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Emmanuel spent his days attending daily prayer classes and prayer services where the pastor issues prophetic utterances to members of the congregation (‘God will give you a child; God will bless you with a new job soon!').

‘The prayer makes me feel good,' Emmanuel smiled. ‘It gives me purpose and destiny.'

It didn't give him good mental health or a job, though. But perhaps I was being unfair in demanding pragmatism from a society that had suffered so much. Applying practical solutions is next to impossible when corruption strangles all aspects of life. Bona fide evangelical ministries do a lot for the community, providing facilities that the government and private sectors don't. The Church collects money from people more effectively than the taxman, and builds on its assets (many of the gleaming vans or cars seen on the roads had Church ministry logos painted on their sides).

In many ways, the Church reflected Nigerian society at its most functional. Prayer City's orderliness was the product of hundreds of thousands of people with similar cultural values subscribing to a common vision, contributing towards it, and having a leadership that executes that vision. Our non-governmental institutions – the village, the Church, the family – tend to work more smoothly than the state: bring government into the frame, and everything goes to the dogs.

 

After a fortnight of staying at Aunty Janice's, eating by candlelight and collecting water from a well, I now worshipped the miracles of daylight and rain, and wanted to kiss Mother Nature's hand for providing them free of charge. Mabel and I set off one day to the local NEPA office in Satellite Town to pay the electricity bill. In her hand was a cheque for
4,000, NEPA's fee for giving us less than four hours of electricity that month. The NEPA man sat in a tiny office, watching an evangelical church service on his portable DVD player. The device was powered by batteries since there was no electricity in the building. The man accepted Mabel's cheque – her compulsory payment for a month of almost total darkness – and wished us a good day.

The two of us took a danfo to Victoria Island and ate ice cream. Later on, Mabel headed to her office and left me alone to explore the Galleria shopping mall, wide-eyed with veneration. After dodging ditches in the street markets of Satellite Town, the gleaming, stock-rich shininess of a mundane shopping mall became a thing of beauty. In other countries I marvel at ancient ruins found among their modern streets, but in Nigeria, a modern jewel among our ruins was deeply impressive: vanilla ice cream, glossy magazines and other banal consumer items never seemed more enchanting. The Galleria on Victoria Island excited me in particular. It housed Nigeria's first multiplex cinema, which – praise be – was showing a Nigerian ‘Nollywood' movie. I never thought I'd see the day
when Nigeria would make its own films and show them at such a venue. Twenty years ago our film industry didn't even exist. Today, Nollywood thrives, but mainly on DVDs in homes and restaurants – cinemas are a rarity, especially in Southern Nigeria. Having seen a handful of Nollywood movies myself on DVD, I couldn't resist the novelty of experiencing Nollywood on the giant silver screen. I was intrigued as to whether the film quality would match the grandeur of the venue.

I settled down in an almost empty afternoon auditorium, a bag of popcorn between my knees, and munched excitedly as the opening credits of
Mission to Nowhere
illuminated the screen. A woman a few rows ahead of me chatted on her mobile phone, while two stewards talked audibly in the front corner – a veritable whisper by Lagos standards.

The film was the best Nollywood movie I'd seen, in terms of cinematography: good close-up camera angles and cameras held steady on tripods, even though the sound was still rather tinny, as if boom mikes were absent. The film's murder mystery plot wasn't particularly Nigerian, the musical score was American, and the characters all had English names: there was a heavy US influence throughout. The plot, which unfolded through the police detective's eyes in a first-person narrative, was linear to say the very least: each murder suspect and other characters were introduced to the audience only at the time of their arrest. Still, the unusual technique had a surprisingly suspenseful effect.

I was thrilled when Mabel used her contacts to arrange a meeting with
Mission to Nowhere
's director, Teco Benson. We travelled by okada to his offices in the mainland district of Surulere, the moviemaking capital. Like downtown Lagos, Surulere had an appealingly urban aesthetic. Narrow streets funnelled through mid-rise colonial buildings, segmenting them like chunks of a cake. The air clanged with the productivity of sewing machinists, shoe repairers, bike mechanics and food merchants.

Benson's offices were on the upper floors of an unassuming four-storey building. We waited in a reception room furnished with a suite of pneumatic red-and-black leather armchairs. On one of them sat a voluptuous woman, breastfeeding a baby.

‘That's my wife and our fourth child,' Teco smiled as he invited me into his office. His quietly spoken courteousness softened his stocky, almost thuggish aspect. A devout Christian in his mid-thirties, Teco left his civil service job in 1994 to become an actor and then producer. He was now one of Nollywood's most successful directors. Posters of his movies decorated the wall of his small office, which was dominated by a large desk. The sounds of street traffic roared through the windows.

‘Where did you learn to make films?' I asked Teco.

‘I taught myself. I travelled to different countries, attended film festivals. I read books about movie production. Nigeria has no film schools, so I had to teach myself the camera work and lighting and all that.'

Nollywood is still mostly an amateur affair. It barely existed in my childhood. Nigerians watched American films, and they had a curious penchant for Indian Bollywood movies too. I remember a cousin of mine played me one of her favourite Indian films years ago. A singing man caged a female love interest by hurling wooden fencing into the ground around her. While he constructed this four-walled prison, the woman stood there in a feminine fluster, needlessly rooted to the spot. Such theatricality wasn't to my taste, but many Nigerians were keen on it – in the absence of our own indigenous films, Bollywood tapped into something they weren't getting from Hollywood.

