Nollywood's new star: meet Claire Edun AKA Nigeria's Oyinbo Princess
Pidgin-speaking former BA cabin crew member is YouTube sensation in Nigeria where she premieres in major film role
Nollywood has a new star. Oyinbo Princess, as she is known in the Nigerian film industry, is as dramatic, expressive and fluent in pidgin English as any other actor in the west African powerhouse. She makes a kissing noise with her lips to get a barman’s attention, and raps out a sharp “aa-aa” if she disagrees with you.
Oyinbo Princess is not Nigerian, though; her alias means White Princess. Her real name is Claire Edun, and in another life she is a young woman from the southern English city of Winchester who used to be a British Airways cabin crew member.
Edun’s fluency in pidgin, learned through years of watching Nigerian films, landed her a role in a major Nollywood film, ATM (Authentic Tentative Marriage), which premieres in Nigerian cinemas on Friday.
She is a sensation in Nigeria, where she has built up a following on social media. Many of her YouTube videos have been watched more than 30,000 times, even the ones she films herself on a wobbly mobile phone in her living room.
In England, where she lives, Edun performs at Nigerian comedy shows, and the Nigerian diaspora hire her to do skits for their events. It all started, she said, because she wanted to show people another side to Nigeria – one far from the stereotypes of it being a “fantastically corrupt” country, as David Cameron put it, full of criminals and where Boko Haram runs rampage.
“From understanding pidgin, and then visiting the country and getting to know the people and the country itself, I realised that it’s not what we see on the news at home. I thought, let me just share my love for the country and see what happens,” she said.
“That’s where it came from – trying to bridge that gap between different races, cultures and traditions.”
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