Nkem Owoh, Osuofia, and Nollywood

The Power of Film

"[Movie characters'] ideas become our ideas. Their thoughts become standards of our thinking and language. Their style of dress and movement are seen on the streets of our nation. And their moments of triumph and defeat become our successes and our failures."

Jodie Foster, as quoted in Movie Nights

Welcome to Nollywood's Excitement and Danger

It was when they pulled out the machetes that I started to worry.

I’d seen men with machetes in Africa before, but they were rusty, practical tools used for clearing away brush by the side of the highway. These were long, shiny and housed in decorative sheaths, pulled out ostensibly so the men could sit down more comfortably, but done with a clear, understated flair. They were more like sultan swords than jungle tools.

The kicking in my six-month pregnant belly had gone eerily silent since we entered the vigilante court at Alaba. I reassured myself that I’d been through things like this before. The time I went to visit Brazilian entrepreneur Marco Gomes’ hometown in the crime-ridden slums of central Brazil, comforted only by his reassurance that “No foreigner has ever died in my hometown, because no foreigner has ever been to my hometown.” And the time I was driving along the boarder between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and armed Rwandan guards stopped our car, wordlessly got in the backseat and hitched a ride for several miles.