By Jide Akinsemoyin
Last week, I had to contact my UK credit card company by phone. The representative who handled my case introduced herself as Kemi. She was of Nigerian heritage like me, and judging by her name, also from the same Yoruba ethnic group. Recognizing our shared nationality and ethnicity, she jokingly greeted me in Yoruba, and we exchanged light-hearted banter before diving into the details of my case.
This interaction made me reflect on how the experience of being Nigerian in the United Kingdom today compared to when I first arrived there as a student in the late 1970’s. Whilst my generation at that time sought to blend into UK society rather than assert our cultural identity and who we were, today’s Nigerians seem much more at ease embracing and expressing their heritage. I doubt that, in my time, I would have done what Kemi did, not because I lacked the confidence to do so, but because the Nigerian backstory of the 70’s, 80’s and even the 90’s, is markedly different to the backstory of today’s Nigeria.
For me, leaving Nigeria meant leaving a country where everyone looked like me, to go to a country where my race placed me in the minority. It was a time when UK perceptions of Africa were shaped not by African storytellers and historians, but by a powerful, Western owned, traditional media, who promoted an African narrative that supported their own commercially driven interests on the continent. This was the narrative of a broken region, where Africans lacked the basic skills, capacity, or interest to fix Africa, and whose only recourse was to look to the superior West for help and money to solve its problems. The objective was to keep the continent poor and underdeveloped, thus providing the West with cheap and unfettered access to its abundant natural resources.
Hollywood played a big part in reinforcing this narrative, churning out popular TV series in the 70’s like Kojak and Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle (both of which were shown on prime-time Nigerian TV), with their negative stereotyping of African Americans and Africans. Band-aid and Live Aid in the 1980’s, although well intentioned in the objective of raising funds to fight the Ethiopian famine, also contributed to this narrative, with negative stereotypical images of starving Africans plastered across Western TV networks. In the absence of similarly powerful, home grown media organisations on the African side to provide a counterbalance to this Western narrative, the West was able to impose their version of the African story on Africa and the world, without challenge.
Today, Nigerians arrive in the United Kingdom with a very different backstory to the one I have just described. This backstory has been hugely influenced by the success of Nigeria’s creative industry on the global stage, particularly in music, film, acting, literature, art and gastronomy. Social media has played an instrumental role in enabling these stories to be easily shared with a global audience.
In music Afrobeats has become a global phenomenon, creating a host of Nigerian superstars in the process. Included in this list are Davido, who appeared on Time magazines Time 100 Next list and is widely regarded as one of the most important Afrobeats artists of the 21st century, Grammy award winner Burna Boy, the most streamed African artist on Spotify in 2024 and first African to sell out a stadium in the United States, Tiwa Savage, who sang at King Charles III coronation concert in 2023 and is the most followed African woman on social media with over 31 million followers across several platforms, and Wizkid, another Grammy Award winner and recipient of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) plaque for his songwriting contributions to American artist Drake’s song, One dance. Also making waves are three-time ASCAP Award winner Rema, Grammy Award winner Tems, and Grammy Award nominee Ayra Starr.
In literature, we have established literary icons like the late Chinua Achebe, winner of the Man Booker International Prize in 2007 and Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986, along with other prize winning writers like Ben Okri, winner of the Booker prize in 1991 for his book The Famished Road, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, winner of the AKO Caine prize for African writing in 2006 for her book Half of a Yellow Sun, and the late Buchi Emecheta, who was awarded a British OBE in 2005 for services to literature.
In films we have screen actors like Chiwetel Ejiofor, David Oyelowo and John Boyega who have made their mark in Hollywood, whilst in fashion, designers like Deola Sagoe, Lisa Folawiyo, Folake Akindele Coker (founder of Tiffany Amber) and Mai Atafo continue to bring African inspired designs and fabrics such as Ankara, Aso, Oke and Adire to a global audience.
In the world of art, we have the late painter and sculptor Ben Enwonwu, arguably the most influential African artist of the 20th century, internationally renowned printmaker, painter and sculptor, Bruce Onobrakpeya, who has exhibited at the Tate Modern Gallery, National Museum of African Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, and portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, the first African-American (of Nigerian heritage) to paint an official US presidential portrait (of President Obama) for display at the Smithsonian National Portrait gallery.
In the world of films, Nollywood, the second biggest producer of movies in the world after Bollywood in India, is set to reach an estimated $14.82 billion in revenue in 2025, according to the Nigerian Entertainment Conference (NECLive).
Finally, in the field of gastronomy, Michelin star Nigerian and West African restaurants were well represented in the 2024 National Restaurant Awards list of 100 best restaurants in the UK. Ikoyi, the UKs first Michelin star Nigerian restaurant owned by Jeremy Chan and Iré Hassan-Odukale came in at number 10, Akoko, the Michelin star restaurant owned by Aji Akokomi (Chef Ayo Adeyemi also won the Chef to watch award) came in at number 23 and Chishuru, another Michelin star restaurant owned by Adejoké Bakare (who was also awarded Chef of the Year), came in at 31.
People have a natural desire to be associated with success. In that regard, the positive response of British Nigerians to the success of Nigeria’s creative industry can be said to be an extension of that natural desire. This has been particularly evident in the field of sports where British Nigerian’s are also excelling. Footballer Ademola Lookman, winner of the CAF 2024 African Footballer of the Year Award, was proud to showcase his Nigerian heritage to the world by wearing traditional agbada attire and giving part of his acceptance speech in Yoruba at the CAF awards ceremony in Morocco. Former heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua, in his speech at the annual Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey in London in 2020, declared he was “proudly Nigerian and proudly British”, and made reference to Fish and chips, alongside the popular Nigerian dishes of Egusi soup and pounded yam in his closing remarks. Maro Itoje, one of England’s finest Rugby players (named in the 2023 “Powerlist” for most influential black people in the UK and Tatler’s Little Black book 2022), has often spoken publicly in interviews of his pride in his Nigerian heritage. Is it any surprise then that Kemi, the representative I spoke to at my credit card company, found it completely normal to converse with me in Yoruba?
The emergence of social media has been instrumental to the global success of Nigeria’s creative industry. It has also negated the power of the Western owned traditional media to control the African narrative the way they did in my early days in the UK. What people think about Africa is a function of the information they have about Africa, both visual and written. Social media, by changing the way in which people access information and how they share and consume such information, has and is positively changing the way Africa is perceived by Africans and the world. Hollywood has demonstrated an understanding of that change by making the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in 2022, portraying a world where it is not too much to believe that a country in Africa could be the most technologically advanced nation in the world. The film went on to gross over $850m at the box office, the 6th highest grossing movie in 2022, indicating how far we have moved away from the African narrative of pre social media days.
The excellence of Nigeria’s creative industry has become a badge of success for Africa because Nigeria’s success is Africa’s success. Even Hollywood, which produced Kojak and Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle in the 70s, has moved with the times in wanting to be associated with that success. More will surely follow in the days and years ahead as Nigeria’s creative industry continues to make an even bigger impact on the global stage.
