How Well Do We Know Nollywood?

When over 51,000 thousand  Nigerians congregated at the Tafawa Balewa Square for Fatimah Binta Gimsay’s Black Market, a point was proven: Nigerians have a patriotic commitment and obsession with their own. Scroll through social media, Nigerians – for self-aggrevadiation or not, are ready to hawk their commitment to something; anything Nigerian. This commitment explains why from music, food, fashion, literature, to cinema, Nigerians bring a nationalist disposition to conversations. It also reveals the authoritative confidence Nigerians bring to subject matters, unmindful of their expertise or lack of. When Nigerians disputed Stella Damasus’ belonging to a Nollywood big three : Genevieve Nnaji, Omotola Jalade-Ekehinde, this tendency revealed itself. The confident ignorance in discussing historical facts was glaring to the point of fury. But, beyond the anger, the conversation reveals three things: cultural and historical amnesia, lack of documentation, disinterest. 

In contemporary Nollywood, filmmakers are swift in announcing themselves as the first to achieve or do anything. Agreed, being first is admirable, pioneering, commendable, and marketable even. That a filmmaker is the first to produce a musical, action film, horror, and others are generally attractive. But, a casual Google search and that claim at novelty crumbles. The result: an endless cycle of frustrating the already fragilly-documented Nollywood history, industry, and practitioners. Thus, the non-existing Nollywood archive and efforts of pioneering filmmakers and films get reduced into oblivion with every historical rewrite. 

For Nigerian film enthusiast Motunrayo Ojo,  a lot of it comes down to data, or more precisely, the absence of publicly available and easily verifiable industry data.  Damasus’ distance from the centre of the industry for a considerable period, partly because of a series of unfortunate events in her personal and professional life meant her mainstream recognition is limited. “She also, perhaps unwittingly, courted a degree of notoriety through her marriage to Daniel Ademinokan, and I think that has affected how some people perceive her. Once the public has a negative perception of someone, it becomes much easier to diminish their achievements or turn them into a target.” There’s also a generational issue. A significant number of participants in the conversation did not experience the 2000 to 2006 Nollywood nor were curious enough to study it. This knowledge gap and lack of curiosity instills reconstruction. “They are trying to reconstruct that period retrospectively, often from whatever remains visible online. And that brings us back to data. We do not have an easily accessible historical record telling us which films sold the most copies, what their budgets were, what revenues they generated, which actors consistently received top billing, what stars commanded in fees, or how those things changed over time. We know, for instance, that Stella was one of the so-called G8 actors who were banned at the height of the marketers’ dispute with leading stars. Whatever else one thinks about that episode, you do not become part of that group without considerable commercial leverage and bargaining power.” For Ojo, what sometimes masquerades itself like cultural amnesia is also an information problem. In the absence of records, memory becomes evidence. And memory is inevitably shaped by age, nostalgia, personal bias and, increasingly, whatever the algorithm happens to make visible.

Nigerian journalist and editor Molara Wood diagnosed that the conversation of the Big Three of Old Nollywood (which completely overlooks the big names in early Yoruba-language Nollywood, by the way) appears to be cultural amnesia. For her, the difficulty with this conversation is its retroactive application of the social media lexicon of the Afrobeats era to Old Nollywood. “I understand why that term – to come to the level of the Gen-Z audience as it were – but it is anachronistic. It then becomes a contest between those who did not witness the Old Nollywood era, and those who did.” What the lexicon and conversation also refuses to ponder on is the existence of many female Nollywood stars that were huge, even before the emergence of Genevieve Nnaji and Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde. Liz Benson and so on. “Many more notables than allowed by some “Big Three” label. What I can tell you for free is that Stella Damasus was right up there; a whole generation of young men had crushes on her, even in the diaspora; she was in many successful films and paired with Richard Mofe-Damijo in many movies, and they were at the top of their game.”

