Naming Nollywood

(Norimitsu Onishi)--Back in 2002, on a phone call to an editor, I was trying to explain that I’d been working hard, really, during a visit to Lagos, my favorite city in West Africa, the region I was covering at the time. I’d spent a few days hanging out in the district of Surulere, which had emerged as Nigeria’s moviemaking capital. It seemed filmmakers were busy shooting on every street corner, frantically churning out what were then called home videos. 
Young would-be actresses and actors came from all over the country, wanting to be discovered. Over hot pepper soup and Gulder beer at Winis, a hotel that served as a studio and the site of never-ending parties, producers and directors told me with typical Nigerian ambition and bravado that they were building the new Hollywood. I even flirted with the possibility of playing the role of an evil white man, a bit part in a production called “Love of My Life.”

It’s like Hollywood or Bollywood but in Nigeria — Nollywood! I told my editor. A few days later, my article appeared on the front page, under a headline that christened the world’s newest movie powerhouse: “Step Aside, L.A. and Bombay, for Nollywood.” Fourteen years later, Nigeria’s movies have won fans across Africa and the African diaspora worldwide, and they are known to all as ... Nollywood.

I’ve received occasional queries over the years from the growing cohort of academics doing research on Nollywood: “Was I the one who had coined ‘Nollywood’?” I’d reply that a copy editor had written the headline, but, yeah, sure, “Nollywood” appeared for the first time with my article.

A Czech graduate student doing a master’s thesis on Nollywood emailed me a few years ago: “I would like to ask you if this invention came as result of a sudden inspiration, or if you remember thinking about using the word more deeply.”

The truth is, it was only during a recent visit to Nigeria — my first in more than a dozen years — that I got a full taste of my unearned fame in Nollywood. Introducing myself at random shoots, I’d be rewarded with a look of recognition that I could watch spread across a face or two around me. When I cold-called leading movie figures, their voices would soften at the mere mention of my name and that of The Times.

“Oh, yes, you’re Nollywood,” Mahmood Ali-Balogun, a leading Nollywood filmmaker, said the second I introduced myself in an out-of-the-blue phone call. We began chatting as if he had been expecting my call for the past decade.

The next morning, I called upon Mr. Ali-Balogun in his office in Surulere. Nollywood, he told me, had redefined African cinema since my 2002 article. In collaboration with other African filmmakers, Nollywood was making movies and telling stories about Africans for Africans without the financial or editorial involvement of Westerners.

But the term “Nollywood” itself was not without controversy. After all, an industry that was asserting cultural independence had been branded by an American newspaper, without, it must be said, much deep thought or maybe even sudden inspiration. Some Nigerians, and even non-Nigerians, weren’t happy about that. More than halfway into a two-and-a-half-hour talk, I gently asked Mr. Ali-Balogun about this.

“It doesn’t matter who names the child,” he said with a smile.

Norimitsu Onishi is chief of The New York Times’s southern Africa bureau, based in Johannesburg. He previously covered Southeast Asia, Japan and the Korean Peninsula, and West Africa for The Times.