 It's become something of a tradition for the forum to sponsor a kind of prequel to the Futures of Entertainment conference that will begin tomorrow and run over the weekend. And we're especially pleased to do that this year because the topic has such suggestive importance, it seems to me, concerning not only the question of the diffusion of media around the globe, but in particular the way in which West Africa, perhaps Africa more broadly, if our panelists are able to address that in a lesser way, is coping with and gobbling up and using, exploiting the cornucopia of technological possibilities that seems to have opened. Not all of them, maybe I'm putting it in too generous a way and we'll leave it to our panelists to tell us whether there's a dark side to these matters as well. My job is mainly to introduce our distinguished moderator and he will do the rest of the work for us. I should mention again for those of you, I also wanna say a special word of thanks to the CMS students who have already endured weirdly a long, tedious lecture and here they are again. I won't forget this, we're happy to see you. And I expect wonderful questions from you in the question period. The format of the forum is widely known but briefly let me outline it for those of you who are not familiar with our basic operations. In the first hour or 50 minutes or so, there's a sort of conversation amongst the moderator and the panelists and in the second hour, almost always the highlight of each forum, the audience gets to its say. There are microphones on each side and we ask you to come up and speak into the microphone, identifying yourself if you prefer. We'd like you to do so. You can ask questions or even make brief comments and that interaction with our audiences is often, as I said, the highlight of our events. I hope as you're listening to our speakers, you'll be gathering your wits for very sharp and serious questions. Our moderator tonight, we're very fortunate to have here, is Ralph Simon, the founder of the Mobilium Advisory Group which studies innovation in mobile usage in such countries as Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. He's served as an executive at Capitol Records, Blue Note Records and EMI Music and he co-founded the Zumba Group with Clive Calder of South Africa. He's been called the father of the ringtone because he is said to have created the first ringtone company in 1997. But these descriptors don't count the extent to which Ralph Simon has been a pioneer, a leader in the, one of the earliest people to recognize the profound implications of mobile technologies, especially for third world and underdeveloped areas. And we're very fortunate, I think, to have him here. Ralph, where are you? There you are. Thank you very much and a very warm welcome to you this evening on this cold night here in Boston. It's lovely to be here. I just got in from Mumbai, traveled from Mumbai. I left at four o'clock yesterday afternoon, Boston time got here at four o'clock this afternoon. But so excited to be here and to see such a distinguished audience of people wanting to learn about not just West Africa but also about the incredible way in which cultural products such as film, television, music is changing the way that people interact in Africa and what's adding to all of this to give you some kind of setup in the way that all of this works is the immense explosion of the mobile phone as an instrument by which people not only communicate with each other but are getting their content and entertainment in a way that no one would have imagined. So let me give you some statistics just to give you a sense of this. There are now about 800 million mobile phone users in Africa. It's expected to grow beyond one billion over the course of the next five years. And this is significant because right now on a global basis, there are just under seven billion mobile phone subscribers or users on a worldwide basis with the device now becoming increasingly much, much more of the touchscreen smartphone variety. What's interesting about this is that in Africa the smartphone such as the Apple iPhone has got a negligible usage in Africa because it's very expensive and the dominant phone used in Africa is the feature phone basic entry level phone but you're seeing an enormous growth in the touchscreen smartphone because of the development of very low-cost smartphones that are not only internet connected but also can tilt in a horizontal frame to get very, very good resolution for film content and television content. Where's my sheet? I think you have to use that speaker. I took his notes away. Thank you very much. He likes a challenge, that's okay. It was actually a test. Thank you very much. I should have had that on my phone, but never had it. We've got a really distinguished trio of participants, speakers, authorities here this evening that I think will really add a lot of muscle to what we're going to be talking about and the objective tonight is to do three things. We want to first of all give you a sense of the latest developments in terms of what's emerging in entertainment in West Africa with the implications of what that's going to do for the rest of Africa. Secondly, we want to take some kind of view on what's happening with African music and how African music and African creative products are spreading not only in Africa but also in the diaspora and the diaspora in African communities particularly from West Africa are quite substantial on a worldwide basis. And thirdly, we want to have a look at some of the new trends that are going to be influencing things in West Africa that are touching the lives of people both in Africa and also internationally and how there's this very, very interesting kind of cross-pollination where we're seeing, for example, African content that has got contextually colloquial relevance, having relevance in cities in the United States like Houston or even in Michigan where there are large clusters of the diaspora. For example, in the Bronx, the Bronx has a huge cluster of Garnayans. You can be walking down the street in the South Bronx and hear people conversing in Gah. Anybody here speak Gah? Anybody here speak Tui? Three Tui, Tui. Anyone here speak Yoruba? Ebo or Hausa? One. Anybody here that speaks Kosa? No one speak Kosa? Anyone speak Zulu? Anyone speak Shona? Yeah, very, very good. Okay, so I'd like to take this opportunity of introducing our very, very distinguished group of speakers who will be conversing with us and giving us some of their wisdom and pearls of knowledge that will absolutely help supplement your awareness and understanding of this really exciting area. And what makes it so exciting is we're seeing a real revolution going on in the emerging countries, the developing markets, in the same way as we saw some really fascinating changes in the results of the election here over the last couple of days where the political landscape has been changed forever seeing the way that things really manifested with the Obama victory in a similar kind of way. We're starting to see the cross-pollination of cultural impact starting to affect communities in the developed countries but coming from the emerging countries. So first of all, I'd like to introduce you to our group. I'd like to introduce you first of all to Colin McClay, Colin. They're a very good looking bloke there. Colin is the managing director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School and as co-founder of Harvard's International Technologies Group and at Berkman, Colin's research pairs hands-on multi-stakeholder collaborations with the generation of data that reveals trends, challenges, and opportunities for the integration of communications technologies in developing communities. Colin, welcome. Give him a big hand, ladies and gentlemen. He's a hometown boy. Of course, we always have beauty and brains and of course that applies to all the men as well as the women on this panel. But it gives me very great pleasure to introduce you to Fadzi Makanda. Fadzi and her family were originally from Zimbabwe. That's why she speaks Shauna and she is the business development manager in the New York office of the very, very important Nigerian company called Iroko Partners who are really crusading in a very interesting way in television and film and specifically looking at driving Nollywood around the world. And she leads the development and execution of the U.S. advertising and sales strategies for Iroko. So please give Fadzi a very, very warm welcome. And last but by very no means least, we have a, some would say a superstar with us. Well, he is a superstar, not only in his own right, but he's a superstar in his country of origin, which of course is Ghana. Derek Ashong leads the band Soufage. Soufage is a bigger pardon, a group that produces an eclectic blend of hip hop and reggae, funk, world beat, West African high life. How many of you know the rhythm of West African high life? Fabulous, just small number. Well, if you just imagine Calypso with soul. Calypso with an African kind of feel. Calypso with secret sauce that soon as you hear it, your feet start moving. That's Derek's kind of stocking trade. And he's also known as DNA. That's his kind of stage name is Subrakay, which is the name of his blog. And he recently hosted the Oprah radios, Derek Ashong Experience, and also has been very involved in constructing a really, some would say, revelationary TV series on Al Jazeera, the Arab, the Qatar network called The Stream. So please give a warm welcome to Derek. Derek, you're looking very, very hip tonight. I see you've got nice, is that something from Ghana that you wear around your neck? These are my Calry shells. A lot of artists in the United States, you know, everywhere talks about their bling and their diamonds and things. And we know that there's been some political turmoil on the continent for people to have all those diamonds. So Calry shells were actually used as currency back in the day around West Africa. And so this is what you could call my traditional bling. It represents wealth and power. And nobody got shot for me to have it. So you certainly are not shell-shocked at this point because this is exactly what you need to do to show who's who in the zoo. Yes indeed. Very good. Okay, so at this point, just before we get into the mix, we thought we'd give you an interesting bit of sizzle. And we'd like to get Fuzzy to come on to the podium here and show you a reel so that you can get the context of what Nollywood is. We're going to show you some little snippets. So why don't you come up here and it's over to you and let's give people a nice little hors d'oeuvre before we get into the meat. So this is sizzle reel showing the content that we have on Iroko Partners, which is a great representation of the type of content we have in Nollywood. Bu bayi turu ikani. There you go. That's a glimpse of Nollywood and Iroko TV. So come back and join us here because what we'll do now is go through some particular issues that we think will have relevance to your understanding of how this important art form, as well as the cultural art forms of West Africa, are starting to expand. And just to give you some context, the Nigerian movie business, Nollywood, is worth about $250 million a year in terms of its earnings capability. About between 1,000 and 2,000 different kinds of movies are made each year. So to give you some context, 250 movies or so are made in Hollywood, 800 or so in Bollywood, different Bollywood languages, Tollywood, Bollywood, Sandlewood. And then of course in Nigeria, you have between 1,000 and 2,000, but generally around 800 movies of a kind of feature substance. And this has been an industry that's been going since 1960. So if we think that the Nollywood business has been going for some 60 years, it's only really in the last 10 or 15 years with the arrival of digital technology, editing and shooting and cheaper, the democratization of the production process that we are seeing this huge explosion of creativity that in turn is influencing stuff. Now Colin, you were recently in Nigeria. Tell us about some of the things that you saw and give us a sense of when you were exploring this medium, what were some of the impressions that you came away with as a Nollywood virgin? Can you believe that he just got off a plane from Mumbai? This is, I don't trust it, this is remarkable. So I have to disabuse you guys of a few misconceptions that Ralph may have conveyed. One, I'm not an expert. Two, I'm not like these other people as you can see. I don't have that deep Nollywood experience. I actually started going to Nigeria probably about four years ago on another topic altogether, working on technology and civil society with pals here, Ethan Zuckerman and Mike Best. And we knew a bit about Nollywood and we said, we're in Nigeria, how can we not explore this phenomenon? Which is, as you got a sense, a totally remarkable phenomenon where you have an indigenous film industry that, I mean, yeah, maybe it's been around since 1960, but generally talked about since about early 90s, late 80s. So it's 20 years of this kind of thing that's basically producing one to 2,000 films a year that is in the top three of production. It's in the top three, 250 to maybe 500 million I've seen up to a billion dollar revenue estimations. So one of the things that you'll hear are that we don't really have good numbers, it's big. That's what we can say, it's really big. The second biggest employer in Lagos State, so this is a state, it's a city of 20 million people, state of 40, I don't know, however many million people, massive source of employment, a million or so jobs directly or indirectly in Nigeria. So it is a huge economic force, but also a huge cultural force, right? And this is about, this is Nigerians telling Nigerian