Nollywood

Nollywood’s rapid growth and success has allowed it to become an important space of decolonization in visual culture and a tool for the reshaping of Nigeria’s national and international depiction. Historically, the film industry in the west has created oppressive images of Africa and blackness; cinematic narratives depicting Africa as backwards and Africans as inferior have contributed to the survival and continuous reproduction of cultural imperialism. Nollywood has challenged these falsehoods and oppressive attitudes by creating a space where African stories are told from the perspective of African people. Nollywood gave Africa a tool to take their collective agency back -agency that has been neglected to them because of colonialism for centuries- by giving African people the power to decide how to tell, depict, and sell their stories, their cultures, their histories. In the words of Olibanji Akinola, “emancipation can be imagined within the films in Nollywood” (12).

The establishment of Nollywood as a critical creative space is an explicit refusal to participate in global structures of oppression. As Toni Cade Bambara said, “revolution begins with the self, in the self.” Nigeria started a revolutionary change by creating a space for cinematic narratives that exposed oppressive structures that operated within the country, and from that struggle they became a tool of decolonization for the entire continent.