Juju and Justice at the Movies: Vigilantes in Nigerian Popular Videos

What is the popular logic of vigilantism in southeastern Nigeria? In this essay I want to explore this question while resisting the tendency to reduce it to a "world-view" or "culture" incommensurable with my own. I want, instead, to ground my analysis in: (1) the ethnographic and historical complexities of the experience of violence and justice in Nigeria; (2) an examination of the social conditions that frame the present wave of vigilantism; and most crucially, (3) the mythography of the Bakassi Boys in Nigeria's popular video movies. I contend that these movies provide unique insights into the everyday Nigerian experience and help make the popular logic of vigilantism and public reactions to it more readily intelligible.

While wary of analytic strategies that posit coherent but incommensurable cultural worlds, I also remain wary of strategies that assume conditions of social incoherence. In examining the crisis of civil law in Nigeria, I want to avoid resorting to the concept of chaos that has become a common formula for describing conditions in postcolonial states. In this I heartily agree with Achille Mbembe's (2001: 8-9) critique, in which he contends that little is accomplished by resorting to the notion of chaos to dismiss rather than interpret the complex fluctuations, meanderings, juxtapositions, displacements, and entanglements of factors that characterize post-colonial African nations. Mbembe argues that employing chaos as a pseudo-explanatory strategy is a lazy intellectual gesture that falls back on a pernicious habit of analyzing conditions in Africa by way of notions of lack, absence, incompleteness, and darkness.

My underlying assumption is that all societies value human life and social justice, that every society is faced with individuals who transgress those values, and that the prevalence of those transgressions increases when systems of social control are corrupt and ineffective. Events of day-to-day life, however violent, are made intelligible and are imbued with meaning on the basis of lived experience. Reactions to public violence in different societies vary not because of innate differences of culture or value systems that are incommensurable, but due to historically constituted conditions that structure variant and sometimes radically divergent expressions of common human needs and values.

Valor or Villainy? The Rise of The Bakassi Boys in Nigeria

In May 2002, Human Rights Watch (HRW), in conjunction with a Nigerian NGO called Centre for Law Enforcement Education-Nigeria (CLEEN), issued a report entitled "The Bakassi Boys: The Legitimization of Murder and Torture." The report condemned the extrajudicial crime-fighting activities of the Bakassi Boys, who have been conducting vigilante operations in the Igbo-speaking region of Nigeria since the late 1990s. HRW argued that while vigilante action may have been initiated as a desperate effort by citizens to protect themselves from the rampant crime in the region, the vigilantes have now become a terror themselves, committing a range of atrocities including torture and execution without trial. The report chronicled the vigilante excesses and challenged the Nigerian government to prosecute the Bakassi Boys for their crimes and bring all law enforcement activities under control of the established federal criminal justice system.