Dance Film Depicting Igbo Creation Story Makes Pittsburgh Premiere

A still from "Obi Mbu"

BY BILL O'DRISCOLL

PITTSBURG (WESA FM) - While exploring his African roots, Nigerian-Swedish artist Mikael Owunna discovered that even many of his family members in Nigeria had never heard some of the stories that might be considered foundational to their culture.

Take the tale he and co-director Marques Redd tell in “Obi Mbu (The Primordial House): An Igbo Creation Myth,” their 30-minute experimental dance film making its Pittsburgh premiere Fri., Feb. 25, at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater.

The story concerns the male deity Chukwu and the female deity Eke-Nnechukwu, whose relationship goes from unity in the blackness of space to a state of discord and separation that brings the world into existence. The two characters are played, wordlessly, by Corey Bourbonniere and Victoria Watford, two Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre dancers who – in photographer Owunna’s signature style – are adorned with streaks of body paint and photographed under ultraviolet light so as to suggest cosmic beings.

Owunna, who grew up in Pittsburgh, is the son of a Nigerian-Swedish mother and Nigerian father, and learned of this creation story through research, some of it conducted with Redd, an independent scholar based in Pittsburgh. But he discovered that for many Igbo people in Nigeria, colonization and other factors had erased much knowledge of traditional belief systems. That loss was further confirmed in a moving episode that followed the film’s world premiere, in September, at ClampArt gallery, in New York City.

“After the screening, an Igbo woman from Nigeria came up to me and she was almost moved to tears, and told me how meaningful it was for her to see and also learn her creation story for the first time,” said Owunna.

Owunna, a photographer with a growing international profile, began the film as pandemic project – a COVID-safe way to transition from still imagery to live performance. “Obi Mbu” was shot entirely in one small room in his Uptown studio, with movement direction by Ursula Payne, and sound design by Herman Pearl, aka Soy Sos. The project was supported by the Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh Grants Program, a partnership of The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments.

“Obi Mbu” has no dialogue, with just a bit of on-screen text to orient viewers. “We wanted the expressivity of the movement, of the art, of the images that you see on the walls of the set to really push the story forward,” said Redd.

Since that premiere, in New York, the film has also screened in Los Angeles, and Raleigh, North Carolina. It was all part of a big year for Owunna, who also did his first public artwork, right here in Pittsburgh – including a permanent, mural-sized photo Downtown – and his first solo exhibition, in New York.

The Pittsburgh premiere is 7 p.m. Fri., Feb 25. It’s followed by a panel discussion featuring the creative team.

Admission is $10 to $25 on a “pay what moves you” sliding scale. More information is here.

Filmmaker Rudy Rochman On Surviving A Terrorist Jail Cell In Nigeria

(Left to right): Filmmakers Edouard David Benaym, Andrew Noam Leibman and Rudy Rochman arrive in Lagos, Nigeria, July 2021. Image: David Benaym via @wewereneverlost

In traveling to Nigeria, the three men hoped to tell an incredible story. Little did they know that after just two days, they would become the story.

BY TABBY RAFAEL 

Rudy Rochman, a 28-year-old Israeli activist, social media influencer and former sniper in the Israel Defense Forces, had a plan for escaping the clutches of the Nigerian secret police when he and two other Jewish filmmakers, Andrew Noam Leibman and Edouard David Benaym, were rushed into a van by masked gunman this past July.

“We were thrown into the middle van, while the soldiers entered a van ahead of us and behind us,” he said. “I recognized from my army service that it was a patrol, and looked for signs that we were being taken to the jungle or somewhere else to be executed. So I came up with a plan: I would take one of the soldiers’ guns and use it to ‘take out’ the three guards. But what was I going to do about the front and back vans, which were also armed and extremely dangerous?”

Rochman decided to wait an hour before taking action. But soon thereafter he, Leibman and Benaym were taken to the Department of State Services (DSS) headquarters in the Nigerian capital, Abuja. It was there that Rochman, an unabashedly proud Jew and Zionist who asked for access to his tefillin while in prison, was forced to share a small jail cell with a convicted murderer belonging to the Islamist terrorist group, Boko Haram, which has killed nearly 40,000 people and abducted hundreds of school girls in its quest to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state.

To understand why Rochman and his colleagues were imprisoned in Nigeria, it’s important to revisit Rochman’s college days at Columbia University (he transferred from UCLA to Columbia upon learning that the latter was “the most antisemitic school in the United States,” he said, and he wanted to face his enemies head-on).

It was at Columbia that Rochman founded a group called Students Supporting Israel and first heard about Jewish populations in Africa. At Chabad of Columbia, he met a young woman who had traveled to Uganda and showed him pictures of the country’s Jewish community.

“I started researching all sorts of stories about Jews being displaced, seeking to be accepted back into the mainstream Jewish community, and I saw it as an opportunity to change Jewish history,” he said. “I want to bring them back to the fold of Am Yisrael (the Jewish people) and even give them an option to make aliyah.”

Rochman, who was born in Paris but now lives in Jerusalem, began researching the 2,000 to 3,000 people who practice a form of Judaism and belong to southeastern Nigeria’s Igbo community, which comprises roughly 40 million people, most of them Christian, in a total population of 211 million Nigerians.

Igbo Jews partake in many Jewish practices, including circumcision, kosher dietary laws, wearing kippot and tallit, and marital separation during a woman’s menstruation. They also observe Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and in recent years, have begun celebrating Hanukkah and Purim as well.

Rochman, Benaym and Leibman were able to film two days’ worth of interviews with members of the Jewish Igbo community during their first few days in Nigeria before they were captured.

“Their neshamot are so elevated,” Rochman said. “All they talk about is Torah and being Jewish. They breathe it, and it was a beautiful experience to be with them.”

He recalled seeing a single siddur with pages that had been photographed again and again for worshipers in synagogue, as well as meeting a young Igbo man whose dream is to move to northern Israel and become a pioneer in agricultural technology.

But despite some Igbos’ claims that they are descended from ancient Israelites, scholars have found the historical evidence lacking. Unlike Ethiopian Jews, the community is not allowed to immigrate en masse to the Jewish state because Israel’s Supreme Court does not officially recognize Igbo Jews as an authentic Jewish community.

Rochman and his colleagues weren’t the first Western Jews to visit the Igbo; in 2006, Rabbi Howard Gorin and members of his Rockville, Maryland synagogue, Tikvat Israel, visited Nigeria and also shipped computers, books and Jewish scripture to the community. Other visitors have included Dr. Daniel Lis, Professor William F. S. Miles, filmmaker Jeff L. Lieberman and Shai Afsai, an American writer who has visited the community three times and who, in 2013, invited two Igbo Jewish leaders to visit his Jewish community in Rhode Island.

But Rochman, Leibman and Benaym wanted to capture the story of Igbo Jews on film for a documentary series called “We Were Never Lost,” which is about unknown Jewish communities around the world. The trio is aiming to show the documentary on an online streaming service, but would not disclose more information. The first season will focus on Africa, and Nigeria was their first destination.

The crew applied for visas as filmmakers without specifying that they wanted to make a documentary about the Igbo community (providing film information wasn’t required). They also enlisted the help of a local “fixer,” according to Rochman, who handled the paperwork.

“NONE OF US COULD HAVE EXPECTED THAT THE GOVERNMENT WOULD SEND MERCENARIES TO ABDUCT US AND THROW US INTO A CAGE.” — RUDY ROCHMAN

When I asked if he and his colleagues knew that Nigeria was a dangerous destination (the U.S. State Department has issued a travel advisory against the country due to “crime, terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping and maritime crime”), Rochman responded, “We knew that Nigeria is one of the least safe countries in Africa and that the government is very against the Igbo population, but our main concern was that a robber would take us for ransom. None of us could have expected that the government would send mercenaries to abduct us and throw us into a cage.”

In 1967, Nigeria endured a two-and-a-half-year civil war when Igbo secessionists tried to create their own independent state, calling it the Republic of Biafra. Up to three million Igbo were either massacred or died from starvation, resulting in what writers and historians have called one of the worst genocides in Africa of the twentieth century. But the conflict, which ultimately resulted in the dissolution of the separatist state in 1970, only increased ethnic nationalism among the Igbo. The government is still embroiled in conflict with the Igbo, accusing them of attacks against the state and blaming them for the country’s massive unrest.

In traveling to Nigeria, the three men hoped to tell an incredible story. Little did they know that after just two days, they would become the story.

“We Are Here to Spread Light”

Rochman, Leibman and Benaym didn’t consider themselves agents of Igbo separatism (Nigeria considers the movement, called Indigenous People of Biafra (Ipob), a terrorist group); they wanted to explore Jewish identity through the African Jewish experience. A few days before the trip, Leibman, who runs Kavana Films in Tel Aviv, suggested taking a sefer Torah that was written in Ukraine and survived the Holocaust as a gift to the Igbo Jewish community.

"THE TRIO ARRIVED IN THE COUNTRY ON JULY 6, AND ONE DAY LATER, PHOTOS OF THE MEN PRESENTING THE SEFER TORAH TO IGBO JEWS WERE POSTED BY LOCAL BLOGGERS AND SEPARATIST MEDIA, CLAIMING THAT THE CREW WAS IN NIGERIA ON BEHALF OF ISRAEL, TO “OFFICIALLY DECLARE BIAFRA A JEWISH SOVEREIGN STATE.”

