By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Whenever Onitsha gets into any business, other cities take a back seat. When market literature was in vogue, Onitsha was the leader. Now that home movies have taken over, Onitsha has shot ahead as the centre of the booming trade.
According to a study published by the British Library in 1990, Market Literature from Nigeria: A Checklist, there was zero publishing output in Onitsha as of 1949 when Lagos could boast of as many as 19 titles. By 1950-54, Lagos accounted for 30 books while Onitsha had only seven titles. From 1955 to 1959, Onitsha gained ascendancy with 56 books against 31 from Lagos. In the boom years of 1960 to 1966, Onitsha published a whopping 411 titles while Lagos had only 65 books. Of course, the civil war years of 1967 to 1970 dealt a heavy blow to the growth of market literature in Onitsha, but that is another story.
Onitsha market literature was made up of inexpensive booklets and pamphlets comprising genres such as fiction, plays, verses, current affairs, language primers, social etiquette, religious tracts, history, biography, manuals, collections of proverbs, letter-writing, traditional customs and, of course, money-making. There is actually a title How to get Rich Overnight by H. O. Ogu.
Colonialism and its education somewhat “opened the eyes” of the authors of the market literature. Some of the soldiers who had travelled to Burma and other sectors of the Second World War came back with exotic ideas. The economic prosperity that followed the war provided extra income for leisure reading. As large numbers of rural dwellers trooped to Onitsha, the book market shot up especially as there was massive expansion in primary and secondary education after the war. The Onitsha publishers made up of a close-knit group of families from some surrounding towns were in effective control of apprenticeships, sub-contracts and agencies while organising the distribution of their titles to all parts of Nigeria and indeed West Africa.
Sales of the booklets ranged from three thousand copies per title to 100,000 copies for bestsellers such as Ogali A. Ogali’s play, Veronica My Daughter. Scholars and writers like Chinua Achebe, Emmanuel Obiechina, Ulli Beier, Michael Echeruo, Ernest Emenyonu, Ime Ikiddeh, Bernth Lindfors, John Reed, Alain Ricard, Adrian Roscoe etc. have written extensively on the Onitsha market literature phenomenon.
A quotable quote from one of the titles, from the recently deceased Ogali’s Veronica My Daughter, goes thus: “As I was descending from a declivity yesterday with such an excessive velocity, I suddenly lost the centre of my gravity and was precipitated on the macadamised thoroughfare.” The next character then says: “I hope your bones were mercilessly broken.” The reply from Bomber Billy of bombast comes this way: “Don’t put my mind under perturbation!”
Some of the more prominent Onitsha authors and their titles include: J. Abiakam How to Speak to Girls and Win their Love; Cyril Aririguzo Miss Appolo’s Pride Leads her to be Unmarried; S. Eze How to know when a Girl Loves You or Hates You; Thomas Iguh $9000,000,000 Man still says No Money; Highbred Maxwell Public Opinion on Lovers; Nathan Njoku Beware of Women and My Seven Daughters are after Young Boys; Marius Nkwoh Cocktail Ladies and Talking about Love (with Mr Really Fact at St Bottles’ Church); Joseph Nnadozie Beware of Harlots and Many Friends; Raphael Obioha Beauty is a Trouble; Ogali A. Ogali Veronica My Daughter and No Heaven for the Priest; H.O. Ogu Rose Only Loved My Money and How a Passenger Collector Posed and got a Lady Teacher in Love; Rufus Okonkwo Why Boys Never Trust Money Monger Girls; Anthony Okwesa The Strange Death of Israel Njemanze; Okenwa Olisah Money Hard to get but Easy to Spend and Drunkards Believe Bar as Heaven; Speedy Eric Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away; Felix Stephen Lack of Money is not Lack of Sense etc.
