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

There was no historical break separating precolonial legal procedures from colonial and postcolonial practices. Precolonial legal procedures coexisted, and in the case of customary law were officially integrated with those imposed by the colonial regime such that an array of legal systems, including colonial courts, customary law tribunals, elder council deliberations, arünsi shrine priests, and diviners, offered options that could be played off one another to the advantage or disadvantage of litigants. Arünsi remain active in village life to this day. There is no need to speculate about a resurgence of precolonial practices to understand why, in the face of an evident failure of national law, indigenous legal rationalities come into play.

"Normal Law and Order"

The HRW report's call (2002:41) for the Nigerian government to implement reforms that assist the police in "resuming their normal law and order functions across the country as soon as possible" presupposes a police-based system of law and order that has at some point been a "normal" state of affairs in Nigeria. Such an assumption places the report on unstable premises from the perspective of most Nigerians. Nigeria has a national police force. States and local governments are forbidden from maintaining their own police. The new regime of civilian rule has done little to change the perception of police as alien to the regions they monitor. Thus they are regarded more like occupying troops than as helpful civil servants. The corrupt character of Nigerian police is legendary, and the first Issakaba movie includes the local police chief among the cadre of officials who conspire with robbers for their own enrichment. In one scene, a woman with a blood-streaked face runs into the police station announcing that armed robbers have just stolen her car. The officers ignore her at first and then lackadaisically shove a pad of paper at her and tell her to write her report. When she demands to see the police chief, he interrogates her about the valuables in the car. He then explains that he has only two rounds of ammunition for his small pistol and that the robbers use automatic weapons. He pleads: "I don't want to commit suicide, madam." When the indignant woman finally leaves, the chief makes it clear that he already knows the identity of the thieves. He recounts her inventory of money and jewels to the officers and tells them to make sure they are not cheated when collecting their share.

The depiction of the police as corrupt is not merely a dramatic strategy in the movies. It reflects the attitudes and everyday experience of many Nigerians. In 2000 the popular daily newspaper Vanguard published a story by Harry Nwana recounting his experiences with the Nigerian police. Nwana insisted that collaboration between criminals and police had become the normal state of affairs and that people who identified robbers to the police were marked for assassination. He wrote: "The situation on the ground is that only criminals and potential criminals seek the friendship of the Nigerian police, not honest decent men and women." In spite of the fact that Issakaba portrays the police as corrupt, the vigilante leader Ebube is remarkably sociological in his explanation of the overall failure of the police. Rather than blaming the moral shortcomings of individual officers, he offers a more structural interpretation: "The police alone cannot keep the peace. They are handicapped-poverty, illiteracy, inadequate mobilization. I think some persons in high places are benefiting from underdeveloping the police force."