Movie Review : Aníkúlápó

My brother has been bashing this movie since he watched it. A few days back, I read an article about how mentioning a particular art work is a means of paying the creator – whether it is written work, a painting, a song or a movie. For a work to receive both negative and positive reviews at the same time, it has the potential to hit it big in the world market. That is some cool money for the creator.
I have already received enough reviews to get the gist.

What did Kunle Afolayan do? He washed Yorùbá people dirty linens in the public. That’s all he did.
A people without a past is like a great man who wakes up with amnesia. Having said that, the prevalent themes in the movie were:
-Magic (Supernatural)
-Polygamy
-Sexual deviants
-Patriarchy

In Africa, polygamy is a constant and we all know unless we want to pretend that we have always been monogamous. 😂😂😂 Polygamy does not start in one day. A man who is married to the love of his life, does not just wake up and decide to marry a second wife, unless he was the king, a chief or a very affluent person. Things like lust, rape and having more children than one woman can bear leads to polygamy. The men in Africa have been told that it is normal to have many women as long as you are rich or powerful. Polygamy and promiscuity is not only a learned behavior, it is something men are proud about. The more wives and children you have, the more respect you command in your society. The women have been instructed that the man is the prize. He is to be revered and respected. He is to be worshipped as without him you as a woman have no usefulness in the society. This is one of the reasons why Arolake the Queen would possess a great power that can raise the dead but she gave it to Saro. She wanted a head. Who will marry such a powerful woman? Which Yorùbá man wants to be seen as a simp? None. Not then and not now.

People in the Yorùbá land were not morally pure as they pass down to us through oral tradition. It does not mean that morality was not upheld as the standard, but there were women who had sex before marriage. If the man she marries decides not disgrace her, he will keep her secret. There were young girls who met their lovers in the moonlight and in bush paths. There were men who slept with their friends wives and had a child with the said woman. There were kings who took any woman they wanted. Should I shock you further? There was incest and suicide. These things are not new but we decided to throw away the bad and pass down the good.
Yes, a woman can leave her husband and decide to have any young man she wants. It is not a new thing in the Yorùbá land. Have you read about Efusetan Aniwura? Did you know she had no husband and yet she had many slaves who were working for her? Did you hear anything about her sexual life? Or do you think a woman in her prime will choose to be chaste just because she doesn’t want to be under any man’s control? Do you know what having wealth does to a woman? A full-grown woman has sexual needs and she will meet those needs in whatever way she deem fit. That was the case of the Sugar Mummy (Awarun) in the story.

Let’s talk about the magical bird with the power to raise the dead. Some people say that such bird does not exist and the Akala bird is not mystical. I don’t know how true this claim is, since I’ve never heard of the case of anyone been brought back to life through a bird.
Another concept that is a total fiction is someone having sex with the Queen. It is an abomination in the Yorùbá land for someone to sleep with a Queen whether the King is alive or dead. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)

I love the movie because the writer was able to remind us of some key morals of obedience and humility – as pride goes before a fall.

When they spoke those proverbs in a sing-song manner, I smiled. One that keeps rings in my mind is “Orí ọ̀kéré kokoro láwo, taba wi fun ọmọ eni ko ma gbọ”.

@bookywrites, 2022

Movie poster