But the Nigerian government saw things differently: The trio arrived in the country on July 6, and one day later, photos of the men presenting the sefer Torah to Igbo Jews were posted by local bloggers and separatist media, claiming that the crew was in Nigeria on behalf of Israel, to “officially declare Biafra a Jewish sovereign state.”

In response, the filmmakers took to Twitter to adamantly restate their mission to connect with little known Jewish communities around the world. “We do not take any position on political movements as we are not here as politicians nor as a part of any governmental delegations,” they wrote. “We are here to spread light.”

Rochman, Leibman and Benaym had planned to attend a youth Shabbaton with hundreds of members of the Igbo Jewish community on July 9. At 7:30 a.m. that day, they received a phone call to their hotel room in Ogidi (an Igbo village) and were told to go to the lobby, and to bring their phones and passports. Upon arrival, 15 gunmen from the Department of State Services (DSS) surrounded them, placed them in separate vehicles and confiscated their passports and phones. They were taken to a holding facility where English-speaking guards told them that they would be detained for 15 minutes. Ironically, they were taken at gunpoint with Israeli-made Tavor rifles, which Rochman immediately recognized (and as a former sniper and paratrooper, knew how to use).

The trio never managed to make it to the Shabbat festivities. They spent the remainder of the day being questioned and verbally abused in separate rooms. For Rochman, whose maternal family members are Mizrahi Jews from North Africa and whose paternal family is Ashkenazi, it was his first time forgoing erev Shabbat rituals.

Upon realizing that they would be spending the night in the dark and filthy cell, the crew asked a guard for a few grapes and crackers so they could recite the prayers for kiddush and ha’motzi, in a miserable “cage,” as Rochman described it, thousands of miles from home, with their dire situation unknown to anyone at the time. They were joined in the facility by their Nigerian “fixer” as well as a matriarch of the Jewish Igbo community named Lizben Agha, whom the DSS had also arrested.

“It’s how I was raised,” Rochman said about maintaining Shabbat customs in the jail cell. “I’m a Jew, and as a Jew, I have these practices. I have respect for my ancestry. For me, saying kiddush and bringing in Shabbat is like brushing my teeth. I always do it.”

The following morning, the gunmen were even more belligerent. They released the fixer, but threw Rochman, Leibman and Benaym into a van together (Agha was also transferred). The filmmakers imagined an imminent execution, which only strengthened their resolve to survive. “In the van, I shifted to warrior mode and said to myself, ‘My story is not ending here in Nigeria,’” Rochman said.

They were taken eight hours away to DSS headquarters in Abuja and forced into another “cage” no bigger than a few feet. Agha was separated from them and placed in another cell. The smell of rat feces permeated the air and left the dank walls encrusted with black fecal matter. There was urine everywhere and the floor was littered with cockroaches. Even worse, the atmosphere was brutally demoralizing.

Rochman remembered the writing by former inmates on the putrid walls, and the messages were devastating: “Remember my name, because tomorrow, they will execute me,” read one. “This (prison) is the university of life,” read another. Finally, a solemn plea: “May my life see happiness one more time.” There were tally marks on the walls signifying prisoners’ terms as well.


“WE WERE MORE STRESSED ABOUT THE DANGERS WE COULD PUT THE COMMUNITIES IN OR THE WORRY WE BROUGHT TO OUR FAMILIES THAN FOR OUR OWN LIVES.” — EDOUARD DAVID BENAYM

“We were more stressed about the dangers we could put the communities in or the worry we brought to our families than for our own lives,” Benaym said. “But all I could truly think about at the very beginning of our arrest was a phrase from the Torah. After being welcomed by the Igbo Jews and before we could celebrate Shabbat with them, I kept thinking, ‘How beautiful are your tents, Yaacov; your home, Israel,’ because we had discovered a part of us in this village, a synagogue in the middle of Nigeria, and it felt amazing. And I also thought about how amazing it was to be captive with such amazing brothers as Rudy and Noam.”

Leibman said that the trio remained calm during the initial detainment: “We genuinely believed this was all just a miscommunication that we could clear up over a brief conversation,” he said. “Over the course of the next few days, it became clear that that was not going to be the case.”

It would be three days before they were given food, and the cell didn’t have a single bed, but Rochman, Leibman and Benaym had something more pressing on their minds: Benaym, a film director and Emmy-nominated journalist who specializes in analyzing American politics, suffers from an autoimmune disorder and his medicine was hours away in a hotel room in Ogidi.

“Once in the ‘cage,’ I was focused on trying to let the outside world know where we were, and on finding a solution,” Rochman said. “We had a ticking time bomb on his [Benaym’s] life. But we knew the guards wanted to keep us alive because they gave us water.”

On the fourth day, they decided to request nourishment in a way that would betray their location to the Chabad of Abuja: Rochman, Leibman and Benaym told the guards that they would only eat kosher food. Once the request was made to Chabad, the word got out: the three Jewish filmmakers had been imprisoned. Their families were notified and they immediately contacted Israel’s Chargé d’Affaires in Nigeria, Yotam Kreiman. Soon thereafter, the story broke worldwide.
Comforting Signs

Five days after being detained, the men met Kreiman, who secured one kosher meal a day for them from Chabad. Each day, they reserved part of the meal for Agha, the Igbo matriarch who was imprisoned elsewhere in the facility. The trio asked a guard to send her some of their meager rations.

After six days, they were handed buckets that previously contained human waste and afforded a chance to bathe themselves. According to Rochman, by then, their nostrils were black from inhaling so much rat fecal matter.

On the seventh day, the guards informed them that they were being moved into a new cell and delivered horrifying news: While one of their new cellmates was a gun smuggler, the other, they warned, was a Boko Haram terrorist who had killed 70 people. “He’s the one you have to look out for,” warned one guard.

That same day, Benaym was taken to a hospital and eventually released into the custody of the French embassy (he holds dual Israeli-French citizenship) due to his autoimmune disorder, although he was forced to report back to the prison every week for further interrogations. Meanwhile, Rochman and Leibman found themselves face to face with a murderer—an Islamist terrorist who knew they were Jewish and Israeli.

“We had to act with a lot of confidence,” Rochman said. “Let’s just say that I constantly was making him understand that I was a very dangerous person.”

Rochman managed to steal a pair of small scissors from a guard’s desk, which he displayed again and again to the terrorist. In case of an ambush, he and Leibman practiced back-to-back fighting in the cell, in full view of the Nigerian prisoners. Showing any sign of weakness could have gotten them killed.

Neither the guards nor the Israeli ambassador had any information about how long Rochman and Leibman would remain imprisoned, but the duo was hopeful. In fact, said Rochman, they derived strength and meaning from several auspicious signs: During each interrogation, they were placed in Room 18 (the numerical value for chai, or life, in Gematria, the Hebrew alphanumeric code), while the room across from them, where the guards gathered, was Room 26 (which alludes to one of the names of God). On each door of the interrogation wing was the Hebrew word “magen” (“shield” or “protection”). Ironically, the Nigerian facility had bought Israeli-made doors. According to Rochman, when put together, the signs were reassuringly clear: “Hashem is protecting our lives.”

"ON EACH DOOR OF THE INTERROGATION WING WAS THE HEBREW WORD “MAGEN” (“SHIELD” OR “PROTECTION”). IRONICALLY, THE NIGERIAN FACILITY HAD BOUGHT ISRAELI-MADE DOORS. THE SIGNS WERE REASSURINGLY CLEAR: “HASHEM IS PROTECTING OUR LIVES.”

There were other signs, too. On their tenth day of imprisonment, Leibman found a note in his tefillin bag that read, “When you lay tefillin in times of war, you strike fear in the heart of your enemies.” One day, Rochman and Leibman were brought downstairs for more interrogations in a space that was also occupied by civilians. They decided to protest their detainment and “make a lot of noise,” wearing their tefillin and shouting to attract attention. One guard asked them what they were wearing. When Rochman explained about the tefillin, the guard responded, “When I saw you in this, it really scared me.” That interaction also reinforced their hope of divine protection.

Each time Rochman was in Room 18, he took whatever he could find that would prove helpful, including ripping out pages from the middle of a paperback novel. On those pages, he wrote letters to his mother describing the crew’s treatment and identifying contacts who could help with their release. And each time he met with Kreiman, the Israeli diplomat, he slipped the notes into his pocket. This began during the second week of Rochman’s imprisonment. Kreiman took photos of the notes and sent them to Rochman’s mother.

Daily interactions with various guards became psychological assessments in which Rochman and Leibman tried to understand which guards were the stronger bullies, which ones were weaker and which ones only backed down when treated with equal aggression. More than anything, they spent three weeks finding a way to survive.

“Being a combat soldier in the IDF takes a lot of emotional and physical strength,” said Rochman, who is still a reservist. “You’re trained to know how to survive all situations, and as a paratrooper, I was exposed to minimal food, constant drills, marching for miles with heavy gear, simulations of grenades, carrying injured soldiers and much more. In training, I barely ate, slept or drank, and wasn’t allowed showers. But I learned how to read people and their body language psychologically and to recognize their dynamics between one another.”

Leibman and Rochman didn’t know if they would be imprisoned for weeks or years. And they rightfully feared that well-intentioned media campaigns to release them (including a planned protest in front of the Nigerian Consulate in New York City, which was later aborted) would only make things worse. Rochman said he believes that the Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, could have easily ordered their execution if triggered by what he would have perceived as aggressive international pressure. In the past, Buhari has sworn to crush Igbo separatists.

