by Akinwande Jordan
In the fray to maximise profit, compete and retain a baseline audience engagement, streamers have resorted to creating six-episode mini series as sequels to feature films. This, as a result of misguided fan service disguised as institutional interests in stories, has potentially converted every feature film on a streamer into a possible franchise. Although we can not classify this as a bad business practice despite its dubiousness, we can point out how it elides the novelty and potency of the original features. The recently released series sequel to Oloture (Kenneth Gyang, 2019) by the title of Oloture: The Journey finds itself unceremoniously prolonged in that corporate quest to solely capitalise on pseudo-momentum but it’s not abjectly indefensible.
This 3-episode sequel bares thematic resemblance with the feature, carrying on the inquisitive descent into the transnational malaise of sex, modern slave-trade and power through the delimited exploration of the women entangled in these devilish trade. The eponymous protagonist Oloture, still armed with her undercover persona Ehi (Sharon Ooja) is on a crusade-like continuance in her dogged journalistic investigation of the grisly and squalid shadow world of human trafficking under the pretext of being a sex worker. There’s a sleight of hand here — a swift erasure of real-time passage, missing no beat ; the intercuts purveys the audience the dirts of roads and the porosity of African borders, familiar characters like Peju (Beverly Osu) surrounding Oloture/Ehi fraught with anguish and fatalism on their faces. Beauty (Adebukola Oladipupo) journeying home to her mother, weary and despondent like the parable’s prodigal son. There’s a shimmering sense of urgency as the camera swings from close-ups to wide shots, foreboding the vastness of the labyrinth and the inescapability of our characters.
We must, however, recall that the previous installment was partly inspired by the famed 2014 article published by Premium Times “INVESTIGATION: INSIDE NIGERIA’S RUTHLESS TRAFFICKING MAFIA” by Toboure Ovuorie, a journalist who moonlighted as an undercover sex worker to the investigate the objectionable decadence of the Abuja desecrating nightlife. Intrinsically, this is a story that exudes a stark realism as shown in the Docu-fiction style of the first instalment. These are police blotter stories our wandering eyes elude as we race to the entertainment of scandals and socialites in page six. And there are no bars held in its flux of anxiety and high-stakes, similar to the feature it keeps you glued to the edge of your seat —not counting on your empathy — but on your insatiable voyeurism for the Nigerian dream underworld rampage and a cat-and-mouse game of swinging guillotines.
A broader thesis on who gets to tell a story can be analysed some other time but one must watch Oloture:The journey with a neutral skepticism. While it seemingly depicts the perils of victims and the numerous avaricious actors they encounter across cities, there’s a sourness that emerges when the subtextual purpose dawns on you ; the gaming of the system. One cannot dictate to the team how they choose to create a sequel but a three-episode sequel to a feature about a story with such a palpable sensitivity presents as obvious profiteering. Granted that all art has economic value but at the very end of Oloture:the journey the initial zest dissipates because its fractured nature has unfortunately self-converted into a festival of sporadic rawness that could— or should have been in another feature film. One gleans that at the denouement of the series; you see the contrived ambiguity that leaves the fates of the characters in the wind, ready for harvesting and belaboring under the guise of a journalistic practice of telling it as it is. Yelping and elongating to evoke the all-too-familiar wow unsuspecting audiences are prone to as they vicariously partake in the entertainment of tragedy.
Everyone is guilty here. This is not an indictment but it stands out like the proverbial sore thumb in Oloture: The journey. Perhaps a dampening of that obvious tedium or a removal of franchise-baiting would have made the pathos in the limited series marginally authentic, complementing the dimness of the shot and the frantic nature of the pace. The ambivalence it ignites isn’t one that’s worth productively probing because it leads you to a forked path marked by commerce and probable potential ; you stare at Beverly Osu’s face long enough and the anguish almost engulfs you in a whirlpool of empathy — an empathy that should be natural, that should catalyse your interest in the decay of our immediate society and keep you suspicious of the elite, paranoid of gerontocracy and the scathing allure of the Nigerian. But through the bleakness and social commentary, you can see the glimmer of artificiality crossing a porous border of well-meaning minds.