[Reader-list] cinema house in nigeria

[lush inkk]

an article i wrote while an outsider-insider in lagos, nigeria, for a local paper. the idea came from hearing of some of the work sarai was doing with theatres in delhi. and it helped me to make 'focussed ' trips on my own, and under cover of 'work', to have conversations, and anchor arbit surprises( like standing in the market behind my house in agege, holding a toothpaste tube of 'dabur dentifrice', made in sahibabad! - a suburb of delhi whose name has entered my life, as a series of stories told by a close friend, about growing up there. so, here is to agege, lagos then.)
 
 

 

 

 

 

REELS FROM A GROWN SUBURB

 

I listen to friends telling stories about Agege.  Professionals, in their mid and late thirties, who have spent childhood years in this area and have seen it grow and change.  Stories of how politics shift people from their homes, how suburbs are born, stories about the particular nature of their own suburb. With some of these stories as my main research, some other small conversations, and my own conjectures, I try to sketch a  picture of the area that is home. 

 

In the 1970�s the government shifted a huge working class population of Oluwole area, Central Lagos to the far, far outskirts of the city, in Ogba. Oluwole was too close to a prospering business area and a semi slum, however vast, however old, could not be allowed to stay there, reasoned the powers that be. After all, the area was ripe with business possibilities, there were many other, more profitable eyes on it. Very soon, real estate prices would sky rocket in the  �cleared out� land that was now �developed� as the business navel of central Lagos. 

 

The people who lost their homes struggled to adjust to a place that was closer to the rural hinterland than their city. Gradually, they brought back some of their lost citylife into the suburb. Their shops and institutions, their businesses and  entertainments, and their urban outlook began to give a new character to Ogba. 

 

The civil war got over. The government planned again, and  �gave place� to the many soldiers, shattered physically and mentally by the war, and their families, in far off Agege, away from the city.  Way out from the center of Lagos, Agege was already a large trading junction for the Egba man coming in from Abeokuta and for the Hausa trader disembarking at its once famous  railway station to go to Lagos.

 

My friends came from other families , families of middle class people from Lagos, who decided to relocate to the outskirts of the city, where land was cheap, where it was still possible to build a decent house. People who hoped, (as all middle class people all over the world, making this shift, hope of their cities) that Lagos, expanding on and on, would eventually embrace their suburb as its own, and share out its amenities and its opportunities. 

 

For  the children, leaving Mushin, or some place else in Lagos, to go live in Ogba or Agege was like going to live in the bush! They eventually found fellow complainers in the neighbourhood, with whom they tried to make this new place their own. One afternoon a child saw someone being knifed in Abule Egba. It gave him a precocious insight into a dangerous adult world. Responding perhaps to a sense of danger, or to the sparsely peopled, empty landscape of Agege, he played destructive games with his friends, throwing stones at passing car windows.  Stories of violence became the chidrens� mythology and the source of new games. They made their own map of danger of the unfamiliar suburb- certain street corners, among certain �kinds� of people, in darknesses, like the darkness of cinema theatres which �hoodlums� frequented.  Danjuma, Pen Cinema.. were places of entertainment for �strange �people�.

 

Then missions opened schools in the new suburb. And roads to Agege from Lagos became busier. Simultaneously, from outside the city, traders were also increasing traffic in the area. Perhaps reassured by the increased new crowds, slowly more middle class people started frequenting the cinema halls. And the two cinema houses of that area got some respectability in the eyes of their children too. Danjuma (�International�) Cinema was considered safer than Pen Cinema. It was larger, with a huge seating capacity, air-conditioned., relatively expensive balcony seats which  separated the people who could afford them, from the poorer �masses�, and 35 mm projection, mostly of Indian films. The children started flocking to the cinemas, boys with small stolen change, trying to get in on half tickets after the interval, sitting with unknown crowds of people, with�people not quite like their families�, in the crowd, in the stalls, watching the screen. 

 

The cinema boys of the 70�s grew up. Film watching became less of an addiction, more a pleasant occasional outing: A late night film with friends, or with a date maybe. By the late 1980�s public areas across Lagos, started becoming unsafe. The nights especially had new dangers- armed robbers, increasing in number as the sliding economy created more poverty and unemployment; a military government that was suspicious of everyone; and its arm of law, the policeman: the man in the crowd given a uniform and a gun, power and a bad salary, a training and a license in violence and a need to show �results�. 

 

One late night in the 1980�s, a group of friends, all children of the 70�s, were returning from a late night show at Danjuma. Some trouble had broken out nearby. The police stopped the young men. The usual: kneeling on the roadside, humiliation. It seemed like simple extortion would not serve the policemen. The young men were told to get into the police van. The future lawyer among them refused, and managed to get a word with the senior officer. Managed to tell him they were coming from the cinema.  � Show your ticket then�, the officer barked. Wale put his hand in his shirt pocket- and that night, the slip of paper that let him into Danjuma  became �proof� and let off Wale, and I suppose, the friends with him . The ticket became  a talisman to protect the faithful patrons!

 

Late eighties, and with the still increased state brutalities, and the bad economy, cinemas became more deserted. The middle class was the first to clear out of the theatres. For many of them the house became the sanctuary instead. For those who could afford it, security gates, higher walls, grills, broken glass shreds, barbed wires, guarded the house where entertainment, communion, leisure, everything was to be strictly contained. People lived as though in voluntary house arrest. 

