The Great Nigerian Films, No. 7: The Campus Queen Review

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Not Rated, 100 m., 2004. Starring Serah Mbaka (Banke), Kabirat Kafidipe (Tolu), Tope Idowu (Governor), Lanre “Sound Sultan” Fasasi (Ladele), Segun Adefila (Toks), Koffi Idowu (Martins). Directed and produced by Tunde Kelani. Screenplay by Akinwumi Isola.

Since the early 1990s, Tunde Kelani, now 77, has perfected a distinctive filmmaking style. His films are marked by Yorùbá aesthetics and worldview and his stories a “literary” feel. Many are adapted from books and are frequently written by writers who sometimes adapt their own plays and novels. Music, dance, choreography, and, sometimes, celebrity performing artists’ cameos, suffuse his work. His mise-en-scene fills up the frames with crowd scenes (market, party, dance, protest, procession, etc.) and, for visual storytelling, placards, posters, paintings, pictures, sculptures, etc.

While his films are steeped into Yoruba culture, his thematic concerns are larger in purview. Often his movies are an allegory of Nigerian socio-political dysfunctions, an exercise in decolonization, and an effort to sensitize the public. See, respectively, Saworoide (1999), Thunderbolt: Magun (2001), and Dazzling Mirage (2015). These themes are sometimes co-mixed in a single film as they are here. The Campus Queen is a typical Kelani’s film. It’s not just infused with music. It’s a musical. There are staged lip-synched performances of music by the likes of Sound Sultan, Cece, and Eldee. There’s choreography. Mime, too. All punctuate, in English, Pidgin, and, mostly, Yoruba, the satirical political drama to delightful effect.

After two musical performances the film shows two young ladies who have been sent by the Heavyweight Club to sponsors at a hotel for a promised donation. This is a usual arrangement between the group president Toks and his patrons in Lagos, two older men in this case, whom he procures university girls to. But one of the ladies, Banke, the film’s protagonist, who isn’t used to these arrangements, won’t be pawned. She relies on her “good girl luck” and cleverness to escape one of the sponsors’ snare.

After her escape, Banke, flanked by her friend Tolu, is confronted by a vexed Toks. A quarrel ensues. This is where Ladele, president of a rival group called The Silver Lines Movement, comes into the picture. Before, the film has opened to The Silver Lines Movement Musical Concert, with clapping sound and a graphically-designed purple curtain, and Ladele has performed a politically-charged song on stage. Now he's loosening Toks from Banke’s hold and Banke from Tok’s. Banke locks Toks shirt, Toks slaps Banke, claiming she’s roughened his sick shirt and tie, Banke insults his mother, accusing his family of running a dirty business. Then plenty threats from both sides. 

Meanwhile she’s held on to the donation, a N50,000-bank draft, and the N25,000 “gifted” to her. (“This,” says the man, of the 25,000, “is from me to you.”) When Toks commands her “give it to [him] now,” she says: “No one can benefit from my humiliation.” Toks then accuses her of converting club’s money into personal use, a claim he tenders as an excuse to exterminate Banke at a Heavyweight Club meeting. His excuse includes, also, Banke’s “defecting to a rival club.”

During the concert the military state governor, who is seated in front row, is abused in a biting protest song: “Governor’s belly is bulging.” The governor notices Banke when both Banke and Ladele go to apologize at his office on behalf of their movement, and she becomes the governor’s love interest. Banke attempts to use her new position to expose the governor, staying true to the character of a Silver Liner. (“You love getting yourself involved in dangerous assignments,” her mum tells her early in the film.)

Ultimately, the conflict matures as the Heavyweights set out to take down Banke and The Silver Lines Movement and as the Liners continue their crackdown of the corrupt powerful. Of course the Heavyweights collaborate with all the men of power that the Liners are bent on “punishing,” some of whom have sponsored the Heavyweights in the past. The Liners sometimes take law in their hands, coercing transgressors to pay for their injustices. 

