Inside Nigeria’s porn industry
By
Sun News Publishing
Saturday,
May 20, 2006
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Photo: Sun
News Publishing |
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Months after Saturday Sun expose on child sex industry and
the consequent police raids on Lagos brothels housing teenage
girls, EMMANEL MAYAH (emmamayah@yahoo.co.uk) investigates
yet another vice; this time, the underground world of pornographic
filmmakers. He discovers some secret locations, recruitment
mode and the Mafia-style creed turning the wheel of an industry
nicknamed Nude Nollywood.
Ever wondered what became of the hundreds of Nigerian ladies
deported yearly from Italy and other parts of Europe where
they had sojourned on sex trade? Ever heard of one success
story out of the much-publicised scheme designed to give a
new life to those victims(?) of human trafficking? In other
words, have you ever seen one former comfort-girl, plucked
from the glitzy life of Torino, now sweating it out as a waitress
or apprentice fashion designer, all in the name of rehabilitation?
In more ways than one, the Italy returnees, already used to
measuring their essence in dollars and Euro, have proved that
the leopard cannot really change its spot. Wanting in skills
and good academic qualification, the last thing anyone heard
about these girls was the unsuccessful bid, of some of the
most desperate among them, to return to Europe. For those
that went underground, never to be heard of again, the conclusion
was that a few truly slipped across the border while the majority
stayed back in the country to do other things.
Those “other things” may never had been known
but for a discreet newspaper advert tucked away in the crowded
pages of society magazines including Fame, Encomium and City
People. The message was innocuous and simply informed the
reader of the availability of a collection of adult home videos
made in Nigeria. The advert further listed the addresses of
some distributors in Lagos, Ibadan and other cities where
these items could be purchased. The year was 2001.
Like a wildfire, the news spread across the cities. In their
hundreds, possibly thousands, connoisseurs of illicit tastes
trooped out to these stores to get copies. Some were lucky.
Among the home-grown porn on sale were videos with explicit
titles as Valentine Sex Party, Oba’s Nine Daughters,
A Forest of Flowers, The last Nigerian Virgin and Allen Avenue.
Hotter than hot cake, the producers of those porn smiled to
the bank, but only for a short time. Vice squads in Lagos
and other cities swooped on the distributors, confiscating
hundreds of cartons of porn. It is not on record that any
of the producers or distributors was charged to court. The
X-rated industry suffered what the players merely saw as a
teething problem.
The producers returned to their underground and to the drawing
board. As they figured out, even at the outset, their only
headache was distribution. Getting ‘raw materials’
for their kind of business was no big deal. With the deportation
of Nigerian prostitutes from Italy, Lagos especially was crawling
with idle girls, rearing to do what they knew how to do best,
even before the camera. These ‘veterans’ would
later serve as mentors to their home-base counterparts, who
displayed at the very first opportunity, a knack for quick
learning.
There were also no short supply of unemployed young men who,
uncertain of their next meal, were eager for a few thousand
naira to play the role of studs in dirty flicks. Encouraging
as the public response to their products was, they could not
penetrate the market, certainly not through the conventional
route that employed major distributors who for legitimate
movies, control all aspects of distribution from duplication,
marketing and delivery to the collection of revenue. For the
various amateur porn production companies, however, the roadblock
just must be dismantled. They even formed an association to
fight their common enemy. Like brothel owners and other counterparts
in the vice industry, they too forged a pact with law enforcement
agencies. It was only a matter of time before they began to
rise from the ashes of their debacle.
In the beginning
When in 1996, the home movie Domitilla was released, it immediately
became a box office hit, grossing over N70 million to the
producers and pirates alike. The mad rush for the flick had
little to do with fantastic acting and certainly nothing of
technical wizardry of the director – even as these were
not lacking.
Being a tale of prostitution and city girls, Domitilla’s
only magnetism was a whiff of sex. Poor movie watchers had
gone for it in the conclusion that the movie would parade
some flesh, raunchy scenes and possibly frontal nudity.
Right from the moment the seductive posters hit the streets
and titillating radio jingle the airwave, the rush of hormone
translated into a manic rush for the videotapes. Though Domitilla
was such a commercial success the movie title crept into the
Nigerian lexicon, if anybody expected it to be Nigeria’s
first erotica, they cursed silently after watching it.
Whatever the promises and failings of Domitilla, the movie
proved that in show business as elsewhere, nothing sells like
sex. Already, a huge appetite had been provoked which Kenneth
Nnebue cashed in on with his production of Glamour Girls.