My opinion that Old Nollywood being greatly documented was contested by Ojo. Surely, there are historical footprints in books about the history of Nollywood, academic research , newspapers and magazines covering the industry, and some filmmakers and producers — Charles Novia, for example — have documented their own experiences. But documentation is not the same thing as having a comprehensive archive. “A great deal of what survives is anecdotal or fragmented. Wikipedia pages have gradually been filled in, interviews survive here and there, people remember particular films as enormous hits, and industry veterans can tell us who commanded the biggest fees or whose name could sell a film. But that doesn’t substitute for systematic information about box-office equivalents in the home-video era: unit sales, production budgets, distribution numbers, top-selling titles, actors’ billing, fees, geographical reach, and so on,” she stated. The absence of this comprehensive and accessible archive is important because Old Nollywood operated largely through an informal home-video economy. Old Nollywood relied on informal open-air trade hubs like the Alaba International and Idumota markets, where electronic traders acted as the primary financiers and distributors. These marketers used high-speed VHS and VCD replication warehouses to supply a massive network of neighborhood rental shops and street hawkers nationwide. Old Nollywood commercial infrastructure was very different from the cinema-led industry we have now, where box-office figures can at least provide one measurable indicator of commercial performance. “So I think the loss is partly neglect, but it is also structural. We built an enormously influential popular culture without building equally strong institutions for preserving its commercial and industrial history. And because those institutions don’t exist, the burden has fallen on individuals. We all become amateur archivists, sociologists and cultural preservationists, piecing together the history through old films, newspaper clippings, interviews, personal collections and the memories of the people who were there.”

For Wood, although Old Nollywood was documented, the process was fragmentary and dependent largely on the documentarian’s self-propelling commitment. Certain sections of the industry didn’t court the press to lay the stories of their exploits down for posterity and thus fell into the information gap in the beginning. Nollywood scholars Hyginus Ekwuazi, Jonathan Haynes, Onookome Okome, Noah Tsika, and countless others have written multiple books about the Nigerian film industry and its players. But, beyond accessibility and affordability of these books, it takes a critical culture to place those books in the proper perspective to ensure their visibility as a precursor of their becoming part of a canon. “Without a critical culture, or proper arts education that involves the citing of books, the books themselves will fade into obscurity. Attention gives life to books.” 

There are also non-exist newspaper records. Nigerian newspaper archives are almost non-existent online beyond a radius of maybe 10 years, though Archivi.ng has been battling this structural deficit. As a weekly arts columnist for a major Nigerian newspaper in the 2000s, Wood shared that virtually all her journalistic writings prior to 2016 cannot be found online. Again, there are individual and collective efforts towards documenting the cultural spaces. But, in 2026, those archives are non-existent. In contrast to the West, everything even prior to the advent of the internet is carefully digitised for posterity. This absence means it’s impossible, for writers and artists and the audience, to track the development of an artform and with a historical mindset; everyone knows at which rung of the ladder they engaged with it. This archive will dissuade the loudly ignorant because they know where they are coming from, individually and collectively, and we can better build on things. “Nigerian newspaper online archive culture unfortunately is poor. Then the National Archives, the school libraries – these are not well-maintained; and even what was collected in the past, those records are falling apart, pages turning to dust and so on.”

There’s also an issue of interest. The industry needs more enthusiastic students of the art making and writing about Nigerian film, rather than people interested only in the visibility that comes with the industry. “We have filmmakers who can enthusiastically reference Kurosawa, Scorsese or Nolan, discuss international film movements and identify the influences behind a Hollywood director’s work, but who are sometimes surprisingly ill-equipped to reference the filmmakers, actors, aesthetics, and storytelling traditions that built the industry they themselves now work in,” Ojo stated. This isn’t to say Nigerian filmmakers shouldn’t expand their cinematic language vocabulary but that Nigerian cinema should also be part. “I fundamentally believe that you need an understanding of the past to move forward. Old Nollywood became extraordinarily successful across Africa and the diaspora despite its technical and financial limitations. There is something worth studying there. The stories were culturally legible, the actors possessed enormous charisma, and the best directors understood how to turn very limited resources into compelling popular entertainment. That doesn’t mean romanticising Old Nollywood or pretending everything about it worked. It means asking: what did it understand about its audience that we may have forgotten? If we study Nolan but don’t study the people who figured out how to make Nigerian stories travel from Lagos and Onitsha into homes across an entire continent, then we are leaving an important part of our own film education unfinished.”

