UBT_TaiSha2021 - Taiwo Shango

This project will analyse and evaluate the long-lost TV film, Taiwo Shango: Der 2. Tag nach dem Tod (TS) (1965) — a coproduction by the Bavarian Broadcasting Cooperation (BR), West German Broadcasting (WDR), and Nigerian Television Service (NTS) — in relation to contemporaneous cultural production in Nigeria. Directed by Klaus Stephan, BR’s ‘resident specialist correspondent’, the film makes controversial use of a historical incident – the interruption of the ritual suicide at Oyo (1946) – that Wole Soyinka responded to in Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), and which inspired Duro Ladipo’s ‘Yoruba opera’ Oba Waja (1964). Shot almost entirely with Nigerian actors on location, the film sits uneasily at the juncture of an emerging national Nigerian television service, post-independence cultural production (specifically in connection to Yoruba Travelling Theatre, the Mbari Clubs and Ulli Beier), Stephan’s journalistic out-put and the work of his wife, Nina Fischer-Stephan, photographer and filmmaker. We propose to analyse the context in which TS was produced, the modalities of production, the distribution of and responses to the film. We will study its multi-layered, multi-lingual aesthetics in relation to contemporaneous Nigerian works, including its soundtrack for which Akin Euba was the musical consultant. Above all, we will pay attention to the intersection of gender, race, nationality, religion and class to examine power relations both on - and off-screen. Our project is a first step towards the recuperation, appraisal and digitisation of two major private collections: the Fischer-/Stephan archive (Iwalewahaus), and the Lagos holdings of the late Segun Olusola, producer and actor in TS, and a neglected pioneer of Nigerian television. The project contributes to the RS Arts & Aesthetics’ objective to study the multidirectional flows of creative works, and how they contribute to social and artistic experiences across, and beyond, West Africa and Europe.