stories to other folks in Nigeria, but because of, in part substantially actually, because of the unlicensed copying, the piracy, expanding that market from the initial communities in Nigeria where the films might have been targeted to elsewhere in the country, Tagana, across the border, down to South Africa, to Liberia, to the entire continent, and then much further afield, reaching diaspora communities, but as I think Fazi will tell us, reaching communities all over the world and building an audience like that of the telenovelas where you have this very kind of culturally based storytelling that is about Nigeria and even sub parts of Nigeria, right? That is all of a sudden resonant with a much, much broader community and is done very much in spite of any kind of institutional supports. There's no copyright, there's no studio system, there are no studios, there's no money. These things cost 25 to $50,000 to produce maybe 10 days to shoot a month or a month and a half or two months for the whole movie to turn around. They can of course go up to probably a million dollars, but by and large, they're low end, they're not all as fancy as the Cizarille we saw. Many of them don't have great sound quality, don't have great lighting, have jumpy cuts, they're filmed on cheap cameras, but they're storytelling and people love them and they love them everywhere. And so it's just this totally, it is a remarkable phenomenon where culture economics, storytelling, community, all these things converge in a way that I think none of us could have predicted or engineered. And we're right now at this very exciting moment that says what next and what's gonna happen. So Fadzi, one of the things that we've noticed about Nollywood is that tends to be principally around themes dealing with moral dilemmas that face modern Africans. Tell us a little bit about what Iroko is and does. You've got a library of some 5,000 movies. So tell us about some of the movies that you've got. And secondly, we'd like to know a little bit more about this diaspora and audience that's outside of West Africa, because you seeing a lot of what you're doing and the development of getting the movies to this diaspora, give us some sense of the extent of it. Yes, so Iroko partners are basically trying to revolutionize the way that Nollywood content is distributed. So kind of the world that Colin explained, we're really trying to move it to the next level. So because Nollywood has always been very DVD driven, it's always been a physical market, it's been very much restricted to the local market. So if you're abroad, you didn't really have access to this content. So the CEO Jason Joku really saw a huge opportunity here where you have this massive diaspora, this huge demand where people can have access. So by bringing the content online, we've really been able to aggregate the diaspora, wherever it has access to this content. And we've really seen massive growth. We're now in 180 countries, just showing that there is demand. 180 countries. 170 countries. So hold on a second. If we look at Nigeria as the font for this, which is principally the West African movie business comes from Nigeria. Ghanaian movie industry is not as well developed. If it's 180 countries, where is the bulk of the Nigerian or the African diaspora? Give us some numbers on this, some demographics on it. Sure. So for our traffic, the U.S. actually is our largest market. So we have about 25% of the users are here. And it's pretty much in pockets where you'd expect to find Africans. So in the DMVs, so DC, Maryland, Virginia, New York, we find a lot in Atlanta, a lot of those hubs. Another 20% in the U.K., because as you can imagine, the proxies in Africa are a lot there. They're also countries that we were surprised about. So our other top five markets are Canada, Germany, Italy, Malaysia. Hold on a second. Italy and Malaysia, why would those have a passion for Nollywood? Well, you'd be surprised. You have a lot of these, I guess, small pockets of Africans where you're not as surrounded by the people in your community. So this is a way to connect with home. This is a way to see some of the values. That's why you're saying, in terms of the content, the things that are really popular. It's a lot of these stories from home. You've got romance, you saw it from the scissorio, also the morality side. You're seeing the good guy win in the end. The girl get the boy. So really these stories we can connect with home. I think that's why there's a lot of this popularity where people can connect with home. And don't a lot of the films also promote Christian and Islamic values? Exactly. These are a strong religious thread that runs through a lot of them? Yes, there's a strong religious thread. Why is that? Actually, a lot of funding also comes from the churches. I mean, you said there's not a lot of money pouring into it, but you do see a bit of funding coming from that ends. I think that's the reason why I can see a lot of these moral themes in the films. So of the 5,000 movies that you've got, which would you say would be the two or three big titles and why are they big titles? It was interesting. So we've had Blackberry Babes and Facebook Babes are two of them. Is that Blackberry Babes? That doesn't sound very... You'd be surprised. It's actually been a very good sequence. So there's been one, two and three actually. And so you get a lot of... It's not the Blackberry Phone Babes. Yeah, so you find a lot of these stories have to do with technology nowadays, even though it's about romance and these stories. A lot of it has to do with people being cool with their Blackberry. Everyone's very tech savvy now, whether it's on Facebook. So it's a very interesting merging of technology and modern themes into these stories, really reflecting how Africa is today. You're not necessarily gonna see some of those more traditional portrayals that people would expect from seeing Africa. You're really seeing very modern stories where technology is very relevant and you're seeing that a lot in the content. And in terms of the way that it's developing its own TV appeal as well, is there now a TV channel that is catering for this kind of material here in the United States? So that's an area that we're actually looking to move into. We realize this is a multi-channel world, so we should be on every device where our users are. So we have the mobile aspect, but we are looking into potentially going to TV, starting with in the US and UK. We're still in the beginning stages of this. We have a BizTev team in New York doing the research because it's a very massive undertaking, but we think it is important as an African multimedia company to also be in broadcast. And how do you go about communicating with the producers of all of this material? Do you have relationships with the producer community in Nigeria and you effectively pay them an advance amount as people traditionally do in the movie business to secure the rights outside of Nigeria to those pictures? Yes, so that's something that distinguishes Aroco is that we have relationships with each and every one of these producers. So when Jason Joku, the CEO, went out to found the company, he actually went out to the Alaba market where all these producers are and met with each one of them directly because we wanted to make sure that they were compensated fairly for their content because as you know, piracy is a huge issue. And so what we've done is we want these producers to have an incentive to continue to produce this content, increase the quality of it. So we signed and negotiated deals with each one of them directly. We have licensing between 5,000 to 15,000 to have exclusive rights to the film. Dollars. Dollars, yes. So we do give them... That's pretty low. You think it's low? Five to $15,000, relatively speaking. Well, this is for the digital rights. I mean, they also get the DVD stream. So we're only playing... So that's very, very important. Yes, so what we've... Exactly, so we've brought in an additional revenue stream from these producers where before it was only DVDs, very small amount theaters, but we've brought in this other massive stream of revenue. Since on the digital side, it can be monetized through advertising, which is very lucrative. And can I ask a question on this? Sure. And is there revenue sharing, or is it just straight up, here's your five grand and then you sign the rights away and whatever you guys can make on it is... It's just licensing. But we're starting going to co-production agreements as well, so that we're also content owners along with the producers. But also, I think, interesting context is the cost of these films, because an Hollywood filmmaker costs $50,000 to produce. So if you license it for five to 15, you're looking at a minimum of 10% of your budget gained back from the digital rights, which previously didn't... That was a revenue source that didn't exist at all. Exactly. So this is really changing. And I'd like to ask a question to the audience while we're on the subject. How many of you here in the audience are screen-ages? Nobody? None of you are screen-ages? Okay, let me pose the question in a different way. How many of you look at TV and your iPad and your mobile phone at the same time? Okay, so now, how many of you are screen-ages? Thank you, much, much better. So, Derek, this is a good segue in with this. This whole phenomenon of people becoming screen-ages, this is not... This is a universal phenomenon. In Africa, I mean, you're a very successful musician, guitarist, bass player, keyboardist. You were working last year with the founder of the Eurythmics. Dave Stewart. Dave Stewart in Hollywood, not in Hollywood, but in Hollywood. And you were apprenticed at the Berkeley School of Music, where you really got your chops really up and you also did something special for Channel O. Yes. And give us a sense of what you've been doing because you focused on the musical side, which is as important. Absolutely, so I came up here to Cambridge, got an expensive education up the street at Harvard and decided that the best thing I could do with my parents' money was to learn to play guitar. They loved that. So once I escaped from the medical school track, I decided I wanted to find ways to communicate important things to people and being a person who grew up in many different countries, born in Africa, in Ghana, raised in Brooklyn and in Saudi Arabia and in Qatar, I always felt that artistry was a way in which you could bridge the gap between societies. And so I formed a band and one of the things we did early on is we created a music video for a remake of a classic West African song called Sweet Mother. And one of the trends that you'll find is that on the continent, a lot of young people aspire to like the lifestyle and the imagery and aesthetics that are coming from the West. At the same time, there's this dynamic of wanting to assert one's own identity and to have one's own voice be shared. And I would say that in recent years that dynamic has grown as technology has enabled us to better connect to one another and to better share our own perspective. So Nollywood is, for example, very much Nigerian voices telling Nigerian stories to Nigerian audiences. And now other people are looking in and being like, oh, that's kind of interesting. So what we did is we did this remake and we did an old West African song called Sweet Mother which is the most popular song in the history of African music arguably. And we basically did it with a whole new perspective. And that song had an explosive success in Ghana. The video charted number four. What new perspective did you add to it? We hip-hopified it. And without taking away the Ghanaian, actually, this is good, I'll show you, I'll show you. You're pointing to someone in the audience. Who's that? So this is Jonathan, he's in my band. And we were, he's... Give him a hand, make him feel good. If you would grab that microphone. So I'll give you an idea of what I'm talking about specifically. So Sweet Mother, has anyone here heard this song? Okay, cool. That's not bad, we got some crew. So the basics of it says, Sweet Mother, I know go forget you The way you suffer, the way you suffer for me, oh Sweet Mother, oh Sweet Mother, oh And everyone loves that, we all grew up hearing that. So what we said was simply, One, two for the cool in you, We rock it three, four when you're hot for more. I'll give you a five and six for that lyrical mix. Yo, D and Nego, flip these scripts with an African twist. I love this mercy. Look who taught a boy to be bold. Black woman with treasure more dearly than gold. You say, you know, the truth is where the truth is keeping soul. We'll expect no substitute here for the truth that she told. I'll buy you a top-up, what won't no bet? One kind of sum for the child to grow wise. He must learn to listen so ear, then no man's army, no riches, no picket. Take my love from my mama away, Sweet Mother. I know go forget you. The way you suffer, the way you suffer for me, oh, Sweet Mother, oh, Sweet Mother. Cross through a dash for a transatlantic baby. No, but that is really, that is fantastic because what you've done is you've showed something that, someone like Professor Henry Jenkins had spoken about at length over the years is contextual colloquial relevance. Exactly. You're taking a hip-hop mode, welding it into something that's really your own and creating a whole new sound with it. Exactly. And this is a phenomenon that you find across the continent. I remember when I was in college in the 90s, going home and learning about, you know, all my research, doing all this stuff. I did a lot of very important research on cultural relevance and, you know, practices of cultural expression, primarily in the clubs of Accra, because that's where the kids practice. That's where