Features and Essays

Surnames
Whose Name Do You Bear? The Politics of Surnames and the Erasure of African Women

The erasure of African women through surnames is not tradition, and it is not culture.…

Macondo Literary Festival
Macondo Literary Festival 2025: East Africa’s Literary Vanguard Holds Its Fifth Edition

Macondo Literary Festival is now one of Africa’s essential cultural rendezvous, a yearly promise kept…

music videos
Are Music Videos Relevant in Afro-Pop Today?

Today, music videos in Afro-Pop no longer mainly serve to reach new audiences. Instead, they…

Marketing
Noise or Attention: What Really Sells Nollywood Films?

What separates fleeting attention from lasting impact is not merely scale, spectacle, or formula, but…

Labubu dolls
How Capitalists Are Exploiting Us Through ‘Must-Haves’

What Labubu dolls, AI therapists, and Stanley Cups reveal is not just the power of…

To Kill a Monkey
To Kill a Conversation: Nollywood, Criticism, and the Culture of Silence

The danger of the constant antagonistic resistance to criticism is that it fosters a shallow…

Nigeria
Nigeria’s Class Problem and the Nepotism Debate

Nigeria has a serious class problem. As with all such societies, the controlling oligarchy is…

sexual violence
Dear Nollywood, Stop Using Sexual Violence as a Plot Device

There is a way to portray sexual violence onscreen, even in Nollywood, and that way…

African languages
Do African Languages Come From the Same Place?

Phonologically, African languages can find similarities based on a number of factors. Sound relationships are…

Geoblocking
How Geoblocking and Cinema Scheduling Bias Undermine Distribution in Nollywood

It becomes clear that while geoblocking is a significant barrier to Nollywood’s global reach, cinema…