154 african appropriations
Nigerian films made their entrance into local video parlors and living
rooms as novelties and were met with great acclaim. In the beginning,
images of the occult, luxury cars, huge mansions, and a wealthy lifestyle
had served as attractions and helped non-English speakers endure the
incomprehensible, lengthy dialogues, but ultimately these flashy images
would not be enough. Therefore, during the heyday of Nolly wood’s popu-
larity in Tanzania, in 2003, local cultural producers began experimenting
with the remediation of Nolly wood films by tackling the biggest obstacle
to their local reception: the English language. Adding commentary and
translations in Swahili, they drew on older media genres, such as the photo
novel and oral narrative.
FILLING IN THE GAPS: VIDEO FILM AS PHOTO NOVELPhoto novels were introduced to Tanzania during the late 1960s, when
South African Drum Publications came up with so-called look-reads—
photographed stories with an African cast. The most famous of these
magazines was African Film, which featured the adventures of Lance
Spearman and had a circulation of forty-five thousand in East Africa alone
(see chapter 2). Tanzanians would read their first Swahili photo novel in
Film Tanzania, a magazine founded in 1969. As the titles of the magazines
suggest, the photo novel served as a substitute for film, which until the
introduction of video technology, was too expensive to be realized on a
greater scale.^1 The medium was quite well established when Sultan Tamba,
a well-known novelist, video filmmaker, and columnist, took a Nigerian
video film and made it into a serialized photo novel, which appeared in
Sani in November 2003. Moreover, since the tabloid is famous for its com-
ics, Tamba could count on a sophisticated readership that knew how to
read “sequential art” (Eisner 1990).
For his experiment, Tamba chose Omereme (2002), a village-based film
about a polygynous Igbo household. The central figure is Mama Nnamdi,
who feels disrespected by her husband and his two other wives. With the
aid of a secret female cult, she acquires deadly powers and kills the mem-
bers of her household and the village, until the preacher son of one of her
husband’s other wives discovers what she has done and saves the family.
As a video filmmaker, Tamba prefers making films about village life (de-