a cynical commercial catchall, doesn’t work, then what does?

The films that I review here certainly share a series of representational strategies and thematic concerns, but that is all the more reason to dispense with the name “Osuofia” as the glue that holds them together. The obsessive, genre-building invocation of this beloved film character only contributes to the difficulty of drawing legitimate generic boundaries in Nollywood—a difficulty that several scholars, from Jonathan Haynes (Reference Haynes, Krings and Okome2013) and Moradewun Adejunmobi (Reference Adejunmobi2002) to Lindsey Green-Simms (Reference Green-Simms2012) and Matthew H. Brown (Reference Brown2013), have confronted head on. It is, in many ways, a difficulty that has long plagued studies of African cinema, with such scholars as Manthia Diawara (Reference Diawara1992), N. Frank Ukadike (Reference Ukadike1994), and Kenneth W. Harrow (Reference Harrow2007) offering frameworks for classifying films that have not had the benefit (or the burden) of boundary-drawing marketing campaigns, or of industrial systems designed to consolidate and promote particular genres. In African Cinema: Politics and Culture, Diawara famously explores three broad “movements” in African cinema—what he terms “social realism,” “colonial confrontation,” and “return to the source”—while Harrow, in Postcolonial African Cinema, examines a range of theoretical rubrics. Given the manifold obstacles that African filmmakers have faced in realizing their visions, relatively few have been able to revisit narratives and characters in what are commonly called sequels, let alone to engage in any consistent way with the aesthetic requirements of a particular genre (à la John Ford and the Western, for instance). Nevertheless, some scholars have offered the convincing argument that Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas (1992) is a sequel of sorts to the director’s Touki Bouki (1973), and not just a broadly auteurist follow-up. By this logic, the Paris-bound Anta (Mareme Niang) of Touki Bouki becomes the “been-to” Linguere Ramatou (Ami Diakhate) of Hyenas; the name change is but a technicality.

While such a reading of Mambéty’s work might seem eccentric, Nollywood’s conditions of production, distribution, and reception have long invited consumers to view films in a vividly relational way, comparing characters without recourse to authorial intentions or critical traditions. That is not to say that conventional modes of authorship are unimportant in Nollywood. To cite a specific example, Nollywood’s Jénífà series, starring Funke Akindele, not only refers back to Chika Onukwufor’s influential Glamour Girls (1994); it also suggests a certain auteurist tendency in its use of a single director, Muydeen S. Ayinde. While Ayinde’s precise stylistic contributions may be difficult to discern, due in part to the standardization of filmmaking techniques so characteristic of Nollywood, his name’s attachment to all of the entries in this series—separated as they are by year and site of production—suggests an invitation to the spectator to read them in terms of auteurism, and not simply as a function of Funke Akindele’s star power and screenwriting skills, or as a product of patronage. Such an invitation may not be accepted, and indeed, if individual authorship of any kind is immediately detectable in Jénífà, it is surely that of Akindele. As both star and screenwriter, Akindele contributes a character whose original idiosyncrasies link all of the films.

