24 african appropriations
In Tanzania, I observed a case of contact and copy which prompted a
local critique akin to concerns in northern Nigeria over protecting local
cultural identity. Interestingly enough, the influence of Nigerian Nolly-
wood films on local Swahili video film production has come under fire by
an intellectual elite in Tanzania. In chapter 5, I discuss such local copies
of Nolly wood movies in the context of the rapid spread of Nigerian video
films across Africa within the past decade (cf. Krings and Okome 2013a).
Tanzanian audiences are fascinated by Nigerian movies for the very rea-
son that they depict an African life-world similar to their own—and yet
different enough to evoke a sense of novelty. Similar to Hausa fans of
Indian films, Nigerian video films provide their Tanzanian viewers with
images of a “parallel modernity” (Larkin 1997). For Tanzanian audiences,
however, Nolly wood films shot in English pose one major problem: lan-
guage. A number of cultural producers in Dar es Salaam capitalized on
this and provided translations into Swahili by remediating Nolly wood
films. I discuss three distinct examples involving remediation: a photo
novel based on screenshots of a Nigerian video film, with speech bubbles
in Swahili; a Nolly wood film with a cinema narrator whose Swahili voice-
over simultaneously provides commentary, explanation, and translation;
and, finally, Dar 2 Lagos, a video film produced by a Tanzanian and shot
with a mixed cast of Tanzanian and Nigerian actors in Dar es Salaam and
Lagos.
In chapter 6, I return to Nigeria and look at how local cottage culture
industries have reworked the newscasts of global mass media related to
9/11 and America’s subsequent “war on terror.” In this case, it is not other
possible lives that are remediated by African copies but rather the life of
a single person—Osama bin Laden, who has become an icon of radical
Islam. Soon after 9/11, a plethora of bin Laden merchandise flooded the
northern Nigerian markets—posters, stickers, badges, key-ring pendants,
T-shirts, baseball caps—all of which bore his image, as well as video films
and tape-recorded songs that praised him. I argue that Nigerian cultural
producers have not only capitalized on bin Laden’s cult status among
radical-minded Muslims but also provided the very material that estab-
lished him as a brand of radical Islam. I distinguish two different mean-
ings attached to this brand by local Muslims, corresponding with the
communicative function of menacing gestures directed at two different