When I first meet Mo Abudu, the most powerful film and TV producer in Africa, she is drinking prosecco with friends at the new production office of her company, EbonyLife, in Lagos. They’re celebrating the opening of the EbonyLife Creative Academy, where hundreds of young Nigerians will be able to learn everything from production to screenwriting to acting and lighting for free — thanks to support from the local government.
Upstairs, the cast of Castle & Castle, the Lagos-set legal procedural that aired its first series on Abudu’s satellite TV channel, is filming series two on a floor that has been mocked up to be the eponymous law firm’s offices. It will air later this year on Netflix under a landmark deal Abudu struck with the streaming giant.
She and her friends are discussing the glass and steel offices of some of Lagos’s top law firms, which she compares to photos on the wall that show the grittier lives of everyday Nigerians. “I love these pictures, because it’s part of who we are — but that is not all we are,” she says. EbonyLife does gritty and glamorous, but Abudu is also interested in changing perceptions of the continent from the ones she heard at boarding school in England: do you live in a hut? Do you have lions and giraffes running in your garden?
“The same questions I was being asked in England [40 years ago] are the same questions my children were being asked when they went to school in England,” she says.
EbonyLife is developing two series and multiple films for Netflix — one based on Lola Shoneyin’s book The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives and another on Nobel Prize-winning playwright Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. The first film, Òlòturé, about a journalist who goes undercover as a sex worker in Lagos, aired in October.
Ikechukwu Onunaku in ‘Òlòturé’ (2019), which first aired on Netflix last October © Alamy
Streamers such as Netflix have seen success with non-western narratives, she says. “People are enjoying these stories,” she tells me a few days later over Zoom, where we’ve decided to continue our chat. “It’s working because . . . it makes business sense to offer the world stories that they can relate to, not stories that are just about a particular part of the world, but stories that encompass everyone.”
The Netflix deal was the first of four major deals she signed in the past year, along with an agreement with AMC, the US network behind Mad Men and The Walking Dead, to develop a sci-fi show called Nigeria 2099. In February, she announced a deal with Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Westbrook Studios to develop two more series and a movie, along with a first-look TV deal with Sony Pictures Television.
The world has decided that it needs more stories, it needs different backdrops and that there needs to be more diversity in storytelling
It’s an unprecedented run for an African production company and speaks, she says, to the quality of EbonyLife’s work and the fact that the world is ready to hear African narratives.
“I think what’s happened is that the world has gotten to a place whereby it has decided that it needs more stories, it needs different backdrops and that there needs to be more diversity in storytelling,” she says. “The story that gets told from our continent in film has been about the slave trade. Now, I’m not saying it’s not an important part of our history, but it’s not the only history we have — there is so much more. And I think that now, studios around the world are appreciating the fact that they can commercialise these stories, because they’ve never been told.”
She bristles slightly when I ask her what the series of deals says about Nollywood, Nigeria’s film industry, a cultural behemoth on the continent.
EbonyLife’s legal series ‘Castle & Castle’, series two of which will air later this year on Netflix © Emmanuel Oyeleke
“Nollywood means film, and a lot of the work we do is film and television. So I don’t want to say that it’s bigger than Nollywood because Nollywood is a massive industry, but I’m just trying to see if Nollywood truly defines the work that we do,” she says. She points to the recent string of deals: “The kind of projects that we’ve signed, and the deals we’re doing, they’re global in nature . . . But I love Nollywood, and . . . I want to continue to do local stories, because I think our box office needs to grow in Nigeria.”
Why does she think the entertainment industry has come around to global content? “It had to happen at some point, because there just wasn’t any diversity. There just wasn’t any equity in the storytelling around the world . . . Particularly in the last year, we’ve seen the importance of Black Lives Matter. And when we say Black Lives Matter, black stories matter, African storytelling matters,” she says. “So I think the world has just kind of now woken up to this reality, that it’s time to hear more.”
Abudu was born in Hammersmith in west London but moved to Nigeria as a child before heading back to the UK for boarding school and university. She returned to Nigeria in the early 1990s and worked as the head of HR for the oil company ExxonMobil. She left that job to found a recruitment agency, Vic Lawrence & Associates, when she got the itch to launch her own talk show.
She took a course in London on how to be a TV presenter, watched an Oprah Winfrey DVD box set and then went into the offices of MultiChoice, the satellite TV provider, and pitched her idea. Moments with Mo debuted in 2006. Like Oprah, it covered everyday domestic issues — love at first sight, dieting, having it all — but from an African perspective.
“I love watching The Oprah Show. I mean, who doesn’t? But how relevant is this to people across the continent? If she’s covering a topic like sexual abuse, how does that American helpline help you here in Nigeria?” she says. “If Oprah is doing a show about weight loss, for example, now, what on earth is she going to tell you to eat that is relevant to an African? Our diets are different. So I had dietitians come on my show that would say, OK, locally, eat this . . . it was about just finding the relevance to everything on a local level.”
Mo Abudu on her talk show ‘Moments with Mo’ in 2011 with Christine Lagarde, then head of the IMF
It has since aired hundreds of episodes and Abudu has interviewed most of Nigeria’s most powerful politicians, as well as the likes of Hillary Clinton and Christine Lagarde. With the success of the talk show, Abudu launched a channel named after her production company, EbonyLife, in 2012, and a film studio in 2014. Before Òlòturé, it had mostly produced comedies, and its seven films are among the top-grossing Nigerian films of all time.
Before the pandemic, Abudu knew that traditional TV was dying, even on a continent where more than half the people have no internet access. The future is streaming, everywhere, she says, and the streamers are now paying attention to African narratives. But there is still more work to be done.
“I just want to tell stories that don’t have to be classified as an African story — I just want to tell really great stories that the world is going to appreciate,” she says. “When an American tells a story, it’s not preceded with the word [‘American’]. It’s just considered a great story. And I just want to be at a point whereby we are part of that ecosystem that provides great content for the world to enjoy.”
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