Unbeknownst to me, in the late 1980s, the seeds of Nigeria's film industry were germinating. Yoruba creatives who had previously worked in the travelling theatre began shooting self-scripted films on video, a relatively new technology. But then Nigeria's economy suffered under a painful structural adjustment imposed by the IMF.
Government spending went down, and unemployment went up. Celluloid film became too expensive to produce, forcing film-makers to adopt the video format instead.

One of the first Nollywood directors was Kenneth Nnebue, an electronics dealer who began selling these Yoruba films on video cassettes. Viewers could now watch the films at home on their VCRs instead of going to public cinemas, which had become decrepit and were based in cities that had become too dangerous at night (many cinemas have now been converted to churches).

The ease of shooting on video inspired dozens of film-makers to emulate Nnebue and create films that were made cheaply and quickly, and distributed informally. In the twenty years since Nnebue produced his first film, Nollywood has grown into the third largest film industry in the world in terms of output, churning out three movies every day. It's a money-making business, run largely by fast-buck entrepreneurs without a creative bone in their collective bodies but a strong knowledge of their market. Companies with names like Get-Rich Productions shoot the films in under a week on home-movie budgets before selling them to an unfussy, undiscerning audience.

Teco's film – a one-man effort – was especially impressive, considering the collaborative requirements of film production. Nigerian cinema, unlike that of Senegal and other francophone countries, has no colonial sponsorship or tutelage. It's purely indigenous, financed by local producers and marketers (including Pentecostal churches), who demand a strong ‘Nigerianness' to the storylines. The speed of production and distribution makes it possible for films to cover topical issues while they're still hot. Largely uninterested in acceptance by global cinema, Nollywood film-makers tap into audiences' aspirations and concerns: domestic strife, sex scandals, marital infidelity, financial swindling, Christianity, witchcraft. Storylines like these, which guarantee profits, are demanded by the predominantly Igbo marketers who control much of the films' distribution. Teco Benson,
however, was part of a minority of film-makers with higher aspirations for the art.

‘I had a strong vision about film,' he told me. ‘I wanted to be an agent of change for people in the village. They weren't getting proper news, only state newspapers. They cheered their corrupt kinsmen but would stone them if they knew the truth. I have no access to the pulpit or political power, but I can tell the truth through my films.'

Teco gave me copies of his DVDs. They were American-influenced films with dramatic names such as
Blood Diamonds
and
False Alarm
. The cover blurb of
Explosion: Now or Never
read: ‘Just out of prison, Steve discovered to his shock that the gang he suffered to protect wiped out his family. Having given his life to Christ, he is left in a dilemma. To revenge the killing, or hand them over to God.'

‘Are you into making films about witchcraft?' I asked him.

‘No, I'm not so interested in those type of films. I made a witchcraft film called
End of the Wicked
, but I like to explore themes like gangsters, 419 scams [fraudulent letters or emails used to extort money from people] and religion.'

On Teco's desk was a non-fiction book, written by a pastor who claimed that if people dream about sex in their sleep, it is because evil spirits are having sex with them in the night. I hoped he was speaking metaphorically.

‘Do you have dream about having sex?' he asked me.

‘No,' I replied defensively. Teco warned me against it, and suggested I read the book. I don't know why his religiosity still surprised me – being in the creative arts didn't make a Nigerian any less devout.

Supernatural forces, so strongly rooted in the psyches of some Nigerians, dominate and drive the film plots. The characters' circumstances are often controlled and changed via the spiritual: a mother who disapproves of her daughter's fiancé will cast a spell on
the girl in order to change her romantic choices; a man makes financial gains through ritual sacrifice, then suffers retribution at the hands of mysterious invisible forces. Guilt, epiphanies and the court of law rarely feature in any plot line. Character development is an alien concept.

Yet the films are so popular they're watched across English-speaking Africa. The once-thriving Ghanaian film industry withered in the shadows of Nollywood. Our films play on television screens in Southern Africa and the Caribbean, and Nigerian slang can be heard in the slums of other African cities.

Nollywood is popular despite its startlingly shoddy production quality. Convulsive camera work and poor lighting are de rigueur. Tinny, electronic synthesiser music often drowns out the dialogue, recorded without a boom mike. The characters speak with a slightly alien, non-Nigerian vernacular (‘For crying out loud!'), sometimes adopting highly un-Nigerian mannerisms, from insipid laughter to slow, stilted dialogue. The only exceptions to this rule are anger and disdain – Nollywood actors always convey those sentiments convincingly.

I found the poor production standards of these movies even more entertaining than the plots themselves. One film used exterior shots of a street in Cape Town – complete with sunshine and palm trees – to depict ‘London, England'. Other directors on constrained budgets see no shame in shooting two different films in the same house (‘Hold on, didn't I see that room, that car, in the other film?' Mabel once exclaimed). Editing discipline is loose; they shoot very long scenes that do nothing to take the plot forward. No activity is too mundane. In one film, the central character drives to the market to purchase some clothes in an eight-minute sequence so dull it was captivating.

The poor standard of these films embarrasses many Nigerians, but I'm proud of Nollywood in some ways. It is one of Nigeria's few indigenous, non-oil industries, and it represents a certain
independence of mind and spirit, while generating jobs for poster designers, distributors, journalists and promoters. Nollywood speaks to its audience and maintains cultural ownership without bending to Western cinematic values. On the other hand, surely there are cinematic rules that shouldn't
ever
be flouted? Aren't scene length and camera angles dictated by innate, universal human responses and aesthetic values? Maybe Nigerian viewers differ from the rest of the world. Perhaps all those electricity blackouts and traffic go-slows have stretched Nigerians' attention spans and raised our tolerance threshold to the point that we're comfortable with poor sound and picture quality, comfortable with interminably long film scenes, and
positively
in favour of supernatural conclusions or any finale involving the comeuppance of women.