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Major shifts in Nollywood shortly after 2000 included greatly increased power for the marketers, a shift of filmmaking and financing to the Igbo cities of Asaba, Enugu, and Onitsha, a crisis of overproduction, and comedy emerging as a prominent commercial genre. The figure of the rogue or trickster is central in the Nigerian comic tradition, as is Pidgin, a contact language associated with unofficial laughter, truth-telling, the lower classes, and what Bakhtin called dialogism and the grotesque. Unlike other Nigerian film genres, comedy is weakly associated with a specific location or plot form, often parodying or sharing themes with other genres.. Some films by Nkem Owoh, the greatest Nollywood comic actor, have village settings and perspectives. Issues that cause stress in other genres are treated with confidence in the resilience of communities, but difficulties in the politics of development are presented with sober clarity and complicity.

The cultural epic genre is set in the “traditional,” precolonial past. The genre was cofounded by The Battle of Musanga, which conceives of Igbo history in the manner of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Igodo, which is legendary and archetypal. The genre is ambivalent in its interpretation of the past, presenting it alternately as a source of cultural richness and righteous order, or as a nightmare of tyranny and dark spiritual forces requiring intervention by Christian missionaries. Epics normally center on an igwe (an Igbo king), though historically Igbo societies were seldom monarchies. The king is also an ambivalent figure, either a virtuous priest/king ensuring harmony or a tyrant. The genre was launched at the end of military rule and was originally preoccupied with political and spiritual issues, but romance became increasingly important. The genre of “royal films” with contemporary settings springs from epics about romances in royal families.

A genre of films about Nigerians living overseas has been produced through collaborations between the Nollywood industry and African immigrant communities in Europe, North America, Brazil, China, and elsewhere. The point of view ranges from that of settled expatriates to one grounded at home in Nigeria. An extension of Nollywood film culture, the genre has a typical setting, story arc, moral and psychological themes, and formal features. Under the harsh conditions of undocumented immigration, the protagonists must make contact with an African expatriate community, which normally becomes their principle horizon. Often they are forced into drug dealing or prostitution. Betrayal and the question of what one is willing to do for money are common themes. The genre explores opposing sides of the national character as Nigerians conceive of it, in both harrowing and comic versions.

“New Nollywood” names a strategy by independent producer/directors to make films with larger budgets and of higher quality, suitable for screening in theaters. The strategy depends on the new multiplex cinemas in Nigeria, on screenings abroad, and on foreign DVD sales. The few screens available in Nigeria form a precarious economic basis, and the films must target an elite demographic in Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora. Kunle Afolayan is the leading director of such films. His situation and strategies are inscribed in his first three films. Aesthetically and thematically, Irapada is close to the Yoruba film tradition in which his father Adeyemi Afolayan was a major star. The Figurine is sophisticated and cosmopolitan, designed to appeal to both foreign and Nigerian audiences. Phone Swap, a light romantic comedy, continues Afolayan’s vision of the Nigerian nation, unified across ethnic, cultural, and class divisions.

The rich oral traditions of storytelling in Black Africa have evolved into cinematic forms, adapting social satire and political humor to the realities of modern life. After a brief history of the region and its early encounters with the medium of motion pictures, this chapter introduces concepts like négritude, the griot storyteller, pan-Africanism, and Afropolitanism to explain how African beliefs and sub-Saharan cinema differ from others in the world and how African filmmakers like Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Adama Drabo, Henri Duparc and Benoît Lamy, Flores Gomes and Fanta Régina Nacro have fashioned a cinema that reflects the way Africans see themselves and their place in the world.

