The celebration recognizes the diverse cultures, languages, traditions, and achievements of the African people. It is a time for reflection on Africa’s past, present, and future, as well as a call to positively promote African culture. From arts to music and films, African culture has recently influenced global pop culture. Afrobeats and Nollywood have made local languages more popular with a global audience.
In recent years, Netflix is one of the contributors to this recognition, especially promoting local languages from Nollywood, by offering a platform for African storytellers to share their narratives with the world. Some of the best performing titles in Africa on Netflix are Nollywood films in indigenous languages.
Kunle Afolayan’s Aníkúlapó, arguably the best performing non-English title on Netflix from Africa, reached the top spot on the service just a week into its release amassing over 8,000,000 views globally. The movie is set in the pre-colonial era of the 17th century old Oyo Empire and tells the story of a sojourner who finds his way to Oyo in search of greener pastures. The movie, although dialogue in Yoruba featured in the top 10 in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Poland, Portugal, Kenya, Morocco, Bahrain, Israel, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates, among other countries.