The latter was more successful if only because it was more
daring. Smart in the ways it manoevered withiniron cage of
censorship, Glamour Girls was able to show some flesh; that
of an unknown Eucharia Anunobi in a bathtub scene with Zack
Orji. A star was born just as Eucharia emerged Nigeria’s
first sex symbol. Movie viewers went on to dub her “Nigeria’s
Sharon Stone” and Eucharia lived up to that name, shedding
her clothes in more films including Theo Akatugba’s
Native
If Eucharia had any claim to Nollywood’s sex symbol,
she got a good run from actresses like Barbara Udoh, Halima
Abubakar (nicknamed the wild cat) and Bimbo Akintola, the
busty graduate of University of Ibadan who, it was revealed
by her former boyfriend (actor Yemi Solade) never wore anything
under her dress. The bad girls’ club would received
a boost when Shan George shocked her pastor, dramatically
shedding her good girl image only to snap up in rapid succession,
semi-nude roles which she intepreted with leather outfits
that left little to the imagination. Tried as she did to be
certified queen of erotica, Shan was eclipsed by an unknown
but daring actress named Cossy Orjiakor who took Nollywood
by storm with her uninhibited spirit and watermelon chest.
With actresses like Angela Phillips, Foluke Daramola, Ronke
Oshodi, Grace Evaly and Jennifer Eliogu, Cossy certainly was
not the first woman to come to Nollywood with voluptuous breasts.
Though good acting ability was not one of her strong points,
she became an instant phenomenon with her generous display
of her most prized assets, in the process building a cult
following of drooling perverts.
With a degree in Accounting and a Masters in Management from
the best of schools, Cossy never pretended to anyone that
she could act. Her ticket to fame was her natural endowment
and with that chest she redefined sex on the screen, not only
taking it to the roof but dismissing the likes of Eucharia
Anunobi and Shan George as “old school.”
Before Cossy, Nollywood’s video features fell into five
clearly distinguishable genres: Voodoo, love stories, epic,
comedy and gangster movies. With Cossy, sex or erotic thrillers
was blatantly added. Movie producers raced to her with scripts
specially written for her. With films like Outcast and Itohan,
the story lines all had excuses and sequences for Cossy to
bare her body. The busty actress did not disappoint anyone.
She proved herself a happy exhibitionist even as she became
the target of housewives’ venom. As it turned out, Cossy’s
mammary glands were as sought after outside film location
as inside it. On TV stations across the country, the girl
from Anambra State became the subject of heated debates among
clerics, academics, film critics, bigots and liberals alike.
Cossy had over 15 movies to her credit, but in what would
amount to a conspiracy to yank her off the screen, producers
began to drop her like a hot potatoe. With the Censors Board
banning almost all her last movies, the producers having incurred
huge losses were unwilling to gamble anymore with her boobs.
One man however, who continued to gamble with Cossy was the
dimunitive music promoter, Gbenga Adewusi. A shrewd businessman,
Adewusi was the pioneer of lecherous music videos in Nigeria.
Having watched with delight the commercially successful marriage
of porn and Hip-hop in America, the CEO of Bayowa Films and
Records International was hell-bent in procuring local materials’
to produce his own version of Luke’s Freakshow, Hip-Hop
Honeys, Snoop Dogg’s Diary of a pimp and 50 cent’s
Groupie Love and And the Lord said … Let there be Pum
Pum, among others.
Styling himself as an avant garde, Obesere – the popular
Fuji musician, notorious for his gutter lyrics – was
a natural choice for Bayowa’s project. Together they
produced Gogo Night in 2000 which unbelievably showed glimpses
of pubis. To this day, it remains a mystery how Bayowa was
able to navigate without drowning the stormy waters of both
the National Film and Video Censor’s Bard (NFVCB) and
the Nigeria Broadcasting Commission (NBC) which had variously
yanked off air Femi Kuti’s innocuous Bang Bang Bang
and Zule Zoo’s Kerewa.
Allegations of heavy inducement were rife but having tested
the waters, Bayowa raised the stake even higher. He had gone
ahead to sign on the voluptuous Cossy who was only too happy
to lead a pack of other skimpily clad ladies to wiggle, pout
and titillate in a succession of X-rated musical including
Apple Juice, His Excellency, Fuji Gyration and G-String Carnival.
Clips of these raunchy videos were advertised on television
and while some viewers concluded that Cossy had finally gone
off the hook of sanity, the actress cum erotic dancer was
reportedly coveted by rich politicians and their sons. For
all her recklessness’ and ‘plain naivety’
Cossy silenced her critics when she acquired a choice property
in Lekki.
If Cossy was an embarrassment to her folks back home, the
emotion was nothing compared to that elicited by Kano-born
Halima Abubakar who like Cossy Orijiafor came to Nollywood
with an open mind. Having weighed the odds against her, Halima
was quick to put a tattoo to her breast and flaunted it in
the right places. She was soon linked with half a dozen footballers
including Celestine Babayaro. Yes, Halima got a few roles
in the movies but she got more doing seductive scenes in the
private homes of the rich and mighty. Unlike Cossy, she added
class to her art, and even did a photo shot for T&B Lingerie
in Paris. Among others thing, she has done a calendar job
in South Africa.
