I no get time for juju…
Low budget CGI. Inconsistent audio quality (especially during movie previews). Overacting. Even though they were far from perfect, old school Nollywood films will always have a special place in my heart.
With the re-emergence of Nollywood Y2K fashion and music, I decided to watch many movies from my childhood. Thanks to Youtube, I was able to find them all (although the movie titles would appear as ‘BEYONCE AND RIHANNA “TWO BEAUTIES AT WAR” OMOTOLA VS. NADIA — BLOCKBUSTER NOLLYWOOD NIGERIAN MOVIE’), including a few classic horror films.
Juju (a spiritual belief system primarily practiced in West Africa) and witchcraft are the typical Nollywood horror themes. Ritualists usually offer only two to three services: If a man visits the ritualist, he wants to get rich and if a woman is visiting, she wants to trap a man or seek revenge.
Their shrine would also be placed in the middle of the bushes and make strange requests in order to fulfill the buyer’s request.
As I continued browsing, I stumbled across one movie that I refused to watch when I was younger — Karishika.
This 1996 Nigerian horror film starring Becky Ngozi Okorie as Karishika (the queen of seduction) revolves around Satan and his followers, including Karishika, who is sent to the mortal world to seduce men and feed them with temptations (money, sex, the whole nine yards).
Based on the mystical elements of the film and many others like it, it wouldn’t be too far off to catergorize these films as ‘Africanfuturism’, a term coined by Nnedi Okafor, that depicits a mixture of true existing African spiritualities and imaginative work.
“Other non-central points: Africanfuturism does not include fantasy unless that fantasy is set in the future or involves technology or space travel, etc…There are grey areas, blends, and contradictions, as there are with any definition. Africanfuturism (being African-based) will tend to naturally have mystical elements (drawn or grown from actual African cultural beliefs/world views, not something merely made up).” — Nnedi Okafor
Nollywood continues to use supernatural elements in films, the most recent example being Living in Bondage: Breaking Free, a remake of the classic 1992 film that sparked the industry.
In the past, I probably wouldn’t have considered any of these films as Afrofuturism, let alone Africanfuturism. However, learning more about this genre has made me appreciate not just Nollywood speculative fiction, but the entire industry as I can look past its [many] flaws and deeply analyze its message(s).
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