African societies have witnessed tremendous changes in many spheres of economic, cultural, and social life over several hundred years. Beginning with the forced expatriation of people from the continent, followed by the diffusion of the African population throughout the "New World," African peoples have had to endure untold and unimaginable change. They continue to negotiate on a daily basis the challenges brought on by the forces of globalization and the pervasive influence of mass media. Out of the distress of change of many African societies come a number of cultural forms; as African people endure, they reinvent traditions, creating something out of nothing. Some cultural forms may appear as broad-based popular culture, other forms as political texts. But what binds together these arising cultural forms is that they express the experiences and struggles of local creators and speak to local audiences. Contemporary arts in Africa reveal the real Africa, because they are mostly produced outside the scrutiny of the policies on culture and the arts imposed by African governments. Because popular arts are created outside the watchful eye of the law, they often incorporate elements of subversive narrative, and do so in a playful manner. These works are some of the most authentic and spontaneous responses from the people living at the very bottom of society. It is the people's art, defined by the people and sustained by their enthusiasm.

The video-film is one such art form, and one of the most vibrant forms of popular art in contemporary Africa's postcolonial cultural space. The genre of film narrative produced on video crosses several borders: technical medium, class, social sector, and nation. Video-film in Africa is defined as "something between television and cinema," and far from the North American variety. Video-film is an example of Africa's involvement in what some African scholars refer to as a "dubious modernity": on the one hand, it ties local practice to the global world, but on the other, it signals the filmmakers' depleting resources in this part of the "Third World." This popular art form was created out of the necessity of a continent's economic predicament. During the economic, religious, and political exigencies of Africa during the 1970s, film producers in the region turned to video technology as the last resort when it became obvious that they could no longer afford to tell stories in celluloid format.

The video-film is the medium of the city. It was initiated in the city and defined by the aspirations of the upwardly-mobile young urban generation. When video-film first made its debut in Nigeria, it mostly portrayed the seedy and flashy aspects of urban life, in the starkest of terms. This was also the case in Ghana. Video-film concerned itself with the themes of the city: violence; witchcraft and sorcery; prostitution; tradition versus modernity; the rise of religious fundamentalism; and with the continual decline in the economy, including debilitating poverty. Chief Kenneth Nnebue, considered the "pioneer" of the Nigerian video-film, created two early examples, Living in Bondage I and II and Glamour Girls I and II, both extremely popular with local audiences. Their central theme was the city, with sub-themes about the decline of family values, the rise of individualism, and financial greed. In Living in Bondage I and II, the primary question deals with how the urban upwardly-mobile make money and the way they live, i.e., ostentatious, brazen, and loud. In Glamour Girls I and II, the focus turns to the place of "opportunistic" women, and how they negotiate to get the better deal from their patrons, the males of the city. Depicting for the most part the lives of ordinary people living ordinary lives, these early video-films inaugurated an entertaining and playful means of interrogating society.

The story of video in Ghana is not remarkably different. Its popularity can be easily apprehended by the screaming banners outside the venues now known as "video parlors" announcing new releases and screenings. These parlors are small rooms outfitted with video cassette players and small television sets, where the audience pays to see the evening's advertised video-film. Most of the works, with titles such as Kiss Your Wife, Step Dad, and Diablo I and II, deal with themes such as the integrity of the family, and the ever-present debate on the rise of Pentecostalism in contemporary Ghanaian society.

In Nigeria and Ghana, video-film began as a pedestrian art undertaken by small, entrepreneurial businesses. Amaka Igwe, who produced Violated and other titles, offered her definition of the genre to a local journalist: "It's not really art for art's sake. It's arts for business and it's not business for business, it's business for arts. I'm an artist but a business person." As a medium, video-film's popularity soon spread to the religious sector, including even the puritanical new Pentecostal churches, which arose in the aftermath of the economic structural adjustment era in Africa. Very quickly, the new churches found a use for the video-film. In these religious videos, traditional belief systems are often pitted against Christian doctrine, with the narrative order emphasizing the Manichean duality between good and evil. The Christian God represents all that is light and good, whereas traditional beliefs are portrayed as darkness. These films are a strategy used by the urban religious leaders to attract the urban poor, who, longing to escape their excruciating poverty, would turn to a belief in a better afterlife as promised by the Christian ideology.

The Nigerian and Ghanaian video-film industries began independently in the 1970s and did not have any close contact with one another until the late 1990s when co-productions between the two began. Some Ghanaians resisted the influx of Nigerian film. As one researcher in Ghana wrote me, "I fear the imperialism of the Nigerians in Ghana." What this shows is that these Ghanaians (as well as Tanzanians and other Africans) fear a new kind of colonization, not only by the West or "First World," but by neighbors—the bigger, comparatively stronger countries within Africa. This was especially felt from officials of the culture agencies, who continue the cultural politics of Ghana's first post-colonial president, Kwame Nkruma. Nonetheless, video workers in Nigeria and Ghana have begun collaborating across national borders. The co-productions between Nigerians and Ghanaians suggest that in the near future cross-border cooperation may grow to gain enough clout to resuscitate the ailing African film industry.

The similarities between the Nigerian and Ghanaian video-film are very telling. Extremely popular and widely patronized across ethnic and class divides in both countries, this emerging sub-continental video culture is a response to the realities of Africa's chief postcolonial edifice: the city. Video-film presents to scholars of history, cultural studies, ethnography, and visual studies a way of understanding how contemporary Africans see themselves, and how they see the outside world that has held an unmitigated fascination for them. But more than anything else, the video-film phenomenon points to the fact that Africa may be economically distressed—but the continent is never tired of trying to make sense of it all.

Dr. Onookome Okome, a professor in Nigeria and a visiting scholar in Germany, is currently writing a book on the video-film phenomenon entitled, "The Video-Film in Nigeria: Policy, Audience, and Producers."