Scattered Thoughts on House of Ga’a
I do not in anyway pass for a cinephile, and so many Nigerian movies — that should naturally draw me in because they are “telling our story” — have repeatedly squandered the opportunity to make me one, after repeatedly torturing me with easily predictable climaxes, useless scenes, mindless plot connections, unbearably hazy storylines, and needless nudity and profanities.
I hold it to be true that our movies have the generic advantage to create exceptional, world-class cinematic contents from our bottomless reservoir of uniquely relatable cultural, political and religious realities. But most times, this advantage is so poorly used in storytelling that it doesn’t appear as though an advantage had even been used.
All this is why I thoughtlessly disregarded the prompt when the Netflix app on my phone notified me that a new movie titled House of Ga’a had been added to Netflix’s endless, addiction-inducing repertoire of movies. Later in the day, a friend whom I trust his intellectual judgement of movies gave the movie a good rating and recommended it on his WhatsApp status. That was the prompt I needed! I didn’t allow even a minute of delay to come between the time I saw the WhatsApp status and the time I opened my Netflix app to begin watching the movie. I’m glad I didn’t regret watching it.
Here are my scattered thoughts.
The Bashorun Ga’a we all didn’t know we needed
Anyone who watched the movie will never struggle to accept that the main character Bashorun Ga’a is easy to hate. What may, however, be uncomfortable for us to accept is that he is also easy to love in the same breath.
How will you not love a family member or friend like Bashorun Ga’a who makes you and others in his circle beneficiaries of the successes of his astute realpolitik, and also calibrate your mind to hope for even brighter future every time he one-ups the political system?
Once we watch the movie with the mind of a beneficiary of Ga’a’s negative overdrives, it becomes easy to see that many of us secretly either want to fit into a perfect prototype of his nepotistic mold so we can help our families and friends, or be related to someone who does so we can enjoy the benefits. If we agree that Bashorun Ga’a’s nepotistic marker is a specimen of Nigerian politicians’, then we can’t in all god-fearing truthfulness deny that we don’t need it or want to be in connection with someone who has it.
I don’t know what it feels like for nepotism to work in my favor or against me in high places of political power, but I do know what it feels like to have the opportunity to escape the agony of a long queue only because I knew someone who gave me an undue advantage over other people on the queue. In another similar quotidian experience, I know what it feels like to be a victim of such undue advantage.
Experience doesn’t show that we wholeheartedly detest nepotism. What we wholeheartedly detest is being a victim of nepotism. It enrages us because we know there are people on the other side benefitting from it.
The good, the better and the ugly in House of Ga’a
After watching House of Ga’a, I found myself telling my sisters about it with an inflamed passion that’s hard to silence or ignore. I made a post on my WhatsApp status about it. I searched Google to know more about the producer Bolanle Austen-Peters.
I wanted to be sure my positive response to the movie wasn’t wrong or exaggerated, so I tried to use social media posts about the movie to validate my feelings. I went on Facebook and Twitter to know if there are enough people whom we both share the same feeling about the movie. The last time I went giddy like this after watching a Nigerian movie was two decades ago when I was a teenager. For refreshing how I used to feel after a teenage me watches a truly interesting Nigerian movie, House of Ga’a gets a 10/10 rating from me.
Here are more reasons for the 10/10 rating.
House of Ga’a is studded with A-list male and female actors, and the producers put in the work to successfully convince us that those actors weren’t in cast only because the producers needed their huge, almost-cultic base for wild publicity and acceptance for the movie. None of the A-list artist in the movie made me question why they had to be in the movie at all.
Aside from that, each of the A-list actors (that I know well enough) who played a major role delivered their character so well that I didn’t have to think another actor would have done it better. In that regard, I give Femi Branch the trophy. His rendering of Bashorun Ga’a is so agreeable that I closed my mind to all possible replacement or alternative for the role.
Throughout the movie, characters portrayed as elites of the precolonial Yoruba society are sometimes decked out in gold and jewelry made from other precious metals. I feel like while the accessories aren’t anachronistic, the way they are carefully matched with the clothing, is. Although, I quickly admit that my feeling about that part of the costume might have been inspired by previous lengthy exposure to dissimilar cinematic representation of precolonial Yoruba elite. Did the sartorial taste and fashion sense of the actual 18th century Yoruba elites match the intentional, sophisticated one displayed in the movie? I would be happy to get answers from authorities in Yoruba history.
Now, to the ugly.
All the intentionality and fastidiousness put into the movie were blighted by some avoidable carelessness. One of that is the grating, inconsistent pronunciation of Orun. Another is the anachronistic Yoruba spoken by characters like Oyemekun, Agbonyin, Zainab, and others. Then there is this random, pesky silliness: delivering lines in a Yoruba that’s a word-for-word translation of the English script. Then we have the one I judge to be the most annoying: the use of the word “emir”. Emir is an English word that was clearly never used by natives, either in 18th century Yorubaland or Nupeland. The producers didn’t need a degree in precolonial Nigerian history to know that.
The movie doesn’t need nudity and sex to accurately deliver the story it’s telling. But for publicity and promotion, those raunch were necessary. Sex and nudity had to be added so their almost-real appearance can spark online debates that would promote the movie for free. For example, after the sex and nudity scene in Anikulapo, netizens wanted to know if the intimate parts shown in the movie were actually those of the actors. I suspect that the producers of House of Ga’a were trying to achieve the same effect.
It’s a disappointment for me that the producers are afflicted by the craze afflicting the Nigerian movie industry lately: essentializing sex and nudity because there’s an effective knowledge of the use of a technology that makes the scenes appear real and believable. Sex sells movies and it sells them even more if you know how to make it real and believable.
Every time video editors in the Nigerian movie industry unearth new skills in manipulating video editing software, the audience is made to suffer the boredom of it endless usage. There is one example I recall I as I write this. In the early 2000s when Nigerian movie video editors got the hang of using computer program to create simultaneous appearance — on the same screen — of the same person in different act, they wore out the feature. That period, it became hard to find any movie that didn’t use the feature.
A final thought
I’m not sure what you read in the third part of this article passes for a review of House of Ga’a. But I’m sure this article will add to the spread of the movie’s digital echo. I honestly think the movie deserves that unsolicited promotion.
