The documentary as a genre of filmmaking is not favoured in Nigeria for the sheer reason that it doesn't have the sort of popular commercial potential that gave birth to the so-called Nollywood.

True, the earliest films made here were of the documentary type, used as a record and promotion of its policies and programmes by the British colonial administration, it never really caught up with the cinema going public.

This has confined its source of funding to government and corporate business interest and limited its availability. It has also made its production less adventurous than it is in Europe and the US where documentaries are commercially exhibited and patronized by theatre-goers.

Ibadan- The cradle of Nigerian Literati, by DV Worx's Femi Odugbemi, is a conventional entry, judging by the source of its funding - the Nigerian Film Corporation and Federal Ministry of Information and Communications - but a rare one if weighed against the fact of Nigeria's predilection for non-documentation of its momentous contributions to world civilization.

Up till now, it is hard to find a film or video documentary locally produced on music legend Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. The few we've seen come from Europe, with European funding. It is rare to find one on Wole Soyinka, or Chinua Achebe or Austin Okocha or Philip Emegwali.

Ibadan is not an attempt to sell any government policy or programme or any commercial product; it is a purely cultural concern, trying to situate Nigeria's literary beginnings, especially the published variant.

It does that engagingly in 48 minutes, 26 of which dwells on the ancient city of the title, more as the country's hob of post-colonial socio-cultural and political revolutionary thinking, with as much library material as anyone could scrounge up in a country with a minimal appreciation of history. The pains of working with a poor archive shines through.

As a digital video conference on Ibadan city as a cultural milestone, this is a pacy and never-boring job, lining up such contributors as Soyinka, Segun Olusola (the first television producer in Africa), poet Odia Ofeimun, publishers Aigboje Higo of Heinemann, Akintayo Thomas, Bankole Olayebi and Spectrum's Joop Berkhout, with poems and literary comments by J.P Clark, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare and Tony Marinho.

Higo's 90-minute dramatic narration of how he, a non-indigene, acquired the elite status of an Ibadan chieftain captures the liberal and cosmopolitan essence of the old city the way the remaining 24-plus minutes devoted to that subject never succeeded.

But, apart from the problem of lack of stock material that a documentarian must creatively surmount in Nigeria, the tradition of heavy voice over commentary, celebrating a brilliant script (by Afolabi Adesanya, Tomide Faquez and Femi Odugbemi) makes Ibadan dependent more on words than pictures and atmospheric sound in a way that deprives the viewer of sharing in the vivacity of Ibadan life.

Yet, nothing can excuse the re-writing of Clark's immortal poem on the ancient city at the beginning: "Running splash of rust and gold, flung and scattered around seven hills, like broken china in the sun." Clark's own word is "among" (seven hills), not "around". This version of the poem could pass as an adaptation if not attributed still to Clark.

For the record also, the emphasis of Berkhout that the arrival of Oxford University Press in 1948 at Ibadan was "the VERY beginning of publishing" in Nigeria is dubious, considering that by 1859 missionary Henry Townsend had initiated publishing with the newspaper Iwe Iroyin and a few less known publications at Abeokuta.

Nevertheless, such revelations as the discovery of novelist Chinua Achebe and the publishing of his world classic, Things Fall Apart, and the fact that the popular African Writers Series of literary treasures was actually founded at Ibadan with Achebe's novel pioneering are evidence that Odugbemi delivered the promise Ibadan made in its title.

Reviewer
Muritala Sule