Of Religion, Theodicy, and Monsters

"Like his far more eloquent counterpart in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, [James] Whale's god-forsaken, posthumous [1935 movie The Bride of Frankenstein] monster is something of a theologian. Not a theologian with all the answers but one who raises profound questions, questions that survive their answers. By playing God, does one inadvertently end up playing monster? Who is more monstrous, the creatures who must live through this vale of tears, or the creator who put them here? What does it mean to be 'monstrous' anyway? Are we not all rendered monstrous under God? Is our monstrosity in the image of God? Where is God in all this?
          Very quickly we find ourselves in deeply unsettling theological territory, a territory traditionally called theodicy. Theodicy concerns divine justice in the face of unjustifiable suffering. Why do the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer? In a world such as ours, how can we possibly conceive of a just God? Indeed, Shelley's novel begins with an epigraph from the quintessential English theodicy, Paradise Lost by John Milton, whose explicit although inevitably unrealized aim is to 'justify the ways of God to men.' Shelley's epigraph draws us to the theodic question, which echoes far beyond any answer, and which will be posed again and again by the monster to Victor Frankenstein throughout the novel:

          Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
          To mold Me man, Did I solicit thee
          From darkness to promote me?
                                                         --Paradise Lost X.743-5

The voice of the monster is the audacious voice of theodicy. It is addressed not only to the creator Frankenstein but also to the creator God. Why did you make me? Why did you put me here? What were you thinking? What kind of a world is this? What kind of divine justice is this? What kind of God are you? The monster in Shelley's novel, as in Whale's movie, stands for these questions and terrifying religious uncertainties. His questions pry at cracks in the world's foundations that open onto abysses of unknowing."

Timothy K. Beal, 2002, 3

Religion and its Monsters

Of Monsters and Contemporary Cultures

"Contemporary cultural interest in monsters is still very strong. ... Monsters of demonic possession are imaginative expressions of ... loss of control. The specific face of the monsters will vary from culture to culture, but the universal dimension seems undeniable."

Stephen T. Asma, 2009, 279, 284

On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

Africa: A People Imprisoned By Its Religion

Of African Female Filmmakers

Hermon Hailay, dir. Price of Love (2015)

"Traditionally denied access to the medium of film, African women have been increasingly taking control of the camera in recent years. Female video makers are exploring cultural conventions and innovative strategies that challenge Eurocentric and male chauvinistic assumptions/readings of black female subjectivity. One of the most innovative video-films by an African woman that emerged from this practice is Veronica Quashie's Twin Lovers (Ghana, 1996). The film is about the consequences of urban life, the lure of the city, promiscuity among young people, and the menace of of 'sugar daddies.' The film revolves around the central character Juliet, who at about the age of 22 is still a virgin until she meets Kobbie - not by choice, but in the company of socializing friends. Her friend Doreen slips a narcotic into her drink making it possible for Kobbie to lure her home to be raped. Kobbie is a rich engineer and, as a notorious Casanova, he uses his charm and other dubious tactics including intimidation and deceit to achieve his goal. As a village girl, Juliet is pure, but the city full of vices, to which she went for education, destroys her ambitions. Now pregnant, she is terrified that her father will kill her if she fails to perform puberty rite, a ritual of honor that makes parents proud. In tranquil villages where tradition is upheld, sex and pregnancy before marriage are abhorred. Here, the film reminds us that villages are where cultures and traditions are preserved in modern Africa, while the city is a confluence of foreign influences. This emphasis on purity and culture also explains why in those days in Africa, civil servants who lived in the cities would go home to their respective villages to marry, ignoring the young city women, who were thought to be contaminated."

Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, 2003, 130

"Video Booms and the Manifestations of 'First' Cinema in Anglophone Africa,"

in Rethinking Third Cinema, ed. Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake

Dear God: A Child Writes

Sarra Lou Comandante

Nollywood is Too Big to Ever Die

"Nollywood is too big to ever die: it is the third [now second] largest film industry in the world, as we
like to keep repeating, and it will eventually be seen as one of the world's major film cultures. The story of its beginnings ought to be told with an appropriate level of depth, detail, and accuracy. One hopes that Nollywood will evolve into dazzling glory impossible to imagine at present, but the remarkable extent to which it holds on to and repeats themes, stories, and aesthetics suggests that a lot that will remain fundamental was laid down at or near the very beginning, that some of the early works will remain as classics, and that whatever the future of film in Nigeria turns out to be, it will be recognizable as an extension of what has already been created. To an extraordinary degree, [Kenneth] Nnebue's Living in Bondage (1992), the film that started the Nigerian video boom, contains the seeds of almost everything that followed."

Jonathan Haynes, 2010, 15

"What Is to Be Done?: Film Studies and Nigerian and Ghanaian Videos,"

in Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century: Art Films and the 

Nollywood Video Revolution, ed. Mahir Saul and Ralph A. Austen

Bonang Matheba: "Bury Them With Success"

The Husband and Wife "Jesus Industry"

Nkem Owoh, Osuofia, and Nollywood

In Memoriam: Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike

Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike (1950 - 2018)
-Professor of communication and Africana studies
-Scholar of cinema and film history, African cinema, film and media of the African diaspora
-Author of Black African Cinema (1994), Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers (2002), African Cinema: Narratives, Perspectives and Poetics (2014), and Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse (2014)

Of Popular Memory and Official History

Teshome H. Gabriel (Dan Chavkin / UCLA)

"Once memory enters into our consciousness, it is hard to circumvent, harder to stop, and impossible
to run from. It burns and glows from inside, causing anguish, new dreams and newer hopes. Memory does something else beside telling us how we got here from there: it reminds us of the causes of difference between popular memory and official versions of history.

Official history tends to arrest the future by means of the past. Historians privilege the written word of the text -- it serves as their rule of law. It claims a 'centre' which continuously marginalises others. In this way its ideology inhibits people from constructing their own history or histories.

Popular memory, on the other hand, considers the past as a political issue. It orders the past not only as a reference point but also as a theme of struggle. For popular memory, there are no longer any 'centres' or 'margins', since the very designations imply that something has been conveniently left out. Popular memory, then, is neither a retreat to some great tradition nor a flight to some imagines 'ivory tower', neither a self-indulgent escapism nor a desire for the actual 'experience' or 'content' of the past for its own sake. Rather, it is a 'look back to the future', necessarily dissident and partisan, wedded to constant change."

Teshome H. Gabriel, 1989, 53-54

"Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetics"

In Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen

How Religion Undermines Nigeria's Development

(By Okenyi Kenechi) – I have never seen a dilapidated church. I have seen hundreds of dilapidated schools.

In my home town, the schools are rotting away while church buildings are growing bigger. No industries, just churches.

I once told someone that if the churches in Port Harcourt were to be transformed into industries, unemployment will vanish within one year and crime will be brought to a screeching halt. He agreed. 

Truth is, if a politician asks a certain village what they will prefer to be built for them, chances that they will chose a church will be higher.

Doubt me? Gitto in a bid to show appreciation to former president Goodluck Jonathan, asked him to chose one thing they will build for his village people and he chose a church. I don't know if there are world class hospitals in Otuoke or standard schools but he chose a church.

Of Nnewi and a Resourceful Igbo Town

(By Eromo Egbejule) – The Small Town Of The Super Rich 

Shortly before Nigeria’s independence in 1960, Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu, reportedly Nigeria’s first black billionaire, and founding president of the Nigerian Stock Exchange, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. The royal honor came after he helped the British during World War II with his fleet of trucks. He was so wealthy that during the Queen’s visit in 1956, she was chauffeured around in his Rolls-Royce – apparently the only one in the country at the time – on the request of the colonial administration.

Profiled in September 1965 by TIME magazine, Ojukwu made his money by importing dried fish for resale, and diversifying into textiles, cement and transport. When he died a year later, his wealth was an estimated $4 billion in today’s economic value.

His son, Chukwuemeka, who also ended up a billionaire, returned from Oxford University at 22 with a master’s degree in history and led his fellow Igbos into the Nigerian civil war as head of the secessionist state of Biafra in 1967.