In November 2012, Nkem Owoh, who memorably joined forces with Akindele in Oga on Top (dir. Amayo Uzo Phillips, 2013), traveled to São Paulo to shoot a film entitled Osuofia in Brazil. Co-directed by Reginald Ebere (who wrote the script) and Abel “Success” Ebere, Osuofia in Brazil belongs to an expanding subgenre of Nollywood “diaspora films” set—and in many cases shot—in South America. As Jonathan Haynes has suggested, this subgenre is a product of the success of Osuofia in London, and Osuofia in Brazil is, in fact, a bona fide sequel to Ogoro’s film—the only such sequel among the titles reviewed here. To begin, Owoh’s character actually answers to the name “Osuofia,” which the film’s soundtrack additionally invokes through the nondiegetic songs that, as in Osuofia in London, describe what Osuofia “don” do. (He memorably encounters a Michael Jackson impersonator on the streets of São Paulo, joining him for a performance of Jackson’s “Thriller,” and he later attends a soccer game at which his boisterousness is quite at home.) Questions of authorship help to further contextualize Osuofia in Brazil—to place it in relation to filmic precedents that exceed the geographical and thematic boundaries of Osuofia in London. The redoubtable Reginald Ebere, who made the stunning, circumcision-themed Nollywood drama Scars of Womanhood in 1997, had hoped to collaborate with the young Nigerian-Brazilian filmmaker Abel “Success” Ebere, who made the hit film A Black Night in South America (2007), starring Desmond Elliot and Eucharia Anunobi, as well as that film’s sequel, Brazilian Deals (2010). While A Black Night in South America and Brazilian Deals are far darker than Osuofia in Brazil, beholden as they are to melodrama’s moralizing tendencies (as well as to the general challenges of the exilic experience), they still provide a certain template for the later film’s largely comedic depiction of cultural collisions. Indeed, São Paulo is as whitewashed—in all senses of the word—in Osuofia in Brazil as in the earlier films; the black Nigerian protagonist is still situated in a sea of extremely light-skinned Brazilians (including the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, bikini-clad “beach bunnies” who flirt with him at a resort, coming to his “rescue” after a soccer game has sent him tumbling, face first, into the sand). Such starkly racialized collisions are certainly central to the comedic mechanics of Osuofia in London, as is the dialectic of village and city that, in Osuofia in Brazil, sees Owoh’s character veering between the Nigerian bush and the Brazilian metropolis.

In Osuofia in Brazil, various dialogue exchanges establish that ten years have passed since the title character’s exploits in London, and that, in the period just prior to the film’s opening scenes, he managed to earn a degree at Cambridge. He has now, at long last, returned to become headmaster of a primary school in his home village in Nigeria—a way of “giving back” through pedagogical involvement. If Osuofia’s elevation to Cambridge-educated headmaster seems incongruous—utterly out of character for the randy, rambunctious speaker of “bush English” in Osuofia in London—it is important to recall that, in Ogoro’s film, Osuofia consistently champions education for his youngest daughter and dabbles in youth-centered instruction on the steps of Trafalgar Square, memorably admonishing a young woman for her alleged improprieties. Osuofia in Brazil opens at a pivotal point in the title character’s career. Having succeeded in shaping his school into a “haven” for young girls, Osuofia meets with a committee of elders whose members decide to send him abroad in order to “do some research, make some connections,” and, as Osuofia puts it, “buy some things that are required for the improvement of this community, for the development of this community.” Once again, as in Osuofia in London, local development is linked to an influx of funds, connections, and competencies from abroad, and Osuofia, still flush with his late brother’s money (acquired toward the end of Ogoro’s two-part film), prepares to depart for Brazil. First, however, he must hand over the management of his school to Agnes (the quietly charming Chinelo Oloh), a beautiful young woman with little experience, pedagogical or otherwise. “Great Helen of Troy!” Osuofia exclaims upon meeting Agnes, who has applied for employment at Osuofia’s school. Struck by her comeliness, the lecherous old Osuofia appoints Agnes to the relatively lofty position of assistant professor, then hastily hands over stewardship of the school—“unofficially, of course.” Recognizing that Agnes is homeless, Osuofia then forces his students to contribute fifty naira each “for her upkeep,” thus demonstrating that his corrupt tendencies coexist with a high-minded commitment to education.

Throughout Osuofia in Brazil, the title character is susceptible to the advances of younger women, one of whom—a dog-walking seductress with breasts that make Osuofia burn with desire—fleeces him in São Paulo. The kindhearted, “homegrown” Agnes is different, however—a village innocent who doesn’t know how to respond to Osuofia’s flirtatiousness. Osuofia’s wife (played by Ngozi Ezeonu), who has long known of the near-indiscriminate immensity of her husband’s sexual appetite, decides to warn Agnes against falling for him. “I hope my husband has not been disturbing you,” she says, and then adds, in an even quieter, more conspiratorial voice, “Just be careful. I don’t want you to make the mistake I made—being taken in by all the big grammar. If I had known he had nothing else but grammar inside, I would not have married him.” Her sad face and equally mournful tone suggest that she is serious—that Osuofia has been a major, near-tragic disappointment to her. She’s still capable of experiencing jealousy, however, as she demonstrates just minutes before her husband’s departure, when she scolds Osuofia by shouting, “Anything that has a bottom, or even one breast, is OK for you!” Weeping uncontrollably, she continues, “I know you—those Brazilian girls are going to use you like native soap!”

