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The globalization of cultural industries: Nollywood – the view from the South

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THE GLOBALIZATION OF CULTURAL INDUSTRIES:
NOLLYWOOD – THE VIEW FROM THE SOUTH

by

Jade L. Miller

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2010

Copyright 2010 Jade L. Miller
ii
DEDICATION

For my parents
Susan Basow
and
Jay Miller
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation is the culmination of five years of hard work mostly in Los
Angeles, CA.
I’d like to first thank my parents, Susan Basow and Jay Miller for their support for
me throughout my graduate career and my entire life. Both have always made me feel
there is nothing I can’t do and I feel incredibly lucky to have them in my court no matter
what life throws me.
I’d also like to offer deep thanks to my advisor, Manuel Castells, for his
unwavering support of me throughout my academic career. He’s always believed in my
potential and has been there for me throughout my growth as a scholar and as a person
over the past five years. His feedback has been invaluable, and he always seems to know
what I want to say with much more clarity than how I’ve been saying it. His support for
this project is what made it possible.
Special thanks as well go to Sarah Banet-Weiser who served as co-chair,
advocate, and supporter, and in every way enabled things to go smoothly in my many
times of greatest need during this project! The other members of my committee have also
been very supportive and have each contributed to the final form of this project through
their particular expertise: Jonathan Taplin, Adam Clayton Powell III, and Elizabeth
Currid. The same can be said for the members of the faculty whose offices I’ve often
shown up in unannounced looking for advice: François Bar, Alison Trope, Jonathan
Aronson, Josh Kun, and Larry Gross, as well as Nollywood scholars John Downing, Jon
Haynes, and Brian Larkin, all of whom offered advice on research in Nigeria. My
dissertation also went particularly smoothly with the assistance of Manuel Castells’ two
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extremely helpful assistants, Melody Lutz and Susy Garciasalas, and AnneMarie
Campian and Donna McHugh in Student Services and Christine Lloreda in the Director’s
Office. I also feel lucky to have landed in a graduate program that treats its graduate
students so well and provided generous graduate support over the past five years: I will
miss the ability to do my reading and revising while laying out by USC’s outdoor pool!
I would also like to thank my friends who have helped me forget about the
pressures of this project, particularly: in New York, John Smith and Jennie McCormick;
in San Francisco, Meredith Marzuoli; in London, Daniella Rossi; in Denver, Marika
Tonay; in Los Angeles, Amy Judd, Christine Han, Tree Alexander, Eric Dy and everyone
else from the neighborhood. My fellow graduate students have also been invaluable:
especially, Lauren Movius, Amelia Arsenault, Eleanor Morrison, Inna Arzumanova,
Melissa Brough, Lana Swartz, Kevin Driscoll, Laura Portwood-Stacer, and also Drew
Margolin, without whose frequent advice sessions I might not have survived the first few
years of grad school.
That all said, the people who truly made this project possible were all those in
Nigeria and connected to Nollywood who responded favorably to my requests for help.
Gbemi Olujobi is perhaps the one person who enabled the form of this entire dissertation,
as she so graciously welcomed me to Lagos by introducing me to her good friend, the
Arts Editor of the illustrious Guardian newspaper, a man who knows nearly everybody in
Nollywood. I never expected my research in Lagos to go so rapidly and so smoothly, and
Gbemi paved the way: she was kind enough to worry about me in her spare time as well!
I also thank those at Communicating for Change in Lagos, particularly Isaac Yahi who
seemed the only person in all of Nigeria who agreed with me that there was no place in
v
Lagos too dangerous for me to go and who agreed to accompany me on each quest,
laughing at my foolishness the whole time. Without the CFC, I’m not sure I could even
have afforded a long-term stay in Lagos and would certainly have been much less well
taken care of. On that note, I would like to thank Jennifer DeWitt Walsh at the U.S.
Consulate in Lagos who introduced me to the CFC. I would also like to thank Sylvester
Ogbechie and the Nollywood Foundation in Los Angeles for allowing me to attend their
event in the summer of 2009 and make my first contacts in Nollywood from the comfort
of a hotel reception in Westwood. I would also like to thank Kathy Smith for actually
coming to visit in Lagos, for bringing me cherries from the States which surely never
tasted so good before, and for sweeping me off to the alternative universe of an Ikoyi
hotel for the weekend right when I needed it most.
I would also like to thank all of my interview subjects for taking time out of their
busy days to speak with me, especially those who introduced me to others. I’d
particularly like to thank those who not only agreed to an interview but also those who
braved Lagos traffic to actually pick me up and take me places despite my protestations
that my directionally-challenged driver was sufficient, particularly Ufuoma Ejenoboor.
And I’d like to thank my most difficult interview subject, Marketer 2, for allowing
himself to finally be pinned down via near-stalking and blatant banquet-crashing outside
of the Lagos Airport Hotel. On that note, I would like to thank all of the people of Nigeria
whom I encountered, who were almost without exception incredibly welcoming and
accommodating to me, the rare and obvious foreigner in their midst as I hopped okadas,
negotiated terribly, and traipsed through remote neighborhoods with a crumpled and
somewhat useless address in my hand.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii

LIST OF TABLES vii

ABSTRACT viii

CHAPTER ONE:
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Endnotes 20

CHAPTER TWO:
The Growth of a Peripheral Movie Industry: The Growth of Nollywood 21
Figure 1: Number of Movies Submitted Annually to NFVCB, 1994 - 2003 33
Chapter 2 Endnotes 51

CHAPTER THREE:
The Processes of Movie Production and Distribution in Nollywood 54
Chapter 3 Endnotes 81

CHAPTER FOUR:
Organizing Nollywood: Government Policy and Self Organizing Alternatives 84
Chapter 4 Endnotes 128

CHAPTER FIVE:
The Cultural Specificity and Appeal of Nollywood 131
Chapter 5 Endnotes 150

CHAPTER SIX:
Nollywood and its Global Connections 151
Chapter 6 Endnotes 177

CHAPTER SEVEN:
Conclusion 178
Chapter 7 Endnotes 192

REFERENCES 193

APPENDIX
Table 1: List of Interviews 198
Table 2: List of Observations 202

vii
LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: List of Interviews 198

Table 2: List of Observations 202

viii
ABSTRACT
This study interrogates the rise of new hubs and nodes in the global cultural
industries through an in-depth examination of the Nigerian movie industry known as
Nollywood. Informal and networked in nature, Nollywood is the second largest movie
industry in the world in terms of titles produced per year, and the dominant popular
movie producer of sub-Saharan Africa and the African diaspora. Through analysis of the
rise, shape, governance, content, and global connections of this industry, this study
investigates the shape of global cultural industry networks and the specific challenges and
opportunities facing cultural industries growing in the global South, outside of the
traditional core. The project is the result of extensive fieldwork done globally but mostly
in Lagos, Nigeria, and involved 40 interviews with key actors and 22 observations.
The implications of the location of this industry are at the heart of this project:
Nollywood is centered in Lagos, a rapidly growing African mega-city, and an exemplar
of the non-spatially-bounded Fourth World, which is made up of that which exists in the
gaps between connections to the dominant global order. From here, one can examine the
ways in which cultural industry growth in the periphery differs substantially from such
growth in the global North, where most research on creative industry development has
been done. One can also examine implications of the global reach of this industry on
debates regarding global flows of culture, as Nollywood movies, a product of the global
South, are circulated globally through alternative informal networks.
The findings of this research suggest a view of global cultural industry networks
as multi-polar, and rife with multi-directional flows, standing in the face of North-to-

ix
South conceptions of flows in global cultural industries. This research also suggests a
new understanding of cultural industry growth in the periphery as being necessarily
different from cultural industry growth in the global North. The growth of Nollywood,
marked by informality and the strength of black and gray market networks, is an
exemplar of the different shape of challenges and opportunities that confront creative
industry growth in the urban global periphery.
As the globe is increasingly networked, and the Network Society increasingly
becomes the organizing principle of people and industries globally, the emergence of
networked informal cultural industries in the global periphery will likely increase, and
informality, opacity, and unofficial alternative networks will become even more relevant.
The future may be in the harnessing of networked creativity from emerging global hubs,
and this project suggests the implications of this both in terms of new understandings of
cultural industry growth, and in terms of new conceptualizations of the shape of cultural
industry networks in the Network Society.

1
CHAPTER ONE:
Introduction

At a Film Financing session as part of the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival, a
panel of five global film industry professionals convened a session intended for producers
of independent films entitled “Crossing Borders: Global Film Markets.” Throughout the
discussion, the panelists, including a representative for international buyers, and
specialists in selling international distribution rights, painted a picture of a global system
of media sales: rights being sold under similar terms to virtually identical buyers who
happen to represent different territories which all function under the same system, and all
operating under similar logics. They discussed the rationality, for instance, of splitting
theatrical rights from television and DVD rights on the global film market, and the global
decline in DVD watching they attributed not only to piracy but also to rising global
consumer preference for one-time viewing. The picture they painted was of the world as
a global market, split into territories for convenience of sales.
In the question and answer session, one attendee who did not identify herself rose
to ask a question: “What about Africa?” She noted that panelists had discussed countries
in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia, but hadn’t mentioned distribution in Africa.
The response from the five panelists was unanimous. “We really don’t sell to Africa,”
said the moderator. She noted that theatrical rights might sometimes be sold to South
Africa, but usually for a pittance, a drop in the bucket compared to sales made in other
territories. Other countries in Africa, she noted, might get television sales, but probably
would not. There is not enough infrastructure in any other countries in sub-Saharan

2
Africa, she said, to guarantee making any money at all in those territories, rendering
distribution there pointless.
The moderator’s and the other panelists’ comments in answer to this question
were echoed at a banquet that same evening by the Senior Vice President of Business
Development and Acquisitions for a leading distributor of Black and Pan-African film.
He also mentioned the lack of infrastructure in countries like Nigeria as a reason he has
never sold distribution rights to Nigerian entities, nor has he bought them. He mentioned
once having sent screeners (advance copies of a film meant for review purposes only) of
three films to a distributor in Nigeria who had requested them, and having never seen the
screeners nor heard back from this distributor again, leaving him to believe the screeners
may have been pirated or otherwise “illegally” distributed. How can anyone enter into
business deals with “unreliable” partners?, he asked (U.S. Distributor 1, personal
communication, June 19, 2009).
These comments illustrate the experience of global cultural industries from the
perspective of the global South. The entire continent of Africa, for instance, is mostly
considered to be outside of and tertiary to the well-oiled functioning of the global movie
industry, both as a place of production and as a place of distribution. That which emerges
in the gaps between, in the absence of connectivity to global networks, will have no easy
path to grow to join or match up to the dominant global cultural industries in a quest to
grow. This dissertation sets out to interrogate the rise of new hubs outside of the
traditional core networks in the global cultural industries through an in-depth look at one

3
case study: Nollywood, the burgeoning Nigerian movie industry, currently second largest
in the world in terms of titles produced per year according to a 2007 UNESCO study.
Networks in the Global Cultural Industries
If the global entertainment complex can be thought of as a network, or a series of
networks, “Hollywood,” might be most easily thought of as its hub. After all, films
produced and owned by studios based in the greater Los Angeles area financially
dominate in theaters nearly globally, and television produced for networks based in Los
Angeles (and New York) dominate prime time television to a similar degree. However,
like most networks, the global entertainment industry does not have just one hub. Instead,
there are many sites worldwide that also serve as hubs of creativity, production, finance,
decision-making, and distribution networks. Despite the dominance of Hollywood in the
global imaginary, movie production on a global scale is diverse both culturally, in terms
of production content, and economically, in terms of business structures and profit
structures. Movie industries have emerged worldwide, some quite robust, some quite
profitable, and some quite popular – and with varying degrees of connections to dominant
global cultural industry networks, from dense to incredibly sparse. Mumbai, for instance
is the hub of a vibrant production, distribution, and exhibition network specializing in
“Bollywood”-style films. Mexico City is a hub in the global telenovela industry,
producing television content that rules primetime in countries spanning five continents.
The production and distribution networks of these industries do not stand completely
alone – all are globally linked in a number of ways. Yet while each hub is globally
linked, it also represents a specific local creative milieu, responsive to local domestic

4
(and regional) exigencies, and reflective of a number of very specific local conditions that
have helped shape it.
While Hollywood movies play on screens throughout the world, and while
Hollywood as an industry grosses more per title than any other, Hollywood takes only
third place globally in actual number of productions per year. According to a 2007
UNESCO UIS survey, the industry producing the most titles as a whole per year is
Bollywood, India’s entertainment behemoth. According to the same survey, the industry
producing the second largest number of titles is one much less known on a global scale. It
is Nollywood, the Nigerian movie industry.
Nollywood is virtually invisible to much of the global North, but throughout sub-
Saharan Africa and the global African diaspora, Nollywood is not just known but is
known as a dominant force. In Nigeria and in countries throughout sub-Saharan Africa it
has eclipsed local production, Hollywood, and Bollywood to dominate the movie sector,
a move that has caused complaints of oversaturation of local screens in some smaller sub-
Saharan African countries (see Ondego, 2008). Unlike Hollywood and Bollywood films,
Nollywood movies are not made to be shown on a big screen in theaters. Instead, they are
produced and mostly traded in physical home movie form (VCD, DVD, etc.), although
they are also shown on terrestrial and satellite television. Most are long – at least three
hours in length – and consist of at least two parts (e.g. Part I and Part II, the purchase of
which is not necessarily linked). Profits are made en masse over a catalog of titles as
opposed to from individual movies
1
. Nollywood movies are a distinct cultural form, with

5
more of a connection stylistically to soap operas than to the sorts of cinema one might
find at international film festivals.
Nollywood movies, like Bollywood movies, telenovelas, and other creative
industry products originating in the global South, then, may be thought of as indicative of
the cultural diversity of cultural industry production worldwide. After all, despite
periodic complaints of dominance from homogenous Hollywood productions, global
audiences like, consume, and support a diverse catalog of culturally-specific products.
And, despite the attractiveness of high production values, audiences also exhibit
preference for production from their geolinguistic region (Sinclair, 1999). The
discreteness of Nollywood-the-industry from global Hollywood’s value chain may also
be indicative of the economic diversity of cultural industry production worldwide. While
some industries, like the telenovela industry or Bollywood have been integrated in some
ways into global cultural industry profit networks, Nollywood is still quite peripheral. Its
global connections are largely self-made and run parallel to – and invisible to – dominant
global cultural industry networks. While there is an imperative for the global movie
industry to integrate diverse cultural products into its overall portfolio, Nollywood is an
example of continued economic diversity in the global cultural industries.
Nollywood the Cultural Product
Nigeria is a vast and diverse nation, with over 250 languages spoken and a large
percentage of the population – approximately 140 million people – of sub-Saharan
Africa living in its borders. The Hausa, the dominant ethnic group in Nigeria populate the
Northern parts of the country, while the South, where its largest metropolis, Lagos, is

6
located, is dominated by the two next largest ethnic groups: the Igbo towards the East and
the Yoruba towards the West. There are similarly structured and interlinked movie
industries associated with all three ethnic groups but the term Nollywood is most usually
used to refer to English language films.
English language films are the most prevalent in the Nigerian video film
production sphere and exports. The Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB)
statistics show that, between 1997 and 2003, 43.8% of films submitted for review were in
English, 31.1% in Yoruba, 23.8% in Hausa, and only 1.1% in Igbo. Marston, et. al.
(2007) report that 65% of the current export market of Nigerian films is English language
(54). The low level of Igbo language production reflects the reality that English language
films are most closely associated with Igbo executive producers. This is not to say that
English language movies are only the provenance of the Igbo. On the contrary, English
language movie production is often a very diverse affair in terms of ethnic groups and
many stars of English-language films are from southern minority groups such as director
Zeb Ojiro from Delta state and actress Liz Benson from Akawa Ibom (Haynes & Okome,
2000). However, the English language industry is dominated by Igbo businessmen who
control most aspects of production from financing to distribution deals. These
businessmen running the industry traditionally come from backgrounds in electronics
sales and their job title could be described as executive producers and distributors.
However, in Nigeria, they are known by what may be one of the least involved things
they do: they are known as “marketers.” For the sake of consistency, that is also the term
I will use to refer to them throughout this dissertation.

7
While there is much overlap between Igbo-dominated English language industry
and the Yoruba-dominated Yoruba language industry, Hausa films are both stylistically
and geographically discrete from their Southern cousins in both production and
distribution and exist mostly out of the sphere of Lagos video film production and
distribution. While Yoruba-, English-, and Igbo- language films are sold in the North,
Hausa films are virtually invisible in the South (Haynes & Okome, 2000). Hausa workers
are, however, consistently linked into the national guild system.
Definition of Issues in the Context of Global Communication Research
Research in international communication has been concerned for the past 40 or so
years with questions of power in the international distribution of cultural products. One of
the seminal theories regarding the global flow of cultural products is cultural imperialism,
originally introduced by Herbert Schiller (1976). The theory of cultural imperialism
draws a world in which multi-national corporations (MNCs) based in the global North
dominate foreign markets, inculcating the local populations in capitalist philosophies and
undermining local cultural autonomy. In the years since Schiller’s work first came out, a
number of challenges and caveats have been lent to the discussion. Polysemy in texts, for
instance, or the possibility of multiple meanings and readings of a singular text, and the
concept of an active audience negotiating meaning have been proffered in contrast to the
one-way-flow model of the original cultural imperialism argument. Some, like Tyler
Cowen (1998), have even suggested that the spread of cultural products globally, even at
the hands of the dominant elites, is a specific engine of cultural diversity worldwide, as
cultures stagnate without new input for inspiration and fuel. Despite this, distrust of

8
cultural products from the Global North remains, and the dominance of core global
cultural industries such as “Global Hollywood” or the major music industry is sometimes
considered threatening to international competitors.
I have dealt with these questions in my previous work on the nature of the
telenovela industry (see Miller, 2010). Most easily considered Latin American
productions, telenovelas are indeed products of Latin American countries, particularly,
México, Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia. They must first do well on the domestic
market before they are eligible for export, they tend to embody particular cultural
characteristics of their producing nation, and they feature settings, actors, themes, and
plots that can be identified specifically as belonging to their home culture. Even when
exported globally (and they are, ruling television schedules from Russia to Western
Europe to sub-Saharan Africa), they are closely associated with the culture of their
producing nation. In this way, telenovelas can be considered to be contributing to the
cultural diversity of the global mediascape. And, taken at face value, they appear to be a
potential counterpoint to the cultural imperialism argument: South-to-South and South-
to-North flows of cultural products standing counter-posed to the North-to-South flows of
cultural products at the heart of the cultural imperialism argument.
Flows of cultural productions, while highly visible, are not the only thing at play
when we examine globally-linked cultural industries. Of equal importance are the
financial ties of these industries, and the global paths that revenue created by these
cultural products travel. When examining the global telenovela industry, for instance, we
see that, over time, the dominant producers of telenovelas for the global market (e.g.

9
Rede Globo in Brazil, Televisa in México, Venevisión in Venezuela, etc.) are all owned
by conglomerates with diverse international and cross-sectoral industrial concerns. At
this advanced stage of development in the telenovela industry, there are a small handful
of MNCs profiting from the industry and these MNCs are not particularly identifiable as
domestic concerns. Instead, they derive their income from concerns in both the global
North and the global South and are in nearly every way global corporations as much as (if
not more so than) they are domestic corporations. Furthermore they are highly interlinked
with the very entities to which they may seem to be standing in opposition. The Cisneros
Group in Venezeula, for instance, has interests in Venezuela-based production via
Venevisión and Caracol TV, as well as in Univisión, the dominant Spanish language
network in the United States.
In this way, we can see that any attempt to define a South-to-North cultural flow
standing in opposition to North-to-South cultural flows will be problematic. What makes
something a product of the Global South? Is it a degree of cultural integrity to its
producing nation? Something to do with ownership and revenue flows? In my previous
work (Miller, 2010), I have argued that many seemingly domestic products are inherently
global products, and that the global cultural industry must be viewed as more than the
productions of major studios based in the global North. Instead, we can view global
cultural industries as networks of diverse culturally-specific content that are constantly
becoming economically less diverse. In other words, it is in the best interests of global
cultural industry networks to invest in cultural products that are popular in domestic
markets globally, in order to continue diversifying their productions and refreshing the

10
creative clusters from which they draw. As described by Tyler Cowen (1998), hubs of
cultural production thrive on new input and new inspiration, and dominant cultural
industry networks are no exception. In order to profit from emerging markets, cultural
industry concerns will have to acquire interests in those cultural products that are popular
in these markets, and these are often not products of the dominant cultural industries. In
this way, we can see the global cultural industry networks as becoming increasingly
culturally diverse (as “local” productions are spread more widely) and increasingly
economically and structurally homogenous (as global concerns invest in - or are invested
in by - emerging industries, and as these emerging industries attempt to shapeshift in
order to better match up to opportunities for investment in or from global concerns).
While these interlocking connections and global paths can be easily traced in the
telenovela industry as well as, to a lesser extent, Bollywood, I take as my case study here
an industry that is truly a product of the periphery and is, for the most part, not integrated
into dominant global cultural industry networks at all. Nollywood movies are inherently a
local production of Nigeria, reflecting local culture in very specific ways. And
Nollywood movies are distributed globally and are connected to a number of globally-
linked networks, for both distribution and production inputs. Unlike in Bollywood or the
telenovela industry, however, these networks are almost exclusively informal, and
Nigeria (like most of sub-Saharan Africa as a whole) is mostly invisible (at least
currently) to the dominant cultural industry networks, as a potential site for productive
input or even as a potential site for distribution. As such, this project is an exploration of
the emergence of, and global networks formed by, an industry in the global periphery –

11
the global Fourth World. How does this cultural industry, peripheral in both its
distribution and its industrial structure, relate to global markets and global networks?
Development, the City, and Creative Industries
It is not just questions of cultural imperialism and multi-directional flows that
mark Nollywood and other emerging cultural creative hubs as important objects of study.
There are important practical implications of this project as well. Creative hubs and
clusters can spring up globally, in both developed and developing contexts. And they can
travel different routes towards becoming robust and successful industries, spurring
growth, creating jobs, and attracting capital to the urban agglomeration that produced
them. Creative industries, thought to spur growth and add value to urban agglomerations
as they create auxiliary positions around them and contribute to the competitive
advantage of the city itself, can be a powerful lever for development. In the global North
and in the global South, creative industries are high value additions to the urban areas that
spawn them. How much of creativity in developing countries can be channeled into
industrial form, bringing about these positive externalities? How much can this creativity
connect to and profit from involvement with dominant global networks? The individual
nodes dominating the non-global-North creative economy all seem to emerge out of cities
that are among the largest and fastest growing in the world: Mumbai, for instance, in
terms of film, Lagos in terms of straight-to-DVD content, and Mexico City, a globally
prominent producer of television content. This highlights the particularities of the
seething creative chaos of the rapidly developing mega-city, as well as the potential for

12
rapidly developing countries to create new markets and encourage creative production
and cultural industry formation. Much research has been done on the development of
hubs in the creative industries (see Chapter 2 for a lengthier discussion of this literature),
but most are in the context of the global North. This project gives us the opportunity to
examine such development as it comes out of an entirely different set of circumstances,
less connected to the global core. Lagos is a particularly intriguing setting for a case
study, as it embodies many elements of the developing mega-city in the extreme.
Setting of this Study
Lagos can be considered the urban extreme of the global periphery: an over-
crowded under-organized growing global mega-city. Lagos has too many people, too few
services, and a culture of scrabbling loose pieces together in order to survive. A 2001
public CIA report rated Lagos as the global city at highest potential for urban crisis due to
rapid growth coupled with extremely low levels of governance and infrastructure (CIA,
2001). Yet while much of Lagos exists in a state of neglect, the organizational responses
of the city’s residents to neglect have been an exercise in creativity – and have also
produced creative explosions from Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat to contemporary hip-hop popular
throughout sub-Saharan Africa to Nollywood movies. In investigating the possibilities of
growth and the drivers of and harnessing of creativity in the global periphery, Lagos is
perhaps the ultimate setting.
It is not only urban Lagos but also Nigeria that forms the setting of this case
study. Nigeria is an extreme example of governmental neglect in the Fourth World. Not
only does Nigeria neglect its own populace, but the actions it has taken over the years

13
have largely been self-preservationist. Nigeria was, for many years in the past, considered
the very definition of a predatory state. In a nation rich in oil wealth but full of poverty,
political power is thought of in Nigeria to be essentially equivalent to extreme wealth.
The government is thought of as enriching itself and the already elite classes and is
credited with little else. Even the most basic infrastructural elements - building oil
refineries for instance or strengthening the electric system so that Nigerian businesses
would not be forced to pay exorbitant rates for imported fuel for the generators they must
run daily during business hours – are ignored while money continues to pour in from
taxes on foreign oil companies. Wherever this money winds up, it is usually not in
service to the average Nigerian. The police are avoided at all costs by lawbreakers and
law-abiding citizens alike. Any (rare) roadwork done tends to be the product of
cooperation from a group of interested citizens paying for it themselves in their own
neighborhood. Water and electricity are sourced privately by individuals or collectives.
The government is relied upon for very little.
Out of these settings has emerged Nollywood, the second largest producer of
movies per year globally, in terms of number of titles. The story of the rise of Nollywood
the industry is a study in perseverance: a tale of making something out of virtually
nothing, and in building an industry from scratch where others have faltered even with
external support. It is a story of structural fixes emerging from an architecture made of
lack: lack of copyright laws or enforcement, lack of working equipment, lack of
formalized financing and distribution structures. It is a story of creativity and innovation
on the periphery (or perhaps it’s the flipside) of the dominant global network of culture

14
industries. When technological and financial connections are either non-existent, broken,
or “informal” to the extent of being unreliable, whole new structural fixes will arise. This
research project is about the nature of locally-based creative industries, their emergence
out of the ecology of the creative global mega-city, and, even more specifically, their
development and integration into the global system, even when that integration is
informal and alternative in nearly every way.
Methodology
In conducting this research, I conducted fieldwork in Los Angeles, CA; London,
U.K.; Lagos, Nigeria; Abuja, Nigeria; Accra, Ghana; and New York, NY, from February
to December of 2009. In these locations I both performed observations and conducted
interviews in order to obtain information about Nollywood that is not publicly available,
and in order to build a thorough view of how the entire industry functions as a whole. All
interviews and observations are listed in Appendix A.
I conducted 40 interviews over the course of my fieldwork, in Los Angeles, CA,
Lagos, Nigeria, Abuja Nigeria, and New York, NY. Subjects for interviews were selected
because of their expertise and knowledge. Interviews aimed at acquiring a thorough and
authoritative overview of the industry through the knowledge of the subject. I
interviewed two main types of subjects. The first is key informers: those with a birds-eye
view of the industry, often in a position to speak on behalf of others, such as the president
of a guild or a high-ranking government minister. The second type is representative
actors: those not in a position of power, but actually working in the industry on a daily
basis. Key informers may have much experience in the industry, but representative actors

15
are necessary informants to understand how the industry works on a day-to-day basis.
This class of interviewee can provide knowledge about all levels of the industry below
the top-tier, and this is the level where most of the industry functions. For instance, I
interviewed two marketers. One (Marketer 2) is the president of the marketer’s guild. He
has a bird’s eye view of the workings of the industry and can speak authoritatively as a
mouthpiece for the goals of the marketers’ bloc. The other (Marketer 1) is an active
marketer not involved in industry governance. I spoke with him to round out knowledge
of how the industry works; to see what the industry looks like to a non-elite making a
living from it. Marketer 2 was targeted because of his position. Marketer 1 was chosen as
representative of an average working marketer, and Director/Producer 4 introduced the
two of us at my request. This is the way most connections are made in Nollywood: via a
personal introduction.
Contacts to all subjects were made through introductions, usually from other
subjects, or directly through their acquired mobile phone numbers. My initial forays into
the industry were made through a few key introductions to major industry players,
including the Arts Editor of a prestigious local newspaper, a high-ranking official in the
Foreign Ministry, and a contact at the U.S. Consulate. These initial contacts helped to
introduce me to the key high-level informers, and any introduction quickly led me to
many other potential interviewees. Interviews took place in the offices and working
spaces of the subjects, at their convenience, and are listed in Appendix A. More than half
were recorded and extensive written notes were taken on each. Interviewees were assured

16
anonymity (though none said that they wanted it). I have, however, anonymized identities
for the purposes of this dissertation.
In addition to interviews, I observed 23 sites that make up Nollywood’s physical
manifestations, located in Lagos and Abuja, as well as Los Angeles, New York, Accra,
and London. These included permanent locations such as rentals shops and an optical
disc replication factory; they also included one-time gatherings such as a film festival, an
audition, an industry banquet, and a movie shoot. Notes were taken on each site, both
while present and afterwards. Observations took place at the invitation of contacts. As
can be seen in Appendix A, I attempted to observe each stage of the production and
distribution process, as much as was possible.
Structure of this Dissertation
In the next chapter, Chapter 2, I look at the formation of Nollywood, comparing
what we know about its birth and rise to the existent literature on cultural industry
growth, literature based nearly exclusively on industrial growth in the global North. If we
look at Nigeria, Lagos, and Nollywood as sites specifically located in the Fourth World,
disembedded from legitimate global cultural industry networks, how does cultural
industry growth differ there? I systematically go through the history of Nollywood, born
in the early 1990s, supplemented by my own interviews with those who were active in
the early years of the industry.
In Chapter 3, I extend this look at Nollywood as an example of a cultural industry
existing in a different environment from that dominating the existent literature: an
industry impossible to conceive of separately from its location in the global South. In this

17
chapter, I lay out the current structure of the industry, from financing and production to
marketing and distribution. I draw heavily from my interviews with those working in the
industry and my observations of Nollywood’s many functions.
In Chapter 4, I analyze the governance of the industry. One of the things for
which Nollywood is most famous is its rise without the support or guidance of
governmental policy. Instead, it grew in the gaps between official oversight and
developed informal processes in lieu of most possible policy initiatives that could have
come from the government. This is indicative of the extreme of the networked model of
cultural industry development, standing in contrast to a patronage model. I outline,
however, some specific ways in which the Nigerian government attempts involvement:
censorship with the National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB), development
with the Nigerian Film Corporation (NFC), and copyright enforcement with the Nigerian
Copyright Commission (NCC). I also outline major governmental interventions that were
in the works (and still unresolved) during the time of my fieldwork: the summer of 2009.
These include a new distribution framework from the NFVCB and an effort to effectively
license the ability to legally work in the industry known as the MOPICON initiative
(named after a proposed motion picture practitioner’s counsel). I finish by outlining how
the alternative works: self-organization in the industry, primarily through guilds. In the
Fourth World, and in a state such as Nigeria that could be considered not just neglectful
but predatory, the most effective organizational tools may be self-grown, just as the
industry is self-grown and informal.

18
In Chapter 5, I analyze the content of Nollywood movies: that which drives all of
the elements described in the other chapters, from the industry’s growth, to its current
functioning, to its global spread. Using the content of individual Nollywood productions
as a guide, I analyze the specific ways in which the movies connect to audiences both
domestically and globally as a result of both the broad appeal of their plot formulas and
their cultural specificity.
Chapter 6 is where the investigation of Nollywood as an industry is rounded out
and connected to my key research questions. In this chapter, I look at the global
connections of Nollywood, both formal and informal (and, overwhelmingly, it is the
informal which rule). I go through the entire production and distribution chain and
identify the ways in which the industry is globally connected. In production this includes
the occasional foreign sources of financing (usually altruistic in nature), cultural
exchange efforts on behalf of both Nigerian and foreign governments, and training
exchange efforts, on behalf of philanthropic bodies, and programs set up between
Nigerian entrepreneurs and foreign schools, and the efforts on behalf of foreign movie
equipment shops to sell to and train Nollywood practitioners. In distribution, this includes
the informal networks that distribute authorized and (mostly) unauthorized physical
copies of Nollywood movies internationally (including one authorized dealer in the
Bronx who sells to most of North America) and authorized and (mostly) unauthorized
sales to international television channels.
In Chapter 7, the concluding chapter, I bring all of these points together, looking
broadly at Nollywood as an exemplar of cultural industry growth and functioning in the

19
global South: informal, and following alternative networks, filling in the spaces between
connections to the global Network Society. Bringing together the major findings of my
research, I discuss the analytical implications of this work, both in the context of debates
surrounding global flows of cultural products and in the context of our understanding of
cultural industry growth. I discuss how this suggests alternative models of industrial
growth in cultural industries growing in the global South. I also address policy
implications of this work.
In all of these ways, then, this dissertation will serve to interrogate the rise of new
hubs and nodes in the global creative industries. Through an in-depth examination of
Nollywood, the second largest movie industry in the world in terms of titles produced per
year, and the dominant popular movie producer of sub-Saharan Africa and the African
diaspora, I set out to investigate the shape of global cultural industry networks and the
differing realities facing creative industries growing in the global South. Nollywood as a
case study offers us a chance to analyze the rise of a cultural industry in the global
periphery. This allows us to understand that which gives the industry strength, and the
implications of this research on debates surrounding global flows of culture, as well as
debates regarding cultural industry formation.