Meanwhile, the trio’s family waited in angst, and on Instagram, Rochman’s 100,000 followers helped ensure that as many people as possible knew about the crew’s dangerous circumstances.
The Incomplete Light

After 20 days, Leibman and Rochman were finally released from prison. They’re still not sure why they were freed then, but Rochman is certain that the government never really suspected them of conspiring with separatists. “They only wanted to prevent us from making the film,” he said.

On their last day in Nigeria, Benaym was brought back to the facility so that the trio could leave the country together. Their pictures were taken so they could be identified as “criminals,” according to Rochman, and never allowed to enter Nigeria again.

Agha, whom the trio called “Ima Lizben,” was released on bail nine days later. Suffering from illness, she was hospitalized and has since returned to her community in Odigi.

“I gained an appreciation for life,” Rochman said about his release. “After three weeks, I saw the sun. It was such an intense experience. I could actually feel the sun’s vibrations in my ears.

“In 12 hours, we went from being in a cage to being back in Israel,” he continued.

Just before leaving Nigeria, the crew was handed back their cell phones and passports. “I went for weeks without any communication with the outside world, and when I got out, I realized, ‘Hey, Ben and Jerry’s is a problem now’ and that the Olympics were almost over,” Rochman said.

Exuberant family members as well as the media welcomed them home, but transitioning back to normal life proved overstimulating. “Just seeing colors [and] hearing music or even the sound of a dog barking was an overload,” Rochman said. For weeks, he had difficulty sleeping. “I kept feeling that it wasn’t real. Were we actually back? I remember thinking that we even take something as simple as colors, which weren’t anywhere in the prison, for granted.

“It’s hard to explain what it was like in that cage,” he continued. “For three weeks, you couldn’t move your body more than a step or two. And there was nothing to distract you, especially not a phone. There weren’t even lights. The conditions were definitely some kind of torture. And then, out of nowhere, you’re back to normal life.”

The filmmakers are including the limited footage they captured of Nigeria’s Jewish Igbo community in the documentary series. For Rochman, a return to normal life means continuing to create educational virtual content with the goal of combating antisemitism and influencing global conversations about Israel and the Jewish people. It also includes working with Leibman and Benaym on their documentary series “We Were Never Lost,” for which they are currently crowdfunding. Rochman also remains active on social media platforms (particularly Instagram and Twitter), and on his YouTube channel.

Ironically, his ordeal in Nigeria only strengthened his resolve to support the Igbo Jewish community and tell its story. “Each [Jewish] Diaspora group took something with them—a piece of life—when they were scattered,” he said. “The goal is to come together and be a full light. I realized that without people like the Igbo coming back home to Israel, we’ll never be able to complete that light.”

Rochman is challenging Israel’s rabbinate to use its “responsibility and resources” to visit the Igbo in Nigeria and investigate their claims of Jewishness for itself. Many Igbo Jews are willing to officially convert to Judaism in order to make aliyah, he said.

“Coming home meant that we were going to be able to tell the story, the tale that we were originally supposed to film,” Benaym said. “We became the story and that was never our intention. As a journalist, and as filmmakers, all we want now is to go back to document these amazing lives and bring back the consciousness of these Jewish souls to the world.”

“I PROMISED SOMETHING TO THE IGBO COMMUNITY: THIS IS THE LAST GENERATION OF JEWS THAT DOESN’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE.” — RUDY ROCHMAN

For Leibman, returning to Israel was bittersweet. “I still feel much frustration that we were blocked from being able to capture these amazing stories and share them with the world the way we intended,” he said. “On the other hand, it was a blessing to return to our homeland and experience the basic freedoms of daily life, such as being able to go outside, deciding when to eat and having the ability to be productive again.”

Some have expressed concern that the filmmakers’ trip put the Jewish Igbo community at greater risk, especially given that the trio posted photos of themselves with Igbo leaders and alluded to a relationship between Israel and the Igbo community (one Instagram post by Rochman stated, “Israel X Igbo are locking arms”). It’s an important question, especially given that the visit also resulted in the imprisonment of an Igbo Jewish matriarch. But Rochman is adamant that the Igbo story must be told: “To talk about her [Lizben] spending 29 days [in prison], to quantify even what suffering means for the Igbo people means that someone does not understand what the Igbo people are facing,” he said. Rochman claims he received several videos from Igbo members this week that showed “bodies on the floor; of people’s heads being blown off … there’s a massacre happening to the Igbo people and it’s necessary for us to bring awareness in the world as to what’s happening.”

He acknowledged the inherent dangers of exposing the Igbo’s suffering, adding, “Of course, people are going to have to risk their lives to create change; that’s the only way that change has ever happened in the past, and they [the Igbo] are the ones who are spearheading that movement among their community. And we’re there to document and to show it in order to actually save them. If we focused our energies more on trying to save them, and less on trying to pin fingers on where that suffering is from, we would actually be saving more lives.”

When asked if he made any promises to himself or to God during those three tortuous weeks, Rochman thought for a moment. Then he responded, “I didn’t promise myself. I promised something to the Igbo community: This is the last generation of Jews that doesn’t know who you are.”

For more information on “We Were Never Lost,” visit www.wewereneverlost.com.

Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker, and civic action activist. Follow her on Twitter @RefaelTabby

CINEMA: Why Nigerians Living Abroad Love To Watch Nollywood Movies

A man passes by Nigerian movie billboards at a cinema in Lagos. Image: Cristina Aldehuela/AFP/Getty 

BY FRANCOISE UGOCHUKWU

The Nollywood industry – which came to life in the early 1990s – is often seen as a natural heir to the Nigerian TV series which had already produced roughly 14,000 feature films in the previous decade. These video-films of the early years have now become full feature films, and an integral part of popular life in Nigeria. Local audiences appreciate these homegrown productions relating to daily life in the country.

The films – about 1,000 are produced a year – offer a mix of urban scenes and village encounters. They appeal to both young people and to families, reaching out to local audiences in several Nigerian languages. The films are mainly produced in the big cities in the south of the country such as Lagos, Onitsha, Enugu, Aba, Ibadan or Calabar, though they are usually set in Lagos or Abuja and involve crews and actors from various ethnic backgrounds.

While Yoruba and Hausa filmmakers have opted for productions foregrounding their respective languages, statistics show that the number of films in Igbo, the language most commonly spoken in Eastern Nigeria, has been infinitesimal. Most of the films emanating from Igboland are in Nigerian English, a choice which has allowed them to reach out to wider audiences in other parts of the country and abroad. This has made them an instant hit and projected Nollywood on the international scene.

The number of films produced in other Nigerian languages such as Esan, Edo (Bini), Urhobo, Ijo, Hausa and Ogba has equally gained momentum.

Over less than three decades, Nollywood has gained an international reputation and inspired new film industries across Africa. The industry is widely considered as a showcase of the country. Interestingly, although a growing number of these films are now set in locations abroad, most remain firmly grounded in Nigerian cultures.

Over the years, the African public has come to discover and appreciate Nollywood. Nevertheless, outside Nigeria, its main public remains the Nigerian diaspora. Research carried out in London and Paris nine years ago sought out the opinions of Nigerians living abroad about the films.

The research showed that respondents spend a significant portion of their leisure time together with other Nigerians or other Africans, viewing Nigerian videofilms. They overwhelmingly preferred them to foreign films. These observations have since been enriched by follow-up interviews, confirming that these results remain relevant.

Scripting and scene-setting

By and large, protagonists in Nollywood films adhere to ancestral beliefs and carry on with most rural traditions.

The ancestral village that nurtured these beliefs never disappears entirely. It is nearly always the scene of at least a few family encounters. The acknowledgements that follow the film give precious few details about the places used, such as community centres, hospitals or churches. The village is usually signalled by narrow paths, mud houses, grassy compounds and farmlands, people in wrappers, bare-chested men or chiefs in traditional attire and oja music.

The set is far less important than the content; it is just there to provide a background to the protagonists’ actions and to reinforce the message that the individuals’ behaviour is partly determined by their family background.

Both the ‘old’ Nollywood and its ‘new’ version that has developed within the past 20 years have highlighted the premium value still given to the concept of extended family, the bedrock on which most scenarios are constructed. Yet storylines point to the flaws of the traditional family system and reflect on the malaise experienced by a country in the throes of rapid changes, leaving traditions behind and often incapable of replacing them with new values.

Subjects woven into the plots include polygamy turned sour, marital infidelity and couples drifting apart, obsession with male heirs and problems associated with childlessness, and strained relationships with in-laws and with rural folks.

Films also denounce other social ills. These include the traditional maltreatment of widows, political corruption and some of the troubles associated with urban life.

All these topics appeal to a broad African audience and have helped to lead to African co-productions.

The crucial role of Nollywood in Diaspora
Nearly half of those interviewed in my research said they preferred watching Nigerian films in English. A quarter preferred Yoruba while 16% preferred Igbo. Even so, over 58% of those interviewed considered that Nigerian languages played a role in the pleasure they derived from viewing films. They clearly perceived those languages as part of their cultural heritage and identity, a legacy to be cherished and protected.

Respondents equally considered their Nigerian language as a vital tool to communicate with older relatives in Nigeria and keep in touch with their roots. One of them says it beautifully:

It makes me feel more at home once I speak my language.
Unsurprisingly, language featured prominently in the list of what attracts viewers to Nollywood, second (50%) after the storyline (71.7%). Factors such as landscape and clothes, body language, houses and dances trailed behind.