The wife’s words prove prophetic, but Osuofia, as in Ogoro’s film, somehow manages to escape unscathed from the disturbing temptations of life abroad. Before departing for Brazil—a destination that he himself has selected for its “exoticism”—Osuofia insists that he’s traveling there for research, not for “fun.” He occasionally admits his “past mistakes,” and it is at such moments that the film explicitly invokes Osuofia in London. Osuofia, however, doesn’t know how to book a flight to Brazil, and in his confusion he confirms that for his earlier excursion to London his late brother’s solicitors handled all travel arrangements, effectively chauffeuring Osuofia all the way to the U.K. (How he managed to take a degree at Cambridge and return years later is a question that the film does not answer.) Panicked, Osuofia locates Agnes on the eve of his trip and confesses, “I don’t even know how to travel—how to get to Brazil—or even how to make arrangements to begin to travel.” Agnes appears perplexed. “Headmaster, I thought you said you have traveled to England before!” In response, Owoh offers an extended “aah”—an invitation to the spectator to laugh as Osuofia recalls his iconic trip to London—then says, “Yes, but that was a long time ago.” Agnes then gives him the phone number of a travel agent that her family uses “for vacations,” explaining, “He will also give you contacts of somebody who will receive you when you get to Brazil.” (How the provincial, “village-bound” Agnes has such a close connection to a cosmopolitan travel agent is another of the film’s unanswered questions.) Delighted, Osuofia screams, “Mama mia!” and then blurts, “Don’t tell my wife you were the one to give me advice!”

Osuofia in Brazil reestablishes some of the title character’s defining traits, which are so familiar from Ogoro’s seminal film. Along with Osuofia’s sheer lecherousness, these traits include a tendency to pepper his utterances with words borrowed from a range of languages, both African and European. “Get him a cup of agua!” Osuofia shouts after encountering a parched compatriot, and at other moments he relies on Yorùbá words and phrases in a futile attempt to get his points across within an Igbo-identified village. Osuofia’s speech is generally jargon-filled and altogether pretentious, prompting one Nigerian character to dismiss it as a product of “this Cambridge thing.”

Such syncretism is central to Owoh’s star persona, and it thrives even beyond the confines of his most famous film character. For instance, Owoh’s performance as Isiokwe in the misleadingly titled Osuofia the Village Teacher (dir. Kensteve Anuka, 2014) suggests character traits that are far removed from those of Osuofia. When we first meet Isiokwe, in the film’s rather shapeless opening scene, he’s a dancer at a nightclub, wearing spangled bell-bottoms, a tight black vest, and a Mexican sombrero on top of his enormous Afro wig. That Isiokwe is a “been-to”—an African who has lived abroad—is apparent from more than just his syncretic sartorial choices. Awkwardly intercut with Isiokwe’s dancing are shots of two elders discussing his longtime absence from their village. “It’s been twelve years since we sent our son to the white man’s land to study, and we have not heard from him since,” says one of the old men; the other rues the fact that Isiokwe hasn’t returned “to open the eyes of our people.”

References to Osuofia abound in the film, but they are indirect, even elusive, subtly recalling Osuofia’s general investment in the pedagogical, developmental potential of life abroad but also evoking the character’s time at Cambridge, which Osuofia in Brazil adopts as its principal backstory. This debt to Osuofia in Brazil is perhaps most evident in the plot trajectory that takes Isiokwe from nightclub dancer to village teacher, as the title indicates. However, if the title’s use of “Osuofia” represents a familiar commercial move, it distracts somewhat from Owoh’s unique achievement as Isiokwe, a multidimensional character who is, in many ways, more abrasive—less immediately lovable—than Osuofia, and more threatening than clownish, despite his preposterous getup at the outset.