20
Chapter One Endnotes

1
In other words, quantity is the name of the game and the goal, even for low level
creative workers in the industry.

21
CHAPTER TWO:
The Growth of a Peripheral Movie Industry: The Formation of Nollywood

Nollywood has become somewhat of a trendy topic for features in the popular
press. The theme of most of these articles is the idea that Nollywood created itself, rising
from virtually nothing in just the past 20 years, the product of local creativity and
ingenuity in a place marked by bad news and lack. In this chapter, I look in greater detail
at the formation of Nollywood the industry as an example of cultural industry growth in
the periphery. I narrate a history of Nollywood’s growth, dealing first with the specific
political economic conditions and opportunities from which the industry emerged, and,
then, the themes that emerge in this narrative. I then discuss these themes in the context
of previous work that has been done on cultural industry growth, largely based on case
studies from the global North. In light of the specific context of Nollywood’s growth in
the urban global periphery, this project allows us to review work on cultural industry
growth in a new way: in light of the challenges of opportunities offered by location in the
Fourth World and in a growing African mega-city.
Development of Nollywood, 1990 - 2000: Hustle, Hope, and Hubris
Nollywood the industry was born out of the combination of a number of
conditions present in Nigeria at the beginning of the 1990s. As background, it is
important to note the significance of this timeframe. The late 1980s marked the advent of
the World Bank-fueled series of economic severity policies known as the Structural
Adjustment Program (the SAP). This fueled rapid naira (the Nigerian currency)
devaluation, plunging existent cultural industries into disarray and re-sorting even

22
entertainment-seeking patterns in Nigerian society as a result of increased violence and
theft, and the accompanying reluctance to leave the home. From this context, ironically
coming shortly after a late 1970s oil boom-led dramatic increase in entertainment
consumption (Haynes & Okome, 2000; Larkin, 2004), all of the other conditions relevant
to Nollywood’s growth also emerged.
First there was the emergence of two different types of trained yet increasingly
underemployed (and dissatisfied) pools of Nigerian creative talent. The first were actors,
coming from the long tradition of traveling theater troupes amongst the Yoruba, who
institutionalized a cultural tradition of acting as a profession, yet whose industry was
experiencing a sustainability crisis by the early 1990s. The second were the Nigerian
Television Authority (NTA) employees. The NTA’s policies were squeezing trained soap
opera creative workers off the air, from directors to videographers to actors. Added to this
was technological opportunity: as the world was phasing out initial VHS technologies,
Chinese and Malaysian businessmen were selling deadstock very cheaply to Nigerian
electronics dealers. These elements (actors, soap opera workers, and inexpensive new
technologies) came together and formed the basis for something new in a moment of
entrepreneurial clarity. This entrepreneurial moment was itself the product of specific
political and economic conditions and a culture allowing for such dynamic progression.
Before drawing from the themes of this story, I will first narrate in greater detail the early
years of Nollywood and the specific conditions of time and place, and of politics and
economics that provided both a window for the birth of the industry and the tools and
opportunities it took to realize that opportunity.

23
Nigeria’s Yoruba drama troupes were composed of tightly knit bands of actors –
many of whom were actresses polygamously married to the director of the troupe,
cementing a family-esque unit. These troupes were extremely popular as they toured
Yoruba-speaking areas, but, by the mid-1970s the troupes were becoming increasingly
large and unwieldy, and were having an increasingly difficult time making money from
touring. As a fix, some Yoruba theater entrepreneurs began filming their performances
with 35mm and, more usually, 16mm cameras for later exhibition (Ogunleye, 2004).
These exhibitions were usually at makeshift small-scale “theaters”: churches or meeting
halls fitted for the showing with portable projection equipment. Members of the troupe
were responsible for renting the venue, arranging projection, marketing, and promotion
and ticket sales, just as if it were a live drama troupe performance. Troupe members
would almost always be present in order to ensure profits from ticket sales weren’t
falsified (Ogunleye, 2004). The first major filmed Yoruba film, Ola Balogun’s Ajani
Ogun, was made in 1976 (Adesanya, 2000; Ogunleye, 2004). As the oil boom boosted
entertainment consumption in the late 1970s, a small number of filmed Yoruba hits
followed, including Aye in 1979, Jayesinmi in 1980, and Kadara in 1981.
While some of these hits made the production of filmed theater performances look
promising to entrepreneurs, the reality was that film-making costs were too high for any
serious profits to be made. All post-production occurred abroad, most often in London, as
there were no facilities in Nigeria, and post-production costs (most notably, film
processing) quickly dwarfed all other inputs to the film. It was similarly difficult to get
funding and to distribute these Yoruba theater-based films widely (Ogunleye, 2004).

24
However, production continued on, though there was little thought that there was a
sustainable industry hidden in the smattering of small-scale theater troupe films.
The second half of the 1980s introduced a number of particularly challenging
conditions for the creation of any art forms in Nigeria, much less an expensive one
requiring foreign exchange for post-production. These were the twin advents of economic
hardships associated with the introduction of the World Bank-fueled Structural
Adjustment Program (SAP) and the spate of everyday hardships accompanying the
Babanginda regime. In the SAP era, the naira underwent a rapid decline. Filmmakers
could no longer even hope to afford the expensive processing and post-production
necessarily done in London. Any such entertainment would have to be remarkably
inexpensive as well as reliant only on a domestic production and distribution chain.
By the mid-late1980s, the Yoruba theater troupes had moved on from 16mm to
less expensive options. One was color reversal stock – which some report was often
pilfered from the Nigerian Television Authority (Adesanya, 2000). Color reversal stock
had the advantage of being much cheaper than film stock, and didn’t need expensive lab
development. The downside, however, is that the film could not be copied. The only
existing copy in color reversal is the original, shot on film that does not need lab
processing. This sole copy usually degraded quite quickly as it was screened multiple
times. Less than ideal, color reversal stock was considered a temporary fix for troupes
and producers looking to keep costs down. Even with these savings, the plummeting
naira lead to an even further decline in film production as raising money became even
more difficult (Adesanya, 2000) and seriously impacted the sustainability of Nigeria’s

25
cultural movements, including Yoruba drama troupes and domestic soap opera
production.
A number of other elements that marked these years also set the stage for the
advent of Nigerian home video production. The Babanginda era was marked by
increasing insecurity and violence in Nigeria’s Southern cities including Lagos
(Esonwanne, 2008; Obaseki, 2008). Violence and insecurity were so endemic that people
took to shutting themselves indoors from sundown to sunrise, abstaining from
entertainment outside of the home
1
. While this led to the death of existent cinema houses,
it opened space and demand for entertainment suited for home consumption.
As the era of the SAP and Babanginda began, there were still a number of
popular soap operas produced, directed, and acted in by Nigerian talent, on the air at the
Nigerian Television Authority (NTA). However, in the early 1990s, a number of shake-
ups hit and ultimately disrupted the robust Nigerian soap opera industry. For one, the
economic decline meant less program sponsorship by the major soap opera companies,
and the advertising agencies that acted as the bridge between producers and the major
soap opera companies were falling behind in and in some cases not paying at all the
advertising funds owed to producers (Obaseki, 2008). At the same time, the NTA was
pursuing a model of increased program ownership (Obaseki, 2008). As producers balked
at these conditions, the NTA also began getting particularly inexpensive deals for bulk
buys of Latin American (primarily Mexican) telenovelas, squeezing out room for
Nigerian-made productions during prime-time programming hours and filling the

26
airwaves with nightly shows like the global Mexican-produced hit The Rich Also Cry
(Obaseki, 2008; Director/ Producer 9, personal communication, August 4, 2009).
As the NTA was the only outlet, and only large soap companies such as OMO,
Joy, and Elephant, were sponsors, outlets for soap operas were highly limited and
growing increasingly so. Not only was NTA’s single station distribution suspected not to
be meeting demand but producers also believed that the NTA, acting as the sole
gatekeeper, was keeping smaller and more daring entrepreneurs out (Director/ Producer
9, personal communication, August 4, 2009). Director/ Producer 9, one of the prominent
independent NTA producers from this era reports that the disgruntled attitude of the top
producers of the day were compounded by the new top-down NTA rules (meant to
mitigate the squeezing of time slots) that, for example, restricted actors to acting in one
NTA drama at the time, actually helping to contribute to the exodus from soap operas
(personal communication, August 4, 2009).
Against this SAP-fueled background of disgruntled and squeezed-out soap opera
talent, Yoruba drama troupes struggling to make money in the face of the falling naira,
and increasing insecurity, came one more – and vital – ingredient in the explosion of
home video production. While these elements led to a glut of soap opera and Yoruba
drama troupe creative talent, it was a glut of a different kind that opened up initial
Nollywood development: the advent of VHS technologies purchased from Asian sources
and dumped cheaply on the Nigerian market. These technologies included both VCRs
and massive extraordinarily inexpensive shipments of blank tapes.

27
In an article written long before Nollywood was even born, Boyd and Straubhaar
report that the late 1970s oil boom led to a boom in the importation television-based
technologies in Nigeria (1985). Initially, VCR technologies were only the purview of the
wealthy, but even in 1985, Boyd and Straubhaar were able to report some penetration to
the middle and even those lower classes “seeking a means of earning a living from
pirated cassettes” (13). Not only that, but Olusola, the then Managing Director of the
NTA, reported as early as 1983 that a few “small local video production operations” had
emerged, mainly taping performances of popular musical artists for resale (64). He also
reported in 1983 that “video cassettes (blank, smuggled, pirated off-air or dubbed-off
master copies) are available from road-side teenage vendors on all major roads in Lagos”
(64) and that the famous Alaba electronics market was already full of VCRs and tapes for
sale. It was the beginning of the 1990s, however, that brought a concentration of VHS
technologies en masse to Nigerian markets, as some of the technologies had become
increasingly dated in the First World and used and deadstock VHS technologies became
available at cut rates. It was the advent of this increasingly low-cost technology that gave
birth to what we now know as Nollywood.
By the late 1980s, Yoruba drama troupes had started some video-based
productions: a small-scale Nollywood producer cites a culture of Yoruba video-making
known to be existent in Lagos by late 1980s (personal communication, Director/
Producer 11, August 7, 2009). By most accounts, these Yoruba video films are the most
immediate predecessors of today’s Nollywood films. Yet these video films were still
entrenched in a business model that was based on both its drama troupe and celluloid

28
roots. Even with the capability that videos offered for reproduction and distribution, the
old model remained: many members of the drama troupe appearing in the movie would
travel along with the official copy of it to exhibition halls and run all aspects of ticket
sales and projection (personal communication, Director/ Producer 11, August 7, 2009).
The break to the Nollywood model we can see today came from Kenneth Nnebue, an
Igbo electronics trader dealing in imported used electronics equipment and blank VHS
tapes. He noted not only the popularity of the Yoruba drama troupe movies in the Yoruba
market, but also the economic implications of the new technologies being used.
Those of Igbo descent, it is worth noting, have a reputation as being the most
business-savvy of Nigeria’s ethnic groups, seizing business opportunities from those
places where nothing before had existed. There is a saying in Nigeria to the effect that if a
town has no Igbo living in it, there is nothing to be had there. As the Yoruba have a
reputation as being the most culturally expressive of Nigeria’s ethnic groups, this
combination of Igbo trader networks and organized Yoruba drama troupe talent would
seem to be the perfect combination of two traditions of organization: cultural and
economic. A similar situation can be recalled in the development of Hollywood, wherein
largely Jewish entrepreneurs saw new and open business models drawing from existent
talent sprung from already entrenched talent networks (Hall, 1998; Scott, 2005).
Also similar to Hollywood, these initial years of Nollywood were chaotic and the
business was essentially open to any comers. The story of one small-scale producer,
Director/ Producer 11, who has been making movies for 20 years but has yet to make any
profits – or even break even – exemplifies the condition of this milieu. Director/ Producer

29
11, now living in Lagos, began trying to make movies in the “bush” in Igboland (as the
Southeast of the country, dominated by the Igbo people is known) even before Kenneth
Nnebue made his first successful video for distribution (personal communication, August
7, 2009). Working as a DJ in a brothel, he was first inspired to make a movie in the mid-
1980s after a chance encounter lent him the opportunity to see what a script looked like.
Unschooled in every aspect of the movie making process, Director/ Producer 11 utilized
talent networks known to him: NTA workers from the local NTA station, those working
in the local video production business (for hire for local weddings, funerals, and
banquets), and his own personal connections to a local community of martial arts
enthusiasts more than happy to demonstrate their skills on camera for free. In terms of
distribution, Director/ Producer 11, too, went off of the model he knew - that of public
exhibitions - intending to create a master tape that he would show around Igboland. He
was also able to utilize existent church and community center networks for screenings,
none of which made him back even his paltry initial investment (personal
communication, August 7, 2009).
Later, after Nnebue’s innovations spurred an industry, Director/ Producer 11 was
able to draw from others’ successes. After seeing Nnebue’s tactics, he realized he too
could exploit networks of electronics traders and video pirates (both nearly exclusively
Igbo) for financing and distribution, and he eventually moved to Lagos to further pursue
his career (personal communication, August 7, 2009). While he eventually achieved a
degree of fame as an action movie actor, and has a central role in a number of guilds,
Director/ Producer 11 has yet to achieve great success or even a profit as a producer. It is,

30
however, his ability to enter the industry with little training and eke out a living on the
outskirts of the industry which speaks to the open-ness and penetrability of the industry
throughout the stages of its development. And it is his ability to draw from existent
networks centered in Lagos that speaks to the magnetic self-increasing power of
agglomeration and organization.
Kenneth Nnebue’s first entry into the movie industry came in 1991 when he
produced Aje Ni Iya Mi, a Yoruba language video film, quite similar to those produced
already by the drama troupes and aimed at Yoruba audiences. Not entirely different from
the Yoruba videos of the day, Aje Ni Iya Mi proved to be successful in the Yoruba market
(Esonwanne, 2008). Fresh off of this success, it was in 1992 that Nnebue produced the
video film almost universally cited as the first true Nollywood production: Living in
Bondage I, made in the Igbo language for “a few hundred dollars” (Haynes, 2007), or
2000 naira (Haynes & Okome, 2000). Living in Bondage I is considered a Nollywood
classic, still widely viewed and the beneficiary of legendary success. The Igbo language
opened up the video film market to non-Yoruba and this film is widely viewed as the
catalyst for the explosion in video film production to come.
After the massive success of Living in Bondage I, Nnebue returned two years later
with the first English language video film: Glamour Girls, released in 1994. Despite the
success of his earlier movies, it was Nnebue’s first foray into English language
production that opened up his and other entrepreneurs’ eyes to the potential of the
marketplace for English-language mass-market home videos made in Nigeria
(Esonwanne, 2008), now the backbone of the Nigerian movie industry.

31
Nnebue’s foray quickly attracted an explosion in production as producers were
drawn from the ashes of NTA’s soap culture and distributors/marketers/executive
producers were drawn to add to their business as electronics traders. Both report being
drawn by the lure of profitability, particularly in an era when many other business models
were falling apart. Director/ Producer 9, for instance, the popular NTA producer and
director, had begun working for the NTA only in 1990. In 1993, she was directing and
producing a top soap opera. In 1993, in the face of her and her colleagues’ increasing
frustration with changes at the NTA and the hardships offered by the SAP, Kenneth
Nnebue approached her and commissioned her to write an English language script for a
new venture. She realized immediately that one could make 20 times the money in
movies versus soap operas for producing the same three hours of entertainment content
(personal communication, August 4, 2009).
She was not the only one to realize this, and many made the jump from soap
operas to movies. Virtually all of the pioneering big name directors of Nollywood came
out of the soap opera directors and producers of the early 1990s. It is not for nothing that
many claim that Nollywood’s closest stylistic cousin is soap operas, as opposed to other
film industries. In the beginning, says Director/ Producer 9, there was no difference from
the practitioner’s standpoint between working on soap operas and working on films,
though she claims that has changed over the years with experience, evolution, and
training (personal communication, August 4, 2009). To that end, Nollywood was
certainly not created completely from scratch. Yet when the NTA-as-the-sole-gatekeeper-
of-limited-airtime model gave way to a cacophony of independent producers (i.e., anyone

32
who could raise the funds, or, as Director/ Producer 11 proves, anyone who could hustle
together a production with no real funds or connections), each able to find their own
space in the marketplace (literally in stalls at the market), those producers were now
capitalizing on this same talent. In this way, penetrability and lack of entrenched business
practices can be seen as not only an asset but also as one of the main assets marking
networked cultural industry development in any context.
The impetus of the marketer/ distributors/ executive producers (known
colloquially as marketers and referred to as such throughout this project) was similarly
financial. Electronics Trader/ Producer 1 was one of the early executive producers/
distributors, and, like almost all early “marketers” began as an electronics importer. He
produced two of the earliest and most popular Nollywood movies, still famous and
popular today. He reports that his drive was simple “As a businessman, I know when I
see something that will be a good business. When I saw there was a passion for home
movies, it made sense” (personal communication, July 20, 2009). When he saw the
success of and market potential suggested by Living in Bondage, he decided to invest in
production himself. The workers on this, his first movie, were recruited from the NTA
where they had been soap opera and news producers. The movie was a financial success.
Subsequent to this success, Electronics Trader/ Producer 1 remained in both businesses:
twenty years later, he still imports and sells European electronics and he still produces
and distributes Nollywood movies.
Directors/ Producer 9 and Electronics Trader/ Producer 1 are only two among
many spurred by Nnebue’s early successes with Living in Bondage I and Glamour Girls.

33
In 1994, the same year as Nnebue’s English language production, three video films were
sent for national approval to the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB)
2

(Adesanya, 2000). One year later, in 1995, the NFVCB received 201 video films, and, in
1996, the NFVCB received 250 video films (Adesanya, 2000). Video film production
levels climbed even further between 1997 and 2002. By 2002, 868 video films were
submitted to the NFVCB for review. This rapid rise is illustrated below in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Number of Movies Submitted Annually to NFVCB, 1994 - 2003

Data Source: Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board, via Nigerian Film Commission
It is worth noting that as productions grew from existent talent bred in relatively
legal and on-the-books contexts (NTA soap opera productions and Yoruba drama
troupes), distribution and marketing grew from a different set of roots: the sellers of

34
electronics (ranging from black to gray to white market) and existent sellers of cassettes
and foreign movies. Many of these existent networks were those that made their money
largely from black market and unauthorized content. Rather than a shady or disreputable
origin, Larkin (2004) points out that networks of illegal and unauthorized distribution are
what in fact enabled Nollywood’s growth: without the existence of those networks,
distribution networks would have had to be formed from scratch. Chapter 3 will deal in
greater detail with the implications and legacies of these origins in the murky area
between black markets and “legal” markets, particularly significant in the Fourth World
where informality, black markets, and even technological failure can be seen as endemic:
potential building blocks as opposed to pure obstacles
3
. Chapter 3 will also detail the
current functioning of the industry, including the specific locations and neighborhoods in
which Nollywood has clustered.
This rise of course is not only attributable to the time and place, and the economic
and political conditions. After all, the rise of VHS technologies enabled much of the
world to engage in their own low-cost cultural productions. Perhaps more than anything,
we can cite the demand for local content: a main driver of Nollywood’s growth was the
near insatiable appetite for not just home entertainment but for Nigerian (or West
African, or African) entertainment. The implications and logics of this will be addressed
in greater detail in Chapter 5, but it is worth highlighting here too: as Hollywood ignored
the African market, space was created for a cultural product that felt locally relevant –
and this space and potential was large in a country of 150 million people. Lack of
connections to the global order spurred a demand for a local response.

35
Creative Industry Growth
This tale of industrial development in Nollywood is a study in making something
not from nothing, but from very little. Without governmental support or an over-arching
architect, Nollywood emerged as an industrial node in the spaces between formal
business endeavors. We can consider this story in light of existent models of cultural
industry development. One important way to view Nollywood is to understand it as the
extreme of the networked model of cultural industry growth. As the counterpoint to the
patronage model (usually governmental patronage) wherein industrial growth is carefully
guided and, usually, specifically sponsored by the state or some other party, we see the
networked model (Singh, 2008). In this model, industries rise on their own from
opportunity, entrepreneurship and ingenuity
4
. Nollywood, clearly absent from
governmental intervention (as I address further in Chapter 4), is a prime example of the
networked model, which has proven a particularly dynamic and robust incubator of
creative industries in the context of a world increasingly governed by networked linkages
instead of top-down structures.
Allen J. Scott, in his 2005 book, On Hollywood, writes a broad overview of
patterns of industrial growth in the context of this networked model, delineating what are,
in effect, three phases that mark the birth of non-patronage-model creative industrial
agglomerations. The beginning - the initial location of creative individuals in one place -
tends to be happenstance due to minor benefits or ease offered by the locality, and can be
thought of as somewhat random. The second phase is when this locally-based creative
clustering begins to pull ahead of other similar sites, attracting others to it in an

36
exponentially self-increasing magnetic circle. The third phase, according to Scott, is
when this agglomeration “extends and consolidates its market reach,” (16) becoming
institutionalized as an industrial node. In other words, after the first phase, the phase of
chance, the second phase is the phase of rapid-fire initial development. The third phase is
then the institutionalization of this industry into an established industrial node, with
increasing links to a global system. Nollywood’s growth has torn through Stages 1 and 2,
entering Stage 2 when Nnebue’s original forays into the industry were well-received and
attracted other producers. The phase of institutionalization and industrialization, to be
discussed further in Chapters 3 and 4, has been in effect ever since. Scott’s chronology is
general enough to have the potential for universality: chance, followed by increasingly
rapid growth followed by industrialization, institutionalization, and global integration. As
such, this model can serve as a guide in examining the more specific characteristics of
cultural industry growth teased out by scholars thus far, and in examining the growth of
Nollywood the industry.
As Scott’s (2005) model serves as a general guide, it is worthwhile to look at the
specific characteristics of creative industry growth that have emerged from previous work
done on the topic, with a focus on the two dominant academic exemplars: “Hollywood”
and Silicon Valley. The most salient theme that emerges from this previous work is the
importance of those elements that enable informality and a penetrable networked
business culture open to change, and these are what enables Scott’s second phase. As we
have seen, they can also guide the third phase, particularly in the global South.

37
It is this penetrable business culture that Peter Hall (1998) cites as a main driver
of Hollywood’s development in his narrative of its growth. In his telling, in addition to
the apocryphal draw of climate and diverse landscapes, the remote location and “frontier
spirit” of Los Angeles was one of its strongest assets. For one, marginality marked the
lives of the major studio founders, largely Jewish immigrants for whom East Coast
society was closed. The penetrable (and still relatively primitive) social structures to be
found in Los Angeles also were a draw. Perhaps even more importantly, L.A.’s frontier-
style cultural environment was attractive in that an entire continent separated the industry
from threats of entrenched business interests in New York, particularly the “Trust” who
owned the copyrights on the expensive technologies needed to make movies at the time.
The nearness of the Mexican border meant that shoots of questionable legality in terms of
patents and contracts were feasible. While Hollywood did not take long to become
dominated by the centralized power of major studios, at its birth it was penetrable in the
extreme. Hall notes that one could build and open a theater for less than $400, important
when few bankers would back the early film industry entrepreneurs.
The importance of penetrability is not just a hallmark of Hollywood or even
cultural industrial development, but it has been cited in studies on the growth of
technological creative industries as well. Saxenian (1994) and Zook (2005) both cite the
culture of freedom and institutionalization of constant change that have marked Silicon
Valley, both now and throughout its stages of growth. The volume of work done on the
development of Silicon Valley outstrips even that of Hollywood, and, as we can see, the
themes that emerge are quite similar. Saxenian compares Silicon Valley’s growth to that

38
of a rival Boston-based technological hub and concludes that Silicon Valley won out
because of its networked as opposed to top-down structure, and a business culture that
was more penetrable and open to change. In his investigation into the social milieu of
Silicon Valley the industry, Zook speaks to this same culture. He notes the culture of fast-
paced innovation and constant start-ups in Silicon Valley. This means, on one hand, high
turnover, but it also means a constant shifting of collaborative teams and of skilled talent
ready to move on to the next short-term project.
Another theme that both Saxenian (1994) and Zook (2005) note in Silicon Valley
is the ease with which employees travel between firms, taking with them the expertise
and knowledge garnered in their previous gigs and spreading them around. While the
technology workers that Saxenian and Zook describe are not officially freelancers,
employees and knowledge are in some ways as ambulatory as if they were. While this
expertise and knowledge is less an integral part of industrial growth in the culturally
creative industries than in the technologically creative industries, it speaks to the other
hallmark of the literature on features supporting both cultural and technological creative
industrial growth: informality, particularly in terms of employment. As Caves (2002)
outlines in great detail, cultural industries also tend to have a flexible and freelance
industrial structure
5
, though many emphasize repeatable patterns of employment
6
.
Although I have split these elements into two features, one might say that the
most salient features enabling cultural industrial growth revolve around one general
theme, spoken of in many ways: that of an openness. Informality, penetrability and even
the opportunities offered by new technologies all speak to the same driver of cultural

39
industry growth: opportunity for new ideas, new people, unofficial, non-overseen
transactions to enter, meet, and grow. While these elements mark all three of Scott’s
(2005) stages, his third stage (institutionalization, industrialization, and (global)
integration) however, is a particularly difficult prospect for universality. While all of
these industries may have similar goals, industrialization, institutionalization, and
integration look very different in competing sets of realities. For example, the Nigerian
labor markets emerged through flexibility, just as in the First World models; however,
whereas the conditions in the First World have quickly become flexible and formalized,
they remain flexible and informal in Nigeria. While both Hollywood and Nollywood
utilize freelance creative workers, assembling and re-assembling for different jobs, and
while both often use the same workers time and again, Hollywood’s system is predicated
on legal contracts for said work, while Nollywood’s system is predicated solely on
relationships of trust and informal business agreements. Similarly, while conditions in the
First World are relatively penetrable, the type of penetrability present in Nigeria is
predicated on the kind of social and economic upheaval unthinkable in the highly
developed world. An ineffective state and imposed economic severity rules can breed a
particular variety of ingenuity, borne of necessity, survival instinct, and self-sufficiency
endemic to the global Fourth World, a context worth exploring in greater detail.
The Context of the Urban Global Periphery
While these elements mentioned above contributing to cultural industry
development and growth mirror the informality and openness that marked the beginning
of Nollywood, their histories and models are all based on an industry coming of age in a

40
fully industrialized economy, and in a country that had already achieved some level of
prominence in the global order. While California and Los Angeles were quite peripheral
compared to New York and even San Francisco, two established cultural hubs of the day,
for instance, Hollywood was still situated within a politically and economically central
nation-state, with at least hypothetical potential access to all of the bank capital,
governmental reliability, and, particularly important, stability that that location implies.
While Hollywood wasn’t a popular investment magnet in its initial years, it was growing
in conditions that could hypothetically (and did, in fact) match up quite quickly to
existent functioning formalized industrial processes.
In this project, I set out to examine the industrialization and globalization of an
industry growing up out of a somewhat similar setting to Hollywood, and to the many
cultural crucible cities that went before it. The similarities lie in the informalities and the
frontier mentality of a place initially off of the national or global radar. However, the
more important and salient features of my analysis lie in those areas in which Nollywood
and Lagos are almost unfathomably different from every creative city Hall (1998)
analyzes in his work on cultural hubs, and nearly every industry Scott has analyzed: its
disconnectedness, or disembeddedness from the global order.
The Fourth World and the Global Order
In the context of the widely theorized “Network Society,” a globally interlinked
world order based on access to and integration into globalization processes and
connective networks (Castells, 1998), there is a flip side: those left out of this world
order. This is known as the “Fourth World,” rising from the ashes of a now defunct

41
Second World (the USSR and its cohort of affiliated nations) and the Third World, which
is seen by many as an increasingly meaningless grouping after the fall of the Soviet
Union. This Fourth World is on the rise with the advent of the connectivity of the
Network Society (Castells, 1998). The Fourth World is a non-geographically discrete
land of exclusion and isolation: an exclusion from even the possibility of making a living
wage and an isolation not just from a distant global elite but from the very members of
the global Network Society living in the same city, perhaps even in the same quarter. For
the Fourth World, unlike the Second and Third Worlds, is not constituted by nation-
states; the land of the Fourth World can be conceived of as large as a continent, e.g.
Africa, and as small as a hidden apartment of illegal immigrants or a neighborhood of
urban poor in a global elite city such as New York, London, or Paris. As some segments
of the world – those which offer value to global networks of power, wealth, and
information - are linked through global networks, their very physical neighbors are easily
excluded, lost in the gaps between connections in the Network Society.
These characteristics
7
are particularly relevant to the Information Age, as global
connections become the currency of the day. Sub-Saharan Africa itself can be considered
a case study in exclusion. Africa as a continent is not totally excluded; indeed, the global
oil, diamond, and other precious metals industries are hard at work in pockets of the
continent, linked to global networks of sales, refinement, and finance in their efforts to
exploit the local natural resources. However, while some Africans do profit from this, the
money is not spread around widely. Africa as a whole is specifically disenfranchised by

42
its “fragmented incorporation” (Castells, 1998: 91) into the global order and Nigeria is no
exception.
AbdouMaliq Simone (2001) has developed a thorough theory of the complex play
between the global order and the highly localized nature of the city in the African
context. He makes the claim that no African cities are world cities in the sense of the
traditional literature on the topic. Instead, urban Africa can be described as a series of
localized informal networks operating on generally unsustainable platforms with their
own informal networks of connections to the global. Simone takes as his starting point
the history of cities in Africa: grown by colonial authorities for the primary purpose of
transporting exploited local resources through to global networks. Yet even in colonial
times – and carried through to the postcolonial era – the African city is also a site of
under-regulated spaces, spaces rife with informal and non-state-sanctioned opportunity.
However, these new opportunities are limited – while some urban African residents can
connect to the global order, there has never been as a result a great restructuring of the
global economic order, a chance for the residents of that city to dominate as a collective
whole. Instead, Simone’s urban African cities house a vast sea of individual opportunities
in their unsupervised realms, connecting some but never the city as a whole. The
economy of the African city, in Simone’s telling, is and has always been linked to global
capital. Yet the urban economy’s relationship to the global order has extensive gaps along
with its connections, and it is in the gaps more than in the connections that urban African
residents locate their own opportunities.

43
In places such as Lagos, we can see the specificities of this fragmented
incorporation that contrasts dramatically with the global Network Society. The global
network society has a physical architecture: fiber optic cables go from one physical
location to another; business parks are built with direct information and transportation
links to other hubs; freeways and high speed trains bypass distractions as they link
business centers to airports (Graham, 2002; Graham & Simon, 2001). Graham and Simon
(2001) refer to this as “glocal infrastructure,” as it is, by definition, first local in nature, a
physical element of the city. Yet at the same time, this piece of physical architecture is
the very device that enables those nodes to connect to the global, and to bypass all of the
purely local elements in between. It is in assessing this physical networked infrastructure
that the experience of lack and of exclusion from the system best comes into focus. In
the developing world, however, not only are high-speed fiber optic connections usually
an impossibility, but very basic levels of infrastructure are highly lacking: water
availability and pressure, telephone connections, roads, security, electricity.
In Lagos, not a single one of these above-mentioned things can be relied upon.
For one, virtually no one receives their water from a central supply, with most sourcing
their water on their own. Even water pressure is an unheard of luxury in all but the most
expensive of hotels and apartment complexes. Nigerian television commercials for bath
soap depict users washing themselves in the same way almost all Nigerians do – throwing
water upon themselves with a bucket shower. The water in the bucket shower may be
unheated, unless electricity or alternative cooking devices are functioning with which to
heat the water – and this situation is shared by the lower and middle classes alike.

