“Have You Eaten?”¹

Portrayals of Deviant Women in Nollywood

DEBBIE FREMPONG

Abstract

This paper explores filmic representations of womanhood in Nollywood, Nigeria’s largest film industry. Focusing on three different films over the span of 10 years, the essay argues that Nollywood’s engagements with Christian moral norms significantly impacts its portrayals of women, producing specific narratives around deviance and its accompanying failures of womanhood. It also shows how these narratives are differentiated through social class, as they highlight the institutionalized capitalist-sexist nature of the professional sphere women have to navigate. Traversing the public-private spheres, these narratives reveal the social pressures that simultaneously produce and disrupt ideas of womanhood. By analyzing the films, the essay posits that Nollywood’s representation of women reflects contemporary social anxieties about modernity, capitalism and morality, which are in turn refracted through the image of the deviant woman. 

Nigeria’s Nollywood is recorded as the third biggest film industry behind the United States’ Hollywood and India’s Bollywood.² With a net worth of over 800 million dollars, Nollywood’s reach and popularity ensure that it operates as a hub that recreates and transmits cultural values into and out of Nigeria. In this way, Nollywood facilitates the space for social commentary and operates as an important site of discourse between transmitters and viewers. This paper seeks to examine the colliding worlds of gender, religion and film by investigating the contemporary images of the religiously and culturally deviant woman, as portrayed in Nollywood films.

The production of Nigerian films today is unprecedented, with about 2000 videos being produced each year.³ These movies address a wide range of topics that are relevant within several aspects of, particularly southern, Nigerian life, and reiterate what Asonzeh Ukah refers to as the “contemporary Nigerian spiritual market,” where “individuals and groups are free to display goods and services, ideas and ideologies, personages and personalities.”⁴ The industry incorporates elements of Yoruba travelling theatres, several of which were transferred into films, while still incorporating elements of the supernatural, and an emphasis on a moral lesson.⁵ Easy access to video CDs (VCDs), in addition to the innovation in information technology contributed to the eventual rise of cheaper, low-budget movies, and a sharp boom in the making and marketing of these films.⁶

Such films show a large portion of general Nigerian society, dealing with topics across the private and public spheres of life. Daily press and weekly news reports are the only mainstream media outlets that can rival videos as a way of exhibiting Nigerian life. Several scholars on mass media have emphasized the ways in which it builds up its consumers’ perception of reality or social conditions so much so that these perceptions are eventually transmitted into the general culture of the people.⁷ The large popularity of these video films, therefore, give us a glimpse into of the kinds of narratives and values that are cherished by Nigerian audiences.

Evangelical/Pentecostal Christianity in Nigeria and the Media

Much like Nollywood, Evangelical churches are also a huge part of the public domain in Nigeria. With one of the largest population of Pentecostals in Africa, these churches are the most rapidly growing denomination of Christianity,⁸ and continue to gain a lot of social and political power within the country. Some of this power is inevitably directed towards the public spaces including radio and television, and undoubtedly, Nollywood. Mega-churches like the Redeemed Christian Church of God, The Synagogue, Church of All Nations, and Christ Embassy use the media to spread their messages, including through radio, television, and print sources. Similar to many other arenas, video plays a role in the neo-Pentecostalist movement as a medium for spreading the Christian message, and many of these videos become “surrogate authority on matters of religious, social and ethical value.”⁹ In fact, the neo-Pentecostal movement is so important to the rise of video-film in Nigeria that even the “first nationally important” video-film, Living in Bondage, had neo-Pentecostalist sentiments couched within the rhetoric of salvation.¹⁰ Thus, many of the films are primarily concerned with the eschatological implications of life, with making commentary on the “right” ways to live, and with becoming enmeshed in a cultural Nigerian worldview as well.