we express. Kofi. There you go. That's hip-hop, right? That's wonderful, for sure. And, but the thing that was interesting is you go there and you hear all the same songs. Back then it was the 90s, it was Jay-Z, it was Missy Elliott, and the whole night. Then you come into like the 2000s and you go back and all of a sudden the music you hear, you still hear the American artists, but 80, 90% of the music is in the indigenous languages. And that was the birth of what's called hip life. It's hip-hop and high life. And what languages would those have been? So that would be in cheap, primarily, in ga, a number of things. Some people will also do it in Hausa. Sometimes you'll get some stuff in ever, but chi would be the dominant one. And also in what we call pigeon, which is what sweet mother we just sang in. It's like hybrid, slang English, what's that for? Can you give us a translation? When you got into the pigeon, give us a sentence in pigeon and then tell us in kind of Americanese. So, okay, well the song that I just sang, like sweet mother, so sweet mother, I know go forget to you, right? That's, we get that. And then it's like, if you went into like the verse of saying when I know chop, my mother know go chop. They say, if I don't eat, my mother won't eat. When if I know sleep, my mother know go sleep. If I don't see, my mother won't sleep. And in our version, we also started it out with ga. So if I say, mi mami ke mi, ka joya kwa tashi mi, a ke kok be shi ma luotwe kaha bo no ba nuni. It means, Slowly, dude, slowly. mi mami ke mi, ka joya kwa tashi mi, a ke kok be shi ma luotwe kaha bo no ba nuni. And basically that means my mother told me, mi mami ke mi, ka joya kwa tashi mi. Don't dance in the kitchen. A ke kok be shi. Because if you fall down, ma luotwe kaha bo no ba nuni, I will beat your ears until you learn how to hear. Right? Shidag benin lu, shi mi mami yi mi la la e wumi, ne ke mi ka fu nanadi. But every time I fell down, my mother didn't beat me. She held me. And she said, don't cry. Nanadi, nana is my Ghanaian name, right? Now look at me grown man. I rock, I cry to Trini. Still never met a woman as stellar as she. African queen. That's who Miss Ohanua be. Ohanua means queen in Trini. And they praise God for all the greatness that form mi mami. And when you talk about this localization, basically we do that song in English pigeon patwa ga in Trini. There are very few people on the planet that can understand the whole thing, but they get the sentiment and they get this idea that you're reaching out to them. So the point of that is to illustrate that. What's happening on the continent is people are rather than consuming simply what's coming from the outside world. They're starting to articulate their unique distinctive identities. And those are hybrid identities. African identities are by their very nature. You know, I grew up in a household where everybody speaks four languages so that you can communicate with your neighbors. I talk to you and yours. I talk to you and yours. I talk to you and yours. Just to be polite. That's normal in our crowd, right? So I think when we're talking about what's going on at the intersection of culture and technology, we have an opportunity for people to truly articulate global identities to a global community of fellow participants, fellow lovers of art and culture as equals. And that is something that has not existed for the continent and it's got profound implications, not only culturally, but politically and economically. This is absolutely correct. This is a very, very important area. And if you're studying this area or trying to understand the waves of the future that are going to influence this area, here's an interesting piece of technology that's been developed in New York just over the last few months. Because a lot of people in Africa want to be global. Does anyone know what global is? I see you nodding your heads. Not global warming, there's some global warming. But global, globally local. So let me give you an example in an American sense. Lady Gaga has got global phenomena, she's a global phenomenon, but she's not yet global. Derek is taking his global sensibility and making his work global. So what this technology does, very interesting, it's a technology that takes the phonium from someone's voice. So Derek would have that song that you just did with Jonathan Wright. And what we would do is take the phonium from his voice. We would then go to a lyricist, let's say we wanted Zulu, we go to someone in South Africa to record against the production track that Derek recorded on. We would then get a Zulu lyric and a Zulu playback singer to sing that song. We then take Derek's voice from a sample from his spoken voice and just wrap the phonium around the Zulu playback singer and the net net result of what we get is Derek singing in Zulu. His voice, or hit the timbre of his voice, but with the playback's phrasing of the Zulu, he won't even have to go into the studio to do the Zulu. So this is something. It's great, because my Zulu sucks. Yeah. But think of the implications because one of the big problems in Africa has always been that it was very hard for someone from the South to migrate their cultural style east or west. So for example, one of the best proponents and someone who is always considered to be the Bob Marley of Africa was a Zulu singer by the name of Lucky Dubay. Unfortunately, he died. He was killed in a hijacking that went wrong. But Lucky Dubay was the first Southern African artist to actually go and play stadium performances in Uganda, Nigeria. He was huge. He had a reggae feel, but everything that he did was either in English or in Zulu. He dreamed of being able to be a Pan-African performer. So Derek, if you had the opportunity to have local vocal on your vocals such that you could have a following in Swahili and in Southern Africa and in Chichewa and Malawi, is that something that would appeal to you? It would be massive. And it's one of the biggest challenges facing, for example, Ghanaian musicians is that the Ghanaian market is only but so big. And you know... 20 million people. In Ghana, 20 million people outside of Ghana. Hold on a second. 20 million outside? Yes. Why did they all leave? Ha ha. Well, now we go talk politics. Oh, yeah. I mean, that right there. They left the same reason, you know, I left because my dad came to study in the West, but I couldn't go home because there had been a first Rawlings coup then a second Rawlings coup and not to put it all on him. A lot of people have done coups in Ghana, but they were really disappearing people. And so a lot of people, and particularly a lot of musicians in the 80s left. I mean, you literally will talk to, I remember talking to Maktanto of Osibisau, the late Maktanto. Osibisau. Of Osibisau, which is a huge band. I mean, Ghanaian band that used to tour with the Rolling Stones. And these guys are amazing, but he was talking about how there's a whole generation of Ghanaian youth who didn't get the mentorship of established musicians because all the established musicians fled the then dictatorial regime. We're very happy that we've got democracy now. Things are better. But what it means is that you've got so many Ghanaians in Ghana, you've got all these Ghanaians outside of Ghana. If you're a Ghanaian musician, you only really have that domestic market because it's hard to reach all the people out in the diaspora. Well, what if you could just connect even to the other continental markets? And that becomes difficult because you may be singing in your own language and they can't connect to it. You know, there's a saying in Ghana that your English is as good as you can afford, right? So if you're not highly educated, you don't have money, then you may not have the ability to sing in a language that's more universally heard and it might not even sound as good for what you do. So that kind of technology means that before you even got to go and track down all the people who might like you in London and in the Bronx and in New Zealand, et cetera, that you could be looking at Legos and Nairobi and Kampala and Dakar and Johannesburg. And there's, I mean, to literally create these domestic exchanges of culture, I think would be profound economically for the artists, but it would be a real powerful weaving together of a continental fabric. So let's take one of the great West African artists, probably the number one or number two artist in Nigeria is a rapper by the name of Two-Face. So Two-Face, we've been trying to get Two-Face hooked up with Little Wayne in New Orleans and then trying to get Little Wayne's voice to sing in Yoruba because if we can find some cross-pollination, there's no reason why we should not be meshing together West Africa and West Los Angeles or West Africa and Louisiana. And people are, that's exactly what they're trying to do. For example, we did a track a couple years ago with a guy named Reggie Rockstone, very well known. He's really like the godfather of hip life. He's the guy who founded the hip hop movement in Ghana. And right after we did the thing with him, he showed me a video they were about to release where Reggie Rockstone from Ghana and Two-Face Idibia from Nigeria and Beanieman from Jamaica all got together and they did a track together because they all realized that there's this massive sort of de-esporic audience and the Jamaicans have been the best at this, a tiny, tiny island with an incredible global impact. There's no country other than the United States and perhaps the United Kingdom that could argue that they've got that degree of cultural impact around the world musically. And if you take a per capita, Jamaica beats everybody, right? So those three got together and they're like, we can market this in Ghana, in England, in Nigeria and in Jamaica. And the, but it's still hard, but they're thinking that way. The degree to which technology can start to facilitate that. I think you see an explosion of creativity because the artists already want it. Colin, you've made, some of the observations you've made when you were in Lagos, one of the things that has been very, very important. Good luck, Jonathan, the president of Nigeria, elected in the recent election, decided that Nollywood and Nigerian cultural content, soft power as has been evidenced by what India does with Bollywood or in fact what Hollywood does for the United States. Tell us about something of the Innovation Council because you, you heard about that and it intrigued you. Well, I mean, I think it's absolutely, there's a huge opportunity there and you're starting to see politicians and leaders in Nigeria recognize it, right? So if most, most people, probably not those inside this room, they're primarily familiar with Nigeria because they get a lot of emails from Nigeria, which it turns out is not the, you know, it's not really the best foot forward and a lot of them aren't actually from Nigeria, they're from Ghana, but that's all. It's easy to blame the Nigerians. Someone's always blaming someone, but whereas this is, you know, recognizing that there's happy stories and sad stories, this is a totally different kind of opportunity, right? To tell the story, to tell your story. How many people are employed by the movie business in Nigeria? This is what I said. So they estimate again a million people directly and indirectly. So it's a big industry. It's a lot of people and a lot of money, but there's a real, there's a money problem there. There's a huge finance problem and piracy, which has created the market, also exacerbates a lot of pressure, exacerbates a lot of the issues, which is to say you have about two weeks or so to make your money back from your film, aside from whatever Rogo TV gives you for the online version, to make your money back from the film before it enters into kind of a piracy market and you're basically competing one to one with the pirates. So that means that there's not a huge incentive to invest in films, to really do high-end films, because it's gonna be pretty challenging to recoup your investment. The fact is that something like 99% of all the revenues are from DVDs and VCDs. So they're a dollar or $2 a pop. There are about a dozen theaters in the country and they primarily don't show Nigerian films. They will for the opening, but that's really about it. So there's a really big challenge with, on one hand, you have sort of piracy eating away at these revenue streams and you don't have alternative revenue streams that are beyond the physical object that people thereby. So there's a real challenge to figure out how do you crack this nut of injecting more money into the industry so that you can do better films. You can take longer than two weeks to produce them. That you can get better skill sets in there and that you can change some of the sort of less productive dynamics of the Nigerian film industry. So to your point, so the government has done a couple, a couple of different government officials have done things recently. So one is with World Bank support, good luck Jonathan announced a $200 million fund for Nigerian films. That's not chopped liver, that's a big amount of money. It is, but they haven't given any of the money out. So it's chopped liver. What do you have to do to get the money? So well, this is the question. Nobody knows what you have to do to get the money except for one film. You can't just write a script and say, this is gonna work. You know, there've been a handful of apparently not so great applications and one joint Nigerian American production has gotten the money. But it appears they are funding kind of more of a Hollywood model, like even going back to a 35 millimeter film and thinking that it's gonna be a much higher production value, you know, a million dollars, a million and a half dollars for a film. So that's one