44
Telephone wires are seen jumbled in heaps all around Lagos, fallen from their posts,
dragging on the ground and tangled with one another. Businesses provide landline phone
numbers to prospective clients mostly as a formality. Without a mobile phone number as
a supplement, one is unlikely to even get the phone to ring, much less contact someone at
the business.
Roads, too, are a constant reminder of infrastructural discreteness from global
circuits in Lagos. Not only do potholes the size of cars bog down traffic, particularly in
rainstorms, but the road system appears to be untouched by changes or repairs since the
mid-1970s, despite an exponential increase in the number of cars driving and over 30
years of wear and tear. There are hardly any traffic lights and hardly any roads that are
not clogged during the daylight hours. Okadas, or motorbikes, that weave in and out of
traffic are a way of life: virtually anyone seen driving one can be paid around $1 to take
passengers a short distance, and it is not uncommon to see even middle class
businessmen exit their chauffeured car and hop on the back of one of the ubiquitous bikes
in order to make it to a meeting on time.
It is security and electricity that are one of the biggest infrastructural problems in
Lagos, however. Electricity is so unreliable that practically every functioning business
and the majority of urban households have access to a generator to supplement
government supplied power at a great expense, though these generators may be decades
old and in a near-constant state of failure and disrepair. In 1988, private infrastructure
provision was estimated to constitute 25% of small firms’ operating costs (Kessides,
1993), a number that may by now be even higher. The implications of this lack of

45
infrastructure not only derail development and growth, but also bring into full focus the
level of disembeddedness from the global order, viscerally experienced on a daily basis.
It is from this context that Nigeria’s home video industry not only emerged but
began its processes of industrialization – a process that, for all of its similarities to the
models of peripheral growth highlighted in existent renditions of creative industry
development, has been and is still being performed under conditions quite different as a
whole from that in the global North. This theme comes up in the small number of case
studies that have been done on the rise of cultural industries emerging from the outskirts
or outside of the global cultural industry networks. Dominic Power and David
Hallencreutz (2004), for instance, compare the development and integration of the music
industry based in Stockholm to the music industry based in Kingston, Jamaica, both
industries well-known hubs in the global music production market. Stockholm is the hub
in Sweden’s role as the largest net exporter of popular music after the U.S. and the U.K.,
due largely to its production and post-production expertise, while Kingston is the hub of a
robust network of innovative independent producers and musicians whose work gets
consumed on a global scale. Both industries have only a small domestic market yet have
been able to link up with global distribution chains, attracting attention and business deals
from the global “majors” (major labels). Yet, while Kingston’s products have a higher
collective commercial value on the retail market, it is Stockholm that makes the larger
real collective profits.
The reasons for this are manifold. Power and Hallencreutz (2004) point out a
number of features of the organization of both industries that have led Kingston to trail

46
Stockholm in profits, but each feature leads back to one central theme: level of “links
between the local production system and the international circuits of capital, distribution,
and effective property rights” (p. 224). In other words, it is the level and quality of links
between the local and the global that determine stability and growth potential. The links
in this instance are both virtual in the sense of flows of cultural products and business
deals, as well as quite physical: each of the major global music labels has a presence in
Stockholm, all through wholly-owned subsidiaries located in one particular Stockholm
neighborhood. In Kingston, on the other hand, the Jamaican government and local
industry chiefs have traditionally spurned the attempts of global major labels to locate
offices there. As such, the city is virtually devoid of any entrenched global music industry
interests. Power and Hallencreutz note that, while Kingston’s music industry has a
number of significant linkages to the global majors, there are many wide gaps between
those links – and even the existent links are often under strain due to “cultural
differences.” They conclude that Kingston’s lack of profitability compared to its
collective-retail-value inferior Stockholm is attributable to these gaps: from low adoption
of new music production and distribution technologies to the lack of internal
organizational ability to protect themselves from intellectual property rights violations.
While some have noted the positive effect that the distance between Jamaica’s music
industry and the global majors may consistently have on production and innovation, the
fact remains that Jamaica is still lacking in its ability to reliably and consistently profit
from its innovative and popular musical production. If their goal is financial success, it is

47
in their disembeddedness from the global order where they have their biggest barrier to
achieving this goal.
In this way, we can see the specific challenges Nollywood faced and continues to
face in its growth. Born of informality and continuing to thrive in conditions particularly
inhospitable to the entry of major multi-national entertainment firms, Nollywood too
exists in the gaps between connections to global networks. Nollywood, like Kingston’s
music industry, is lacking in its ability to reliably and consistently profit from its creative
production, and this instability in profits means that financing and production is also
unstable. When taken in the context of previous work done on cultural industry growth in
the global North, we can see the gaps in the literature and the very different conditions
faced by cultural industries growing in the global South.
The development of Bollywood, India’s movie industry based in Mumbai, can
also throw into relief that which separates cultural industry growth in the global South
and North, as we can examine the similarities between Nollywood and Bollywood in
comparison to industrial development in the global North. Like Nollywood, Bollywood’s
production processes emerged from immense informality. Athique cites a 1997 Indian
newspaper as estimating that 40% of Hindi films made in India in the 1990s were
financed by “dubious money” (Koppikar, 1997, cited in Athique, 2008: 700). As in
Nollywood, this includes so-called “pirates” themselves investing in production, and
independent producers cobbling together funds from sources that include “pirates,
thieves, criminals, and underworld dons” (Pendakur, 2003: 53). Like in Nollywood,

48
established “pirates” (there, of music) were gradually “normalized” and brought into the
system as financiers and distributors (Athique, 2008).
In terms of distribution, while Bollywood did emerge from a Hollywood-esque
system of film prints and theatrical distribution, its development since the 1980s has been
rooted in the informal processes driven by the same new technologies that have driven
Nollywood. While theatrical distribution in Bollywood’s earlier development was
hampered by foreign import taxes and outright bans in places like Pakistan and
Bangladesh, VHS technologies propelled the industry from the early 1980s onward
(Athique, 2008; O’Regan, 1991). Even as VHS technologies enabled rampant piracy,
they also ‘saved’ Bollywood from fading away, as informal distribution allowed vast
international penetration into areas where Indian movies were not yet popular enough to
justify theatrical screenings (Athique, 2008). New digital technologies have further
extended this phenomenon.
The main themes that emerge from a comparative look at the development of
Bollywood and Nollywood reflect the emphases that Simone (2001) and Larkin (2004)
put on innovative response to the state of exclusion from global networks. To begin with,
in both industries, piracy, VCR and other new technologies and informal distribution
points like small grocers enabled growth in global markets without any influx of global
capital (though this global capital and formal organization has begun to arrive and
integrate India in the past 5 – 10 years; Moullier, 2007). When mapping both industries,
we can see the use of alternative networks with alternative hubs – such as Dubai or
Jakarta – for supplies and distribution, as constitutive of alternative growth. Just as

49
Simone described in his analysis of African cities, those Fourth World hubs, existing
largely outside of the global order, create their own alternative international circuits
(more on this in Chapter 6). We can see too the power of growing demand for content
that feels local in places not central to the global cultural industry networks. And we also
see their birth from a rapidly growing mega-city. While Bollywood was birthed in
Mumbai years ago, we can see that the chaos, pressure, and creativity of the Fourth
World mega-city forms its own variety of incubator of explosive growth.
Conclusion
As Nollywood continues to engage in processes of institutionalization and
industrialization (Scott’s (2005) third stage), we can see the many ways in which it has
been similar to Hollywood, the dominant model upon which existing models of cultural
industry development are based. The drivers that mark cultural industry growth in the
global North are also visible in Nollywood, an exemplar of growth in the global South.
Just as Los Angeles offered freedom and openness to early Hollywood producers, Lagos
offers those qualities to producers in the extreme. The freelance employment highlighted
by Caves (2002) and Faulkner and Anderson (1987) figure heavily in Nollywood’s
business culture, as does the culture of freedom and change that Saxenian (2004) and
Zook (2005) discuss. Like in Bollywood, we can see informal and gray market financing
and distribution networks as a source of industrial strength, a source not open to
industries growing in the rigid regulatory environments of the global North. Utilizing the
flexibility and penetrability of “pirate” networks for distribution is much easier in
locations where there are few functional distinctions between authorized and

50
unauthorized distribution networks. Utilizing informal funding (of dubious origins) from
individual investors is more feasible in a society where such funders are ubiquitous and
doing business without the knowledge of the state is a way of life, not a surreptitious
activity. In Nollywood’s growth story, we can see the possibilities offered by the
burgeoning industry’s penetrability and lack of business interests.
Yet we can also see Nollywood in the context of work done on growth in the
global urban periphery. Wholly a product of the global urban periphery and the Fourth
World, and an example of the fragmented incorporation of the African city to the global
order, Nollywood faces similar challenges in its relationship to the global movie industry,
as does the Kingston music industry in its relationship to the global music industry. The
gaps between connections to the global order offer space and room to grow in an
environment of freedom and entrepreneurial flexibility and creativity. These same gaps
offer challenges. Like Kingston’s music industry, Nollywood maintains difficulties in
acquiring formal funding, acquiring and utilizing the newest of technologies and
integrating effectively with the global networks that have the potential to maximize
funding and returns.
The development of Nollywood is inseparable from its position as disembedded
from the global order, a position that offers both opportunities and challenges. And the
location of Nollywood in not only a city of fragmented incorporation to the global order,
but also a nation – and a continent – that epitomize fragmented incorporation to the
global order – mark it as distinctive from industries like Hollywood that rose in a
peripheral or frontier-esque city that still benefitted from its location in the global North.

51
We can see the emergence of Nollywood not only as a product of the opportunities
emerging from existent cultural industries (Yoruba drama troupes and NTA soap operas),
technological development (VHS), and SAP-induced changes in Nigeria, but as a product
of the specific Nigerian condition, itself an example of the Fourth World condition. It is a
story of making a functioning industry out of an architecture of lack. It is a story of
creativity and innovation on the other side of the global network of culture industries. I
study next the current map of Nollywood the industry: the production and distribution
processes that have emerged, and how the industry functions in a simultaneous state of
connectivity (to alternative and dominant circuits), fragmentation, and disembeddedness.

52
Chapter Two Endnotes

1
This feeling of insecurity and the measures taken against it have sustained themselves
through the past 20 years and continue to this day in Lagos

2
The National Film and Video Censors Board was established in 1993. Not only do they
censor and classify films, but they also keep what are to date the best official records of
Nigerian film and video productions. Despite the lack of governmental input in most of
the industry, NFVCB censor approval is considered vital by most. Some films do
disregard it or can’t afford the fee, but film-makers hoping for any level of success are
well-advised to comply as film-makers have had assets seized or been thrown in jail for
non-compliance. As with many censorship regimes, many film-makers complain of
overzealous censors and nonsensical restrictions on creative expression, most dealing
with social mores. Political statements are not usually visible in Nollywood movies.

3
This is not, of course, to romanticize disembeddedness. Nollywood producers
repeatedly speak of how they would prefer their technology to work, greater
accountability, and greater transparency in the financing and distribution realms.

4
I will address these two models and characteristics of each further in Chapter 4.

5
While Hollywood reached the apex of this structure in the wake of forced vertical
disintegration in the wake of the 1948 Supreme Court Paramount decision, Caves notes
this same structure as having developed in fields as diverse as gallery art, performed arts
as in theater and ballet, the recorded music industry, film production, book and magazine
publishing, fashion design, and game design, and toy design.

6
While every new production in the contract-based cultural industries tends to require a
new crew, Faulkner and Anderson show that repetitive employment and consistent
collaboration throughout cultural industries are the norm (1987). In other words, the
same people work together time and time again despite the lack of formalized contracts
mandating persistent collaboration. The driver for this is perhaps self-evident: the
importance of trust. It shows that knowing with whom one is working, personal histories,
and proven ties are important considerations even when working in an industry without
contractual mandates to continue using the same workers time and again. The theme of
trust shows up repeatedly in the economic geography work done on cultural industries.
Caves (2002), Saxenian (1994), Rantisi (2004), and Currid (2008) all point to the
importance of an environment enabling chance encounters and face-to-face contact.
When every production is a new venture, Currid points out, every social encounter can be
part of the job networking process (2008).

53

7
“the territorial confinement of systematically worthless populations, disconnected from
networks of valuable functions and people” (Castells, 1998: 164)

54
CHAPTER THREE:
The Processes of Movie Production and Distribution in Nollywood

Despite the low cost and rampant pirate distribution that marks the industry,
Nollywood is a huge business, employing thousands. Nollywood movies sell in Nigeria
for 150 – 300 naira per copy (often 150 naira or $1 in the open air markets that serve as
major distribution hubs and 300 naira or $2 in secondary retail outlets such as streetside
vendors or street hawkers). Of course, as most movies tend to be released in a two part
format and sold separately, those wishing to follow a story from start to finish will often
wind up spending twice that. Profits and expenses are a closely guarded secret by those
involved in them, and few will publicly admit to experiencing great returns, at risk from
tax authorities and business partners coming to them for a cut. For the most part, the
major profits are for the distributors
1
and come in the context of quantity: profits are
usually made from collective returns over a wide catalog of movie productions, as
opposed to a blockbuster mentality of exceptional returns from one individual production.
Anyone without their own distribution networks, including well-known producers,
directors, and actors, can struggle to maintain their lifestyles.
This chapter will outline the processes of movie production and distribution in
Nollywood, from financing to production to the logics of creative employment to
marketing and distribution, highlighting the informality, pirate networks, and
relationships of trust that are particularly relevant to movie industries growing out of the
Fourth World. In that vein, before going into the specifics on processes of movie
production and distribution in Nigeria, I will be looking at Nollywood as growing out of a

55
very specific place: Lagos, an over-flowing Fourth World mega-city. The structure of
Nollywood reflects the specific architecture and shape of Lagos.
Nollywood the Place
“Where is Nollywood?” asked a neophyte on a Nollywood message board in early
2009. The mirthful and mocking responses were plentiful. “Nowhere!,” said many, while
others were more specific, citing places where one can, indeed, see Nollywood at work.
One answer could be Idumota Market, a crowded sewage-laden marketplace on Lagos
Island that was traditionally the center of distribution (one street in particular is given
over to stand after stand after stand of video film vendors). Another answer could be
Alaba Market, a vast sprawling electronics market on the outskirts of Lagos that
succeeded Idumota as the nerve center of distribution (though Idumota continues to sell
large quantities in its own right). Surulere is another answer. This is the neighborhood on
mainland Lagos where most producers, actors, and other creative professionals live and
work. Far from the expatriate high-rises of Victoria Island, Surulere is an upmarket
middle-class neighborhood populated by fast food restaurants and internet cafes. While
production and editing equipment is housed in the studios, private bungalows, and office
spaces of Surulere, there are no soundstages or production studios here or anywhere else
in the movie business
2
. Another answer is O’Jez’s, a bar in Surulere’s National Stadium
that serves as a meeting point and source of business deals. With the exception of
O’Jez’s, the offices and other workspaces of Nollywood in Surulere are unmarked and
the streets are largely residential; besides the lively and open O’Jez’s, most of Surulere’s
Nollywood workspaces will not lead to chance encounters. Another specific answer: 51

56
Iweka Road, a building in Onitsha, a city in Igboland in which many Igbo marketers base
their business despite their presence in Lagos, housing an inordinate number of small
production companies, offices in a row. Even within Nigeria, there are multiple
production centers.
Despite international distribution and penetration throughout Nigeria, Nollywood
remains centered on Lagos. Lagos is a growing global mega-city that is often cited as
growing ‘off the grid’. Home to 16 million (and projected to reach 23 million by 2015),
only 5% of households are connected to the city water system (down from 10% in 1960)
(Haynes, 2007), for instance, and it may be on its way to becoming the third largest city
in the world (Haynes, 2007). Lagos is a very specific geography and most production and
distribution concerns have a presence there.
Alaba International Electronics Market may be one location of Nollywood that
epitomizes the nature of the industry in its very structure. The sprawling market exists on
the outskirts of Lagos. Journeying there in a taxi, one will emerge from the densely
populated urban maze that is central Lagos into a dusty spread of low-lying disconnected
buildings speckling the landscape, until Alaba itself is reached. Alaba is a city unto itself,
with streets, churches, banks, and apartments, though all look similar: low, dusty, and
constructed of inexpensive materials. The market, according to an estimate from a decade
ago, is the epicenter of 75% of West Africa’s electronics trade, housing 50,000
merchants, and netting $2 billion US each year (Koolhaas, et. al., 2001). At Alaba, one
can purchase anything from new flat-screen televisions to used generators to, of course,
movies (primarily on video compact discs, or VCDs).

57
Originally part of the Alake market in Mushin (another Lagos neighborhood),
Alaba came to prominence in the 1970s as electronics merchants began selling speakers,
part of a newly popular craze for recorded music. As the market for electronics products
grew, 1977’s African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) arrived, putting pressure on
Alaba to move, and so it did. The merchants moved en masse first to Mile 2, near the
Apapa port, and then far West on the Western highway leaving Lagos bound for the
Benin border. Where it stands now is right where the largest Nigerian (and West
African) electronics market could be expected to stand, directly between two sources of
product importation: one formal (the Apapa port) and one informal (the Benin border at
Seme)
3
.
The location also separates Alaba from any government officials wanting to
create “order” or control the market in other ways. While markets like Idumota are in
more vertical, more densely populated areas in Lagos, Alaba can spread out as far as it
would like without running into anything that the city would consider important enough
to protect. The only efforts at delimitation come from within. Essentially “dumped”
(Koolhaas, 2001:702) in the middle of nowhere, the market has thrived on neglect,
forging its own global network of connections out of a locale that was not only
disconnected from the world order, but also from Nigeria and from Lagos itself.
Koolhaas et. al. report that Alaba, now institutionalized as an important center for trade,
has also collectively developed its surrounding areas, building a car park, local (Ojo)
secretariat, fire station and electricity sub-station, as well as a local library and all of the

58
books and televisions in it, all paid for by a collective of Alaba merchants and unrelated
to taxation or governmental oversight.
Alaban infrastructure is much like that of Lagos: improvised and astounding.
Koolhaas et. al. (2001) reference a statistic that, even though it may lack veracity, gives
an idea of the scale and atmosphere of the market: that Alaba has the highest
concentration of generators in the world (p. 706). Each stall owner has his (almost all are
male) own “gen” and many also have their own communication system. Merchants have
private radio-wave towers to ensure mobile phone service.
Outside of Alaba, Koolhaas et. al. argue that Lagos is not just the urban extreme,
but is also “imploded suburbia” throughout central Lagos (2001). Neighborhoods band
together to wall themselves in, yet urban life abounds both inside and outside of these
walls, walls built in the heart of the city. Packer (2006) notes that, unlike other
megacities like Mumbai, Dhaka, Manila, and São Paulo, which have given birth to entire
satellite slum cities, in Lagos “there is no distinct area where a million people squat in
flimsy hovels. The whole city suffers from misuse.” A 2001 public CIA report notes that
Lagos had the highest score on their rankings of global cities on potential for urban crisis,
citing the low levels of governance and infrastructure (the report notes that “The basics of
adequate shelter sanitation and water are lacking for the majority of the populace,” p. 64)
combined with a dramatically rising population due to births and migration, unemployed
youth, and the propensity for religious and ethnic conflicts
This city and context form the backdrop for a number of specific conventions that
guide the industry. The next sections of this chapter will lay out in detail those specific

59
conventions: how business in Nollywood works, and how a movie goes from financing to
distribution via informal trust-based networks with more connections to Nigerian black
market networks than to dominant global networks. The same theme of creative
improvisation in the face of lack and the triumph of informal fixes to systemic failure
mark Alaba, Lagos, and Nollywood alike.
Financing Movies
Average budgets for Nollywood movies range from $20,000 to $50,000, though
there are certainly movies made that eclipse such budgets on both the low and high end.
The process of financing a Nollywood film is often very creative. As Nollywood is
generally not stable enough to attract bank loans and is involved in often antagonistic
relationships with the government over taxes, loans and grants upon which other film
industries can rely upon are usually unavailable to movie makers in Lagos. Instead,
movies tend to be financed by individual marketers who serve as executive producers,
marketers, and distributors for each movie. Some movies go from inception to
distribution under the direction of one marketer who is responsible for the whole movie,
though other producers try to cobble together networks of investors, promising
distribution rights, creative control, and other incentives. While they dominate the scene,
it is not just the marketers who executive produce. Independent producers can also sell
their completed projects directly to marketers, and producers with more access to capital,
either through personal connections or their own prior film profits, will often prefer to do
this in order to retain more control over their product. If the completed film looks
promising, a producer can immediately recoup his investment in the film by selling it and

60
all the rights associated with it to a marketer, or, if the movie has a number of stars and
seems a sure bet, can sometimes garner a “pre-sales” guarantee which in effect finances a
film entirely in advance. In an ideal scenario, the funder pays 50% of costs upfront and
50% at the end of production. In reality, however, movies are often plagued by rapidly
disappearing and re-appearing financing. Osei-Hwere and Osei-Hwere (2008) note that
the lack of capital leads to loans being largely short term with high interest rates, which
necessitate fast returns on investment.
If the movie is not sold outright or funded wholly by the distributor, there is a
royalty system in place in which the marketer pays to the producer a percentage of each
copy of a title sold. This system of royalties is not considered very desirable, as producers
can rarely expect a fully truthful accounting of sales figures. No matter what system of
financing is used, there tends to be a great deal of tension between directors and
marketers, and deals are wrought with rancor and distrust, a phenomenon, it may be
noted, that one can find in movie industries worldwide, including Hollywood.
Unlike in global Hollywood, however, financing decisions are not based on any
official estimates of sales potential, nor are they based on any degree of transparency in
distribution plans. The only people who can feel confident in financing a movie are those
who will also be in charge of distribution, and their decisions are based on informal
knowledge of the market based on their ownership and management of distribution
outlets. As Marketer 2, head of the marketers’ guild, put it, “the man in the market
interacting with the people in the market knows what makes commercial success,”
(personal communication, July 31, 2009). In this way, financing is both informal and tied

61
to gray market money. Like all else in Nollywood, informality and creativity born of
necessity are the name of the game.
Production in Lagos
Decisions throughout the production are nominally up to the director but, if a
marketer has funded the film, as is most often the case, he has the right to dictate
everything from casting to plot. Particularly when such decisions are related to financial
expenditures, they will tend to do so. In most cases, primary sponsorship of a movie also
means active participation in production decisions. Marketers will often work repeatedly
with the same director/producer or a small handful of trusted and reliable
director/producers, as relationships of trust outweigh formalized contracts and negate the
need for agents.
Scripts are often written by the directors but are also purchased from
screenwriters, usually quite cheaply. Scripts must deal with minor governmental
censorship (the mechanics of which are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4). This
mainly constitutes a lack of visible sexual contact onscreen (though sex certainly figures
heavily in plots), discouragement from over-reliance on witchcraft as a plot point
(somewhat futile, as black magic is a dominant plot element) and a call for negative
consequences for immoral actions
4
. Overt political statements are usually lacking in these
mass-market productions
5
.
The scriptwriter’s concept, the big name star actor, and the director usually begin
the package. Once a movie moves closer to actual production, a cinematographer
6
is
enlisted. The cinematographer will usually book the soundmen, sound mixers, lights men,

62
and all relevant assistants (and these are almost always all men). Non-star actors, on the
other hand, are usually enlisted through auditions. Auditions tend to be rather formal
well-attended affairs, with members of the leadership of each guild
7
expected to attend
and make sure everything is operating in a respectable fashion
8
.
Nollywood production is marked by velocity, low cost, and coping with lack. An
average of ten scenes are shot in one day, with 10 – 15 days worth of shooting on an
average movie
9
. With one week of pre-production and one week of editing and
packaging, a video film can easily go from inception to sale in four weeks, though two
months is a relatively common scenario. An in-demand worker can easily shoot two
movies in one month. With low pay from any individual movie, workers make a living
mainly through quantity, and some can be found working nearly every day.
A standard theme in production in Lagos is the lack of reliable power supply.
With NEPA (Nigerian Energy and Power Authority, often mockingly redubbed Never
Expect Power Anytime) power exceedingly unreliable, the use and failure of noisy
generators often plagues productions. Budget constraints also mean that Lagos is often
the shooting location, and the time period is usually the present. A single movie may span
several decades and generations but this will not be reflected in the costume or set.
Scenes located in expensive homes are frequently shot in the homes of the movies’
wealthy financiers and scenes set in simple apartments are often shot in crew members’
own homes. Non-ambient lighting is seldom used and it is even more rare to find it used
creatively. In this way, the very aesthetic of Nollywood is tied to the conditions of lack
which mark both the industry and the country.

63
Similarly, lack of money for editing and last-minute production schedules also
contribute to a cinematic style marked by long sequences with no action, repetitive
dialogue, and the unsettling entrance and exit of storylines tertiary to the main plot of the
film. It is an aesthetic marked by haste, improvisation, and the haphazard. Full scripts
tend only to be given to leads, and those in supporting roles tend only to receive copies of
the scenes in which they will appear, as producers see no reason to incur the
photocopying expenses for minor characters (Actor 1, personal communication, July 8,
2009). As a result, many characters may be unaware of their role’s relation to the overall
plot, contributing to the disjointed feeling of many productions.
In terms of recording, Nollywood movies are often shot using new equipment
imported from Europe or Asia and sold through official representatives of major
equipments manufacturers, such as JVC and Sony. Sony is by far the dominant supplier
of equipment in Nigeria and their shop on Lagos’ Victoria Island is frequented by most of
the professional cinematographers
10
. Clients will order equipment and the store will have
it shipped, usually from Sony distribution centers in Asia (or, at times, Europe). This of
course makes the equipment that much more expensive, as taxes and shipping charges are
then included, prompting many to request equipment be purchased on trips that
acquaintances make abroad. While the purchase and use of these technologies connect
Nollywood to the global economy, the conditions of their use (following long waits for
shipping and customs, more expensive than in the “First World,” and reliant on
interrupted power supplies) drive home Nigeria’s and Nollywood’s place in the global

64
economy. This is a place of exclusion and semi-exclusion, and connections to the global
sphere will usually be heavily mediated by the conditions of the Fourth World.
Movie-making technologies in Nigeria have changed since Nollywood began on
VHS in the early 1990s. After VHS came SuperVHS, followed by Betacam, then DV,
and then DVPro. Some have now reported the advent of HD as well, though it was
certainly not widespread by the summer of 2009. If lighting is used, one professional
cinematographer reports generally using “redheads,” Arri 2Ks, kino lights, and 200 watt
bulbs (Cinematographer 1, personal communication, July 20, 2009). These lights will
usually be owned by the production company in charge of the movie, but if extra lights
are needed or the producer does not have their own, these lights are easily rented from
other production companies – or individual cinematographers - not currently shooting.
The nature of the industry – informal, and trust-based – means that it is usually easy
enough to find a trusted person with extra lights to rent, and formal rental outfits have
little place in Nollywood.
Post-production usually occurs in editing suites located in the production
company offices of Lagos, and using digital editing tools, a stark contrast from the days
of sending film for processing to London at great expense. Busy production companies
will employ an in-house editor and have their own editing studio, but others can rent that
same studio on an individual basis. One production company in-house editor notes that,
while editing a movie “properly” should take at least 30 days, 16 days is common
11
and a
week not unheard of (Manager 1, personal communication, July 20, 2009). Inexpensive
(and often illegally acquired) software packages EDIUS and Canopus DVStorm are

65
amongst the standard editing tools. Some production companies will edit during shooting,
but most won’t due to the unreliability of shooting schedules and the associated expense
of renting out editing studios.
Once a movie is edited, it must be sent to the NFVCB for censorship and approval
before wide release. Then, a master copy is sent to the movie’s distributor who must have
a good relationship with the replication factory in order to get to the front of the queue
and ensure a timely release. The factory returns the shipment of VCDs to the distributor
who then packages them with the appropriate graphics and then sends them through their
distribution network, usually first focused on a few main hubs in Alaba (the Lagos
market) and Onitsha (the city in the Igbo-dominated Southeast that is homebase for a
large number of production companies). These distribution networks are held together
through trust and informality as opposed to legally binding contracts, as are virtually all
Nollywood institutions, another reminder of Fourth-World-ness.
Labor in Production Processes
There is little in the way of formal training in the industry and many workers have
no training whatsoever, improvising along the way. Some efforts to institute training
programs via movie-making schools have begun but these have not yet become a reliable
mechanism for feeding talent into the industry. It may be that schools are too formal an
education for an informal industry. A notable exception is one-off training seminars
offered usually to the more technical of workers. For instance, Sony, the dominant
supplier of camera and sound equipment to the industry, leads periodic seminars on using

66
its products, which it advertises through the guilds (e.g. the Nigerian Society of
Cinematographers).
The most common way for people to get started in the industry, however, is
through apprenticeship for little to no money. It is commonplace in Nigeria for a “big
man” to train a number of “boys” to work under him
12
, and it is no different in
Nollywood. This tradition is thought to ensure loyalty on behalf of the underlings and the
industry is full of people who got their start through loose personal connections. Director/
Producer 5, a mid-level producer, for instance, runs a production company. The in-house
editor at this company is Director/ Producer 5’s former barber, who he trained and
groomed to do editing. In this way, he says, “I know he will always be loyal to me”
(personal communication, July 16, 2009). Most in Nollywood seem to have gotten their
start in this way as opposed to coming into the industry already trained. Those who do
enter the industry already possessing skills often acquired these skills in an informal
fashion. Special Effects 1, for instance, a post-production special effects artist, entered
the industry with special effects skills, but these were learned mainly via free online
tutorials on special effects software such as Video Co-Pilot, Cinema 4D, and After-
Effects, taken due to a personal interest in eventually working in the industry while he
was in university studying something else (personal communication, July 12, 2009).
University education is common though certainly not necessary in the creative arms of
the industry: editors, producers, and directors. Marketers, on the other hand, are often not
university educated, coming from a practical background, and some of the rancor and
distrust between the two groups is based on that point alone. Those that are university

67
educated often report their parents’ initial lack of enthusiasm about their chosen career
path in the arts, a familiar story worldwide.
Guilds and trade organizations, explored in greater detail in Chapter 4, form the
backbone of the movie industry in Nigeria. For guilds with many members and limited
work, e.g. the Actor’s Guild, guild membership forms the framework through which
creative workers look for and find work. In recent years, when the Actors Guild’s offices
were inside of the National Theater, the National Theater complex became a central
location in the movie industry: calls for auditions would be posted at the Guild office, and
an actress in the Guild’s leadership claims that many would sit at the restaurants in the
National Theater complex all day long waiting to be discovered by a passing director or
producer.
Repeat collaborations and working relationships based on informal networks of
referrals and trust are common. Despite the prominence of the guilds, people usually hear
about jobs from either someone they have worked with before or from the
recommendation of a friend. While there is no system of agents, the close-knit nature of
the movie-making community means that a potential phone number is just a few phone
calls away. If one wishes to contact an inferior, their phone number is easily found
through personal networks. If one wishes to contact a superior, it usually must be done
through an introduction, again through personal networks. Gathering places, like O’Jez’s,
a bar and restaurant in the National Stadium, can provide another opportunity to network
one’s way to the top. Industry events such as premieres, awards ceremonies, and
elaborate birthday banquets are the type of invitation-only places where big deals can get

68
hashed out. Bars like O’Jez’s or its predecessor, Winnie’s, which are open to the public,
are less likely to yield dramatic results. They do, however, provide the chance to see and
be seen, and people always make an effort to hold their important meetings there, in order
to be observed by others in the industry.
In all of these ways, we can see informal connections and trust as the building
blocks of the industry, giving it both the freedom to grow and the strength to stand.
Informal trust-based connections as a building block emerged as a fix to the ever-present
challenge of infrastructural lack – lack of legal frameworks, for instance, through which
to form and police legally binding agreements. Payment often runs along the same logics.
It is rare to receive payment upfront, though the more caché a creative worker has, the
more likely they’ll be able to demand such a scenario as a condition for employment.
Average creative workers are only paid after production and it is quite common that these
fees are subject to disputes and are sometimes not paid.
Marketing and the Market
Marketing may be the least informal of the industry’s many arms, as it is quite
visible and information about Nollywood productions blanket the streets, particularly in
the form of newspapers sold by the ever present street vendors. Marketer 2 estimates that
a third to a quarter of a movie’s overall budget is devoted to marketing, with budget sizes
depending on the script (personal communication, July 31, 2009). Marketers do engage in
targeting movies to specific market segments, such as women, children, devout
Christians, and rural populations, but mass market affairs are common.

69
The market for Nollywood movies in Nigeria spans classes, but elites do mark
themselves to a certain degree by their professed preference for Hollywood over
Nollywood movies, while lower classes would appear to feel conversely about their
cultural consumption. Rural and urban, young and old – Nollywood movies appeal to a
wide swath of the population. Whole families watch Nollywood movies together and
movies are made to offend few. It is undoubtable that Nollywood, like almost every other
film industry in the world (with the possible exception of Hong Kong) is at heart a
domestic industry. Just as those working in the production of telenovelas call foreign
sales the “gravy” on top of the main course of domestic receipts, and just as American
studios continue to produce culturally specific comedies, baseball-themed, and other
films with limited appeal abroad, Nollywood too is almost exclusively focused on
appealing to the domestic market – and the industry clearly benefits from the sheer size
of the potential domestic market in a nation of 150 million. Not only is the domestic
market a focus, but domestic markets comprised of particular ethnic groups are also a
main focus in movie production. Director/ Producer 3 repeatedly refers to the Yoruba
masses as “my audience,” saying he produces films in the Yoruba language more than
English “because that is what my audience wants.” His English films “flop,” he said
(likely an exaggeration as many of his films have enjoyed great success), because Yoruba
audiences demand Yoruba language films (personal communication, July 12, 2009).
Marketing in Lagos is marked by resourcefulness. Posters and handbills dominate,
usually very colorful and full of the most recognizable actors’ faces – often contorted into
a particularly dramatic expression
13
. It is extremely important for a movie to have

70
recognizable actors on the cover, even if their appearance in the movie is essentially a
glorified cameo. Movies also benefit from publicity in newspapers, magazines, radio, and
television programs devoted to Nollywood news. While overall profits are still low, a star
system has emerged, and successful actors and actresses can at least affect the appearance
of extravagant lifestyles and are featured regularly in Nollywood-themed magazines and
television shows. Top stars can command thousands of dollars per movie, but reports of
stars’ fees are usually exaggerated for public effect. In order to make a consistent living,
even the biggest of stars must work frequently, and those demanding extravagant fees can
be refused employment en masse by collective action on behalf of the members of the
marketers guild (FVPMAN), as has happened in recent years. Although it is a virtual
necessity for a movie to have a star in it in order for it to be a good candidate for turning
a profit, the marketers in their collective actions hold the absolute upper hand, as they
control both financing and distribution. They can and will shut down production in the
industry or blacklist certain workers if they feel their own power is being chipped away.
It is here we can see the policing of the informal trust-based relationships that
mark the industry: there is power and it is guarded jealously by a large opaque bloc.
These marketers are particularly important as we analyze the structure of the industry.
The industry is not a disorganized chaotic collective. In the absence of control by legal
institutions or major studios, control is enforced by a mass of small enterprises bound
together by strong informal ties.
Joining posters and handbills, some producers invest in radio and television ads
(if they believe the film has enough potential to warrant such an investment) (Esonwanne,

71
2008) and sometimes even “touts” (people who mill about in video film shops casually
extolling the virtues of particular films while pretending to be an average customer)
(Marston et al., 2007; Ogunleye, 2004). Awards shows, too, provide another outlet for
publicity.
Image is very important in Nollywood. Nigeria is full of fan publications and the
star system is actively enabled. Journalist 1, editor of the Arts section of Nigeria’s top
newspaper, notes “if you don’t put a picture of a Nollywood actor or actress on your
paper, you don’t sell” (personal communication, July 9, 2009). And, indeed, there is
almost always a small picture and blurb about some Nollywood gossip on Nigeria’s most
respected news publications. The streets, too, are full of gossip publications being sold by
street hawkers, and there are also frequent interviews on radio or television programming.
Distribution
Nollywood movies, despite their sometimes haphazard-seeming production, are
incredibly popular and widely distributed. These distribution processes are mainly
focused on physical sales (VCD), and are often “pirated” or distributed by non-rights-
holders. Nollywood movies are consumed in a variety of formats, in a variety of settings,
and make their way to their final destination via a wide variety of paths, mostly informal.
While Nollywood movies are distributed globally, we will focus here on the logics of
their domestic (Nigerian) distribution. Global and foreign distribution will be addressed
in greater detail in Chapter 6.