Gender and History Framework

Consequently, these worldviews are simultaneously affected by, and affect socio-cultural ideas related to gender and womanhood. Transmitted through media, proverbs, religious institutions, etcetera, these worldviews reinforce women’s primary positionality as wife and mother and subordinate to a husband.¹¹ While there are several contestations of these social structures, and while Nigerian women do utilize religious resources and other avenues to advocate for more equitable relations within their partnerships and society at large,¹² they continue to face some of their greatest challenges in the socio-cultural and political spheres.¹³ As they navigate the complex terrain of these norms, issues of domestic violence, sexual harassment and gender bias are rife. Using the framework provided in Dorothy Hodgson’s and Shirley McCurdy’s “Wicked” Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa, I analyze the processes through which women become “deviant,” and consider how the tensions that exist become sites of disruption within gendered relations, social practices, cultural norms and political-economic institutions. The idea of deviance can be said to emanate from discourses that allow “masculine power … to control or oppress women by stigmatizing certain actions, whether normative or unconventional,” as well as from any “manifestation of feminine power whereby women purposefully and effectively challenge political, social or cultural constraints on their behavior.”¹⁴ Women’s responses as deviance are similar to the eruptions of mass dissent from women during the Aba Women’s War of 1929, when the women of Aba collectively mobilized to challenge colonial power and address social and political grievances.¹⁵ This paper is concerned with capturing the “eruptions” that happen within day-to-day domestic living and exploring how these supposedly pedestrian reactions to the constraints of proper gendered performance are portrayed by Nollywood.¹⁶

Film Analysis: Barren Women, Hit the Street, Fifty

This next part of the essay will focus on the three films I decided to use for my analysis. These films were chosen because they have women protagonists who are dealing with the issue of deviance identified as the focus of this paper. All the movies included were made between the years 2004 and 2015, with Barren Women being the oldest, and Hit the Street and Fifty being the most recent films. Consistent with the themes in Nollywood films, these movies focus on the everyday lives of people, but are written as melodramas. All the movies are shot and directed by men, and two of three of them, Barren Women and Hit the Street, are classified as Nollywood films.

The first film, Barren Women (2013),¹⁷ follows the lives of five women as they try to have children in their marriages and relationships. To help them with their efforts is Dr. Williams, a quack, who produces babies for his clients in nine months by kidnapping other people’s newborns. The first woman we meet is Anne, who has been married for five years with no children, and as such is constantly taunted and harassed by her mother-in-law. It is after years and years of this taunting, even to the point of accusing her of being a witch, that Anne attempts to seek help from Dr. Williams. Anne’s ploy fails, however, when the Doctor is unable secure a child for her. As Anne dies, presumably from the concoction the Doctor gave her, she confesses that she sacrificed her first son to a fetish priest in order to become wealthy. In that moment, her mother-in-law, screams, “I was right! She’s a witch; she’s a witch!”

The next group of women are Ronke, Kassandra, and Abby, who make their living as international drug-dealers. Their fourth friend is Zeinab, who exchanges sexual favors for money. During one of their drug transportation operations, Abby dies when one of the packages explodes inside her. The other three friends carry on. A few years later, the remaining friends, who are now married and desperate to have kids, also seek help from Dr. Williams, as they are unable to conceive. While this is successful for the most part, these women still come to a horrible end. Ronke dies from drinking the concoction the doctor gave her. Kassandra’s husband leaves her because he finds out that he is impotent, and the child cannot be his. Zeinab never gets married.

Issues of childbirth are very important in certain parts of southern Nigeria, and it is relevant to note how this film reproduces particular cultural values related to the issue of fertility. Women who are unable to have children suffer from social stigma, as evident in the extents to which these women are willing to go to have children. Having a child is, therefore, inherently desirable for women, and forms a fundamental part of their marriages and societal status.¹⁸ In line with the cultural relevance of childbirth, the inability of these women to have children becomes a form of un-performative deviance that must be remedied. What becomes a site of contestation is their chosen method of remedy.

