Extreme Feminist’s Revolt in Selected Yoruba Nollywood Films

Abstract

The paper investigates the construction of feminist revolt and gender contest in Adeshina’s Married Life, Alabi’s The Queen, and Soneye’s Ogun Ife – three selected Yoruba-Nollywood films. The research is a revisit to the African aboriginal assumption that women should be silent in society and accept patriarchal excesses as their fate. As theoretical guide, the study is motivated by Thomas Carlyles’s The Great Man Theory, which emphasizes the supremacy of the male gender in social leadership, and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie’s Stiwanism which uses the African variant of the feminist ideology to request the inclusion of women in the development of Africa. The study notes that the civilization that came with the millennium in Africa two decades ago is marked by much efficient Internet use and progressively the use of smart phones, tablets phones and social media. This has made some African women pursue the rights of women through the feminist advocacy more ruthlessly involving violence and disingenuousness. This is as presented in the films interrogated for the study. The reactions of the women in the interrogated films are extreme belligerent responses. They gradient towards violent rejection of the African traditional belief that women should be silent and tolerant in spite of the discomfort inflicts on them by the society. The attitude of women in the films studied suggests the traditional African woman’s meekness has always been a sacrifice to attain gender harmony with men.