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

The Nigeria depicted in the movies is one characterized by a pervasive failure of leadership. The argument that the cause of Nigeria's many problems can be traced to a failure of leadership was canonized by Achebe's (1984) well-known essay, "The Trouble with Nigeria." Among Igbo people this view is virtually proverbial, and it pervades the dramatic logic of the vigilante movies. In the world of Issakaba, village chiefs, elected officials, religious leaders, police, and venerable native doctors all conspire in greed-driven murderous exploits while decent members of the community live in perpetual terror. When, at last, the vigilantes arrive, they are depicted as the very embodiment of a return to justice. The drama revolves around the vigilantes' employment of occult techniques to unravel the complex web of deception, avarice, and the abuse of public trust that has undermined the possibility of conventional institutionalized justice.

The Elusive Character of Justice

The disjuncture between the depiction of Bakassi Boys as valiant superheroes in Nigerian movies and HRWs accounts of them as perpetrators of atrocity is significant. Both the movies and the report engage in discourses that seek a moral clarity-a formula for action that can make justice possible under conditions in which both agree that justice is sorely needed. The movies draw the viewer into the Nigerian experience of violence and despair in a way that vividly evokes what Mbembe (2001:8) calls the "labyrinthine entanglements" of crime, leadership, and justice in postcolonial Africa. In doing so, the movies concretize a narrative that makes the Bakassi Boys intelligible-a position from which one can agree with HRWs report in principle, but nevertheless empathize with the day-to-day desperation and loss of faith in government that informs Nigerians' attraction to the mythography of vigilante justice in the movies.

If, however, the movies simply valorized Bakassi Boys without exploring the inherent fallibility of vigilantism-indeed, the inevitability of its corruption-then they would have failed not only as ideology but also as drama. In truth, many of the weaker examples of the genre have this failing. I contend, however, that the popularity of the hsakaba series is due precisely to the fact that a pervasive subtext regarding the perilous character of vigilantism-and indeed, the elusive nature of justice itself- is enfolded in the dramatic structure. The movies are crafted to remind us that while the Bakassi Boys are depicted as heroes, they are also susceptible to the human weaknesses that have corrupted the leadership in the communities they seek to rescue. In hsakaba, this subtext warns the audience that those who fight corruption will eventually be contaminated by it.

To understand the popularity of the hsakaba video series one must go beyond the obvious explanation that the movies glorify Bakassi Boys as saviors who finally bring an end to the daily violence and terror with which Nigerians are all too familiar. Virtually all the vigilante-themed movies valorize vigilantism, but the hsakaba movies do so in a highly nuanced manner. I contend that Nigerians are attracted to hsakaba because it gestures toward complex truths that mediate between a simplistic valorization of vigilantes, on-one-hand, and their criminalization in global forums like the HRW report, on the other. One distinguishing feature is the charismatic performance of Sam Dede as Ebube-the leader of Issakaba. Dede's embodiment of cool philosophical detachment in the face of danger and violence aligns him with classic action heroes, from Glint Eastwood's lone gunman to Richard Roundtree's unflappable Shaft. Like them, his reflections on the nature of his violent occupation also reveal a sense of its moral ambivalence. But Dede's character is also both a distinctly African and distinctly modern hero who speaks in proverbs and who longs to return to his former occupation as a fashion designer. In each of the four hsakaba movies Dede's character is confronted with a powerful native doctor whose juju he cannot, at first, defeat, and his cool detachment gives way to a very human despair and fits of frustrated rage.