Yet another textual form produced by the impact of digital media on Nollywood films is the videogame. I have already discussed previously in my book Cultural Netizenship how internet memes, GIFs and other aesthetics of social media aesthetics demonstrate an intermedial convergence between Nollywood and other media assemblages. The point of that earlier work is basically to think about how platform culture shapes the ontologies of African popular arts. You know Nollywood is a global brand not only because its best films now travel to major film festivals around the world but also because its images and scenes consolidate their famed entrance into the flow of global media culture through its unabating supply of internet memes and narratives.
But beyond the transnational opportunities streaming platforms like Netflix now provide people around the world to consume Nollywood films, there is also the visibility of Nigerian films among a playful commentariat on the internet some of whom rely on Aki and Pawpaw memes for their everyday online communication. With real names Osita Iheme and Chinedu Ikedieze, Aki and Pawpaw are two diminutive actors who often played children characters in Nollywood movies many years ago.
For those of us who grew up watching the home videos of the 2000s, the story of two rascally boys who were essentially a menace to their community was quite a filmic encounter not to be forgotten. I am talking specifically about the 2002 comic film Akin na Ukwa in which Aki and Pawpaw were first introduced. Two decades later, a remake of this movie, eponymously titled Aki and Pawpaw began streaming on Netflix, with both troublesome brothers relocating to Lagos and angling for social media fame after meeting a dishonest online influencer who profits off of their talents.
With a new mobile game featuring both Nigerian actors becoming available on Google Play stores in the first quarter of 2023, Nollywood’s convergence with other media forms, it appears, continues to bear the distinctive marks of Aki and Pawpaw. Developed by Blueportal the first Nollywood-based mobile game, Aki and Pawpaw Epic Run mimics the aesthetics and goals of popular running games (like Temple Run), as the main player runs away from trouble using mainly either Aki or Pawpaw as avatars.
To gain points, they overcome challenges throughout the duration of gameplay while encountering different obstacles that hinder their escape. The gamer runs to avoid several assailants including a street vendor, a street urchin, and a masquerade. But, curiously, its message appears to be that something nefarious in Lagos keeps you endlessly running and panting. Even a masquerade, an otherwise significant symbol of African religious traditions and cultural performances, is problematically presented as a danger from which one must flee. A certain demonization of indigenous aesthetics animates the plot of the game, it seems. At this thematic level, the game can immediately imagined as extending Nollywood’s abiding fascination with urban processes, especially in the city of Lagos. While the game is fascinating for its exploration of urban locations in Nigeria, that it articulates a particular, troubling image of the city aligns with Nollywood’s atypical portrayal of stereotypic narratives about everyday life in Nigeria as a hellish experience to avoid. It is like the game is bent on presenting Lagos as, to use the title of Nigerian novelist Toni Kan, a carnivorous city that devours people through crime and violence. There are, of course, many troubling realities in Lagos and other urban spaces in Nigeria, but that is just one aspect of the narrative.
We can look past this dimension of the game and commend its developers for reminding potential consumers that people play in Africa. At the same time, one also gets the sense that it ironically undercuts an African agency by depicting the experiences of its Nigerian characters as people constrained by tales of woes and troubles from which they have to escape. I can’t but think Aki and Pawpaw, like many in Nigeria today, would japa and leave the country if they could.
But these contradictions also generate the game’s promises as a valid expression of African popular culture. Video games as digital genres work as interactive and alternative digital objects intended through their design and aesthetics to convey specific narrative experiences based on user interactions. There are many creators of video games in Africa that present visual narratives which open aesthetic windows into the African predicament. From multiplayer games on Boko Haram to games that portray African farming practices, the video game is a significant aspect of digital culture in Africa and we need to do more to ingratiate ourselves as scholars to the scholarly provocations it activates.
Besides being an important aspect of a culture industry that is yet to be fully theorized in the Africanist context, it is an excellent instantiation of how now digital objects build on the mobile phone revolution in Africa to document and express quotidian realities. Here, I can think of another Nigerian mobile game Sambisa Assault, created by Chopup, a company that promises to give the world games that tell the African narrative. The combat game is based on the insurgency of the armed group Boko Haram and has players hunting down members of the armed group in their jungle stronghold. Players have a gaming experience through which they participate in a virtual battle with the terror group, killing and disarming them around the Sambisa forest. This was at a point when Boko Haram constituted a menace in Nigeria.
If Wakanda’s Afrofurist world in Black Panther constructs a solution in Nakia’s secret missions for terrorist activities in Northern Nigeria, Sambisa Assault puts players in the line of fire. I realize the aim of the game creators, to get users to “save our city” by taking on the terrorists, seemed utopian. Like another plastic experiment that remained in the ether. But I think the game enabled pertinent analyses of the social impact of fictional narratives and media discourses on the coverage of the Boko Haram terror, propelling us to examine the relevance of gaming to the media coverage and representation of terrorism.
In Sambisa Assault, we can focus also on the representation of terrorists as othered subjects, enemies to be killed and annihilated, but the game also invites us to think about questions of mob justice and what it means for citizens to take up arms against violent social actors. Along with Aki and Pawpaw Epic Run, the game is another fascinating example of how digital platforms enable digital storytelling as another aesthetic mode by which people now respond to social and political issues in many parts of Africa. While it is true that they are texts of pleasure and entertainment that often get caught up in the debates about gun control and violence in the US, video games, as one sees in Aki and Pawpaw Epic Run, are indeed sites of social meanings and political ideologies.
In addition to these two games, and beyond the Nigerian digital ecology, there are more sophisticated video games that focus on sociopolitical issues from other parts of Africa. For instance, at some point, the Ugandan video game developer Lual Mayen offered a preview of the game “Salaam” which, like Samba Assault is focused on social impact. Based on his life as a refugee, the mobile phone game gives players the opportunity to take on the identity of a refugee who escapes a troubled area or conflict zone, even as they strive to survive by gathering food and medicine while also running away from violence.
This video game allows players to develop empathy for refugees, connecting a new media form with the immigration politics and anti-refugee populism being witnessed around the world. By examining how games like this, as well as Sambisa Assault, and Aki and Pawpaw Epic Run manifest as symbolic texts of digital culture in Africa, the task of a more extended analysis will be to reflect on some of the ways by which the game industry in places like Nigeria remains underdeveloped. A more solid industry has the potential to strengthen scholarly and public discussions on the poetics and politics of digital media more generally in Africa.
For Aki and Pawpaw Epic Run, it might be useful to close by adding that the game gives Nollywood audiences another kind of experience of two of the industry’s beloved characters. At the same, it is playing on nostalgia by reconnecting audiences back to an era of Nollywood that is far gone, one that offers a counterpoint to the current realities of the moment. This tendency is common in forms of popular culture, but it is probably the first time in Nollywood gaming has been recruited as an entertaining affordance to bring back the past. The design and graphics of the game might not be anywhere near the industry standards, but it is another step further in the Nigerian creative industries.
James Yékú 