Osuofia the Village Teacher is bound to generate sequels, if only because Owoh provides such a striking performance as Isiokwe. The misleading reliance on the name “Osuofia” recurs with tiresome regularity, however, and it characterizes the titles of two other recent films that feature Nkem Owoh. Osuofia and the Widow (dir. Emeka Nwosu, 2014) appears to take a measure of inspiration from a bit of gossip that circulated in the fall of 2012, when Owoh was allegedly involved in a land dispute with a widow in Enugu, but it quickly subsumes this ripped-from-the-headlines approach under the narrative demands of a family saga, one that boasts multiple intergenerational conflicts. Once again, Owoh plays not Osuofia but a different character altogether—the cautious Ochudo, whose relationship with his elderly father provides Owoh with a fresh performance mode, one that requires him to soften his voice to deferential levels as he seeks advice from the eminent older man. At other times, however, Ochudo seems little more than an extension of Osuofia, as when he complains about having produced only daughters, and then hastens to acquire a second wife who might be able to bear him sons. This doubly misogynist gesture certainly evokes the chauvinism of Osuofia, but Ochudo is otherwise an original Owoh creation, as is Uwa, the character he plays in Osuofia the Boxer (dir. Michael Jaja, 2014).

Uwa is a widower—a former officer in the Nigerian Army who, following the death of his wife, must relocate from Lagos to Enugu with his son, Nsogbu (Osita Iheme). Even more boastful than Osuofia, Uwa often describes his past as a champion boxer—the “leading light” of the army’s boxing club. “Papa, I’ve heard all of these stories,” complains a weary Nsogbu. “The most important thing is: how do we eat this afternoon?” The ornery Uwa responds with a challenge: “How do you eat this afternoon? Are you not old enough to feed me? People of your age feed families of four, five, six. . . .” While the thirty-something Osita Iheme, perhaps best known for playing Pawpaw, the enfant terrible of Amayo Uzo Phillips’s 2003 hit Aki na Ukwa and its many sequels, still tends to play child roles, his Nsogbu in Osuofia the Boxer is the emphatically adult son of Owoh’s Uwa. (By contrast, in Forgive Me, Father [2012], directed by Tchidi Chikere, Iheme plays the adolescent son of Owoh’s Johnbosco, a gentle man slowly dying of lung cancer.) In Osuofia the Boxer, Nsogbu and a friend decide to register the aged Uwa in a local boxing tournament. In response, Uwa accuses them of conspiring to murder him. Indeed, Uwa’s fear of reentering the boxing ring after several decades is so pronounced that, instead of inquiring as to the scheduled date of the boxing tournament, he asks his son, “When am I dying, and who is doing my burial?” Nsogbu simply ignores his father’s self-dramatizing tendencies, saying, “Papa, do you know that if you win this tournament, you will become the most popular person in this town?”—more popular, he adds, than even the Igwe, or village chief. “The most popular dead body,” quips Uwa.

Eventually, Uwa agrees to train for the tournament, and his newfound ambition proves infectious. “Anyone who stands between me and the [tournament] crown is an enemy,” warns Nsogbu, who has internalized his father’s fight for legitimacy—a fight that has already won Uwa a new house as well as a new car, thanks to a wealthy former schoolmate who believes in the power of patronage systems. Uwa’s experience is not without its obstacles, which include the members of a rival family—headed by the Igwe (Uzoh Umeh)—who would like to see him fail. Eve Esin plays Nkiru, a shy young woman who has had a secret affair with the Igwe’s son, resulting in a child for whom Nkiru alone must care. Shortly before the boxing tournament, the Igwe’s henchmen threaten to kill Nkiru’s father and child if she refuses to feed Uwa a debilitating poison that will ensure his defeat at the hands of a much younger boxer. “I don’t know how to lie, and I don’t know how to turn down any requests,” says the vulnerable Nkiru, who in her spare time has grown close to Uwa and Nsogbu but who must, for the sake of her son, accede to the evil plan. In the days before she hands Uwa the poisoned meal, Nkiru watches him prepare for the tournament. In a fashion familiar from Rocky (dir. John G. Avildsen, 1976) and its sequels—but also from the more recent Grudge Match (dir. Peter Segal, 2013), in which the equally senescent Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro reenter the boxing ring—Osuofia the Boxer features a montage sequence of Uwa completing a rigorous training regimen that sees him jogging through the village, jumping in place, and practicing his jabs.

