On a television set in thick green bush outside Nigeria’s megacity Lagos, the mood was buoyant.
“Welcome to my palace,” said Bola Stephen-Atitebi, a theatre actor who is grinning after taking the leap from stage to screen as a star of Itura, the latest hit in a booming new African telenovela scene.
She plays Queen Aderomoke, tasked with preventing her fictitious 19th-century Yoruba kingdom tearing itself apart after the sudden death of the king. The series which launched in August was nominated for a viewers’ choice award for best original telenovela, losing out to a Zambian programme, Mpali, in a ceremony held in Lagos on Saturday.
“Everybody who has the time to be awake is watching it,” said James Omokwe, the director.
He said audiences around Africa have tuned in, as well as in Europe and the UK, addicted to 260 episodes of romance and strife broadcast every weeknight at 8.30pm.
Half a century ago, television stations in Brazil and Mexico pioneered the telenovela form, which became famous for its epic series lengths and formulaic plots filled with fated love triangles and family feuds.
But the arrival of Africa as a hotbed of popular soaps may bring the greatest twist yet, as it threatens to unseat the until-now undisputed Latin American kings of the genre.
Now, less than a decade after the first soap was made, African telenovelas are being dubbed into Spanish.
The first was Legacy, the glitzy tale of a billionaire’s family squabbling after the death of its patriarch, an award-winning South African series carrying more than a whiff of the global sensation Succession.
Legacy was produced by MultiChoice Studios and broadcast to avid watchers around Africa in 2020. Côte Ouest, an Ivorian television distributor that for 25 years has brought Latin American programmes to Africa, has announced it is dubbing the award-winning programme into neutral Spanish for the Latin American market.
The company is already considering dubbing a second African programme into Spanish.
Kimberley Azria, Côte Ouest’s head of business development, said African productions had come to rival Latin American ones in quality, and noted similarities between the two regions, in family values, the strength of tradition and their colonial histories. She said it was time to “introduce the flavour of African content to Latin America”.
Latin American telenovelas, distinct from British or Australian soaps in that they typically end after six months or a year, found global audiences in the late 1980s and 1990s during what became known as the “telenovela craze”. Many Africans fondly remember watching them then, while Mexican telenovela stars are among those who have toured the continent promoting them.
But now homegrown programmes rule the roost, with South Africa and Nigeria leading the way. In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and largest economy, the scene has exploited the talent of Nollywood, the country’s film industry, the second most prolific in the world after Bollywood. Producers have found a perfect fit in Nigeria’s love of “heterosexual romance amid the ‘dirty dealings’ of super-rich rivals”, as the academic Noah Tsika put it.
MultiChoice, the owner of cable service DSTV, which dominates African TV production, broadcasts telenovelas through its Africa Magic channels in English as well as indigenous languages such as Swahili and Yoruba.
Yolisa Phahle, the CEO of Showmax, a streaming service majority-owned by Multichoice, said seven of its 20 most-watched titles in the UK are African telenovelas.
In 2020, MultiChoice launched a dedicated channel, Novela Magic. This year in Nigeria, MultiChoice is cashing in on the growing popularity of the soaps, doubling its usual number..
Itura, another MultiChoice drama, is one of a slew of new African telenovelas shunning the modern, westernised families portrayed in the first ones and echoing the current boom in cinema’s interest in African history around the world.
But it is no departure from the formula. Its plot mirrors that of Legacy, its series length is no small logistical feat, and it has killed off 15 characters since episode one – not including soldiers.
More than 200 revolving actors have slept in a holiday resort near the set and been bussed over every morning to be adorned in raffia skirts, cowry shells and leather tunics in an African village built with wire mesh.
Shammah Agah, 25, a breakout star who plays Moremi, the village belle caught in a love triangle, said she was recently in Ethiopia where a fan recognised her. “I was like: ‘WTF, you guys know me here?’” she said.
Her character disappeared into a forest around episode 90, seemingly never to return, but was brought back 100 episodes later after clamour from her mostly male fans. “She wears a very short skirt so the guys are like …” she said, laughing.
Amid the success, there is the odd downside for those involved. Fans on dedicated social media groups pore over the programmes daily, and often abuse actors in public, confusing them with their characters.
Stephen-Atitebi, in her late forties, said: “I’ve been called all sorts: ‘Stupid woman’, ‘you’re too foolish’.” A theatre actor in her first screen role, Stephen-Atitebi was previously reluctant to audition for television, doubting producers and directors. “I felt that a lot of them didn’t know what they were doing,” she said. “I know better now.”