The question of access is an old-age tale. Nigerians, in Nigeria, can’t access Nigerian films. The few available ones, on YouTube, are in the  shape and sound that discourages an immersive watching experience. Others are locked in personal and Western archives. The question Ojo asked : “How many of those old films and television programmes can a 20-year-old actually watch today? People tend to remember what remains visible. That creates a peculiar distortion of history. If an older star remains active, continues appearing in films, gives interviews or has a strong social-media presence, it becomes much easier for a younger audience to understand that person’s importance. But if another equally important star stepped away from the industry 15 or 20 years ago, their cultural footprint can begin to disappear. And once that happens, we start treating contemporary visibility as evidence of historical importance.”

Does Wood think New Nollywood media rarely pulls from the Old Nollywood archive? And if it doesn’t, is it a lack of access, interest, or something different? First, she mentioned that we suffer from recency-bias. “It’s there in the audience that hardly ever looks back, consumed with the now and the new, in terms of productions. It’s in the scorn for a critical culture by the practitioners as well as the audience themselves. Criticism is not “bad belle.” Criticism is also a kind of archiving; it’s how you begin to place artforms, in this case cinema, in the archive of public consciousness, what the culture will remember and how – not to mention that a lot of criticism will also help form the textual record of those films. If there’s no proper and rigorous critiquing, the culture will treat every production as disposable; here today, gone tomorrow.” 

There’s also the race of being the “first.” There’s a very vocal minority among the younger generation who appear to think that everything started with them, as though there could only have been a void before their time. Even journalists are guilty of this. “I have seen people write on major art figures in the last five years and then shout from the rooftops that they were the first Nigerian journalist to have done so; whereas, those who are humble and attentive will find robust pieces on the same subject in newspapers from the 1990s and the 2000s, when in my view the Nigerian Arts pages were even more robust and committed than in the present time.” This rat race of being the first preference for historical erasures. “The race to be “the first” is counter-productive, partly because it requires erasure and silences concerning what others did in an earlier time. Instead of building on a tradition and growing from there, we are always starting again, always becoming.”

The displayed ignorance, shunning lack of curiosity, inaccessible Nollywood archive, and history not being taught contributes to this cultural amnesia. Wood agrees that history being ostracized from Nigerian classrooms is symptomatic of the larger problem. Added to that is the absence of a systemic framework on so many levels, made worse by an amnesiac society that does not sufficiently acknowledge the centrality of art (in this case film art) to society and development. The absence of cultural institutions enables this cultural amnesia. Wood asked, what about having an Academy of Film that chronicles every Nollywood film released and keeps the record, cataloguing details including year of release, the cast and crew and so on? What are the criteria for determining which film production is worthy of that kind of serious record (since everyone is now a producer, and some films are shot “Pa-Pa-Pa” in just a few days?) Can we set up something like the Criterion Collection? “Netflix and especially YouTube have democratised access to Nollywood productions now, and that’s welcome; but if a title is removed from those platforms, how do we ensure preservation, access and archival memory of it in 20 years’ time? I posted a clip of Moses Olaiya’s Orun Mooru (1982) on Twitter recently, and so many people said they’d never seen a clip of it before. Others asked how they might access or watch the movie; I had no answer. These are some of the questions.”

The social media conversation has died a natural death. In some days, weeks, months, or years, it will be resurrected with the same uninformed and ignorant opinions. Years of pioneering works will be dismissed and the Nigerian film history and its practitioners will suffer for that erasure. For Ojo, this is what happens when our understanding of Nollywood begins only ten years ago. History, eras, commercial systems, and definitions of what constituted a hit get flattened. We start measuring a VHS/VCD star using today’s cinema box office or streaming metrics, when those systems didn’t exist in the same way during their peak. Importantly, we lose continuity before the history, courtesy of its fragmented documentation, is falsely remembered and chronicled. “Today’s Nollywood did not simply appear. Its international audience, its star system, its genres and even many of the expectations audiences bring to Nigerian films were built over decades. If we don’t preserve and make that history accessible, every generation will eventually have to rediscover it from scratch — and whoever remains most visible will inevitably be mistaken for whoever mattered most.”