Nothing less than the very identity of the village is at stake in the boxing tournament. The Igwe has wagered his honor on it, and Uwa, having struggled to achieve a better life for his son, hopes that a victory will enhance Nsogbu’s status in the village. When Uwa finally receives the poisoned dish, Nsogbu refuses to let him eat it—not because he knows that it’s poisoned, but because he wants to prevent Uwa from “filling up” so soon before a fight. Improbably, Uwa wins that fight, knocking out his burly opponent in the first round. Later, however, he learns that Nkiru was part of a plot to defeat him, but, much like the Osuofia who comforts the British woman who has attempted to murder him in Osuofia in London, Uwa soothes his would-be assassin, prompting her to admit how much she loves him and Nsogbu. (In striking contrast to the misogynist Osuofia, however, Uwa frequently praises the wisdom of women; at one point in Osuofia the Boxer he insists that the term “better half” applies only to wives and never to husbands.) “I’ve been very happy around you people—for the first time in my life,” Nkiru says, before joining Uwa, Nsogbu, and several of Uwa’s biggest fans (all of whom wear red team T-shirts that read, “Uwa the Champion”) for a protest march through the village, which ends in front of the Igwe’s abode. “What happened is a shame on the Igwe!” declares Nsogbu, who proposes that the village chief resign. Desperate, the Igwe’s henchmen accuse Uwa of having lied about his background, embellishing his personal history by claiming that he had traveled abroad. Thus cornered, Uwa confesses that he has, in fact, lied, but that the lies were “merely circumstantial”—products of his desire to drum up public support for his boxing ambitions and to help his son secure a comfortable position in society. After Uwa apologizes, the Igwe is deposed, and Nsogbu happily takes his place. The film ends with a public celebration of Nsogbu’s ascension to the chieftancy, at which Uwa, gazing at a dramatic, cloud-filled sky, declares, “I am the bringer of rain, I am the bringer of peace, I am the bringer of understanding, I am the bringer of happiness, I am the bringer of culture, I am the bringer of anything good, everything positive, and God is on our side!”

Deeply Nollywoodian in its elaborate righting of wrongs, the ending of Osuofia the Boxer clearly recalls that of Osuofia in London, inasmuch as it involves a somewhat bumbling character who comes to triumph over murderous obstacles, in the process bringing prosperity to his village. As I hope to have shown, however, Uwa is not Osuofia. The character in fact represents yet another original Owoh creation, down to the verbal tics that the actor obviously improvised, as well as the many physicalized intimations of an erstwhile athleticism—the thrilling reminders that this middle-aged man was once young and exceedingly agile. (Compare, for instance, the comically slow, hunched gait of Osuofia as he sidles up to a young Londoner in Trafalgar Square.) Osuofia the Boxer features a theme song that repeatedly invokes Osuofia—it includes the lyric “Osuofia was a boxer”—but, in its nondiegetic capacity, it is obviously a measure more of Owoh’s star persona than of any narrative elements. Unfortunately, given its prominence in the film’s title, the name “Osuofia” continues to cloud Owoh’s differentiated achievements—at least for those who may be unwilling to watch the actor’s recent films. Merely tallying titles will not suffice as a historiographic method.

Clearly, the promiscuous use of “Osuofia” is reductive with respect to Nkem Owoh’s films and performances. In interviews, the actor himself has repeatedly expressed concerns about the moniker’s capacity to crowd out his career achievements, even as he has tolerated its overuse, assuming an avuncular tone with young fans for whom his real name may well be unknown. In this essay-review I have attempted to clarify some of the contours of Owoh’s star persona as it has both intersected with and departed from the character of Osuofia in films that bear that character’s name. Traditional frameworks for analyzing African popular arts, because so mindful of techniques of imitation, repetition, and standardization, are often inadequate to the task of understanding how Nollywood star personae develop across films and performance techniques. Equally inadequate are those theories of cinema stardom that developed in the global North using emphatically Western models. When applied to African contexts, these theories tend to feed the false assumption that stardom is a matter of sameness—an assumption that a discouraging number of producers, marketers, and website administrators appear to have embraced, but that critics of Nollywood, and of African popular arts in general, have a responsibility to resist.