by Ifeoluwa Olutayo
Informed critique of the systems that oppress us here in the poverty capital of the world barely exists, as we lack enough knowledge about ourselves. So much that anything we provide feels hollow and incomplete, burdened by the responsibilities of all emancipatory writing, but unable to rise to the requirements.
Bridging that gap of information lost to the scheming of some and the negligence of others is such a critical part of repositioning the masses of our ill-informed society, in whatever forms the information may exist.
On April 28th, 2024, I was privileged enough to revisit the past at the post-Memory, post-Archive retrospective at the Goethe Institute, in newspapers, documentary vignettes and films curated from the ’60s-80s in Nigerian expression.
I moved in and around newspapers dated in that period, learning a bit about the happenings of the years before.
There were familiar players; recession, columns with men complaining about their virility, theft of about 133 meters of NEPA cables, problems with nationwide price control, World Bank loans procured by our politicians and just beneath that, a column offering Nigerians a solution to apparent hardships; to seek first the Kingdom of God.
They could have been tomorrow’s headlines.
I witnessed moments frozen in moving pictures, all present at FESTAC ’77, performing, hawking, driving, hailing and existing in vibrant colours and fashionable expressions of Anno Domini 1977.
The month-long event itself was meant to celebrate African expression and culture and it was nice to catch these vignettes, a visual journal of the heavily referenced international festival.
The curation of films at the event boasted Nigeria’s first film by an Indigenous production company, Kongi’s Harvest, the satirical play by Wole Soyinka, adapted for film by Ossie Davis and Eddie Ugbomah’s Death of a Black President which chronicles the ins and outs around the assassination of Nigeria’s former military head of state, Gen. Murtala Muhammed, among other films from that era.
One of the films that stood out was Coffee Coloured Children, the debut short documentary film by British-Nigerian Filmmaker, Ngozi Onwurah in 1988.
Her first film navigates the complexities of her biracial identity through the recreation of moments of self-hate and racism, experimenting with the form to evoke emotional connections with her audience.
Sewn into the work of a then-22-year-old woman is a performed battle against the conditioning of her adopted homeland. You see, Ngozi was born in Nigeria in 1966 amid the tensions of the threatening Civil War to a Nigerian Father and a white British mother, Madge Onwurah. Once the war started, her mother was forced to flee to England with her children while her father served in the Biafran Army.
Growing up in a mixed-raced household, Ngozi and her brother Simon suffered abuse and racism in their childhood, with white neighbours smearing their home’s front door with animal dung and classmates who harassed and isolated them.
There’s a feeling apparent throughout the runtime, that of children who are forced to be aware of the world’s ills way too early but struggle to understand the source, as is expected with children.
The resulting effect of their isolation and harassment is self-hatred, evidenced by the boy’s scrubbing of his skin in the bathtub till it turns tender, trying to get rid of his melanin. The girl wants to be a princess, but to her, only white people can be that, so she applies white powder and cleaning solution, trying to rid herself of the skin that is an apparent barrier to her fantasy.
For them, this much is clear; they rid themselves of this skin and acceptance and love will flow their way. The abuse will end and their mother will not have to clean dung off their front door anymore. They would stop feeling guilty about putting her through this because of their cursed skin.
The scene recreations of the children’s struggles are juxtaposed with scene recreations as adults, possibly to indicate a better awareness, a recognition of the struggle with the indoctrination of self-hate and a need to let go of it.
There’s an understanding that these feelings are brought on by the poor state of the environment they are in and that the idea of a “melting pot” society is a lie peddled around by those who choose to ignore the deeply disturbing racism in England.
They come to terms with the self-hate and wash away their attachment to that warped identity, visually represented by immersing the items that supported their struggle in fiery ends.
Clothes, powder and cleaning solution are burned, and her brother’s body is treated to immersion in water, emerging into a love of Self, or at least a resolution to move towards that.
This debut short is one of siblings grappling with the past to make sense of their identity and heritage, finding themselves along the way.
For them, it signals a move away from the indoctrination of their adopted homeland, a new want to embrace life in all the colour it has gifted them.
It’s a harrowing tale, representative of a corner of that newly established diasporan existence, one that was born of war in a newly post-colonial state and bigotry in the land of the colonialists.
