Abstract

This study aims at a discussion of the portrayal of African Traditional Religion in some selected Nollywood films. It is herein argued that Nollywood is deliberately bent on denigrating the African traditional religion. Three main religious groups are represented in Nigeria. These are Muslims forming about 50.4%, followed by Christians 48.2% while followers of other religions especially African Traditional religion, comprises 1.4% 1. This statistic has earned for Nigeria an accolade: a multi-religious country (McKenzie, 1976). In effect, serious discourse on the impact of religion in Nigeria name Islam and Christianity as the two dominant and competing religions. The tension between Muslims and Christians has a long history. African Traditional Religion is almost always relegated to the background because it has no direct stake in religious disturbances in Nigeria (Olupona, 1992). Yet, movies on the fierce encounter between Islam and Christianity are almost non-existent. Rather, most of these religious films launch a fierce attack on African Traditional Religion.

Keywords:

African traditional religion, Christianity, Islam, Nollywood,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.