Just as it has opened, the film closes with The Silver Lines Movement Musical Concert – an event that includes choosing the campus queen of the title at the end. Meanwhile performances from the concert inflect the film, becoming at once both a stringed standalone piece of show and an intricate part of the plot. This structure allows for a thoughtful layering of genres – mime, music, satire, drama, comedy, and action, the weakest of the mix. The balance of it all owes something to Kelani’s sense of taste and measure. The result is a film that is tonally melodramatic and is marked by stylized line deliveries, emotional outbursts, and, mostly for the better, theatrical gestures.

The Campus Queen is a distinct entry into the Nollywood genre of campus films – films set in Nigerian universities, depicting student life. Kelani's Ó Le Kú (1997) is the director’s first foray into the genre. A campus romance, the movie shapeshifts the campus of University of Ibadan into a window that lowers you into a timeless Yorùbá world without losing sight of its academic environment. It presents an unbelievably wide scope that is yet to be matched by either campus films or Yorùbá films. It is perhaps the greatest Yorùbá film of all time, definitely mine.

Pioneer Nollywood scholar Jonathan Haynes believes Ó Le Kú is the first true campus film. So much for being at home in its setting and so much for having impressive range and depth of perspective. Thanks, of course, to Prof. Akinwumi Isola, who adapted his own novel of the same name, penning a tour de force of a screenplay. That depth of perspective, mostly inspired by the professor-screenwriter, who was then an elderly university insider, is here, too. As a result the script lends itself into a pointed understanding of the university as a social institution, a detailed approach that represents even the campus cab drivers and food vendors. This plus the multi-layered structure makes The Campus Queen a unique piece of art in a genre that has Omoge Campus (2001), A Million Tears (2006), Game of War (2005), Jenifa (2008), and Citation (2020) as some of its finest.

But perhaps because of the constant titillating of the film into multiple layers and skins, some performances come off stagey, and a few actors sometimes seem not to converse but recite lines as they struggle to catch the persons of their characters. This isn't surprising. Haynes traces this brand of acting, common especially in Old Nollywood films, to the fact that Nigerian universities mainly school their students in Theatre Arts. When these talents venture into the film industry, they apply their education in theatre to filmmaking. Nonetheless one gets the sense that the supposed-to-be parodic performances on display here have only tipped from comic art into clumsy acting. Even Sarah Mbaka, despite portraying so well a pill of fury that the lead character is, puts up some clumsy shows, especially in the early scenes. But then you could argue she is only being cartoonish to match the sardonic tone of those scenes. Take the Lagos hotel scene. The score is light, spiteful, farcical, pressing these lewd older men into sorry caricatures of their real-life referents. She, too, needs be a caricature. But elsewhere she seems too self-conscious, too aware of her own acting, and it takes a while, about half of the film, before she settles most naturally into her character. 

One successful piece of cartooning is Larinde Akinyele’s acting as Chief T.K. Comical, organic, he moves through his role as if on bolted joints – like a puppet. Such will be true, too, of Lere Painmo, who, playing Chief Bongo, achieves the same effect with opposite technique. He’s a fine parody. But he's also fluent in gestures and not puppet-like as T.K. It’ll be true, too, of Tunji Sotimirin (Dr. Damisa), whose performance, a piece of burlesque, simmers within serious comedy.

The Campus Queen is particularly a fine critique of the corrupt military rule in Nigeria. A piece of musical activism. All the performed songs are protests leveled against the government. The film lashes out at these corrupt failures of politicians boldly and dexterously. But the power of its critique isn’t that it sings of a past in a present tense but that it also rings true of the failed 25-year-and-still-counting civilian rule in the country. Such timelessness marks Kelani’s best films.

The name Tunde Kelani is important to African cinema. He’s perhaps the most researched Nigerian filmmaker, and, Jonathan Hynes has claimed, the Nigerian director most deserving of the auteur appellation. The acclaim is there. The accolades are there. The work, too, is there. A true, original artist, Kelani's body of work will interest any fan of cinema anywhere in the world. The Campus Queen is a quintessential entry point. 

The Great Nigerian Films (TGNF) are a collection of my favourite Nigerian movies in no particular order. My criterion is the quality of a film. But I'm likely to pick a so-so film that is vital to film development and studies in the country.