model, right? There's not really the theaters there to support it. It's not clear how that's gonna work. And for my taste, most importantly, that is not really in sync with what is Nollywood, right? There is a cultural, those films may or may not appeal to the rest of us, but to a lot of people around the world, they appeal tremendously, right? And so you have this $200 million fund which is kind of pushing in one way, kind of pushing, but it's a carrot that apparently no one wants to eat or that there's, you know, the things work such that who knows what's gonna happen. So I would say that as of yet has not been a success. We are not holding our breath but crossing our fingers and anything we can do to help them to kind of see the way it's clear to make it at work will be great. But there is a more promising one that we're also involved in, which is the state, the state innovation council recently formed body in the state of Lagos where it's employing so many people. Governor realizes in this innovation council realize that there's a real need to do to kind of upskill the industry. And so arguably Nollywood is sort of plateaued is no longer on the meteoric rise that it was, although perhaps at the Roco TV, changing things a little bit, there's absolutely an appetite to say, hey, what do we need to do differently? And one of those things that people agree on is training that we got to get better at what we do. So increase those production values, do different kinds of film. There's a lot of sort of interest in doing and retaining the spirit of Nollywood that has been so successful, but expanding it and doing kind of a Nollywood 2.0 more of the same, not in the way the other fund is set up. So this up my friend and colleague Amy Corrigan who unfortunately couldn't be here tonight, along with Bond and Marouay and a team of other folks who some of which did the documentary, this is Nollywood, which is a fabulous documentary if you haven't seen it, are starting this Nollywood Up program right now as a matter of fact, where they're training hundreds of Nigerian filmmakers in script writing and film in all aspects. My dad also includes citizen journalists that are learning how to. I don't, I'm not sure. You know, there's an application process and they're kind of just starting it now. It's a multi-year project and we're gonna kind of figure out what happens. I mean, my role is relatively small. We have a team of fabulous students at the Berkman Cyber Law Clinic who have been doing amazing research on alternative revenue generation, different kinds of licensing. What can we learn around the world from how you bring in money, especially when you have some of the challenges that you have in Nigeria. So looking at everything from tip jars, which actually have an interesting resonance in Nigeria, to Kickstarter model, to all kinds of different ways to say, hey, what do we do to make this industry work and not just fight back against piracy, which is a challenging thing to fight back against in a direct fashion for a whole bunch of reasons we can discuss, but how do we create value? How do we create other revenue streams so these artists can get paid so they can continue to do movies and do even better movies? So there's a lot of exciting things happening really just beginning right now. So if you've got a million people working in the Nigerian, Nollywood industry, the creative industries are now becoming a trope that is being used to a greater degree and effect by some enlightened African politicians. And in fact, if you look at the British model where two million people out of 60 million people are employed in the creative industries. In the last Chinese 12, five year plan that was elicited about nine months ago, the creative industries were brought in as one of the major verticals. So there's recognition on a global basis about the importance of creative product, creative industries, creative culture that can be exported, transported, and at the same time transport people into new ways of thinking. Derek, what do you say about that? Well I think that it's interesting I had a conversation with a friend by the name of Cynthia Schneider and I know another friend Chris is here, he knows what I'm gonna say. Cynthia Schneider, Chris and I, Chris Shields actually another very accomplished person in the music space has put on festivals across the planet and some of the highest end ones. Now Chris, Cynthia and I were all part of something that the Brookings Institution put together for the US Islamic World Forum and they actually brought together a group of people in entertainment to look at how entertainment can be a force for basically bridging the gap between people. And her, Cynthia, was the former US ambassador to the Netherlands under the Clinton administration. Typically you're not gonna see a lot of State Department people fighting hard and talking about the power of the arts. But I'll give you an example that's non-African just to put this in context. There's a show as anyone here heard of Afghan Idol. A couple people, okay? Afghan Idol is basically the Afghan version of American Idol. Yeah, pop idol, exactly. But it's not licensed. They created their own version of it that's in people come and sing indigenous music in the indigenous languages. It's highly localized. And basically this thing has become arguably the most successful television program in African history. If you look at the recent parliamentary and the presidential elections in Afghanistan, you actually had more people voting in the finale of Afghan Idol than voting in their parliamentary and presidential elections. Now you wanna talk about nation building, right? And everyone's gonna talk about economics and national security and good governance, et cetera. But the reality is the most profoundly successful democratic practice that the country has experienced has been through the form of this television show. And the irony is the people who could perform, people vote for folks from different ethnic groups. Everyone talks about Afghanistan is so tribal. They vote for each other. Women are a part of it. Young people, all kinds of different folks. And so there's an example where you see entertainment being put into context and it having a powerful impact on broader issues in society. And I think that this is something that leaders need to take more seriously. I personally, this may be my bias, but I think that in governmental circles and oftentimes in business circles, people don't take the arts seriously enough, right? And so what winds up happening is you get a bunch of people together who maybe they're not good at art itself, so they don't wanna think that it's that important. And most of the people who spend their lives getting really, really good at it don't learn as much about garnering votes or writing business plans or whatever the case may be. So artistry is marginalized. But all of you, when you get a chance, go home tonight, turn on your television. When you're in the car or walking home to listen to the radio. See how many commercials you hear with no music. Just count them. What percentage of the commercials when you go home and watch the news tonight will have no music and you start to see what I'm talking about. It's ubiquitous, it's everywhere. It is a profound level of human communication that we all engage in, but we don't take seriously. And to the degree to which governments, leaders in the private and public sector can start to look at music as a resource, as a human resource, human capital. I think that you actually find ways of finding greater solutions to your problems and rather than sending all the marines out there in Afghanistan to blow things up to teach them about democracy, maybe you make some better TV shows and you start getting the same effect. I'm not saying- We'll drop videos of I love Lucy. Hey, you know, Lucy, I think that I love Lucy can go a long way, but seriously, it's not to say that you don't wanna look at the traditional mechanisms of development, but it is to say that you've got this profound cultural arsenal that is always overlooked because maybe the people who make those decisions don't have a full grasp of the power and what they're dealing with. So Fati, when looking at the things that you're doing, how much does social media come into your thinking about promoting these various titles and developing this diaspora in audience? How many Facebook followers, for example, can you track? So social media is a large part of Roco and actually we have a Facebook API incorporated in it so everyone can comment on movies and so there's a very social element to it and you actually see people getting really into it and all the movies saying, oh, I can't believe we did that, I can't believe we did this. So social is definitely a huge part of it. And talking about what you were saying, I think on the global, was that the term you used? And being able to disseminate information socially, I think we do a lot of that with iWalking, which is our music platform. So we also have a music streaming site, which has... So what have you got? You've got iRokin, which is the music side. Yes, and then iRoco TV, which is the film side. Exactly, and then iRoking, what we have is we have about 400 artists with 35,000 songs and we've created the ability for people... Which language? Mainly, I think with English, but also some languages in Nigeria, so Yoruba, I'm sorry, I'm picturing them, but across the spectrum. So we've created a way for people to download the songs and be able to share them. And we get thousands of downloads, and it's also globally. So like you said, if someone over here, you don't necessarily have an African radio channel, there's now a mechanism, both through the iRokin website and also through our apps, where you can download these songs, create playlists, and easily share them with people. So I think that's another way, this form of technology that's facilitating this interaction, being able to share the African culture that we have. Can I just pick up on the steam here? So I think these observations about human nature and the power of art and music and film are so readily apparent to any of us who go and watch a movie or listen to a song or see some art or make art or whatever it is, or play games, right? These are like some very basic human kinds of things that we do. And it's remarkable how much the policy world, the development, all the world that I'm kind of very familiar with just disregards this stuff and says, oh no, no, that's not valuable, that's not real, that's not serious. But in fact, it's serious in terms of job creation, self-expression, crossing cultural boundaries. I mean, we're talking about lots of countries in Nigeria included, which have serious cultural divisions. And these are all the things that potentially transcend those barriers. Doesn't mean they always do or that they're a panacea, but that there's a lot of power there. And I think something that we can governments and makers and consumers can all do together is lean into that and figure out how do these things allow us to connect in ways that we, for whatever our reasons are, are unable to do otherwise. So there's a lot of power there to unleash and we're not there yet. So Colin, let me give you a hypothetical. Would something like the Gates Foundation, if you went to the Gates Foundation and said, you could have an influence with your cash in this cultural sphere, have you come across any examples by the Gates Foundation, for example, in this? Well, as it happens, we are actually in discussions with that very foundation and some others. But in particular, talking, I mean, aware of this tremendous power and the reach, right? This is a community of folks that you cannot otherwise reach. They're across the country, in the case of Nigeria and around the world. And you can reach them for this very low price of inserting some ideas into a film, some tens of thousands of dollars. So they're eager to explore the kind of inclusion of social themes like health issues into dramatic pictures. So not what they call an NGO film. Not like, okay, here's the thing, we're gonna teach you a lesson and everyone's gonna run screaming because it's terrible, but it's art and it's dealing with the most profound things that we deal with, which are like loss and risk and fear and all the things we do or dealing with old and new, right? It fits right into all of the classic Nollywood things where you have sort of new ideas, oh, should they get this medicine versus old or men versus women or whatever the particular tensions are, but with other socially relevant issues. And this is the way that we play out so much of, if you look at our film here in the United States, at least some of it, not all shoot them ups, but you see that there. And so to include some of those themes, and this is a group at USC called Hollywood Health and Society has been working on this, we're working with them, has been doing this for many years, kind of advising filmmakers to get the facts right on health issues, but also helping script writers to think about what are creative and powerful ways to include those really human themes into their films. So I think it addresses the funding issue, it gives new storylines, which is exciting, it has potentially fabulous powerful health outcomes. And also for me, there's another interesting aspect, particularly around the health stuff, is you want to reach people, right? So if you want to make them aware of services or other ways that they could kind of pursue the ideas that they learned about in the film, you have all these mobile phones. It's kind of the same as what you, as just a regular old filmmaker want to do, you want to know how to reach your fans too. So what we learn in that space and what you learn reaching your