Nnewi, Nkwo Market, and Biafran War

(By Azuka Onwuka) – How the Civil War aided Nnewi’s Industrial Transformation 

Before the 1966 pogrom against the Igbo and indigenes of the former Eastern Nigeria, Nnewi in Anambra State was under the shadow of Onitsha. The markets in Nnewi were like the typical Igbo markets that were in session every four days, depending on which name each market bore. The Nkwo Market, which was situated at the centre of the town, was in full session every Nkwo day, even though some isolated traders could sell some petty things, especially food items, on other days. Anybody who wanted to buy anything of substance went to Onitsha, some 20 kilometres away.

On religious matters, the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church (the two big churches in Nnewi) had their diocesan headquarters in Onitsha. So, the bishops resided in Onitsha and were seen occasionally in Nnewi. To travel to any part of Nigeria from Nnewi, one had to get to Onitsha first. If the trip was to the North or West, one had to cross over by boat to Asaba (before the construction of the Niger Bridge in 1965). But after the bridge was constructed, Onitsha became the connecting city to other parts of Nigeria for most towns and villages in the current Anambra State.

Ghana, Fufu, and Ebunuebunu Soup

Ariel Lee

(By Ayesha Harruna Attah) - Slow-Cooking History 

Fufu is boiled green plantains and cassava, pounded in a wooden mortar to a distinct pum-pum-pum beat. Fufu, the way I like it, comes out a warm yellow, with specks of black from the plantain seeds. But fufu on its own is bland. Fufu is both food and utensil, and strong enough to scoop up soup. Ghanaians eat it with palm soup, groundnut soup, a tomato soup called light soup or ebunuebunu, green soup. Adventurous eaters go for a combination of all four, known as nkatenkontobenkwan. But I am a purist. Ebunuebunu is my favorite.

Fufu originated among the Akan, the ethnic group that includes the Ashanti, Akwapim and Fanti people of what is today southern Ghana and Ivory Coast. It journeyed across West Africa as foofoo, foufou or foutou, and sailed across the Atlantic in the hearts of the people who were uprooted and enslaved, even keeping its name in Cuba. Of ebunuebunu, however, I am hard pressed to find derivatives. Its ingredients are the leaf of the cocoyam plant; dried mudfish, tilapia or other river fish; mushrooms; snails; onions; ginger; garlic; and sometimes grasscutter, the cane rat, which my mother says “adds gamy flavor for those who like it.” The ingredients are slow-cooked until they coalesce into a forest-green broth that looks like witches’ brew and tastes like smoke and earth, with a wholesomeness that lingers on the tongue. 

Genevieve Nnaji, Lionheart, & Good Old Nollywood

Lionheart, a Genevieve Nnaji film, a true Nigerian home video-styled film, has captured the world—no mende-mende added, just same old simple Nigerian Enugu-based Nollywood’s beautifully told story by same old Nollywood veterans – Pete Edochie, Onyeka Onwenu, Nkem Owoh (I mean the same old Osuofia, nothing added), Ngozi Ezeonu, Zebrudaya, Kanayo O. Kanayo and loads of the same old Nollywood faces based in Enugu. And they made it to the international stage, in a jammed cinema hall in the big city of Toronto, with a mixed audience, seventy-five percent whites. The audience laughed when necessary, cried when necessary, and at the end everyone agreed unanimously that they all thoroughly enjoyed the truly made-in-Nigeria movie. Great sound, beautiful pictures, and of course fast paced cutting that really did the magic. Like I said during the third screening of the film at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), this is our style. Thanking Genevieve for her audacity in sustaining our original story pattern and presenting it just as raw as we always did before they [the oversabis] came and told us we were doing nonsense, that the foreign markets and distributors wouldn't touch us with a ten-mile pole. Now I can say, dear oversabis, Genevieve Nnaji's Obiagu: Lionheart has proven you all wrong. Connections and those she knows may have played a part in securing her much celebrated deal with Netflix, but my joy is that it’s Nollywood that was bought and that gives me so much joy.

Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen

Film Director/Producer

The Rascality and Naiveté of Nigerian Christians

(By Temidayo Ahanmisi) - A woman, dedicated member of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, (RCCG) went out on "Morning Cry" on the streets of Abuja about 2 years ago.

She was slaughtered like a stray pig by yet unknown assailants who will forever be at large.

"Morning Cry", which if we would be sincere, should be called "Moron Cry" is that urban delinquency Pentecostal Christians and their fellow Christian renegades engage in to hawk the Christian gospel in seeming hopes of cornering new members to the fold. 

Seeming, because the rascality is borne from deep psychological issues from unresolved personality drawbacks which give birth to a stock guilt complex, ignorance and extreme judgmentalism. 

Economic poverty, a constricted socialisation and stunted formal education combine to exacerbate the aforementioned psychological problems, and what we have is the urge by the religious to "win souls for Christ" in the most crass, tasteless and rascally manners by disturbing the peace of other residents in their areas of operation.

Chinua Achebe: Nneka - "Mother is Supreme"

Wole Soyinka: From Ake to the World Stage

Nollywood, Stereotypes, and Misrepresentations of Igbo Culture

(By Immanuel James Ibe-Anyanwu) - There was that billboard of a certain West-African president who was dressed in an Igbo traditional attire. A loud caption gave meaning:"Igwe!" It was easy to locate the source of that cultural benefaction, credit rightfully placed at the feet of Nollywood, Nigeria's largest exporter of culture and values. Books and social media can tell the Nigerian story, but none can boast the compelling, even hypnotic power of the movie.

Which is why we should worry about the competence of movie makers—their cultural intelligence and sense of sensational restraint. Their products speak to millions, most of whom are illiterate and poor, but powerful. Powerful in their sheer number, in their capacity to spread a social or religious poison. They are the very agencies often punctual at lynching scenes, consumers of wild superstitions on whom depends the fate of that fellow accused of manhood theft in the local market. 

For the most part, the Old Nollywood is run by Igbo scriptwriters, directors, and producers, who are businessmen more than they are artists. For too long we have watched their cultural illiteracy ruin the integrity of much of what stands for Igbo culture and values; we have watched them distort historical facts, fixate on and promote ugly, exaggerated stereotypes, even invent cultural obscenities that do not exist. We have seen Igwes who do nothing all day other than look like frogs on shiny thrones, flanked by two able-bodied human fans, as they condemn villagers to evil forests, when they do not order their deaths outright. We can tolerate such cultural inventiveness for its decorative value, aware that fiction need not be exact and realistic.

A Worshipper, His Maligned Gods, and Hypocrisy of Christians

Dede Ege, man, and the art of gods by Immanuel James Ibe-Anyanwu

I have seen a lot of foolish gods. Grandmother once told me about one who complained that teenagers that often played around his shrine gave off smelly farts, to his eternal suffocation. Poor, lazy dude, he wouldn't move an inch. Another wiped out an entire family for the sin of a member he left unhurt! There is no category of foolishness that has not been practised by some god somewhere, even in ancient Rome and Greece.

I have seen a lot of gods--and that is because, to read Homer, Herodotus, or Plutarch, ancient purveyors of the Greek and Roman gods gist--to read them is to be an eye-witness seated cross-legged at the scene of the event. Ancient Greece probably had more gods than humans, some of them thoroughly silly--and I shall not attend to your lingering suspicion that perhaps man, often unwise, made the gods in his own image; that the foolishness of the gods can be explained in the social genetics between man and what he created--I shall not attempt such a sacrilegious thinking, gods forbid!

Why Nigerians Pray More

(By Nk'iru. Njoku) - "Many people pray more when they're in Naija than when they're out here. Because being in certain parts of the world, you do not need to pray for basic amenities. They are there, they work. You know they will work. If there's a problem, it will be fixed. 

Back home, my people pray so much because the country is broken and the only way some of us get to feel like we are doing anything about it is when we physically engage ourselves in vigorous prayer, for OURSEVLES. 