72
Theaters
The few Western-style cinemas in Nigeria tend to show Hollywood films at prices
only accessible to the elite classes
14
. Nollywood productions are never shot on film, and
are made for direct home entertainment release. This lack of cinema culture is bemoaned
by many working in distribution. As Marketer 2 put it, “If there were cinema culture, we
could recoup investments more reliably” (personal communication, July 31, 2009).
Unauthorized distribution is accelerated when the initial release is on home entertainment
format. The extreme informality of distribution in Nigeria, marked by lack of cinemas, is
seen by many as a liability for future industrial growth.
Nollywood movies can be seen in public spaces, however. Video parlors may be
set up informally in some neighborhoods. These tend to be small cramped uncomfortable
spaces with a single television, sometimes only 14 inches wide, screening the latest
movie at an admission price of only 20 naira, or 14 US cents (Okome, 2007). Even more
informally, one person in a given neighborhood may run his generator at night and charge
neighbors a nominal fee to come and watch a movie at his or her dwelling, so as to spread
out the cost of electricity and electronics ownership amongst a wider network. Profits
from any of these screenings do not, of course, go back to the producers.
Theatrical premieres, however, are a part of the Nollywood process. Movies with
big name stars and aspirations of great sales will sometimes put together an elaborate
premiere of sorts, full of free food, non-movie entertainment (musical acts, dance acts,
etc.), clips of the movie
15
, and, of course, high profile guests and multiple speeches

73
praising them. Premieres are usually sponsored by a corporate body, such as a bank, and
photographs of the guests wind up in a wide variety of gossip publications.
Television
Another distribution outlet for Nollywood films is television airings throughout
Nigeria, Africa, and the world. Television seems a natural home for Nollywood
productions, not only technologically but also stylistically, as many have noted that
Nollywood titles have much more in common with the style of telenovelas and low
budget soap operas than they do with cinematic productions originally intended for the
big screen. While the lack of theater exhibition compounds problems with unauthorized
distribution, screenings on television worldwide at least offer the chance for formalized
distribution of the production past the first few weeks the title is on the market. What
they do not offer is the chance for formalized profits. Particularly outside of Nigeria,
television stations will air movies for which they have not paid the original producer.
Frequently, they will have paid a third party masquerading as the original producer.
However, no matter who is paid, television distribution rights are incredibly inexpensive,
even by the scale of Nollywood production budgets, often selling for $200 - $300 per
movie. Again, profits come in quantity, across a library of movie titles sold en masse.
Anglophone African countries represent the largest television market for
Nollywood productions (Osei-Hwere & Osei-Hwere, 2008). Free-to-air channels in many
sub-Saharan African countries – both Anglophone and Francophone – broadcast
Nollywood productions regularly. Satellite channels also broadcast Nollywood films,
including the M-Net Africa Magic Channel based in South Africa, available on African

74
satellite service MultiChoice. In the U.K., three British channels available on Sky TV
broadcast Nollywood films: OBE TV, Passion TV, and BEN TV. Sky TV competitor
Triscali TV offers The African Movie Channel, a video-on-demand service that also
provides Nigerian video films. Broadcast in the U.S. is anemic: the Africa Channel
mainly offers South African fare but has been looking into scheduling more Nigerian
programming (Television 1, personal communication, Nov. 7, 2009).
Video sales
Most Nollywood films are primarily and first distributed through domestic video
sales. Video sales are dominated by the marketers who control not only the production of
movies and hiring of personnel, but also the informal distribution networks that snake
through the country’s crowded marketplaces. Most producers must go through such
channels, although big name producers will sometimes fund the movies on their own and
attempt their own distribution networks.
Once the master cut of a movie has been produced, it is delivered to the marketer,
who, in turns, delivers it as soon as possible to the replicator. There are only
approximately 14 licensed replication plants in all of Nigeria, the vast majority of which
are in the greater Lagos area. Despite the factory-level size of such a plant, the
informality of all business in Nigeria and low level of governmental oversight mean that
illegitimate plants also exist. Both the unlicensed plants and some of the licensed plants
are known to engage in mass-scale factory runs for unauthorized parties engaged in
illegal distribution.

75
Video compact discs (VCDs) dominate as a replication technology
16
. Factories
manufacture VCDs from scratch – polycarbonate resin – in Nigeria. When a run is
finished, the VCDs are sent directly back to the distributor which has ordered them.
These distributors/ copyright owners do the packaging of these discs themselves into
cases with artwork so that they can control the process and have additional security
against unauthorized distribution. Orders range between runs of 1000 and a few hundred
thousand, with frequent orders for second printings. Factories maintain contracts with a
number of clients, agreeing to produce a certain volume of VCDs at reduced rates and
shorter turn-around times for each client per year if the client agrees to do all of their
reproductions with the same factory. Other distributors, however, negotiate for every run,
comparing deals with a number of firms (Disc Replicator 1, personal communication,
July 20, 2009).
A new week’s video films are usually released on Mondays for sale at Lagos’
small-scale kiosks, tents, and street corners. Proprietors of the small-scale retail outlets
will pick up (or receive delivery of) the weeks films on Monday from their regular
distributors and sell them on commission, returning unsold copies to distributors (Osei-
Hwere & Osei-Hwere, 2008). There have been attempts by FVPMAN, the marketers’
organizing guild, to space out movie releases in order to counteract the periodic “gluts” in
movie releases. FVPMAN has also cut down on production at times to address the same
issue. The collective power of this guild is immense; it can and will shut down the
industry and blacklist huge stars with great ease and efficacy. Attempts to dethrone the

76
marketers always end in failure. The strength of their informal networks trump any
attempts at formal takeover.
These new releases are sold by small businesses: video stalls and shops in bazaars
small markets and sometimes inside small grocery stores. This tradition of informal
distribution outlets as opposed to large retailers (e.g., a large chain of formalized shops to
be found in shopping malls) is another source of industrial strength in the Fourth World
entertainment industries.
In terms of ex-Lagos distribution, marketers tend to have connections with
distributors in other major Nollywood hubs: Onitsha, Aba, Kano, and Lagos (with Accra
in Ghana as another common initial distribution destination). As almost all optical disc
replication factories are in the greater Lagos area, which is where the majority of
legitimate copies are produced. Marketers will send copies to each hub by trucks, busses,
and lorries, and traders in surrounding areas will in turn come to pick up copies at each
sub-hub. People may pick up copies form Aba, for instance, and take them to nearby Port
Harcourt. Marketer 2 reports a desire on behalf of the powerful national marketers to
exert control over some of the smaller hubs, controlling, for instance, Port Harcourt
directly (personal communication, July 31, 2009).
There are also informal rentals outfits known as video clubs. The head of a video
club will buy a Nollywood movie at street value – approximately 300 naira and rent it out
to club members at 20 - 30 naira per rental period – often a couple of days long
(Ogunleye, 2004) There has been no reliable regulation or taxation of these clubs and all

77
profit from rentals goes to the club owners. Similarly, it is common for a consumer to
purchase a copy of a video and then trade it or gift it amongst their friends and family.
Piracy is also a mainstay of the video distribution system, although I will refer to
it here as illegal distribution by unauthorized parties, or unauthorized distribution, in
order to remain value neutral. Once a movie hits the streets, it is incredibly easy for an
unauthorized party to replicate the movie on his or her own and return to the streets
selling a virtually identical copy which sells for the same price as the original, and
audiences do not seem to differentiate between legitimate and unauthorized copies, or to
prefer one to the other. In a nation where there are virtually no outlets for legitimate sales
of Hollywood movies, unauthorized distribution is not seen as much of a criminal
activity, and there is little public shame in purchasing or selling “pirated” products.
Throughout even Lagos, the centralized distribution hub, it is quite common to see a
legitimate retailer operating one or two storefronts away from a permanent unauthorized
retail shop. With no recourse to the ineffective police forces – and sometimes with
overlapping business interests – the two retailers may even be friendly with one another.
Despite the public proclamations of the marketers that unauthorized distribution is
decimating the industry, the marketers are not collectively clearly operating on the legal
side of copyright law in all of their business dealings. Instead, one might say that they
operate in a gray area, obtaining certain rights for movies and then over-stepping them,
and hiding profits. The core of the marketers comes from a background of electronics
trading, including the trade of pirated foreign movies. Their success comes in part from
using the same distribution networks they built years before, and is augmented by their

78
ability to operate behind closed doors and out of the sight of any potential regulators.
Indeed, the very things most of the visible prominent Nollywood figures bemoan – lack
of transparency, lack of formality, inability for outsiders to calculate returns before or
after the making of a movie – are the very same things that are an original source of
industrial strength.
Larkin (2004) presents a relevant study of the entrenched role of unauthorized
distribution networks and technological breakdown in Nigerian video film business
models. Non- and quasi-functional equipment and systems for production and
distribution can be considered more than quirks in the system: they are so standard and
expected as to be endemic, and a part of the structure. As he puts it, “If infrastructures
represent attempts to order, regulate, and rationalize society, then breakdowns in their
operation, or the rise of provisional and informal infrastructures, highlight the failure of
that ordering and the recoding that takes place” (pp. 290 - 291). Not only is technological
breakdown and “pirate” distribution part of the Nigerian infrastructure, Larkin notes that
Nigeria itself “has become progressively disembedded from the official global
economy… [and] ever more integrated into a parallel, unofficial world economy that
reorients Nigeria toward new metropoles such as Dubai, Singapore, and Beirut” (p. 293),
and derives up to 70% of current GDP from the “shadow economy” (p. 297). As such, we
can see Nollywood as an opportunity to examine the emergence of industrialized
creativity in what might be considered a state of disembededness from the global cultural
industry network/s. In the face of such exclusion, we can see a creative industry that not
only took root, but that is now in the process of engaging in adjustments that could help

79
the industry be integrated into global networks of cultural industry financing and
distribution – or could destroy the industry by destroying the very foundations upon
which it was built.
Conclusion
This chapter examined Nollywood as a specific product of Lagos, using the Alaba
market as a representative case study of the interplay between the architecture of the city
and the institutions it produces. This chapter also laid out the architecture of the industry,
from financing to distribution, with common threads throughout of the informality, the
networks of trust, and the creative responses to the state of global exclusion that guide
and inform it. The functioning of Nollywood as an industry is inseparable from its
location in Lagos, in Nigeria, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in the Fourth World.
Alaba’s rise in the outskirts of the urban core – in the urban periphery, one might
say – mirror Nollywood’s rise in the global periphery. In both settings, a functioning
industrial order was cobbled together from an architecture of lack. In Alaba, we can see
these individual fixes through the individual mobile phone towers and the sea of personal
generators blanketing the landscape, a landscape previously a barren area on the side of
the highway to Benin. In Nollywood, we can trace this thread throughout the industry.
Financing, for example, is usually done by the eventual distributor in the absence of
reliable sales estimates or accountability. Production relationships are built on trust, not
contracts, and entry to the industry is rarely housed in formal schools, as apprenticeships
acquired through personal connections rule. The aesthetic of Nollywood movies is born
from the experience of creative response to the disembedded qualities of the Fourth

80
World: improvised, haphazard, and chaotic. Even the Western equipment used (Sony
cameras, editing software) is mediated through an atmosphere of exclusion: difficult to
acquire and only usable with limited intermittent electricity.
Another commonality is that both Alaba and Nollywood share a deceptively
organized governance. While both are mostly ignored by Nigeria’s and Lagos’ actual
government, both are indeed governed: self-governed. In Alaba, we can see this through
the libraries, firehouses, schools – and even electricity sub-station and governmental
secretariat – built by the massive collective of small merchants housed in the market.
These merchants are held together by the urge for self-preservation as well as the
Nigerian tradition of self-organization. In the same way, we see Nollywood’s marketers
(some of whom are also the very same small-stall owners of Alaba) controlling the
industry with the firm hand of confident self-organization. They maintain star salaries at a
manageable level, control gluts, create stars, and maintain distribution networks that
rapidly disseminate new cultural products to the most remote of Nigeria’s hamlets.
Although they are threatened by illegal distribution practices, they are also strengthened
by them, particularly those of their own genesis.
At the same time, it is important not to over-romanticize the transformative
potential of Lagos. As Packer (2006) put it, “if there is an element of American frontier
capitalism in the unregulated informal economy of Lagos, there is much less opportunity
to make hard work pay off”. That those in Nollywood did so is a testament to their
tenacity and ingenuity in structuring an industry made of nothing with so much working
against it.

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Perhaps one of the more interesting things that can be gleaned from a closer look
at Alaba is the idea of the different requirements of success outside of the core. It is in the
urban margins (and global margins) that flexibility can reign. Informality can be a pre-
requisite for creativity, and informality may have specific spatial contexts in which it
thrives. This is, in some ways, an alternative conceptualization of the creative milieu: the
creative milieu not as core but as periphery, and agglomeration as decentralized in order
to survive. The informality that marks the industry is a creative response to
disembeddedness from the global order, and that informality also thrives particularly well
in the periphery.

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Chapter Three Endnotes

1
The term “distributors” will be used here to denote anyone who distributes Nollywood
movies. I will use the Nigerian term “marketers” to describe the specific class of industry
workers that executive produces, markets, and distributes Nollywood movies, and
belongs to the industry-structuring guild FVPMAN.

2
Some television shows do have soundstages, mostly built for specific shows. I visited
the set of an all West African reality show, akin to American Idol, and found it to be shot
in a brand new high-end soundstage, sponsored by the show’s South African owners and
corporate sponsors. No Nollywood movies were shot there, nor were there any plans to
rent it out to the infamously low-budget Nollywood productions in the future. The
disparity between the slick international pan-African reality show production and the
hodgepodge Nollywood movies I saw being shot was striking.

3
Koolhaas notes that increased trade with both was related to the mid-1990s decision by
the Nigerian Port Authority to relax its import tariffs.

4
These all seem to be reflective of the will of the general populace. Movie-goers will
complain about these things when they are noticed in movies.

5
While most would say that the market would not bear such statements (just as
Hollywood movies tend to be apolitical), the additional relationship between the lack of
political statements and censorship is unclear.

6
While these are technically videographers, they are referred to as cinematographers in
the industry and I will refer to them as such here, to minimize confusion when quoting
Nigerian sources.

7
As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4, most job functions in Nollywood are
represented by a guild and guild membership is so widespread it can be taken as a given
for anyone working extensively in the industry.

8
Though of course their presence certainly doesn’t prevent rumors of the time-honored
global tradition of sleeping one’s way to the top being at work.

9
Cinematographer 1 suggests that 10-15 days is the bare minimum for a movie, while a
“good” movie will take 21 days of shooting and some producers will attempt to get away
with just 4-5 days.

10
Cinematographer 1, a top cinematographer, claims that the dominance of Sony is due
to their efforts to better understand the Nigerian production system.

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11
He breaks this down as 12 days of picture cutting, two days for the director to turn this
into a directors’ cut, and two days to lay sound.

12
In Nigeria, a wealthy successful man is usually referred to as “big”, and underlings and
servants are often referred to as “boys,” no matter their age.

13
These posters are always printed and never painted as in Ghanaian cinema.

14
Though surging crime rates shuttered most cinemas, a handful remain. These are a
novelty, however: the exception rather than the rule. The Muslim North is a different
story entirely, with male-only open-air cinemas common. Nollywood as defined in this
dissertation, as well as in the industry, has little intersection with the North’s cinema
system.

15
The full movie is usually not shown so as not to spoil dozens of potential customers –
and so as not to spread the word about hypothetically sub-par quality.

16
Haynes notes that “the visual quality of VCDs is poorer than that of DVDs; it is about
the same as that of a pristine VHS tape, but considerably better than that of a videotape
that has spent a week out in the tropical sun on a hawker’s shelf and is then played on a
machine full of Harmattan dust” (2007, p. 137). Disc Replication Factory 1, one of the
largest optical disc replication plants in Nigeria, is representative of the changes that took
place in duplication and distribution over the course of Nollywood’s short history. Disc
Replication Factory 1 began operating in 1994, reproducing VHS. VCD production
capabilities were added in 2004, and, by 2005, all VHS technologies were ripped out,
replaced with all-VCD replication facilities. The managing director and CEO described
this move as a response to “a sudden shift in the market” (Disc Replicator 1, personal
communication, July 20, 2009).

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CHAPTER FOUR:
Organizing Nollywood: Government Policy and Self-organizing Alternatives

Nollywood, as mentioned previously, is an industry that was born and emerged
without any over-arching external effort guiding it, particularly not any state-governed
arts development initiatives. While states worldwide attempt to support growth in their
cultural industries through policy, the early years of Nollywood’s growth occurred
without the oversight – or, it would seem, even knowledge – of most of Nigeria’s
government agencies, including the agency charged with promoting film industry growth
(the Nigerian Film Commission, or NFC). In the most recent years of the industry,
however, Nigeria’s government agencies have begun attempts to regulate, structure, and
otherwise interact with the now-successful movie industry. This chapter will serve as an
examination of efforts to govern an industry largely viewed as unregulated. Although
Nollywood did spring up without governmental intervention and largely functions outside
of the scope of governmental involvement, there is a relationship between the hyper-
networked industry and government agencies. Only one of these agencies can truly be
said to be an effectual regulator: the censorship authority (the Nigerian Film and Video
Censorship Board, or NFVCB). This chapter will examine current governmental
involvement in the industry as well as two initiatives to alter industry structure in the
works as of the summer of 2009: one involving the industry’s distribution structure and
one involving the employment structure. The chapter will then go on to examine
alternative governance: the guilds which organize much of Nollywood, looking at both
their present industry governance and two guild-led efforts to alter industry structure,

85
filling in for government agencies (one involving distribution structure and one involving
piracy prevention). All of these governance initiatives – including the self-governance
alternatives of the guilds – can best be understood when considering the nature of the
Nigerian state and its goals. As such, before delving into the specifics of past and present
movie policy and industry oversight in Nigeria, we must first examine the specifics of
Nigeria the State.
The Nigerian State
Nigeria is a vast nation marked by its ethnic and geographic diversity. It contains
at least one fifth of the population of sub-Saharan Africa
1
, more than two thirds of which
are split amongst three main geographically discrete ethnic groups: the Hausa, the
Yoruba, and the Igbo. The area we now know as the state of Nigeria is the product of
fairly arbitrary borders drawn by colonialists and encompasses hundreds of ethnic groups
and languages. The divisions between the Hausa-dominated North and the Yoruba- and
Igbo-dominated South are particularly pronounced, as the two regions were separate
entities even under British colonial rule, and developed separately at different paces. The
North today is majority Muslim while the South is majority Christian.
Nigeria gained independence from Great Britain in 1960 and declared itself an
independent republic in 1963. The decades that followed were largely marked by
upheaval and government corruption. The new nation’s first forays into self-leadership
quickly led to ethnic and regional tension over the make-up of that leadership and
Nigeria’s first years as a republic quickly transitioned into more than three decades of
military control. Nigeria was ruled by a succession of military regimes achieving power

86
through repeated coups d’état from 1966 through 1999, the vast majority of its time as a
sovereign nation (with the exception of a brief civilian government from 1979 – 1984).
Some of these military governments were better or worse than others, but, as a whole,
political power in Nigeria in these 33 years was something taken by force and employed
mainly for the enrichment of those in power and their cronies.
Towards the latter years of military rule, Nigeria became known not only as
corrupt and ineffectual, but also specifically as a “predatory state” (see Lewis, 1996).
Throughout the military years, Nigeria, like much of sub-Saharan Africa, was marked by
serious governmental corruption, cronyism, and low levels of public services. By the
1980s and 1990s, however, Nigeria exhibited these characteristics in what can only be
described as the extreme. Ibrahim Babanginda, notorious military dictator from 1985 –
1993, seemed to have one goal in his governance: maintaining power by personally
enriching those who could keep him there. This included extensive state engagement in
illegal activities such as international money laundering and smuggling, reckless
diversion of public resources to the private parties keeping him in power, abandonment of
currency controls, and a variety of other actions that signaled overt disinterest in the good
of the Nigerian state in preference for the good of the Babanginda hold on power (Lewis,
1996). This specifically predatory approach to governance continued with Sani Abacha,
president from 1993 until his death in 1998 and the subsequent advent of civilian rule
(Lewis, 2007).
While Lewis himself cites the death of Abacha and subsequent civilian
government as the dusk of Nigeria’s classification as a predatory state (2007), the

87
legacies of this attitude towards governance have persisted: weak institutions full of non-
functional bureaucrats, clientelism, and political power as a vehicle for distributing favors
and income to cronies and supporters, for instance (Lewis, 2007), as well as a focus on
self-preservation and general lack of regard for the actions that would benefit
development (and the people) the most. The incongruence of Nigeria’s lack of reliable
electricity and road maintenance, for instance, in a state with such massive oil wealth can
be seen as symbolic of the functioning of the Nigerian state. While the civilian
governments since 1999 have put into place reforms aimed at enhancing public goods
and conditions for private investment, federal institutions have remained weak, and the
nation’s new leaders found it difficult to break free from the allure of patronage and
collusive relationships with those private parties in control of the nation’s dominant
source of foreign exchange: oil.
While the years of Nigeria as a predatory state put it in a small class of worst
offenders (along with, for instance Duvalier’s Haiti), Nigeria’s current condition – weak
institutions, clientelism as a main focus of a self-preservation-focused state, lack of most
social services, etc. – is not confined to Nigeria. We can see similar scenarios across sub-
Saharan Africa (and in other countries of the Fourth World globally) to the extent that the
failure of the state to effectively provide for its people can almost be considered the
condition of the Fourth World. The poverty and stagnancy of economic growth on the
continent can be traced directly back to the governments of said states, as Molesti Mbeki
traces in his 2009 book. The annual list of so-called “failed states” put out by U.S. think
tank Fund for Peace, for instance, is usually dominated by sub-Saharan African states. In

88
2009, of the twenty states judged to be failing the most to perform even the most basic
security and development functions for its people, 12 were in sub-Saharan Africa. While
Somalia, existing in a state of virtual anarchy with no functional central government, took
first place on the list, Nigeria ranked 15
th
on the list of failed and/or failing states in 2009.
Nigeria is notorious for its problems with governance, even a decade into civilian rule.
It is from this context that we can best understand policy initiatives and
governmental involvement by the Nigerian state. As we examine the involvement of the
government in Nollywood’s structure and functioning, it is important to keep in mind its
motivations. I posit that there are three main urges driving the involvement of such a state
in its industries. The first motivation is self-preservation: by formalizing Nollywood, the
government can integrate the industry into clientelism networks and take a cut. In other
words, the more formalized Nollywood is, the easier it will be for the state to profit from
this money-making industry it had little hand in raising. This motivation is that which
many Nollywood players grumble about, and drives in part resistance to state
participation. The second motivation is legitimacy-seeking. While the Nigerian
government may be internally corrupt, it is constantly seeking external legitimacy. The
success of Nigeria’s movie industry on the world stage, and the participation of Nigeria
in international agreements, such as intellectual property rights accords serves to soothe
bureaucrats’ feelings of insecurity about the nature of the state on the world stage. The
last motivation I posit here is legitimate in nature: the desire to target weaknesses in an
industry with high development potential. All three of these motivations may be at work
simultaneously, and it is important to remember different government actors are behind

89
each. Some initiatives may be put into place primarily by those with legitimate
motivation to do so, and many of the actors I interviewed, excited about their policy
initiatives, were surely in this camp. However, it is likely that any implemented policy in
Nigeria will be the product of two if not all three of these motivations, favored by
different key actors.
In this chapter, I analyze the government’s oversight through both industry-
governing agencies and in initiatives that were being pursued during the time of my
fieldwork in the summer of 2009, all through the lens of the nature of the Nigerian state,
and in light of the motivations discussed here. As a prelude, let us first examine the roots
of the current relationships between government and the Nigerian movie industry, which
stretch back to the colonial era.
Colonial African Movie Policy and its Aftermath
That which could be classified as movie policy in Anglophone and Francophone
Africa has its roots in the colonial era. Beginning in 1939, the U.K. began establishing
“Colonial Film Units” in their colonies, which produced educational films meant to
inform colonial subjects about health and comportment standards, including titles such as
Post Office Savings Bank, Mister English at Home, and Infant Malaria (UNCTAD,
2007). In an effort towards cost reduction in the production of these films, a small
number of local Africans were given Western-style instruction in film production,
preparing them to work on these films. This training first went on in regional institutes set
up for this purpose
2
, and, later, in London as these training centers were shut down,
relocated to one central base in London, and renamed the British Overseas Film and

90
Television Center. Though some Anglophone Africans received training at the BOFTC,
there was no great movement towards African-led film-making in colonial British Africa,
and, therefore, little need for film policy and the number who received such training was
quite small.
While there was no movement towards African-led film-making in colonial
French Africa either, there was also no African involvement in movie production,
particularly with no tradition of instructional movies produced in-country. The only
official French policy regarding film in Africa during colonial times was the Laval
Decree, issued in 1934. The Laval Decree stipulated that any prospective film shoots in
French colonies had to be submitted to French colonial authorities for prior approval, a
policy meant to discourage subversive messages which, in effect, also discouraged film
production in general (Thackaway, 2003) and the hiring of African creative workers on
films shot in Francophone Africa (Diawara, 1987). As different as Anglophone and
Francophone film involvement in their colonies may have been, their approaches differed
even more widely after their colonies achieved independence.
After independence swept through Anglophone Africa, the British had virtually
nothing in the way of organized initiatives relating to movie-making in its former
colonies. On the other hand, after independence swept through Francophone Africa,
France began to actively support cinema there through a number of policy initiatives. In
1961, the Consortium Audio-visual International (CAI) was founded, and in 1963, the
Ministry of Cooperation and its Bureau du Cinema were founded, with the goal of
offering financial and technical assistance to African filmmakers in their former colonies.

91
While these efforts originally supported newsreels and documentaries from the former
colonies, the focus quickly shifted to artistic expression
3
(Okome, 1995). While some of
this money was required to be spent on French technicians and post-production in France
(Thackaway, 2003), and other less pure motives have been suggested
4
, a main stated goal
of these efforts was aid to the arts after years of colonialist domination. The results of this
continued initiative have been striking and long-reaching. While Anglophone African
movie-making has been little-known on international festival circuits on a grand scale,
Francophone African cinema has become well-known in film festivals the world over,
garnering awards, and launching the careers of numerous African auteurs in the French
tradition of cinema as art.
Models of Creative Industry Guidance: Networked vs. Patronage
While the films produced through these efforts in Francophone Africa are widely
and well-regarded, the structure and support that produce these films can be regarded as
paternalistic. While there are no political content restrictions as there were in the days of
the Laval Decree, French civil servants are, in many cases, still deciding whether or not
particular films can get made and which subjects are valid, especially when the
independent economic viability of these African “art” films in the free entertainment
marketplace is not very robust. Most believe that Francophone African cinema, like much
publicly funded entertainment the world over
5
, could not support itself. Despite the
sometimes preference of these organizations for politically resistant content, having
former colonial authorities still serving in the role of gatekeeper makes some chafe. As
Thackaway (2003) put it, “Such technical and financial aid has nonetheless frequently

92
been attacked for perpetuating neo-colonial dependence on France and promoting films
that conform to French expectations of what should constitute an African film” (p. 8). In
stronger words, Senegalese filmmaker Ousman Sembéne, often referred to as the “father
of African cinema” has said “it is an economic dependency which, as such, gives the
West the right to view Africa in a way that I cannot bear” (cited in Slome, 1996)
6
.
The French model of technical and financial aid is not only France’s policy in
supporting African cinema, but it reflects the country’s overall attitude towards film
policy, including that for its own domestic cinema. French arts support has been referred
to specifically as a patronage model (see Singh, 2008), a model in which creative
production is funded and guided by an entity that has sizable resources to fund multiple
projects based on its own determination of its quality. In this way, one or a small number
of decision-makers determine creative production. This model dominated global cultural
output for thousands of years: in cultures throughout the world, and certainly in Western
Europe, the dominant model of creative production was one in which artists (painters,
sculptors, musicians, etc) were supported by royal or titled patrons to produce works,
usually under contract. When the French film authority (or NPR, or the BBC) supports
specific works that match their own ideas about quality film productions, they are
engaging in a modern day version of the same model.
Singh (2008) presents a view of two rival models structuring cultural industries
touched on earlier in Chapter 2: the patronage model and the networked model, wherein
networks of entrepreneurs and entrenched business interests build their own industrial
structure and support themselves through capitalist distribution. In the networked model,

93
decisions about what gets produced are not made by one entity based on quality or
content considerations, but can be made by numerous individuals throughout vast
networks of potential financiers/ distributors/ etc. These parties tend to base their
decisions on perceived financial viability and perceived potential popularity.
While the necessary focus of decision makers (quality vs. potential popularity) is
important in shaping the content of the industry, it is the number of potential decision-
makers that is particularly important when investigating the structure and political
economy of the industry. Having more decision-makers means more flexibility, more
dynamism, more openness, and more room for the new. While industries rarely wholly
encompass one model (networked or patronage) at the exclusion of the other, the
networked model has risen to prominence in the age of the Network Society and mass
production: as demand for creative work (from books to phonograms) exploded, creative
work ceased to be a scarce commodity and a model of large – and frequently global –
commercial distribution networks took over (Singh, 2008). While governments and
NGOs still support creative production, it is the networked model that is now globally
dominant. Particularly important to note, the networked model can be the only option
available to guide potentially sustainable new creative industries in areas without strong
governance or strong ties to foreign governments or powerful NGOs. With no potential
patron, emerging creative industries may have only one way to go.
The Nigerian video industry, of course, famously born with no government
initiative or government oversight (or, for the most part, even government awareness or
presence), is perhaps the extreme example of the networked model. As we saw in Chapter

94
2, Nollywood emerged out of a state of governmental and international neglect: mired in
a society marked by a fast-deflating currency and nose-diving economy, by increasing
and frightening lack of security, and by a continued business tradition of informality and
quasi-legality, Nollywood’s early entrepreneurs were able to carve out a place for their
industry and a new business structure. As veteran executive producer/ marketer/
distributor Marketer 2
7
put it, “the Nigerian believed from day one to sponsor things from
their pockets…. In other African countries they make movies with money from
international agencies. I don’t have to wait for any NGO to give me money. I can do it
myself” (personal communication, July 31, 2009). Significant governmental attention to
the video industry took at least ten years to come about and has been met with a mixed
reaction: while many in the industry lament the lack of structure and demand specific
government interventions, many others (particularly those currently profiting from and
running the industry) complain that the government has little justification to interfere in
something developed without their support (and lack of trust in a corrupt government is,
at this point, practically a given in Nigerian society).
This chapter is a closer look at these arguments and how they are currently
playing out in Nigeria. While direct patronage is unlikely to happen, can government –
particularly a state such as Nigeria, ineffectual in many of its initiatives - structure an
already self-formed network-based industry? Can structure through governmental
intervention be laid on top of an industry born largely outside of any formal
governmental rules or policies? While the timeframe of this project does not allow us to
determine the ultimate answer to these questions, it does afford us the opportunity to look

95
at specific policy and governmental oversight initiatives that the government is making
18 years into the birth of a dynamic informal creative industry, and that government’s
motivations for action.
Main Governmental Agencies Involved in Nollywood: History to Present Function
First, it is important to examine the birth of the governmental agencies in Nigeria
for whom the video industry is a part of their purview: The Nigerian Film and Video
Censors Board (NFVCB, formally inaugurated in 1993); the Nigerian Film Corporation
(NFC, formally inaugurated in 1979); and the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC,
formally inaugurated in 1989). All three have roots that stretch back further than the
beginning of the video boom of the early 1990s but the NFVCB was the only agency that
had a relationship with the industry in its formative years. That relationship was not
meant to be organizational or supportive and it had one goal: censorship. Currently, the
NFVCB is also the only agency thought to hold any power in the industry, and the only
agency to have succeeded in instituting policy that has had any significant structural
effect in the industry.
NFVCB and Censorship
The NFVCB has roots in colonial Nigeria. The first censorship board was
established in Nigeria during colonial rule, in 1933, in an Ordinance that also created a
scheme in which only licensed venues could screen films
8
(Okome, 1995). This
Ordinance went through a number of changes over the years, but was kept through
independence, keeping much from its original form in its 1963 (independence era)
revision. The films being censored in the early years of the Republic of Nigeria (founded

96
in 1963 after independence from the UK was declared in 1960) were primarily
educational and documentary films, following the lead set by the Colonial Film Unit
9
.
In 1993, in the first full year or so of the video boom, the federal government
inaugurated the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board with 1993’s Act. No. 85, and the
NFVCB began operating at full force in 1994. This act formalized the requirements that
any video sold in Nigeria must be reviewed by the Censors Board (now known as the
NFVCB) before it can be released to the public. The NFVCB immediately became a
virtually unavoidable part of the movie production process in Nigeria and it continues to
serve such a role today. Nigeria is, generally speaking, a socially conservative and
religious (Christian in the South and Muslim in the North) nation. While sex is often
integral to the plot of Nollywood movies (a man cheating on his wife, a woman who
decides to prostitute herself, rape, and incest are all fairly common plot elements), hardly
a hint of it is physically shown on camera, nor is nudity. Bad behavior without negative
consequence is similarly frowned upon by the censors, and some mostly unsuccessful
efforts have been made in recent years to cut down on the amount of “black magic”
shown in Nigerian videos. While the NFVCB can ask for certain movies to be re-edited,
most movies do pass (perhaps due to self-censorship) and very few are banned outright.
As the NFVCB became a required stop in the movie production process, it
simultaneously became the only source of reliable figures on the industry, as the vast
majority of movies made in Nigeria, no matter how small their budget or their
distribution, pass through the offices of the NFVCB. While numbers and estimates as to
the size and impact of the industry are notoriously difficult to come by, the NFVCB has,

97
at the very least, impeccable records of practically every movie made in (and imported
to) Nigeria since its initiation in 1994. These records include the title, the format (i.e.,
video), the duration in minutes, the producer or importer and his or her address, the rating
assigned to it by the NFVCB
10
, in which NFVCB hub it was previewed, the year of
production, and the language. In recent years, the NFVCB has also taken to documenting
video rentals clubs as well, in addition to the names and contact information for any
producers known to be active in Nigeria.
The power and reach of the NFVCB may seem quite surprising, as it stands in
stark contrast to the informality and extra-legal qualities of much of the industry and the
ineffectuality of most of Nigeria’s government agencies, a contrast that seems
particularly stark when one imagines the instant obligation that early Nollywood
entrepreneurs felt in bringing their videos to the newly inaugurated NFVCB which
opened its doors in 1994. It would appear that the drive of the Nigerian government to
control the content distributed to its people has proven much stronger than its drive to
regulate the cultural industries in any other way, and speaks to the self-preservation
motivation I described earlier in this chapter. This may not be as paradoxical as it seems:
coming out of the colonial era, Nigerian governmental structures reflected the strategies
and structures and, as a result, the priorities of its British colonizers. In the colonial era,
film policy consisted mostly of directing what content – educational, usually – would be
distributed in the country. This is reflected in the current housing of two of the agencies
most closely associated with guiding the video industry – the NFVCB and the NFC (a
developmental as opposed to regulatory agency) – in the Ministry of Information, as

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opposed to a Ministry of Culture. And, in 1993, the age of military dictatorship and
Nigeria as a predatory state, self-preservation functions, such as that of censorship, could
hardly have seemed more vital to the state. To put it in basic terms, there was already a
drive for and culture of censorship functioning in Nigeria at the birth of Nollywood, and
the government agency in charge of censorship was simultaneously powerful and flexible
enough to adapt to the birth of new technologies and new industries. As we are about to
see, the other governmental agency with a direct charge to direct the movie industry – the
NFC – had neither of these two qualities, was never powerful or strong in the first place,
was slow to adapt to change, and is still struggling to find its role and relevance in a
video age.
NFC and Development
In 1979, the Nigerian Film Corporation Decree established a governmental
agency meant to support a domestic film industry: the NFC. This came about seven years
after the 1972 Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decree (also known as the Indigenization
Act) which was also meant to support local film production by setting up impediments to
the distribution and exhibition of foreign films and trying to limit foreign ownership of
cinema houses
11
. The ambitious charges of the newly formed NFC included the
promotion of domestic film production through financial and other incentives; state-
sponsored film production facilities and post-production facilities (the latter was
particularly important when none existed in the country); financial and other incentives
for the development of more cinema houses; training facilities; and the acquisition and
distribution of domestic films deemed important. As ambitious as this Decree was, aside

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from establishing the Nigerian Film Corporation, still existent today, it did little else
(Okome, 1995). One can easily posit that the Nigerian government’s initial motivation in
setting up the NFC laid in legitimacy-seeking. In attempting to join the ranks of players
on the world stage, the existence of arts development programs could only serve to
further legitimate the workings of the state.
Underfunded and disorganized, the NFC has struggled with relevancy since its
inception. At the advent of the video industry in the 1990s, the NFC had still not
instituted training facilities, production or post-production facilities, or any significant
financial incentives for cinema construction or film projects. Its main achievement has
been in creating an archive of important Nigerian films and the administration of a film
school in Jos that is well-regarded but has little connection to the movie industry centered
hundreds of miles away from its rather remote location. The most visible actions of the
NFC today and those on which it spends much of its budget are its participation in a large
number of international film festivals, through which it sends some of its representatives
and some Nollywood producers on all-expenses-paid international trips to places from
Cannes to Israel. This is not to deride the NFC: it has found itself with a budget (albeit a
limited one), but no longer any clear view of what its mission should be in supporting the
development of a domestic movie industry that has already developed on its own. It has
found it quite difficult to insert itself after the fact in supporting an industry that is largely
wary of unwanted government interference. Consequently, it has been busying itself with
other useful but far from vital tasks in the meantime, such as documenting facts about the
industry.