The real McCoy
Sex musicals may have assumed a new trend with Obesere, not
only taking to cross-dressing on stage but recording and marketing
his life concerts with strippers in London, the real McCoy
in the porn business however remain the faceless producers
with underground outfits mostly in Lagos, Benin and Port Harcourt.
In the chase of locally-made hardcores, Saturday Sun gathered
that commercial porn production effectively began in 1999
months into the advent of democracy, however sex videos in
Nigeria actually began to rear their heads under military
regimes between 1995 and 1998, but especially under the Abacha
junta when debauchery so permeated the corridors of power
it became official pastime.
If anything, the flick Glamour Girls 2, exposed the depravity
and kinky sex Nigerian ladies trafficked to Italy were subjected
to. In the movie, Tina Amuziam, chasing the big buck,was cajoled
by her husband (Zack Orji) to sleep with a dg just to satisfy
the pervert taste of a white client. Naturally, Nigerians
felt such act was only possible in the realm of make-believe.
In 1998 however, they were shocked to their marrow when a
sequence of events revealed that what was going on in real
life was even more outrageous.
It started with a female undergraduate of a university in
the South East who was admitted to a hospital with acute itching.
For days, the girl was scratching and yelling like a wild
animal. In a case widely reported in the papers, no one would
had been able to fathom what was going on until another girl
died of the same acute itching, thus forcing the first female
student to a confession. Knowing that death was imminent and
unable to bear anymore the uncanny itching, she told doctors
that she and her late friend had been forced by a German expatriate
to sleep with his Alsatian dogs. For a handsome fee, they
had sex with the randy canine while the expatriate recorded
the scenes on video.
When police raided the home of the expatriate, stacks of pornographic
videos, all showing naked Nigerian girls were confiscated.
At his arrest and interrogation, the German said the sex videos
were for his personal pleasure, the police however had reasons
to believe the X-rated tapes were exported to Europe for commercial
purposes.
Whichever, the national outrage that greeted the sex-with-dogs
story did not subside until the government said the offending
expatriate had been deported. Even at that, tongues did snot
stop wagging as people asked one another how long ago such
bizarre sex activities had been going on in the country unnoticed.
At the end, enough information trickled out to suggest that
the major culprits in the making of porn videos in Nigeria
were military officers, expatriate workers, politicians, businessmen
and oil workers stationed in Warri, Eket and Port Harcourt.
Italian connection
Saturday Sun’s investigations revealed that until 1999
most of the porn videos produced in Nigeria were done by amateurs,
often notorious hedonists, who with a handful of dollars and
expensive gifts got university girls to do their biddings.
It was even said that with the help of hi-tech cameras, the
porn makers filmed all the kinky sex scenes in their private
homes without as much as the girls having a clue to the fact
that they were being recorded.
In 2001, however, when police raided those porn outlets in
Lagos and Ibadan as advertised in some tabloids, the commercial
nature of the confiscated videos was never in doubt. They
all bore the marks of professionals. What more, the naked
women in the videos were not innocent, dew-eyed debutantes
rather scorching femme fantales who had lost their inhibitions
to dirty lucres.
They left no one in doubt, having long turned their bodies
into sex machines that could be manipulated to achieve desired
erotic effects. Their naunces were not something picked up
from the frivolities common on Nigerian campuses, rather from
exposure to an international sex industry alive with all its
gaudy sophistication. Though it was not branded on their faces,
the lingos and mannerism of most of the ladies in the sex
videos strongly suggested they were deportees from Italy.
Evidences would emerge that x-rated videos like Oba’s
Nine Daughters did not only star former victims of human trafficking,
the productions were financed by former madames, some of whom
had as many as 30 girls in their carted back then in Italy.
With the police hot on the heels of porn distributors in 2001,
not every movie lover who wanted copies of the domestic porn
was able to do so. As the producers were driven farther aground,
the video tapes became one of the scarcest commodies with
prices reaching as high as N2,500 per copy. As Saturday Sun
discovered, the tapes and CDs are available, they are not
necessarily displayed on the shelf. In fact, the retail control
was such that only those who truly desired porn could get
them only after due perseverance.
The first tape that Saturday Sun procured was Valentine Sex
Party and this was at a shop (address witheld) that sold exclusive
male accessories from cologne to spanish fly aphrodisiac.
The shop in question is located inside a shopping plaza befind
Habib Platinum Bank at Adeniyi Jones’ side of Allen
Roundabout, Ikeja.
Valentine Sex Party turned out to be striptease work performed
by Nigerian girls at an unindentified club possibly in Ikeja,
Apapa or Lagos Island. The girls were all attired in sexy
party dresses that included the shortest of minis. To the
beats of reggae and Makossa, they swayed and twisted. Every
movement exposed their crotches and as simulated passion rose
to crescendo, they abandoned themselves to their male partners
who were they in their movie to play the role of Val dates.