For Anne, portrayed throughout the majority of the movie as a dutiful and gentle woman, to the point of subservience, the moment of failure is in the decision she took earlier in her life to kill her son. What this earlier instance of cruelty does is to force Anne to become a symbol of deviance – good mothers do not kill their children for money – and the appropriate punishment for that becomes infertility. Through stories such as Anne’s, and in other instances, rather than focus on individual moral failings and/or illegalities, these films highlight and make intentional, gendered commentary on the activities of these women. Ronke, Kassandra, Abby and Zeinab, for example, are introduced through a shot of them dancing, drinking and smoking; the camera zooms in on their shaking breasts and buttocks, such that one immediately may get the sense that these are women living on their own, and outside the expectations of a modest, single womanhood. Their occupations as drug dealers and sex-workers reproduce the idea that women who break legal and moral codes are unmistakably sexually promiscuous, and childlessness becomes the way to hit them where it hurts. It is unsurprising that it is when most of these women attempt to conform and to fulfill their roles as child-bearing members of society, they can only attempt this through deceit, and most eventually, die.

It is not entirely far-fetched to claim then that, the desire to treat barrenness as punishment for some moral wrong-doing suggests that a woman who cannot have children is not only an abnormality, but is one who has the potential to embody a moral failing as well. The issue here is not that these women do bad things, or that they fraudulently showcase children that are not theirs, but that their infertility, i.e., their bodily deviance, must point to an original sin of some sort. Here, it is important to recognize how deception becomes necessary for women who wish to re-enter acceptable forms of womanhood. There is no second chance; there is no opportunity for an honest path to freedom. It makes sense then, to imagine that the desire to deceive also comes out of the need for women to find ways of protecting themselves from the scorn of a society that demands children from them at all costs – regardless of their previous moral actions.

What the film never addresses is the silent violence that is enacted upon women who for one reason or another, are unable to conceive. Nothing is said about the man who kicks out his wife, Kate, because she does not get pregnant, or about the abuse Anne endures in her own home for several years. There is also almost no commentary on the continuous social pressures of motherhood as a default position for women in Nigerian society, and the reality that these pressures are part of a structure that creates a market for fraudulent persons such as Dr. Williams and willing customers such as Anne and the other women who seek Williams’ assistance.

The next film Hit the Street (2004) follows the story Nneka, a young, Christian woman who is compelled to work in a sexually exploitative bank in order to support her sick mother. The bank is competitive, and primarily runs on the sexual exploitation of three of its workers: Juliette, who is married with a daughter, Tope, and Nneka. Much like her co-workers, Nneka is expected to sleep with rich clients so that they deposit huge sums of naira into the bank. On the basis of her Christian faith, Nneka is portrayed as being somehow resistant to these conditions and manages to work in the bank without falling prey to any of its exploitative policies.

Juliette, on the other hand, who spends a majority of her time at the bank, and consequently in the arms of business clients, witnesses her marriage falling apart. Her husband, who has lost his job, expects her at home to take care of their daughter, and is unhappy with her absence. After enduring physical violence from him, Juliet speaks to her father, who reiterates that she must not let her work come before her family. With the exception of Nneka, everyone who works at the bank is portrayed as morally vacant and questionable. Things eventually begin to fall apart for Nneka’s co-workers in devastating ways: Tope is strangled to death by her lover’s wife, and Juliette’s demise is equally dramatic. Her daughter dies, she contracts AIDS, her husband divorces her, and her father disowns her. In her final moments, Juliette returns to the bank and kills her bosses, before finally, shooting herself. Nneka becomes the only person left, and ends musing from the Bible verse in Mark, “for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”¹⁹

While Hit the Street does well to show the material challenges that women in the corporate world confront, it still presents an inverted discourse. Instead of focusing on the criminality of sexual harassment in the workplace, the impetus is rather placed on women to stop this harassment with their morality. Juliette and Tope are, then, in this framework, women who enjoy being pawned off as sexual items. Unlike what it does for Nneka, the movie does not show whether either of them had any initial reluctance to the nature of their job. They are simply women who like to use their bodies for financial gain, despite the fact that it is required of them.

Similarly, when the film has the option of showing the challenges that working women face in the home because they are still expected to be the primary performers of domestic duties, it presents Juliette, a woman who is not actually “working,” but who is breaking her marriage vows and sleeping with clients. The double critique here is clear: not only do proper women stay faithful to their husbands (the same is not required of men), they also prioritize their families over their work. This suggests that Juliette would have still been framed as deviant if she had been doing work that did not require her to be unfaithful to her husband.

