Interrogating Queer and Female Bodies in Nigerian Film Archive

When, in 2021, Nigerian academic and documentary filmmaker Dr. Añulika Agina tried accessing the Nigerian Film Archive situated at the National Film, Video and Sound Archive (NFVSA) in Jos, her research interest was stifled by bureaucratic absurdities. Emails were left unacknowledged and when they were acknowledged, sloppy responses followed. The academic recounted this traumatic experience while giving the opening keynote at the 27th Visible Evidence conference in December 2021 convened by Vinzenz Hediger and composed of Hyginus Ekwuazi, Didi Cheeka, Filipa César, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and Ellen Harrington.  This singular incident encapsulates the institutional and political obstacles that Nigerian researchers, archivists, academics, filmmakers and curators have to endure to access the Nigerian film archive. It shows that if a respected Nigerian academic with a university backing couldn’t access the Nigerian film archive, how do the average Nigerians, curious about their history, access it? Who and why is the Nigerian film archive imprisoned? Who and what gets seen and unseen when an institutional and political barricade is placed on the Nigerian surviving film archive? What nuanced, contemporary, cultural, political and historical conversations can questioning the decades-long repressed Nigerian archive inspire? 

These are the guiding questions behind the Goethe Institute-funded Post Memory, Post Archive project, a year-long exploration and questioning of the Nigerian film archive. Ideated and curated by Dara Omotoso and Esé Emmanuel, the project had over eleven Nigerian researchers, architects, multidisciplinary artists and filmmakers visiting the National Archives, Institute of African Studies (IAS) Archives and Demas Nwoko’s New Culture Studios in Ibadan and  National Film, Video and Sound Archives (NFVSA) and National Library in Jos. These fieldwork paired with physical and online teachings featuring Cheeka, Abba T.  Makama and other mentors were geared towards motivating the cohorts to question, contend and respond with care to the archive. The cohort’s members’ individual thoughts and responses to the archive, in audio-visual format, was recently presented to the public in a two-day screening event tagged Post Memory, Post Archive in collaboration with The Nigerian National Film Corporation and the Goethe-Institute Nigeria. 

The films range from experimental documentary, short films, and exude deep reflection about the archive. The individual films represent ongoing personal and institutional efforts led by Cheeka, Goethe-Institute and the Nigerian film corporation in ensuring that the surviving Nigerian archive and history doesn’t fade. The films include Babatunde Tribe’s  Between Shadows and Light, Ebimoboere Dan-Asisah’s Palimpsest of Her Flesh, Amanda Madumere’s A Body in Metaphor, Yusuf Ishaya, Eiseke Bolaji, Olabode Moses and Azeezah Adekambi’s Festac 77 Exploration of Heritage, Ogochukwu Umeadi’s Don’t Let Them Die, Osho Abiodun’s Reflection of Memory, Mide Gbadegesin’s Kehinsokun, Philip Fagbeyiro’s Common Grounds, Eieke Bolaji’s Memoirs of the Soil, Immaculata Abba’s Our Bodies, Nigeria’s Ghosts and Cheeka’s Memory Also Die. Of these eleven films, Madumere’s A Body in Metaphor and Tribe’s Between Shadows and Light interested me due to their political and political questioning of the erasure, domestication and sexualization of the woman and queer bodies in Nigeria and African film history.  

To echo Cheeka’s thoughts in his Accidental Archivism: A Necessary Accident essay, “what political act of forgetting laid the foundation for this institutional neglect?” To rephrase this, what political act of erasure erased queer Nigerian identity, subculture and imagery from the Nigerian film archive and media history?   Sleuthing through the archive, Tribe’s film was inspired by the absence of queer representation and documentation in the Nigerian archive. Between Shadows and Light, made in response to this absence, laid the foundation for the multidisciplinary artist experimental and narratively verbose. The film questions this political and historical erasure. 

Questioning scenes from pioneering African filmmakers’ films, Madumere’s A Body in Metaphor presents a feminist interrogation of sexualized images of African women. Using Hussein Shariffe’s The Dislocation of Amber, Souleymane Cisse’s Yeelen and Den Muso, Djibril Djibouti Mambety’s Touki Bouki and Ousmane Sembene’s Xala, the film questioned how the female body is stripped of agency and respect. In Madumere’s argument, women aren’t presented as “complex subjects ” but as visual devices” that carry a director’s,  mostly male, vision, theme and aesthetics.  As the director mentioned during the post-screening conversation, she was unable to find a film that doesn’t deny the female body agency except Dika Ofoma’s Something Sweet  which was recently released as part of the Zikoko’s Life short film anthology.  

As Cheeka predicted in the previously referenced essay, there’s an ongoing “memory boom.” Despite the ostracizing of history in Nigerian secondary schools’ curriculum, average Nigerians and Nigerian filmmakers are actively seeking ways to engage with the Nigerian past. The influx of epic films in Nigerian cinema, though profit-driven, also comes from a place to reconnect with the Nigerian cultural and political history. And the films made from the Post Archive, Post Memory project is another indication. In Cheeka’s words, “it is possible that this seduction is informed by the fact that a new generation is only now awakening to its own history and the need to tap the memory of the last surviving witnesses to this history.” Unmindful of the motivation for the reflection and re-countering of Nigerian traumatic history, it’s a welcoming development for Nigerian academics, researchers, historians, and filmmakers trying to trace and contextualize Nigerian history. 

The Post Memory, Post Archive project is an ongoing institutional effort at interrogating the Nigerian film archive and imprisoned history. Despite the banishment of history in Nigerian schools, this institutional-backed exploration of the Nigerian archive is a way of opening up Nigerian history for deeper interrogation and questioning by not just intellectual but everyday Nigerians.