Viewing Nigerian movies can therefore be seen and experienced as a trip down memory lane, a virtual journey back home and group therapy. A number of respondents also insisted on the educational value of the films, saying that “they have a moral tale to tell”.

Looking forward

Given the growing number of Nigerians migrating abroad in the current political climate, and given the proven benefits gained from regular watching as proven by my research and interviews, one cannot but encourage the current trend, which has seen a number of London and Paris cinema houses screening films belonging to the new Nollywood co-productions. Their recorded success will no doubt help Nigerians adjust to their diasporic situation while enriching the cultural scene of host countries.

SOURCE: THE CONVERSATION

TINA TURNER MUSICAL: These Charlotte Area Actors Never Met

Nkeki Obi-Melekwe, who grew up performing in Union County schools, said Tina Turner has “boundless energy I can relate to.” Image: Manuel Harlan via The Charlotte Observer

BY LAWRENCE TOPPMAN

Daniel J. Watts and Nkeki Obi-Melekwe have a uniquely satisfying relationship.

On Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, he insults her, throws a cymbal at her, pulls her by the hair, slaps her, chokes her and punches her. She bites his ear, kicks him and knees him in the groin. An hour later, they’re holding hands.

That’s how things go in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” now playing to near-capacity houses at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York. Watts stars as volcanic Ike Turner, Tina’s abusive husband, in his ninth Broadway show but the first where he’s created a leading role. Obi-Melekwe steps in for top-billed Adrienne Warren on matinee days, because no sane actress would do this taxing performance twice in nine hours. (The show ends with a 12-minute mini-concert.)

How did two actors from Union County end up side by side at the curtain call of a Broadway hit? That’s a strange story — two strange stories, really — but their shared heritage makes them comfortable together. British director Phyllida Lloyd, who made her own Broadway debut in 2001 with “Mamma Mia!,” saw that when she cast them.

“I was looking for actors whose personalities and qualities went beyond their acting talents, people who look beyond ‘What is my next role?’ and think of the world,” she said. “That Nkeki and Daniel come from the South means they have a special understanding of the world from which Tina and Ike came. (Tina grew up in Tennessee, Ike in Mississippi.)

“Daniel is a person of the greatest integrity, a caring and passionate man — an instinctive actor and musician without any vanity who helps to lead the Broadway company, but in a discreet way. Nkeki is a force field —she is so magnetic she makes you believe she’s actually creating Tina’s choreography in front of your eyes. I have to remind myself sometimes that she is so young and just setting out in the profession.”

Though Watts and Obi-Melekwe never knew each other growing up, both were buoyed by supportive family members and single-minded in their determination to perform. Here’s how they reached their goals.

THE MAN FROM INDIAN TRAIL

Between 2006 and 2019, Daniel J. (for Joseph) Watts appeared in eight Broadway musicals that racked up 21 Tony Awards. If you remember seeing him in any, you are likely a member of the extended Watts family, a classmate from Sun Valley High School or maybe a CPCC Summer Theatre veteran who worked with him in the 1990s.

That’s no longer true. As Ike Turner, he has become a star by projecting sinister seductiveness through the first act of “Tina.” (Ike gets only one brief scene in Act 2.) New York Times critic Jesse Green wrote: “Watts is terrific delivering his gleaming menace.”

How does a genial human being, one raised in an atmosphere of love and acceptance, find the core of Ike’s rage? How does the guy Obi-Melekwe said “has a brotherly quality toward everyone he meets” play this bitter loner?

“Hurt individuals hurt individuals,” Watts explained. “Ike grew up in the pre-Civil Rights South in the ‘40s with a lot of trauma: a father killed by a lynch mob, an abusive stepfather, one wife who left and another who ended in an asylum. The world told him who he was and who he would not be. He wrote one of the first rock songs (“Rocket 88”), but he would never be allowed to be Elvis.

“I started going to therapy a couple of years ago to find out what anger I was holding onto. I grew up in the South around the Confederate flag, and kids called me n----- when I was a kid. There were times I wasn’t positive if I was being treated equally, because I was black. My dad wasn’t around. You can try to put your pain (somewhere) — Ike put it into music — but maybe that’s not enough. Theater and dance were my outlets.”

Watts’ life has differed from Ike Turner’s in two crucial ways. First, he can articulate deep feelings, most recently in an ever-evolving, one-man autobiographical show called “The Jam.” (He did it at the Public Theatre in January.) That makes sense, as he committed to acting after watching John Leguizamo in a similar endeavor titled “Freak.”

“I had been writing as an outlet since I was 11 or 12: stream of consciousness stuff, poems, stories. I saved everything. In 2011, I was touring in ‘Aladdin’ in Seattle — I was supposed to be a carpet, but they cut the carpet — and had nothing to do. I started going back through my old material … and subtitled the show ‘Only Child,’ because being an only child (shaped me).”

Second, supportive women urged young Watts forward and kept him focused:

“I always knew I was loved. My mother (Artez) broke her neck to make sure I had what I needed; she understood the necessity of keeping me busy in a positive way, with dance and basketball and baseball and soccer. All my grandmother cared about was love, and she adopted every friend I had as a surrogate grandchild. Sue Mead, my French teacher in high school, has been to every production I’ve done, except ‘The King and I’ in Rock Island, Ill.”

They watched him grow dramatically, from a 1997 “Big River” at CPCC Summer Theatre — as the smallest cast member, he hid inside a log to roll it across the stage — to plays at Elon University, where he graduated in 2004.

Two years later, he joined the ensemble of “The Color Purple” on Broadway. Until “Tina,” he was always in the ensemble on Broadway, or a swing available to cover many roles, or an understudy, or a replacement in a small solo part. Through “The Little Mermaid” and “Memphis” and even “Hamilton,” that seemed to be enough.

BROADWAY KEPT CALLING
“Everything is timing,” he said at 37. “I didn’t know how to get out of the ensemble and didn’t believe I would. They’re safe. By the third year in New York, I was making the most money I had ever made. I never stayed in a show more than six months, and I liked to keep things moving. The artist in me couldn’t stay put: I would go on to something else (such as regional theater), my bank account would suffer, and I’d find my way back to Broadway.

“Around ‘Hamilton,’ I got tired of that pattern. I was not on Broadway for three years after that and worked a lot in television. If I was going to come back, it had to be on my own terms.”

Adrienne Warren, who met him during a brief run of “The Wiz” in 2009, believed him ready for something big and put his “name in the hat for ‘Tina’.” Bernard Telsey, casting director for “Tina” and countless other shows, had met Watts on “The Color Purple” and kept him in mind for something substantial.

“I did some research on Ike and thought, “I know this guy, and he might be fun to play,” Watts said. “For all his wickedness, there’s a human being in there doing the best he can, but his best is subpar. An audience can disassociate itself from a monster and not think, ‘That might be me.” But I wanted people to be able to see themselves to some degree in Ike Turner.”

THE WOMAN FROM WAXHAW

Her first name means “one who owns the future” in the Igbo language of her father’s native Nigeria, and the future arrived last spring in London. At 22, Nkeki Obi-Melekwe was hired to take over the title role of “Tina” six nights a week when Adrienne Warren departed.

The girl who’d gotten serious about theater just seven years before would have to carry a hit musical in the West End. She was trying to rise to that occasion when she met the 79-year-old icon she played.

“I was nearing my opening and had learned all the lines and songs and dances — it was quite a whirlwind — but I didn’t know what to do with any of it,” she recalled. “I had all this information, and I knew who this person was, but I didn’t know how to make her someone I could relate to. Then she invited me to her home in Switzerland. (Turner, now a Swiss citizen, lives near Zürich.)

“Getting to meet her lined everything up for me. I think of myself as spiritual. I believe in many things — karma and God and gods — and she’s a Buddhist. I didn’t know how to talk about Buddhism with her, but she was excited to hear that I would like to chant, and we did. The way she kind of enveloped me in her spiritual realm … I can’t describe it.”

Obi-Melekwe hadn’t cared about acting at all until middle school. Her parents, Obiajulu Melekwe and Bernice Obi-Melekwe, moved to North Carolina from the Bronx when she was 9, and her dad got a Ph.D. from the School of Nursing at the University of North Carolina.

Little Nkeki watched the Disney Channel and thought idly “I could do that.” She made her stage debut with three lines as narrator number four in the Marvin Ridge Middle School “Beauty and the Beast,” then moved to Cuthbertson Middle School and played Grace Farrell in an eighth-grade “Annie.” Her father’s insistence that she watch the movie “Fame” was about to pay off.

She landed in the high school theater program at Central Academy of Technology and Arts in Monroe. There she won acting awards at N.C. Theatre Conference and Southeastern Theatre Conference as the Lady in Red in Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls.”

‘IT’S MY LIFE’
“I don’t think I realized theater was going to be my job until my senior year of high school,” she said. “I wanted be a writer, a journalist, a public health doctor, a teacher. Performing was just a hobby that turned into a more serious hobby. I’m still getting used to the idea that theater isn’t a hobby anymore — it’s my life.”

She made that transition at the University of Michigan, after Charlotte director-choreographer Linda Booth showed her how to audition for colleges and vocal coach Susan Roberts Knowlson fine-tuned her voice. She sang “Let It Go” for a halftime show at a Michigan football game, starred in multiple musicals and graduated in 2018. Within a year, Phyllida Lloyd cast her in that London production of “Tina.”

