Womanism and After: A Theatrical Justification for African Women’s Radical Response to Subjugation in Reloaded

Abstract

The inculcation and transmission of socio-cultural, ideological and moral expectations of every society are is as much the role of individuals and institutions of that society as the available oral or written records of the society. With the advent of modernity, the mass media have come to play crucial roles in the socialization and conditioning of members of the society to accepted or expected roles and behaviour. The theatre has come to be very relevant in this regard. Diverse thematic preoccupations have actually authenticated the social relevance of theatre and the home video, especially in the Nigerian Nollywood industry. The focus on inter-personal relationship is particularly remarkable. Some Nollywood movies are particularly exemplary in their deconstruction of the man/woman relationship in the African society. This paper studied ‘Reloaded’, a Nigerian Nollywood movie.  The choice of the movie, Reloaded for this paper is informed by it radical departure from the African feminist tradition of womanism which tends to reject a radical response by women to their subjugation, and rather favours a sort of mild – even passive - dialogic synergy with men. This advocacy for complementarity, as we can see in a movie like Reloaded, has not brought the much-desired solution to women subjugation. This revelation is much more in consonance with reality; the reality that response to issues is spontaneous and universally natural to individuals rather than being unifocal. Using the sociological approach and adopting a critical analysis method, this study finds out that reality in the Nigerian society has shown that, in many cases, passivity, docility and persuasion have failed to bring about desired results where corrective retaliation has done the magic. The man/woman relationship is not an exception, as it is revealed in Reloaded.