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NCC and Copyright
The Nigerian Copyright Commission, although inaugurated five years earlier than
the NFVCB, is still a much newer entity than either of the other two agencies. The
Copyright Law (Decree No. 47 of December 1988) first recognized Nigeria’s creative
productions as eligible for copyright and allowed for the establishment of a governmental
agency to oversee the administration of this copyright. In August 1989, Nigeria’s federal
government established the Nigerian Copyright Council, which was later upgraded into
the more powerful Nigerian Copyright Commission in 1996. This Copyright Law was the
first time international-style copyright had been recognized and administrated by the
Nigerian government and, as such, when the video boom began in the early 1990s, the
NCC was still trying to get its footing
Copyright in Nigeria looks to be quite straightforward on paper, yet it is not very
functional in practice. Nigeria is a signatory to the Berne Convention
12
, a baseline
international copyright convention that today provides the foundation to most nations’
copyright law. The goal for the Nigerian state of signing this convention and at least
nominally providing for a governmental agency to administer it was almost certainly
motivated by legitimacy-seeking. While not motivated to provide resources to actually
support its implementation, being a signatory to this international agreement legitimizes
Nigeria as a participant in global standards while taking virtually nothing away from the
government’s power, especially when it is rarely utilized.
The Berne Convention, internationally applicable, holds that copyright is
considered to be automatic and not dependent on registration with any authorities. By

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law, the rights holder is she or he who supplied the resources to make the film (i.e., the
financier), unless there is a contract that says otherwise. If there are no documents and
multiple people lay claim, then, hypothetically, both parties would be obliged to prove
that they were the executive producer, or the main resource provider. While this may be
true, few in Nollywood are aware of this legal standard; it is rarely enforced; and, in
many cases, such proof would be quite difficult to provide. In a cash society, few reliable
records of transactions are produced. And, in a society of informal employment, virtually
no contracts are produced. Similarly, money is often flowing in from multiple places –
many of which may be black market dealers with an understandable aversion to the legal
system – and proving who was in charge overall is almost always fraught with difficulty
in the case of a dispute. However, what really prevents such cases from ever making their
way through a formalized legal process is the lack of faith in and disgust with the
bureaucracy of the court system, on behalf of both the creative workers and even the
lawyers at the NCC itself.
The court process tends to be frustrating to all parties. There are, for one, no
specialized copyright judges, but this is far from the root of the problem, which stems
from the inefficiency and bureaucracy of most court battles. Cases invariably drag out
and if a judge retires or gets transferred – a common occurrence – one has to start afresh
in a new courtroom. Similarly dragging out the process, the inevitable appeals process
will commonly take four to six years (NCC Official 1, personal communication, July 30,
2009). As a result, NCC Official 1, a lawyer with the NCC, admits, “real resolution of
issues is a real issue” (personal communication, July 30, 2009). He notes that the NCC

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has been prosecuting some optical disc replication plants since 2004 and, as of the
summer of 2009, those cases were still pending with no resolution imminent. Also, those
subject to criminal prosecution for copyright violations are often allowed to continue
operating as their case works its way through the system. NCC Official 1 particularly
complains that one of the biggest problems in the few prosecutions of copyright that
occur (in the movie industry, it’s been close to zero, and most prosecutions have occurred
in the book industry) is the tendency for rights holders to settle out of court their civil
cases and then refuse to testify in criminal proceedings
13
.
Rights-holders, of course, have very different views of the virtual failure of the
copyright regime in Nigeria. Falling amongst the large group of filmmakers disillusioned
with the NCC, Director/Producer 8 angrily alleges, “the NCC is lying if they say
filmmakers are not motivated to prosecute,” and that this is in part why prosecution has
lagged (personal communication, August 3, 2009). She alleges that the NCC has caught
illegal distributors in the past and not prosecuted them due to the personal connections of
said unauthorized distributors. Taking a different tack, Marketer 2, president of the
marketers and distributors guild (FVPMAN), claims the reason his members will not
prosecute or testify in NCC cases is because of fear of violence from unauthorized
distributors (personal communication, July 31, 2009). “Most of the pirates are deadly,” he
says calmly with a smile on his face. “They can go to any lengths to track you down”
(personal communication, July 31, 2009). His sincerity here is unclear, as many have
accused members of his organization of engaging in such unauthorized distribution in
some of their business dealings.

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One of the biggest problems the NCC faces is that it lacks resources in almost
every way. While the agency was meant from its 1988 inception to administer copyright
law, it also was authorized to enforce copyright law and appoint inspectors in 1992
14
.
This change in law, however, was matched by no change in funding or staffing. Any
seizures or raids must be run by the police who are themselves underfunded and unlikely
to carry out any raids on behalf of an underfunded government agency that cannot
promise that they will make any money from their endeavors. In this way, we can see
that, while the employees of the NCC may have legitimate motivations in their work,
truly intending to clamp down on copyright violations, they are hampered by the forced
rent-seeking behavior of underpaid government employees (the police) and lack of
political motivation to provide more resources. After all, the existence of the NCC
suffices to legitimate the state’s intent, and there is little self-preservation motivation for
the state to actually enforce copyright.
While the NFC and NCC struggle with relevancy and efficacy, the NFVCB is
engaged in significant efforts to change the structure of the industry, as will be discussed
in greater detail later in this chapter. However, these efforts thus far have had an impact
more paralyzing than anything else. Overall, with the exception of censorship, Nigeria’s
government agencies struggle to regulate or structure the video industry. An interesting
sidenote is the heavy regulation of the Nigerian television industry. One reason for this
may be that one agency (the Nigerian Broadcast Corporation, or NBC) is in charge of
regulating the industry as opposed to regulation by three agencies in the video industry,
none of which are authorized to make over-arching changes. Perhaps closer to the heart

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of the matter is the fact that television and radio stations are central in fomenting coups,
and the government has particular self-preservative interest in regulating these outlets,
just as the NFVCB has more political will behind it than the NFC or NCC. And perhaps
closest of all to the heart of the matter is evolution: unlike television, the video industry
rose up without regulation, and government intervention after the fact is not only
challenging but could in fact be damaging.
Attitudes of Practitioners Towards Governmental Involvement
The optimal level of government involvement in the industry is a point of
contention. NFVCB Official 2, Director General of the NFVCB, says he believes in
theory in “light touch regulation,” aimed only at artificially helping the industry grow
institutional strength and accountable distribution structures (personal communication,
July 30, 2009). Yet there is good cause to mistrust government involvement in any
endeavor in Nigeria, as government agencies have a reputation for self-interest as
opposed to service. This mistrust is particularly true for those operating in the murky area
between legality and extra-legality, for those who see the strengths in the current system
coming from their efforts, and particularly for those already profiting from the current
system. As Marketer 2 notes, “My people saw opportunity in Nollywood. Most wouldn’t
invest in Nollywood but we were the only ones who would. How, now, do you build on
top of what is already in existence?” (personal communication, July 31, 2009).
However, it is not just the marketers who rail against governmental involvement.
Director/Producer 8 suggests that securing reliable electricity, security, and water for the
country should trump any film-related project, saying “If the government can’t sort out

105
basic infrastructure needs of my nation, how can they improve on something made out of
the tenacity and ingenuity of the people?” (personal communication, August 3, 2009).
She also alleges that three billion naira (around $2 million at 2009 exchange rates) a year
is spent on the three agencies that are meant to support the film industry (the NCC, the
NFC, and the NFVCB), “and what are they doing with it?,” suggesting that any more
money spent on these agencies would not lead to any change in the industry (personal
communication, August 3, 2009)
15
.
While marketers like Marketer 2, president of the marketer’s guild, may resent
government interference after two decades of self-wrought growth, and producers like
Director/Producer 8 may express skepticism at the ability of the Nigerian government to
effectively change anything, there are many in the industry that feel very much the
opposite and actively demand greater government involvement in structuring Nollywood;
this is an area of contentious debate. The two areas of potential governmental
intervention that seem to be most highly demanded are protection from piracy, and the
formalization of guild power. While desire for protection from piracy is a given in movie
industries worldwide, the goal of formalization of guild power seems particular to
Nigeria. As we will see below, many who have risen to leadership roles have expressed
desire for the government to step in and mandate guild membership in order to formalize
the guilds and protect their position in the industry. There are calls, too, to attack the
power of the marketers. However, these calls tend to come from obviously self-interested
parties (i.e., producers who would prefer to be able to retain their rights to their
productions and distribute on their own) while many creative workers with no clear self-

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interest tend to voice respect for the marketers’ history and development of the industry.
While Marketer 2 and Director/Producer 8 exhibit a mistrust of the government borne of
personal experience, those demanding protection of their elevated position in the industry
are seeking to initiate and perpetuate clientelist relationships, institutionalizing their
power and connecting them to those powerful in the government.
Major Governmental Interventions in Summer 2009
In the summer of 2009, there were two major initiatives in the works meant to
involve the government heavily in the structure and functioning of the industry. These
two will serve as case study snapshots of current efforts to regulate and structure a largely
informal and networked movie industry. The first initiative is a complete overhaul of the
distribution system by the NFVCB and it is currently being implemented, to disapproval
from many in the industry. The second is MOPICON, or a Motion Picture Practitioners
Council, the main function of which will be to mandate guild membership and formalize
guild power. In the summer of 2009, this initiative was going through the Federal
Assembly, had not been implemented, and was somewhat controversial.
New Distribution Framework
Despite the many calls for more government regulation, only one regulatory
‘reform’ has been made in the history of the entire industry: that in distribution. In April
2006, NFVCB Official 2, Director General of the NFVCB took a proposal (written
largely by industry consultant, Director/Producer 6, also interviewed for this project) to
completely overhaul and formalize the distribution frameworks within Nigeria to the
NFVCB. A formal review ensued, lasting from August 2006 through January 2007, at

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which point the framework was approved to begin the first stage of its implementation in
February 2007
16
. It took almost another two years, until December 2008, before
implementation reached a point at which changes were seen in the industry. As of the
summer of 2009, however, the framework was implemented only partially and, as such,
many blame it for a marked slowdown in production, as producers and marketers
scrambled to understand what the new landscape looked like or if it will actually wind up
changing at all.
At its most basic, the framework stipulates that only those who register with the
NFVCB may distribute videos in Nigeria. Based on a broadcast model (i.e., the
assignment of distribution rights in much the same way that airwave frequencies are
assigned to television channels) and on Hollywood’s international distribution model of
territorial rights (NFVCB Official 2, personal communication, July 30, 2009), the
framework institutes three levels of distribution licenses: national, regional, and local,
17

which are supposed to correspond with each firms’ distribution capacity. Only one firm
can get distribution rights per territory. Hence, any copies of a film found for sale in that
territory should be able to trace their legitimacy or lack thereof back to one licensed
distributor, and each retail outlet should be clearly labeled in a way that makes clear its
legitimacy and accountability
18
.
One of the admitted goals of the plan is to support new entrants to the distribution
system that come from outside the entrenched marketer networks that are subject to much
conflicted and sometimes contradictory distaste. The hope is that a few of these firms,
untainted by the strategies and extra-legal tendencies of the marketers, will rise to

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become one of a small oligopoly of dominant national distributors: with a small group of
large players in charge of all distribution instead of a vast network of small-scale flexible
enterprises, the NFVCB hopes to have more control over distribution (NFVCB Official 2,
personal communication, July 30, 2009). After all, a large distributor will be much more
visible and much more accountable than any individual firm in the small network of
micro-firms making up the current distribution networks
19
. While not exactly moving
towards a patronage model, the NFVCB here is clearly hoping for more control and more
clarity in the industry by a move away from the extreme networked model at work today.
This move by the NFVCB would appear to have both legitimate and legitimacy-
seeking motivations, as greater transparency in distribution and a move towards a small
oligopoly of distributors from the network of opaque parties distributing now would be
necessary in any efforts for the industry to enter international networks of financing and
distribution, receiving funding from international banking networks and producing more
reliable sales estimates. Yet, the move also would allow Nollywood to be co-opted into
clientelist networks, allowing the state to tax and profit from Nollywood’s sales in a way
it is now unable to do.
Regardless, the NFVCB’s stated vision of the future is certainly not happening
right now. For one, anyone with clout and a bit of money has found it easy to register as a
national distributor despite their questionable capacities in, for instance, the less
populated corners of the country, or even the North at all. In the planned model, national
distributors take on one of two forms: a chain that owns all of its facilities (the Board’s
preferred outcome), or a network of alliances with smaller distributors. The problem with

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this in practice has been the lack of desire for entrepreneurs to register as any of the
smaller scale distributors
20
. For some without much capacity to distribute, the fee paid to
the Board has seemed worth the clout involved in the ability to call oneself a “national
distributor
21
.”
Complicating this goal even further, after a lengthy period of antagonism between
the NFVCB and the marketers’ guild, FVPMAN, most FVPMAN members have finally
registered with the NFVCB and, subsequently, have continued to do business in exactly
the same way as before. In the initial stages of implementation, FVPMAN, feeling (with
some cause) that the new framework was aimed at evicting them summarily from the
market, sued the NFVCB both collectively and individually, through about 50 cases,
most of which were settled out of court. These cases allege that the NFVCB does not
have the powers to license them, and that the new regulations are unjust. Most of the
contention had been worked through by July 2009. By this point, NFVCB Official 2 said
he would estimate that 80 – 90% of the traditional marketers had registered with the new
framework (personal communication, July 30, 2009). Most of the hold-outs, he said, were
Hausa movie distributors from the North, not a part of the traditional Igbo networks
structuring Nollywood, and they are holding out for minor concessions like asking the
NFVCB to let them register without paying fees or by paying reduced fees. With this
great influx of new registrants to the NFVCB, NFVCB Official 2 does believe that some
black market distributors have registered, but he posits that this is a good thing, as “these
registrees do not realize that they are more accountable now” (personal communication,
July 30, 2009).

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For this too is a goal of the distribution framework: to reduce unauthorized
distribution and create accountability, numbers, and statistics that make the entire
industry more “professional” on an international level, a motivation that is both
legitimate and legitimacy-seeking. NFVCB Official 1, NFVCB Official 2’s deputy, notes
“Our main goal is to create transparency, and to generate reliable statistics… we want to
create an environment for infrastructure, security, reliability, structure, accountability”
(personal communication, July 29, 2009). Continuing in the same vein, NFVCB Official
2 says, “Unless you bring a level of formalization into the business, you will never be
able to get financing from banks, and you will never be able to grow” (personal
communication, July 30, 2009). And the industry consultant and author of the framework,
Director/Producer 6, says that the goal of this new framework is not just to secure profits
for Nigerian producers but, even moreso, its extension: “better distribution enables better
funding. This is so there will be some kind of sanity in the system” (personal
communication, July 18, 2009).
While Director/ Producer 6 admits that the dream of a Nollywood fully integrated
into a global network of financing and distribution may be a pipe dream, he firmly
underlines the goals of transparency and accountability as the first step towards that
dream. While he admits banks may never be interested in funding Nollywood
productions, he says that this at least would eliminate one excuse banks cite for lack of
participation. Director/ Producer 6 also cited integration with Hollywood as a goal: when
this dream of accountable distribution is realized, he says, Hollywood will be able to
liaise with licensed distributors. He admits that official Hollywood distribution in Nigeria

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too is unlikely but this would at least make it possible. These dreams speak to the
legitimacy-seeking urges not just of representatives of the Nigerian state but also of
private parties engaged in Nollywood.
Marketer 2 of FVPMAN, of course has a very different perception of this drive,
one he says reflects the feelings of his members. “Perhaps these larger companies can
grow naturally from the more successful smaller companies”, he said, “but the
government shouldn’t be muscling out those who already successfully created a
profitable business out of nothing” (personal communication, July 31, 2009). He also
suggests, as have many others, that the NFVCB’s “true” motives may be in self-
preservation: garnering additional income through licensing and registration fees. “The
government may want to help, but they also want to make money,” Marketer 2 noted
(personal communication, July 31, 2009). Nearly everyone in FVPMAN registered by the
summer of 2009, but Marketer 2 says that not much has changed in the wake of the new
framework and he warns that implementation was slow precisely because the NFVCB did
not consult with the marketers throughout their design and implementation of the
framework. In other words, any state efforts will be severely hampered by those that hold
power in the industry – the marketers – if decisions are made without the marketers’
involvement. Marketer 2’s remark can be read both as a threat and statement of simple
fact. While many in the industry have claimed that the new distribution framework led to
a slow-down in new production, both Marketer 2 and NFVCB Official 2 at least publicly
deny that anyone has permanently left the distribution business due to the new
framework.

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One might wonder why, if the original marketers were making things work,
anything should change. “It seems like they are thriving,” said NFVCB Official 2, “but
they’re thriving in chaos” (personal communication, July 30, 2009). When everything is
as informal as it is, NFVCB Official 2 says, business suffers, as financing and
distribution can never join global networks and never rise above what they now are. As it
stands now, the framework is still not fully implemented but has created a large number
of contentious battles within the industry and, some allege, a temporary slowdown in
production. As these battles die down, it may well be that the new framework has
succeeded only in getting the existent marketers to pay fees to register with the NFVCB
and then to continue doing business in their own way, creating no real space in the
marketplace for new entrants.
As a whole, however, the new NFVCB distribution framework can be seen as
reflecting all three motivations of the Nigerian state. Those running the agency may be
motivated by legitimate as well as legitimacy-seeking impulses, while part of the force
driving the framework forward is also the potential for future returns to the state from
increased control and transparency – and even returns from the new registration fees
levied for distributors of various levels. NFVCB officials admit that the ideal future for
them would involve a few small oligopolistic distributors much easier to coerce into
transparency and taxation and much easier to control than the impossible-to-pin-down
constantly shifting network of small opaque distributors currently held together by
relationships of trust and kinship under the rubric of the FVPMAN. The NFVCB, it
should be noted, also attempted in 2009 to jumpstart an alternative distributor’s guild,

113
headed by powerful Electronics Trader/ Producer 1. Ultimately, despite the power of the
NFVCB and of Electronics Trader/ Producer 1, neither the new distribution framework
nor the alternative guild could function without the participation and support of the
FVPMAN members. And, once they joined en masse, after negotiations led by Marketer
2, the efficacy of these alternative structures was minimized, and power reverted to those
in the FVPMAN-centered cartel. Without the support of FVPMAN, the NFVCB’s new
framework and alternative guild could not be said to be functioning to structure the actual
industry, an industry in which few things happen without the support of the marketers.
And, with FVPMAN’s members signed on en masse, the new framework and alternative
guild appear to be much less likely to achieve any of their ambitious goals.
MOPICON
In the summer of 2009, one other major effort at affecting industry structure in
Nollywood was in the works. Much less dramatic in its ambitions, it too sought to
formalize part of the informal industry. Just a bill working its way through the Federal
Assembly in the summer of 2009, MOPICON is meant to be a new government-
mandated council governing the industry. The main function of this council would be the
requirement of a license in order to work in the movie industry in a creative capacity. In
other words, any aspiring director, producer, actor, or other creative talent would have to
obtain a license (the requirements of which are decided by the leadership of the
appropriate guild) in order to legally work on a movie production.
It is difficult to conceive of a scheme that could go further against the spirit from
which Nollywood was born than one formalizing even the ability to work on a movie that

114
makes its way to the mass marketplace. The main function this requirement would seem
to serve would be to protect the already established movie-makers from competition from
newcomers. Perhaps fittingly, as it is the brainchild of one of the old guard of Nollywood,
Director/ Producer 2 (the bill’s primary author and proponent) and the old guard is where
it finds most of its support. While many support this initiative, many others have
protested it, claiming it would decimate the industry by legitimizing an elite and
depriving the industry of the creativity that fresh talent can bring. As NFVCB Official 1
remarked, “this is one of the gravest mistakes anyone in the industry can make. You
cannot legislate creativity. You can’t set up a government agency to tell you who can be a
filmmaker” (personal communication, July 29, 2009).
At the same time, we can see the motivation for those supporting the bill and for
those in the government to push it through, and these motivations are related to one
another in a clientelist relationship. Those already dominant in the industry see the
government as a prime place to look for the institutionalization of their power, and those
in the government may see supporting those already in power in the industry as an
excellent opportunity to co-opt the industry, gaining from it rents as well as loyalties
from its already powerful players. The fact that this move, if ever able to actually be
implemented, would likely decimate creativity in and the power of informality and
penetrability in the industry would not be an important factor for those lawmakers
interested in self-preservation before any other motivations.
In both the new distribution framework and the MOPICON initiative, we see
those who would stand to profit from the regulations amongst the loudest supporters of

115
governmental involvement. Yet we also see in both initiatives the problems inherent in
structuring a self-organized networked industry. In the NFVCB framework, those already
running the industry (the marketers) have the power to stop it from functioning. Any
attempt to sweep them from power can easily beget chaos and a vacuum, at least for a
time, and possibly forever. In the advent of MOPICON, we can see that governmental
intervention can often be based on the will of the self-interested and can serve to rob a
self-made industry of its lifeblood. In both efforts, the government is trying to disrupt two
self-made processes: informal distribution and informal employment. If the efforts
succeed as planned (which they likely will not), both are likely to disrupt the functioning
of the entire industry.
In both initiatives as well, the state is incentivized to act in part for self-
preservation reasons: the prospect of greater control over an industry that mostly escapes
regulation and taxation (with the exception of censorship). The motivation for this greater
level of control is not purely in self-preservation, however; the more control the
government has over its increasingly higher profile movie industry, the greater the
government’s legitimacy on a world stage. And, even more importantly are the legitimate
drivers of governmental intervention. Perhaps less applicable in the MOPICON initiative,
we can see at least the NFVCB legitimately trying to provide a functional formalized
structure for Nollywood, an informal industry that is in some ways hampered by its
informality (even as it is served in other ways by that same informality). Lack of
accountability and transparency in distribution indeed delimit the industry’s potential to
benefit from international networks of funding and distribution. At the same time, the

116
formalization of an industry that draws its very strengths from informality is likely to be
more destructive than constructive.
Guilds and Self-organization: Filling in the Blanks
Yet without much effective governance, Nollywood is still not in chaos. It is self-
regulated, self-organized, and, largely, self-governed. Some of this stems from
entrenched relationships of trust and reputation. But the industry is more formalized than
simply a network of trust-based relationships. There are formal representatives and
organizations of even the most opaque parts of the industry: the guilds. Nollywood’s
guilds serve many of the functions that legal solutions could also serve, such as contract
or dispute mediation, although their ability to do this effectively is hampered at the same
time by their informality. Guilds can also attempt large scale structural changes, but, as
we will see, this is fraught with difficulty.
It should not be all that surprising that formal guilds have proven so popular in
Nollywood. Nigerian society is full of organizations and leadership positions. It is not
uncommon for people to spend their little spare time going from meeting to meeting:
church governance groups, church special interest groups, groups of those originally from
the same village, groups of those that speak the same ethnic language, groups of those
that live in the same neighborhood. It seems that anyone who is anyone (and many who
are, in effect, nobodies) holds or has held a leadership position in some organization or
another. In a state where political ascendency is thought to be directly related to financial
reward, ascendency to leadership in any organization is afforded a great degree of respect

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and importance, and leaders of even the smallest of these organizations are usually hailed
by their title in public.
How the Guild System Works
Before the video boom, there was already a tradition of guilds in place in the arts.
The two dominant guilds that fed into the video boom were ITPAN (Independent
Television Producers Association of Nigeria), which represented producers working for
the NTA, and NANTAP (National Association of Nigerian Theater Arts Practitioners),
which represented those working in the theater arts (i.e., stage productions, mostly
including Yoruba drama troops). As the video boom brought about new kinds of creative
workers, new guilds rose up to represent them. NANTAP fed into the Nigerian Actors
Guild (which later morphed into today’s Actors Guild of Nigeria) and ITPAN fed into
today’s Association of Movie Producers (AMP). Gradually, other professions in the
industry formed their own guilds.
Today guilds represent almost every aspect of the industry from marketers to the
make-up artists and hair stylists
22
. They tend to meet monthly. Despite the separate nature
of the movie industries in the North and the South, the guilds are truly national, with
branches in multiple zones; e.g., Kano, Onitsha, and Lagos. The leaders of the guild are
chosen through election by all national members through an election in Lagos. While
they abide by a democratic system, in the summer of 2009, one could see proof that the
electoral processes were not exactly free and fair. That summer, a contentious battle
between the incumbent of the AMP, Director/ Producer 4, and a prominent challenger,
Director/ Producer 10, erupted into violence. Director/ Producer 10’s supporters assert

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that incumbent Director/ Producer 4 hired street thugs to attack Director/ Producer 10 and
his supporters
23
.
What was particularly notable about this contentious fight was the attitude of
those involved. When asked why they supported one candidate over the other, or what the
difference in platforms was between the two contenders, people seemed unable to be
specific. They cited mainly their deeper personal ties to one candidate over the other and
what that candidate could do for them. The main criticism of the incumbent was
cronyism and squandering of funds, but those supporting his challenger seemed to expect
him to engage in similar activities for their benefit
24
. Besides cronyism, one of the main
functions of the guild in an everyday context is to solve disputes.
Guild as Contract Substitute
Official contracts drawn up with the help of lawyers are of little use in
Nollywood. Business relationships built on informal “memorandums of understanding”
and, even moreso, trust, respect, clout, and handshakes form the basis of collaboration
and business in Nollywood. Substituting for contracts can be considered one of the main
function of the guild system in Nigeria: the solving of disputes without resorting to legal
methods.
Disputes run the gamut from actors finding their hotel to be of unacceptable
quality to complex financial disputes regarding post-shoot compensation, but the process
of redressing the dispute is supposed to be the same. If, for example, a producer and an
actor have a dispute over payments or agreements to work, the guild of the party deemed
to be in the wrong is supposed to discipline or otherwise rectify the situation. For those

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(most) without their own clout with the offender’s guild, they can go to their own guild
and their guild representative will represent them in negotiations with the other guild.
Yet the self-organized guild system as substitute for the government-organized
contract system carries its own set of problems. For one, many creative workers believe
the guild does nothing for them, and takes the part of the powerful in contract disputes.
Additionally, despite the mission of the guild to protect its members, any informal
grouping of non-famous creative workers will typically lead to grousing about working
conditions on any number of sets, and the failure of their guild or anyone else to do
anything about it. Complaints about working conditions can range from the necessity to
be awake and available to shoot for 24 hours on end to being provided only one meal in
the course of a 14-hour shoot.
Despite the informality of employment, contracts in Nigeria do exist. They are
rarely drawn up, however, due in part to legal costs and to their tertiary connection to the
existent system. They are even more rarely drawn upon if they are violated, for the same
reasons those without contracts find they cannot pursue their more powerful adversaries.
For example, active Nollywood screenwriter, Screenwriter 1, told of wanting to pursue a
broken contract through the appropriate framework open to him at the time – only to find
that it was in his best interest to swallow his losses and move on, as those who had
wronged him were more powerful. He had a contract with a group of executive producers
after he had pitched his idea and treatment of a potential movie to them. After blatantly
stealing his idea and offering no payment, the producers then called him, saying in
colorful language, “we know you have our balls right now and we ask that you don’t

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squeeze,” strongly suggesting it was in his best interest not to do so (personal
communication, July 15, 2009). “It is one thing for the law to be on your side on paper,”
Screenwriter 1 said, “but if you’re up against a multi-millionaire
25
, what can you do?”
(personal communication, July 15, 2009). What is particularly important about
Screenwriter 1’s story is to note that the variables holding guilds back from truly policing
all industry deals are the same variables that may keep lawyered contracts from being
pursued as well: relationships of rank and trust that can be stronger than any method of
governance. This is a tale that could also be told in contract-heavy places like
Hollywood: even with rock-solid legal contracts, the perils of pursuing the wrongs of the
more powerful are strong in any context. However they may be particularly strong in an
industry almost solely centered on relationships of trust, clout, and reputation and with no
tradition of litigation.
Guild as Alternative Distribution System: FCON and its Failure
Guilds can serve not only as substitutes for legal relationships, but in the context
of the governmental actions we’ve seen, it will be particularly enlightening to look at
guilds’ attempts to alter the industry in much the same way that the NFVCB is currently
attempting with their new distribution framework. The keyword here, however, is
attempt. While some of the guilds are made up of those that do structure the industry
(most notably FVPMAN, the marketers’ guild), as we can see in this case study of the
failed initiatives of FCON, those not already in entrenched positions of market control
will find it difficult to alter the system on their own.

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The Film-makers Cooperative of Nigeria (FCON) was the effort of a number of
producers (primarily those producers who thought of themselves as the respected artistic
elite) to completely re-conceptualize and reform the structure of the industry to become
one in which producers and creative talent had control over financing and distribution of
their products. The idea was that this would allow the elite creatives to bypass the
marketers: those that effectively have run the industry since its inception and continue to
do so today.
Led by two well-regarded producers, including Director/ Producer 8, FCON set
up an alternative movie market in Surulere, an area that, while still Lagosian (crowded
and frenzied), is miles away from the dizzying chaos of the markets in which marketers
ply their trade. This initiative was ill-fated, however. One of the main problems was the
dearth of products offered for sale at the collective. The existent marketers would not
allow their movies to be sold at the FCON market, and these constituted the majority of
Nollywood’s output. Additionally, unauthorized reproductions of movies released by the
Cooperative could also be found for sale by street hawkers, even just outside the Surulere
market location. For these reasons, few shoppers felt motivated to make a trip to the
Surulere market just to buy a small selection of movies.
This initiative was not the only way FCON tried to break the marketers cartel.
Director/ Producer 8 and the cohort she led attempted to not only break free of the
existent distribution structure, but also to break free of the existent funding structure.
Director/ Producer 8 also brought forth an entertainment desk at a premier Nigerian Bank
(the United Bank of Africa - UBA) that was authorized to fund up to $50,000 per movie.

