Inside the life of an adult entertainment actress

“We are who we are,” Cindy, 28, sums up the circumstances that have led us to this interview.

On a regular working day between 9am and 5pm, you can find Cindy, 28, at her office in Nairobi’s central business district, making sales calls for her employer. She is easy on the eye and obviously quite smart. A few minutes chatting with her reveals a warm, candid personality.

Underneath all that, one can sense a somewhat defiant attitude. Still, nothing would cause you to suspect that every few months, Cindy gets paid to have sex on camera.

A few years ago, locally-made pornographic movies were ridiculed for their bad production, terrible sound and physically off-putting actors.

But with the market demand growing, local porn manufacturers and consumers have become more sophisticated. Search statistics show that Kenyan pornography accounts for 45 per cent of our country’s Internet search requests for porn.

Cindy is one of hundreds of young girls in the major towns around the country who are starring in locally manufactured pornographic movies.

I ask her why; she has a college diploma and a day job, and with her aggressive nature, she can claw her away up the corporate ladder. So why choose the sex trade?

Rebellious streak

“Rebellion,” she says.

“We grew up in a time when a parent’s words were law. I have two siblings but I was the child who was always getting punished for speaking up. You can call me my family’s black sheep. I grew up continuously trying to prove myself,” she explains.

At some point, she got tired of continuously trying to get people to look at her a certain way and plunged right into the down and dirty world of adult entertainment.

Her first ‘professional’ outing was as a dancer at a private party six years ago. For four years she did several short stints as an exotic dancer.

Then, two years ago, a male ‘friend’ who was visiting the country for a few weeks from Europe asked her if he could film her while having sex. He paid her Sh15, 000.

“I liked it. I wasn’t bothered about what he was going to do with the footage at the time. But whenever I was broke over the next few months, I would think about how easily I had made that money. Eventually, I asked around from friends at the strip club and I acted in my first blue movie. I have done a handful of them since,” she says.

Industry bosses

All through, she has maintained a series of day jobs as a marketer. “There is money in the industry but it is flooded with middle-men seeking to make money out of it. I don’t think one can survive only on the acting. You need a second job,” she says.

At the top of the food chain are the producers. Some producers of local movies and television shows also double up as producers of blue movies. Then there are the pimps who seek out the girls to act in the movies. Male actors, I am told, are never in short supply. Once a troop has been assembled, the producer sources a location. This can be anything from a hotel, a residence or a swimming pool to cars and even shopping malls in the night. The location will depend on the movie budget. For high budget movies that often find their way to European counties, an actor can make up to Sh20, 000 per scene in contrast to as low as Sh1, 000 in a low-budget production.

Like any job, there are parts of being a porn actress that Cindy doesn’t like. “There was a producer who lured me to his production with the lie that he would get me a spot in a local television show that he produces.

There are also those ones who promise to pay with proceeds from sales only to turn around and tell you that the movie failed to go through.”

I organise a meeting with one pimp named Willy who operates in the Zimmerman area in Nairobi. I pose as an investor with Sh200, 000 to pump into the industry.

Willy shows up on time at our agreed rendezvous with a female companion who sits a few tables away. He is light-skinned and slight-framed with an easy smile and a gentle manner – nothing like the brash, hard-faced individual one might imagine. With his neatly tucked in light blue shirt, he could pass for a young manager at any company in the city. He is friendly at first but when he learns that my real intention is to uncover the trends in the local porn industry, he is suddenly in a hurry to leave. “Hiyo ni ngumu (what you are asking me to do is difficult),” he explains.

Once shot, the movies are distributed via a number of avenues. Essie is a self-made porn actress who conducts her business on phone and laptop. She will send you a sex video of herself for Sh200 and naked photos for only Sh100 via WhatsApp. “Are you interested in pictures, videos or sexting?” she asks when I text her. We get round to talking about her work; what is her motivation? “There is a market for them. Have you seen the stir that leaked nude photos cause on the Internet?”

It looks like Essie may have a point because despite manufacture, display and distribution of porn being illegal and punishable with up to two years in prison according to section 181 of the Penal Code, the business is still thriving. A willing client can easily purchase locally manufatured porn in various dialects.  There are no hard statistics on the expanse of the industry but a spot check reveals that it is deep-running.

When I ask a movie vendor along Moi Avenue, Nairobi for a Kenyan blue movie, he shakes his head and points at the large poster on the wall saying that the shop does not sell pornography.

When I linger at the shop and ask if I can have a peek at his personal collection, he finally opens up and asks me to come back in three hours with Sh500. When I do, I walk away with a Kenyan-made blue movie in a dialect of my choice.

Who are these girls?

There isn’t a single profile that can fit the Kenyan porn star. There are prostitutes, university students seeking to make some easy money, confused young women giving away parts of themselves in an attempt to please the men in their lives, and a few professionals running parallel careers. Mostly, it is about the money and sometimes about the fame for those women who believe that any kind of attention is good attention.

Cindy has heard of instances of beastiality and bondage and submision plays, especially with Caucasian men, which pay more and says that how far down the rabbit hole a woman goes, all depends on her dignity.

Does Cindy ever worry that people she knows will find out? “I wouldn’t say that I am embarassed about what I do because it is a job like any other, but I do not advertise that fact to everyone I meet because people can be judgmental and once somebody knows something like that about you, they can’t see you as anyone else,” she says.

She admits that she doesn’t have the healthiest love life, having jumped from relationship to relationship. Her family is aware that she doesn’t keep the best company but they do not know the details of her activities. After some thought, she says that if they found out that she was shooting porn, she doubts that they would be surprised. “I have done a lot of things,” she says.

Uncertain future

A month ago, there was panic in the porn industry in the US when a male actor tested postive for HIV. Because pornography is illegal in Kenya, it means that there are no regulations in place to protect actors. With the high-risk sexual acts that are charateristic of blue movies, sexually transmitted infections are daily risks for these women.

“Safety precautions depend on how high-end the budget is but most of the time you are acting with the same group of people so it appears safe. You just do it and hope that they are safe,” Cindy says.

For now, Cindy appears content juggling her two jobs but she appears uncertian about how long she will do this. “I don’t know. I will cross the bridge when I get there,” she shrugs.