In the audio-visual age of today, what Onitsha has lost in market literature it has more than gained in the production and marketing of home movies especially at the celebrated 51 Iweka Road. Impossibility is quite absent in the lexicon of the Onitsha entrepreneur. A wannabe Onitsha movie producer once breezed into Lagos with a briefcase filled to brim with money, insisting that he wanted to produce an urgent movie in which Richard Mofe-Damijo (RMD), arguably the then most sought-after leading man in Nollywood, would star. I was in the company of my about-to-be-wedded bride Chidimma when I ran into RMD, who incidentally is an old friend of mine, late in the morning in front of the Surulere, Lagos office of the movie producer Zeb Ejiro. We exchanged cursory pleasantries, but I became curious when I still saw him hanging around the one-storey house late in the evening as my fiancée and I were walking back home. It was then RMD told me the story of how the Onitsha man came with cash to make an instant movie named Scores to Settle, starring RMD and Regina Askia with the prolific Chico Ejiro as director. The man had chosen the cast and director all by himself before setting foot out of Onitsha. He knew who and what he wanted! No beating about the bush… The director, actors, actresses, technical crew etc. had to drop other jobs they had at hand to do the movie of the Onitsha man who paid upfront! When I travelled to Onitsha barely a week after to distribute my wedding invitation cards, I saw the now deceased ace Nollywood marketer Azubuike Udensi at 51 Iweka Road holding a movie sleeve bearing the title Scores to Settle.
“But that’s the movie RMD told me they were shooting just the other day in Lagos?” I wondered aloud.
“The film has sold out already,” Azubuike said. “There’s not a single copy left in Onitsha. This one I have here had to be borrowed from somebody…”
The most famous address in Nollywood resonates across Africa and indeed the world. It is as though no home video comes out of Nigeria without the ubiquitous address on its jacket: 51 Iweka Road, Onitsha.
It used to be a house meant for the selling of electronics. Not anymore, for the rise of the Nigerian movie industry has meant a shift of focus by the importers of the electronics. The business these days is the production and marketing of home videos.
The building is some 60 metres long and three storeys high, with more than a thousand shops, mini-shops and sheds scattered across its entire length and crannies. Makeshift staircases lead to some of the shops in the backyard. The house belongs to the famous Modebe family of Onitsha, and a young member of the family was so full of joy introducing himself as the most prominent landlord of Nollywood. Crowded, almost bursting at the seams and stuffy, the house is definitely not an architectural masterpiece. A major tenant in the building, Ugo Emmanuel, a proprietor of Emmalex Associates Ltd comes to the building’s defence by stressing that the oyster that produces the beautiful pearl happens to be very ugly.
Chief Rob Emeka Eze, CEO of Reemy Jes Nigeria Ltd and chairman of Association of Film/Video Producers and Marketers of Nigeria, is a key player in the industry who made the successful transition from importing electronics into producing and marketing home videos. “Concentration of video producers and marketers is high in Onitsha but very understandable,” Chief Eze says, adding: “The majority of the materials needed in film are consumables of electronics. As an importer, most of my goods must first come here. Most of the investors are here.”
Onitsha, or more specifically, 51 Iweka Road has since become the major centre of the booming film industry of Nigeria. About 45 movies are produced in Nigeria every week, and 51 Iweka Road provides outlets for bulk purchases and retailing. An attempt by a group known as the Filmmakers Co-operative of Nigeria (FCON) to break what it called the monopoly of the likes of the key players at Iweka Road in film distribution did not yield much fruit. The group set up an elaborate marketing plaza in the heart of Lagos, but it could not rise up to the efficiency of 51 Iweka Road.
The key players, notably Chief Ossy Affason, Chief Rob Eze of Reemy Jes Production, Ugo Emmanuel and Alex Okeke of Emmalex etc. have a hand-on approach to the production and marketing of movies. Schooled in the workaday life of trading, these proprietors have established vital links in the trading chain across the nation which come I to ready use in the distribution of their films.
They almost always chorus that they need “an enabling environment” from the government for the production and distribution of films. According to Chief Eze: “The government can help us by making things easier for us. Once I applied a police helicopter for one of my productions and I was made to wait for six months without getting any helicopter. I went to Sierra Leone, and it took me only three days to get it.”
He argues that the cancerous activities of the pirates can only be curbed by the government. “We hardly ever recoup our investment because of these pirates,” Eze says, adding: “There ought to be special loans for filmmakers at low-interest rates. The funds ought to be easily assessed without bottlenecks.”
Even without the needed loans, the tycoons at 51 Iweka Road are not doing badly at all. Ernest Ezenweinyinya, a major fan of Nigerian home videos, says: “The tycoons at Iweka Road deserve all the credit for undertaking the bankrolling of Nollywood which has turned otherwise hungry Nigerian actors and actresses into big players in the money world.”