fans through mobile phones are absolutely, I think, kind of reinforcing and can inform us how better to use this new ability to reach our audiences, to engage them in the substance of the film or in the way you were describing in sort of the community aspects of film, which when we don't have theaters, we lose so many of those community aspects which are so kind of culturally enriching, but also for health or for other, you know. Who have you here in the audience has heard of a visioneer from Africa by the name of Alpesh Patel. Okay, so I'll tell you a little bit about this man. When he was six years old, he and his family were kicked out of Uganda by Idi Amin, moved to the UK. He decided that when he was a young man in his early 20s, he'd moved back to Africa. He went to Kenya and he became intrigued by a company in India called Micromax, a company that built a low-cost touch screen smartphone. And he said, what I'd like to do is to be the first one in Africa to bring very low-cost touch screen smartphones to Africa. He started the company called My Phone, M-I-F-O-N-E. Anyone heard of My Phone? Well, you can get an iPhone like My Phone or a My Phone like iPhone for about $35. Internet, great pictures, and Alpesh Patel over the next two years is envisaging that he's going to sell 50 million of these phones. He bases himself in Dubai, Mauritius, and Nairobi, and he has got a huge relationship now with Eti Salat, which is the kind of big challenger to the number one telco operator in Nigeria, which is South African company MTN. MTN have 53% of the market in Nigeria, but Eti Salat are using My Phone devices and getting movies and television and music to the populations. So Derek, if people had access to change their very basic feature phones, phones that couldn't give you the internet, couldn't give you a video, what do you think people are going to do if they can get a phone for $20 to $30? I think that it's going to be explosive for a couple of reasons. One, smartphones are not simply about communication, right? Smartphones about changing the way in which we consume content and interface with the world. So it literally opens up their world. I remember I was doing some stuff some years ago with an organization called Taking It Global, and Taking It Global is written taking IT global. It's, everyone calls it TIG, it's out of Canada, started by two really young, brilliant change agents. They started when they were 19 or 20, and it became this global phenomenon. And if you go on TIG, you would find at the time that the largest population or the largest number of people for any country were from the US, which is funny because it's Canadian. I think the second largest number were probably Canadian. The third largest country that had the largest number of people there was Ghana. There are so many people in Africa that want to be wired, and this is like seven years ago or more. So many people are wired, but if you want to get online in Ghana, you've got to go to an internet cafe. Easier to find an internet cafe in Accra than in Manhattan or in Boston, frankly, because here we all have our own laptops, our own computers, but there that's not the case. When you start taking this device and you're going from the feature phone, which you all will forget, that's the kind that you use just to make phone calls and sex messages. It's basic Nokia from 10 years ago. Exactly. To the smartphone, where now you have a wireless connection, all of a sudden you have this whole world that's open to you. Now take it a step further. I know a guy by the name of Marvin Hall in Jamaica who's done this incredible project in collaboration with some people at MIT and at Stanford Harvard, and he's basically created this program to teach robotics in Jamaica. And he teaches robotics to kids in the worst ghettos of Kingston. The year when I first started collaborating with them, Jamaica had the highest murder rate on the planet, higher than Iraq, Afghanistan, whatever, right? And he's going to the communities where all that shooting is going on and teaching kids who everyone else presumes are illiterate, robotics. And one of the things that he told me, he's like, you know what? Like, it's amazing. Like, yeah, we can get all this information. We can show them all this stuff, but you know what's the key? What's going to take it to the next level is when they can get all the information, all the access, and they can program these robots all from their mobile device. And that's when you start having low-cost smartphones available. So I think that that is the next big revolution. Africa completely skipped the landline thing. You know, my grandma had a cell phone before I did. People in Ghana were sending text messages before US knew what SMS stood for. And it is expensive to do this in Africa because text messaging still is quite pricey for local community. Exactly, and you're basically paying for minutes. And so you can send your text and use your phone until you pay for minutes. But once you've got a model where you've got affordable phones and you've got the providers migrating to data packages that are, they actually fit the domestic market, it's not just like you're talking about people being able to read their email or check Facebook. You're literally saying that this is going to be your computer because you don't have another one. And I think we'll be shocked at the degree of innovation that Africans will pioneer once they have greater access. This is absolutely correct. And in fact, it's a tremendous change agent all around because you're finding now that with these, with internet connectivity, over the last three or four years, they've been gradually laying the submarine cables down the east and west coasts of Africa. And here's an interesting factoid for you. When the connection was made into Kenya, there was a spike of usage of music videos because for the first time with the internet cable being connected, people could get YouTube videos on their mobile phones. This is something that is also growing very fast. We see the big success of Gangnam Style. How many of you know about Gangnam Style? See everybody knows about it. Now interesting, nearly 700 million views on YouTube, only 5% of those views are in Korea. 95% the rest of the world. Derek, we've got to create the African equivalent, the Nigerian equivalent of... Bufu style. There we are. Jonathan? Here we are, it's coined here tonight. Anyone here blogging? What did you say it was? Bufu style. How do you spell that? F-U-F-U. And I don't mean it like that. That's escape. So, here's an interesting question for you. How many of you here in the audience know a woman by the name of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? One, two, three, four, five, six. Okay, let me phrase the question differently. How many of you here know of a novel first came out in 2006 called Half of a Yellow Sun? A fantastic book. It's really well worth a read. And the reason I mention this to you, it's a drama that brings together the lives of four people during the struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria. And this movie, the movie of the book has just been completed in Nigeria. It's very important for Nigeria because the movie is directed by B. Bandele and it features Tandy Newton who won an Oscar and Chiwetel Egyafor, well-known actor. But here's an interesting thing. They started shooting the movie and making the movie before they had a commitment to get money. A young woman who is a merchant banker in Lagos but loves the creative industries was desperately trying to raise money for the movie. She could not raise it. She went to the heads of the major industrial conglomerates in Nigeria and they all said to her, you're making a movie, that's not business. Can't you rather do something where you can build a factory that produces food stuffs? She said, don't you understand? This is food for the mind. If we make a movie about this great novel, this is something that would be beneficial. She eventually raised $3 million. It's just been completed. They're now looking to try and get this movie distributed overseas but the interesting thing about it is it's also one of the first times where a great writer has taken their work to the screen and is turning this into something. So Fudgy, tell us about, are you seeing this in terms of some of the movies you're getting with Iroko that are looking at more serious than Blueberry Girls, Blackberry Girls and movies of that nature? Yeah, so they're starting a new phenomenon I guess called New Nollywood where they're trying to do more of these big budget films, putting more behind just $30,000 in funding and it's actually part of the reason why we launched Iroko TV Plus which is a subscription platform that we launched in July where users, you actually have to pay $5 a month where you can watch the content with no advertising and there was a reason for doing this because now with this more high budget content, in order to get the digital rights to be able to recoup it, we need users to start paying. So I think we're definitely gonna start seeing this trend where we're seeing more substantial stories, really serious stories, we wanna show the world about Nigeria and in order to get that funding, definitely companies like us trying to put in the right. Colin, you know they say that the Internet Society, texting, tweeting and all that stuff is leading to people being much more shallow. In fact, a successful book came out about a year ago called Shallow and how the Internet is changing people's writing. Are you seeing the development of creative writing on your trips and your work that you do in Africa? No, but that's because I'm not looking for it but I don't buy that argument at all. Why not? I think that's just a polemical argument that people throw out there to say that it's not like the good old days. So I don't think that's, I don't wanna talk about it. What I would much rather talk about is this really interesting development. So this film probably released on the Oscar schedule. This could be a real international film. So this is at once really exciting. I mean you heard the story, to me that's an amazing story. Amazing story. This is a woman who has no business doing this and she makes it her business to do it and she does it as a dream. So that's like a Hollywood story or an Hollywood story as the case may be. There should be a movie about that. But for me it raises a bunch of questions. So one question is, is that gonna be, is that film gonna be resonant in Nigeria and outside? Is that- Well, Tandy Newton is box office so it could well be. It could well be or it could be two highbrow, right? So they've done some other highbrow films that have flopped in Nigeria. So for me a question is, and I think a question within the new Nollywood is, are we making films for the global diaspora and for the rest of the world or are we making films for Nigeria? Because it's, in some sense, it might be changing the capacity to commercialize and to get revenues for those films internationally might, you know, that's a bigger market in some sense. Or at least for now until the internet arrives in a more kind of robust fashion. So I think that that's an open question. What direction are these filmmakers gonna go and do they have to choose? Or is the, are those markets actually gonna converge and maybe they're not so different after all? Well, you know- What do you say about that? I think the two factors that are, and actually I'll be interested to hear what y'all think as well because I see a bunch of very intense faces, but the two things that I think are worth considering there. One is the degree to which African communities celebrate and lionize the success of their own folks outside. I mean, like even for me, things that I've done out here, when I think of the first time, like I got interviewed by Oprah Winfrey for this thing. And the amount of phone calls, Facebook messages, tweets, whatever, from Ghana alone, just from people because everybody knew about it, because it was such a big deal. How did they get to know about it? Online. The word spreads like wildfire, right? And then they, or I mean, I would literally be doing my show and then people would be checking in and tweeting in or sending in a note from all around the world, and including from my home country. Someone like Chua Tzu, who I actually know because we did a film together years ago, is a star, like someone that Nigerians at home and in the diaspora are very, very proud of. Idris Elba, you know, if you talk to Ghaniz, they're like, he's half Ghanan. They will let you know. Kenyans and Barack Obama, it only takes half. We'll take a quarter, whatever it is. And I think that, so what winds up happening? So that's one phenomenon. We love those of us who are able to succeed in a broader case. I literally will have people tweet me and be like, oh my God, he's one of the only Ghanans that's verified on Twitter, right? And they keep track whenever somebody new gets verified. That's one thing. The second thing is, I remember when my uncle, my youngest uncle, or my mother's youngest brother, used to run a little movie facility out of my grandma's house. He took the garage over. He put up a big screen and got a projector and they would play movies in there. And I remember, because I would sneak in and I watch American Werewolf in London when I'm like eight years old and I'm dying of fear. And I was like, oh my God, it's terrible. And my mom's like, you can't watch that. But the point is, everyone wanted to see all those Hollywood films and there still isn't the kind of distribution for theatrical release. So if you combine these two phenomena, where on the one hand, we want to see ourselves represented on the global stage. And on the other hand, we're looking at the stuff