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

As the series unfolds, the relationship between the vigilantes and the police evolves. In the second movie Ebube announces that they will now turn criminals over to the police rather than execute them. He explains, "We used to maim and kill them, but we have come to realize that no matter how wicked some of these people are, no one has the right to take another's life." This plot development closely follows official statements made by the actual Bakassi Boys regarding execution of criminals after criticism of the large-scale massacre of alleged robbers in Onitsha. In spite of these declarations of cooperation, however, neither the Bakassi Boys nor the cinematic Issakaba were able to keep this pledge.

The official status of the Bakassi Boys has been unstable and has varied from region to region. In both Abia state and Anambra state they have received support from the governors and opposition from the police. When the Bakassi Boys cleaned up the market in Aba and subsequently pacified other crime-ridden areas in Abia state, Orji Kalu, the governor, endorsed their crime-fighting efforts, even as the police protested. The most dramatic official sanction came in 2000, however, when the governor of Anambra state asked the Bakassi Boys to employ their uniquely effective methods in Onitsha. The city was at a break point. Robbers openly brandished weapons as they intimidated marketers and stole goods and money. They terrorized the market on a daily basis. As the police's resolve to neglect the problem became painfully apparent, the thievery escalated into a full-blown bloodbath. On one occasion a shooting spree in the market involving a gang of over one hundred thugs "left dozens dead and hundreds injured" (Baker 2002:225). Shortly after that the luxury bus massacre was on the front page of newspapers. It was clear that the violence was out of control and that something had to be done. Under pressure from Onitsha market women, Governor Chinwoke Mbadinuju invited the Bakassi Boys to Anambra State and offered them land and vehicles. Almost immediately vans and trucks marked "Anambra Vigilante Services" and teeming with machete-waving Bakassi Boys were plying the roads around Onitsha. This very image is returned to again and again in the movies, accompanied by the Issakaba theme song. Thus, when the movies gained popularity, the valorizing anthem irresistibly sprang to mind whenever one saw the vigilante vans passing on the road.

The burned human remains I witnessed from the window of the bus were the result of the first wave of executions staged by the Bakassi Boys after they were brought to Onitsha. My old friend Chief Ink explained the reason they chose to leave the corpses exposed and why they destroyed them by burning. When they first began operations in Abia, the Bakassi Boys removed the bodies of the people they executed. People began to accuse them, however, of selling human body parts to ritualists for use in money-making ceremonies. The traffic in human body parts is a grisly business from which most Nigerians will go a long way to keep their distance. The fate of those who do not is a theme explored in many of the popular videos (McCall 2002). Public witness of the disposal of criminal remains is, therefore, a technique to demonstrate that the vigilantes have "clean hands." The Bakassi Boys leave the bodies on public display as a gesture of transparency. It is a procedure of reverse panopticism born of Igbo participatory democracy, and it is fundamental to the unique legitimacy that the Bakassi Boys claim. Foucault (1977) argued that modern systems of social control are based on panoptical surveillance as opposed to premodern practices such as public torture and execution, which are based on spectacle. The shift from premodern to modern techniques of social control involves a reversal of the legitimizing gaze from transparent public display to centralized pervasive surveillance. In the context of Nigeria, however, "the center cannot hold" as Yeats and Igbo proverb have it.6 The government has failed to establish an effective system of social control or civil justice in which the populace can have any confidence. Therefore, the raw public transparency of the Bakassi Boys' form of justice is powerful precisely because it promises to turn the public gaze upon the thieves in their midst and follow the corruption as far up the structure as it can go.