 

 Public gatherings did not die out completely, they found a new venue, in religious assemblies. Almost every street of Agege had a church soon. What must these assemblies have offered that the cinema could not any more? More local context, maybe. Hope: that was desperately needed. A place of communion where you seemed to be much more directly addressed. Who had the spare money to spend on some exotic cinema? What if you were attacked by armed robbers, stopped by the police? 

 

And still even those difficult years did not manage to shut down many cinema houses, they still had their takers. Some old faithfuls, some new initiates, and some seekers for whom the organized communions of religious places were not quite it. Who were these people who put together their meager resources to still afford this leisure. Maybe those for whom life, with or without the military government was a constant struggle anyway. Some sought the oblivion of the dark, some made the theatre their own carnival of discontent, unwinding with noise and disorder.

 

By the time some sense of order returned to the polity, the local film on video had become very popular with the middle class especially. The children of the 70�s did not return to these old haunts, these childhood films, except in nostalgiac conversation. The combination of a locally made film, and a place like FSP, set in an estate, more �orderly� and professional, started drawing in some middle class families.

 

Today, an old ticket collector, Ahmeduilahi, sits astride a bench at a much weathered looking Danjuma that has seen years of changing crowds, changing times. The old man himself has been here 22 years, almost as long as the cinema. It is Sallah day, the end of Ramadan, but there is hardly anyone in the balcony watching the video projection of a new Hindi film (I am told it is new, therefore there are no subtitles).  I peer down, and see the same emptiness. Perhaps there is a crowd where I cannot see, tucked under the balcony. This is afternoon, maybe the evening show draws more people? Curtains are hanging loose, many blinds have been broken, and daylight flows in. A young couple sits stiffly,  staring at the screen. Two young men share a resigned look and try and laugh at a comedian on screen. New forms of violence, muscled men, frail women- that seems to be staple to the current lot of films from India. A man smokes alone in one corner, and a speaker shoots out unintelligible,
 badly distorted dialogues in a foreign language. The cinema house smell of iboh wafts, not unpleasantly, in the air.

 

Behind the balcony, up a flight of stairs, is the projection room at Danjuma- unusual,  beautiful. The ease of space with which this building was built, is still very present in this room.  Large, airy, with a small balcony outside overlooking the sunlit street below. Quite different from the regular small dark box that pass for a projection room almost everywhere. The room seems to at least take into account the drudgery of the job and the late hours a film projectionist often keeps. There is a cot in the room, signs of living, even a small black and white television set alongside the projector.  The large 35mm projection machines are still. Their windows are being used as ledges, with small objects of daily use on them. The small box of a video  projector runs sits alongside from a adjacent window.

 

Sonny who runs a small video shop stocking tapes of Indian, Hausa, Chinese and English films, does not visit the theatre anymore. He looks at the many video tapes in his own shop and says, � these are meant for this� (pointing to a television set) not to show on a big screen! He wishes someone would talk to the authorities at the theatre to bring 35 mm projection back on the screen. 

Seems unlikely, I think as I look at the meager crowds looking at the posters outside the hall. A series of poster announces a  �Light up da stage� music concert, of cool Hausa bands in the Danjuma auditorium, with �maximum security guranteed�, to supplement the meager income the theatre must be providing.

 

Danjuma International Cinema. Large spacious, built generously,  By far, the largest building in the landscape. At a distance I see the tall minarets of  the Morcas Arabic and Islamic School. Around the theatre  the road is  neatly lined with single shops, there are hardly any buildings with even a first floor. A large cinema in a working class area.

I think of the contrast with the enclosed, strictly middle, upper middle class housing estates spread over this area, where my friends live. Friends weighed in still by the wasted years of misrule, struggling at relatively late ages, to consolidate hard earned positions or to provide well for newly started families. Friends, who, as young boys had clamoured to this theatre, as young men had frequented road side beer parlours. Had been part of the �common life�. Maybe the leisure and curiosity of early youth, or early adolescence are the only times we step out of our class, mixing with people from other contexts, sharing a more public life. And then, living in more closed contexts, these memories and experiences are almost all we have to connect us to lives outside �people like us�.

 

 Agege has grown. Travelers, visitors, people of different nationalities are seen here today.  Many kinds of shops and markets, catering to different classes of people, as many kinds of homes. On the streets, crowds, and vans of different organizations. The different churches for different classes of congregation, and  now  Muslim assemblies catering to the middle class have grown. For people at large, the  beer parlours continue to be gathering places, lively with  politics, personal relationships, religion, the electricity problem of Agege, lively chatter that sets into relief the silence of a lonely beer drinker.

 

In the market behind my house at Oko Oba, is another world of Agege: a poorer world, lively, vibrant, where small traders make a  very small daily living. These people of this small market  have lived on, through times of violence and disruption,  struggling  to keep their place at the margins of this suburb. It is here on a routine Saturday morning shopping, that I meet a faithful member of the thin crowds at the Agege theatres. I hear a scratchy rendition of a Hindi song, on an old transistor. I ask the owner of the box, a soft-spoken middle aged trader, maybe a little older than my friends, if he likes Indian songs. He does, he likes Indian films too. He still goes to Danjuma, Pen or another small cinema( I later get to know it is Daily Mirror- a small busy cinema house tucked away in a small lane close to Danjuma) on weekends. One film on the weekend. It is a leisure he really tries to make time and money for, an outing he tries to treat himself to. Pen Cinema is out of his reach
 now, far off in Alagbado. But Danjuma and Daily Mirror  still play for their faithful patrons from Agege.
Sunday afternoon , and someone else is minding his pepper-onion-tomato shop. I presume he has gone to diligently keep his tryst with his leisure, the screen at the theatre.


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