Houston plugs into West African TV
Lanre and Abiodun Omotoso’s video store in Little Nigeria wasn’t the first of its kind in Houston. Like a few others, it specialized in hard-to-find Nollywood movies on VHS. And although their store may have outlasted its competition, DVDs and the internet undid what they had built. The couple closed shop in 2006.
But the seeds that were planted with the short-lived success and the couple’s mission to bring African movie culture to the city only grew. It also moved beyond physical media and into the world of local television with Millennium Broadcasting Channel (MBC), a station airing a daily 12-hour block of Nollywood movies, African soap operas, Afrobeat music videos, nightly news, talk shows and spiritual programming.
“It was my wife’s idea,” Lanre, who goes by “Larry,” says proudly in a voice so deep and steady he could give James Earl Jones a run for his money.
“It’s not something that you just wake up and say, ‘Oh, let’s start (a television station),’ ” says Abbey, as she likes to be called, looking up from her phone. “No, there’s a reason. There’s this need in America, there’s this need in Texas. God gave us the vision, and we went ahead with it.”
That need is clear if you look at the numbers.
The Bayou City has strong ties to Nigeria. There’s a large concentration of Nigerians here, numbering 40,000 people, according to 2018 census data analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute. Houston has become a hub and necessary stop for notable African music acts. Local cable channels have featured Nollywood movies, and movie-award shows have been held here. With that activity comes the need for relevant news and, of course, entertainment.
And the Omotosos certainly aren’t alone. Such other enterprises as AfrocentrikTV and Afrovibes Entertainment also have stepped into the broadcasting breach.
In many ways, what’s going on in Houston belongs to a bigger trend exposing African media to the world. Netflix recently acquired several Nigerian movie and TV projects, and last year launched Netflix Naija, its official presence in Africa.
At the recent Grammy Awards, two Nigerian performers popular in the Afrobeat genre took home trophies. Burna Boy (no stranger to performing in Houston) had the best global music album with “Twice as Tall,” and Wizkid was a co-winner for best music video along with Beyoncé (the Houston connection can’t get any stronger) for “Brown Skin Girl.” Not to mention, Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti was nominated for entry into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year.
Making people feel at home
For the Omotosos, a couple in their 50s, the journey from VHS tapes to TV began with Abbey, who started a mobile videorental business in London to tap into the growing Nollywood industry. She would take orders over the phone, then stack the tapes into her car to drop off to people on her way to work every day. The rentals were for two days, and Abbey would return, pick up the films and drop off more.
Later, after arriving in Houston and marrying Larry, she started the business again, this time working with her husband putting up flyers for her Nigerian-movie-delivery service. This video-rental hustle caught the attention of a local African video-store owner who wanted to sell.
Seeing an opportunity to take the side gig a bit further, the couple bought the store, in March 2000, and the aptly named Millenium African Video Center on Bissonnet was born. It became something of a Blockbuster for those in the know. For six years, customers rented mainly VHS tapes that had to be manually transferred to a format that played on VCRs used in the U.S. Later, DVDs came into the picture and started to disrupt things. “A lot of people would go to Africa and just put a lot of DVDs in their bags,” Larry recalls.
In a real estate office in the southwest part of the city that doubles as their TV headquarters, the couple sits across from each other while sharing the story of MBC’s origins. Larry, dressed in traditional loose-fitting Nigerian clothing with an oval hat, sits across from his wife of 21 years. She has on a floralcolored business suit, looking at her smartphone while her husband tries to remember the year they made the move to their current over-the-air television station (the answer: 2009).
Their market is not just Nigerians but the larger Black community and anyone else in Houston who can access MBC through a streaming app, a live TV link on the station’s website and over the air on Channel 21.2. After running a block of infomercials in the mornings, MBC has a female politics and culture talk show called “Your View” that airs every morning, and after back-to-back hours of soap operas, a 10 p.m. news show. It’s all meant to “make people feel at home,” Abbey says.
Asked if his programming was aimed primarily at people from his home country, Larry said no. “The programming may be Nigeria, or West Africa, but because a majority of the viewers are West African people, 80 percent is in English,” he says.
Other programs can air with subtitles, such as movies or soap operas where characters speak using indigenous languages such as Yoruba and Igbo in Nigeria, or Akan in Ghana.
‘We don’t have a voice’
Over the years, several attempts have been made to create local TV for Nigerians and African immigrants in general. Most of the stations have popped up among the litter of home-shopping channels, evangelical stations, farright programming, as well as channels that are in Spanish, Vietnamese and more. But few last beyond a year or two.
Not counting pay-cable television, which features some African channels, such as the Californiabased Africa Channel, MBC is one of two free over-theair broadcast stations in Houston that have been around for more than five years and are aimed largely at the Nigerian community. The other station is Afrocentrik Television, which began in 2013 and similarly features entertainment, news and commentary shows.
“We don’t have a voice,” says Wole Van Olasoji, who runs Afrocentrik Television, about the importance of having African TV in Houston.
What began as Vinyard TV, which broadcast mostly spiritual programming, the channel, he says, is a bridge to communicate across the African diaspora. “My primary audience is Africans, and then African Americans who want to learn about their roots.”
Similarly, a local computer programmer saw a wave of Afrobeat music coming and co-created Afrovibes. He paid approximately 50 DJs who specialized in the genre and started a 24-hour streaming network. It evolved to include AfrovibesTV, which streams music videos showing the depth and splendor of the Nigerian music scene. The videos are highly produced and feature superstars including DaVido, who performs in the recent Eddie Murphy film “Coming 2 America.”
“Most of the media outlets don’t sell us for who we are,” says Philip Balonwu, who came to Houston 15 years ago from Nigeria and launched his company in 2016.
Balonwu’s online TV network has also created an outlet for Houstonians to create programming, namely talk shows to be streamed via the app and online, as well as on TV through Roku devices. Shows that delve into fashion and politics and others that feature weekly gossip segments are staples on the channel. “I felt we needed a platform that promotes Black culture to the world,” Balonwu says.
There are few major media outlets outside BET, OWN, TV One and Byron Allen’s channel TheGrio that promote Black culture.
Still, the images on TV and film largely ignore Black people from outside the U.S. It’s a gap the Omotosos are trying to help close.
“My wife said we can do TV, and I burst out laughing,” says Larry in his basso profundo. “Do you have the money?” he responded at the time.
Between their part-time work in real estate and a day care they own, the couple purchased a channel on Comcast. The cost was about $20,000 a month, according to Larry. That channel lasted only a year, then the government switched to digital over-theair broadcast, and MBC leased Channel 43 before the move to Channel 21.2.
Representation of African culture and showing the full breadth of Africa is one of the reasons for continuing with TV, Abbey says. “No. 1 is to erase from the mind of people who have not been there that we do not live in trees,” she jokes.
Also, it’s meant to be a focal point for families who move here. She says, “Everything that a couple needs is on there on MBC.”