Whether prayers are answered or not, the energy that leaves us during prayer is enough to make us feel like we've done something. 

Plus, prayer makes our people hopeful. Sometimes things are so incredibly bad that hope is all a person has."

"My Great-Grandfather, The Nigerian Slave-Trader"

Illustration by Angelica Alzona

(By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani) - My parents’ home, in Umujieze, Nigeria, stands on a hilly plot that has been in our family for more than a hundred years. Traditionally, the Igbo people bury their dead among the living, and the ideal resting place for a man and his wives is on the premises of their home. My grandfather Erasmus, the first black manager of a Bata shoe factory in Aba, is buried under what is now the visitors’ living room. My grandmother Helen, who helped establish a local church, is buried near the study. My umbilical cord is buried on the grounds, as are those of my four siblings. My eldest brother, Nnamdi, was born while my parents were studying in England, in the early nineteen-seventies; my father, Chukwuma, preserved the dried umbilical cord and, eighteen months later, brought it home to bury it by the front gate. Down the hill, near the river, in an area now overrun by bush, is the grave of my most celebrated ancestor: my great-grandfather Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku. Nwaubani Ogogo was a slave trader who gained power and wealth by selling other Africans across the Atlantic. “He was a renowned trader,” my father told me proudly. “He dealt in palm produce and human beings.”

Soyinka, Language, and Ede Yoruba

TundeKelani.tv

Black Expressive Style: Deep, Direct, and Vivid

"I am the first and the last
I am the honored one and the scorned one
I am the whore and the holy one
I am the wife and the virgin
I am the barren one and many are my daughters. ...
I am the silence that you cannot understand. ...
I am the utterance of my name."

Julie Dash, 1991

Daughters of the Dust

Myths, Mythologies, and Modern Cultures

“The myths told by the [ancients] are as important as history for our understanding of what those peoples, ancestors of [modern] civilization, believed and thought and felt, and expressed in writing and in visual art.

The intelligible form of ancient poets,

The fair humanities of old religion,

The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,

That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,

Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,

Or chasms and watery depths: all these have vanished.

They lived no longer in the faith of reason!

But still the heart doth need a language, still

Doth the old instinct bring back old names…

And so even communities professing that quite different code of beliefs which is Christianity have, after various struggles, found it impracticable to dispense with the classical stories. Today new political systems have fabricated their own myths which Coleridge, writing those lines under the Graeco-Roman spell, had never imagined. Yet twentieth-century writers, from tragic theatre to comic strip, have continued to employ the archetypes with renewed vigour. These dramatic, concrete, individual, insistently probing ancient myths still supplement the decisions of science as clues to much in the world that does not alter.

Ogbuide: The Lake Goddess of Oguta

"Ogbuide is the awesome water goddess of Oguta Lake located in Southeastern Nigeria. The goddess has multiple names and is also known as Uhammiri. A local divinity, Ogbuide is but one manifestation of the generic Igbo mother water goddess, Nne Mmiri....

The Igbo town of Oguta is located on a beautiful lake near the confluence of the rivers Niger and Urashi [or Urasi]. These waters are associated with divinities of the Igbo pantheon of multiple gods and goddesses. Oguta's lake goddess, Ogbuide, is the major reference point in the lives of the Oru-Igbo people of Oguta, Orsu-Obodo, and a host of other towns. This awesome goddess embodies the forces of nature that dominate life and death. Water is recognized as a divine power of dual faculties, both giving and destroying life. Locals worship the lake goddess Uhammiri together with her husband, the river god, Urashi, as a divine pair. These divinities existed before, until, and beyond the advent of Europeans, Christianity, and Islam. Recognizing the mother water goddess and her powers is altering our perception of and dealing with nature, power, and gender. ...

