After Karin Barber’s canonical essay on audiences in Africa in which she lays out some theoretical and methodological apparatuses with which to approach audiences, little has been done to probe deeply “how audiences do their work of interpretation” (Barber 1997, 357). In the last three monographs (Haynes, 2017; Miller, 2016 and Meyer, 2015) on Nigerian and Ghanaian films, the audience question – their socio-economic status and their meaning-making experiences with viewing African films – has been treated marginally. This approach silences a significant group of people in the economics of filmmaking. Although a bold exception to the silence is Meyer’s (2015) work on Ghanaian films, yet the discourse on audiences can easily be glossed over as a result of the book’s thematic engagement with visions of religion. Furthermore, the dominance of textual analyses in African film scholarship (Agina, 2016b) has rendered the need for audience and reception studies even more glaring. It is difficult to deny that the audience factor is an indispensable element in the film production and consumption circuit. As Barber (1997) affirms, “there are different ways of convening, and of experiencing reception, whether collectively or in dispersal, which are deeply connected to the nature of social life of the age and place” (p. 347). Therefore, this study seeks to break the silence by allowing the voices of cinema-going audiences in two African countries emerge strongly. Through ethnographic and survey approaches, existing knowledge gaps will be closed with rich and multilayered descriptions of film audiences in Lagos and Accra – two important filmmaking cities on the continent – where little information exists on the socio-economic status, preferences and interpretive strategies of African film viewers. In doing so, it will also examine the economic, social, legal and political conditions within which films are distributed and consumed. The paper will be useful to filmmakers, cinema operators, investors and scholars, who require more than market research surveys for creative intervention in the film industries under investigation. Specifically, the objectives of this breaking-the-silence study are:
- to update the history of spectatorship in Nigeria and Ghana
- to examine and document the socio-economic status, audience preferences and interpretive strategies of Lagos and Accra cinema-going audiences in an attempt to close existing knowledge gaps in film spectatorship.