By
Obododimma
Oha
A common expression one hears in many Nollywood films
focusing on indigenous Nigerian life is “The gods of our land.” One does not
need to be an expert in African Traditional Religions to understand that this
sounds like a local self-enslavement to the supernatural, or a kind of fatalism
in which the divinities have the final say. In this case, human beings just
leave their affairs in the hands of the supernatural, but we know as viewers
that it is humans who eventually take the decisions on behalf of the unseen
entities. If it is banishment pronounced by the “king” against a widow accused
of witchcraft, or an abomination pronounced by the chief priest, it is all in
the service of “the gods of our land,” or it is “the gods of our land” who have
“spoken.” The innocent widow has to be banished, chased out of the community,
by a rabble that cannot think on their own. So, in this essay, I briefly look
at how humans mortgage their interests with their expression or acts attributed
to unseen divinities. What does this imply for human society in its
relationship with the supernatural? I consider the interpretation of human
actions as the action of the supernatural and how this makes the society susceptible
to tyranny.
The expression, “the gods of our land,” first of all points
to a triadic relationship: humans relate with humans, but they are not alone.
As in many African situations, the world of humanity is seen as being
intertwined with that of the supernatural which is populated by gods,
goddesses, as well as other divinities. As I pointed out in another blog essay,
the supernatural that are privatized or attached to the community are means of
constructing identity and may even be weaponized. The primary role they play is
to protect the community (since they belong to it) against another. But we know
that when they fail in this role, they could be replaced. Chief priests as
spiritual merchants may recommend and install other deities as being more responsive
and powerful. Do you blame the local people? The deities are not just there to
consume sacrifices but cannot make one community win a war against another.
They have to transform into shells, fighters and bombers and even light
weapons. They have to fight the enemy at the spiritual battlefield.
This then means that a deity could be transplanted, and as
such, there is really no indigenous deity, no “gods of our land.” The
postmodifier, “of our land” is just because their conscription or new identity
for the moment. “Gods of our land” could become “gods of their land” and it is
always “them versus us.” That is to say that the divinities have a social
identity that is tentative. Communities that insist on permanent social
identities for deities are disadvantaged.
The expression also makes community logic very prominent. In that relationship
I talked about earlier, they are privileged, in the sense that they are the
final arbiters. The members of the community must defer to them in everything.
But there is a contradiction! Whether through the Afa divination (Ifa in
Yoruba) or through the mouth of the king, the pronouncement deploys the human
to be actualized. That is, it is the human that decides, deploys their logic,
in deciding a case!
This has serious consequences!
First, consequences for the deities: errors or right actions
could be attributed to them.
Second, humans could very easily smuggle in their own sentiments
and claim that such are the wills of the
deities. Don’t tell me that they cannot do this! They can and sometimes do.
They can smuggle those in so to feature human wickedness as divine action,
since they know that naïve members of the community would swallow every spittle
that is labelled as the gods’.
The second above creates room for tyranny. People already
enslaved to the supernatural can easily be mentally manipulated and deceived. They
can easily do anything that they are told, since the directive is supposedly
from “gods of our land.” In that line of thinking, they can submit to the worst
form of leadership in the world, in the name of doing the wills of “the gods of
our land.”
Now, the expression also represents the fatalistic logic of
the community as one source of the community’s problem. The community cannot possibly develop beyond
its fatalistic logic. The logic is its norm. The logic is its future. Really,
it has no future. If it has a future, it means it has to change its system of
thinking – and, inevitably, “the gods of our land.”
Anytime I hear “the gods of our land” while watching a
Nollywood film, one of the things that come to my mind is that the film is in a
genre of traditionalism in which the bad could be the good. Although not all
films in the genre surrender human logic to culture, it is often the case that
the arbiters are above our heads and we are invited not to bring our logic with
us. The “gods of our land” will have the final say, even if they are pursuing
injustice. That may be part of the war they are conscripted to fight!
Many may be enjoying the film (as superstition can be so
commodified), but I am worried that populations are exposed to a dangerous ideology: they
are made to believe that they can suspend their own logic as community members
in discourse, and depend rather on a ready-made thinking that may be against
their interest really. That imposition, too, may come from “the gods of their
land.”
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