Revealed: How the porn movie industry has grown in Kenya leading to addiction in many teenagers

A week ago, following a tip off, security officers raided a house along Kabarnet Road, Nairobi, and arrested over 30 girls who were allegedly involved in prostitution.

The four-bedroom maisonette that was being operated by a popular Nairobi businessman served as a brothel for high-end businessmen, politicians and other significant individuals who would visit the joint for sensual pleasures under the guise of going for massage services.

During the raid, pornographic material featuring Kenyan girls was found, proof that the illegal business of pornography filming was taking place at the residence.

Another raid also took place in Kileleshwa as well as down town River Road where illegal sex and pornography making has been allegedly going on for years.

It has not been long since police at the Coast arrested a Swiss national, Christoph Clement, and a woman over DVD recordings in which 11 girls were allegedly involved.

Lately, there are many joints where college age girls can make a living as escorts and call girls pretending they are models for hire.

We now have local porn videos being shot in the country, from dingy vernacular porn in seedy dives and lodgings, to foreign-shot high-quality videos in villas along the coastline.

A source at a private charter company once revealed to Pulse how they had a plane load of porn actors and actresses going to shoot an epic sex movie in one of our national parks at a luxury lodge, with the big ‘blue’ director grinning on the aeroplane as if the lions had just elected him King of the Serengeti.

Another shocking finding has it that university hostels are becoming the home of blue videos, a huge business that is being run by powerful individuals in the city.

River Road is said to be the home of local porn production. According to our sources, the young girls involved in these downtown productions are paid about Sh30,000 per film while the rates go up to Sh100,000 in uptown Nairobi.

The DvDs are sold on the streets by vendors for as little as Sh50.

Big business

“These DvDs are everywhere. Just take a walk down Muthurwa market and you will find them on sale. The vendors usually ask if you want a ‘Kikuyu’ or a ‘Kamba’ one or any other vernacular language, after which they quickly go through their collection. The covers of these DVDs have nothing suggesting they are pornographic material,” an undercover policeman told Pulse.

“Porn is illegal in the country so no vendor will stand and shout that they are selling such tapes and DVDs. However, this is a big business that no one wants to talk about. We pretend that it does not exist yet the fact that River Road is producing hundreds of porn DVDs everyday, means that the consumers are many,” adds the officer.

“Porn production happens on campus. Sometimes students are just experimenting, but in some cases, they make porn videos for quick and easy cash,” a student leader at a leading public university told Pulse.

With smart-phones and free websites like porn.hub, consumers of blue movies need no longer look for the furtive DvD with a hawker. Back in the day, to watch porn you would have to look for that rare blue movie videotape in Eastleigh or Muthurwa.

Pulsers, as a generation, are growing up with this phone technology, swift streaming on triple X sites, and no adult oversight.

A Google search reveals that ‘teen’ is the most searched term in Internet porn search engines, with four of the most popular sites getting forty million hits in 2014 alone. It is this perverse interest among Pulsers aged between 16 and 21 that led producer Rashida Jones to make the Netflix documentary, Hot Girls Wanted. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival exactly three weeks ago - and in spite of being just three weeks out, is already said to be an early Oscar contender for ‘Best Documentary’ next year.

Intimate things

It features five small town girls - Tressa, Rachel, Jade, Karly and Michelle - fresh out of high school, and looking to switch their small-town lives and their parents’ supervision for the bright stars of Hollywood.  They have been lied to that amateur porn is their ticket to stardom by the ruthless exploiters who run the multi-billion dollar genre.

But as Rachel explains after her six-month stint in the ‘industry,’ it is very hard to stay relevant for longer than a year in a world where ‘women are little more than the processed meat’.

First, there are so many hot girls and pretty faces that you need a little ‘flair’ to stand out in the adult film game. Some amateurs like Sasha Grey shot to professional porn stardom by using ‘abuse porn’ - slapping, slamming and asking to be stomach punched by porn brutes like loco Rocco Stiffredi, the Italian stud - as their flair.

Secondly, the supply and demand economics of the porn game mean a year tops, is what these teens can count on.

As a pornographer explains in the documentary, “If you are young, and dumb as hell, and need a quick $500, then amateur porn is the game for you.”

The downside is having sex with random dudes, sometimes more than one, that you would never even say ‘hi’ to in normal life, saying intimate things on camera to strangers and letting things be done to you that are over the top.

All that means lots of Plan B (or ‘morning after’ pills, as we call them in Kenya), which can often lead to permanent infertility. This is because these teen porn videos are shot ‘in the raw.’ Water douches after sex with strangers are a norm.

“We have foreigners who give young girls incentives that are so irresistible to have them filmed in porn films. Sometimes the girls get tickets to fly abroad where they are introduced to full-time pornography shooting,” a source told Pulse.

At first, with the free flight to shoot in Miami, the young ladies in Jones’ documentary think they have left behind idiots who work nine to five jobs with bad bosses and measly benefits. But, in the end, they are left broke, literally broken and abandoned by their ‘sponsors’ for the next freshers and suckers.

“You pay for your own STD testing, make-up, nails, lingerie, travel, rent and ten per cent to the agent,” says one girl in the Hot Girls Wanted documentary. “I made $25,000 in the first five months of 2015 out here in Miami (that’s $5000 a month), but after all my expenses, I only had $ 2,000 (Sh200,000) left in my bank account.”

Then there is the stress of friends, or God forbid, parents, outing you in your birthday suit on the Internet, the shame and ruined reputation. And what if your husband, down in ‘2030’, discovers your filthy porn video on the ‘net?

Accusing him of watching teen porn will not make you any less guilty.

“Porn can be a very terrible thing. It undermines morals. Here are two people who are involved in sexual gratification yet they are in no way attached to each other. Many youth are addicted to pornography. This habit has destroyed many families,” says Martin Musembi, a doctor based in Nairobi.

“Porn addiction may come through peer pressure. Young people are all about experimenting. By the end of the day, one finds himself trapped in this,” Jackson Okoth, a university student told Pulse.

Singer Trapy narrated how he lost his girlfriend due to his porn addiction. She caught him enjoying a porn tape and called it quits.

Others watch so much porn that they begin to blur gender lines. There is a growing bi-sexuals, gay and ‘she-male,’ community in Kenya and going forward, this massive grey area might present a problem - although folks like Binyavanga Wainaina, a writer and gay rights’ champion who was recently at a gay fundraiser in New York with the likes of musician Janelle Monae, would beg to differ.