In the course of the last ten years, the West African film industry has grown exponentially, so much so that it now occupies a comfortable third-place position behind Hollywood and Bollywood for the number of movies produced annually. "Nollywood"—that is, Nigerian Hollywood—films are exported throughout Africa and elsewhere, ensuring that their cultural influence extends far beyond their country of origin. These movies differ from their Western counterparts in many respects. The plots feature traditional healers, polygamous families, and ancestral spirits. Some films are set in rural villages with actors wearing traditional Igbo or Yoruba clothing, while others are shot in concrete, airconditioned Lagos mansions. Most Nollywood movies feature intrigue and scandal, and are as likely to focus on the power of witchcraft as on marital infidelity.

Over the same period that the West African film industry has developed, Pentecostal Christianity has also expanded across the continent. If the growth of either one of these sectors has encouraged the development of the other, no one seems to have found this terribly surprising. Studies of the religious content of Nollywood films have been quick to cite the longstanding Protestant facility with new media, whether the printing press, radio gospel hours, or evangelical chat rooms. Doubtless there is an argument to be made in this direction, but I'm more interested in the films as snapshots of the wider context of urban Africa. Across the continent public discourse is increasingly reliant on Christian idioms and forms, a fact that has implications for the church in Africa and elsewhere.

The story of Final Account (2010) should be as familiar to readers of Goethe as it is to Pentecostals in the urban Zambian township where I worked as an ethnographer. The film opens with a half-dozen people clad in flowing red and white robes, heavy necklaces, and long red headdresses. They are chanting praises to a man at the head of the table, whose sequined garb and elaborate crown are suited to his title, "The Great One." The latter offers his followers a proposition: in exchange for the blood of pregnant women, he will guarantee them wealth and success. Each agrees to this vile transaction, and at several points in the film we witness women being kidnapped, dragged to the bush, and left unconscious after blood is extracted from their abdomen with a syringe. Following the first such incident, the main character, a man called Tagor, returns alone to "The Great One" bearing a frightening amount of blood in an ordinary plastic pail. The leader urges Tagor to drink the blood, and he obeys, allowing some to dribble down his chin while his eyes grow wild.

Meanwhile, we have also been introduced to Tagor's wife and daughter, both of them beautiful, God-fearing members of the "Charismatic Bible Centre." Much of the rest of the film involves conflicts within this household, as well as Tagor's response to his epileptic brother's repeated requests that he send money to his family in their natal village. Anyone who stands in the way of Tagor's success, whether his wife and brother, his mistress, or a preacher, is summarily killed. In the end, one of the few people left alive is Tagor's daughter, who enlists the help of a Pentecostal pastor to pray for—or rather, against—her father. While they are praying, Tagor falls to the ground, after which he is taken home. A short time later he confesses his murders to his daughter, who has remained by his sickbed. Tagor's confession is followed by violent convulsions and death, at which point the screen fades to black. The audience is left with the words, "Thanks be 2 God," a very common sort of closing remark in Nollywood films, even those without such an explicitly Christian plot.

Like Final Account, The Prodigal Ones (2008) warns against the unfettered pursuit of riches. In this case, it is not Faustian pacts but rather social pressures that bring a Christian family into contact with the powers of darkness. Much of this film was shot in Texas (the closing credits thank the Arlington branch of the prominent Nigerian Redeemed Christian Church of God), with occasional scenes set in a rural Nigerian village. The film carefully shows the opulent wealth of Bayo and Rosie, a couple who have immigrated to the United States with their four children. Despite their undeniable material success, the signs that the family is facing moral breakdown are evident at every turn. Bayo and Rosie argue about money; their daughter and son are running with the wrong crowd; the family routinely misses midweek church meetings. To top it all off, Bayo agrees to wire money to his mother in Nigeria for a sacrifice to be made during a masquerade festival honoring his ancestors.

Eventually, the family's world comes unhinged. After Bayo has vivid dreams of being flogged while at the masquerade festival, his oldest daughter is nearly expelled from school, and his younger daughter is rushed to the hospital. In desperation, the pastor is called. He explains to the family that even tacit participation in what he calls "idolatrous festivals" can have spiritual consequences. The pastor prays with Bayo to break the evil spirits behind his family's misfortune, and a dramatic chain of events follows, beginning when an unknown man shoots a masked Nigerian dancer. The film ends as the pastor prepares to lead the repentant family in prayer.

While not all Nollywood movies feature such overtly Christian themes, they are overwhelmingly moralizing in character. Viewed the way that most Western audiences watch movies—seated in silence, paying full attention—they feel heavy-handed. And, while it is true that I found that people in urban Zambia sometimes watched movies this way, it was more common for a film to serve as a backdrop for other activities. When neighbors plait one another's hair or sort groundnuts, they often do so in front of a Nollywood movie. These films lend themselves particularly well to this type of viewing, partly because they move so slowly. West African movies are long on showing and short on telling. For example, rather than hear a character tell her friend that she went to the market, the audience watches her board a minibus, get off in town, walk to the market, haggle for fish, and return home again. This preference for demonstration over explication ensures that those who do not understand the English dialogue very well are able to follow the plot, but it also allows Nollywood movies to fade into the background of conversation or shared labor.

Because Nollywood films, with their prominent religious themes, are so frequently the backdrop to social activity in places like Zambia, they present a helpful example of how we in the West might interact with the material cultural aspects of Christianity. When we encounter cultural objects—whether media such as film, architectural features like church buildings, or documents like the U.S. Constitution—that bear witness to some form of Christian influence on their creators, how ought we to respond? We have all seen what can happen when the wrong amount of emphasis is placed on the spiritual or religious significance of such objects: too much and the history of a nation-state is so sacralized as to stand beyond critique; too little and erstwhile places of worship are turned into museums.

In an effort to find some balance, perhaps we can take a cue from the audience of West African films. While people in any society derive the meaning of things like movies from a larger relational context, the way that people in urban Zambia encounter Nollywood films adds an additional social layer to this process. Because these movies are usually viewed with others, sorting through and applying the religious content of Nollywood films is a group effort. At the same time, the collective nature of this experience lends an element of distance to movies like Final Account: their influence is checked as much by the momentum of everyday life as by the opinions of the group. In short, the social world of the audience pushes back against the content of Nollywood films even as the religious messages in these movies are allowed to push against the viewers.

Nollywood films have something of a balanced position in the communities they speak to, and are therefore good religious artifacts for Western Christians to think with. When life brings us across cultural objects with Christian themes, perhaps the best thing to do is integrate them into the daily rhythms of our communities and families. The challenge of imbuing songs or monuments or anything else with too much or too little meaning will remain, of course. But at least we face it together, with our feet planted and our hands busy. We face it, in other words, in the knowledge that we are part of something greater than ourselves, something that links us to Zambian believers and West African filmmakers, as well as to each other.

Naomi Haynes is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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