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This initiative too ended in failure. She claims that the majority of filmmakers could not
fulfill the paperwork required by UBA, most specifically showing a financial plan for the
production that included distribution and sales plans (personal communication, August 3,
2009). With FCON’s distribution outlet, she said, there was a chance of this happening,
but with FCON dead, any chance of guaranteeing distribution had also died. Stanbic IBC,
another bank with whom Director/ Producer 8 managed to set up a program, is in fact
funding a film. However, this film is by foreign (British) director Andrea Calderwood,
director of British award-winning arthouse film The Last King of Scotland, set in Uganda.
The film she is producing in Nigeria is based on Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s
famous book, Half a Yellow Sun. Her film, released through Western/ global
entertainment industry networks is much more reliable in terms of return on investment
for investors. As such, FCON cannot be said to have had success in either restructuring
distribution or restructuring financing, despite the greater palatability to international
funding and distribution bodies of its members – well-educated and well-spoken – over
the generally less-educated entrepreneurs that make up the marketers.
Guild as Administrator of Copyright: ODRAN and its Proposal
While FCON failed where the NFVCB is currently having slightly more of an
impact (distribution), another guild is attempting to take on the copyright protection work
of the NCC. On July 31, 2009, the guild of disc replication factory owners met with
representatives of a number of guilds representing copyright holders (most from the
music and movie industries). They were there to discuss a new plan that the president of
the Optical Disc Replicators of Nigeria (ODRAN) was proffering as a potential solution

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to problems with piracy. His solution, which relies on the cooperation of both his
members and each copyright holder organization likely does not have the collective will
behind it to succeed. It is, however, based on a few important principles of extra-
governmental organization
“What we cannot do for ourselves,” the president of ODRAN, Disc Replicator 1,
announced at the meeting, “government will not do for us,” adding, “We can deal with
piracy from the supply side.” His proposition is that ODRAN, which is comprised of 11
of the 14 licensed optical disc replication plants in Nigeria, will publish on its website a
list of who is placing orders, and each copyright holder organization will in turn create
lists of rights holders. In this way, factories can check to see that the proper rights holder
is placing the replication order, as opposed to a pirate. This of course assumes that
factory owners have an incentive to refuse orders that they know to be from unlicensed
sources. Cynics might claim that they have no such incentive once they are out of the
public eye.
Disc Replicator 1 called for guilds to stand together and work together to do what
the government has not been doing. While governments worldwide have been
unsuccessful in eliminating piracy, associations in Nigeria have one benefit those in the
West do not: the unauthorized distributors are likely also members of these same
organizations, in a number of different potential capacities, from distributors to disc
replicators. As Disc Replicator 1 said at the meeting, “we recognize that even some of
our members may be part of the problem. This is why I’m looking for a solution.” His

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point is that, while they cannot root out intentional abetting of piracy, they could
hypothetically cut down on unintentional abetting of piracy.
His plan will almost assuredly go nowhere due to lack of real motivation on
behalf of the optical disc factory owners and of organizations of rights holders, many of
whom themselves represent those toeing the line between legality and extra-legality. Yet
what Disc Replicator 1 proposes is based on a few principles that can apply to the whole
Nigerian video industry. For one, the strength of organizations in Nigerian society and in
the Nigerian video industry is a resource that can be relied upon. Where the government
may be unwieldy or unreliable, trade organizations that truly encompass the majority of
practitioners in a field may hypothetically be able to enact the type of change the many
wish to see. As Disc Replicator 1 said at the July 31 meeting, “let’s use what we have.
We have associations and each association knows its own members.” Of course, one
major problem with this is the corruption of these organizations and the brutality and in-
fighting that go with the power plays in the elections for each organization. However,
once elections are through, those within the organization do seem to accept the decrees
and initiatives of their leader, no matter their path to the top. This type of power might be
considered a great boon in such a dispersed industry.
Conclusion
This chapter examined governance in Nollywood, in a effort to understand what
governance works best in a networked and informal industry, as well as the motivations
behind any state involvement. In a state marked by corruption and self-interested
government, we can best understand policies made by the state in the context of the

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benefits they offer to the decision makers. I posited three main motivations for
governmental intervention in a largely unregulated and networked industry after the fact:
legitimate goals, the pursuit of external legitimacy, and the pursuit of self-preservation
for state actors. We can certainly see the motivations of the state in the three main
governmental agencies currently interacting with Nollywood: the NFVCB, the NCC, and
the NFC. Both the NCC and the NFC have proved ineffectual thus far in their efforts to
affect the industry. The existence of both serves legitimizing functions for the Nigerian
state (and, if functional, could also serve the industry legitimately). As the Nigerian state
seeks external legitimacy on the world stage, the existence of the NCC signals to the
international community that Nigeria is engaged in supporting international agreements
(involving intellectual property rights), and the existence of the NFC signals to the
international community that Nigeria is developed enough to actively support national
artistic output, often in the context of the major international festivals and exhibitions
which the NFC attends. Neither of these agencies are propped up by the sort of political
will (and budget) that would let them actively pursue their charter, however. The NFVCB
is the only of the three agencies interacting with Nollywood that has been successful in
its corner of industry governance: censorship. The success of the NFVCB stems in large
part from the importance of information control in a society marked by political
instability and a history of military coups, and by a government concerned with self-
preservation above all else. It is not surprising that the only agency to consistently
perform its stated function effectively is that agency which contributes to the self-
preservation instincts of the state. And this urge is nothing new, as NFVCB’s success can

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also be attributed to the tradition of censorship in Nigeria stretching directly back to the
colonial era and strength of subsequent censorship institutions due to path dependence.
While we can see all three posited motivations at work in supporting these three
governmental agencies, we can also see that self-preservation is the only motivation
actually leading to a strong functioning agency at work.
We can see a similar story when examining the two government initiatives that
were attempting to intervene in the way the industry functions during the summer of
2009. The new NFVCB-sponsored distribution framework is motivated separately by
each of the three motivations I posited as well. The stated goals of this initiative (greater
transparency in distribution, and the emergence of a small number of oligopolistic
distributors) are genuinely believed by industry actors to be likely to advance Nollywood
as an industry, and such a move would also help to legitimate Nigeria on the world stage.
Yet, not coincidentally, greater transparency and the emergence of a few larger
distributors would also benefit the state directly, affording it more control over the
industry, as well as more chance to tax it. MOPICON, the new effort to formalize and
mandate guild membership, is even more tilted towards this third motivation. While
posited by its drafters to legitimately help the industry and to enable Nollywood to join
the rest of the world through formalization and regulation, the move would above all
serve to ingrain clientelist relationships between Nollywood heavyweights and
politicians, at potential benefit to both parties.
In assessing the efficacy these new policy initiatives, it would seem that both are
ambitious but ultimately less likely to push the industry forward and more likely to

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seriously derail it if those controlling the industry ever even allowed these efforts to be
fully implemented. While the Nigerian government has attempted to touch the industry in
many ways, few of these efforts have worked thus far, and no planned efforts seem likely
to succeed either. After all, it is difficult for policy to touch the invisible, an industry
structure operating via an opaque world of vast networks of small distributors.
The policy implication here is that self-governance will likely fail unless it comes
from those already in control and has the political will of those already running the
industry. Guild networks already serve many of the same functions as written contracts,
for instance, and guilds have the potential to regulate many other things. Over-arching
structural change in the industry which evicts the marketers and their quasi-legal business
dealings from their current position of power is highly unlikely if it is meant to be
accompanied by continued functioning of the industry. In a highly networked industry
marked by dispersed power, governance is likely to come from the industry’s own
existent sources of strength. In an industry founded on self-organization, guilds have the
potential to organize solutions that the government cannot, despite their frequent
replication of the very power relationships that cause problems in the first place. In an
industry based on a self-grown networked structure as opposed to a top-down patronage
model, it is likely that the most effective form of governance will be self-governance and
will be led by dispersed networks of self-grown guilds. While their will to change as
opposed to self-enrich may not be as robust as it could be, it would appear that the self-
formed unregulated guilds offer the most effective path towards governance in a hyper-
networked industry.

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Chapter Four Endnotes

1
All such numbers and statistics in Nigeria must be taken with a grain of salt, as methods
of counting are notoriously unreliable and subject to bias in such an opaque state.

2
For Nigeria, the designated training center would have been the West African training
hub that was opened in Accra (Ghana) in 1949, while Nigeria itself was home to the West
African branch of the Colonial Film Unit.

3
Okome (1995) traces this specifically back to the 1963 appointment of 1963, Jean-Rene
Debrix as the director of the Bureau du Cinema who had a vision of narrative cinema
developing in France’s former colonies.

4
Such as the benefit that the support of Francophone cinema would have on French
cinema and the propagation of artistic production in the French language.

5
See NPR, PBS, or many other state-sponsored outlets meant to support “quality” as
opposed to “popular” creative production.

6
It is worth noting that, in recent years, the French have technically expanded their
support of African movie-making to non-film-based and to non-Francophone
productions. However, this support is more on a one-off basis and hasn’t inspired an
entire industry or stylistic movement as it has in Francophone Africa.

7
Also the president of FVPMAN, the marketers guild.

8
“Cinematographic Ordinance 20: An Ordinance for the Better Regulation and Control
of Cinematograph and Similar Exhibition and Purpose Connected There,” which, among
other things, created a censorship board and censorship committee.

9
Interestingly, most narrative films shown in Nigeria by the early 1980s were not
actually subject to censorship by the Censors Board of the time. The 1963 revision to the
1933 Cinematographic Ordinance excepted a number of classes of films from the Censors
Board, one of which was foreign films (Okome, 1995). (Not a sizable class at first, film
importation soared in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly during the oil boom of the late
1970s, and by 1982, 80% of domestic cinema screens were airing foreign films.) Today,
foreign films do pass through the Censors Boards before they can be screened in one of
the few remaining Nigerian cinemas (usually the expensive world-class ones in wealthy
enclaves in Lagos and Abuja), though, of course, pirated foreign films do not pass
through these same gates.

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10
The rating of the videos goes by a system similar to that used in the US, with rankings
such as G, NC, and 18.

11
At the time, most were held and run by Lebanese owners, who form one of the more
powerful of the small enclaves of foreigners who have risen to the top of a large number
of industries in Nigeria.

12
Nigeria signed in 1993, just five years after the US finally agreed to become a
signatory.

13
As it stands now, there are two paths to pursue a copyright claim in the courts system.
The first is as a criminal offense. The NCC serves as the prosecutor in this kind of case.
The second is as a civil case, in which the rights-holder pursues the damages lost when
their copyright was breached. In this sort of case, the plaintiff is in charge of securing
private prosecution and can sue for damages. NCC Official 1 estimates that Nigerian
attorneys will charge at least one million naira (around US$6600) for their provisional
fees and thereafter will charge subsequent appearance fees every time a court appearance
is made (personal communication, July 30, 2009). For an industry with such slim profit
margins and budgets between $20,000 and $50,000 per movie, civil prosecution is rare,
while criminal prosecution through the NCC is little known and little trusted.

14
In most of the developed world, copyright enforcement is done by the police and other
enforcement-oriented agencies, separate from the primary regulator.

15
When asked what government involvement she might suggest, she proffers that the
NFC could offer both free training and an interventionist film fund for struggling
productions but doesn’t see this happening.

16
As the NFVCB had the authority to implement such a law, there was no need to go to
the National Assembly.

17
Local was originally broken down into three categories: state, “local government
authority” (similar to county), and local retail point (now called community retailers).
No one was motivated to register as any of the smaller sized distributors and, as a result,
the three smallest classifications were condensed into one.

18
Each outlet must visibly display their official authorization code outside of each retail
outlet and any street level vendor must have a sign showing their license number, or that
of their licensed supplier. In rural areas, where playing machines are scarce, licenses are
available for “community viewing centers,” which are essentially anywhere with a power
supply and a television. (It has yet to be seen how many of these small town
“distributors” actually are incentivized to buy distribution rights and register themselves).

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Rentals shops, too, are a part of the new framework. They are meant to pay 20,000 naira
($133) for five rentals copies and the rights to rent them out. In a country where films can
be bought in the markets for 150 ($1) and on the streets for less than 300 naira ($2), this
does appear to be an uphill battle, particularly when, as of the summer of 2009, there
were not yet any significant enforcement efforts.

19
Of course, this goal has not gone unnoticed by the marketers. Marketer 2’s guild, the
FVPMAN, has protested this perceived goal vigorously.

20
While I found it difficult in my research to actually locate any mid-level distributors,
Director/Producer 6 did procure for me an advertisement for partners, illustrating that at
least one company was attempting to follow his design. Given Director/ Producer 6’s
excitement about this advertisement and lack of regard given to this classification by any
other parties in my fieldwork, it seems highly likely that this was one of the few, if not
the only company attempting such a classification, however.

21
However, in November of 2009, the NFVCB pulled the licenses from 17 such vanity
operations, some of whom were quite well-known and powerful figures in the industry.
The long-term implications of this on the framework’s implementation are as of yet
unclear.

22
It is not uncommon for current producers to be members or in leadership roles in both
ITTPAN and the Association of Movie Producers (AMP): there is much overlap but no
redundancy.

23
While I didn’t see the physical altercation, I did see the majority of those involved both
the day before and the day after the alleged altercation and can attest that some injuries to
Director/ Producer 10’s entourage were inflicted by someone, at the very least, though
not by whom.

24
For instance, Director/ Producer 11 is a martial artist, large in size and frequently found
pumping iron at the National Stadium’s spartan crumbling and unlit weight-lifting gym,
where I interviewed him. He is also an aspiring producer, and, in the summer of 2009, a
near zero-budget movie he’d shot was being edited by Manager 1, the editor and office
manager of Director/ Producer 10, the challenger to the presidency of the AMP. When
asked whom he was supporting for the presidency, Director/ Producer 11 was quite clear
about the direct relationship between his support for Director/ Producer 10 and the
editing assistance Director/ Producer 10 was providing for him. He also was quite clear
about the likely relationship between his physical prowess and intimidating appearance
and Director/ Producer 10’s overtures towards him, including him as a member of his
inner circle during his drive for the presidency. He appeared to be bothered by none of

131

this and seemed to consider it par for the course in his efforts to succeed as a producer
and a lucky break.

25
In the summer of 2009, the exchange rate was around 150 naira to the dollar.

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CHAPTER FIVE:
The Cultural Specificity and Appeal of Nollywood

A woman looks on in horror as the witchcraft she used to ensure her fiancée’s
loyalty backfires and he dies a violent death before her eyes. His ghost then returns to
haunt her until she takes her own life in a mixture of regret and despair.
A man trades identities temporarily with his less fortunate but fertile twin in order
to impregnate his wife and finds himself unable to return to his comfortable life, leaving
him in a state of despondency. His ensuing machinations leave multiple lives in an utter
shambles.
A 15 year old girl marries against her parents wishes and proceeds to spend the
next few years being beaten and cheated upon, suffers severe pregnancy complications
and ultimately takes her own life.
Nollywood movies do not hold back on shocking plot points or dramatic
consequences for actions. They are marked by extended monologue and dialogue scenes,
lengthy side stories, and multiple climactic plot elements spread out over the course of
what can sometimes feel to be a meandering storyline. Nollywood movies often run over
the course of two and a half to three hours, and the majority are sold in at least two parts,
Part I and Part II, meant to be purchased simultaneously. The movies are quite
stylistically identifiable, clearly Nigerian and West African both in form and in specifics.
This project thus far has focused on the shape of the Nigerian movie industry – its
growth, its structure, and the institutions that govern it. Yet what drives all of this – what
drove the original growth of Nollywood and what continues to fuel the industry – is the

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popularity and appeal of Nollywood as a cultural product. The resonance Nollywood
movies have with the Nigerian viewer, the West African viewer, and viewers throughout
the rest of sub-Saharan Africa and the pan-African diaspora, is the true motor of this
industry’s explosive growth. Despite the production values, the haphazard editing, and
the low-budget special effects, demand for Nollywood movies is robust. Sold in the open-
air markets of sub-Saharan Africa alongside pirated Hollywood movies, viewers
consciously make the decision time and again that Nollywood movies are their cultural
product of choice.
In this chapter, I address the specifics of the content of these movies. I assess the
ways in which these movies appeal both broadly with popular themes and in a number of
very specific ways that immediately reflect the experiences of Nigeria. Using the content
of specific Nollywood productions as examples, I first discuss the plot formulas that are
repeated throughout Nollywood and that relate to the overall appeal of the genre. I then
discuss a number of specific elements present in Nollywood movies: the settings, the
characters, the themes, and the ways in which the movies are shot to better uncover the
specificities of Nollywood’s mass appeal.
The movies I use as examples here are not meant to be representative of all
Nollywood productions. With plots ranging from gun-packed thrillers to love stories to
traditional dramas involving tribal life in the countryside, it would be impossible to select
a handful of titles that could truly encapsulate the diversity of Nollywood content. After
all, Nollywood is many things to many people, and is popular in its very diversity. For
the sake of this analysis, I have chosen two movies that have been successful with

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audiences, as success signifies resonance, and these two movies are different enough to
reflect resonance with audience in two distinct forms. One, Osuofia in London, was
immensely popular and could be considered primarily a comic movie. While sales figures
in Nigeria are notoriously unreliable, a French Nollywood expert puts the sales of this
movie well over the 300,000 to 400,000 range in the first year of its release (Barrot,
2008), which is quite high for a Nollywood production. Whether that number is accurate
or not, the movie has been mentioned time and again as a Nollywood classic, and is still
in circulation more than half a decade later. The other movie, Letters to a Stranger,
achieved more modest success, and could best be considered a romantic movie. While,
again, sales figures are largely nonexistent for Nollywood (and, when existent, are rarely
reliable), Letters to a Stranger generated a lot of publicity and discussion due to its larger
than usual budget and roster of stars
1
. Letters to a Stranger was not as huge a success as
Osuofia in London, but it is reflective of the more everyday type of success for which
Nollywood movies can usually aim.
Letters to a Stranger is a light romance directed by Fred Amata and released in
2007. The movie is high profile, and features a cast almost entirely made up of well-
known stars: veteran actress Joke Silva, heartthrob Yemi Blaq, and the biggest star in
Nollywood, Genevive Nnaji, amongst others. Letters to a Stranger is somewhat unusual
for a Nollywood movie in its streamlined plot and focus on simplified higher quality
production, but worth inclusion here due to its success and good reviews. The plot
revolves around the romantic travails of its protagonist: Jemima Lawal, played by
Nollywood’s marquee star, Nnaji. Jemima is living in Abuja, working as a management

135
consultant, and engaged to Frederick, an unromantic businessman who seems more
interested in his work and pleasing his mother than in understanding Jemima’s inner
thoughts and feelings (or, for that matter, in remembering her birthday). She spends her
free time writing wistful letters on her laptop to an imaginary sensitive suitor, when a
misdialed mobile phone call while on extended holiday with her sister in Lagos puts her
in touch with Sadiq, who is everything for which she had been pining. She carries on a
pseudo-romance in Lagos with Sadiq until she realizes she must choose between the two
men who, it turns out, happen to coincidentally be good friends with one another. A few
more plot twists down the road in this love triangle (including the death of Frederick’s
mother and a physical altercation between Sadiq and Frederick), Jemima ultimately
chooses Frederick, as he has learned his lesson and become more sensitive and ultimately
seems more willing to let her make her own decisions.
The second movie that will be used here as a case study is one of the most popular
movies in Nollywood’s history: Osuofia in London. Directed by Kingsley Ogoro and
released in 2003 (Part I) and 2004 (Part II), the movie features acclaimed comic actor
Nkem Owoh and British actress Mara Derwent. The plot features Owoh as the titular
character, a bumbling and scheming down-on-his-luck man living in a remote village
with multiple wives, little luck, and little money. When men in suits from Lagos show up
to tell him his estranged wealthy brother has passed away and left him a fortune, he
travels from the village to London and enters his brother’s lifestyle of wealth and
opulence, complete with chauffeurs, a mansion, and an attractive British fiancée
(Samantha) who, it turns out, is scheming along with a British-Nigerian solicitor to cheat

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Osuofia out of his inheritance. When, at the end of Part I, it is revealed that the solicitor
was, in turn, planning to cheat Samantha out of her cut, she convinces Osuofia to run
back to Nigeria with her in order to escape the solicitor’s nefarious plots. Once in
Nigeria, in Part II, Samantha struggles to fit into village life as one of Osuofia’s many
wives, and even attempts to poison Osuofia in order to steal his money yet again. When
he survives the attempt, she apologizes tearfully and explains that she was so intent on
obtaining the money because she had lent her last £500,000 to his brother shortly before
his death. Osuofia forgives her, and sends her back to the U.K. along with £500,000 from
his late brother’s accounts. Despite the many turns of the plot, most of the movie is
devoted to the comic moments produced by the fish-out-of-water moments of Osuofia
encountering London (Part I) and Samantha encountering village life (Part II).
Cultural Specificity of Nollywood
Nollywood movies are easily stylistically identifiable, both in their general
formula and in their stylistic specificities. While each movie has elements that make them
appealing in a somewhat universal manner, they also reflect qualities specific to the
culture from which they were born. They reflect the Nigerian environment as they portray
settings in both the Nigerian countryside (“the bush”) and cityscape (usually Lagos).
They reflect Nigerian culture as they reflect traditional elements of Nigerian society,
including values of collectivity, family, and faith. And, above all else, they reflect the
Nigerian experience: the everyday of living in modern Nigeria.
Plots

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The plots of Nollywood movies tend to be dramatic and full of plot twists. Good
and bad news enter dramatically and characters often react in ways that are less than
subtle. When the solicitor in Osuofia in London, for instance, reveals himself as a
schemer, he does so in a soul-searching and gut-wrenching monologue in the mirror in
his office bathroom, “accidentally” slipping into the Nigerian accent he has rejected for
the good life in the U.K. When Jemima of Letters to a Stranger is swayed to return to her
fiancée the first time she does so, it is because his mother his died, and she has received
word through her would-be lover, Sadiq in a dramatic scene. Plots are rife with shocking
revelations (e.g. someone is pregnant, has HIV, is someone’s long-lost father) and the
length of the movies allows for many turns and twists before anything is resolved. In this
way, plots are multi-climactic, much in the spirit of a multi-episode soap opera or
telenovela. Also like in the plots of their soap opera brethren, changes of fortune feature
frequently, with rags to riches tales, and drastic alterations in status (often the result of
black magic) an often used plot convention.
Settings
If Nollywood movies resemble nearly universally-appealing soap operas and
telenovelas in the shape and formula of their plots, it is in their settings where they are the
most specifically Nigerian. Country scenes take place in villages and “out in the bush,” in
places at once traditional yet inextricably linked to the modern world in a number of
ways. For instance, country scenes set in modern times are likely to include televisions,
brand name products, and mobile phones. City scenes are similarly familiar, taking place
on the crowded and sidewalk-less dusty streets particular to the Fourth World metropolis,

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and inside the tiled and staffed upscale houses that are familiar throughout sub-Saharan
Africa. In Letters to a Stranger, we see in the characters’ upscale Lagos and Abuja
apartments numerous elements that will be familiar to Nigerian audiences from rich to
poor: metal railings on interior stairways, traditional Nigerian printed fabrics for curtains,
tile floors, even framed pictures of Nigerian pop star D-Banj. The geography of suburban
U.S.’s manicured front lawns, quiet well-paved streets and electronic garage door
openers, the signifiers of success that mark Hollywood movies, are nowhere to be seen
and could hardly be more foreign and out-of-place than in a Nollywood movie.
Osuofia in London is similarly very specifically Nigerian in its Nigerian settings,
even as it sets up London as the impossibly exotic alternative, skipping the realities of
most immigrants’ experiences of East London and South London slums in favor of an
imaginary of immense wealth, handed over on a platter. Every detail in Osuofia’s village
is bound to be highly recognizable to Nigerians, as well as West Africans and the
diaspora. The plastic buckets used in serving food, the traditional clothes, the country
accents, the women pounding yams, the gated yards full of dust and goats: none of these
likely required any art director or set designer making specific decisions, as all of these
elements are the props of daily life and they can be easily recognized as such. In the
village scenes of Osuofia in London, even Lagos is a distant thought, represented by men
in suits carrying important documents. To be sure, the poverty of Osuofia and his family
and friends in the village is presented for laughs, but these laughs are made to be laughs
of recognition, rather than derision. The London of Osuofia in London is also very
specific, shot in tube stations, petrol stations, and grass-covered lawns, and the accuracy

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of such settings would be familiar to any viewers familiar with London. Yet these
settings still have an air of unreality to them, a disconnect from everyday experience – the
experiences of both the rich and the poor living in London, particularly the experiences of
actual Nigerians of any economic status living in London. The village scenes in Osuofia
in London are rife with the happenings of daily life in a village, multiple minor characters
gossiping over yam-pounding, for instance, while the London scenes are more a theater, a
stage set for specific interactions between main characters. For example, one scene
features a beautiful woman lazing about mid-day on the well-manicured lawn of a gated
estate, attended to by servants, a scene that accurately depicts the daily life of virtually no
London residents.
Looking at the upscale apartments in Letters to a Stranger alongside the modest
village in Osuofia, and the exotic appearance of an imagined upper class London, we can
see the presence of Nigeria in nearly every scene in Nollywood movies, and this presence
can serve as one of the movies’ primary draws, something Haynes points to in his
analysis of the ever-present awareness of Lagos in Nollywood movies (2007). This
presence is a product of the realities of production. Almost all shooting is done on
location, as there are no soundstages, and the locations are usually crew members’
apartments, production offices, the expensive houses of well-to-do Nollywood investors,
or the city streets (or, for country settings, “out in the bush”). “Sets” for movies will
generally consist of a spare room transformed into, for instance, a necromancer’s lair via
a hastily thrown together painted backdrop and a few odd props, such as a table covered
with gold foil and halved gourds.

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Characters
Not only do the settings of Nollywood’s movies reflect Nigerian and African life
in a way movies from outside of Africa will find it hard to replicate, so too do the styles
of the characters. Nollywood movies present recognizable characters from all different
walks of life, from poor village dwellers to wealthy politicians and business owners. Yet,
while Nollywood competitors (such as Hollywood and Bollywood, competitors at least in
the Nigerian market) may also present protagonists from the highest socio-economic
classes, the unattainable circumstances of the elite as portrayed by Nollywood are also
accessible, clearly a part of Nigerian society. Actors in Nollywood movies will often
wear traditional Nigerian clothing and their forays into Western dressing follow Nigerian
stylistic mores. Larger women are visible and valued more highly in Nollywood than in
Western fare, and Nigerian gender roles (more traditional than in the West) are a focal
point of plots. The jobs the characters hold, the lifestyles they lead, and the problems they
have are all very culturally specific.
The characters of Nollywood movies, while somewhat archetypal (Letters to a
Stranger, for instance, features the mirthful overweight sidekick, the dashing and suave
stranger, and the wealthy fiancée who forgets birthdays and just doesn’t understand,
characters who have all surely appeared in productions the world over), are also
specifically and clearly Nigerian. Marriage, faith, and family, for instance, are usually of
utmost importance, and many plots are structured to reward those who value these and
punish those who blindly pursue material things to the detriment of their families or faith.

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Production Values
The very aesthetic of Nollywood movies has become synonymous with the
circumstances of their production. As there is no money to support paying for soundstage
rental, Nollywood movies are shot on location, without permits, and in borrowed and
hastily thrown together sets, full of borrowed props
2
. In most of these cases, ambient
noises are at a maximum. Not only are Lagos’ streets rife with car horns and the shouts of
street hawkers, but most shoots are accompanied by a noisy generator sputtering along
quite close to filming. These ambient noises are part and parcel of shooting in Lagos, and
the resultant sound quality of the movies is part and parcel of watching Nollywood
movies. While some viewers complain about it, it has not seemed to dissuade viewers
from watching.
The movies’ camera angles are the product of Nollywood’s lineage from soap
opera alumni, and go along with the melodramatic plots. Close-ups of dramatic facial
reactions proliferate, and scenes are shot with few cameras. Special effects are common
despite the small budgets. These include things like people disappearing, levitating, and
being consumed in flames, all usually the result of the movies’ frequently appearing
black magic. Most require suspension of disbelief, but industry experts report that any
unusual special effect seems to attract viewers, no matter the execution (Journalist 2,
personal communication, July 16, 2009). This is not to deride Nigerian audiences. They
also have access to high production value Hollywood fare, and, due to unauthorized
distribution, Hollywood movies are available for around the same price and ease of
acquisition, yet Nollywood continues to be more popular. Clearly something else is at

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work, and it has a relationship to the appeal of the cultural specificity of Nollywood
productions.
Themes
Themes in Nollywood movies reflect Nigerian values. As mentioned in the
section on characters, marriage, family, and faith, as well as duty and fidelity are central
to Nollywood movies and excessive individuality is often punished in Nollywood plots.
In Nigerian society, as in much of the global South, collectivity is valued over
individuality, and these values are reflected in each society’s cultural productions. Our
example here of Letters to a Stranger is unlike most Nigerian movies in that the plot is
quite simple and streamlined, with few characters, few twists, and few antagonists bent
on revenge, or black magic gone wrong. Yet protagonist Jemima’s ultimate choice of her
original fiancée (Frederick) over the man (Sadiq) that seemed perhaps more in tune with
her inner creative passions speaks to themes of fidelity, loyalty, and duty over personal
gain and fulfillment that resonate in Nigerian society. Going along with these themes of
family and duty, Nollywood also celebrates morality, and religiosity. The emphasis on
morality appeals to many who feel a disconnect with the sexual overtones in Western
movies. Pastors are often given exalted status, and the devout, while often not the main
subject, are usually particularly well-regarded in the plots.
In addition to family and faith, Nollywood movies also tend to highlight justice,
financial status, and the thin lines of fate separating lifestyles of wealth and poverty.
While melodramatic plot twists often include betrayal and violence, punishment for
wrongs is a central theme in Nollywood movies. Though unscrupulous and un-pious

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behavior can sometimes lead characters to wealth, Nollywood movies are quick to show
that this behavior will ultimately lead to characters’ downfall. In this process, black
magic is a frequently-appearing plot point. Yet religious faith is highlighted as ultimately
besting the power of black magic. While wealth and riches may come with the moral
lapses that result in resorting to black magic, the theme running through is the ultimate
misery and madness that comes to those making such a decision.
This focus on black magic reflects the widespread belief in Nigeria – and across
sub-Saharan Africa – in the everyday realities of black magic and witchcraft. Particularly
in Nigeria, in a society marked by extraordinary differentials in wealth, these stories hold
particular appeal. Nigeria is marked by the extreme differences between immense oil
wealth, accompanied by private jets, foreign boarding schools, luxury cars, and phalanxes
of security - and the abject poverty which informs the daily lives of most Nigerians, many
of whose full-time job salaries never quite constitute enough to afford food, shelter, and
transport to and from work. Many of these low wage workers eke out an existence
marked by overcrowded living quarters, hours on end on danfos (the overcrowded
minibuses which serve as public transport), skipped meals, and only surviving through
favors from those in higher positions in life than them. While this disparity in wealth
marks many countries in the developing world, Nigeria’s version is particularly
distinctive because of the closeness between wealth and poverty there, both
geographically and in terms of social ties. In Nigerian cities, wealth and poverty ride up
on one another. There are no separate areas of slums on the outskirts of a wealthy core.
Instead, the poor make their way all the way up to the front gates of wealthy estates.

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Street hawkers are parked outside of the gates of even high-end Western hotels and
government ministries. Street life even in moneyed gated communities continues and is
often made up of underpaid and overworked security guards congregating and passing the
time. Similarly, the patronage relationships between employers and employees, and the
vast size of Nigerian families mean that it is often a short path of social and familial
connections between the rich and the poor. The rapid enrichment of individuals and
families through oil wealth, as well as piracy, 419 scams
3
, and other ill-gotten sources
have led to the status of wealth as seeming unnatural and the product of a mix of luck,
tenacity, and, perhaps, the ill-gotten blessings of some dark lord or black magic. It may
be no coincidence that Nollywood movies are much more popular with the poor than with
the wealthy and the themes of these movies are certainly born of these experiences of
wealth and poverty in Nigeria.
Conclusion: Universal Formulas, Specific Details
As mentioned in the above section, the plots of Nollywood movies tend to be
multi-climatic and drawn out. It is not just in multiple climaxes that Nollywood movies
resemble soap operas, of course; it is also in the melodrama itself that marks the
storylines. This is not surprising, as soap operas are in some ways also Nollywood’s
forbearer, as discussed in Chapter 2. This similarity, though, is not solely relevant
because of the relationship to Nollywood’s lineage. These elements are characteristic of a
number of popular culture productions that have achieved cross-national success.
Nollywood plots, like those of soap operas and telenovelas, can be generalized as
incorporating melodrama. Nollywood, soap operas, and telenovelas alike are cultural

145
products with drawn out multi-climactic plots, full of outlandish plot twists, and dramatic
reactions, and low on in-depth character development and real-world believability. Also
of importance, all are popular when going head-to-head with productions produced with
much larger budgets. This popularity is derived in part from the universality of the
melodramatic plots.
Melodrama is an oft-maligned but very popular dramatic form. Haynes (2000)
cites the pre-video boom popularity of melodrama in Nigerian audiovisual popular
culture through three forms: the English-language soap opera, the Spanish or Portuguese
language telenovela, and the Bollywood movie, all popular throughout Nigeria. He also
notes the prevalence of melodrama in everything from Chinese to Egyptian cinema and
television, both important cultural product exporters regionally. In other words, if a
movie or televised production is widely exported and consumed by the masses in an
international context, it tends to incorporate melodrama
4
.
Those theorizing specifically about the global popularity of telenovelas, for
instance, have focused on the narrative elements in telenovelas that constitute archetypes
with universal – and timeless – popularity. Telenovelas are almost exclusively
melodramatic and tend to follow a rags-to-riches storyline, with protagonists achieving
love and success against all odds (de Urbina and Lopez, 1999; Martinez, 2005). This
universal storyline is particularly appealing when viewers specifically identify with the
character. For instance, stories featuring a rural-to-urban migrant achieving social,
romantic, and economic success in her new surroundings have been particularly popular
in countries with large rural-to-urban migrants (Singhal & Rogers, 1999: 33).

