162 african appropriations
As usual, this film was translated into Swahili by Cpt. Derek
Mukandala—L-u-f-u-f-u! If you are looking for films already translated
into Swahili, call Mukandala Lufufu Videotheque—number 0754821169.
Lufufu can send to you all translated films wherever you are in Tanzania
and wherever you are in East and Central A frica. Beware of buying films
in the streets where you will get bad copies and bad prints. Come straight
to our library and get good original copies with stereo sound and brilliant
pictures. A ll of you are welcome. (1:10:43–11:50)The model of Mukandala’s art of remediation is obviously the perfor-
mance of the traditional African storyteller. Like a storyteller, Mukandala
adopts different roles—as narrator and as the dramatis personae—and he
provides a moral message. Like the traditional storyteller who reinvents
preexisting stories according to the time, place, and context in which he
retells them, Mukandala also works with preexisting material. Unlike
the storyteller’s “scripts,” however, which are immaterial, Mukandala’s
audiovisual “scripts” exist outside him. Mukandala compared his art with
“the transformation of rice into pilau” (pilau is a delicious Swahili rice
dish). According to this metaphor, Nigerian video films are like raw or
unprocessed foodstuffs that have to be prepared according to certain
principles of local cuisine to become a palatable dish. In this way, video
narration may be conceptualized as domesticating foreign films through
remediation (Krings 2009). This implies that in Tanzania, such films are
made digestible—to apply Mukandala’s metaphor once again—through
the use of another medium, the spoken word, and that their exhibition in
video parlors is reconfigured in terms of the classical live performance
of traditional storytelling. This is based upon the observation that live
video narration in fact transfers video films into oral narratives. Freeing
narratives from their audiovisual containers and reshaping them accord-
ing to the principles of “primary orality” may well be considered a way
of accessing and reconstructing meaning through an inversion of the
process Walter Ong (2010) has described as “technologizing of the word.”
THE INFLUENCE OF NIGERIAN FILMS ON BONGO MOVIESW hile the consumption of Nigerian video films was still at its peak
in Tanzania—that is, between 2003 and 2006—a viable local video