At Conie’s African Market in Burnaby, two customers watch Ahonhom Bone, a movie in the Akan language of northern Ghana. The viewers utter a collective sigh as African scenery is blacked out by the rolling credits. Although they may feel pangs for African landscapes, the store owner, Comfort Sam, notes that her movie customers are from all over Africa and the Caribbean, and are sometimes people who have family members of African descent.
“All of them are our favourites,” Sam says about the Nollywood movies in her store. “They remind us of home. Here, we are homesick.”
Nollywood is Nigeria’s multimillion-dollar movie industry, which produces more than 1,000 titles a year. It’s the world’s third-biggest, after Hollywood and Bollywood. Nollywood movies—offering fictional representations of Africans in their homelands with dialogue in African languages, English, or French—are shot straight to DVD and distributed internationally. They’re made on a tight deadline, two weeks or so of shooting, and an even tighter budget, up to a few thousand dollars. They’re often poorly shot, using digital cameras, and badly edited, with substandard sound quality, but these are Africans “telling our own stories our own way”, as director Bond Emeruwa says in the 2007 documentary This Is Nollywood.
Nollywood exploded into being with the 1992 production of Living in Bondage by director Chris Obi Rapu. But this was not the first movie made in Nigeria. The Nigerian film industry had existed since the ’60s but had not made much headway due to the high expense of production. In 1992, businessman Kenneth Nnebue needed to get rid of several thousand blank VHS tapes when the opportunity to make a movie became available. Living in Bondage was dubbed in widely spoken pidgin English and made cheaply available.