Can You Put A Spirit On Trial?

This title can be about the aftermath of the just concluded election but it’s not.

Hello, my good people!

How have you all been this past month or so? I have been experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions really: from Beyoncé losing the album of the year Grammy to Nigeria’s sham election, it’s been crazy. As usual, instead of healthily processing any of my feelings, I resorted to watching as much film and TV as I could while maintaining some academic diligence [I’ve mostly failed at the later but I give myself an A for effort, something my lecturers should take a cue from]. Today, I want to write about my favourite episode of Showmax’s Crime and Justice: Lagos, but first let’s do a rapid fire review of some of the stuff I watched while I was gone.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Almost collapses on itself because of the weight of real grief sipping into a franchise trying to honour a legacy but still push a story forward with new characters.

Your Place or Mine - There’s more chemistry between me and this screen than between the two leads.

A Sunday Affair - When did Tyler Perry start working with Ebony Life?

Whiplash - Damien Chazelle decided to mine his jazz trauma for this film and I am fully in support.

John Wick - I guess.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande - Most of this film takes place in one room with two people who are opposites in almost every sense of the word trying to have sex but its layers are many and the performances are earnest. You should see it if you haven’t.

La La Land - Now I know you all like to tussle so don’t fight me but I enjoyed it technically but didn’t connect to the central romance.

76 - Rita Dominic and Ramsey Nouah carry this film like the veterans they are to create a moving love story set to the unsuccessful 1976 military coup. It reminded me that Nigeria has many stories, we haven’t even scratched the surface.

Okay! That’s done.

When I started watching Crime and Justice, I didn’t expect anything special. If anything, I was scared I would see sloppily mimicked American procedural formulae but as Dika Ofoma wrote in his newsletter, it’s anything but that. Fola Storms playing Kelechi and Ibrahim Jammal playing Danladi steer the show through inherently Nigerian issues like female genital mutilation and police brutality as part of the Serious and Special Crimes Unit. The show is deftly shot with drone shots of Lagos that will normally bore me and framing that is deliberate in its beauty all evidence of the unrivalled skill of Yinka Edward.

Of the six episodes released, one kept coming back to me: episode three, Oro, written by Segun Michaels and directed by Mak Kusare. The episode opens with an overhead shot of men clad in white walking slowly down a road and you are swiftly drawn into a ritual as the Oro spirit is called upon. The walk continues and a teenage girl, Shalewa, hides to watch them just as a car approaches and two drunk women stumble out of it. Shalewa tries to warn the women but it’s too late; Oro confronts them and brutally murders them with a club as the rest of the secret society stands behind. Shalewa screams and the Oro masquerade hears and approaches her, their club is raised to strike but then they don’t, leaving her to run away. That is the crime of the episode. The rest of the episode unfolds asking interesting questions of gender, indigenous religious practices and justice.

The Oro festival is a thing that happens and there have even been news reports of women’s fears during this practice. These real fears materialize in this episode as the death of these women and for the rest of the episode their deaths are treated as, at best, irritating inconveniences by the men in the community—even in death, women are scorned.

Living women are also not spared in this show. Kelechi (played by Folu Storms) goes to question the chief and is met with hostile misogyny and Shalewa is constantly shut up by her father who refuses to let her testify about the crime she witnessed (a fact important to the twist at the end). Kelechi is shaken by a hatred of women that is so ancient and backed by everyone including her boss and in another scene, her father. We speak of the misogyny of religions like Islam and Christianity, but there’s something to be said about that of our indigenous spiritual practices. This episode shows you the ways the disdain for woman has been ingrained and passed down in these practices so even a modern justice system cannot tackle it. The crime is constantly reinforced as being committed by a spirit so how does a system that deals in tangibles prosecute it?

There is a mystery that exists throughout this episode that blurs the boundaries between the physical and spiritual, it makes you doubt your senses and also wonder why Kelechi, the female lead, is the one that experiences it most? She hallucinates as she sits in the forest waiting for Danladi and she watches in horrific wonder as, during the interrogation, the masquerade removes mask after mask never revealing a human face. The series takes belief and doubt in the spiritual and places it on Danladi and Kelechi respectively so maybe her experiences are necessary to shake her doubt. But it’s also funny (not funny) that, of course, the woman bears the brunt of believing in a spirituality that will literally kill her. It’s an interesting duality (multiplicity?) that I was excited to see at least get slightly explored outside the main religions.

These spiritual beliefs, real or not, are ultimately held and sustained by humans. Behind the numerous masks of Oro exists a man who serves as a vessel for these atrocities and the argument in this episode (awkwardly executed in the court room at the end) is that was it a spirit or human that committed the crime? It’s easy to dismiss this because, honestly, what the hell? But there are people who believe in these practices and justify them—those women were killed in front of witnesses that refused to cooperate because of their belief—so that is why at the end of this episode we see a masquerade, a manifestation of the spirit, stand trial and go free to everyone’s hopeless disappointment. Indigenous spiritual practices are our own in the end and we cannot—and should not—stop their practice but a cultural conversation must happen about the ways they harm our communities. Crime and Justice puts forward an important entry into that conversation with this episode. It explores the mysterious beauty of these practices, acknowledging their morbidity with nuance and without falling into a sermon.

What I’ve been listening to.

A friend of mine put me on to Lloyiso, a South African singer, and I enjoy the richness of his voice. I’ve had What I Would Say and Seasons on repeat. I’ve also enjoyed Lojay’s new album, Gangster Romantic; it has the dance-inducing Amapiano track, Canada, on it along with six other tracks that highlight his ability to write a killer melody.

What I’ve been watching.

I just finished His dark Materials and I enjoyed the way it manages to tackle multiple fantasy elements and still wrap it up in three seasons. I also watched Bullet Train which was a lot of fun—especially for Brad Pitt. I’m currently watching Wura on Showmax and I have a lot of thoughts, only like two of them are good.

What I’ve been thinking about.

I’ve been thinking about when the ways we love people bubble up to the surface. In words, in actions, in small gestures. Expressions of the way we feel about things and people is often a challenge so it’s a precious kind of beauty when you witness it happen for other people. I also think it’s something that happens with consistent deliberation, so it can feel like magic but trust me, it’s not.

That’s all for now, my people. Till next time, hopefully I don’t stay too long.