A trader with too many blank videotapes started Nollywood. The story of Living in Bondage
Kenneth Nnebue had a warehouse problem: too many blank videotapes and not enough buyers. His answer was to record a film on them.
The film was Living in Bondage, released in 1992 and shot straight to video. It is widely described as the first Nollywood blockbuster, with sales of more than a million copies, and it launched the home-video industry that turned Nigeria into one of the largest film producers in the world by volume.
The trader
Nnebue was a businessman in the eastern Nigerian market town of Onitsha who dealt in electronics and imported cassettes. In the early 1990s he had been producing Yoruba-language films on video and distributing music. With a large stock of imported blank tapes, he saw that a story people wanted to watch would sell the tapes faster than they would sell empty.
He produced Living in Bondage in Igbo, with English subtitles, and it was directed by Chris Obi Rapu. The budget was tiny by any cinema standard, the camera was a video camera, and the plan for distribution was the same market network that moved cassettes of music and foreign films across Nigeria.
The story that hooked the country
The plot follows Andy Okeke, played by Kenneth Okonkwo, a man desperate for wealth who joins a secret cult. The price of entry is the sacrifice of his wife, Merit. He becomes rich, and then her ghost begins to haunt him. The film mixed the money worries of 1990s Nigeria with a morality tale about ritual wealth, and audiences recognised both.
It was sold on tape through markets and rented through video clubs, and people watched it at home rather than in cinemas, which had been in decline for years because of insecurity, economic crisis and the cost of screening imported films. Home video gave Nigerians stories set in their own cities, in their own languages, with actors who looked like their neighbours.
The boom
After Living in Bondage, producers rushed to copy the model. Films were made in days rather than months, often for small budgets, and released to markets straight away. By the 2000s Nigeria was producing well over a thousand titles a year. The name Nollywood came into use in the early 2000s, and the films spread across Africa and the diaspora on tapes, then DVDs, then satellite channels.
Ghana was part of that story from early on. Ghanaian home-video producers were making films on video at the same time, and Ghanaian actors such as Van Vicker, Majid Michel, Jackie Appiah and Nadia Buari became stars across the Nollywood market in the 2000s.
The sequel, 27 years later
In 2019, Ramsey Nouah directed Living in Bondage: Breaking Free, a sequel that brought back Kenneth Okonkwo and followed Andy Okeke’s son into the same world of cult wealth. It was released in cinemas, showing how far the industry had moved from its videotape start.
Andy Okeke’s descent into ritual wealth has been parodied and referenced in Nigerian films for decades. The tapes Nnebue could not sell empty are now a museum-grade piece of African film history.