This chapter illustrates how black programming produced elsewhere navigates the circuits of contemporary commercial television and global, digital distribution platforms. It looks at three examples of non-American black television and video programming: the animated Samoan/ Māori television series bro'Town (2004–2009); the booming Nigerian videofilm industry known as Nollywood; and the transnational pirating of the first Belizean television drama Noh Matta Wat (2005–2008). Together, these examples display several important trends in black television during an era of digitization, globalization, and marketization. First, there is an obvious increase in the variety of video and television programming featuring non-U.S. blacks circulating internationally. Secondly, these programs retain significant cultural specificity. Lastly, black television programming travels through disorganized, parallel markets, which make production funding highly precarious.

In response to the perceived negative images of Africa, a number of pan-African media have emerged and are attempting to develop an alternative news narrative of the continent. However, faced with myriad challenges – both practical and ideological – most have had only limited success. Using pan-African(ist) media initiatives including the pan-African News Agency (PANA), SABC-Africa and South Africa's Naspers-owned Multichoice as examples, the chapter addresses questions on why a successful pan-Africanist media project remains a ‘dream deferred’. The chapter challenges the conceptual framework within which some of the media initiatives are anchored. It chapter argues that the failure of pan-African media initiatives to acknowledge the continent's diversity, even incoherence, undermines attempts to develop counter-narratives capable of telling the ‘African’ stories they claim to be pursuing. The chapter moves on to explore key political, economic and institutional challenges the pan-African media project faces, ranging from the domination of international communication structures by Transnational News Agencies, to the severe financial constraints faced by continental media upstarts. Finally, the chapter suggests ways in which we may re-conceptualise the idea of a pan-African consciousness and the pan-African(ist) media agenda.

Chapter 1 focuses on the history of motorization from the colonial moment to the decolonizing decades following World War II. Examining various events or episodes alongside key literary and cinematic texts, this chapter explores the many ambivalences and conflicts present in the process of motorization. The chapter also discuss how African entrepreneurs took the lead in importing automobiles and establishing a system of transportation while Europeans were often ambivalent or even hostile to the idea of motorizing Africa.

Chapter 2 focuses on the tragedy of motorcar accidents through a close reading of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s 1965 post-independence play The Road about Nigerian lorry drivers living on the urban periphery. This chapter reads the road as a Bakhtinian chronotope – a space-time matrix – that includes various lived times of postcoloniality.

Chapter 3 turns to Francophone cinema, discussing in detail Ousmane Sembene’s Xala and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Quartier Mozart. While media scholars like Kristin Ross have often focused on the shared qualities of film and cars—such as movement, image, standardization, mechanization, and displacement—this chapter discusses how African Francophone films reconfigure the link between the moving image and the moving vehicle by disallowing the automobile to represent a continuous, rational forward movement.

Chapter 4 examines the popular and low-budget Nollywood video films where the private luxury car is both a highly coveted object, typically seen driving down paved roads in posh neighborhoods, and a sign of wealth that is often acquired through criminality, witchcraft, magic, or fraud.

Chapter 5 looks at the way that feminist texts re-write and work in dialogue with the male-centered films and novels where the car is a sign of patriarchal power and capitalist achievement. This chapter argues that in films and novels where women are the drivers, the car figures much less as a sign of upward mobility and elite status and instead highlights the ambivalence with which financially independent women move through West African urban centers.

An African-Indian cultural economy continues to grow through music, dance, film, and fashion. This chapter focuses on Senegalese-Indian connections following the arrival of the first Senegalese scholars to Annamalai University in the 1970s and their negritude/Afrocentric politics. Senegalese love of Indian films grew into a wider media explosion of Indouphilie. While the trend emerged in local cinema-viewing societies, dance clubs, and arts schools, African global cultures came into their own, intersecting with and diverging from Bollywood and Bharatanatyam (Indian classical dance). Some West African performers like Germaine Acogny and Nollywood filmmakers have become highly critical of obsession with India, and they uphold Africa as a cultural mecca. African critiques of Indian cultural forms challenge consumerism, beauty defined by fair skin, and, at times, mimicry of the West and have begun to influence the Indian diaspora in Senegal and young Indians in India.