The love affair between Nollywood — the Nigerian film industry — and Zambian television viewers began in 2003 when the Zambia National Broadcasting Cooperation (ZNBC) began airing the soap opera, Super Story.
The first instalment featured the trials and tribulations of a much-loved male character, Swara, and won such a devoted viewership that it opened the floodgates for pirated tapes to enter the Zambian market.
And with piracy came the darker vice of pornography.
When ZNBC erroneously aired an explicit Nigerian movie during prime time, viewers cried porn.
The acting director of programmes made a public apology, but he was suspended for a month anyway.
Acting on a tip-off, police raided the house of a Nigerian national in Lusaka’s Matero compound. The man was caught reproducing 400-million kwacha (about R557 000) worth of pornographic Nigerian movies.
A trader in pirated tape at the city centre market said some of the tapes are ”really quite explicit”.
”But you cannot tell just by looking at the covers and the title. Some titles look very innocent, but the story inside is a different thing.”
Sadly, most movie fanatics are young. Even children and toddlers are parked in front of the television. But with porn on the loose there is some cause for concern.
William Mwale, a Pentecostal youth pastor in Lusaka, says: ”Though these Nigerian movies are very popular, the darker element they always propagate of the powers of darkness and faith in juju is very alarming. Now there is this new element of pornography. Something must be done.”
In the past eight months, the Zambian police have seized and destroyed videotapes worth more than 500-million kwacha (R696 378).
Zambian anti-piracy law requires that a high-ranking police officer inspect and confiscate pirated tapes. It also requires that stated piracy cases should be handled in a high court. But this thwarted police efforts because inspectors are few and piracy cases could be dealt with more quickly at magistrates’ court level.
Zambia Copyright Society manager Stanley Mkandawire says piracy is highly organised and that part of the difficulty lies in the enormity of the problem. The ratio of pirated tapes to genuine copies is 70 to one.