Still Standing: A Nollywood Veteran on Forty Years, Three Comebacks, and Being Forgotten Twice

Patience Uzoechi keeps a framed poster in her Surulere sitting room from a 1996 film most Nigerians under thirty have never heard of. It sold, by her account, over two hundred thousand VHS copies — a staggering number for the era — and made her, briefly, one of the most recognisable faces in the country's booming home-video industry. "People used to stop their cars on Allen Avenue to greet me," she says. "Now, half the time, the directors on set are younger than my own children and have no idea who I am."