Porn Industry in Kenya

#KenyaPorn

When a friend of mine told me that Google had termed Kenya as the top country that searches for pornographic materials online, I thought that he was just joking. So I went and googled and found out that indeed Kenya does top the Google trends rankings for both gay sex pics and gay porn picks.

Kenya being a rather conservative society, the research shocked me on why we would be interested in gay porn yet almost 90 per cent of Kenyans are straight with such a small gay and lesbian community. That was a shock? Is it out of curiosity? Or is it a message that we are ignoring?

You may have come across porn in a friend’s computer under the name ‘docs’ or when maybe on the phone under an alias ‘work files’. Better still, the Tom Mboya and downtown are of Nairobi is another great porn destination. With Kes 50 you can get a 100 in 1 DVD disc with all the hard core porn from outside the country. With Kes 500, you can part with locally made porn.

Despite the big prize difference, the quality is also poor, with locally made porn being so poor in terms of production. Here they call it “zile za wazee” (for the adults), and you can be sold in the middle of the street by the vendors who hide it under the cheap DVD movies they are trafficking while selling.

Local actor Gerald Langiri on his website terms the fact that Kenyans love the soap opera and Hollywood romance scenes, local productions have not provided that and many Kenyan go online in search of that. He says it is a multi-billion industry that needs to be exploited.

But producing, trafficking or performing in pornographic films is illegal in Kenya, under section 181 of the penal code, and is punishable by a prison sentence of up to 2 years. With a local porn DVD going from Kes 500, it is estimated the producers make a minimum of Kes 5,000 selling online per day.

Participants, if lucky can part with Kes 50,000 for being featured in the film. But in some cases it can be as low as Kes 1,000. It is an industry run by greedy middlemen and producers, who target the prostitutes and strippers who are desperate for that grind. Today, the target list has increased to university students and even working professionals desperate to survive and make extra cash.

But yet Kenya remains a notoriously conservative society which would rather discuss porn in the closed doors of their homes when the kids are dead asleep. Blogs such as kenyaadultblog.com are still pushing the local porn content. Lesbian Facebook pages such as Nairobi Lesbians, +254 Bi and Lesbians, Lesbian Club Hub, Lesbian Hookups and even Adult Jobs Kenya recruit girls interested in the industry every day.

Here are some global porn statistics:

4.2m pornographic websites (12% of total websites)
1.5b pornographic downloads per month
68m daily pornographic search engine request
42.7% of internet users view pornography
72m worldwide internet users visit adult sites per month