Satraps and bans.

"Call me Ishmael."

Do you remember that scene when Captain Nemo leads the first recruits of the league of Extraordinary Gentlemen from that London gentleman's club to his automobile and declares, grandiosley I thought, that it was "The future, gentlemen. The future!" quite forgetting the presence of Mina Harker in the process. (I still get a little frisson of joy every time that big V-16 spools up and the thing rumbles to life.)

Kwendo Opanga, writing in the Sunday Nation (Act now or we continue filming mediocrity, 1st March 2015), states baldly that despite the thousands of films produced in Nollywood, they do not really qualify as films because, according to the Unesco Institute for Statistics, April 2013 report, “Nigeria has a very high number of audio-visual productions — on average releasing 966 films per year between 2005 and 2011 — but they are semi-professional/informal productions, most of them artisanal with limited or no theatrical release …” Raise your hand if you think Kenya has somehow managed to escape the Naija fate.

We all loved Nairobi Half Life, and many of us were chuffed that because of Shuga, Kenya's very own won an Oscar, but we know that these were flashes in the pan, flashes that have come after many other flashes without turning into a full-scale conflagration. With the zombies in charge of the film industry in Kenya inured to the realities of torrents and megauploads, it will be quite a while before the film industry, Riverwood or not, contends with the best of Nollywood.

It cost $78 million to make the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The Kenya Film Commission cannot raise one-seventh of that budget to promote sensible film policies in Kenya because it is busily banning films because it simply doesn't understand how the internet works. Until a pro-film-industry cabal takes over the Kenya Film Commission, it really doesn't matter that the Pan African Federation of Film Makers (Fepaci) will be hosted in Nairobi for the next four years, because (a) Kenya Film Commission satraps will be unhappy that they won't get to fly off to Fepaci events in Ouagadougou or Timbuktu for the fat per diems, and (b) the Kenyan film-makers who will need the tender attentios of the Federation will never get near it's directors for all the hurdles placed in their way by the Kenya Film Commission's satraps who will want all access for their own "pet" projects.