The Marketer Was the Studio
Nigeria built one of the highest-volume film industries in the world with no cinemas, no bank credit and no state funding — the money came from electronics traders in two Lagos markets, and so did the decisions about what got made. Streaming money arrived thirty years later, paid properly, asked for better, and then went away again.
Alaba International Market stands at Ojo, out on the western edge of Lagos on the road to Badagry, and it sells electrical goods — generators, inverters, cable, television sets, air conditioners, phone chargers by the sackful. For about twenty years it also decided what Nigerians watched. Not through a studio or a broadcaster, and not through anything anyone would recognise as a film industry: through traders, who advanced production money out of the till, took the master tape as security, and had a finished film duplicated and on stalls across West Africa within a fortnight of delivery.
That arrangement produced one of the highest-volume film industries on earth. A survey published by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics in 2009, working from 2006 figures, ranked Nigeria second in the world by number of feature films produced — behind India and ahead of the United States — and almost none of it was shot on film or shown in a cinema. There was no state funding worth the name, no bank that would lend against a script, no distribution contracts and no enforceable copyright. Everything about the shape the industry took follows from those four absences. Even the name arrived from outside: a New York Times correspondent, Norimitsu Onishi, coined "Nollywood" in a piece filed from Lagos in September 2002, a decade after the thing itself began.
Nineteen ninety-two
The founding object is a videotape. Living in Bondage went out direct to VHS in 1992, in Igbo with English subtitles, financed by Kenneth Nnebue — an electronics trader — and directed by Chris Obi Rapu, who used a pseudonym because he was on the staff of the state broadcaster and was not supposed to be doing this. Nnebue's own account of why he made it is that he had imported a consignment of blank tapes and could not shift them, so he put something on them worth buying. It sold in numbers nobody had modelled, a sequel followed inside the year, and every trader in Idumota and Alaba drew the same conclusion at the same time.
Why it was tape
Nigerians had been making films on celluloid since the 1970s. The Yoruba travelling-theatre companies moved onto film behind Ola Balogun, Hubert Ogunde and Moses Olaiya, and for a decade it worked well enough. Then three things happened together. The naira collapsed under the structural adjustment programme from 1986, while stock and laboratory processing had to be paid for in hard currency because there was no processing laboratory in the country. Cinema audiences fell away across the 1980s as urban crime made an evening out in Lagos a real risk, and the halls closed or became churches. And video cameras and blank tape arrived cheap, needed no laboratory and could be sold through a market stall. The industry did not choose video over film. Film had become impossible to pay for, and video was what was left standing.
Nobody in Lagos set out to invent a distribution model. They set out to sell tape, and discovered that they were the only people in the country with the working capital to make a film.
What a marketer actually was
The mechanism was simple and it was not generous. A marketer — the trade's own word, and it means the man in the market, not a marketing department — advanced the production budget in cash. In the 1990s that might be a few thousand dollars; a large film a decade later, a few tens of thousands. In exchange he took the master tape and with it the film: the right to replicate it, to set the price, to release it when he judged the market ready and to sit on it when he did not. Directors and cast were paid a fee and had no further claim, which is why actors whose faces were on every stall from Lagos to Kinshasa were not wealthy. He also decided what got made, because he was the one carrying the risk. If the last three films about a village witch had sold, the next four were about village witches and the scripts were commissioned to fit. It was vertical integration run out of a shop, and it answered to nobody — not to a broadcaster, not to a censor with real teeth, and not to any foreign financier, which is the part usually left out of the criticism.
Two weeks to make the money
Speed was not a stylistic choice either. There was no way to stop a film being copied — the same market that sold the original sold the pirate disc, sometimes from a stall in the same row, and no court was going to intervene inside a timeframe that mattered. So the model became a race. Shoot in a week or two, cut in days, duplicate, flood the retail network, and take the money in the first fortnight before the copies caught up. Films were routinely split into two or three parts because that sold two or three discs. Output ran into the thousands of titles a year at the peak, and the average one was made in less time than a European production spends on casting. The same structure ran in parallel in Hausa out of Kano, with its own stars, its own market and its own state censorship board, and it was never quite the same industry. Nollywood has been criticised for thirty years by people who have not worked out that its worst habits were the correct commercial response to its conditions. A film that took a year to make would have been pirated into worthlessness before the first invoice was settled.
A gate that cannot be copied
The Silverbird Galleria opened on Victoria Island in 2004 with the first modern multiplex screens Lagos had seen in a generation, and Genesis Deluxe and FilmHouse followed it into other cities. That mattered less as a cultural revival than as an accounting fact: a cinema ticket is a payment nobody can duplicate. For the first time since 1992 there was a channel through which a Nigerian film could earn money a pirate could not intercept, which meant that for the first time a producer could justify spending more than a fortnight and a handful of naira. Kunle Afolayan's The Figurine, in 2009, is the film usually named as the turn. The numbers climbed from there — The Wedding Party in 2016, Omo Ghetto: The Saga in 2020 — and in January 2024 Funke Akindele's A Tribe Called Judah became the first Nigerian film to take more than a billion naira at the domestic box office. All of it earned on a few hundred screens, in a country of more than two hundred million people.
Then the streamers arrived and the arithmetic moved again. Netflix acquired Genevieve Nnaji's Lionheart in 2018 as its first Nigerian original, and then watched the Academy disqualify it from the international feature category in 2019 because most of the dialogue was in English — Nigeria's official language, a point Nnaji made publicly and at length. Commissioning followed from 2020, Prime Video alongside it, and for four years Nigerian producers were paid up front and asked for schedules, completion bonds and rewrites. Both companies then cut their African commissioning sharply in 2024, and the industry found out what it had traded. The marketers' system took the copyright, underpaid the talent and printed a great deal of rubbish, and it was capital that lived in Lagos and answered to Lagos. What replaced it was better in every respect except one: it could be withdrawn by a decision taken in California. What Nigeria still has is the thing it built first — the ability to make a great many films very fast, for very little, for an audience it understands better than anybody else does. It has never needed permission to do that, which is not something most film industries can say.