The final shot of the film, when Juliette’s husband carries her dead child to Juliette in her hotel room, becomes the symbol of ultimate shame: a woman committing adultery while her daughter dies. Juliette’s ultimate deviance against the tenets of motherhood and wifedom and family, ultimately strip her of her belonging and of herself, and in the end, she has no choice but to end her life. Tope’s end is less dramatic, but nonetheless signifies the repercussions of what it means to be not only morally, but sexually corrupt as well. Nneka then becomes the foil against which these women are placed. As a morally-upright, Christian woman, her faith is what disallows her from engaging in this deviance, and the protection that she has as a result of being a child of God is presented as the thing that sustains her in the face of such an exploitative workplace.

The link between capitalism and the exploitation of women’s bodies in commerce is significant here. As men disproportionately earn more than women is coupled with the fact that heterosexual engagements are the only forms of sexual behavior that are publicly endorsed, the bodies of women become the sites upon which the bank is able to flourish. “Good” women are primarily concerned with what happens in the private, non-commercial sphere, and this, in some ways, implies that a relationship with the public, corporate domain has the potential to lead to unethical and deviant behavior. Nneka’s protest that people hate her because she “refuses to prostitute for worldly success,”²⁰ is indicative of this primarily Pentecostal notion of worldly success as existing in juxtaposition to what real, divinely-inspired success looks like. Deviance, is in this regard, is remarkably “worldly,” and concerned with the pathways to success that will trigger divergent behavior.

The invocation of a certain kind of Christian morality and thought is very important here not only because of the percentage of Christians in Nigeria, but also because of the power that Christian media has in Nollywood. In “Pentecostalism, ‘Post-Secularism’ and Affect,” Jean Comaroff argues that “the right liberal modern state-makers have to determine the place of religion in ‘secular’ society is eroding,”²¹ and, as we see, Nneka’s reasons for deflecting her bosses’ advances are made in the name of belief. The tension in this scenario, however, is that Nneka could have resisted her boss’ advances supported by an assertion of personal rights that protect anyone from harassment and unwanted sexual contact. The absence of women protesting sexual harassment outside of a Christian framework, simply because it is unwanted, implies that women without Christian morals invite all and any form of sexual contact. While the male characters in the film are treated with varying brushes – good religious men, bad non-religious men, and good non-religious men – the women are either religious or not, and the only women who engage in deviant behavior, even within a coercive environment, are those who are indicatively non-religious.

The final film Fifty (2015), which depicts upper class Lagos society, machinates deviance in a markedly different way from the other films that primarily focus on working and lower classed Nigerians. In Fifty, expensive wine, estranged daughters, and million-dollar mansions take center stage, as four women – Tola, Elizabeth, Maria and Kate – who are in their middle ages figure out what it means to be fifty.²² Here, while the bounds of womanhood are different from what we have encountered – in that women are divorced and are free not to desire children – there are still elements of proper behavior that are expected.

While the standard cultural expectations do not play out as strongly in the lives of these women, there is still a strong culture of silence, which they are able to maintain because of their class privilege, that is protective and oppressive at the same time. While Tola, for example, is required to be silent about being raped by her father because of her family’s high standing in society, Elizabeth, a renowned doctor, is able to keep the fact that she slept with her daughter’s boyfriend out of the public eye. Maria is the only one who suffers some form of public embarrassment when she is accused of sleeping with someone’s husband. Even when she is suspended from work because of these allegations, her class status ensures that she will remain financially stable. It is important to note that this movie, while filmed in Lagos, exists outside the “Nollywood” sphere because it is produced by EbonyLife Films, which has largely been described as Africa’s first global Black entertainment and lifestyle television which has the goal of changing “how we view African women.”²³ I include this film, nonetheless, to show how representations of a “different” Africa reveal similar, but different kinds of gendered constraints.