that's already on the global stage. And we love Sylvester Stallone since way back in the day or whatever the case may be. And you start looking at the possibility that we could be telling our own stories on that global stage. If you deal with that distribution question and the questions of how do you monetize it both around the world and domestically, I think there's actually a big audience for higher production value product. The problem is, if you make that higher production value product right now and you don't have an audience for it outside the country, there's no way to make your money back within the country. And this is the challenge facing us. Do we yet have a West African Bruce Lee? That's a good question. Not to my knowledge. Because action movies obviously are popular. Action movies are huge, but I'll tell you, I watched this series. Have you all seen this British series, Luthor with Idris Elba, anyone seen it? I mean, that thing is so cool. And I know so many Ghanans and other people, because Idris is not thought of as African. He's thought of as like, he's an English dude. But we think of him as African because every English person is either African or Caribbean and then Caribbean is African too. I'm just saying, you know, that's basically, a lot of black people in Britain will tell you other stuff, but you ask them, you won't get past the grandmommy from Cabego, right? So basically, the reality is, someone like that is really starting to be that image. Like, he's that action type of guy, but he's a clever detective and this and this and that. And the whole world was watching, and they're just like, yo, this is amazing. I think there's a lot more room for a lot more of that. Daniel Craig, watch out. Let's get some questions from yourselves here on the floor. Would you go up to the microphone, tell us your name, and then pose the question to our Holy Trinity here. Thanks. My name is Finola Kerrigan and I work in London. And I was really interested in this idea of soft power through film and so on. And I was at a conference on Nollywood a few years ago in London and I asked some of the filmmakers how they thought about the fact, because it was very much about how do you bring the stories out to other audiences? And I asked about this idea of talking to ourselves and talking to others. So Nollywood, the films are fantastic because they have lots of stories that are recognized in different areas of Nigeria, that are folk stories and moral kind of tales of what happens and what that means morally. But when you take them out of context, people don't understand them. So the village girl goes to the city and is attacked or whatever. We can take that very literally outside, but we know that this represents some idea about progress and modernity and so on. When we're from that culture, I mean, I'm not, but I understand them because I'm interested in it. And so how is this gonna be dealt with in terms of telling people about Nigeria, making films that speak out and at the same time continuing to use films that help us figure out who we are internally as people. So that's something that affects all film industries. But I'm wondering, is there a lot of thought being given to that or how would that be kind of coped with? What do you say? So I would say I've met some really amazing Nigerian filmmakers in Hollywood. We were talking about this earlier. And these are basically guys, they're not Hollywood filmmakers. These are guys that are working, making TV products for Fox and NBC and making indie films and produced music videos for major record labels, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and are starting to make feature products. And basically what they're doing is trying to find ways that they can tell their own stories with their own vision in a context that can reach a broader audience, but that still has relevance at home. And I think that the thing to remember is that, especially like I'm a Ghanaian, but I'm gonna tell you about Nigeria. I'm not only West African in this panel, so I'm gonna try. But basically, Nigeria is one of the most literally impactful countries on the planet. I mean, the literature that has come out of that country, the writers that have come out of that country are absolutely mind blowing. And part of the reason I think this has happened is because of the success of some few people, but also because there is a tradition. You know, we speak of like the oral tradition and people think, oh, oral tradition means pre-literate society, but it goes much, much further than that, right? I could sit here and I could tell you a story about something I care about. Or I could sit here and I could tell you a story about something that I care about, right? In my language, literally, it's tonal, right? So it's, how do I, if you ask me, do I know Fadzai, and I say inlele, it means I know her. If I say inlele, it means I don't know her. In our culture, it's not just what you say, it's literally how you say it. So you've got this literary tradition that's all about how you say things and saying them with power and with love. And what we're looking at now is the opportunity to translate that from the page and onto the screen, whether it's a silver screen or it's a mobile one. And what I would argue is that there are more economic factors than anything that are preventing that from happening. And as you start to deal with those economic factors, the issues of distribution and making your money back, monetization, drawing in greater investment by being able to get an adequate return on that investment, that you're gonna start seeing more and more people tell their stories in ways that have that cultural specificity, but that are still applicable to a global audience. Anybody who, has anyone lived in LA? All right, only a few people. Who here has seen Swingers? Right, more people. Swingers was a huge success, crazy indie flick. If you'd never been to LA, you're still gonna love it. But if you've been, you get all the subtext. And I would argue that you're talking about cultures where they already have a tradition of speaking profoundly to that subtext, but in a way that can reach out to broader audiences. And we're just looking to bring it to a new medium. So will this lead us to having like a YouTube kind of civilization, or will it lead to more serious filmmaking? I think it'll be both, you know? And I think that you're gonna see more serious filmmakers start taking things like YouTube more seriously. Let's go for another question. There's a good looking gentleman over there. Take a mic, tell us your name. Hi Ralph, good to see you again. We met a couple of weeks ago in Ghana at the ALN conference, so. Oh, we did? Yeah, we did, that's right. Ghana? I cry all the way. So my name is Victor Mallet. I'm an alum of MIT, and I'm a co-founder of realafrican.com, which you may or may not have heard of yet. We're actually- A fantastic company, a fantastic company. Tell them what you do. Thanks, Ralph. We are basically a very little brother of Iroko, in a way. We're a video-on-demand platform for African and Caribbean content. We launched about a year ago, and part of what we launched for is the idea of how do you present African content globally? And not just also Nigerian content, but South African content, Kenyan content, Zimbabwean content. All that needs a place where it can live and where people can find it. So that was the idea, that is the idea behind realafrican.com. So I really found what you've been saying very interesting. I think, Derek, you have a really great point about the content that is, let's say, produced in Ghana can have so many ways of touching people in Malawi or Zimbabwe elsewhere, and making those connections is a great way to foster some cultural exchange that has not really ever existed. Do you dub your pictures? Is it the different languages? No, we do not dub any films yet. We focus on English-speaking contents right now, and when it's in local languages we have subtitles for English. A lot of our audience right now is also the diaspora, so it's the U.S. diaspora. We have some great partnerships with SNAC films and with Hulu.com. So that's how we operate. And I'd be really interested in hearing from Fadzi about how Iroko thinks about distributing to the rest of Africa, because that's really the $800 million, $1 billion market. It's not just the folks sitting in London or in Brixton or whatever, it's really Africa. And what you think, and I'd be really interested in hearing your thoughts on this as well, Ralph, in terms of, and anybody really, how mobile money begins to play into it, because that's another explosive phenomenon that should touch everything that is done, especially when you're thinking about how do you get your money back as a film producer and you have people who might be willing to pay the equivalent of 50 cents sitting in Kenya and you blow that up over millions of people and you begin to see some things happen. So it'd be really interesting to hear about that. So that's definitely something that's at the forefront for us is looking at these other markets. We're trying to basically apply that same platform we've done about having a systematic marketing machine where we can comprehensively put all the content in one place. And we've actually expanded to Zimbabwe. We had our first Zimbabwe film come out a couple weeks ago. I guess apparently there's an industry called Zollywood that's slowly growing. We've started. Zollywood. Yeah, exactly. We're trying to take over. Ooh. Yeah, Zollywood better watch out. We're coming. And we've also started with Ghanayan movies actually as well. So. Zollywood is way behind. Yeah. You just watched the special kinds of films there. But yeah, so we're definitely trying to have a more pan-African approach. So Zollywood is what got to start us, got us our name, but it is definitely a huge market. In terms of distributing it across Africa, we're doing that as well. I think South Africa is another one of a place we have a lot of our viewers. Kenya is another place where Zollywood content is very popular. So we're trying to do more marketing and also make sure that Africans are also aware that we do have this content available. Colin, any views on that? Well, I want to pick up on the mobile money part, which I think is a really interesting one, right? Especially if you're talking about an African, but developing country markets centerally, where lots of people don't have credit cards, right? This is a huge problem. And all of a sudden, when you have mobile money, it opens up all kinds of different monetization opportunities. So whether the straightforward, I'm going to pay 50 cents to watch this film on my mobile, or that we were talking about before, this kind of dashing, this phenomenon of dashing, where here for that's a tip jar. Like, what if I could send the actor in that film my tip, or the director, or the whatever? What if you could do that in that way? Say, like, I'm with you, or it's a Kickstarter version. Or it basically facilitates this whole channel of commerce that is otherwise much more difficult to do in those kinds of settings. Now, which country in the world is the leader in mobile money, mobile commerce, and mobile payments? Anyone want to hazard a guess? Kenya. Or Philippines. Anyone else? The United States? United States, no. Any other suggestions? So the majority of the respondents said Kenya, they're quite correct. Filler by the name of, well, forget his name for the moment. But there's a company in Kenya called Safari Con, which is like the Vodafone of Kenya. About four years ago, established something called M-Pesa. M-P-E-S-A. It's now become the de facto payment mechanism for 70% of Kenyans. You can buy anything from a Coca-Cola to paying for your kid's school fees on your phone. And how you do it is that the mechanism for doing it, the database that connects you into it, and it's primarily to the unbanked and the uncredited carded, is exactly the way that credit cards work, except your phone is given a code and the code is connected to your minutes. And the minutes are then settled between the bank and the telco. And the net result is that you can use your phone to pay for things. This is now spread through to Tanzania, Uganda. And there've been a whole lot of copycats all over Africa, MTN money, many different kinds of mobile money. And in fact, Visa International, based in San Francisco, six months ago, bought a company from South Africa called Fundamo for $110 million so that they could get an accelerated vehicle to bring mobile money not only to their Visa International, but also to the United States. So paying exactly what you'd said, Mr. Mallett, where are you? There you are. About paying for movies, bite-sized chunks of pieces of movies. This is something where if you can get 10 million people paying $0.15 or $0.20 or $0.50, because remember, in Africa, money is hard to come by. And the vast majority of people live on less than $5 a day. But certainly a very important area. Let's see any more questions from the floor. There we are. Go and take a mic. And there's another gentleman after that. No more women asking questions. Come on, ladies, since Obama's victory, we need to see more visibility, more volubility. Go for it. What's your name? My name is Arthur, Arthur Moussa. And I'm a documentary filmmaker, a new documentary filmmaker. And I'm working on two projects right now. The first one is a long-term four-year project where I'm making a film about how some African students are becoming engineers at MIT. So it's taking them from when they arrive until when they graduate. And then the short-term project was a documentary I filmed about a group of MIT students that got together and did a robotics program in Nigeria in Lagos this past summer. And so it was 10 days with them