146
The appeal of these storylines and the appeal of melodrama in general can lead us
to a view of Nollywood as benefiting from universally appealing plot formulas and
themes. Yet, while the melodrama and themes of Nollywood contribute to its popularity,
it is the cultural specificity of Nollywood that clearly contributes overwhelmingly to its
success. Nollywood movies, in their settings, their characters, and even in their
production values represent the Nigerian experience in very specific ways. As audiences
choose Nollywood movies over those of, for instance, Bollywood or Hollywood, the
power of the appeal of the movies’ cultural specificity cannot be overstated. It is the
presence of Nigeria in Nollywood movies that serves to drive their popularity. In this
way, we can view Nollywood movies as incorporating cross-culturally-popular base
structures (melodrama, themes of the pursuit of wealth and the importance of family,
faith and duty), while benefiting particularly strongly from the cultural specificity of the
movies’ details, such as setting.
In understanding this phenomenon, it is worth looking at a corollary of Nigerian
Nollywood movies: U.S.-made Nollywood productions. A small subset of Nollywood
producers is based outside of Nigeria, primarily in the U.K. and in the U.S. They shoot
movies under the much more forgiving conditions in their adopted nations, and the
movies are not made to be exported back to Nigeria; their main audience is fans of
Nigerian Nollywood movies living in the producing nation (i.e. the U.S. for producers
based in the U.S.). The price to produce a movie may be similar in the US and in Nigeria,
however: while certain incidentals will be more expensive in the US, there are no star
salaries, and “guerilla” production techniques remain the same in both places. While the

147
conditions under which these expatriate Nollywood movies are shot are much better than
those shot in Nigeria, Nigerian productions do much better in the marketplace, as
reported by those selling both U.S. and Nigeria-produced Nollywood movies in the U.S.
(U.S. Distributor 2, personal communication, Dec. 15, 2009). While the American
Nollywood producers may have more geographic proximity to the productions of
Nollywood’s golden standard (Hollywood), the movies are rarely sold in Nigeria. This is
in part because of the star system. Movies without a star are also without an audience,
and actors based in the US simply do not and cannot have the same recognition from
Nigerian audiences as do actors based in Nigeria and intimately involved with the gossip,
interviews, and other machinations of the star publicity machine based in Lagos. U.S.
Distributor 2, proprietor of a shop in the South Bronx selling Nollywood movies to U.S.-
based audiences, also notes that the audiences buying Nollywood movies in the diaspora
buy them because the movies remind them of home. “People want to watch because it
makes them think of Africa,” he notes and adds the obvious corollary. “Movies made
here make them think no such thing.” The African-ness of Nollywood is wrapped up in
its place of production: a movie made by Nigerian actors, producers, and writers, yet
made in the United States, misses the essential Nigerian-ness and African-ness that draws
audiences in the first place.
Yet it is not just Nigerian immigrants looking for a taste of Nigerian-ness or
African-ness in U.S. Distributor 2’s shop. He estimates (numbers to be taken with as
much healthy skepticism as possible) the shop clientele to be 60% Caribbean (he cites
Haitians as particularly interested fans), 30% African (mostly West African) and 10%

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African American. For U.S. Distributor 2 to point to the Nigeria-based movies’ essential
African-ness as a draw yet to sell such a small percentage of his movies to those who
have lived in Africa themselves speaks to an interesting phenomenon: cross-cultural
affinity. It is important to note that the many specificities of Nollywood movies that make
them palatable to Nigerian audiences also make them palatable to Nollywoods’ other
audiences across sub-Saharan Africa and the pan-African diaspora.
Straubhaar noted first that audiences actively choose regional and national over
international cultural productions based on preferences for cultural relevance, illustrating
this phenomenon through surveys done in a number of Latin American countries (1991).
He takes this one step further, and notes that it is not just geographic proximity or
linguistic similarity that can attract audiences to cultural products. Viewers can also be
drawn by cultural affinity, or similarities between cultures that are not drawn along
geographic or linguistic patterns. In this way, countries experiencing similar social
changes, such as increased rural-to-urban migration, or rapid globalization, may find
themselves attracted to the very same cultural products, products that may be discrete
from dominant Hollywood productions. Straubhaar posits, for instance, that the similar
experiences Brazil, Mexico and Russia had with rapid industrialization and urbanization
have contributed to the overwhelming popularity of Brazilian and Mexican telenovelas in
1990’s Russia. Yet cultural products are not popular solely because they are fairy tales or
because audiences identify with their protagonists. The popularity of the archetypes and
melodramatic elements found in cultural productions are usually augmented by the
culturally-specific content that characterizes them as products of a specific culture.

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In this chapter, I addressed the content of Nollywood movies, the driver of their
success. The melodramatic plots and the themes of religion, wealth, and family are the
broad elements that form the basis of the movies’ appeal. It is the culturally-specific
content, however, which may truly drive their success: Nigerian settings, characters, and
even production values mark the movies as specifically Nigerian. In this way, these
movies reflect Nigerian culture, both traditional and modern. And, even moreso, these
movies mark the Nigerian experience overall.

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Chapter Five Endnotes

1
A search for the title on Google reveals lively discussions about it on multiple message
boards and articles about it in a wide variety of Nollywood publications.

2
Guns used in movies, for instance, are usually borrowed from police officers that are
friends with someone working on the production. On a movie shoot observed as part of
this project, the police officer lending his gun stayed for the many hours the shoot
stretched on into the night, so as to make sure he got his gun back at the end of the day’s
shoot.

3
419 is the Nigerian penal code for fraud (“obtaining property by false pretenses”).
Nigeria is known throughout the world for one iteration of these: the email scam from,
for instance, a purported Nigerian prince or former political figure, temporarily separated
from their vast fortune, aimed at tricking the recipient into paying large sums of money in
advance of hypothetical future gains. The so-called Nigerian 419 scam, while known
globally, is particularly prevalent and problematic in Nigeria, and is surely aimed at
fellow Nigerians at least as much if not much more than it is aimed at foreigners. Houses
throughout Lagos, for instance, read on the outside “This house is not for sale, beware
419” to protect against the practice of scammers “selling” the house for cash with false
documents while the rightful owners are on vacation.

4
The irony is the near absence of melodrama in the arts showcases that make up
international cinema. As Haynes put it “popular melodramatic forms get filtered out
almost entirely by the politicized paradigm of Third World cinema and by the aesthetic
criteria that determine the access of foreign films to the art cinema circuit in the West”
(2000: 24).

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CHAPTER SIX:
Nollywood and its Global Connections

In the face of the focus thus far on Nollywood’s exclusion from dominant global
networks lie Nollywood’s many actual international and global connections. Mostly
forged by hand, by individual entrepreneurs, these global connections, taken as a whole,
constitute alternative networks that run counter to and under the radar of dominant global
networks.
As discussed in Chapter 2, AbdouMaliq Simone, in his (2001) work on African
and Fourth World cities in the global order, touches on this. Envisioning the African city
as a place of intermittent points of contact with the global order that never manage to pull
the city forward as a whole, Simone also describes the flipside of these uneven
connections. Not only do African urban residents use the city as an opportunity to engage
with the world, those who live in these cities have also created new circuits within Africa
as well as throughout the developing world. In his analysis, Simone cites Mumbai, Dubai,
Bangkok, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur and Jeddah as examples of important global city nodes
in the alternative global networks that are important to urban Africa. These cities are
linked together with African nodes in circuits of trade which function as alternative
circuits to (and in) the dominant global order. The hallmark of these circuits, Simone
says, is informality and unofficial (i.e. semi-legal and illegal) export and trade. This
particular informality enables the possibility of individuals acting on a global level on
self-built resources.

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Simone’s (2001) general descriptions are concretized in the realities of trade in
daily Lagos. As discussed in Chapter 3, Alaba market, the sprawling open air market on
Lagos’ outskirts that serves as the nerve center for electronics sales (and resales) for all of
Southern Nigeria – and perhaps even all of West Africa – can be seen as a microcosm of
business practices and industrial structure in Nigeria. A warren of small business owners
essentially creating both their inventory (often third and fourth hand) and their market
(often those unable to afford first hand merchandise) from scratch, the electronics and
VCD traders of Alaba are not only connected nationally across Nigeria but globally as
well. In their 2001 treatise on Lagos, Koolhaas et. al. investigate the global networks that
spill out of Alaba’s tin-roofed stalls. In their analysis, if Alaba can be considered the hub,
then Taipei, Moscow, Singapore, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, and Dubai are the key nodes.
“Scouts” are sent to scour these sister cities on what Koolhaas et. al. term “market-funded
missions of capitalist reconnaissance,” (p. 709). In other words, scouts are sent to know
about and engage in business with remaindered and already used stock found in
warehouses and markets around the world. As Koolhaas et. al. put it, these areas of
knowledge could be “a lot of cheap Sanyo stereos up for bid in Singapore” or the
remaindered stock of a folding mass wholesaler in Delhi (p. 709). Each of the cities
mentioned are alternative nodes in this global network of antiquated, broken, and
remaindered electronic technologies.
Far from an anomaly, the alternative global circuits created by Alaban
businessmen and women (many of whom are also Nollywood’s major marketers, i.e.,
distributors/ executive producers) are the hallmarks of the business practices of Nigerian

153
entrepreneurs, supporting Simone’s (2001) theorizing. When excluded from global
networks, alternatives will be created in the spaces left unpaved. An oversimplistic way
of looking at these connections would be to call them periphery-to-periphery connections.
It is more apt to describe them simply as alternative networks – circuits with fewer
distinctions between black market, gray market, and white market, or between formal and
informal than dominant global networks. After all, within many of Nigeria’s and urban
Africa’s global networks of trade, we can find Dubai, for example, at the core. And
Lagos is, at the very least, at the core of alternative networks of movie production and
distribution in Nigeria, in West Africa, and even in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. While
Lagos may be a peripheral node in the global cultural industry system if it even makes an
appearance, in these alternative networks it is both central and integral to the functioning
of the entire system.
Even in Lagos, in the heart of these alternative networks, there is not, however,
any forgetting Nigeria’s relationship to the UK and the US, or Nollywood’s relationship
with Hollywood. In fact, nearly everywhere one goes in Nollywood, one can find a
worker lamenting the state of the industry in comparison to the ever-present specter of
Hollywood. The name “Nollywood” itself piggy-backs on the popular concept of
Hollywood as a globally important and recognized hub of film production. In expressing
hope for the future of the industry, many cite the histories of Hollywood and Bollywood,
industries that sprang up from nothing and took many years to mature. While there is
some logic to Nollywood’s Hollywood-envy, much of it is based on a fictional image of
the state of affairs in Hollywood.

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There seems to be a general sense that the international system or the American
system of doing things is the model to which Nollywood should aspire. One refrain
echoed throughout the industry is that “international standard” is equivalent to “best
practice.” As an actress active in guild leadership put it, “we want to do things the right
way – the international way” (Actor 1, personal communication, July 8, 2009). Oddly,
there seems to be a consistent conflation of international practice/ best practice with
extensive regulation of the industry. Director/ Producer 6, in explaining the new
eventually-implemented distribution guidelines he wrote up, consistently referred to his
model resembling the U.S. model. “In the U.S., any person can’t just set up and say they
are a distributor, right?” (personal communication, July 18, 2009). The answer would be,
of course, that they can, as small scale E-bay sellers have proven time and again – and if
entry to any level of distribution in the US is difficult, it is certainly not because of
specific restrictions imposed by the government.
It seems perplexing how the U.S., leader of the free market, has become conflated
with high degrees of regulation in the collective minds of decision-makers in the Nigerian
video industry. It may be that international standards seem so far off that the only
intervention to achieve them would have to be led by the government. Nollywood’s
Hollywood envy might better be applied directly to the industry’s specific
internationally-recognized legal frameworks if it has any intention of eventually joining
formalized global cultural industry networks. Those networks, after all, are paved by
reliable contracts and copyrights taken seriously. And it is an important point that those
copyrights are governed by a series of international agreements that pave the way for

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global trade in cultural industry products on an official and global scale. Before
discussing these, however, let us first address the myriad global connections marking the
industry in production and distribution.
Production
Production in Nollywood is not very global in nature. With the exception of the
many collaborations and exchanges with the neighboring Ghanaian movie industry,
Nollywood movies tend to be a homegrown affair, borne of Nigerian funds, run by
Nigerian producers, and using Nigerian-grown talent (again, with the exception of
frequent exchanges with the Ghanaian movie industry). Yet Nollywood is not entirely
insular, and global forces do have some presence in Nollywood production processes.
In terms of funding, Nollywood movies almost never receive foreign aid, yet
some resourceful Nigerian directors have found themselves eligible for such funding.
Directors wishing to fund movies while breaking out of the control of the marketers have
at times pursued such funds, although this is quite a rarity. Director/ Producer 1, for
instance, produced in 2008 a movie for mass Nollywood release. The movie, the plot of
which revolves around female university undergraduates forced to sleep with older men,
AIDS, death, and shocking revelations of unanticipated fatherhood, has a strong AIDS
prevention component. As a result, it was eligible for and received money from the
French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for its production. The ability to tell a story free of
marketers and the stresses of self-funding appears to have been more the impetus for this
production than a desire to specifically prevent HIV transmission, and Director/ Producer
1 sees little problem with including an HIV prevention message in his story if it helps

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garner funding (Director/ Producer 1, personal communication, July 10, 2009), a mindset
which makes sense in a nation marked even by advertising-sponsored books featuring
prominent product placement within the story. As a counterpoint, Marketer 2, president
of the marketer’s guild, expresses distaste for even this level of support. “In Kenya,” he
says, “you write proposals upon proposals and the agency wants it to be about AIDS. We
tell our own stories and we don’t give a damn if you
1
appreciate it or not” (personal
communication, July 31, 2009). Marketer 2, of course, also has the impetus to encourage
continued dominance of the marketer’s cartel in movie production. Holding centralized
power in the alternative networks of Nollywood production, the marketers have no desire
to combat French forces for control of content and production.
Foreign governments have a degree (a very small degree) of involvement in
Nollywood production not only through funding, but also through various cultural
diplomacy efforts. These are mostly topical, however, and mostly consist of, for instance,
the U.S. Consulate in Lagos agreeing to host a workshop for the Screenwriters Guild of
Nigeria with a few American practitioners as guests. After many such partnerships, the
Consulate began to cut back, feeling, most likely accurately, that some were holding
events with the sole intention of borrowing some of the cache that a relationship with the
US Consulate holds in Nigeria, and with little intention of effecting a worthwhile
exchange (Consulate 1, personal communication, July 14, 2009).
The Nigerian Foreign Ministry, similarly, has begun to utilize the international
star power of Nollywood actors in their own cultural diplomacy efforts. They have
sponsored everything from a Nollywood North American Film Festival in Mississagua,

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Ontario to inviting Nollywood actors to partake in parades and cultural events held at
Nigerian consulates worldwide (Nigerian Foreign Ministry Official 1, personal
communication, July 30, 2009). For the most part, though, these are side missions and
afterthoughts. After all, the bulk of the cultural diplomacy of Nollywood occurs simply in
the actors and movies popularizing Nigerian manners of dress, speaking, and living
throughout African and African diaspora communities. It is a powerful national soft
power (see Nye, 2004) produced without the efforts of Nigeria’s government at all.
Nigerian cultural influence has been extended through pirate networks of distribution and
informal links to the diaspora. Active efforts by the Nigerian Foreign Ministry are not
taken very seriously. Similarly, requests for cooperation from official Nigerian cultural
diplomacy efforts to famous Nollywood practitioners are resented by many in the
industry who feel neglected by their government until the government wants or needs
something from them.
In contrast to the U.S. and Nigeria’s cultural diplomatic exchange efforts and
French support for specific content, some international government involvement has been
more practical in nature. The German government, for instance, supported a more active
effort to assist production in the industry: a training program for current industry
practitioners. The Deutsche-Welle Academy, a globally connected training program
based in Germany, hosted a year-long series of workshops in Lagos for a select group of
practitioners from 2008 to 2009. The Deutsche-Welle Academy has a general charge to
capacity-build in existent media industries globally and has been offering their program
in situ throughout Africa. The Academy offers acting, script-writing, and production

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workshops to 30 participants, most of whom were already in positions of authority in the
industry. Training took place in part at the German cultural outreach center in Lagos, the
Goethe Institute. The training was by international practitioners, including a German
director usually living in Germany, and an Irish director usually living in South Africa.
This program, too, while productive, is an example of some one-off efforts that have no
consistent role in the industry.
There are other non-government-based training programs with international
connections as well. While many directors have set up training schools of varying
degrees of professionalism, those most serious about the endeavor have arranged
partnerships with foreign institutions. Director/ Producer 9, for instance, collaborates
with Westminster University in the UK in receiving instructors and various
accreditations. In a few rare instances, those active in Nollywood have gone to the US or
the UK to seek training from schools there. One of the more visible of these is Stephanie
Okereke, a popular Nollywood actress who attended the trade school New York Film
Academy in New York. While there, she created a student film starring her and featuring
a number of aspiring American actors, and subsequently released it in Nigeria to much
fanfare in 2009. It was rumored that the New York Film Academy was seeking
subsequently to set up more formal classes for Nollywood practitioners (for profit, of
course), but it has yet to materialize. However, no matter how many enroll in such
international schools, it remains highly unlikely that foreign education will become an
integral part of the industry. Informal apprenticeships forged through personal
connections and introductions are likely to remain dominant.

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Nollywood practitioners also consistently receive international training in a much
less formal way. The Sony store in Lagos’ Victoria Island, as mentioned in Chapter 3,
offers occasional workshops for Nollywood’s cinematographers teaching prospective
clients how to use Sony’s new equipment. The Sony store on Victoria Island is more than
just a supplier of equipment and knowledge about equipment to the industry. It marks the
only appearance in the production chain of a major international corporation making
profits from the industry, and involved for motives other than altruism or cultural
diplomacy or exchange. The Sony store on Victoria Island opened around ten years ago
(Equipment Sales 1, personal communication, July 23, 2009) and sells to both the movie
industry and the television industry. Equipment Sales 1, sales representative at the store
for the past four years, estimates that Sony has 80% market share in new equipment for
Nollywood, though, like most statistics offered about the industry, that specific estimate
should be taken with a bit of healthy skepticism. That said, Sony is widely seen as
dominating the industry, with JVC and Panasonic present but lagging behind. As the
industry has matured, demand for new equipment (as opposed to used and repaired
equipment) has grown.
While equipment purchased in Nigeria is more expensive than the same
equipment purchased in Europe, due to import duties and the costs of shipping, the Sony
store is popular for a number of reasons. For one, the store offers Nollywood practitioners
the opportunity to order products without having to deal themselves with shipping, as
package delivery in Lagos is often fraught with difficulty. Equipment Sales 1 reports that
they will order this equipment usually from a Sony head office in Singapore. Besides

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delivery, the Sony store also offers service and warranties. These are not available when
cinematographers buy equipment cheaper on their own via their or friends’ trips abroad
to locations with a place in the dominant global equipment sales circuit: places like
London and Dubai, places without the inflated prices for import that mark international
electronics (and many other) imports in Nigeria. While acquiring equipment through
such informal shopping trips is popular, cinematographers that work frequently will, in
the absence of such an opportunity, accept the expense of the equipment in return for the
reliability that formal exchange with the representatives of a multi-national corporation
can offer. While Nollywood’s cinematographers are not buying the highest end
equipment, they are consistently buying middle-range gear, and Sony is taking profits
(Equipment Sales 1, personal communication, July 23, 2009). Equipment Sales 1 notes
that drive to obtain market share and sell more to Nollywood comes from the store’s own
entrepreneurial instincts, without directives from any foreign Sony offices. So, while this
store is an example of multi-national corporation (MNC) participation in the Nollywood
value chain, the identification of this opportunity, this gap that could be filled by MNC
involvement, came from within Nigeria, by Nigeria-based entrepreneurs
2
.
Similarly, it is worth noting that software created by Western corporations is used
for various stages in the production process, from script-writing to editing to the creation
of special effects. As mentioned in Chapter 3, some even learn how to use this software
from free online tutorials. This software is most likely acquired through the black market
for the majority of users, however, marking more alternative international networks. The
hardware (computers and laptops) is, of course, also the product of multi-national

161
corporations, but computers in Nigeria are often purchased second-hand (or third-hand or
fourth-hand and so on) from resellers at electronics markets again, having arrived in
Nigeria through alternative global networks of electronics distribution.
Distribution
While international inputs into production are mostly one-off and haphazard with
the exception of physical hardware and software, Nollywood’s arms in international
distribution spread out like a vast web – and mostly an invisible web, due to informality
and opacity. There is currently one international corporation involved in movie
distribution in Nigeria, but it does not deal with Nollywood. Silverbird, a South African
media giant, owns and runs the few Western-style multi-plexes in Lagos and Abuja that
show legally acquired Hollywood films – and charge Western prices for the privilege. In
all other areas of distribution, global connections exist but they follow the logics of
informality, opacity, and small-scale enterprises that mark the rest of the industry. These
global connections, informally made on a small scale, form the alternative networks of
the industry, connecting Lagos to markets from Dar-es-Salaam to East London to St.
Lucia in the Caribbean.
Nollywood movies are available all over the world, throughout the rest of Sub-
Saharan Africa and the African diaspora (including places many generations removed
from Africa, such as a number of Caribbean nations
3
). Countries throughout Africa (and
particularly the rest of West Africa) have complained about the proliferation of Nigerian
movies, which are seen as running roughshod over local cultural production. Markets
from Tanzania to the Ivory Coast are overflowing with Nigerian productions
4
. The main

162
markets are the UK, the US, the West Indies, and sub-Saharan Africa, but countries with
smaller numbers of African immigrants figure in as well, such as Spain, Italy, and
Germany. Despite the wide and rapid global networks dedicated to distributing
Nollywood movies, very little if any money from foreign distribution goes back into the
pockets of those producing the movies.
International Sales of Physical Copies
Physical sales are the dominant method of Nollywood’s global distribution. As
Nollywood movies have no theatrical film-based distribution, this means VCD or DVD
sales
5
. Distribution in sub-Saharan Africa often looks similar to distribution within
Nigeria: open air markets and small dedicated shops. Outside of sub-Saharan Africa,
movies are most usually available in shops dedicated to selling a number of products
from the diaspora. In almost all cases, there is no export of large numbers of copies
produced in Nigeria. Instead, resellers need only one copy from Nigerian sources to
populate their offerings. Small African grocery stores, for instance, may have copies of a
few movies behind the counter, brought over from relatives’ or friends’ trips back to their
native country and this copy itself is likely to be an unauthorized reproduction. If a
customer requests one, the proprietor can quickly burn a copy on the spot. The streets of
certain East and South London neighborhoods in particular are peppered with grocery
shops and small restaurants catering to the large Nigerian population, and each of these
will likely offer some opportunity to purchase a Nollywood movie as a side line of the
business. However, dedicated movie shops catering to the diaspora do exist.

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For the most part, these copies for sale internationally are “pirate”, with no profits
going back to any of those making the movie. In the cases in which the copies are
legitimate, profits are usually in the form of a flat fee for rights, and that fee is usually
insubstantial. Many producers in Nollywood have no active efforts to sell their movies
outside of Nigeria and make no active efforts to combat the sales of their movies by
others globally. There is so much concentration on known and visible piracy in Nigeria
that unauthorized copies outside of Nigeria are just not a focus for most producers. Those
producers that do attempt a level of control over foreign sales do so almost exclusively
through sales agents. They will have a standing relationship with someone involved in
sales in the destination country, and that person will act as a representative for a
significant cut of the proceeds. It is most common for Nollywood producers to have
partnerships with Ghanaian sellers in Accra, as movie culture in Ghana and Nigeria has a
number of overlaps and synergies. London and Johannesburg are two other major hubs in
international distribution. In virtually all of these instances, connections with sales agents
in these foreign markets are made informally and through personal connections and
introductions, as well as chance meetings. Each of these sales agents have multiple
clients, and they are not exclusively contracted with just one producer or distributor, but
none of these relationships is very well organized or documented.
For producers disinterested in forging such connections on their own, there is also
the option of connecting with the rare aggregator within Nigeria. Company A, run by
industry heavyweight Nigeria Distributor 1, is one such company. Company A deals with
middlemen, (allegedly) representing producers who have already made movies. The

164
company offers to represent the titles in foreign distribution efforts and makes money
from the breadth of their catalog, as opposed to significant profits from any individual
sale. It is important to note that this business too is informal in almost every respect. It is
not always clear that the “middleman” or other party with whom Company A transacts
has indisputable legal rights to the movies offered, and deals are rarely exclusive:
producers are free to contract with others to sell their products abroad as well. The
middlemen that Company A deals with offer letters documenting ownership rights and
contracts giving out rights to Company A, but none of these go through a legal
framework of notaries or lawyers, and it is quite difficult to track down the veracity of
such a document.
It is virtually impossible to verify that someone claiming to be a sales agent for a
Nollywood producer is in fact engaged in an on-going business relationship with that
producer, both inside Nigeria (as in Company A) and outside of Nigeria. False agents
proliferate. And, of course, most sales outlets have little incentive to buy en masse from
sales agents, as they too can make copies of others’ work while only paying for one copy.
Networks of unauthorized distribution are de rigueur in Nollywood’s global distribution
circuits, but the line between black market and white market is blurred here too.
Unauthorized resale agents, operating with the promise of near 100% profits on
Nollywood’s inexpensive movies, can be incredibly rapid and pervasive and have spread
Nollywood’s productions much further than they ever could be were they to be
distributed with centralized top-down distribution networks. And these pirate networks
may add value to their merchandise. Some may, for instance, decide to create more

165
“professional” looking packaging, in sturdier cases and with higher quality artwork or
more sensical blurbs on the casing (this usually applies to markets in the global North,
where such packaging is expected). In Francophone countries, unauthorized parties often
undertake an entire dubbing of the movie into French and subsequently sell their value-
added version with no permission and no rights – yet it would appear that the original
producers would have neither the impetus nor the incentive to dub their movies into
French for sales to Francophone Africa anyway, so these markets are only even
economically feasible export markets due to the economic logics of black market
distribution. In this way, Nollywood is altered to be culturally specific to the country into
which it is imported, even in canned form. However, this customization comes not from
the ingenuity and business acumen of the original producers. Instead, this customization
comes from the local contacts in each country who are incentivized by 100% profits (in
the case of unauthorized distributors) or even near 100% profits (in the case of many
sales agents) on the low cost merchandise with little formally standing between an
individual sale and profit.
Some of Nollywood’s more powerful and august producers have made an effort to
profit directly from foreign sales, but these producers tend to be the exceptions rather the
rule, and tend to come from the more educated and artistic side of the industry as opposed
to the marketer networks that make up the lifeblood of sales and profits in the industry.
One veteran producer and distributor, for instance, has set up a satellite office in the
London suburb of Essex through which he hopes to profit from his own movies by selling
directly to shops in the UK – and perhaps even be able to actively pursue piracy

166
prosecutions with his increased London presence (Electronics Trader/ Producer 1,
personal communication, July 20, 2009). Others have relationships that, while not very
lucrative, do allow them some surety of profit from foreign markets.
African Movies Mall
A big figure in this small world of legitimate international distribution is U.S.
Distributor 2, who owns a distribution business based in a heavily Caribbean and African
neighborhood in the Bronx in New York City. His business can serve as a case study, a
glimpse into the dynamics of Nollywood’s international distribution through the window
of the rare legitimate international distributors. U.S. Distributor 2 had been involved in
selling unauthorized copies of Nollywood movies (Director/ Producer 8, personal
communication, August 3, 2009) when he realized the opportunity to connect with
Nollywood producers and offer legitimate authorized copies for sale, a business move
which has led him to dominate the small North American market in a number of ways. A
number of producers have standing relationships with U.S. Distributor 2’s company
(African Movies Mall), wherein they give U.S. Distributor 2 a master copy on DV-CAM
and he buys the rights to reproduce this movie for a flat fee. This flat fee is generally
fairly low, and, again, both U.S. Distributor 2 and the producers are only making decent
profits based on large catalogs of movies for sale as opposed to individual movies. U.S.
Distributor 2 sometimes edits these, uploading the movie onto his computer to fix audio
and glitches. As his market is mostly English-speaking, he has no need to insert subtitles
or dubbing
6
.

167
African Movies Mall has been open since 2000. After wondering whether he
could build a larger business by engaging in lawful distribution, U.S. Distributor 2
contacted Nigerian producers. At first, those producers wanted high prices from him for
their movies, thinking that any films sold in the U.S. were making millions, just as they
thought of Hollywood films. However, he consistently explained the smallness of the
market, and eventually was able to enter the market. African Movies Mall sells not only
to individual consumers but also to store owners across the U.S. While these owners
generally don’t care about legality, U.S. Distributor 2’s business remains popular because
it is a reliable source with consistently new content on offer. He believes that another
element that sells his legitimate copies is the effort he puts into marketing with posters he
makes and circulates himself, and professional-looking DVD packaging. “They look like
Hollywood,” he proudly says (personal communication, December 18, 2009).
U.S. Distributor 2 estimates the store retail clientele as 60% Caribbean, 30%
African, mostly West African, and 10% African American. He also estimates wholesale,
or selling to those small mom and pop shops and grocery stores dotting African and
Caribbean enclaves across America, as making up 80% of his business overall. Yet
wholesale yields precious little profit. He estimates 20% of his business as coming from
his retail outlet: one sole shop in the South Bronx, in a largely African and Caribbean
neighborhood. This retail business, he reports, yields much of his profit. The market in
distribution of Nollywood films in the US is centered in New York, the Washington DC/
Maryland/ Virginia area, Houston, and Florida. The first three are Nigerian hubs, while

168
the last is a base for Haitians, a group that adores Nollywood nearly as much as the
diaspora.
True to the nature of his business, U.S. Distributor 2 does not just distribute
domestically. Instead, he adheres to the alternative networks that embroider together
international Nollywood audiences. He sells to distributors in the Caribbean as well,
citing two shops in the Virgin Islands that consistently carry his products, in addition to
individual Caribbean proprietors who come into his store themselves to buy and ship
product.
His web presence has helped him immensely, he says, as many order products
from him directly without having to physically come to this obscure storefront on a wide
sparsely-populated boulevard in the South Bronx. A new venture is coming too, though,
like many Nollywood ventures, its persistence as a functioning business is to be taken
with a bit of skepticism. In the fall of 2009, U.S. Distributor 2 began offering streaming
video on his website, inspired by the model of hulu.com. These movies are free, and, in
order to keep it free, the site is ad supported. Because of this, he is limiting it to North
America now, hoping to focus on the North American ad market.
Despite the safety of movie-going in the US compared to Nigeria, neither
screenings nor rentals have worked in North America. Both are rendered pointless by the
low cost of even the legitimate DVDs even in the US, where they tend to sell for US$5
per title. U.S. Distributor 2 reports having tried setting up screenings at various theaters,
but reports two hitches. First, the audience is not traditionally movie-going; theater-going
is a foreign concept for many African and Caribbean communities. Secondly, charging

169
admission up to $10 per person when the DVD sells for $5 doesn’t make financial sense
for what are mostly low-income groups, a similar situation to that in Southern Nigeria
where Nollywood reigns. Similarly, renting a movie makes little financial sense: when
wholesalers can buy a film for US$3, rental fees at US$1 or US$2 don’t seem to be worth
the trouble of keeping track of wayward renters, especially in a community where credit
cards are not a given.
Just as African Movies Mall has a business that spreads across North America and
the Caribbean through a network of small business and individual entrepreneurs and built
on the basis of personal connections between U.S. Distributor 2 and Nollywood
producers, so too goes Nollywood’s networks on a global level. Built on informality and
trade, Nollywood’s networks run counter to global ones yet spread a Nigerian cultural
product powerfully.
The African Movies Mall also offers an interesting case study with which to view
copyright even in cases of active efforts to do everything in a formal manner in
Nollywood. U.S. Distributor 2’s selling point is the exclusive contracts he has with movie
producers. While he admits to paying very low fees, he says it is often difficult to recoup
even those, so he must ask for exclusivity. However, it is extremely difficult to prosecute
those violating his rights to the title. On one hand, there is a group of pro bono lawyers
with whom U.S. Distributor 2 has a relationship that will pursue violations. On the other
hand, most violators are small shops, often grocery stores, selling only three to five
copies of any given title and it often seems hardly worth the time and effort of
prosecution when little money will be gleaned from the defendants.