This film is different from the other films I have discussed because it tends to normalize what could be considered as “less conservative” forms of morality. The woman who is sleeping with another woman’s husband is not publicly shamed or killed, and the mother who sleeps with her daughter’s boyfriend is able to reunite with her daughter. There is barely any “punishment” for any of the women, and the movie ends on a rather reconciliatory note. I do not include this film to set up the dichotomy of the upper classed, progressive film versus the mass produced, conservative Nollywood film, but to reveal how deviance is thought to be demonstrated across different spectrums of Nigerian society. This is to say that upper class Nigerian society may not be simply progressive, but that its insulation and class privilege provides an alternative way to map out deviance onto its female characters.

Analysis and Conclusion

While the rise of discourse on gender rights has historically produced a push for women to enter the professional sphere, there is still the expectation for women to perform in gendered ways, both at home and at work. As explained by April Gordon, the status of women is a product of pre-capitalist gender relations and an immersion into the world economy, meaning that women have to deal with both the sex-gender system and emergent capitalist formations.²⁴ It is unsurprising then that Hit the Street, for example, gives us a glimpse into the overwhelmingly gendered sexual economy that operates within capitalist structures, particularly in the banking industry that has grown so rapidly in Nigeria in the past 20 years.²⁵ This raises questions about the implications for women who want to enter the corporate industry and the ways in which their bodies become a battlefield in formally professional settings vis á vis other occupations. Consequently, and as seen in the film, the deviant woman becomes the one who resists institutionalized sexual-capitalist exploitation by enjoying the thrill of seeking sex and capital simultaneously. This produces the precise pressures and double standards that necessitate a navigation of self, where women can be shamed for wanting to be economically independent through institutionalized means if they fail to make time for marriage, or still called ashawo/prostitute for seeking economic independence through other – deviant – means, and thereby becoming undeserving of marriage and children.²⁶

As previously discussed, these notions of goodness, while cultural, are also closely related to Christian notions of womanhood. A widely endorsed gendered script within some Christian Evangelical and Pentecostal communities, that serves to paint a vision of what the ideal woman should be, can be found in Proverbs 31:10-31. This verse is a huge part of the discourse primarily because the woman in the text is industrious but still centers her home. The Proverbs 31 woman is diligent, works with “eager hands” and always provides food for her family, workers, and those in need. The sentence in verse 30, “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised,”²⁷ brings to the fore religious and cultural ideas surrounding materialism, particularly when thought of as a part of the modernizing project of capitalism and secularism. Here, women who are materialistic, such as the women who dealt drugs and engaged in sexual and other acts for monetary purposes in two of the movies discussed, fall short of not only the glory of God, but also of cultural values.

Misty Bastian writes, in the concluding passage of “Acadas and Fertilizer Girls,” that what each stereotypical group suffers from is the suspicion that they harbor “a belief in the importance of the modern self over older, communal values.”²⁸ This suspicion is produced within an assumption that deviance is inherently linked to modernity – either through a capitalist framing that prioritizes the pursuit of wealth, a secular one (set up against Christian values of asceticism) that seeks pleasure, or an individualistic one that prioritizes the self over community. These dichotomies are, however, not entirely stable. The reality of the constant negotiation of values within the postcolonial societies demonstrates that current hegemonic cultural norms are not so much about what is pure or authentic to a particular kind of good, i.e., gendered performativity of womanhood, as much as it is about what triumphs within these negotiations. In most of these movies, however, deviant women are often shown to be solitary actors who exist in an affront to all that is collectively good and noble, with no interrogation of what constitutes that which is good and noble, and thus no interrogation of what constitutes the morally questionable or deviant.

What all these women do, then, per my earlier definition of deviance, is to simultaneously challenge patriarchal power by bending the constraints placed on female behavior. In that sense what becomes socially produced as deviance is made up of interactions between local and global transmissions of gender performativity, class structure and mobility, and the presence of hegemonic cultural norms about gender dynamics. It is possible that Nollywood films, if they are able to excavate the intricacies of gendered expectations situated within these tensions, can produce more just portrayals that ultimately reflect the level of complexity embedded in the lives of women; that, perhaps, remove the weight of religio-cultural transgression that is placed upon women; that interrupts general understandings of transgression; that refuses to conflate religio-cultural deviance with moral corruption; and that, ultimately, attempts to seek out new understandings of freedom.