and how they pulled it off. Now, the question I have is, is there a world of documentary in Africa? Are the documentaries being made? Are they being consumed? What is out there? Because I'm an engineer. I'm from Ghana, actually. And I came to MIT trained as an engineer. But I've always had a passion for storytelling. And that's led me to become a filmmaker. And the stories I'm interested in telling are African stories, hopefully that can inspire Africans to do cool things. So anyway. I have not been as familiar with the documentary industry personally in Africa. I'm sure it exists. Are you guys aware? I'll tell you, so I'm not going to give the same answer. I don't know. But I'm totally with you. I think, I mean, my hope, of course, I love theatrical films and drama and so forth. But the prospect of people telling those kinds of stories, those documentary stories, as opposed to kind of Western teams going in there and telling you what you need to know about country X or situation X, to have people in those settings telling those stories to me seems just fundamentally important. And I feel like that's, I don't know to the extent that it's happening now. I'm not aware of it, which suggests that if it is, it's pretty small. And it certainly is. I mean, you have the funding problem. You have the financial sort of returns from just, it would be hard. On the other hand, you have the skills. And you have the tools, increasingly, and the technology tools and the platforms for people to be able to do that. You have civil society increasingly thinking about NGOs and so forth, thinking about how do we tell stories? How do we use new technologies to tell stories? Whether it's using platforms like Ushahidi or using phones or video. So I think we'll see it. I don't think you're gonna see it in the same way taking the world by storm. You look at the U.S. documentary market, right? And it's a tough road to hoe here. So it's gonna be even tougher there. The majority of the documentaries in Africa have generally been directed towards training, training films, to try and train people in professional or artisanal pursuits. We had a gentleman there. Yes. With his hoodie. Yes, my hoodie. Boy from the hood? Yeah, and I have pulled the microphone too. What's your name? My name is Matea. I am an artist, I'm a percussionist, I'm an engineer and a producer with Samba Lolo, which is based from Mali in West Africa. We also founded a non-profit organization called Fede Kene that focuses on traditional African storytelling and preserving traditional African storytelling as well as opening new markets for it. So I'm a messenger from the way I experienced West Africa and music in West Africa. Is that storytelling is a job in West Africa, much like woodworking is or metallurgy or whatever you wanna call it. So my question around this is, I've heard a lot about finance and mobile money and a lot of media stuff. So my question is, sitting here at MIT especially, is around back what you mentioned, which is global. Local technology sounded like autotune to me almost. And one of the things that autotune does for traditional storytelling in Africa is it removes the origin of it. So in danger in accepting just technology, any technology in any way that we're imposing with markets and money onto Africa is great for traditional storytelling where most of music comes including hip hop and not everything obviously. But that's our mission. So my question is, do you see accepting technology based on markets or how Africa accepts that technology? So here's the thing. For me, there's two ways to look at the continent that I think we, how do I put it? I think a lot of times when we look at Africa, we see a divide between the sort of traditional vision of Africa, the griot, the storyteller, you know, a guy with an imbiro or a balafon, a lot of these beautiful instruments and how they practice and represent African culture and identity. And then you have the other side, which is how young people, which is my primary interest in Africa, are actually living their daily lives. And the reality is the uptake and the degree to which technology is integrated into people's lives is absolutely massive. And people have really taken it and utilized different technologies in ways that are profoundly indigenously uniquely African. For example, again with the mobile phone, who here knows what it is to flash somebody? And I ain't talking about taking your clothes off. You see, all right, all right? So, and I see these Ghanans, they know exactly what I'm talking about. What does it mean? It means that I want to say hi to you, right? But I ain't got that many minutes. So I flash you, which is I ring you, it rings once, you see my name or you see my phone number come up. I don't let it ring anymore. If you call me back, I go say, oh, Chalet Ralph, why you didn't call me? And you be like, oh man, you just call me back. I say, no, I just flash you. I want you to know I'm thinking about you. You know what they call that in England? What? The Scotsman's Ring. The Scotsman, a cheap. That's fantastic that you pointed that out because that is, does that express what you are trying to illustrate? Not totally, probably. But that's just an example of like, even a little thing, like we're not talking about market or anything. We're just saying that the way we use technology in Accra is different from how they use it in Atlanta. And what you're starting to see happen now and I've seen it with so many of my peers is people going home, investing in projects in Ghana. People like Victor who are looking at how can I do something there? And I think that part of what's going to happen is those African communities will determine the degree to which the intersection of market forces, traditional force of values and cultural values and their own creative expressions can be fused in a way that works for them because what's happened historically is we'll look and we'll say, oh, you guys are, this is the way Africa Coder should be. I mean, I've had people tell me, I remember the MIT station, the MIT, I'm gonna call people out. The MIT radio station wouldn't play my music when we were first got started because they said it wasn't African enough. I mean, we were being listened to by millions of kids in Ghana and they wouldn't play it at MIT because somebody from Cambridge knew what African music was, right? And it took before an East African DJ was like, yo, man, yo, I keep listening to your stuff. How come you all don't have that soulfish? They were like, we were like one of the hot African bands coming up out of Boston at the time. Jonathan can attest to this. And then they were like, oh, oh, well, oh, we didn't know, you know? And so I would just say that we have to be careful, just as we wanna be careful and when we impose the idea of how technology and markets would play on the continent that we should be careful how we understand how those things do play on the continent because a lot of us are looking and we're like, hey, man, like I get that the traditional values are good but we also see that those African artists, those African entrepreneurs, they have to eat. And why shouldn't we be able to monetize our vision of the world using the technologies that are available and hopefully we're creating the next Facebooks and Googles and Twitters out of Africa as well. But let me ask the gentleman that asked the question this. In Nigeria, two guys, Eric Idiyahi and Dunlady Varheyan, saw Spotify being very successful in Scandinavia and in Europe and decided they would start their own West African Spotify. It's called spinlet, spinlet.com. Is that the kind of engineering thinking that you are referring to where you're saying what is going on is that the youth love technology, love digital engineering, love stuff that will give them some kind of global something with an African voice? So I can't actually answer the Spotify question because I don't think Spotify provides any support for the artists, so that's not what I want for Africa. But I think I didn't make myself clear. I support the local thing. I think that there's real innovation and there's going to be a boom in creative growth there. But the local vocal is what I was referring to, which is, hey, I'm gonna sing in this language and translate it for me in these 17 other languages. Is just the same thing that Autotune did, which is remove who is the origin of the message. So musicians and artists were messengers, right? And that should be important to us. So this is tradition and this is a job in Africa, right? The griot, the jelly, whatever you call it. So in some way it is my job to even ask this question but in my mind, Nollywood has done for the video and movies what Ivory Coast has done for the music production in West Africa, which is as fast as possible, let's see how we can monetize this technology. So I'm saying yes, we should. I'm not saying no, we shouldn't, but I'm saying we need to be careful how and not just accept models that are coming, just like Autotune, for example, which has done, I don't know, I switch off the radio when I hear Autotune. So I hope you don't use that or respect your heart and everything. No, I do understand what you're saying and I hate Autotune. I figure why not just learn to sing in pitch or sing off pitch, but do it. And I think the technology you're talking about, you're literally saying, he's raising a very powerful point which is that if you take a technology that can take your vocal essence and wrap it into another language, are you losing something literally in the translation? And I think it's a very good question. And we do have, yes, there's hundreds of languages there as well as in India and it shouldn't be, we shouldn't try to be monetizing on the culture through, you know, this just sounds wrong to me. Autotune removes that connection, but also it is technology that's available that will bring you money at this point. There is industry that will, you'll get more money to make that song if you do put Autotune on so you're gonna put it anyway. That, you know what I mean? Because you can use anything, anything that will get you more popularity on Spotify and whatever it is. So you literally change the way you transmit messages. I think Autotune's a fad, frankly. I don't think you hear it as much now as you did three years ago. And I think in two years nobody would even dare put it on because it'll be sound corny. But the incontrovertible fact is that young people in Africa today are consumed and completely obsessed by wanting new technology, new digitalia. This is what they want. Let's get a lady to ask a question. Come on girls, don't be so mute. Come on, we're in Boston. Surely you have a question for the Holy Trinity here? No? This gentleman here, what are we gonna do? Come on girls. I'm sorry, I'm not a lady. Tell us your name and... It's okay. You could be if you wanted to be. Oh, this way. Oh. My name is Federico, Federico. I'm Italian slash Spanish and for that reason I want to excuse my jet lag English also because I've just landed in Boston and I'm not so active like you, right? I want to thank you all really for this panel because I find it fascinating also because I've been working in this field since I was a teenager. I happened to grow up in a very small town in Southern Spain where we, a group of crazy people at the moment, we founded an African film festival now called Tarifa slash Cordoba African Film Festival. Then I studied journalism. I don't want to tell the story of my life but just to tell you how I got to Kenya and work in this similar field. And I had the chance of work as a cultural cooperation officer for the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation in these last two years in Nairobi, Kenya. And then I worked with a group of upcoming young filmmakers from the slums, mainly Kibera and Matare and we started up a small film festival with them that are called the Slum Film Festival which for me it's a bit of a very small scale example of this big discussion about how media, new technologies and new media are empowering communities as well in Africa. And my question is for Colin actually because I find when I worked in Kenya I found also fascinating how young Kenyans are using mobile technologies not only to consume cultural products but also to produce their own cultural products and that was the idea for me to fund the Slum Film Festival. And so I happened to discover this fascinating work of what Scottish, well South African scholar called Pro-Sumption, the production plus consumption factor. So I wonder if you also look at it in your civic new media usage to understand what are the needs of local communities. I mean, so I think this addresses to, you also addressed the previous question, right, about sort of imposing technology and I guess my view is that technology as we've heard is coming, people want technology and so the best thing that we can do is help them to navigate what it is to use technology effectively, right? So thinking about their kind of information and media literacy on the consumption side but as importantly on the production side and we in the US I would say are much more oriented towards consumption for a whole variety of reasons, cultural in some cases but really business heavy reasons, even the way that you access your internet often the upload speeds are different from the download speeds, we wanna be, we're told to buy stuff and to consume stuff and to me they're really exciting thing about the cost of these technologies and the power and the simplicity is that all of a sudden you can have a tremendous number of new creators in the space and one of the big research efforts around the Berkman Center, Youth and Media Project and the Youth Media Lab is what we see is that the way that kids learn things this will