At the time, Lloyd told Playbill Magazine, “This role must be one of the most demanding in world theater and requires a human being of exceptional gifts and massive inner strength. Nkeki has both. Nkeki just has that thing — ferocious power — without which you can’t even think of playing Tina.”

Asked about that, the actress laughed.

“Guys I’ve dated have said, ‘You are simultaneously a 13-year-old girl and a 30-year-old woman. You have the energy of both.’ I have always been told I have a certain maturity, but I also feel like someone who’s going through puberty at times.

“In researching Tina and watching her and then speaking to her, she has this kind of ageless quality, this boundless energy I can relate to. That’s what I try to capture onstage.”

SOURCE: CHARLOTTE OBSERVER

INTERVIEW: Matias Marini Delves Into The Igbo In Feature Film

Image via Director's Note

“Shine Your Eyes’” Matias Marini on the Perfection of Squares, Portraying Sao Paulo, Brazilian Cinema

BY EMILIANO GRANADA

BERLIN (VARIETY) — Produced by Primo Filmes in co-production with MPM Film, Tabuleiro Filmes and SP Cine, “Shine Your Eyes,” warmly received at Berlin, tells the story of Amadi (OC Ukeje), a Lagos musician who flies to Sao Paulo to track down his older brother Ikenna (Chukwudi Iwuji), who’s gone missing, and bring him back home.

As he immerses himself in a city of simmering life, following the scarce trail that his brother’s left behind, Amadi encounters a multitude of characters and, despite language barriers, starts seeing the possibility of a new life.

The debut fiction feature of Matias Mariani who had made the documentary ‘I Touched All Your Stuff,” “Shine Your Eyes” is a highlight of Brazil’s recent drive into diversity via its cinema. A movie that, by both celebrating the culture of its protagonists, the Igbo people, an ethnic group of South-Eastern Nigeria and the exuberant life of Sao Paulo, delivers a tale of two brothers which is striking in tone and aesthetic with a colorful palette of human interactions and multiple unsaid mysteries.

“Shine Your Eyes” is about identity but also cultural differences and finding a common ground, human connection, which the films captures really well,” says Panorama head Michael Stütz. He adds: “Mariani also manages to dive into a subculture African diaspora, talking about roots, where you come from, what is home, what does it mean, where can you find yourself?”

Variety talked to Mariani as his film. the kind that demands a second viewing, finishes up its screenings in the Berlinale’s Panorama section.

Your film feels very much like a matrioska that as it unfolds opens up issues and ideas about cultural identity, family dynamics, physic theories, among others. What was the genesis of the script?

A lot of it has to do with the experience of living abroad. I come from a very big and protective family. So when I moved to the U.S. it really felt a different existence, like the difference between you and the exterior are much clearer. You know who you are, where you stop and other people begin. I felt very lonely but at the same time very myself. On the other side was this attraction to Sao Paolo, where I was born. Which is a weird city, that people have even mythologized how ugly and savage it is. So when you say to someone that you miss Sao Paolo, it’s very hard to explain.

That’s when Maíra Bühler came in. We started doing research (about the Igbo culture) and giving Portuguese classes to a community in Sao Paolo. And it became less of an actual research and more of an interchange. You’re giving something and getting something in return. But I also remember coming back so doubtful, making a film about people that are so different from me. So a lot of the screenwriting process was making myself feel at peace with that idea and in that sense it was really important to have a lot of collaborators who made me feel comfortable in each area. I was more at ease working with actual contributors, scriptwriters who knew the story.

That same process of collaboration, one senses, feeds into the mise en scene. The film has a very clear visual style, portraying Sao Paolo via striking compositions. How did you try to find the right style for that?

I directed documentaries before but my actual 9 to 5 job is as a producer, so it might be one of the reasons why I approach collaboration in a different way than maybe people that come from a straight-up directing. I see a lot of directors that are protective, as if collaboration would somehow dilute their idea, would somehow make it less personal. For some reason, i have a lot off fears but this is not one, that really helped to let people really go into the script and into the images.

Leo Bittencourt, the DoP, is a close friend, the godfather of my child and was present throughout the whole process. So it’s hard to know where the idea began. I really didn’t need to write the city into the script too much because we would do that through mise en scene. He came with the idea of shooting in 4:3, I was very reluctant. I thought it felt gimmicky and I love Sao Paolo skylines which are very horizontal in nature. But he convinced to change the format of my phone and take pictures during a week and it felt amazing: The city opened up: How the 4:3 plays with the modernist architecture of Sao Paolo; how the lines appear much more in that format. But it came as well from talking with Chioma Thompson one of the script contributors. She understands a lot about Igbo mythology and religion. She gave me a book where I discovered that the mythological genesis of the universe in the Ibo religion is the idea of the square. So you had this concept that the world was a square originally and from there came the big bang, the breaking of that square. The square is perfection, the idea that things are in order. I felt this came into contrast with our idea of the celestial spheres, the sphere as a perfect figure. And talking to Fernando Timba, our art director, we decided to use the square as our shape and began figuring out how to visually break it.

Still today there’s this preconception of Latin American cinema as more bleak stories that handle social realism with a certain grit. In contrast, your film jumps from family drama, to horse racing equations, to magical realism, to moments of comedy, without losing some lightheartedness. How was the process of creating the film’s own tone.

As you say, that certain bleakness of Latin American cinema, that sense of urgency, we’re here to talk about social issues, so much pressing urgency to it. I totally get it and I understand why some Latin American cinema is like that and I respect it but at the same time I feel very disconnected, aesthetically and linguistically. That was something that I would constantly think about in this film. What’s the need for this film? How to explain to people why this film needs to be? As I was talking to Chukwudi, he said that to have characters who are not living from hand to mouth, who are not so much subject to the destiny of things because they are desperate, is in itself an act of subversion, specifically if you’re doing black characters. This is a heavy political, to give agency to characters like that. Of giving subjectivity, to create characters with rich inner roles. It’s heavily politica. That made me feel more at ease with the film – not being part of that tradition. Tone-wise I think it comes a lot from specific films, I wanted to emulate. “Into the White City,” by Alain Tanner; “C0de 46,” from Wintebottom, There was something about how they build their tone which is basically interpretation beyond simply aesthetics. And I knew I needed to find a tone because the actors were so diverse, OC who is a Hollywood actor and does much bigger roles in terms of gestures, then Chukwudi who is Shakespearian, thespian and then Indira who is more Brazilian theater which is very different from English theater. So there was a sense that if I did’t do anything, things would go all over the place.

Now, more than ever, that bleakness is very present in Latin America’s political and social climate. What is your perspective on what’s happening to Brazilian Cinema?

I’m glad you ask. I’ve been talking in interviews and I feel that I’m so pessimistic and I should give some sense of hope but that is not how I feel. We are in a very dark place. Art of course is not the worst, we have social economics, press freedoms, that have a stronger impact on people than cinema. And this is what people should focus on now. But talking about what I know, which is art, I think Bolsonaro is very intentionally closing down all the financial possibilities in filmmaking, theater, arts in general. There was a huge work community of thousands and thousands of people and now you’re in Rio or Sao Paulo and everyone is unemployed. There’s a sense of doom among people who have dedicated their whole life and suddenly from day to night things have stopped. And he did it because it was the main focus of opposition to him, something that he very much wanted and needed to silence in order to do all the other stuff he wanted to do. But is also about how he needs to tell stories that are more akin to what he is trying to do, that’s his main objective, to work his own narrative. People will continue to make cinema, that is without question, but the conditions in which it’s made will be set back, I think, for a long time. And it came exactly at the time where things were changing for Brazilian cinema, as a result its being taken care of by many politicians from both left and right. But I think this climate will reinforce those aesthetics that we’ve talked about, less subjectivity and more “savagery.”

INTERVIEW: There’s No Any Experience In My Life That Was A Mistake

Jide-kene Achufusi. Image via Fashion Lifestyle Entertainment.

BY AZUKA OGUJIUBA

Jide Kene Achufusi, popularly known as Swanky, is an actor, writer and model. Following the success of the much talked about sequel, “Living in Bondage: Breaking Free” where he was the lead character, no doubt, Achufusi is gradually becoming a household name in the industry. The talented actor shares his experience working with the producer of the film, Charles Okpaleke, as well as director, Ramsey Nouah, the things that endeared him to the script, future plans, his formative years and more, with Azuka Ogujiuba

You act, model and write scripts. Have you always wanted to go this path or you just picked it somewhere along the line?
Well, I’d like to think that we all pick things up along the line. Background, education, and environment, will definitely have shaped all of us into what we are today. So, acting is something that I realised I could do in high school. I could mimick or imitate someone’s behavioural pattern; that is where I started to get the incline that maybe I could be good at this thing.

You were the lead in one of Nollywood’s biggest production, “Living In Bondage the Sequel”. Share your experience with us?

First of all, it was my first time working in Lagos. It was also my first time working in their system or how they do things. You know, I had to be the one person who doesn’t complain, I had to be the one person who doesn’t give a hard time, I had to be the first person to arrive, first person to leave, you know they weren’t going to as much as possible cut you any slacks. Press number one, you don’t even want that happening because, ‘if any person com de talk say e be like say e don de enter him head,’ it’s a big deal.

