For Nigerian documentary filmmakers, Getting Access To Archival Materials Is Difficult and Expensive

Yusuf Ishaya, a Nigerian documentary filmmaker did not set out to make a film about FESTAC. He was at a workshop with archivists, filmmakers, and creators in Lagos, discussing the possibilities of archival materials, when the conversation shifted towards FESTAC. “Up until that moment, I had not known that there had been an event like that,” Ishaya admits. “I knew about Festac Town, and I knew that it was in Lagos, but I didn't know why it was built or what it was built for.”

This curiosity led Ishaya towards digging into the vast history of FESTAC (Festival of Arts and Culture). In the course of his preliminary research, Ishaya would learn for the very first time that the month-long event happened between Lagos and Kaduna and that it showcased the best of African music, fine art, literature, music, religion and performances to a diverse and global audience in 1977. “It felt like I was a history student,” he tells OkayAfrica. “Even from secondary school, this is like the kind of information that I wanted to know and [would have been] proud of.”

In his documentary, FESTAC 77 Exploration of Heritage, Ishaya, along with other filmmakers and researchers, Eiseke Bolaji, Olabode Moses and Azeezah Adekanbi explored the sprawling but often misrepresented story of FESTAC. The documentary explored the work and reason behind the event, its ambitious scope, which turned Nigeria into a formidable host country, to accommodate the number of guests coming in, a temporary settlement, known now as FESTAC town, was built from scratch. The project mixes old footage, photographs, and other archival materials that are largely inaccessible to the public. Those archival materials were also incredibly difficult for Ishaya and his team to access during the course of their project. 

Ishaya says the process was long. “At first I thought I was just going to get footage from the National Film Institute, and it turns out that they didn't have [any]. I found out that there were already documentaries about FESTAC on YouTube, but they weren't the story I wanted to tell. I felt like there were missing pieces.” To Ishaya, most of the existing documentaries focused heavily on the facts: the 16,000 people who attended, for instance, but hardly anything about the role Kaduna played during the experience. 

But to tell that story with some level of newness, Ishaya knew he had to access and incorporate footage and details that already published documentaries were missing. And as a Nigerian filmmaker, working within an industry still struggling to establish a formidable archival ecosystem, that proved to be an issue. 

Accessing and using archival footage or photographs from CBAAC (the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation), run by the Federal Ministry of Culture, was one of those hassles for Ishaya. “There was a lot of red tape for me to get access,” he explains. “They have hours and hours and hours of footage. I sent at least four emails over a course of maybe like 7 months, and had to start going there physically and would not leave until we got some sort of audience. But it still was not successful. I only got the footage 5 days or so before the deadline.”

Ishaya says he was only able to access the footage he needed by securing a personal line to the director. Nigerian filmmakers working in documentary and nonfiction are often met with stymies when trying to access footage that can enrich their work. It’s a pattern that resonates with other filmmakers, OkayAfrica spoke to for this story.

Enduring patterns

In recent years, the interest in archival materials has risen. In Nigeria, Archivi.ng has been digitising old Nigerian newspapers as a way of not merely preserving history that would otherwise have rotted away, but using these archival materials to inform and contextualize present socio-cultural conditions. Other online platforms, such as Archiveafrica, have established an accessible entry point into understanding Africa’s rich history through images. And in Ghana, the Dikan Center has been at the forefront of restoring and preserving Africa’s lost history. 

This interest is fueling a new generation of artists, who unfortunately are not always able to access the historical materials they need to make sense of the present. 

In cases where footage exists in Nigeria, it is usually difficult for filmmakers to access it or get a pathway to securing permission to use it, even when the purposes of that usage are educational. While working on his own documentary, filmmaker Ifeoluwa Olutayo had to access archival materials from the British Film Institute, which has the largest collection of colonial footage from their former colonies. These materials were from the colonial times, and as Olutayo explains, were often recorded without permission and under conditions of forced occupation.

“There's a conversation again to be had about the validity of their claim to what they shot because they took no permission from the colonized peoples,” Olutayo notes. “To access a minute of colonial footage was going to cost £4,920. And by the time I did the calculation for maybe 10 minutes of footage, you're looking at almost £50,000.”

For Olutayo, it was a bitter reminder of the power imbalance that still exists between colonial institutions and the people whose heritage they plundered. “It just came back to this idea of neo-colonialism coming back in a subtle form where you took an image violently from a colony and then the former colony has to pay to access images you took by force.” The situation raises an important question about restitution. At a time when physical artefacts are the biggest focus of repatriation efforts, what does reparation look like in the realm of documented history, caged and inaccessible to the people born of said history? What can a partnership look like with the Nigerian government to democratize access to footage held in private hands and Western institutions to help improve collective consciousness?

“It will be good if the government could support these endeavours in some sort of agreement where they get a copy of that heritage domiciled within the national film, video, and sound archive because that is the central archive and you should be able to go there and access this,” Olutayo says.

In many ways, Olutayo and Ishaya admit that the slim access to archival material is hindering the scope and scale of work that non-fiction and documentary filmmakers could be doing. Nigeria is currently dealing with a dearth in historical education. History was once cut from the curriculum, and archival institutions or museums are still figuring out where they fit and how they can be necessary sources of collective enlightenment. 

“You have to build a system where whoever it is that wants to access these things knows where to go and knows what to type in to be able to get access to them,” Ishaya says. “They are not cheap, but people don't see it as important. That is why the archives are suffering. That is why it's in such a dilapidated state, and it's really sad because there's so much that can be done with what is in the archive.”