By Hyeladzira Maryam Adamu
It started as a small interruption. Sitting on the floor with work open and YouTube running quietly in the background, a newly released Nollywood film began to autoplay. The title was catchy enough to pause for a moment. Then the dialogue began. The accent hit first, followed by Hausa spoken in a way that sounded properly rehearsed. Within seconds, the feeling was familiar: the quiet irritation that comes from watching a culture being approximated instead of understood.
That irritation quickly hardened into anger. Not because this was new, but because it wasn’t. Year after year, Nollywood continues to misrepresent Northern Nigeria, relying on shortcuts that flatten a region of immense diversity into a narrow set of visual and linguistic cues. Each new release feels less like a mistake and more like a pattern, one that raises difficult questions about effort, authorship, and whose stories are considered worth telling properly.
This pattern is not limited to a single film or moment. For decades, Nollywood has struggled with representation, often mistaking familiarity for accuracy. But nowhere is this failure more pronounced than in its portrayals of Northern Nigeria. Across films, the region is reduced to a single identity, stripped of its internal differences and cultural depth. Religion is simplified, traditions are distorted, names are mismatched, and accents become caricatures. The result is not merely misrepresentation, but a sustained failure of storytelling craft.
What makes this especially glaring is that Nollywood has repeatedly shown that it understands how to do better. When telling Yoruba stories, the industry slows down. Attention is paid to dialects, social hierarchies, naming conventions, and the subtle differences between communities. Igbo stories are treated with similar care, capturing family structures, class tensions, and cultural nuance. These portrayals are not flawless, but they are intentional. They reflect research, proximity, and a willingness to engage deeply with the worlds being depicted.
That same care rarely extends northward.
Northern Nigeria is not a monolith. It is home to multiple ethnic groups, languages, religious expressions, and histories. Yet Nollywood often treats “the North” as a single character type rather than a complex social landscape. Films collapse Hausa, Fulani, Bura, Kanuri, and the many, many other identities into a vague composite, defined less by interiority or motivation and more by costume, prayer scenes, and exaggerated speech patterns. Dialogue is frequently delivered in Hausa that sounds memorised rather than natural, suggesting imitation instead of fluency.
The issue of accent, in particular, has become emblematic of this broader problem. Accents are not aesthetic accessories; they are cultural markers shaped by geography, education, class, and community. When an accent is poorly rendered, it signals that little effort was made to understand the people being portrayed. This is especially frustrating in an industry where Hausa-speaking actors exist, where Kannywood has long established its own cinematic tradition, and where Northern Nigerian actors have demonstrated range across both regional and national productions. The talent is present. The resources are available. Yet they are repeatedly overlooked.
This raises a larger question about authorship and power. Representation is shaped long before casting decisions are made. It begins with who writes the script, who directs the story, who controls the production process, and who is invited into the room as a collaborator rather than an afterthought. When Northern voices are absent from these spaces, stories about the region become speculative. They are told from the outside, filtered through assumption rather than experience. Authenticity is replaced with convenience.
This is not a problem unique to Nollywood. Film industries globally have struggled to represent communities outside their centres of influence. However, the persistence of this issue in 2026 suggests more than oversight; it suggests complacency. Audiences are no longer passive. They are informed, vocal, and increasingly unwilling to accept stereotypes as storytelling. The tools for better representation exist, as do the examples. Even international productions such as Black Panther demonstrated that cultural consultation and intentional research can enrich a narrative rather than dilute it.
The frustration, then, lies not only in getting it wrong, but in getting it wrong repeatedly and predictably. Each misstep reinforces narrow perceptions of the North and limits the imaginative possibilities available to both Nigerian and global audiences. These portrayals do not merely reflect misunderstanding; they help reproduce it.
Good representation is not about achieving perfection. It is about making the effort to engage seriously with the cultures being portrayed. It requires time, curiosity, and humility. It requires recognising that cultures cannot be approximated without consequence. When films continually misrepresent Northern Nigeria, they do more than offend; they reveal whose stories are considered worth the labour of getting right.
Nollywood is at an inflection point. Its reach has expanded, its ambitions have grown, and its stories now travel far beyond national borders. With that growth comes responsibility. The industry must decide whether it will continue to rely on shortcuts, or whether it is willing to invest in narratives that reflect the complexity of the societies it draws from.
The question is no longer whether Nollywood can do better. It is whether it chooses to.
Zeera is a Nigerian writer and journalist based in Jos, Plateau, exploring culture, society, and Africa’s creative landscape.
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