The end of Nollywood's guilded age? Marketers, the state and the struggle for distribution

Abstract

The Nigerian National Film and Video Censors Board has played a key role in Nollywood's story, using classifications to promote spectacular narratives about the industry. The Board's 2006 Distribution Framework was an ambitious attempt to create a new set of classifications and constituted the Nigerian State's first serious attempt to regulate Nollywood marketing. It aimed to create a centralized film distribution structure, but its implementation was traumatic, with the parastatal Censors Board, industry guilds and individual marketers struggling to shape the process. This paper examines these institutions' conflicts over the enforcement of regulation and contestations over institutional legitimacy, and the marketers’ struggles for social self-realization. The initiative is analysed across four scenes: Impasse, Realignment, Coercion/Shaming, and Transformation. At the conclusion of the final scene, the Censors Board had largely succeeded in its confrontation with the guilds, but was unable to fully legitimate the Framework and to remould the marketers into the desired structure. This gave the marketers the space and ideological resources to appropriate the Board's conflict and contestation strategies through their own uses of the licences. Nevertheless, the Board did succeed in creating a new set of classifications, enabling it to create new industry-transforming narratives in the future.