The water has emerged as the single most influential spiritual and existential force complementing the earth goddess Ani, or Ala, and the ancestral gods. ... Oru-Igbo culture and society, its economic foundations, and its major artistic expressions revolve around water, particularly the flooding and receding of the Rivers Niger and Urashi, and above all, Ogbuide, that is, Oguta Lake. This is evidenced in the local farming cycle, the timing and performance of the town's major Owu festivals, Agugu and Omerife, and other cultural activities, its underlying myths, religious beliefs, and customary rules. All of the indigenous deities and particularly the ever-present lake goddess are reflected in the people's daily conduct, their cosmogony, spirituality, aesthetics, and perception of the universe. The notion of the flexible, fluid female side balances the more static plane of the earth and male ancestral traditions."

Sabine Jell-Bahlsen, 2007: 1-2

The Water Goddess in Igbo Cosmology: Ogbuide of Oguta Lake

The Sacred Earth Among the Igbo

Photo credit: Herbert Cole

"In some African cultures, the Earth Mother is a divinity. The Earth differs from other nature spirits, being a chthonic force rather than an anthropomorphic figure. Ala or Ana [or Ani] is of central importance in much of Igboland. Many crimes are seen as abominations because they offend her. The whole body of inherited custom is Omenala, and ritual prohibitions are nso Ala. Those who died forbidden deaths, such as suicides or lepers, could not be buried in the earth, and their corpses were cast into the Evil Forest. Missionaries were sometimes given such areas for their churches, as a trial. ... Nri, dedicated to the earth, was one of Igboland's great ritual centers. Ritual specialists from Nri, their faces marked by distinctive scars, traveled from village to village, purifying the earth from abominations. Instead of weapons, they carried a staff of peace.

In the Owerri area, people honored the Earth in a different way, by creating mbari houses, shrines of clay sculpture that were allowed to disintegrate. It was the act of creation itself that honored the Earth. One of Igboland's great oracles was called Igwekala (Heaven Is Greater Than Earth). But in 1966, when village elders debated whether the Earth or Chukwu was supreme, opinion was divided.

The cult of Ala, apparently so universal, illustrates the impossibility of making valid generalizations about the whole Igbo culture area. In the Okigwe area, Ajala (the local form of Ala) was less dominant; in one community, she was recently introduced, and she was often less dominant that the yam god. In a village group south of Owerri, Ala is thought of as male. Ala is clearly linked with the Nri ritual sphere, though her cult is found well beyond it."

Elizabeth Isichei, 2004: 232

The Religious Traditions of Africa: A History

Prayer Doesn't Equal Understanding

Bishop Tudor Bismark

Negotiating Orunmila: His Mask, His Wisdom

"A mask of Orunmila stared down at him from the wall, or at least the artist in Osogbo had said the large eyes belonged to the god of wisdom. His mother would have been horrified by the serene wooden face, angered even, by what she would dub apostasy.
     When he prayed, he prayed to Allah the most merciful. But what was he to do with all these gods and goddesses and spirits and ancestors that had peopled his village in Kwara before the first cleric arrived with a Koran? He did not worship Orunmila but he thought to himself, this wooden embodiment of wisdom hung on his wall."

Chibundu Onuzo, 2018: 145

Welcome to Lagos

Igbo bu Igbo: Culture, Language, and Gender Relations

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "Igbo bu Igbo" - Keynote at 7th Annual International Igbo Conference

How to Become an Invisible Woman in Lagos

(By Sisi Lucia) - Do you want to become an invisible woman? I have found the perfect vanishing cream, immediately you slather in on your body, fiam, you just vanish.

So I live in an estate, every morning or evening I pass by the only gate in the estate. Depending on my mood, I either smile and greet, or just wave at security men at the gate. On Fridays or during any celebration say Christmas or Easter, they razzle me for ‘something for the boys’ and also depending on my mood, I give them ‘something’ or not. So you would think they know me, yes?

Well, they know me until they see me with a man and that’s it, the vanishing cream. Men are the vanishing cream. The presence of a man makes women invisible. The other day I took a cab home, they greeted the cab driver and totally ignored me. I wasn’t even expecting the greeting because I knew the presence of the cab driver has already made me evaporate. The cab driver had to ask me “did you just move here? Abi na new security?” I just smiled. It was not the first time. If my male friends are visiting, they do it and it is not as if the greeting adds any naira to my account, so shrug, right?