Kunle Afolayan has set his craft apart from every other director in Nigeria, and audience who have followed his craft from the very beginning can attest to this fact. The Anikulapo franchise which has been tagged the Nigerian version of ‘Game of Thrones’ is his biggest production yet given the massive scale, the story, the characters and the platform.
Like some of if not most of Kunle Afolayan’s movies, there is always the presence of the supernatural rooted in African spiritualism. That is his trademark.
Theme-embodying Characters.
Having just rewatched the entire series, Anikulapo is also a story about love and longing which we see from the perspective of Awolaran whose love for Omowunmi runs so deep he was willing to go face to face against his feared and nuisance of a father whose journey we will look into shortly.
In an era, where the powerful took whatever or whomever they wanted to either breed with, marry or enslave, Awolaran stands apart and this is evident when even Awarun tells Awolaran’s father, Bashorun when he came to complain to her that it was either she didn’t provide the most beautiful woman for his son to sleep with or his son did not like women or was simply impotent. Awarun tells the Bashorun that men like his son fall under a category of people who will not lay with anyone asides from the person they are deeply in love with and Awolaran fits this description perfectly.
We see his love and longing for Omowunmi when he had to challenge his father, when he had to fight Prince Kuranga in a very uneven match, we see it from the way he cherished and respected the choices of Omowunmi and never once be selfish about his own personal desires. This deep and consistent characterization is rare in modern Nollywood cinema and no, the odogwufication of love in Nollywood doesn’t count as that in itself is more of a trade – your love for my pockets.
The writers of Anikulapo the series created Awolaran’s character to be something more, something different, a breath of fresh air, a reminder of the definition of love that the Nigerian mind have forgotten because they live in a culture that has defined love by how deep the pockets of their partners are.
Just as we have characters like Awolaran, we had his polar opposites in characters like Omowunmi and Arolake. I do not know if it was merely a function of the writing or the way the writers intended her to be, but you’d think Omowunmi wouldn’t have moved on so quickly from Awolaran.
Let’s give her the excuse of not being in love with Awolaran – though her character stated she loves him during her conversation with Kuranga after he had beaten Awolaran black and blue – the way he was in love with her, why did it take her so little time to throw away their history together. History they had built since they were children. It was quick, brutal and inhumane, but I believe it is indeed the kind of person she is and on this again, the writers were consistent and spot-on, hence it was simply a function of her character. She moved on Awolaran, moved on from Kuranga after a brief stint of mourning him, and before her capture into slavery, she was already priming her emotions to fall in love with Kuranga’s younger brother.
The character of Omowunmi embodies deeper themes such as disloyalty and entitlement which leads her to make self-serving choices every single time we see her on screen, and ultimately culminates in her fleeing a place she was well taken care of into slavery.
To discuss Arolake, let’s back up last season. Arolake embodies the unending greed of humans, the dissatisfaction that drove her to pounce on Saro while she still married to the King. How higher could she have gone after being married to a King and reaping the benefits that came with it? But for our Arolake, that simply wasn’t enough for her, she wanted more, she craved more. And she got it. She was given another start by the Spirits – a depthless pocket – and even that wealth wasn’t enough. She still longed to be accepted back by the same King whom she had cheated on.
There’s a Yoruba proverb roughly translated into English that says, “What you’re looking for that you think is so far away is right inside your pocket.” She had Akin right beside her who is willing to accept her for who she is, but her greed, her dissatisfaction made her want more than she could actually handle, and that led her back to the King and to a death which unfortunately didn’t come, but the damage to her name, reputation and character in Oyo had already been doubled.
Thankfully, she had a new start again, but she had to sacrifice her wealth. Despite that sacrifice, she was once again blessed with the one thing she had been denied off since the very start of Anikulapo – a child. One will think her now having a child of her own would satiate her hunger, but again like she had shown us before time and time again, she wanted more. This time, she wanted more money to buy new clothes, when they have enough. Arolake embodies the insatiable wants of man, and she embodies it well.
Then to Bashorun Ogunjimi, a character embodying the themes of man’s desperation to attain and hold on to power using whatever means necessary. This is a theme as old as time itself and Owobo Ogunde does his best to embody this character with the material he’s been given, even adding his own twist to it.
We’ve followed his power-seeking journey throughout the series from hunting down Anikulapo to get the ability to raise to dead, burning his relationship with Awarun in the process despite his claim to love her to the extent of making her his wife to charming the King’s daughter Omowunmi and killing Kuranga in the process simply because he wanted access to the more – the throne by proxy of marriage between his son and the King’s daughter which only led to his death.
Usually, death is a turning point for characters, but for Bashorun Ogunjimi death only made him hungrier and more desperate for power, leading him to find a way out of hell which results in unimaginable cost to his body and soul so much so that he has to feed on the souls of men and women to keep him from returning back to the land of the dead.
When it comes to characterization and consistency, the writers of Anikulapo have done a splendid job as they have defined the thematic roles of major characters deeply which is a rare feat and it is to be celebrated.
That said, what exactly is going on in this season? The stories were disjointed, the Crown Prince Aderoju had no major purpose asides from when he went to Ede to bring his sister back, which made little to no impact on the story. Episode five came a little too late with the filler episodes absolutely unnecessary as they added no real value to the overall plot.
Though I appreciated the multiple perspective of the characters which was well done in the first Anikulapo series, it was abysmally done in this second season. The multiple perspective was messy, the story incoherent and incomplete which is why I’ll treat the plot between the Crown Prince and the mythical deer woman has nonexistent.
This season tries to delve further into the themes of slave trade, and watching it was heart wrenching. The storytelling around slavery and slave trade didn’t come with the usual brutality we are used to, it snuck up on us, crawled into the skin and stayed there because it hit close to home. Seeing the earliest form of corruption in the form of Awarun paying off the King, the Chiefs, the entire kingdom just so they can turn a blind eye to her slave trade with she co-runs with her daughter.
The convenience and absence of remorse with which they conducted that vile trade was one of the more powerful things that was well-done in the show. Her daughter going as far as falling in love with the Portuguese like he would treat her differently from the people she had been selling off to him.
This is one of the plots that makes me look forward to the next season – how the writers intend to delve into this story especially now that the stakes has been raised with the capture of the King’s daughter, Omowunmi. Will the King go for the jugular and erase Awarun, her daughter and their accomplices from Oyo Kingdom or will the King go to war against Ede Kingdom for losing his daughter?
For both of the above scenarios, I doubt they would happen as we’ve come to know that Alaafin Ademuyiwa is a coward and we see that play in his dealings with his chiefs, unable to go toe-to toe with Bashorun Ogunjimi, unable to stop the Ede warriors to taking his daughter right under his nose, powerless to stopping one of his Queens from fleeing the palace with his children so I do not expect a radical change from such a character as Alaafin Ademuyiwa.
Although season two of Anikulapo is underwhelming, it still leaves me wondering what direction Kunle Afolayan intends to take the third season. Will it suffer the same fate the final season Game of Thrones suffered or will it find a way to merge its stories, cut out the noise and focus on what really matters and come out on top?
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