By Morenike Taire

Jenifa – aka funke Akindele, or is it the other way round- is the household name that has changed the way  we do the big screen, probably forever.

Before the film Jenifa, she was only the obscure, plain looking actress on daytime television playing one of three friends on some sponsored drama telling us to beware of the downsides of early marriage, vesico vaginal fistula and female genital mutilation.

Then, she became a brand though, at the time, she was totally unaware of the transition. It was not until earlier 2012 that the Jenifa brand was effectively and formally stamped upon the public consciousness: Funke akindele herself announced her intention to turn Jenifa into a series in the mould of Tyler Perry and Madea.

There are one or two differences between the Jenifa brand and the Madea one vis-à-vis their owners, chief of which is that Madea is quite distinct from its actor and producer in terms of age and gender, while the character Jenifa is quite similar to its creator. Otherwise, in terms of genre (both comedy) and central themes, they are rather similar.
Rather disingenuous then, it would seem, but then which brand is completely original? A brand is innately and essentially a shallow entity, whose whole essence is the presentation of a front to its consumers. That front is not necessarily precise, but would likely slant towards the ideal rather than the reality. With a good lashing of humour however, it is easier to miss the imperfections and see the integrity of the brand.

Funke Akindele

The right to be morph into the brand has been earned, as it always has to be, mostly from its influence on the industry in general. In the Yoruba genre of the Nigerian film industry globally known as Nollywood, tragicomedy had been the order of the day traditionally. Yet, the failure of the older and more local genres of Nollywood to influence the industry in any significant way has cost it respect and definition.

Many of the greatest stories ever told on the big screen at home as well as internationally have had love as their central theme (Ogunde’s Aiye/Jaiyesimi, the Sound of Music, the big screen version of the epic love story of Austrian World War 11; Gone with the Wind, another classic, and of course Kelani’s Oleku). Needless to stress, other themes are more difficult to push, particularly when the consumer cannot immediately relate with them.

Akindele did it successfully, and created a fashionable, contemporary theme which has stood the test of time and will likely attain classic status on the long term.

This  could be arguable, but what is not is that Jenifa was the strongest and most unforgettable female character ever created in Nollywood. It is easy, also, to identify with her. Everyone knows a jenifa: a caricature type young Nigerian woman with an inferiority complex, a propensity to cut corners, sell her body and live a lifestyle way above her means. Her rollercoaster life is exciting, to say the least, and is mostly so because she has neither a future to look forward to, nor a past to look back on. She is the girl the consumer loves to hate and hates to love. While the generous lashings of humour were more than tongue-in-cheek, Jenifa the film was a most apt metaphor of the times.

It is no wonder then that its influence was wide-reaching, and had various implications. A rash of movies were to follow Jenifa (Omo Ghetto, Blackberry babes) centred around the same theme: badly behaved wannabe young women who get into trouble in the end. The humour is varied in concentration, if not as clever. Nothing succeeds like success, as they say, and what better a way to build on and consolidate that success than to make a brand of it?

Enabled by technology and a continually shrinking world, the new artiste was created, the one who can be innovator, producer, director and actor all at the same time. Division of labour might be one thing, but an ailing industry can only be redirected by leadership, and this is what Akindele, via Jenifa, provided.

Beyond the industry, Jenifa has affected our urban culture in a way no other film had done before, in a way that is comparable with the Bridget Jones Diary, or DBanj of the Koko fame, or 2Face of the no long tin. At the end of the day, it is not the quality of the brand or product- important as that is- that determines the success of a brand. It is the extent to which the brand influences and moulds popular culture.

ALUU 4 KILLINGS: A culture of violence

It’ been a long way, it would seem, from the days when society wholeheartedly endorsed jungle justice. The Nigerian tyrannical leader Sanni Abacha was haunted to his death over the execution by hanging  of Niger Delta Activist Ken Saro Wiwa and 8 of his associates, together with whom he came to be known as the Ogoni9. While the execution had been the fallout of a mob action that saw to the brutal slaughtering of the Ogoni4, the slaughter had attracted less of the public’s sympathy than the lack of due process in the prosecution of the Ogoni9.

At the time it had been perfectly normal to roast a petty thief alive in full view of a cheering crowd, and the only reason most of the south kicked against the introduction of Sharia law in Zamfara state and some other northern state was that it was linked to religion.

File photo: One of the suspects with journalists in Port Harcourt,.

On a good day in large cosmopolitan cities such as Lagos, vocal violence is not only a very present phenomenon, it is one that has been accepted by the norm. People settling their dubious differences by fistcuffs in the streets are mostly seen by onlookers with little more than indifference. Slowly, we have built for ourselves a culture of violence.

Interestingly, people looked on as the four students of the University of Port Harcourt were mobbed for alleged theft. It is baffling that the same people who stood by and cheered are the same ones who were crying and saying the right things on television later, after the deed had been done. The more of a permissive environment we create, the more the lines between right and wrong are blurred, and the more likely that people will stand by, and not have the moral indignation to stop events like public lynching from going on.