not come as a surprise to anyone in the room is by doing, right? And the way that they learn about sort of new media literacies and learn about and Henry's in the back of the room who can talk this much more effectively than I can but one of the big ways that they learn about how to consume things is by producing and they learn about intellectual property and their views on it when they have their own thing to share or not share and to decide how to treat it. So I guess for me I see this just with these kinds of inexpensive phones, the capacity to put stuff on YouTube or whatever the local equivalent is and to make their own, make their own works and it gets to the documentary, it gets to anything else. It's just an amazing opportunity for modern storytelling and to continue in that oral tradition and to make it your job. So I think it's like- Do you think it reduces the cultural authenticity or increases it? All right, absolutely increases it. It gives you tools potentially to be yourself and be more than you could otherwise be, right? Cause you get to, I get to take your picture, I get to mash it up, I get to add Derek's fabulous music to it. I get to do this and that I can make money off it too but I can express myself. And so I think that's where, but the key there is that people have the capacity to access and to understand how to use those tools. If I may just attach to that conversation. So that does sound like the tools that we're bringing there should be both capable of production and consumption, right? So it should be a little more than a screen, right? So wouldn't it be then better to bring in, if we could God knows the best, bringing the best will bring in the iPhone, not my iPhone, my phone, whatever that was, the cheapest thing, right? Because the one that would be also capable of production and not just consumption, doesn't that mean, yes, perhaps we need a little bit more expensive technology and we should be thinking about investing in these terms or not. Should we just- I would put it like this, anyone who can afford an iPhone in Africa right now already has one, right? Like it's not like you can't have an iPhone. I mean, some people have an iPhone and don't even, they have it just to show up. Exactly, they got all the blackberries in the sun, they got all the Nokia devices that we don't even buy out here because Nokia has no market penetration. I'm saying that it's not that those technologies are not available, but for the person who is like, hey, I want a smartphone and I don't have $400, what about them? And so what you're seeing is, it's not a matter of an either or, it's an and. But in the iPhone, I mean, the my phone, if it doesn't have a camera now, it's gonna have a camera. I mean- Yeah, it's got one. So then there you go. It's got video. There you go. It's democratized production values in a $30 device. Bam. Bam. Done. Let's get, ladies, give us, we only got time for two more questions. So, here we go. All right. Yay. I can't take it anymore. What's your name? My name is Eleanor. I might be putting my phone in my mouth because I missed the first half hour. So I hope you guys didn't already talk about this, but I was curious, you were talking about the lady who went around, the merchant bank who went around was trying to get funding for this movie from these corporations. You completely covered that already. Yeah, I know. Yeah, that I got. I'm curious, like a lot of the funding we've talked about other than that example is coming from like foundations or from actually distribution in the country in the brief period where you can have a theatrical release or licensing deals from your site. What about corporations being involved in funding movies and why is it that they're not more involved? I mean, here we have corporations doing product placement, sponsoring cultural events like concerts. So is there resistance in Africa to that type of involvement and why? There is one African, there's one large American corporation, Pepsi, who've been told by Indra Nui, who is the global head of Pepsi, saying emerging markets are really important. Do something in Africa that can stimulate what we've been trying to do in the United States as they did a couple of weeks ago in New York City with Nicki Minaj. Now, it doesn't mean you've got to find the Nicki Minaj of Lagos, but they will be putting money where their mouth is. What you're suggesting is a fantastic idea and... Can I jump in on this? Of course. So, I apologize for not having addressed this so far. So the origin of this film industry is that the marketers, which is to say people who sold then video cassettes and now DVDs in the market, made a film to sell video cassettes, right? So this is, and those are the folks, they're colloquial and known as the marketers, but they're kind of the executive producers and they fund almost all these films. These films are typically funded, self-funded, funded by family, funded by marketers, who also control the distribution. So some people are kind to the marketers, some people are really not kind to the marketers. It's a really, it's a rough system, which reinforces the limited amount of money, reinforces, most people would argue, low production values and quick turnaround, and has a effectively control over distribution and also allegations are that at least some of these marketers are actually also pirates. So that you have the same people who are ostensibly your executive producer selling out the back. So it's not the kind of piracy that we see in the West, right? This is a different kind of piracy. Are you sure? Well, here in the West, it's like an individual. It's like me downloading something and here you have like someone's given her 100,000 copies of a VCD and then they're giving me 100,000 copies and I'm walking out the back of the shop, right? So it's a real problem. It really limits the, and it's not great for the marketers either, right? For the legit ones, the illegitimate ones have to deal with paying people off ostensibly and all sorts of risks and the legitimate ones are dealing with the pirates too. So it's a rough system. There have been a number of different attempts to deal with this distribution and funding thing. Another, I mean another element of the problem is that there's not a lot of transparency in the film industry. So nobody knows how many copies are sold. Nobody knows how many copies are viewed. There's no way to track it. There's no box office revenue. So you can't track hunting. Like the way we do here, there's no, they don't like to show their books. So if you're a company who's gonna invest in their film, they're like, no, no, no, this is art. You know, I'm not showing you my books. Yeah. So they're a whole host of those, and then you have the legal issues, right? There's no, there's no contract. No one knows who owns the IP. There's no signature, you know, just it's a very kind of opaque system which the legal system is slow and arguably dysfunctional. So there's a real problem there. And this is actually one of the things that I did not start off saying we need to deal with this, but this is clearly at the root of so much of the challenge to the industry right now. I was figuring out how to finance films so that you can make the full range of films from crappy, too weak, you know, action or whatever to really thoughtful, great literature, high brow, amazing stuff. Or, you know, whatever filmmakers wanna make and whatever consumers wanna consume, there should be that possibility, but right now there absolutely isn't that possibility. And so I think one of the things that we're trying to work through is how do you change that dynamic? And so as Ralph alluded, you have a good luck, Jonathan, this next, this $200 million fund hasn't done it. I think there are questions whether you can get other kinds of companies to address that, but it's gonna require more transparency, it's gonna require more opportunities for revenue in the country, so Iroco and other, you know, sort of streams like that matter, but they're not sufficient to get the kind of returns you need. So one of the things that, well, Stanley, I guess suffice it to say that this is a really important challenge. Well, I think just add what you're saying with the funding issue. And feel free to tell me I'm wrong. No, no, no, no, please spot on. I think it's the nature of the industry being so fragmented, like in the US you have the big production houses. In Hollywood it's basically five big production houses. There it's like 400 different producers. I think it's a lot harder to be able to invest in a big project. I think the way it works in the US is that you have a big production house, the winners basically fund the losers, and so you can put your money behind big films. You basically make your bets. But I think in a market like that where it's just so fragmented, there's so little budgets, I think it's very hard to be able to really fund the big projects. Maybe there need to be changes in terms of consolidating the production houses. Maybe that can be something in the right direction of funding. Yeah, I mean, I think this we would, I would actually personally love to get into deeper conversation on the business models behind all this stuff. Because part of the reason you see these big movies made in the United States, frankly, is because they sell popcorn. And if you actually look at how this stuff works, the movies that sell popcorn are the ones that get made. But specifically movies that sell popcorn to teenage boys. Movies that are made for girls are so that the teenage boys will take a girl and buy her popcorn. That is the underpinning of the American Hollywood film industry. Because that popular in Nigeria was the problem. Exactly, which is why I'm like Fufu style. If we have the way to sell a Fufu, we're gonna make more movies. Where's that documentary film maker? So two quick points. One, actually, interestingly from what Colin said about the actual physical product is where a lot of the growth in Nollywood was stimulated. And Jonathan, I know was smiling when we were saying like the piracy is different, but there's something also interesting that we should be aware of that's happened in the American industry. I talked to a guy I used to work with called Les Bider, who for 25 years he ran Warner Chapel, which was at the time the largest music publishing company in the world. And a point that he made is that a lot of people don't think about it. It's that one of the big issues facing the record industry right now is that the rise of digital is not just that people can steal your music. It's that all the major record labels in the 80s and 90s bought distribution companies, which means that if you sold a million records, like they were gonna have to have a million physical records or physical tapes or physical CDs to sell you and they may cost them five cents to make those CDs, but they're gonna charge the artist a dollar. And so that's a million dollars in revenue. Now you're selling digital content. You made one MP3 file or maybe you made five of different types of quality. How many times do you sell that product? So literally in the American scene, we're dealing with the same issue of once you go digital, you remove the opportunity for the guy who makes the widget to sell the widget. The second thing to your point of like, where do corporations come in? There was an interesting project that happened a few years ago out of South Africa where Guinness funded an action movie. And we're talking a high budget, multi-million dollar, high production value action film around the guy who all of us who drink Guinness in Africa would see on the billboards. He's a handsome brother with a ball head, look just like me. And he'd be there like, Guinness, the power, right? And Guinness the power became an action hero. So it'll be intriguing to see if you have more of that kind of thing happen. Yeah, and just to pile on that, and it should be noted that product placement like Blackberry Girls or PhoneSwap, these are other films that product placement is a pretty advertising $600 million in Nigeria, something like that. And ironically, right, this is where piracy works in their favor. The more movies that get out there like, hey, that's great, right? So that kind of is one of those that pushes the other direction. And remember, Guinness is the biggest alcohol brand in Nigeria, the biggest. And you drink it to slate your thirst and also because it gives you extra masculinity. And on that note of extra masculinity, ladies, we'd like to end it with some music because we feel that getting a good vibe as we go out with these two great performers, let's hear some Fufu style. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. So in honor of the Fufu, I actually want to, because we've spoken so much about Nollywood, which I think is an African treasure. And I think that its best days are still to come and we should give props to Nigeria for really pioneering a phenomenon, a global phenomenon. I want to do a Nigerian song. It's actually an Ibo song and it's very, very simple. And an Nigerian filmmaker taught it to me years and years and years ago, I never got it. And because I can't speak Ibo, I will roughly translate it, it means something along the lines of peace, peace. Anybody here speak Ibo? Okay, good. It means all the goodness and the poetry of the world. And it means Derek is dope. And you can take that to the bank. But the song says, Dibe, dibe, dibe, indi di kan ma, Onyo melu ya dibe nuwa indi di kan ma, Dibe, dibe, dibe, indi di kan ma, Onyo melu ya dibe nuwa indi di kan ma, Dibe, dibe, dibe, indi di kan ma, On your meluya di benua indiri kanma, di bedi di bedi di bedi indiri kanma. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm round of applause to Colin, Fadzi, Derek, thank you so much.