“Ayo Ni Mo Fe” and the Unsolved Curse of Violence Against Vulnerable Women

With the sequel to Ayo Ni Mo Fe in 1996, Mainframe Productions finished what they started in 1994. 30 years ago, no viewer could have thought of a happier resolution. Jumoke (Anike Bola Obot), the main character in this love story gone left, suffers piling tragedies that begin when her lover, Ayo (Yomi Ogunmola), deserts her. She descends into a psychotic breakdown and in this state, becomes a victim of sexual abuse. In the end, she regains sanity, love, and even wealth in the hands of Chief Adeleke (Lere Paimo) who nurses her back to health and takes her child as his. This ties up the loose ends for an audience 30 years ago used to Nollywood tropes of good endings that women get (only) after men-inflicted woes. For the younger audience to whom gender sensitivity is no longer a myth, there’s a hanging thread to be pulled in the story. 

Chief Tomobi (Kareem Adepoju), in the film’s secondary plot, is left with a diabolical option as the solution to his childlessness. Jumoke’s mental illness has nothing to do with Chief Tomobi but she soon becomes a main character in his pursuit of a child because of her condition. He is tasked with hunting down any woman who needs psychiatric care to rape and and impregnate her so her womb opens the path to motherhood for his own wives. To Tomobi, children can be priceless but not their mothers, so when he rapes Jumoke and she gets pregnant, he abandons her and urges his gateman to flog her mercilessly the few times he finds her near his home. 

Ayo Ni Mo Fe is special in its timelessness, especially in the Nigerian society that approaches mental illness as everything but what it actually is. Anike Bola Obot, who is behind the story, has a feminist stance to the plight of women who suffer mental illnesses. Her research into psychiatric caregiving in Nigeria married with Tunde Kelani’s masterful direction, produced this golden work that is dedicated to the mentally disabled. 

The film is an eye-opener that highlights the dangers of the traditional psychiatric care system they often trust against professional help, revealing the physical and sexual abuse meted out on them. Jumoke’s journey to the streets where Tomobi finds her starts from one dingy, rundown asylum where a traditional healer chains and whips his patients, and rapes the woman under his care. The night he attempts to rape Jumoke, she fights him off and escapes. 

Before Jumoke are other innocent women like her that Chief Tomobi’s driver fails to trick into his boss’ den.. Yet, Chief Tomobi’s crime only positions him as an actor in a script bigger than him. His hope of fathering a child is hinged on the violation of these vulnerable women as a payback for the “sin” of his mother. Flashback reveals that when Tomobi was a baby, his mother had exposed a man who attempted to rape a mentally ill woman in the dead of night. The culprit cursed her and the baby on her back, saying he would be under the same desperation in his adult life. “Mo de bee titi, O loo ni gbo, he says. Omo niwo naa pon yen.” This offending man had been told to find the cure to his childlessness between the legs of a mentally ill woman, the fate that later becomes Tomobi’s. 

At the end of the film when Tomobi recognises the child Jumoke has as his, he attempts to fight her and Chief Adeleke, her husband. Then, the circumstances of the pregnancy and his crimes are laid bare to him by his lawyer. Obot’s feminist tendencies once again shine through the insistence on the occurrence as something with a legal definition and is thus punishable by law, not an act to be dissected within a cultural or moral framework that takes into account reasons that can make room for justification. Here, the film fulfils its destiny as a medium of education on the dehumanisation and ensuing sexual abuse of women living with mental illnesses. It meets its fall, though, at the feet of the genesis for which the abuse occurs—a man defending his right to rape a vulnerable woman for his own selfish desire, and Tomobi’s mother, who, in protecting another woman from violation, receives an intergenerational punishment. 

At the time it was released, Obot’s priority was for Ayo Ni Mo Fe to correct the Nigerian thinking about mental illnesses. She reveals that its entry point, Jumoke’s heartache, is a real story. She had met a woman held in an Ijebu asylum. Obot was fascinated by the fact that the woman had a PhD and was disappointed that she had been abandoned in such a  place by her husband, who equally had a doctorate degree. The woman’s story was that her sanity started declining after the man married a second wife to bear him a son.  The terrible conditions of this mental home inspired the story. 

Nigeria’s traditional psychiatric care method has historically been an insufficient one in which patients are seen as dangerous and severely punished like criminals. At a time when the majority of Nigerians didn’t care for inclusion, the film pushes for language use that humanises patients. While checking Jumoke into the psychiatric hospital, Chief Adeleke, only knowing that as a better alternative but knowing little to nothing about appropriate language, calls another patient a madman in Yorùbá. The nurse corrects him and says the word is “patient.” A ki n pe won ni were, sir…Patient la n pe won. The film boasts of this strong credibility until a closer scrutiny of how the lives of the women in it are depicted. The subplots that weave through it are stronger undercurrents that cite the woman’s body as a site of punishment and retribution for male wrongdoing. 

In the cultural context in which the story occurs, the Yorùbá believe that the innocent might be among the spoils of war, but no one ever suffers from a curse they’ve done nothing to deserve. When applied to the question of if Chief Tomobi’s mother is blameworthy, the film’s answer is yes. Every character gets a happy ending, particularly Tomobi, whose wives conceive at once, but Tomobi’s mother is apportioned a misdeed she receives no justification for till the film ends. The woman whom she saves from that sexual violence is not considered (about to be) wronged either. If she is, then the curse should hold no water. The film does a good job of clarifying many wrong notions, but not this one. 

This casts an endless loop. If someone finds Tomobi doing the abominable act and the same scene with his mother repeats itself, does that mean there’s another woman in the future whose body will be a curse-breaking vessel in her vulnerable state, especially because of her vulnerable state? The spiritual misdiagnosis Ayo ni Mo Fe seeks to break from through enlightenment about appropriate care for the mentally disabled is the same thing it runs towards when it comes to the kinds of abuse they face and why. 

Still, the film remains a classic that does a good job of portraying Nigerian society starkly, in all of its flaws and the dangers women face when vulnerable. It’s unsettling, yet very real.