Religion Without God, by T. M. Luhrmann

THIS Christmas our family will go to church. The service is held in a beautiful old church in the charming town of Walpole, N.H., just over the border from Vermont. The Lord’s Prayer hangs on the wall behind the sanctuary. A lectern rises above the nave to let the pastor look down on his flock. The pews and the side stalls have the stern, pure lineaments suited to the Colonial congregation that once came to church to face God.

Except that this church is Unitarian. Unitarianism emerged in early modern Europe from those who rejected a Trinitarian theology in preference for the doctrine that God was one. By the 19th century, however, the Unitarian church had become a place for intellectuals who were skeptical of belief claims but who wanted to hang on to faith in some manner. Charles Darwin, for example, turned to Unitarians as he struggled with his growing doubt. My mother is the daughter of a Baptist pastor and the black sheep, theologically speaking, of her family. She wants to go to church, but she is not quite sure whether she wants God. The modern Unitarian Universalist Association’s statement of principles does not mention God at all.

Nollywood Pays Pres. Jonathan Thank You Visit

President Jonathan in a group photograph with members of Creative Professionals of Nigeria

Nollywood stars, under the aegis of Creative Professionals of Nigeria (CPN), recently paid a courtesy visit to President Jonathan at the State House, Abuja, to thank him for his support of the creative industry in Nigeria. The President, who reiterated his government’s resolve to continue to support the industry, acknowledged that “the creative industry in Nigeria has been a catalyst for change and has been in the forefront of promoting our core values as Nigerians as well as putting our Nation in the world map”. 

CPN President, Segun Arinze, led top stars like Ibinabo Fibresima (President, Actors guild of Nigeria, AGN) and Monalisa Chinda as well as popular journalists, Azuh Amatus and Chris Keyinde Nwandu, on the visit. Other top members of the group in attendance included Abu Yakubu (secretary, AGN), Prince Ifeanyi Dike (chairman, AGN’s BOT), Zeb and Chico Ejiro, Emeka Ossai, Emma Ogugua, Fidelis Duker, Sunny McDon, Teco Benson, Fred Amata, Ralph Nwadike, Keppy Ekpeyong, Chike Bryan, Victor Okhai, Kingsley Ogoro, Lancelot Imasuen, Grace Amah, Kate Okunnu, Toyin Aimakhu, Fathia Balogun, Gideon Okeke, Joseph Benjamin, Charles Novia, and Sammie Okposo.

Beauty, Brian, and Talent, by Stella Damasus

I looked at the clock on the wall. It was already 5pm and I still had one more homework to finish with my 9-year-old daughter. My phone rang a few times and as I saw the name of the caller, I didn’t pick it up.

My daughter noticed my constant glances at the clock and said to me “mummy you can go you know. It’s Friday and I don’t have to submit this in school till Monday”.

I really didn’t want to leave the house but she went into my room and brought the invitation card to me. “Mummy you have to go because this person has been calling for this event for the past one month.” I took the invitation card from her and looked at it again; it was for a movie premiere and a lot of hype had been done about this movie. It was the rave of the moment and everyone who mattered in showbiz was going to be at this movie premiere. Well, everyone but me.

“Mummy I know that look. You have to be there”. So I jumped in the shower, looked through my wardrobe and got the first thing that my hands could grab. A simple but beautiful dress…comfortable for the evening.

As I arrived at the Silverbird Galleria on Victoria Island, the car park was jam-packed and my driver had issues with parking. “This movie must be amazing,” I thought to myself. As I stepped into the atrium at the galleria, I was greeted by a swarm of pressmen. Flashing cameras, microphones and more questions than my brain could process were coming at me like bullets. The red carpet was packed as I saw colleagues, good friends, not-so-good friends, producers and ‘everybody’ looking like a million dollars. “I must have stumbled onto the red carpet at the Oscars,” I thought.

"Thank God Entertainers Lost Their Primaries," Etcetera

My dear entertainers who just lost out in your quest for public office, can you please gbe enu e soun so that we can concentrate on the election at hand? Despite your claims, we all know the reasons why you sought public office in the first place. So many Nigerians have hurt their knees in praying to God to rid this nation of political miscreants and people with selfish motives in seeking public offices. So the fact that you all lost your primaries is a gargantuan sign that the system does not see you as worthy representatives of the Nigerian youths. 

