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THE 100th ISSUE: 100 Innovations, Inventions & Icons From Africa

There is a slight nip in the air as the sun rises on the horizon and workers join the frenzied rush-hour traffic on the Third Mainland Bridge to Victoria Island. Crawling along the Falomo Bridge towards the mainland, I am joined by Kunle (not their real name), a former ringleader in Nigeria’s lucrative piracy industry. We are on our way to Alaba International Market, the largest electronics market in Nigeria and, incidentally, where it all began for Kunle.
“This is big business. At the top of the food chain is the Igbo movie producers and marketers who control the distribution of all the movies,” says Kunle.
Alaba is typical of most Nigerian markets. The place is heaving with sellers vying for every inch of space available on the streets, forcing people to walk in a straight line, like soldiers going to battle. The ‘area boys’, who are the unofficial tour guides of the market, expertly maneuver through teems of people, shouting frantically to get the attention of potential customers. We stop at Alake Enterprises, a rundown shack selling the latest Nollywood movies and gospel CDs.
“Madam, we get brand new movies, I beg [you to] come inside,” says one of the vendors.
As we enter the dilapidated building, a wall appears out of nowhere adorned with the latest cinema releases.
“There are two types of movies here. Those at the front of the shop are the legal ones, which have been released in the cinema and have now made their way to DVD. What you are seeing at the back are the ones that are currently in the cinema and some that are yet to show,” says Kunle.
<div id="attachment_35134" style="width: 511px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35134" class=" wp-image-35134" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Alaba-Market-Nollywood-e1517299294437-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="501" height="332" />Alaba Market (Photo by Andrew Esiebo/Aljazeera America)</div>
Hiring more than a million people, Nollywood is the country’s second largest employer, according to a United Nations report. The ability of film crews, using guerilla filmmaking, to shoot a full-length feature in a week, has made Nollywood a powerhouse in the world of movies.
The National Bureau for Statistics (NBS) estimates that the Nigerian film industry contributed about 1.4% to the GDP in 2013 and 2014, and employed over 250,000 people directly. According to the World Bank, Nollywood produces up to 50 films a week, surpassing Hollywood in volume. Subsequently, the rise in copyright crimes in the country grows alongside the Nollywood industry.
“A couple of years ago Kunle Afolayan’s movie, October 1, was pirated and sold on the streets for less than $3 before the movie’s premiere in the cinema. He spent $2 million producing that movie. Now tell me, how was he going to make his money back? How many cinemas do we have in the country to help him recoup that amount?” says Bose Oshin, Head of Productions at GAME Productions.
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The incident almost led to the writer and director boycotting Nigeria for good. In 2014, a week after the release of Half of a Yellow Sun, a film adaptation of the award-winning novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, film vendors were hawking pirated copies of the film in Lagos. According to Oshin, you can’t fix the problem without understanding why there is a leak in the supply chain cycle.
“Before a movie shows, they need to send a copy to the cinemas where it will make its debut. The pirates pay the workers in the cinema a lump sum of N1 million ($2,790) to steal the copy. For these culprits, this is more money than they would earn in a year, so the temptation is quite high,” says Oshin.
Kofi Ansah, an emerging Ghanaian movie producer looking to have a piece of the lucrative Nollywood pie, experienced this in what he calls his worst day in business.
“I literally used all my savings to shoot this movie and managed to secure some top stars from Nigeria. We were two weeks away from the movie premiere when I got a call from someone saying they had a copy of my movie and I should pay N5 million ($13,950) to prevent its release on the streets for one month. It was as if someone had just shot me in the stomach. We barely had enough to do our promotion and now we were being blackmailed by these thugs,” says Ansah.
He believes the leak was orchestrated by competing producers who do not want any new names to enter the hugely competitive, and often fickle, world of Nigerian cinema.
“We all use the same production crews so it is easy to get your hands on footage. I couldn’t afford to make the payment, so the movie was on the street before we could even do the premier and we lost all our investment. I ended up having to take the movie to other parts of Africa to try to recoup some of the money,” says Ansah.
<div id="attachment_35135" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35135" class=" wp-image-35135" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Nollywood-movies-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="333" />Nollywood movies for sale in a market (Photo by Andrew Esiebo/Aljazeera America)</div>
In the belly of the beast lies an ongoing war between the ‘New Nollywood’ producers and traditional ‘Asaba’ producers.
“New Nollywood does not make any money. They have the fame, the glitz and the glamour, and they do lavish launches in cinemas, but nobody goes to the cinema to watch a Nollywood production when Captain America is showing. Asaba, or old Nollywood, is where the money is made. Movies are shot on tight production schedules, usually about a week, and then the same movie is broken down into several sequels from part one to sometimes part 16,” says Kunle.
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Asaba movies are for the masses. Storylines are simple, humorous, and movies are mostly shot in the local dialect. The top actors in this sector are in such high demand that they sometimes shoot up to 10 movies a week, jumping from one set to the other.
“As soon as the marketers hear that a New Nollywood movie is about to hit the cinema, the whole gang is on high alert. Once the inside person is paid, and we get a copy of the video, we begin mass-production. Sometimes as many as 20 million copies are created and immediately moved by trucks to Onitsha, Aba, Alaba and Idumota, where agents are there to pick up and distribute to a network of street hawkers and shops in those areas,” says Kunle.
The mass production provides economies of scale, with DVDs as cheap as N100 ($0.30). Contrast this with the N3,000 ($8.30) for a cinema screening and it’s obvious why piracy thrives in Nigeria.
“This is simply a case of supply and demand. The demand is there because people want to watch the same movies that are shown in the cinema for a fraction of the cost, and so long as that demand exists, these pirates will always be in business and that is the unfortunate truth,” says Oshin. 
To combat piracy, the Nigerian government established Project ACT Nollywood, with a N3 billion ($8 million) grant. In a press statement, the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, says the proper distribution of movies is important if Nigeria is to win the fight.
But Ansah says it’s not that simple.
“Like any criminal organization, there are those at the top who make the real money and make all the moves. These people have a strong network and they work with the copyright owners or those who have been officially contracted to produce the legitimate DVDs of the new movies, so they have direct access to the source thereby hijacking the market,” he says.
“Piracy works with informal networks and to be honest, there is really no fear of punishment because you hardly hear of anybody who has been arrested on the grounds of video piracy. That is where the law needs to act. Instill a fear of imprisonment and people will behave accordingly.”
But this suggestion may be flawed.
“We have informants in the law enforcement agencies that give us a heads-up so we know all the plans they are making, which means we have enough time to react,” says Kunle.
For now, the clandestine networks continue to grow and as long as they have an insatiable audience looking for the lowest prices for the latest cinematic releases, it is unlikely that piracy in Africa’s largest movie industry will end.

The Fortune And Fury Behind Nollywood

In Ajegunle, a neighborhood located in the heart of Lagos, Nigeria, Tunde Amaechi is readying for an audition. This will be his 20th in a month and today’s audition is on the other side of town in Victoria Island. The trip will cost him two weeks’ wages but the potential gain is worth it.
“I am auditioning for a role in Desperate Housewives Africa. I get to say three lines, which is very good for me. When you get a speaking part, it means you are moving up and I think I will get this one by God’s grace,” says Amaechi.
Nigeria’s growing movie industry, known as Nollywood, is the third largest in the world following Hollywood and Bollywood.
Its growth has spawned a generation of young people desperate for the limelight and a chance to make it big in the movie business. For Amaechi, it is the only way he can help his mother and two sisters escape poverty.
<div id="attachment_32086" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-32086" class="wp-image-32086 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/93Days-credit-Toronto-Film-Festival-1024x512.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="512" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/93Days-credit-Toronto-Film-Festival.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/93Days-credit-Toronto-Film-Festival-300x150.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/93Days-credit-Toronto-Film-Festival-600x300.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/93Days-credit-Toronto-Film-Festival-768x384.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Cast from 93 Days</div>
“I lost my father at an early age and since then I have been the main breadwinner of the house. Making it in Nollywood means my family will be taken care of and my little sisters will have a chance at a better life. It is also my dream to make it and be as big as Ramsey Nouah [popular Nigerian actor],” he says.
With no acting background, Amaechi, like millions of young struggling actors, is looking for that life-changing role and no distance is too far to travel for that break.
Chuks Amaka is an actor and entrepreneur living in Lekki, Victoria Island. He has featured in a number of roles including M-Net’s flagship daily soap Tinsel as well as some local productions and also played the role of executive producer in his own movie. For him, the movie industry, like any other, is a business and the end game is money.
“The goal is to cross over from Nollywood into Hollywood. That is where most actors want to go and that is where the money is. They believe if you build a strong enough brand in Africa’s largest economy, then America will come knocking,” says Amaka.
That belief is not far-fetched. In 2015, American actor Danny Glover starred in 93 Days, a film on the deadly Ebola virus in Nigeria. Acting with the veteran Hollywood star were some of Nollywood’s finest, all vying for international recognition. Beasts of No Nation, the Netflix-distributed civil war movie starring another Hollywood bigwig, Idris Elba, was also shot in Nigeria and Ghana with actors queuing up for hours for a part in a big Hollywood production.
“The natural evolution for any Nollywood actor is to make a name in Africa and then hit the big leagues in Hollywood. These type of blockbusters are hotly-contested and every actor knows this is a potential golden ticket,” says Amaka.
For Amaechi, however, that dream is too big to comprehend. Making a name in Nollywood is already a tall order. He has been auditioning for roles for the past year and is yet to secure any paid work. He supplements his income by working as a waiter at the local Bheerhugz Cafe in Ikeja, Lagos. The Desperate Housewives Africa role will be the first time he may be paid for his work. He is optimistic his fate will change.
“This means everything. I love acting and all I need is the opportunity for the world to see my talent. I know I can be one of the biggest in Nollywood then the rest of the world,” says Amaechi.
Austin Abolaji is a Nollywood actor from Imo State, Nigeria. In 2012, he starred in the action drama film, Black November, with an ensemble cast of international stars including Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger, Vivica Fox and Wyclef Jean. The movie premiered at the Kennedy Center in the United States.
<div id="attachment_32088" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-32088" class="wp-image-32088 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Omoni-Oboli-1024x615.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="615" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Omoni-Oboli.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Omoni-Oboli-300x180.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Omoni-Oboli-600x360.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Omoni-Oboli-768x461.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Omoni Oboli</div>
“Nollywood is still growing and there are massive opportunities in this sector, however it will take a long time before actors are paid properly for their craft. When you look at the average Hollywood actor, they get paid a lot better for the same roles we are doing here. This is one of the reasons why people want to make it in Hollywood,” says Abolaji.
Another reason is the acclaim.
“After Lupita Nyong’o won the Oscar, we all now believe it is possible. We saw her acting in MTV Shuga and to see one of us from Africa succeed in Hollywood is motivation for all of us. She is probably the biggest African actress in the world right now,” says Abolaji.
Nyong’o’s Oscar win has been the catalyst for a new lucrative career ranging from roles in Star Wars to brand endorsements with Lancome to being on the cover of Vogue magazine. Her success has opened up the once forbidden Hollywood dream to the rest of Africa and Nollywood’s elite is looking to follow suit one role at a time.

Idris-Elba-in-Beast-Of-No-Nation-credit-Netflix

Non-Stop  From Lagos To LA

The African entertainment space is perhaps too vast and too cumbersome to measure. But in the scattered data available we find the continent houses the world’s third largest homegrown film industry in Nigeria’s Nollywood, which according to a recent United Nations report, is larger than Hollywood by volume and second only to India’s Bollywood in worth, estimated at around $3 billion. The music arena is sweeping is similar terms.
If an artiste is defined by wholly the extent of their output and global influence, then these women are candidates for celebration.
<h3>Angélique Kidjo</h3>
<h3>Musician, Benin</h3>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-30919" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-478138866-240x300.jpg" alt="" width="240" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-478138866-240x300.jpg 240w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-478138866-300x375.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-478138866-600x750.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-478138866-768x960.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-478138866-819x1024.jpg 819w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-478138866.jpg 818w" sizes="(max-width: 240px) 100vw, 240px" />
She is perhaps the most iconic of modern African songstresses. Known for her electric performances and creative music videos, Kidjo began her musical life in Benin, then known as Dahomey, part of a musical family. Her mother was a theater director and her father, a photographer.
She fled her country following a coup in the early 1980s seeking a secure setting to chase her musical dreams.
“It was not possible to write your own music if you weren’t talking about the communist regime and the people in power. It was one thing I didn’t want to do. So the only option I had was to leave, otherwise I was going to end up in jail,” she says, speaking to us in 2015.
Since then, Kidjo has risen to become a Grammy-award winning artiste with over 37 albums in her repertoire.
The youngest in a large family, Kidjo’s childhood was colored by late nights, singing with her older brothers, at a little bar by the Cotonou lagoon. Eventually, she was headlining at jazz festivals across Europe with the legendary pianist, Jasper van’t Hof, and his afro-jazz ensemble, Pili Pili.
It was a difficult road to stardom.
“It was not easy&#8230;my parents were not rich enough to send [me] money. It was very hard, I had to find work. I did babysitting, I did hotel room cleaning, I did hair-braiding, I was a backup singer in a band. It was a matter of survival but I was free and that freedom had no price for me,” she recalls.
Kidjo did more than survive, she flourished. Her time with Pili Pili eventually led her to a recording deal with Island Records in Paris. A string of number one hits followed and she became a world music icon, picking up awards and accolades at every turn.
TIME magazine hailed her as “Africa’s Premier Diva” in 2007 but she remains true to her personal philosophies in an industry that is notoriously unkind to those with weaker spirits.
“One thing I learned as a young girl singing was always to be true to my inspiration, never ever give that up in order to please other people. If you cannot sing your song alone without instrumentation and be happy, don’t put it out there! You cannot be an artiste thinking that you want to be somebody else. You need to know what kind of artiste you want to be and why you want to be that,” she says.
Kidjo’s latest album, Eve, is dedicated to the women of Africa. She details stories of youth and rise in her memoirs, Spirit Rising, My Life, My Music published by HarperCollins in 2014.
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<h3>Danai Gurira</h3>
<h3>Actress and playwright, Zimbabwe</h3>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-30930 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Danai-02-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Danai-02-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Danai-02-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Danai-02-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Danai-02-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Danai-02.jpg 682w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />
Gurira is a consuming personality. She is both an actress and playwright. Her plot lines are at once accessible and complex, delving into the lives of everyday women fighting the insurmountable and emerging, at their conclusion, to a victorious reckoning. She writes to entertain and educate.
Her Off-Broadway play, In The Continuum, on women making peace with their HIV status debuted when she was still an MFA student at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and won three accolades including the Helen Hayes Award for Best Lead Actress.
Her most recent production, Eclipsed, written in 2009, follows the lives of five Liberian women at the height of the country’s drawn-out civil war as they navigate the horrors of wartime and the people they become.
This has scaled even higher heights than her previous one. It received an African treatment in 2014, at Johannesburg’s Soweto Theatre, in an adaptation directed by South African actress, Warona Seane. The current production opened at the Public Theatre in New York City to rave reviews in October 2015 with Kenya’s Oscar-winning diva, Lupita Nyong’o, at the lead.
As an actress, Gurira can be seen weekly on American hit television serial, The Walking Dead, as the no-nonsense, zombie fighting Michonne. She also has six film credits to her name, notably as Adenike Balogun, a Nigerian woman dealing with infertility, in the independent drama, Mother Of George. Eclipsed ran at The Public Theatre in New York until November 29. A third play, Familiar, based on a Zimbabwean family transposed in Minnesota is slated for 2016.
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<h3>Lupita Nyong&#8217;o</h3>
<h3>Actress, Kenya</h3>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-30921 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Lupita-01-206x300.jpg" alt="" width="206" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Lupita-01-206x300.jpg 206w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Lupita-01-300x437.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Lupita-01-600x874.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Lupita-01-768x1118.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Lupita-01-703x1024.jpg 703w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Lupita-01.jpg 702w" sizes="(max-width: 206px) 100vw, 206px" />
For moviegoers outside East Africa, Nyong’o must have seemed to burst into view out of relative obscurity. However, she was on the Kenyan stage and television before she took on the hearts and minds of red carpet watchers worldwide.
Nyong’o was a thespian from a young age, as a member of Ian Mbugua’s Nairobi Phoenix Players, she lead as Juliet in a local adaptation of the Shakespearean, Romeo and Juliet.
However, her big break was a culmination of efforts. She signed on as a member of production staff on various big budget films from The Constant Gardener, shot in Kenya, to Mira Nair’s adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.
From there she won a place at the Yale School of Drama where she was awarded a prize, in her final year, for ‘outstanding ability’ in her craft. Earlier, in 2008, she appeared in an independent short film shot in New York. The year after that, she directed a documentary, In My Genes, on the much discriminated-against albino population in Kenya. It won first prize at the Five College Film Festival.
With all of this behind her, she was cast in her breakthrough role as Patsey in Steve McQueen’s stellar cinematic effort, 12 Years A Slave, just three weeks before her graduation. From there came her surprise Oscar win.
Her most recent project is with Zimbabwean playwright Danai Gurira and her play Eclipsed, playing a young woman who finds herself a sex slave in the rebel camps of wartime Liberia.
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<h3>Souad Massi</h3>
<h3>Singer-songwriter, Algeria</h3>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-30931" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-163396633-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-163396633-199x300.jpg 199w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-163396633-300x452.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-163396633-600x904.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-163396633-680x1024.jpg 680w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-163396633.jpg 679w" sizes="(max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px" />
Perhaps one of the most successful singer-songwriters in the Arab-speaking world, Massi marries beautifully composed guitar harmonies with her enchanting voice, often the only instruments in her employ, to tell stories through her songs. First-time listeners might compare her music to the American blues softened by the poetic lightness of careful lyrics.
While she is based in France, she was born in Algeria to a forward-thinking, but poor, family of six in 1972. She learned to play the guitar quite early and often performed her compositions to keen family and friends. At the beginning of the 90s, as the country plunged into civil war, Massi joined a political rock band called Akator and had a successful seven-year run with them, producing underground hits and popular music videos.
However, as the war raged on and her popularity soared, she became a target for the conservative fundamentalists that were quickly winning political ground in the country. They threatened her family and they threatened her life. Unfazed, Massi continued her musical conviction, cutting her hair short and disguising herself as a man.
“I grew up in a modest family in Algeria but I [was given] a lot of chances because my parents liked music, so it was easy to listen and to play the guitar. [This became] very hard because it was the civil war, it wasn’t easy to play on stage. In past it wasn’t a problem, but when the movement of Islamists it became very hard for us women to express ourselves, to [wear] clothes that we want. People thought that I [performed] on purpose, to attract attention but that wasn’t my idea,” she told the BBC in October.
Despite her camouflage, it was clear the extremists didn’t care for her music or her opinions. The death threats continued. In 1999, she accepted an invitation to play at a Paris festival and she never returned. Days later she was signed on to a local imprint of Universal Records and two years later she emerged with a celebrated first album, Raoui. It became a commercial success in Europe.
Although a deep yearning for the country she left behind echoes in her music, Massi understands that her voice is much stronger outside the constraints of the conservative society she fled.
“What I did in France, I could never do in Algeria,” she says.
In 2015, she released her latest album, El Mutakallimun, a collection of ancient poems from 9th century Arabic poets living in Cordoba, Spain, put to music. She says she wants the album to counter the negative stereotypes perpetuated of the global Islamic community.
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<h3>Genevieve Nnaji</h3>
<h3>Actress, Nigeria</h3>
Africans, the world over, have patronized a Nigerian movie at one point or another. With complex plot lines and exaggerated theatrics, Nollywood is the undisputed home of African cinema. And of its many on-screen darlings, Nnaji is perhaps one of the more prolific. In 2009, Oprah Winfrey dubbed her the ‘Julia Roberts of Africa’.
A former child model, Nnaji got her start in acting almost by accident. A local soap opera was short of child actors and they called into the modeling agency for recruits. Three names were put forward and she was among them. At eight years old, the actress was born.
“I enjoyed it, it was fun. I never felt so alive,” she told CNN in 2011 about the experience.
Over a decade later, she made her Nollywood debut at 19 with the movie, Most Wanted. Since then, her talent has been lent to over 80 titles of the industry and she has found herself thrust forward as a Nigerian ambassador appearing at film screenings in London and beyond.
This responsibility is not taken lightly.
“As long as you are a celebrity, you are an ambassador [to the rest of the world] they can’t see the whole country so what you show people is basically&#8230;what you show [of] back home,” she says.
In addition to acting, Nnaji has an album, One Logologo Line, released by a Ghanaian record label in 2004. She is also an accomplished model spawning a line of endorsement deals including being the face of Lux beauty products in West Africa.
However, she still has more planned for the future. In 2008, she launched her own clothing line St. Genevieve which donates some of its profits to charity.
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<h3>Warsan Shire</h3>
<h3>Poet, Somalia</h3>
Entertainers do exist in spaces outside music and film. While she is shy to admit she is a performer, writer and poet Shire launched her career at a poetry slam when she was just 16. Although the concept was new and bewildering to her, she got on-stage and performed her piece and to her surprise, won.
“I was very nervous. I didn’t really understand what a poetry slam was. Then I won. My friends jumped around. I didn’t want to ever do another poetry slam, but I think it has a lot to do with how I approach readings,” she says.
Since then she has used the internet to share her work becoming a sensation among a new breed of literary minded young Africans. She has released a popular album of spoken poetry, warsan versus melancholy (the seven stages of being lonely) and has been invited to perform her work from Berlin to Johannesburg.
However, she insists that first she is a writer.
“I’d rather listen than speak. It’s overwhelming, the amount of detail I see in really mundane scenarios: strangers touching one another; someone arguing on the phone; a man falling asleep on the train. I’ll fill in the gaps of the story myself. In my mind I’ll follow them home, I’ll imagine their childhood, what their bedroom looks like, if they are in love with someone who does not love them. The downfall is that I give everything (and everyone) too much meaning. Sometimes a thing is vacant and I’ll create depth for it; that’s not always fair,” she says.
Shire is an also an editor at SPOOK magazine, which focuses on the alternative literary arts. In 2012, she released her debut book of poems, Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth.
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<h3>Anne Kansiime</h3>
<h3>Comedian, Uganda</h3>
Funny woman of East Africa, Kansiime was an internet superstar before she even got on television. Her videos have been liked and shared thousands of times over even though her comedy persona is very Ugandan.
Hailing from a little village in western Uganda, she began her career in comedy while a student at Kampala’s Makerere University. She dabbled in drama and music but continued on with a degree in Social Sciences due to family expectations. Desperately looking for an avenue to showcase her talents, a friend urged her to record her skits and upload them online. After her first few hits, it was clear that she was a big, and unique, talent.
“I didn’t see it coming. I would post a clip and get a reaction, and I thought that I would put it on YouTube&#8230;I got motivated and kept on posting and posting till I started receiving phone calls and [even] receiving money from people who weren’t even in Africa. I didn’t know what I was doing but I knew I was doing a job and I liked it and people liked it,” she told Kenyan media in 2014.
Encouraged by the outpouring of support, she carried on to become a viral hit in no time.
“I just wanted to act. I didn’t understand [then] that acting would make people laugh,” she says.
Already, she has almost a quarter of a million followers on her YouTube channel. Some of her videos have been watched over a million times. She has performed in a variety of venues from London to Lilongwe.
Currently, her weekly online comedy sketch show Don’t Mess With Kansiime can be seen on her YouTube channel. In 2015, she released a debut music album, My Name Is Kansiime, available for digital download on Amazon and Itunes. Kansiime performed live in Washington D.C and New Jersey, as part of her World Tour, in late November.

The Stars  Of Africa

If you ever thought that Nigeria’s Nollywood film industry was only about directors with low budgets churning out films in a couple of weeks, which were shot in the streets of Lagos or in their lounges; think again. Nigerian producers and directors are stepping away from the generic Nollywood film mold; their films are emerging onto international cinema screens at film festivals.
The award-winning Michelle Bello is one such film director and producer. Bello studied visual media at Regent University in Virginia in the United States. In three decades since its establishment, the school has attracted distinguished faculty and guest lectures such as John Ashcroft, former United States attorney general; Vern Clark, former chief of naval operations and Steve Forbes, president and CEO of Forbes Inc. Over the years, the university has been the recipient of more than 267 national and international film awards.
During her time at the university, Bello had the opportunity to attend some of the biggest film festivals including the Sundance Film Festival, which—since its launch in 1985—has been the launchpad for many films. Some of these films gained critical recognition, received commercial distribution and reached audiences eager for fresh perspectives and new voices.
Bello is dedicated to the film industry and was even an intern at the prestigious Cannes film festival. According to the official websites, “Ever since [Festival de Cannes’] creation, [it] has remained faithful to its founding purpose: to draw attention to and raise the profile of films with the aim of contributing towards the development of cinema, boosting the film industry worldwide and celebrating cinema at an international level”.
With these experiences she came to appreciate that successful filmmakers are those who are patient and passionate about their craft.
She lives by the fact that filmmaking is not about rushing into things and making millions of films; it’s all about taking the time to make powerful films. Small Boy, which was inspired by Will Smith’s Oscar-nominated Pursuit of Happyness, was Bello’s debut film about 10-year-old Sonny who has to learn how to survive in the slums of Lagos. She felt that there was a need for such a film in Nigeria.
“For me, the reason why I made Small Boy is because I was tired of seeing the world just having a negative image of Nigeria. I wanted to do something that was an inspirational story. At that time, I felt that we needed such kind of movies to uplift Nigerians and there were very few films doing that. I was not thinking about how much money I will make, I was just passionate about the story,” she says.
The truth is that while Small Boy might not have been a moneymaking blockbuster, nor was it launched at Cannes or Sundance, or gained recognition on a global scale, it has however made headlines in the industry. The film scooped two awards at the 2009 African Film Academy Awards and was screened at the American Black Film Festival in the United States, where it received
two nominations.
She has also opened the eyes of International Creative Management (ICM), one of the top three recruitment agencies, which believed in the skills that this young Nigerian filmmaker had to offer.
“I got to see Hollywood from the inside…” says Bello about her experience at ICM.
She discovered that although there is talent in Africa, recruitment agencies are not queuing up at Africa’s international airports to whisk away this talent to the promised land
of Hollywood.
“They work in a complete business end of it. Someone like Genevieve [Nnaji], for example, is our superstar and from their perspective they don’t see her as [being] bankable. They need to pick the big stars, whether it is Will Smith or Denzel Washington, who are bankable, whom if they are put in the movie are going to make billions of dollars… Unfortunately, right now, they are not at that level where they can get someone like Genevieve and say she can bring 10 million…” says Bello.
Despite this, Bello is optimistic. She was quoted in NigeriaFilms.com as saying, “The growth in the [Nollywood] industry over the next few years will be exciting because there are young people [of my generation] that are now coming up wanting to tell Nigerian stories to an international audience.”
With new cameras and editing equipment, it is now possible for African filmmakers to make films the same way a painter draws or novelists write.
Filmmakers, however, cannot avoid costs. A novelist can write a novel with a pen and paper if they like, they don’t even need a computer. A sculpturer or a painter can use worthless materials such as plastic to create a sculpture or painting, which may be sold for $200. But for filmmakers, it is different. Films inadvertently require money because of the number of people and processes involved in front of and behind the camera: food has to be bought for the crew; filming permits need to be acquired; music needs to be recorded and then there is editing. All these come at a cost, which filmmakers have to budget for.
The Nigerian filmmaker is currently working on another romantic comedy, which started shooting in August and is scheduled for completion in January. The budget for the film is $300,000—two times larger than the first film. She admits, jokingly, that the largest portion of her film budget goes to food catering and the generator.
“I called my brother and told him that the generator is eating into my budget. He was shocked to hear that I had to pay for the generator to film.”
Bello is working closely with her California-based brother who is an award-winning screenplay writer. She wrote the original script during her screenwriting classes at
Regent University.
“I was about to come back here [to Nigeria] whilst completing my internship at Cannes and I was thinking about what project I am going to do next. I thought about the script and talked to my brother about it… and now the script is now where it is today, we are making a movie,”
she says.
She knows how tough the film industry can be and so her intention with this new film is to create a platform for young and upcoming actors to shine and showcase their talent. At first, she was unsure about having auditions, owing to the fact that she had been away from Nigeria for so long. To her surprise the turnout was impressive. It attracted many actors from the popular Nigerian soap opera, Tinsel, which is an M-Net production known for its quality in West Africa. The film will feature stars such as Damilola Adegbite and Ghanaian actor
Chris Attoh.
Piracy is a big problem in Nigeria. It is for this reason that Bello has been careful of whom to give the film to. With her new project she is not concerned because the film is made for theatrical release and has managed to secure various international cinema releases before being released on DVD which is where piracy is most prominent. With this she is hoping to get her money back and make profit, only to invest it further in her passion for filmmaking.

The Sprightly Spirit Of Nollywood

Educor has been around for decades—Damelin and Intec college are household names—now the private education group is going back to school. It’s jumping into Nollywood—the vibrant, chaotic and informal film industry of Nigeria. The industry produces thirty new titles a week at $2 per DVD or VCD, which sell at traffic lights. It’s only getting bigger and better.
There is money in the madness. Nollywood is valued at $3.2 billion a year and produces around 2,400 films annually. It is the second largest film industry, next to Bollywood in India. The films are shot on location in two weeks, on average, for the cost of a stagehand on a Hollywood set: between $15,000 and $30,000. The average film sells between 25,000 and 50,000 copies worldwide; a blockbuster can sell up to 500,000.
New investment in Nollywood is on the way. With the support of the Nigerian Department of Culture, Educor Africa will open a multi-media and creative arts center to support Nollywood. The industry’s rapidly growing potential has also been recognized by Multichoice—a subscription-based South African satellite provider—is spending $300 million to produce local content within the Nigerian market, according to Julian Kannigan, CEO of Educor Africa.
<div id="attachment_968" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-968" class="size-large wp-image-968" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/DSC_5663-1024x680.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="315" />Julian Kanningan, with students at the Randburg Damelin Campus</div>
“It’s going to require local skills which are scarce at best… you’re going to have trained sound engineers, lighting people, actors, actresses, 3D animators, journalists which are all world-class and it’s going to support a burgeoning community,” says Kannigan.
He acknowledges that the larger part of the population want business, information technology (IT), human resources (HR) and marketing skills, which are part of the education staple diet.
But running a business in Nigeria, isn’t always easy.
“Like everyone else who is conducting business in Nigeria, you buy your own generators. It just makes the cost of doing business more expensive but at the end of the day the numbers will bail you out if you get it right.”
It is part of expansion into the continent. In the next 18 to 24 months, Educor Africa plans to expand into Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia, with an investment of R100 million ($12.38 million). The education group runs classroom, correspondence and online education. There are 16 Damelin campuses in South Africa with a franchise in Botswana and a correspondence business in Namibia.
“While the company has had certain overtures in Zimbabwe, with regards to potential partners, we’re just waiting for the right climate to explore those opportunities,” he says.
Educor Africa is busy with regulatory processes to start a correspondence business in Lagos, Nigeria. The education group is also applying for a university license through the national universities commission in the capital, Abuja.
“We aim to change the hearts and minds of the young and the not so young. Our initiative and passion for our business is that we change lives. It’s really important to us,” he says.
Kannigan’s pragmatic approach to business in Africa means the profit will be reinvested into the region.
“It’ll be an investment from one business to another, the correspondence branch will support the multimedia branch and together they’ll support the establishment of the university,” he says.
While the regulatory environment in South Africa doesn’t permit the Educor brands to call themselves a university—even though they can award degrees—that’s not the case in other African countries.
“Certainly some of those governments are aware of their own incapacity to provide, and therefore they welcome players such as Educor. Government’s capacity to spend on public education, with a burgeoning population at the same time, is creating a gap that is growing larger… we are actually assisting those governments to minimize that gap,” he says.
He is witness to the demand for higher education on the continent. The wealthy of West Africa pay a fortune to educate their children in the United States or Great Britain.
“When you take a world-class university experience to them, they embrace it. Now, you’re going to see that in many other African countries, especially those with a high GDP growth. If you want to increase your GDP, you’re going to need a skilled labor force,” says Kannigan.
Educor is going after big partners: “We are approaching the World Bank, who have a mandate with regards to education for Africa. We are busy talking to international universities which require an African or South African partner for various reasons to go into the African continent together… The education sector is recession-proof. People want to upscale themselves during a recession, to make themselves more marketable,” he says.
It hasn’t been smooth-sailing. Educor South Africa bought the business from Media24—Africa’s leading media publishing company—in 2008. When Media24 and Naspers—Media24’s majority shareholder—divested, the business was in the red. Not only has the Educor group brought it back into the black but it has also managed to expand.
“If you have a conversation with me in ten years time, firstly, I’ll be too busy to see you… we would have built something phenomenal across Africa in terms of education,” says Kannigan.
“Now is the time for Africa,” he says.

Tag: Nollywood

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