The Civilization We Already Built.

These days, Nollywood keeps me company.

Most afternoons, while I paint or work on my laptop in Brooklyn, there is a Nollywood film playing somewhere in the background. Sometimes I am watching closely. More often, it simply fills the apartment with familiar voices, rhythms and ways of moving through the world. It has become a kind of companionship.

I've been watching Nollywood for as long as I can remember.

As a child, it was how I bonded with my cousins, friends and the women who cared for us. Richard Mofe Damijo was as much of a crush to my mother as Denzel Washington was. Regina Askia and Stella Damasus shaped what beauty looked like to many of us in the late 1990s. Genevieve Nnaji brought a different kind of elegance to the early 2000s. Omoni Oboli and Funke Akindele made entrepreneurship feel creative rather than corporate. Today, I find myself watching Daniel Etim-Effiong, Ekama Etim-Inyang, Teniola Aladese, Jemima Osunde and a new generation of actors carrying the industry forward.

I am one of the many people whose life has been shaped by Nollywood's reach.

Only recently have I begun to wonder whether its greatest achievement has been something other than cinema.

The history of Nollywood is usually told as the story of a film industry.

I have begun to think of it as the story of a civilization already learning to live beyond geography.

By the early 1990s, Nigeria's home-video revolution had created an entirely new model of filmmaking. Working outside the traditional cinema system, producers relied on commercial networks built largely by Igbo traders to distribute VHS tapes through markets in Lagos, Onitsha and Aba. The growth was extraordinary. In 1993, 177 video films were officially registered. By 1999, that number had risen to 389. Within a few years, Nollywood was producing as many as fifty films every week. Today, it releases approximately 2,500 films annually, making it the second-largest film industry in the world by volume and supporting more than one million jobs.

Those numbers tell one story, the films tell another. That they rarely stayed where they were made.

Long before Netflix commissioned Nigerian originals or YouTube recommended Nollywood to international audiences, those VHS tapes were already travelling. They crossed oceans inside suitcases, shipping barrels and carry-on luggage. They appeared in London living rooms, Caribbean households, churches in Houston, grocery stores in Toronto and hair salons in Brooklyn.

The diaspora was never simply an audience, it was part of the distribution network. When we describe Netflix or YouTube as the platforms that globalized Nollywood, I think we begin the story too late. Streaming accelerated visibility but it did not create the relationships.

Platforms like iROKOtv now report audiences in more than 178 countries. Films released directly to YouTube routinely attract millions of viewers within days. Earlier this year, Omoni Oboli's Love in Every Word surpassed five million views in just three days. These numbers feel remarkable, but they are less surprising when viewed as the continuation of a social network that has existed for decades.

Technology revealed that network and perhaps that is why I have begun to question the language we use when we speak about civilization.

For much of modern history, civilization has been described geographically. Western civilization. Eastern civilization. African civilization. These categories have been useful, but they increasingly struggle to explain the world many of us actually inhabit.

Growing up in Lagos, that complexity felt ordinary.

English existed comfortably alongside Yoruba and Nigerian Pidgin. American films shared shelf space with Nollywood. Bollywood enjoyed devoted audiences long before streaming platforms existed. Today, Korean dramas, Afrobeats, Chinese investment, British institutions and indigenous knowledge all coexist within the same cultural landscape. None of these influences has displaced the others. They have accumulated.

We often describe this as globalization but I wonder if that word obscures as much as it reveals. Perhaps globalization is not the emergence of a global civilization but the moment we finally began to recognise one.

Africans have participated in global networks of trade, migration, scholarship, religion and cultural exchange for centuries. What feels different today is not our participation but our visibility. Digital platforms have made those relationships easier to observe, but they did not create them.

Nollywood simply made one of those networks impossible to ignore.

That is what I hear when a Nigerian film plays quietly in the background of my apartment while I work. Evidence that civilization has always travelled through relationships long before it travelled through platforms.

The future feels so familiar because, in many ways, we have already been living in it.