So I had to be everything at everytime and they were really good as well. So, at the end of the day, it is what it is. The most challenging part was not just doing the film but also having to be the person who doesn’t ask questions. So, basically, when Ebuka of big brother said ‘I took my shot and ran with it,’ that was exactly the hardest part of it, taking that shot.

How was it like working with Ramsey Noah as the director of the movie and a co-actor?

He’s a great guy, he’s gentleman, he’s the guy who sees himself or describes himself as the slave driver. I see him as very compassionate and deeply artistic and so working with him was definitely a bar raiser for me or a bar hanger. I had to bring my A game if not my B+ game because his game is way way up there. I had to bring whatever it is that I had to be able to be in scenes with him and to be visible. It was a challenge and a task, something I was thinking about even before I got the role as well. It excited me because I’ve always looked forward to working with him. With Ramsey, as a co-actor, that was a challenge. As a director, he’s tentative, he’s impulsive, he’s spontaneous so you have to be ready to switch or to go whenever he says go. I guess it was more interesting than exhilarating.

How was it working with Charles Okpaleke, the CEO PlayNetwork, who bought the rights of the movie and is also the Executive producer? We also heard you have been signed to his management, how true is that?

Okay, well Charles is a great guy. He has an amazing persona, he’s the life, the plug, the event guy, he’s the guy that will chase every butterfly down and not get tired of chasing it down. Working with him, as a more experienced hand, not just in lifestyle or in life but also with investment and money and all of that, I’ve learnt a lot also on the business side of things. Being signed into play Network is indeed a great move for me. It’s indeed a great move because I honestly felt it gives me the leverage or the opportunity to be able to explore, more especially now that Nollywood needs to expand and collaborate more. That’s exactly what play network offers me. You know, the chance to see what the influencers are doing, the chance to see what the party boys are doing, the chance to see what they, CEO’s are doing, the chance to see what an entire team looks like, because that’s basically how we can move this to the next level.

How will you define your relationship with the older cast of the movie who acted in the first movie of “living in bondage the sequel”?
My relationship with them was very respectful, cordial, professional and full of support and love from their end to mine. I felt very supported. I felt very encouraged; I didn’t feel like, ‘hey this boy, what are you doing here.’ They took me out to dinners, where, the legends and everything were, and tried to make sure that I was comfortable to do the work I’ve come to do. I can’t thank them enough for their gentility, professionalism, humility, and of course, I don’t know what other big words to use and describe how they were but they were amazing.

What’s your take on the nature of movies Nollywood puts out in recent times? Do you think we are getting it right or we still have a long way to go?
We definitely do have a long way to go. Living in Bondage will start a new era as we believe and its quiet important that we observe the lessons that living in bondage is giving the entire industry. We have set goals and we can do better because, trust me, if we reshot living in bondage, we’d probably have a better throne with the experiences we’ve had shooting the first one. Moving forward, we should indeed bring the world to Africa, not try to phonerize or to take our content to look more like western stuff. You know we can collaborate anytime any day, but like I said, Nollywood is not just about Nigerian films, it’s about the entire continent of Africa. We need to come together; we need to work more with Zambians, Rwandan people, Ghanaians ,South African people, and so on and so forth, we definitely need to collaborate like that, moving forward.

If you weren’t into acting and modeling, what would you have been doing?

I probably would have been a medical doctor, if I took my books seriously, or if I was the type that would read from time to time, or I would have been in the oil business either of the two but then I’m quite happy to explore those industries as well, from here much later in life.

Tell us about your formative years
Everybody has a journey. I’m part of my journey. I was a student, then I became a part time model, then I became a part time actor, then I’ve done a lot of other things in between like organising fashion shows, host events, tried my hands at radio, tried writing a couple of things. I’m a writer. Basically, I just want to say that those years were very important to the final product or the still evolving product you’re looking at right now. All those times were very important. The fact that I live in the East and then this film, Living in Bondage, allowed me show people or give them the nostalgia of what reasonable Igbo boy of our time looks like. Well I’m grateful to be able to put all those my experiences, living in Amobia, Enugu, Ebonyi, schooling in Imo, literally everywhere in the East. It’s down to those formative years.

Give us an insight into your educational background and career?

I’m a geographer, I’m also a meteorologist and I also have a diploma in business. I’m also still in school. I really want to be able to know a little about photography, media, about the business side of things, you know, all those things, getting more things under my belt is very important to me as well. I did my nursery school in Ebonyi State, primary school, in Enugu, secondary school in Imo State, University in Enugu State and that’s it. Basically, my educational background has been in the East.

Can we say you were born with a silver spoon?

Well, as I am a very strong follower of Christ, I’d like to think that, yes I was born with a silver spoon because I’ve always been destined for greatness, but did I have so much money to throw around, growing up? Not so much, not so much.

How did your background shape your life?

A lot. I really said that earlier when I was asked about my educational background. It shaped my life a lot because it allowed me to bring a fresh perspective of things. You know, I’m real, I’m an Igbo boy, I’m down to earth, I don’t see the reason for hanging shoulder. I don’t see the reason for faking any kind of life. You know what you see is what you get. Be natural about everything and people will love you.

What was the best gift you remember receiving as a child?

Well ehmm my mum, honestly every other year that passes, ever since I was like maybe two, three, I usually have time for my breakdown and I cry and appreciate God for the gift of her. Every year, God keeps her in my life, I feel like it’s a new gift, there’s no gift I can be able to think about right now, because once that question hits me. Her name rings in my head. so I thank God for the gift of her.

What was the most difficult thing that has ever happened to you in all your years and how did you overcome it?
Well acne, acne was very difficult for me to overcome. I’m still over coming it, just relaxing more and more effort, washing your face more regularly than you would have, you know. It did a lot for me.

What do you consider the biggest mistake you have ever made?
I don’t know. I hardly ever have regrets; it’s always an experience for me. You learn you get better, tomorrow you wake up on your feet you know you keep going. I don’t. I’ve tried to think about it, so I don’t think there’s any experience in my head that is a mistake basically.

Are there things you still desire?

Of course keys to the good things of life. I want those things. I want to work on my relationship with God. I want people to not only hear, but to see through my life, that a life in Christ is amazing.

What are some of the lessons life has taught you?
Never stop working hard. You literally maybe stopping a week away from that call, never stop. That’s the biggest life lesson I have as of today.

What are your future plans?
The plan is to take over Africa, the plan is to take Africa to the world.

What’s your biggest fear in life?

The day God turns his back on me, hmm which is never gonna happen because if you go to my instagram, I think my very first post in IG is God first and God never lies. Thank you so much.

SOURCE: THIS DAY LIVE

STAGE REVIEW: Three Sisters At The National Theatre

The cast of Three Sisters. Image: Richard Davenport.

BY TIM WALKER

Quite possibly in response to the vacuity of the times in which we live, the National Theatre seems to have adopted a policy of staging very long, cerebral and earnest productions. Inua Ellams' adaptation of Chekov's Three Sisters - running to three and a quarter hours - is a prime example.

Ellams has relocated the story from provincial Russia at the turn of the century before last and plonked it down in Nigeria between 1967 and 1970 during Biafra's attempted secession. An interesting conceit, but I fear not one that can be altogether sustained. I've no doubt that Chekov, who wrote this play in 1900, would find it perplexing.

I don't say that Ellams hasn't got some interesting points to make about British neocolonialism, but it would have been a lot more straightforward, if not also honest, to have just started a new play from scratch than to try to weld all his ideas on to an existing classic. He may say it's a "new play" that he has written "after Chekhov", but it feels as if he just hasn't the courage of his own convictions to do his own play.

The setting is a village in Owerri, where three sisters, sitting on the porch of their home, think back longingly to their halcyon days in Lagos. The sisters are pretty much the same as the sisters in the original. There's Lolo, the teacher, played by Sarah Niles; Nne (Natalie Simpson), the married middle sister who is engaged in an affair with a military commander; and Udo, (Racheal Ofori), who is the youngest and slowly becoming reconciled to never fulfilling her potential.

A lot of the friction of the original was about social class, but it is now about tribal hostility. The failure of Nne's marriage is now down to the fact it was arranged in accordance with tribal tradition when she was 12. It may all be very clever, but it feels clever for the sake of being clever.

All of the conflict and violence that inevitably comes with the setting is hardly in keeping with the spirit of Chekhov. He was famous for writing plays in which not a lot happens but a sense of despair gradually descends upon his characters.

In Nadia Fall's production, the focus is less on the characters and the mood than all the stuff that is happening. 
The acting is uniformly excellent and Katrina Lindsay's sets and costumes are impressive, but ultimately it's the idea behind it all that just isn't strong enough.

I might add, too, in these bleak times, the National Theatre should be in the business at least just occasionally of instilling spirit and hope in the citizens of a largely disillusioned and demoralised capital. This was clearly never going to do that. I look ahead to the productions being staged in the New Year and I see no grounds for optimism. Opening towards the end of January is a show called Death of England.

SOURCE: THE NEW EUROPEAN

Harriet As Igbo

Cynthia Chinasaokwu Erivo as Harriet Tubman in a scene from "Harriet." Image: Glenn Wilson/Associated Press

BY BIKO AGOZINO

This is not a spoiler. “Harriet” is a film without spoilers because the audience already can tell how the movie was going to end. What I would like to comment on are the symbolic representations that the director, Kasi Lemmons, brought into the narrative that will not make sense to viewers who are not familiar with the background Igbo world views of both Harriet Tubman and the actress who played that role, Cynthia Chinasaokwu Erivo.

