Veteran actor Nkem Owoh, popularly known as Osuofia, has clarified his stance on the origins of Nigeria’s movie sector, emphasizing that Yoruba filmmakers pioneered the home-video format long before the industry adopted the moniker “Nollywood.”
The clarifying remarks were delivered during an episode of the comedy interview show Curiosity Made Me Ask, host by popular comedian and content creator Adebayo Abidemi (Bae U). The episode was published on Saturday, November 7, 2026, across the host’s official YouTube channel.
Addressing public misunderstandings regarding earlier comments, Owoh pushed back against claims that he attributed the creation of Nollywood as an official entity to Yoruba theater practitioners, pointing out a critical distinction between the origin of home video and the adoption of the industry’s modern name.
”First of all, you have given me this wrong accusation that I said Yoruba started Nollywood,” Owoh stated during the interview. “No. When we started the thing, there was no Nollywood as a name. We sat together and were brainstorming ideas on how the thing was going to come to fruition, and eventually, we chose Nollywood.”
Owoh highlighted historical figures who laid the foundation for screen entertainment in Nigeria, giving explicit credit to legendary Yoruba theater practitioners and filmmakers such as Chief Hubert Ogunde and Adebayo Salami (Oga Bello).
”Yoruba started the thing,” Owoh continued. “They made home video very popular, and I’ve said it several times. Ogunde and Adebayo Papa, these are the people whose work I loved to watch. When Ogunde was out, I don’t think there was any Igbo man who was that popular in that space.”
When host Bae U playfully suggested that Ogunde might have been Igbo, Owoh firmly dismissed the joke, reiterating Ogunde’s Yoruba heritage and his role in establishing traveling theater and video culture in Nigeria.
The clarification comes amid recurring public debates within the Nigerian entertainment space over ethnic contributions to the film industry.
Yoruba theater troupes successfully transitioned traveling stage plays onto VHS tapes during the late 1970s and 1980s, establishing the commercial viability of home-video recordings in Nigeria.
The formal commercial boom and brand identity known as “Nollywood” developed in the early 1990s, notably marked by the mass distribution of major English and Igbo-language video projects like Living in Bondage (1992), after which industry stakeholders formally coined and adopted the term.
Owoh concluded by restating that while the collective efforts of multi-ethnic filmmakers built the modern infrastructure of Nollywood, historical credit for introducing and popularizing home-video culture remains with the Yoruba film pioneers.
