If you love anime, watch anime. Talk about anime. Buy anime. And share your passion for Japanese animation with other flesh and blood mortals. Conventions boil all this into one oishii super meal you can digest over a Saturday or Sunday. Then, what do you do if your neck of the urban jungle doesn’t have an anime convention? You do what Nigerian otaku did and host your own!
Eko Anime Fest happened on January 7th, 2023, in Lagos, Nigeria’s capital. Almost 1,000 fans gathered to celebrate anime, manga, games, cosplay, and Japanese pop culture together. According to local fans, Lagos had no local anime convention, so they created one themselves.
Euronews quoted co-organizer of the event, Laura Ajayi, as saying:
“We thought why don’t we start this because we have a whole community of otakus, weebs, even people that just want to dip their feet into the anime pool and so we thought why don’t we just do this, everybody comes together and you know have fun and it works.”
#Ekoanimefestival2024 Highlights 🎊🥳
Official Sponsor @otakumartt#ekoanimefest2022 #ekoanimefest2023 #ekoanimefest pic.twitter.com/3L5ecIsnkO
— Nigeria Anime Conventions 🇳🇬 (@nigeriaanimecon) January 22, 2023
You don’t need to understand Japanese to enjoy anime and manga. But now, more than ever, anime is proving to be a global, growing fandom. How did anime take root in Nigeria, though? Much like it did anywhere else, with anime reaching TV screens in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Euronews credits Voltron: The Defender of the Universe, which had aired on the West African nation’s NTA 2 Channel 5. Add in globalization, the Internet, social media, and good-ol’ fashioned word of mouth, so you can bet that good works will travel wide.
— Nigeria Anime Conventions 🇳🇬 (@nigeriaanimecon) January 22, 2023
How about the rest of Africa? It’s hard to say, really. Living in South Africa, on the other side of the world from anime-land (or “Japan” in regular English), we’re relatively lucky. I can buy manga in many good bookstores and watch anime on Crunchyroll or elsewhere online. We even have a host of conventions, many of which feature anime within their lineup. Move further north, and anime access only depends on your Internet connection and available delivery options. While covid and Russian antics have made shipping a rough business, anime can still ride the Internet wave into homes across the globe, and Africa is no exception.
Source: Euronews.com, Eko Anime Fest Homepage