Some critics reportedly protested against the casting of the award-winning “British” actress and singer to play the role of the iconic African American hero but if only the protesters knew that it is a case of an Igbo woman being portrayed by another Igbo woman. Besides, African Americans have played the roles of Africans in Hollywood without protests from Africans, who simply admire good acting by our Black brothers and sisters.

There was a carving that the father of Minty, short for Araminta, gave her when she went to tell him that she was fleeing to freedom from slavery. She kept it with her always just as Frederick Douglass kept a piece of wood that an elderly enslaved man gave him after he was beaten by an overseer. According to Douglass, no one ever beat him again in his life for he kept that piece of wood with him, just as the old man told him.


The Igbo call such a piece of wood or carving, Ofo na Ogu, the symbol of innocence and blessings. The director, Kasi Lemmons, was probably reminding us throughout the movie that Harriet Tubman held Ofo and Ogu as a blessed innocent person and that that, in addition to her strong faith in God, was part of the reasons why she was bold in fighting for freedom from slavery for all, unlike Django who only went back to unchain his boo.

Harriet repeatedly claimed that she heard the voice of God but that was attributed, even by Black abolitionists, to “possible brain damage” from her head injury as a child when she was found in a barn with the white boy. The Igbo will agree with her claim that she heard the voice of God because the Igbo also believe that God is present in everyone as Chi, or God, a part of the Great God or Chiukwu, also known as Chineke, God the creator. Such a God or Chi would never subscribe to the pro-slavery gospel that the Black preacher was paid to preach to the congregation of the enslaved who were called upon to obey their masters and work hard for them as an honor to a white God. Harriet did not say amen to that prayer.

It is a shame that the leading actress, Cynthia Erivo, chose to go by her English first name when her Igbo name would have been more appropriate to the role. Chinasaokwu, the name that her Igbo parents gave her in England when she was born, means God answers accusations. Just as Minty dropped her slave name and chose a free name, perhaps to evade slave catchers who continued to search for runaway enslaved people especially after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Cynthia should be challenged by her fans to drop the slave name and adopt her Igbo name, Chinasa, as her first name in honor of Harriet if not in honor of her own family. Her real last name, Erivo, literally translates as the unfed or the starving, a strange name that echoes memories of the mass starvation of the Igbo in Biafra, during which 3.1 million died. The actress owes it to herself to recover her Igbo name as her first name.

Incidentally, the name Harriet and her original slave name, Araminta, may have onomatopeic meanings in Igbo as Ha aya eti – they will never beat us – and Ala mu nta – my little land, or Aninta, a common Igbo name. Hayeti is, by coincidence, similar to the name that the Haitian Igbo revolutionaries gave to their new republic – Ayeti – and that is the way they still spell it in creole today, like the way that Harriet said that people pronounced Rit, her mother’s name that she took. It means in Igbo, they will never beat us. Even the name of the director of this movie, Kasi, also transliterates in Igbo as to console, suggesting the consolation for those who have suffered great injustice without being offered reparative justice.

Moreover, the name Moses that was attributed to Harriet by almost everyone, may also have an Igbo-sounding meaning – Moshishi, or the spirit said to say. The enslavers could not believe that an African woman was capable of leading such daring raids to free the enslaved and lead them to freedom in their hundreds. They claimed that she was a white abolitionist in “blackface,” which must have been a popular pastime of influential white men then and even now.

The Harriet model of womanist activism can be found in Ogu Umunwanyi, during which Igbo women declared war against colonialism in 1929, only 16 years after Harriet passed away; the Abeokuta women’s rebellion against taxation in 1945; the Kikuyu women’s uprising against forced labor in the 1950s; the South African women’s defiance against the pass laws of apartheid in the 1950s; and the Liberian women’s praying of the devil back to hell to end the bloody civil war in the 1990s.

Unlike Western feminist activists who seek gender-separatism, the Africana womanists are exemplary in the sense that their demands always included the interests of suffering men and women in articulation or intersectionality instead of seeking divisive gender essentialism. This is part of the reasons why Professor Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi theorized that womanism was more appropriate than feminism as a description of the interests of African women within cultures that also inevitably include men as allies who can also be opponents in some ways but cannot be pigeon-holed essentially as all the enemies of “womandom.” The film, “Harriet,” showed that not even all white men were enemies during slavery given the important role played by white abolitionists, though some white women were among the worst enslavers and some Black men worked for the slave catchers to earn some money.

Harriet was fond of singing the freedom song, “Go down, Moses, go down to Egypt land and tell old Pharaoh to let my people go,” as a rallying signal for the enslaved to join the underground railroad to freedom. The biblical Moses was called an Egyptian and so, Harriet was not a Black Moses – the biblical Moses was obviously not white. The fact that Harriet was suspected to be a man goes to challenge the Western invention of women as gendered in submissive relations under patriarchy whereas gender is not a central feature of the conception of people in African cultures where generation, not gender, is more deferential and hegemonic, according to Oyeronke Oyemumi in “The Invention of Women.”

Harriet carried a gun with her for protection and used it to threaten some of her own family members who were too scared to go with her to freedom. But when she had the opportunity to shoot and kill her enslavers, she chose not to kill. This may seem strange to many fans of Hollywood who have come to expect the hero to be a blood-thirsty maniac in Tarantino movies. However, to the Igbo who suffered genocide, pogroms and mass killings in Nigeria without resorting to retaliatory killings, it is normal to leave the gravest wrongs in the hands of our Chi and instead invest our energies into rebuilding our beloved communities in accordance with the African philosophy of nonviolence that Gandhi admitted that he was taught in Africa and Martin Luther King Jr. followed to lead the Civil Rights Movement.

A puzzle that the film tried to solve was why many poor whites who did not enslave Africans continued to fight in support of what the film called the “lost cause” of slavery even after the Africans had asserted their right to freedom as fellow human beings. W.E.B. Du Bois explained this with the theory of the psychological wages of whiteness.

However, the film differed slightly from the conventional interpretation of this theory by explaining that, according to Du Bois, it was not just psychological wages because there were huge structural privileges to even poor whites that they would like to defend – not to mention the hefty rewards placed on the heads of “Moses” and the runaway enslaved people to motivate poor whites to join the posse to try and recapture them.

Also, the young white men were motivated by their lust for the bodies of young Black girls who were gang raped even “before their first blood” perhaps because they were brought up to think of Black girls as “pigs to be sold or eaten” but never to be loved by white men who fathered children that looked exactly like them and still enslaved their own flesh and blood or sold them for money.

The film represented Harriet leading a unit of African American soldiers in battle during the Civil War at the historic Combahee River point of the Black Womanist Rebellion statement. This was the only time that a woman commanded men in battle during the Civil War. It came to pass in fulfillment of the vision that Harriet shared with the young white man who was trying to recapture her as his property even though she prayed for him to survive typhoid as a child.

She had disarmed him and made him climb down from his white horse, knelt him down and aimed his own rifle at him, and told him to listen to the coming sounds of the Civil War even before the war started. She prophesied that he was going to die with thousands of other young white men fighting for a lost cause.

Then she rode off on his white horse, which did not discriminate between a white male rider and a black female rider. That war soon took an estimated 750,000 lives but it could have been avoided if white people simply accepted the fact that Black people were equally human and not property. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech. He can be reached at agozino@vt.edu.

SOURCE: SAN FRANCISCO BAY VIEW

From Living In Bondage To Lionheart: Nollywood's Thorny Path To Its Digital Future

Living in Bondage: Breaking Free, produced by Charles Okpaleke and directed by Ramsey Noah in his directorial debut is a Sequel to the 1992 release.

BY EDWIN OKOLO

In January 2019, American media giant, Netflix, made a splash by premiering Genevieve Nnaji’s directorial debut, Lionheart, exclusively on its streaming service. In a deal brokered by Funa Maduka, months before, at the Toronto International Film Festival, Ms. Nnaji became the first Nigerian filmmaker to debut their project to an international audience in this way, paving the way for the flurry of Nigerian films that would follow in the coming months and closing the circle of digital distribution for online content that began exactly 10 years before with a little show about sexual awareness. To understand how Nigerian media made the leap from video clubs and viewing centers to a winner-takes-all streaming war, we need to go down a tunnel of tax havens, gambling banks and the rise of social currency.

The Internet knocks but once

The first media wave began in 1992 with Living In Bondage (which 27 years later has been revived with a second installment). There are many accounts of how the film was made, but what was not in contention was how successful it became. Funded almost entirely by businessmen turned financiers, the first iteration of Nollywood was almost entirely profit-driven and rode the direct-to-video wave for most of the 90s churning out the bulk of content that today has a second life as Tumblr memes and the subversive work of the sisters behind Instagram account Nolly.Babes. The mass of films from that era eventually led to the rise of the first generation of Nollywood A-listers, whose ascension led to controversies like the G8 ban of 2004, and set in motion the eventual decline of the O.G Nollywood marketer and the rise of what we refer to today as ‘New Nollywood.’ That decline was marked by a decided shift in the viewing habits of Nigerians.

There are many reasons for this decline. The first generation of Nigerians raised on some form of cable television came into adolescence hungry for global content. Piracy soared in response to their demand, competing with and eventually decimating Nollywood pulp cinema.