You are the reasons why the youths are only being regarded as the future in a time like this when we are supposed to be the present. Why is it surprising to you that you lost in the primaries? The system has been analytically taking notes of your below the par exploits even within the madhouse we call entertainment industry. Don’t you get it, because you are in the sacred ministry of receiving brown envelopes doesn’t make you qualified to administer or make laws.

Nigeria's Witch Airways and Other Sad Tales

Let me warn you, reader, in advance: If you have a squeamish constitution, please do not read this piece. Just stop here and flee, for the story I’m about to tell is terribly ugly and disturbing. It is bound to leave you horribly unsettled, disturbed. In my career as a columnist I have written few essays that galled and upset me more. It is a piece I wish I didn’t have to write, but one that I feel compelled to write. A grandmother in my novel Arrows of Rain warns her son, “A story that must be told never forgives silence.”

I’m writing this piece in that spirit; it is a story, I believe, that must be told. It must be told despite its ugliness, or, in fact, because of it. Flee now, dear reader, if you can’t handle it.

Rudolf's "Memo To My Fellow Ndi-Igbo"

Igbo drummers

I write you all with great humility. I forgot how much I missed you all and missed engaging in the all-important conversation we need to have within our “mkpuke” (inner chamber) and the ones we need to have in the square.

As a kid, I was once marveled by the sight of a large cart kept in the church premises on which it was written, “Ọ bụ m, ka ọ bụ gị?” I asked my parents what it meant. They explained that the cart was used to push coffins into the church for funeral mass and was simply asking the question, ”Would it be me or you?” In other words, for whom does the bell toll?

Nigeria: Nollywood's Tale of the Middle Class

Want a feel-good story about an African middle class with a Hollywood ending? It is set in Nigeria, the continent’s biggest country by population, brashest by reputation and ballsiest by self-conception.

Outside its borders, Nigeria is defined by Boko Haram hashtag campaigns, imploding mega-churches and the occasional piece about political dysfunction. But as an entity (“country” does not quite fit the description), led by the unloved Goodluck Jonathan and his People’s Democratic Party (PDP), it marches towards a general election in 2015, and into a future without certainties or precedents.

Inside, the mise en scene is somewhat more complicated. No state that is home to 170m souls can ever be properly united; it will always be a nation of nations. That is certainly the case with Nigeria, which is riven by the tenth parallel, the line of latitude that separates the mostly Muslim north from the largely Christian south. So many of Nigeria’s problems, to say nothing of its indefatigable energy, are generated by this division. But as the energy increases, it becomes more unstable at the core. Regional observers worry that Nigeria will eventually explode into a cluster of Balkanised mini-states.

Sam Dede: I Can't Wait to Return to Nollywood

Popular Nollywood actor, university lecturer and incumbent Director- General/CEO, Rivers State Tourism Development Agency, Sam Dede in this interview talks about his desire to return to Nollywood after the expiration of his appointment as well as what fun seekers should expect at this year's edition of the annual Port-Harcourt carnival.

WHAT's your impression about Nollywood since you've been away?

We have a new crop of filmmakers. In some quarters, they refer to them as new Nollywood; it's good. I've seen some of the works they've done. It's quite an improvement on what we used to have. I just hope it is sustainable because it is not easy out there. It's a different ball game.

Intervention Fund and Project ACT Nollywood

President Jonathan and Fiberesima, Actors Guild of Nigeria President

AGAIN, the Federal Government [recently] in Abuja walked the talk as regards the special film intervention fund approved by President Goodluck Jonathan in 2013.

Less than two months after it released the names of 32 movie production companies that would receive the Film Production Fund (FPF), one of the three components of the N3 billion Presidential Intervention Fund for the Nigerian movie industry managed under a scheme called Project ACT Nollywood, the government through the Federal Ministry of Finance has commenced the process of disbursing funds to beneficiaries who satisfied the requirements for accessing the funds that should best be called a production grant.

26 out of the 32 movie production companies have entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Federal Government. They would any moment now start getting alerts of sums ranging from N2 million and N15 million. However the amount each of the production house will get depends on the magnitude of the film project that was proposed.

Nse Ikpe Etim, Still Going Strong

NOTABLE Nollywood actress Nse Clifford Sule (nee Ikpe Etim) is an actress with an unquenchable passion for acting. A native of Akwa Ibom State who studied Theatre Arts at the University of Calabar, Nse has been having a smooth run in the movies and has been playing a raised game too since she made a return in Emem Isong’s 2009 movie ‘Reloaded’. 