The producers of this porn did not give their names but the
beer posters in the background, pidgin English and mannerism
of the actors oozed Nigeria.
Among the tapes purchased by Saturday Sun four had same flavour
as Valentine Sex Party. Each were shot in a club or private
home using different amateur actresses. None of them had the
names of the producers. In fact, except for the one entitled
Allen Avenue, the rest had no titles. Someone had merely used
a typewriter to write “Nigerian Sex Film”, cut
them out with a blade and pasted them on the tapes. It was
only Allen Avenue that had something close to a story-line.
The camera tracked some girls standing on the popular street.
Next, they were engaged in what was supposed to be dialogue
with male customers in flashy cars. The scene changed to a
mansion which gate had been flung wide open. About eight cars
parked with party-freaks glide in and the girls are deposited
in a swimming pool.
Another porn outlet discovered by Saturday Sun was on Awolowo
Way Ikeja, at a building next door to MEB Eye Clinic. Inside
a shop, aptly named Love Shop, that sold foreign adult magazines,
perfumes, lingeries and wait for this, dildos, this reporter
purchased a Nigerian porn entitled ‘A Forest Of Flowers’.
This film turned out to be one the most adventurous of local
x-rated videos. To leave you not in doubt of what you have
in your hands, the girls in the porn spoke Yoruba, Ibo and
Hausa languages. This sex movie actually had a plot, and a
rural setting. It began with four village girls on their way
to the farm. While they dwell on the latest gossips, they
are unaware of some randy villians laying in ambush. When
the attack eventually came, it was no surprise to anyone.
And while the girls were supposed to be dealing with rapists,
they actually helped their attackers to have their way. The
snag for the producer was that though beautiful girls were
used, the male actors couldn’t play the studs. Most
of the time they couldn’t get it up or had come too
quickly.
To salvage the production and at least stretch it to one hour,
the hands of a desperate director could be seen behind the
camera as he motioned on the girls to give the rapists blow
job. Next, the boys were seen drinking bottles of stout as
if that would keep them going.
Investigations by Saturday Sun revealed that the producers
of A Forest Of Flowers are actually husband and wife named
Charles and Sandra Ekwunife. Both are the publishers of a
porn magazine called Better Lover which the lawyer husband
initiated in 1996. According to a male hairdresser who was
part of another x-rated movie produced by the couple, the
a videos were shot in the coconut groove of Badagry.
The Ekwunifes, having made millions in publishing went into
movie production to expand their empire. They are also linked
with the love shop and the importation of sex accessories.
Having long dumped his wig, the husband styles himself as
the Hugh Hefner of Nigeria. A journalist who after NYSC, started
out writing for Better Lover told Saturday Sun that while
he was there, the Ekwunifes had close to thirty girls in their
employ.
Awed by the soaraway success of the Ekwunifes, another porn
publisher, by the name Peter Rock jumped on the x-rated video
bandwagon. A professional cartoonist, Rock was said to have
taken some girls to Cotonou in neighbouring Benin Republic
having convinced them the movie was meant for foreign market.
The cartoonist allegedly ran into problems in the French-speaking
country and had to abandon the production.
Beside Rock, Saturday Sun gathered that a host of youngmen
who cut their teeth under Ekwunife left to set up their own
porn magazine. One of them simply called Prince is the publisher
of a junk entitled Forever. Operating out of an apartment
in Egbeda suburb of Lagos, Prince had learnt all the baits
to hook young and sometimes unsuspecting ladies. For as little
as N6,000 these girls are made to pose nude. One particular
girl who it is not known what she was told before she bared
it all reportedly came to the Egbeda office weeping profusely
after she saw her nude photos published in a ragsheet and
displayed at newstands.
At the last count, Nigeria’s porn industry had as many
as twenty production houses, some of them owned by former
sex workers deported from Italy. Among the latest works in
the market is Nigeria Hottest Mapouka Sexy Dance, produced
by Crazy World Entertainment which has an outlet at Ubakason
Plaza, Alaba International Market. Others are Nigeria Flying
Girls and Sweetest Taboo produced by Climax Productions and
Nigeria Mapouka Uyompem produced by Sontec Digital Production
Ltd in collaboration with Tonard Internation Ltd.
Having identified porn as a new money spinner, quite a number
of Alaba businessmen are putting their money into porn business.
One x-rated clips called Mapouka Legends has the photo of
actor Jim Iyke on its cover. It is not a ruse. The video actually
had a 7-minute clip of the actor at a nightclub simulating
sex with different girls who patiently lined up waiting for
their turn.
Saturday Sun gathered that local porn producers have become
prolific, churning out videos, many of which are exported
to neighbouring African countries like Benin, Togo and Ivory
Coast.
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