"Nollywood in Focus" Premieres in San Francisco

(TheGuardian.ng) - ‘Nollywood In Focus’ To Premiere At San Francisco Black Film Festival

Nollywood in Focus, an exciting documentary film offering a rare glimpse into the burgeoning Nigerian film industry, … premiere[s] at the 22nd San Francisco Black Film Festival on June 19, 2020. 

#Black Lives Matter

(By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) - "Dear American Non-Black, if an American Black person is telling you about an experience about being black, please do not eagerly bring up examples from your own life. Don't say 'It's just like when I was ...' You have suffered. Everyone in the world has suffered. But you have not suffered precisely because you are an American Black. Don't be quick to find alternative explanations for what happened. Don't say 'Oh, it's not really race, it's class. Oh, it's not race, it's gender. Oh, it's not race, it's the cookie monster.' You see, American Blacks actually don't WANT it to be race. They would rather not have racist shit happen. So maybe when they say something is about race, it's maybe because it actually is? Don't say 'I'm color-blind,' because if you are color-blind, then you need to see a doctor and it means that when a black ma is shown on TV as a crime suspect in your neighborhood, all you see is a blurry purplish-grayish-creamish figure. Don't say 'We're tired of talking about race' or 'The only race is the human race.' American Blacks, too, are tired of talking about race. They wish they didn't have to. But shit keeps happening. Don't preface your response with 'One of my best friends is black' because it makes no difference and nobody cares and you can have a black best friend and still do racist shit and it's probably not true anyway, the 'best' part, not the 'friend' part. Don't say your grandfather was Mexican so you can't be racist (please click here for more on There Is No United League of the Oppressed). Don't bring up your Irish great-greatparents' suffering. Of course they got a lot of shit from established America. So did the Italians. So did the Eastern Europeans. But there was a hierarchy. A hundred years ago, the white ethnics hated being hated, but it was sort of tolerable because at least black people were below them on the ladder.

Benin Kingdom, the Oba, and Religious Diversity

NEBO TV

Afamefuna: The Headstrong Historian

Illustration by Yvetta Fedorova

(By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) – The Headstrong Historian

Many years after her husband had died, Nwamgba still closed her eyes from time to time to relive his nightly visits to her hut, and the mornings after, when she would walk to the stream humming a song, thinking of the smoky scent of him and the firmness of his weight, and feeling as if she were surrounded by light. Other memories of Obierika also remained clear—his stubby fingers curled around his flute when he played in the evenings, his delight when she set down his bowls of food, his sweaty back when he brought baskets filled with fresh clay for her pottery. From the moment she had first seen him, at a wrestling match, both of them staring and staring, both of them too young, her waist not yet wearing the menstruation cloth, she had believed with a quiet stubbornness that her chi and his chi had destined their marriage, and so when he and his relatives came to her father a few years later with pots of palm wine she told her mother that this was the man she would marry. Her mother was aghast. Did Nwamgba not know that Obierika was an only child, that his late father had been an only child whose wives had lost pregnancies and buried babies? Perhaps somebody in their family had committed the taboo of selling a girl into slavery and the earth god Ani was visiting misfortune on them. Nwamgba ignored her mother. She went into her father’s obi and told him she would run away from any other man’s house if she was not allowed to marry Obierika. Her father found her exhausting, this sharp-tongued, headstrong daughter who had once wrestled her brother to the ground.

Mma: At the Heart of Igbo Cosmology and Culture

"To understand more fully the complex set of ideas behind Agu's charge of witchcraft, it is necessary to say something about the connection between and Igbo person's life, his or her productiveness, and the communal 'good.' Mma is arguably the most important, single Igbo cosmological term. It contains a complex bundle of meanings: not only 'good' but wealth, health, and beauty are also implied. The key to following the discussion below is that the reader must keep all of these meanings in mind, since the values expressed by the use of mma are central to Igbo thought, particularly Igbo thought about human worth.
          For the Igbo, personal mma is both a reflection on the mma of the community and a positive statement about, or a continuation through time and space of, that good. "Goodness" is thus an active property in the life of an individual as well as in the life of a group. In practical terms, this means that a productive person is a person who manifests 'goodness' through his/her actions, by working hard and creatively, by having children and by teaching those children proper values, by accumulating wealth and by redistributing that wealth to the community through participation in title taking, town and local credit associations, and the establishment of patron-client relations with the less fortunate.
          One of the most important signs of 'goodness' for the Igbo is children. Children are, on one hand, the visible continuation of the lineage into the future, but they also represent material and spiritual wealth in the present. This is why murder and robbery are so closely linked in Igbo thought. The death of any person implies the loss of his/her productive and reproductive potential for the community at large.