A presidential order by Olusegun Obasanjo in 2001 led to the introduction of Global Systems for Mobile (GSM) Telecommunication networks into Nigeria. New licenses and impressive waivers on operational taxes drew major South African players MTN to invest in the Nigerian markets and usher in privatised, profit-focused mobile telephony. By 2005, MTN, Glo and Econet had introduced mobile internet services to the media market. A direct consequence of this was that it became significantly easier for young people to not only curate the content that they consumed but to also seek out niche content that was either unavailable because it was currently out of syndication or unavailable because terrestrial television stations could not afford to license them. Hunched over desktop screens and cheap Chinese disc players, Nigerians gorged themselves on content.

The second major catalyst was the Blackberry Internet Service (BIS). A unique feature of the Blackberry Service Suite, created specifically as a business tool for Blackberry, a major mobile player in the 2000’s; the BIS was a closed Internet Service Provider network that clients could access for a certain fee and it offered a heavily discounted alternative to the exorbitant data charges of the mobile networks offering similar services at the time. While created primarily for businesses, the BIS network’s significantly cheaper data services encouraged early experimentation with streaming and downloading of digital content for entertainment. Websites like NotJustOk and Jaguda were the first to capitalize on this new craving for digital media created by Nigerians for Nigerian consumption. Early P2P sharing platforms like Limewire were all the rage.

 

The Academy Awards disqualified Lionheart in its foreign language film category.

The third and most influential catalyst was social media. Before the advent of Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, it was incredibly difficult to build local communities around media interests. Fandoms were rare in Nigeria, and it was difficult and expensive to organize or participate in events that celebrated mutual interest in any kind of activity. Yahoo Groups and Yahoo 360 had offered rudimentary versions of fan-based platforms but they had been targeted primarily to Western audiences. Facebook groups, however, were easier to navigate and provided a neat and impersonal solution that simply allowed fans of a TV show or musician to ‘opt-in’ to groups and pages that had relevant information about these interests and allowed fans to find each other virtually. By 2010, it wasn’t uncommon to find fan-managed celebrity Facebook groups and pages with 100,000 fans. Twitter would accelerate the process through live-tweeting, real-time reviews and analysis of shows as they aired. Combined with the ‘opt-in’ feature of Twitter’s follow model, fans were incentivised by social currency to offer their opinions on digital content and media companies were more likely to create content that would trigger that kind of engagement.

Social media, in combination with cheaper mobile internet, meant there was a steady stream of conversation happening at any point in time in already segmented audience groups. All that was left was to create media content that specifically catered to the needs of these groups and a pioneer to get things started.

Media moves online
That pioneer turned out to be MTV. The product was MTV Shuga, a YA-oriented television show that drew from the true-grit model of Western tween television shows revolving specifically on how a group of teens and young adults dealt with the fallout of either living with or interacting with people with HIV. The hysteria around HIV was at its peak in 2009 and MTV Shuga was one of the first shows that did an excellent job of destigmatising the condition. The show also launched the careers of Lupita N’yongo and Nick Mutuma. Released originally only to Kenyan audiences, the enduring buzz around the show led to an online release on YouTube and its second season in 2012. The concurrent release of the show online opened MTV Shuga to an otherwise ignored demographic and most likely inspired the showrunners to move the show West to Lagos for a follow-up season. It seems too much of a coincidence that Ndani TV, Guaranty Trust Bank’s innovative media offshoot, was launched in the same year.

MTV Shuga Naija was a runaway success. Like it had with Lupita, the show launched the careers of Dorcas Shola Fapson and Timini Egbuson, proving unequivocally that there was an audience for content accessible only by streaming. There was an audience, primed for conversations, looking for content to engage with.

Until that point, Tajudeen Adepetun of Consolidated Media Associates and AlphaVision Productions had been the only showrunner to find a sweet spot between accessible storytelling and passable execution. He had conquered television with shows like Everyday People & Treasures, and engineered Nigeria’s enduring obsession with Mexican telenovelas but seemed unwilling to expand into digital. Even his archive of beloved television soaps remained in syndication on terrestrial television. It would take the intervention of Nigeria’s banks to change things.

Guaranty Trust Bank was the first to launch a digital media imprint. Ndani TV, its imprint, was launched early 2012 evolving from a quarterly newsletter of the same name. In its primary role as a content marketing platform for the bank, the platform was helmed by Lola Odedina and Jade Osiberu with Mohammed Attah as the channel’s first showrunner. Without any prior experience in creating content specifically for a digital platform, Ndani experimented with interview style shows, before striking gold with scripted web shows. Gidi Up, their first web show, was a huge gamble.

The studio invested heavily in the show’s production values and hired relatively unknown actors as the show’s six leads. Even the choice to have a multi-lead cast and flesh out multiple storylines was a gamble itself. But the storytelling and Osiberu’s understanding of youth culture helped transform their ambitious ideas into a cult-making season of entertainment. Overt with their branding and ruthless with their advertising, Ndani became synonymous with new media; following the success of Gidi Up with tailored shows like the Youtube juggernaut Skinny Girl In Transit and Rumour Has It.

United Bank for Africa, (now defunct) Diamond Bank, and Access Bank launched RED TV and Accelerate TV to carve their own niches on YouTube and tap into the goodwill that Ndani extended to GTB. Emboldened by the success of Ndani’s programming, both platforms began to experiment with finding their own formats. High profile partnerships with EbonyLife’s Temi Abudu and director Kemi Adetiba led to Accelerate TV’s scripted reality TV show On The Real and their wildly successful interview series King Women. RED TV experimented with meta-comedy, hiring comedian Koye Kekere-Ekun to expand his social media shtick into a detective series called Inspector K.

Ndani has remained the front runner in the race to dominate YouTube despite tragedies like the loss of all its footage for a highly anticipated third season of Gidi Up, and scandals like its reactive decision to scrub the Ndani channel of its 2019 show Oga Pastor mid-season to avoid getting entangled in a co-incidental religious scandal involving a high-profile pastor. But it has also lost significant ground to shows like Accelerate TV’s The Shade Corner (which took three years and two seasons to find its level) and RED TV’s surprise hit The Men’s Corner.

The only real contender for the Big Three on YouTube at this time is LowlaDee productions, an independent production company run by Dolapo ‘Lowladee’ Adeleke. Adeleke’s production company made its name with This Is It, a crowd-pleasing rom-com manufactured to leverage the combined West African and East African digital biomes.

A free for all

The big three (Accelerate, Ndani and RED) got a few years’ head start before the technology evolved enough to shed much of the prohibitive costs that had kept independent players from entering the market. Now that those barriers are gone, digital media content is well and truly anyone’s game.

Long-time veteran Jason Njoku, in partnership with his wife and business partner Mary Remmy Njoku, were early adopters of streaming apps whose primarily sell is exclusive, locally created content. Her shows Husbands of Lagos and Festac Town helped streaming platform IrokoTV pivot away from its archive of vintage Nollywood content and build a contemporary fanbase.

The Njokus have been so successful at creating digital content and courting digital audiences that Mary Remmy was able to broker a major takeover deal with French media giant Canal+. The sale speaks to the current state of Nigeria’s digital media and the growth that has occurred in the last decade. Mrs. Njoku’s sale is phenomenal because Rok Studios is less than 5 years old and until its sale was run independent of external funding.

There is, of course, Linda Ikeji’s attempt to expand her media empire beyond blogging with her Linda Ikeji TV streaming service that had early viral shows like King Tonto and Oyinbo Wives of Nollywood. SceneOneTV (owned by Funke ‘Jenifa’ Akindele) is a niche but self-perpetuating vehicle for Akindele’s personal projects that include the now-labored Jenifa’s Diary and a spinoff show, Aiyetoro Town. Even media mogul Mo Abudu got in on the action with EbonyLife ON (which was sold to audiences by exclusively streaming its glossy legal drama ‘Castle and Castle’ on the platform). Streaming is such a competitive market that even DSTV, feeling the burn of digital media, created ShowMax, its own answer to the streaming wars and the primary distribution vehicle, for its big-ticket show, the Big Brother Naija franchise.

An inevitable consequence of the local audiences finally paying top money for their entertainment is that they now have demands. After nearly 8 years of majorly phenomenal press, Ndani suddenly found itself in a maelstrom of bad press. Agitations have long simmered about the firm’s alleged disinterest in the fans’ concerns, as encapsulated by their refusal to release an official statement on Gidi Up, and consequently the decision to pull its preacher thriller, Oga Pastor, off-air mid-season and replace it with Phases, a show shot and released so hastily its working title was changed after the first episode had aired. Fans have openly promised to boycott and are voting with their clicks and money.

How will the next decade of Nigerian film and television media evolve?

It is hard to predict. Nigerian innovators like Joel Benson are already experimenting with 3D imaging and augmented reality in the same market, ‘Asaba Nollywood’ still coughs up enough pulp cinema to keep the poorest Nigerians entertained. However, it is more difficult to predict if the big three will stay fascinated with their content marketing platforms enough to finance them for another decade without a clear path to independence and profitability. Cheaper tools mean Nigerians are directing and attempting ambitious projects at much younger ages than we’ve ever seen; figuring out the logistics of distribution and revenue channels as they go along.

In a nutshell, while the industry has never been this potent, it remains to be seen if this potency will lead to an expansion or an implosion.

Edwin Okolo is a journalist, fashion critic, and artisanal crocheter. He has written for the New York Times, Native Magazine, African Arguments, and Sable Lit. He is the editor-in-chief at YNaija.com