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Additionally, there are problems connecting legal standards (or lack thereof) in
Nigeria with standards that would be a given in the US. For one, copyright holders didn’t
want to provide any documentation of the agreements they had with U.S. Distributor 2, as
they thought they were selling their rights outright. Now, he says, some are starting to
come around (personal communication, December 18, 2009). Another problem is with
chain of title problems. While Nigerian producers usually employ local music they might
have permission to use, some use foreign music
7
. Although U.S. Distributor 2 says they
claim to have purchased the rights, he certainly cannot pay the copyright fees to music
produced by the global entertainment complex and, as he receives the sound all on one
track, he can’t replace the music in his post-post-production editing, leaving some films
simply unable to be legally distributed in the United States.
International Television Sales
The dynamics of legitimate movie distribution in North America (as seen through
the window of one of the dominant legal international distributors) marks, again, the
informal nature of the industry – and the breadth of Nollywood’s popularity. Nollywood
movies do not circulate just as physical copies however. They are televised
internationally as well. They are shown on public television stations throughout sub-
Saharan Africa, and on some major satellite channels. The United Kingdom has two
satellite television channels that consistently screen Nollywood movies: BEN-TV and
Passion TV. Both cater to the African diaspora living in Europe and North Africa. The
largest screener of televised Nollywood movies, however, is M-Net’s extremely popular
Africa Magic, which airs Nollywood movies 24 hours a day for sub-Saharan African

171
satellite television subscribers. Africa Magic is part of a suite of channels linked by the
M-Net brand. These M-Net channels, including Africa Magic, are carried exclusively by
DSTV, the dominant satellite television provider in sub-Saharan Africa. DSTV is fully
owned by South African media company MultiChoice, in turn owned by South African
media giant Naspers. Naspers is a globally linked multi-national corporation (MNC) with
business interests across the world
8
.
Despite the formality one might expect from deals regarding movies aired by a
large MNC on their highly visible satellite offerings, there is no consistent relationship
between these movies and the producers of said movie receiving payment: independent
channels like Britain’s Passion and BEN have an even worse track record. This is not to
say that these channels are intentionally cheating Nollywood producers. In most cases,
someone is getting money for supplying Nollywood movies, and that person is offering to
sign over the broadcast rights in return. The problem is that, more often than not, that
person is not representing the person who originally produced or made the movie. It is
quite easy to approach the buying desks at a television channel offering a portfolio of
Nollywood movies, as verifying the identities of sales agents will take much more effort
than simply buying a piece of documentation from an agent whose word is taken at face
value.
The Africa Channel is the only American satellite channel exclusively
specializing in Africa-sourced fare. Nollywood productions are not aired however. Part of
the reason for this may be in content: the Africa Channel tends to specialize in slicker
South African fare. Television 1, Executive Vice President of The Africa Channel, notes

172
some problems in logistics that have accompanied forays into broadcasting Nollywood
content. “The right terms and conditions aren’t there,” he says (personal communication,
November 4, 2009). “A lot of our content comes from South Africa – SABC and MNET,
content they’ve already aggregated, and we know we’re in pretty good company to know
that the licenses and rights are all in place because they do it.” In other words, the
presumption is that content purchased from an already aggregated MNC-owned
collection has also already been properly vetted. In the case of The Africa Channel, there
have indeed been no cases where programming was aired on the false presumption of
rights. However, were The Africa Channel to begin airing Nollywood movies (as they’ve
discussed as a possibility for the future), it is not clear there could ever be such a surety.
Perhaps one of the biggest reasons producers have not been more proactive in
pursuing their own sales to satellite channels is the amount of money each movie garners.
Rights to broadcast movies multiple times on satellite channels can fetch US $200 - $600
per title for the seller: “peanuts” in the words of one producer (Director/ Producer 8,
personal communication, August 3, 2009), and certainly not enough to make a drop in the
bucket even in Nollywood’s notoriously low budgets of $20,000 to $50,000. This adds to
the business logic of profits from breadth of catalog versus a small holding of individual
movies. Very few, if any, producers make enough movies to justify spending much time
or energy on self-representation in such sales as opposed to going through a sales agent.
And, as the sales agent takes much of the small levels of profit, there is also not much
motivation to cultivate relationships with sales agents. In this way, informality, opacity,
and unofficial manners of trade persist, and the web of Nollywood’s global connections

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continues to spread Nigerian cultural productions without necessarily returning profits to
the coffers of those funding and running the industry. As mentioned before, the biggest
barriers to lucrative trade on a global scale lie in Nigeria’s lack of participation in the
global agreements which pave the way for formal international cooperations: things like
copyright and contracts.
Conclusion
Los Angeles-based distribution and copyright expert Rob Aft presented a paper
on chain of title and clearances at a conference on the future and business of Nollywood
held in Lagos in October, 2008. The paper he presented spanned nine single spaced
pages, outlining the intricacies of securing rights in advance of selling a film in the
official global film industry marketplace made up of film markets and official business
meetings (Aft, 2008). These rights that tend to be required from film global distributors
and broadcasters run from music clearances to actor agreements, and usually include $3
million in errors and omissions insurance, sure to be a particularly expensive venture for
anybody without all of their other paperwork already in order.
Yet, without anything resembling any of these myriad varied clearances,
Nollywood productions are sold on the global marketplace: in the unofficial corners of it.
On the underbelly of the global network of the global entertainment industry is another
global network, with very different nodes and hubs. In London, the center will be South
London, Dalston, and Essex, as opposed to the refined palaces of the film production
houses and BBC headquarters. Instead of Manhattan and Los Angeles, there might be
ungentrified areas of Brooklyn, and the Caribbean; there might be Accra, Onitsha, Beirut,

174
Johannesburg. In this alternate network, there are few documents that can reliably certify
rights ownership; in fact, the majority used can fairly reliably be considered doctored.
In this chapter, I set out to illustrate the alternative networks that mark global
trade in Nollywood, circuits marked by informality and unofficial trade, circuits which
enable disconnected individuals to act on a global level. The realities of global trade in
Nollywood reflect theorizing done, most notably by Simone (2001), on the African city’s
role in the global order: disembedded but peppered by opportunities for connections to
global networks – alternative and dominant – on an informal and individual level.
Alternative networks are created in this way – one-off personal connections, and via
informal globalization – and, in this way, a city like Lagos, disembedded from dominant
global networks, becomes an important hub in alternative ones.
Despite Lagos’ dominance in sub-Saharan African movie production circuits, it is
important to remember how difficult it will be for it to join global networks or become
integrated therein, when the contracts and copyright which pave global cultural industries
(see Caves, 2002) are so antithetical to its very functioning. As Nollywood rose from and
thrives on informal connections, it is not clear that formalization and subsequent official
participation in global networks of funding and distribution would not kill it.
Despite these disconnects, some official connections exist. There are
opportunities for funding from foreign altruistic bodies, for example, cultural exchanges,
and training exchange opportunities. The Nigerian Foreign Ministry, too, offers
legitimated recognition from time to time, but even that is often spurned by those who
feel they have thrived in a state of neglect and feel no impetus to make formal

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connections to their own globally connected government bodies in a way which benefits
the government more than themselves. But those are mostly one-off international
connections. Most significant are the consistent connections to the official global
economy through the industry supply chain: Sony (and other international) equipment,
editing software, lights, generators, and computers are all originally sourced from MNCs
– and some (although certainly a minority overall) are even purchased firsthand through
an official retail outlet in Nigeria. This connection (epitomized here by the Victoria
Island Sony store) is a key place of connection between Nollywood and official global
networks.
Nollywood’s distribution offers no such parallels. Available anywhere there are
Africans living, Nollywood has achieved global distribution without any top-down
architecture devoted to it. While much of this distribution is “pirate” and unofficial,
sending no money back to support production, it is still a success in its ability to spread
Nollywood as a cultural product – and it enriches many along the way. From foreign
sales agents to Nigerian aggregators to buying desks at satellite channels to small African
grocery stores and open air market stalls, there are few checks on ownership and rights.
And, when documents are requested, it is difficult to tell if they might be forged (and, of
course, they often are), even in the cases of large MNC-owned outlets like Naspers-
owned Africa Magic. This may be connected to not only the business logics of
informality in the industry (i.e., informality as key) but the economic logics as well:
without a large aggregated catalog of titles, there is little profit to be had thus far in
international sales. The motivation is stronger for someone making 100% profit on

176
aggregated stock (often a “pirate”) than for those sharing percentages or paying for rights.
U.S. Distributor 2 of Africa Movies Mall has made it work, however, and his business
model may provide some hope for at least increased formality in the industry in the
future.
Despite Nollywood’s general disconnect from dominant global networks of the
cultural industries, the industry is in fact connected globally. These connections are for
the most part alternative, reflecting the capacity of Nollywood’s producers and
distributors for innovation – and the disconnect between the industry and the very
agreements which pave global networks in the creative industries: enforced copyright and
respected legal contracts. Yet there are places where Nollywood is also connected to the
global economy in direct, official, and formal ways, such as the efforts of Sony’s
equipment sales team on Victoria Island. These salespeople are directly plugged in to the
dominant networks of creative industry technology supplies, and they help Sony, an
internationally networked global Japan-based MNC profit. This may mark the beginning
of global MNC investment and integration into Nollywood. Alternatively, their
involvement may mark no such thing. They may instead be indicative of the ability of
these global MNCs to profit – and, in many ways, support (e.g. workshops) – emerging
creative industries, even if it is in the only corners in which formal industry can hope to
play a role.

177
Chapter Six Endnotes

1
Seemed to specifically be directed at me, a white researcher from the US

2
The store is actually managed by South Asian entrepreneurs, one of the more visible
ethnic groups realizing individual entrepreneurial opportunities in Lagos, though less
prevalent than the Lebanese.

3
For more on Nollywood in the Caribbean, see Cartelli, 2007.

4
Usually dubbed in non-English speaking countries

5
Depending on the market. In sub-Saharan Africa, VCDs are most common, whereas in
the diaspora, DVDs are more common.

6
The small number of movies he sells that were originally produced in Hausa or Yoruba
come to him with English subtitles already inserted.

7
This is a much greater problem for Ghanaian movies than Nigerian.

8
These interests, however, are for the most part in sub-Saharan Africa, and developing
nations worldwide.

178
CHAPTER SEVEN:
Conclusion

This project set out to interrogate the rise of new nodes and hubs in the global
networks in the cultural industries. While global Hollywood is the most well-known
globally-linked player in global cultural industry networks, these networks not only have
many nodes, but they also have multiple hubs. Global cultural industry production is
diverse both culturally and economically, with Bollywood movies, for example, coming
out of the hub of Mumbai and telenovelas coming out of the hubs of Mexico City, Sao
Paulo, Caracas, and Buenos Aires, amongst others. I set out in this project to illustrate the
multi-polarity of global cultural industry networks by analyzing a cultural industry
emerging outside of the traditional core and, furthermore, to interrogate the dynamics of
cultural industry development in the specific setting of the Fourth World.
In this study, we looked at the nature of an emerging hub in the globalized movie
industry – Nollywood, the Nigerian movie industry. This hub is, from one perspective,
central: specifically, when viewed from sub-Saharan Africa. In sub-Saharan African
networks of cultural product distribution, Nollywood movies are both dominant and
ubiquitous: practically unavoidable in networks of popular culture in the region and
related diaspora circuits. From another perspective, Nollywood is peripheral in the
extreme. In the context of global cultural industry networks, Nollywood, Nigeria, and,
indeed, all of sub-Saharan Africa are barely considerations.
As we have seen, Nollywood as an object of study offers a window through which
to examine the rise of a cultural industry in the global periphery. From here, one can

179
examine that which gives the industry strength, and the ways in which growth in the
periphery differs substantially from cultural industry growth in the core, where most
previous research on creative industry development has focused. One can also examine
implications of the global reach of this industry on debates regarding global flows of
culture, as Nollywood movies, a product of the global South, are circulated globally
through alternative informal networks.
Major Findings
In this dissertation, we looked at Nollywood’s birth and growth as well as its
current functioning and the governing bodies which do (and do not) structure it. We also
looked at the appeal of the content of Nollywood movies and the global connections
driven by that content. A few major themes emerged throughout the course of this
analysis. One is the specific implications of the location of Nollywood, on the global
periphery. We have seen that the growth of Nollywood as an object of study is
inseparable from the environment from which it emerged: a rapidly growing African
mega-city, an exemplar of the disenfranchised and excluded Fourth World. The growth of
Nollywood, marked by informality and the strength of black and gray market networks, is
an exemplar of the different shape of challenges and opportunities that confront creative
industry growth in the urban global periphery. While openness, penetrability, and
informality mark creative industry agglomerations in both the global North and the global
South, industrialization and integration into dominant global networks is much more
difficult to achieve from the global South. The extremely fragmented incorporation of
Lagos into the global order is reflected in its products, and the potential of industries born

180
there to rise and grow in fundamental ways is that much more fraught with difficulty.
Despite these challenges, Nollywood has not only grown but also found a way to thrive.
As such, we have seen that the creative milieu may thrive in the periphery – not
necessarily the urban periphery, but the global periphery: the non-spatially-bounded
Fourth World, which exists in the gaps between connections to the dominant global
order. Even the aesthetic and experience of Nollywood movies reflect a constant
awareness of location in the Fourth World, and of living with lack.
In analyzing the nature of Nollywood, the dominant themes were of informality
and creative responses to exclusion from the traditional film industry networks.
Flexibility, opacity, and informality mark both Nollywood and much of what constitutes
trade in the Fourth World. While some Nollywood equipment, for instance, is purchased
from corporations like Sony, most exchanges are informal and done without storefronts.
Trust and informal ties link the industry, but that does not meant the industry is
haphazard; these informal ties can also structure it quite rigidly, as the marketers
demonstrate by their collective grip on industry power. In that vein, another important
theme that emerged in this analysis of Nollywood is how, in the place of government-
shaped structure a system of self-organization can step in: guilds, trust, and informal
links. When compared to the patronage model of movie industry development active in
countries like France and much of Francophone Africa, we can see that Nollywood is in
many ways at the extreme of the counter-model: the networked model of creative
industry growth. Nollywood is a product of the extreme of governmental non-
involvement and, in parallel, of the dominance of a wide variety of networked small

181
informal enterprises. When the instincts of the state are primarily in self-preservation, the
state cannot be relied upon to guide the industry. Instead, we can see self-organization as
a key element in the industry: specifically, the strong guilds.
We have seen also that Nollywood is indeed connected globally, but there are
precious few places in which those connections are to official dominant global networks.
Instead, Nollywood’s global connections tend to be alternative, informal, opaque, and
unofficial. These connections are in some ways a boon, spreading Nollywood content
much further and more quickly than authorized connections could travel, and, in some
cases even creating new value-added content (as in the case of unauthorized Francophone
dubbing when the original creator would never undertake such an endeavor on their
own). In other ways, the informality of these connections are a detriment, limiting the
amount of foreign capital that can be sunk back into production and maintaining
Nollywood budgets at their frustratingly low level, as well as discouraging investment
from any official bodies (such as banks) who would desire some sort of controlled sales
estimate in order to consider investment. The informality of Nollywood simultaneously
enables its rapid unencumbered global spread, but also severely delimits the potential
returns to the original producers.
Analytical Implications
Nollywood offers a view from the side of the rise of a cultural industry from the
global periphery, as well as an opportunity to identify that which gives it strength. It also
offers us an opportunity to examine its past growth and its potential for future growth.
Driven by the appeal of its cultural specificity, Nollywood has spread globally through

182
informal alternative networks. The informal nature of these networks both give the
industry its very specific strength and delimit its potential for traditional kinds of future
growth.
Contributions to Debates Surrounding Global Flows of Cultural Products
The implications of these analyses are rich when considered in the context of
debates surrounding the global flows of cultural products. The cultural imperialism
argument (and other arguments which it has spawned) is predicated on the notion that
global cultural flows are both uni-directional and oppressive. At face value, Nollywood
stands in contrast to this: Nollywood movies are clearly a product of the global South.
But when looked at even more deeply, as we did in this project, Nollywood is an example
not of counter-directional flows, but of the multi-polar nature of global cultural
industries.
Like the telenovelas discussed in Chapter 1, Nollywood movies are not only
produced in a specific location in the global South, but the very nature of the final
product is unable to be divorced from the context out of which it was born: Nigeria, the
global South, the Fourth World. The oppressiveness of North-to-South cultural flows in
the cultural imperialism argument cannot be taken very seriously in a region where
Nollywood content trumps Hollywood content on home entertainment screens despite
price and acquisitional equivalency. The market power of multi-national corporation
(MNC)-owned or MNC-invested cultural content is mitigated in a market where there is
little guarantee of profit or transparent control over distribution. In a landscape where few
business relationships are codified and everything is informal, cultural industry MNCs,

183
particularly those accustomed to the global North, are not even incentivized to invest in
distribution of products they already own, much less production of new cultural products.
In this way, cultural industries in the global South have a chance to rise. In the case of
Nollywood, we can see how they can draw their strength from the very qualities that keep
them peripheral in global cultural industry networks: the preponderance of informality in
industrial structure.
Just as the telenovelas discussed in Chapter 1 can be considered to be contributing
to the cultural diversity of the global mediascape, so too can Nollywood movies. Before
they are products of West Africa, Africa, or of the global South, they are first the cultural
output of Southern Nigeria, and they reflect the characteristics of Southern Nigeria in a
number of specific and clearly identifiable ways. When consumed in the rest of sub-
Saharan Africa, they can be considered representative of South-to-South cultural flows.
And when screened on Sky-TV satellite television channels in Western Europe, for
instance, they can be considered representative of South-to-North cultural flows, despite
their consumption by audiences in part made up of representatives of the Fourth World
(immigrant communities living in the urban peripheries of the global North). Both of
these flows stand in contrast to the oppressive top-down North-to-South global flows of
cultural imperialism arguments.
Yet cultural flows are not the only thing to consider when examining the nature of
the industry in relation to global networks: flows of financing, distribution, and industrial
ownership are just as important. Unlike with telenovelas, there is very little collaboration
and cross-investment with global MNC-dominated networks on the cultural industries. In

184
this way, we can see Nollywood as an example of a truly peripheral industry, with its
products much more able to lay claim to conceptually running counter to North-to-South
cultural industry flows. At the same time, the industrial structure of Nollywood is also
complex and goes beyond a simple South-to-South or South-to-North conception.
Nollywood, like the telenovela industry, does run along globally interlinked networks.
These networks do not run between dominant global industry hubs, like Hollywood and
Manhattan. Instead they run between hubs in black market and grey market trade,
between Alaba Market, Nollywood’s nerve center, and cities like Singapore, Accra, and
Johannesburg, and specific peripheral neighborhoods of the mega-cities of the global
North, like East and South London, and New York’s South Bronx. These alternative
global networks connect Lagos’ Surulere, Idumota, and Alaba, as well as Onitsha in
Nigeria’s Igboland in the Southeast with distribution outlets from Tanzania to St. Lucia
(in the Caribbean) to Italy. The existence and strength of these alternative (and often
black market) circuits of distribution also stand counter to the concept of imperialist
global networks of North-to-South cultural flows. In a mirror image to global
Hollywood’s networks of production and distribution are alternative, hard-to-pin-down
networks of popular culture, produced in the global South and globally interlinked. Just
like telenovelas, it would be hard to label them as primarily South-to-North, as they are in
many ways global products. Just as telenovelas do not necessarily enrich those in their
country of production, Nollywood movies produce profits internationally and these are
often solely for the middlemen along the way or the ultimate sales agent. As of yet
unincorporated into global cultural industry networks (and with few optimistic signs of

185
functional future incorporation), Nollywood serves as an example of the trade of
alternative cultural products via alternative networks running counter to dominant global
cultural industry networks: networks representing the qualities of the Fourth World.
These qualities include informality and lack of firm demarcation between authorized and
unauthorized trade, or between white markets, black markets, and grey markets. These
networks are mostly – though not entirely – discrete from dominant global networks and
derive their strength from the spaces and gaps between connections to the dominant
world order. Thus, it would appear that the cultural imperialism argument does not
account for the complexity of a world of global networks. In the context of the cultural
imperialism argument, we can see the global connections and popularity of Nollywood as
an example of the multi-polarity of global networks and multi-dimensionality of flows in
the cultural industries.
Contributions to Understanding Cultural Industry Growth
In this dissertation, I’ve laid out an alternative geography of cultural industry
networks. These networks link alternative hubs in the developing world. Particularly in
the context of production centers, the implications for our understanding of cultural
industry growth and locative logics are also rich. We can look back to the model of
creative industry development that Allen J. Scott laid out in his 2005 book, On
Hollywood. After the initial phase of creative clustering, built on chance, comes a stage in
which a creative industry pulls ahead of other competitive sites. We can see this in
Nollywood, when movie production in Nigeria became centered in Lagos in the early
1990s and the industry proceeded to become the most popular producer in the region. The

186
third stage is the organization and industrialization of the creative nodes. It is the third
stage that we are most interested in here, and the third stage which is perhaps most
important in understanding the overall logics of cultural industry growth. It is the
institutionalization of the creative processes making up the industry.
This institutionalization and industrialization of cultural industries has been ill-
studied in the Fourth World, a context of informality and the sorts of small enterprises
that can fly beneath the radar: a context where the basic functions of the state such as
protecting property rights cannot be relied upon. Peter Hall, for instance, details in his
1998 book the stories of the rise of what he considers to be a canon of great “creative
crucible” cities. These run the gamut from the birth of ancient Athens to 1920s Berlin and
include nearly 30 place-based creative explosions. All, however, are located in states that
are already central to the global order of their day. Hall does address creative explosions
in economically disadvantaged and disembedded zones, such as Memphis’ music
explosion and recognizes the contributions that the relative disembeddedness of Memphis
from the national and global economy made to its growth – what could be considered the
first and second stages in Allen J. Scott’s (2005) narrative. It is in the industrialization of
these creative explosions, however, that places like early Hollywood and 1950s Memphis
experience the tangible benefits of their situation in the United States: a central node in
the global order, even in the early parts of the 20
th
century.
Nollywood serves as a clear example of cultural industry growth in a place
without access to those same benefits. Yet, while Nollywood is certainly less formalized,
industrialized, and institutionalized than even the two global-South-based audiovisual

187
industries to which I’ve compared it (the telenovela industry and Bollywood), its relative
success and the formula for its growth thus far have also come from the ways in which its
business practices have been institutionalized, industrialized, and organized. Nollywood
draws its strength from the informal and dispersed networks of financing (primarily
marketer networks) and distribution (both authorized and unauthorized, neither running
on legal written contracts) that structure the industry, even though these appear quite
different from the organization occurring in creative industries in the global North. In this
way, we can see the cultural industries in the global South as having the potential to
benefit from the very qualities that also challenge their growth. The extreme informality
of their business environment is central in understanding the shape of their growth.
Cultural industry growth in the global South will necessarily proceed very differently
from cultural industry growth in the global North, and the informality of business
relationships will persist much past the point of their formalization and codification in the
global North.
Policy Implications
Conclusions to be drawn from this case study support the notion that growth in
cultural industries is cemented by the institutionalization of its organization in reliable
ways, formal or informal. In light of this project, we can see that it would make analytical
sense to have a wide conception of what this organization can ultimately look like. It can,
and, in many cases, does mean the emergence of large dominant firms, interlinked with
other dominant firms, controlling the industry’s shape, as in the emergence of the major
studios of Hollywood. But, particularly in the Fourth World, a landscape predicated on

188
informality and lack of collaboration with the state, this organization and industrialization
can also mean an institutionalized linking of small enterprises, operating informally via
trust-based networks. To be sure, this is also what the birth stages of Hollywood looked
like: a series of informally-linked small firms. What is important to note here, however, is
that in the Fourth World, we must not necessarily expect a transition to the major studio
model as occurred in Hollywood, or the globally-interlinked ownership structures of a
few dominant major producers in the telenovela industry. Were Nollywood to move in
that direction, it might be true that its very strength would be destroyed, and the industry
would break down.
The role of the state here, or of any external governing body should be limited.
The most effective organization of the industry thus far has come from the guilds.
Censorship, the one major success of the government, is likely a success because of its
institutionalization from the initiation of the industry and the pre-existing strength of
censorship structures rising out of the history of celluloid films in the colonial era, as well
as the political will supporting censorship in a state consumed by self-preservationist
urges. Guilds rule the industry, and any changes must come from within these structures.
The failure of the alternative distribution collective, FCON, serves as a reminder, too,
that guilds must be organically composed of already powerful players and have wide
industry support in order to serve as a self-organizing alternative. A collection of well-
meaning practitioners without wide support will falter. In this way, external restructuring
of Nollywood or other similar industries in the global South by force or legislation
appears to be fraught with difficulty. Change can be imposed on the industry, but it will

189
come from the governing structures of the parties currently controlling it. Any external
efforts will need to be filtered through these players. In Nollywood, that would mean the
leadership and membership of FVPMAN, the marketer’s guild. In that way, any attempt
to break the power of existent marketers, such as the new distribution framework, is
going to encounter serious resistance. The only changes that are likely to occur will leave
the existing leadership in power – or, perhaps, elevate some of those members to
positions of greater power. In a broader context, we can see that anyone attempting to
develop such an informal creative industry in the Fourth World will need to liaise with
current industrial structures.
The implications from this for cultural industry growth globally are broad. As the
globe is increasingly networked, and the Network Society increasingly becomes the
organizing principle of people and industries globally, the patronage model of cultural
industry development will become even less viable. The future is in the harnessing of
networked creativity from emerging global hubs, and this harnessing can truly not be
externally imposed. Perhaps the most important conclusion to be highlighted here is the
potential for emerging cultural industries to harness creativity born out of places outside
of the core. In this harnessing, policy can support the rise of cultural industries first and
foremost by lack of top-down control. MOPICON, the Nigerian initiative to license
employment in Nollywood, is an example of a policy that would be destructive to an
industry that, by nature, draws its strength from informality. The main places in which
we can see governmental policy as being useful is in creating institutions. Contracts and
copyright are two formal institutions that help structure industries and enable them to

190
attract external financial support from bodies such as banks. It is certainly not clear that
Nollywood or other informal developing industries would benefit from their introduction.
However, the option for their usage has the potential to help growing industries. The state
can perform hands-off industry assistance by providing enforceable institutions which
emerging industries can choose to utilize or not utilize as they grow. In Nigeria, this
would mean devoting resources to seriously streamline the legal processes involved in
pursuing a breach of contract claim or copyright violation, a better use of funds than
some current initiatives being pursued. In developing industries worldwide, this could
mean a number of different things, as long as it involves the strengthening of the
institutions that can be used to guide the industry.
In Conclusion
Allen J. Scott, in the last chapter of his 2005 book, addresses the future of the
global movie industry, wondering if burgeoning production centers (he identifies London,
Paris, Mumbai, and Manila as frontrunners) could overtake Hollywood. What he perhaps
should be asking is whether Hollywood will “take over” these industries: not overlaying
them to make way for U.S.-made content, but incorporating them into the umbrella of
global business relations while maintaining their cultural specificity. Integration into
dominant global industry networks may “standardize” production (and it will certainly
“standardize” financing, legalizing, and distributing a movie) but it also serves to draw a
map of the world as a network society, one with multiple hubs, and one constantly being
redrawn. Cultural industries may emerge outside of this system and they, like Nollywood,
will most likely attempt to shift shape to the “global standard” in order to join this

191
network – at possible great detriment to their industrial functioning. For now, Nollywood
stands as a representative of not just cultural diversity of global cultural industries, but of
the diversity of their economic diversity as well. In a blindspot of global Hollywood, a
region where global Hollywood is largely absent in official representation due in part to
the uncertainties involved in the informal distribution networks of the Fourth World, we
can see a cultural industry that largely dominates the small screens of an entire continent
– and that continent’s diaspora – and that continues to function drawing strength from the
very elements which make the environment inhospitable to global Hollywood:
informality, quasi-legality, and opacity.
Future research would do well to take a closer look at other emergent hubs in the
cultural industries, with an eye to drawing an alternative model of cultural industry
growth in the global South. Similar studies done on other cultural industries emerging
from the Fourth World can serve to build new models of cultural industry development
systematically studied across contexts. And Nollywood itself deserves future exploration
to determine whether it will in fact grow, if it will ever formalize as Bollywood has
begun to do
1
, and whether it will ever become more closely linked to Hollywood. The
results of this research would lead one to believe that it may not – at least not necessarily.
As long as there remain gaps between connections to the Network Society, there will also
be room for alternative hubs and alternative circuits in the cultural industries. It seems
likely that Nollywood, like Lagos (and Nigeria) will remain on the global periphery for
much time to come, central to alternative networks of the Fourth World and peripheral to
the Network Society.

192

Chapter Seven Endnotes

1
Bollywood has been driven in this endeavor by the formality of profits provided by
India’s cinema culture, something Nollywood does not have.

193
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198

APPENDIX
Table 1
List of Interviews
Label

Description

Date

Location

U.S. Distributor 1 U.S.-based film
distributor of African
content for U.S.
audiences
June 19,
2009
Film festival banquet,
Westwood, Los
Angeles, CA
Actor 1

Popular actress with star
recognition
July 8,
2009
In interviewee’s car in
traffic, Lagos,
Nigeria, and O’Jez’s
Restaurant, National
Stadium, Lagos,
Nigeria
Journalist 1

Arts Editor of well-
respected newspaper
July 9,
2009
Interviewee’s
newspaper office,
Isolo, Lagos, Nigeria
Director/ Producer
1

Veteran director and
producer, former actor
July 10,
2009
Interviewee’s
production company
office, Surulere,
Lagos, Nigeria
Director/ Producer
2

Veteran director and
producer

July 10,
2009
Interviewee’s
production company
office, Surulere,
Lagos, Nigeria
Director/ Producer
3
Veteran director and
producer

July 12,
2009
Interviewee’s
production company
office, Surulere,
Lagos, Nigeria
Special Effects 1

Freelance special effects
artist

July 12,
2009
At Director/ Producer
3’s offices, Surulere,
Lagos, Nigeria
Consulate 1

U.S. Consulate Cultural
Affairs Assistant
July 14,
2009

Interviewee’s U.S
Consulate Cultural
Affairs office, Ikoyi,
Lagos, Nigeria

199
Table 1: Continued

Director/ Producer
4
Veteran director and
producer, former actor
July 14,
2009
O’Jez’s Restaurant,
National Stadium,
Lagos, Nigeria
Marketer 1 Mid-range marketer July 14,
2009
Sidewalk chairs
outside one of
interviewee’s shops,
Surulere, Lagos,
Nigeria
Actor 2 Aspiring actress without
star recognition
July 15,
2009
Audition, bar,
Surulere, Lagos,
Nigeria
Actor 3 Aspiring actress without
star recognition
July 15,
2009
Audition, bar,
Surulere, Lagos,
Nigeria
Actor 4 Aspiring actress without
star recognition
July 15,
2009
Audition, bar,
Surulere, Lagos,
Nigeria
Actor 5 Aspiring actor without
star recognition
July 15,
2009
Audition, bar,
Surulere, Lagos,
Nigeria
Screenwriter 1 Mid-range screenwriter

July 15,
2009
Audition, bar,
Surulere, Lagos,
Nigeria
Director/ Producer
5
Mid-range director and
producer

July 16,
2009
Interviewee’s
production company
office, Surulere,
Lagos, Nigeria
Journalist 2 Journalist covering
Nollywood for popular
newspaper
July 16,
2009
Interviewee’s side-job
office, National
Theater, Lagos,
Nigeria
Nigeria Distributor
1
Globally aggregated
distributor of Nollywood
movies
July 16,
2009
Journalist 2’s office,
National Theater,
Lagos, Nigeria
Director/ Producer
6
Veteran director/
producer
July 18,
2009
Interviewee’s house,
Papa Ajao, Lagos,
Nigeria
Electronics Trader/
Producer 1
Powerful electronics
trader and producer

July 20,
2009
Interviewee’s
warehouse/ office
complex, Satellite
Town, Lagos, Nigeria

200
Table 1: Continued

Disc Replicator 1

CEO, Optical Disc
Replication plant
July 20,
2009
Interviewee’s disc
replication plant
office, Amuwo
Odofin, Lagos,
Nigeria
Manager 1 Production company
office manager and
movie editor
July 20,
2009
Interviewee’s
production company
office, Surulere,
Lagos, Nigeria
Cinematographer 1 Popular
cinematographer
July 20,
2009
Movie set, Surulere,
Lagos, Nigeria
Actor 7 Veteran actress, star
recognition
July 22,
2009
Set of pan-West
African reality show,
Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria
Consulate 2 US Consulate
Intellectual Property
Rights desk manager
July 22,
2009
Interviewee’s U.S.
Consulate office,
Victoria Island,
Lagos, Nigeria
Equipment Sales 1 Sony Equipment
salesperson
July 23,
2009
Sony equipment sales
shop, Victoria Island,
Lagos, Nigeria
Director/ Producer
7
Veteran director/
producer
July 23,
2009
O’Jez’s Restaurant,
National Stadium,
Lagos, Nigeria
Attorney 1 Intellectual property
rights attorney
July 25,
2009
Barcelo’s Restaurant,
Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria
NFVCB Official 1

Special asst. to Director
General of NFVCB
July 29,
2009
Interviewee’s
NFVCB office, Wuse,
Abuja, Nigeria
NCC Official 1 Personal asst. to Director
General of NCC,
Attorney
July 30,
2009
Interviewee’s NCC
office, Federal
Secretariat, Abuja,
Nigeria

Nigerian Foreign
Ministry Official 1
Director, Head of Public
Communication division
July 30,
2009
Interviewee’s Foreign
Ministry Office,
Garki, Abuja, Nigeria
NFVCB Official 2 Director General of
NFVCB
July 30,
2009
Salamander Café and
interviewee’s car,
Abuja, Nigeria

201
Table 1: Continued

Marketer 2 Veteran marketer;
President of FVPMAN,
marketers’ guild
July 31,
2009
Lagos Airport Hotel,
Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria

Director/ Producer
8
Veteran director/
producer

August 3,
2009
Interviewee’s home,
Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria
Director/ Producer
9
Veteran director/
producer

August 4,
2009
Interviewee’s
production company
office, Alausa, Lagos,
Nigeria
Editor Editor with NGO
focused on
entertainment education
August 5,
2009
Interviewee’s
apartment, Ikeja,
Lagos, Nigeria

Director/ Producer
10
Veteran director/
producer

August 7,
2009
Interviewee’s
production company
office, Surulere,
Lagos, Nigeria

Director/ Producer
11
Aspiring director/
producer; Actor
August 7,
2009
Weight-lifting gym,
National Stadium,
Lagos, Nigeria
Television 1 Executive Vice
President, The Africa
Channel
November
7, 2009
Telephone interview,
both parties in New
York, NY
U.S. Distributor 2 Distributor of
Nollywood movies in
the U.S.
December
18, 2009
Interviewee’s shop,
South Bronx, New
York, NY

202
Table 2
List of Observations
Object Date Location
Los Angeles Film Festival June 17 – 19,
2009

Century City, Los Angeles,
CA

Nollywood Convention June 17 – 19,
2009

Westwood, Los Angeles, CA

Art Stampede Arts
Convention
July 11, 2009

National Theater, Lagos,
Nigeria
U.S. Consulate in Lagos:
Cultural Affairs House
July 14, 2009

Ikoyi, Lagos, Nigeria

Movie shops

July 14, 2009

Surulere, Lagos, Nigeria
Audition July 15, 2009

Off-hours bar, Surulere,
Lagos, Nigeria
Audition call-backs July 16, 2009

Production company office,
Surulere, Lagos, Nigeria
Movie premiere July 17, 2009

Terra Kulture event space,
Victoria Island, Lagos,
Nigeria
Industry banquet (birthday
of veteran producer)
July 19, 2009

National Theater, Lagos,
Nigeria

Electronics warehouse and
editing studios
July 20, 2009 Satellite Town, Lagos,
Nigeria

Optical Disc Replication
factory
July 20, 2009

Amuwo Odofin, Lagos,
Nigeria

Movie shoot July 20, 2009 Production company offices,
Surulere, Lagos, Nigeria
All West Africa reality
television show set
July 22, 2009 Studio, Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria

US Consulate: Intellectual
Property Rights desk
July 22, 2009 U.S. Consulate main building,
Victoria Island, Lagos,
Nigeria
Sony equipment sales shop July 23, 2009 Victoria Island, Lagos,
Nigeria

203
Table 2: Continued

Optical Disc Replicators
Guild Meeting
July 31, 2009 Lagos Airport Hotel, Ikeja,
Lagos, Nigeria
Alaba Market August 8, 2009 Alaba, Lagos, Nigeria
Idumota Market August 8, 2009 Idumota, Lagos, Nigeria
Movie rental shop August 10, 2009 Adeniyi Jones, Ikeja, Lagos,
Nigeria
Lagos International Film
Festival
August 11-14,
2009
National Theater, Lagos,
Nigeria
Movie sales shops August 18-19,
2009
Throughout Accra, Ghana
Movie sales shop December 18,
2009
South Bronx, New York, NY

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Asset Metadata

Creator Miller, Jade L. (author)

Core Title The globalization of cultural industries: Nollywood – the view from the South

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/24/2010

Defense Date 06/15/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cultural industries,Fourth World,global media,globalization,movie industry,network society,Nigeria,Nollywood,OAI-PMH Harvest

Place Name Lagos (city or populated place), Nigeria (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Castells, Manuel (committee chair), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member), Currid, Elizabeth (committee member), Powell, Adam Clayton, III (committee member), Taplin, Jonathan (committee member)

Creator Email jade.miller@gmail.com,jademill@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3216

Unique identifier UC1326476

Identifier etd-Miller-3741 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-357126 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3216 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Miller-3741.pdf

Dmrecord 357126

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Miller, Jade L.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu