11.2: The Context – Nollywood the Place
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- Jade Miller
- University of California Press
“Where is Nollywood?” asked a neophyte on a public Nollywood message board. 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 is Surulere. This is the neighborhood in mainland Lagos where many producers, directors, and other creative professionals maintain offices and live. A more specific answer might be O’Jez’s, a bar in Surulere’s National Stadium that serves as a meeting point for socializing and making business deals. With the exception of O’Jez’s, chance encounters with Nollywood elites are a rare occurrence in Surulere. Offices, workspaces, and production sites are unmarked; the streets are largely residential. Jonathan Haynes, writing on the geography of Nollywood, notes that the small amount of capital per entrepreneur means that large spaces marking flashy movie industries—studios, theaters, large office complexes—don’t exist here, as Nollywood functions largely behind small unmarked doors. 11 It’s a massive industry that remains hard to see and hard to quantify.
Another answer to the message board query could be Alaba Market, a vast sprawling electronics market on the outskirts of Lagos, which also serves as Nollywood’s distribution nerve center. Journeying there in a taxi, one emerges from the city’s densely populated urban maze into a dusty spread of low-lying disconnected buildings speckling the landscape before arriving at the market itself. Alaba is a city unto itself, with streets, churches, banks, and apartments, all low, dusty structures built from inexpensive materials. The market, according to a rough and unsourced estimate from over a decade ago, may be the epicenter of 75 percent of West Africa’s electronics trade, may house 50,000 merchants, and may net $2 billion each year. 12 At Alaba, one can purchase anything from new flat-screen televisions to used generators to, of course, movies for home viewing.
Alaba’s location is a logical one for the largest Nigerian (and West African) electronics market, directly between two sources of product importation: one formal (the Apapa port) and one informal (the Benin border at Seme). 13 The peripheral location isolates Alaba from government officials, allowing it to thrive on formal neglect. The market can spread as far as it would like without running into anything that the city would consider important enough to protect or regulate. The only efforts at delimitation are internal, and the market’s infrastructure is mostly self-made. Merchants have private radio-wave towers to ensure mobile phone service, and operate private generators to ensure power. In their study of Alaba as urban form, architect Rem Koolhaas and his colleagues 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. Alaba’s self-governance has also included private development of a parking lot, local secretariat, fire station, and local library. 14
Despite its fragmented connection to formal trade and governance, Alaba has forged its own global network and emerged as a central hub in the circulation of electronics in West Africa, as well as in Nollywood’s own circulation networks. The market mirrors Lagos itself, a global megacity that is often said to be growing “off the grid.” Possibly home to 21 million, 15 with less than a third connected to public water supply, 16 Lagos may be on its way to becoming the third largest city in the world, depending on how you count and who is counting. In understanding Lagos, the fungibility of its population estimates speaks to the culture of Lagos at large: mostly informal, undocumented, and difficult to officially count for those who make their living counting such things (and it is worth noting that counting such things has significant financial implications, as population and business figures directly affect applications for everything from loans to grants).
Both Alaba and Lagos are central locations in the production and distribution of Nollywood titles. The growth of their infrastructures serves as not just context but also metaphor for the logics that guide industrial operations in Nollywood. The next two sections of this chapter will detail those specific conventions, focusing on the informal networks that structure Nollywood’s industrial organization and labor processes.