Bollywood in Africa
Bollywood in Ethiopia. From Flickr photostream of furkanjavaid
Also check out this 2005 newsreport of Islamic courts in Mogadishu shutting down “scandalous” Bollywood films. Shashank Bengali reports on the relative popularity of Bollywood films in Africa (read here). Notwithstanding such gushing reports about Bollywood’s contest with Hollywood in Africa, it needs to be put in perspective. Read my previous post Kenya, Africa, and the Indian film industry (here), I have questioned what does it mean for Africa if Indian cinema is successful there.
A kid on the streets of Fordsburg, South Africa renders a Hindi song and some choice Hindi expletives.
Link to photograph here
3 comments
You know, a colleague pointed out the most interesting development as far as Bollywood stars are concerned…apparently Somalia does more google searches on bollywood than even we do here in India. Hindi movies are a huge rage there, and in particular Salman Khan…strange!
Actually that is another of those myths that circulates our educated classes. The award for most google searching goes to Pakistan, following by (no prizes these)… India. Trailing by a huge margin is UAE. The nearest developed country is Singapore (but the difference in percentages is so huge that it is miniscule). No African country features in that list.
This myth about Bollywood’s global popularity is similar to that embarrassment on the number of Indian engineers at NASA and Microsoft.
Well. he showed me statistics…Pakistan is definitely higher than us but somalia is very high according to google stats. Let me try to locate them and send them across
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