    Indeed, the multi-award winning actress who fans picked in 2014 to win the Africa Magic Viewers Choice Award (AMVCA) for Best Actress in a drama for her effort in Tope Oshin Ogun’s ‘Journey to Self’ has, with her acting streaks, found a comfortable position on the chart of top Nollywood practitioners. 

Nollywood and Lagos Cinema Culture

(From The Tribune) How patriotic are the indigenous cinemas? Newton Ray-Ukwuoma, in a bid to answer this question, investigates the reasons behind foreign movies gaining ascendancy in Lagos cinemas and brings his report.

Revamping a cinema culture where more indigenous movies are the choice selections of cinema goers might be a vastly wrung out imagination, but a possible break point for a boom in the Nigerian movie industry known as Nollywood, which spins out a whopping sum of 2000 straight-to-the-video movies per annum, ranking higher than America’s Hollywood and behind India’s Bollywood. But for most cinema houses in the commercial nerve centre of Nigeria, Lagos State, it is all about the exotic and the fray.

Nollywood: Addressing African Concerns

“A friend of mine described Nollywood as someone performing heart surgery using forks and knives. But the genius of it is that the patient survives… and that’s what we have done with Nollywood. Impossible things have happened with us.”

So says Charles Igwe, the CEO of Nollywood Global Media Group and one of the industry’s early investors. The Nigerian based film industry produces an average of around 2,000 films a year, topping both Hollywood and Bollywood.

Despite production being low-cost, especially when compared with the high budgets of Hollywood, Nollywood films have a strong audience in Nigeria and across the continent. According to Igwe, Nollywood’s success comes from a hunger for African content.

“At the time we started there was nothing in the global spectrum of content that addressed anything African. All the information that came to us was filtered through the big networks like BBC, CNN… It was about famine, corruption – the usual things. And the rest of the space was filled with wildlife from Namibia and Serengeti,” said Igwe.

Nollywood and Benefits of the Internet

VENDORS snake their way between cars in the Lagos traffic, hawking the latest Nollywood DVDs to tired drivers. Nigeria’s film industry churns out up to 50 titles a week. Most go straight to DVD to be sold on the streets for the equivalent of a couple of dollars. But the market can be slow. Taiwo, a hawker in the commercial capital, says that on a good day he might sell five films. “When it’s quiet, maybe two.”

Nollywood is a big business—contributing 1.2% to Nigeria’s gross domestic product and employing more than a million people—but the distribution of its films poses a barrier to the industry’s growth. Sales of DVDs account for more than 90% of revenue but filmmakers complain that poor regulation of street markets leaves them open to piracy. That, combined with often low sales volumes, means that little cash reaches their pockets.

The saving grace is that most of Nollywood’s output is shot on a minuscule budget. Nollywood productions… are often filmed in just ten days and cost some $40,000, yielding notoriously low-end content. “Making money is tough, especially for film-makers who are increasing the budget, paying more attention to the quality, and making movies that can travel,” says Obi Emelonye, a director. “Distribution is hands-down the biggest problem... Solve that, and Nollywood will explode.”

Nollywood Launches on Amazon and iTunes

Black Speech Media Group, a multimedia entertainment company, in conjunction with Autonomous Entertainment, a New York-based media marketing and distribution boutique, have brought Nigerian films to the digital distribution space by launching Nollywood movies on two major digital platforms, Amazon and iTunes.

With more than 50,000 Nollywood titles on the Black Speech Media Group platform, the two companies proposed a plan that would build a landing page and digital channel on most of the major digital platforms, such as iTunes, Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu. The first batch of titles are available on Amazon Prime and iTunes and have already gone live in six territories: USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia.

Flavour: Golibe

(By Charles Novia) - I have just watched over and over again on Youtube, the Best Music Video in Nigeria, and arguably continental on a larger scale, of 2014.

And this is no fluke. I spent hours watching it over and over for incisive areas to make notes and point out a few flaws but I could not find any. And I am very impressed.

Forget the eyebrow-raising story of Flavour’s new CD selling a million copies in Five days of its release. Forgive Flavour’s narcissistic  propensity to post half-nude pictures of himself regularly on the internet. What cannot be denied is the Young Man’s monstrous talent and his ability to push that big envelope with original compositions and well-produced visual interpretations.