BEYOND WITCHCRAFT AND POSSESSION: CAN AFRICAN CINEMA BREAK THE SILENCE ON MENTAL HEALTH?

By Osezua Stephen-Imobhio
Festival Director, African Indigenous Language Film Festival (AILFF)

I grew up in Lagos knowing that there were people we were not supposed to look at for too long.

They were the aláwèrè—people living with severe mental illness who wandered the streets, sometimes talking to themselves, sometimes shouting at people we could not see, sometimes simply lost in a world we did not understand.

As children, we learned the rules quickly: keep your distance, don't stare, don't engage.

But nobody taught us to ask the more important question:

What happened to this person?

Instead, explanations came easily. Witchcraft. Possession. A family curse. An angry spirit. An afflicted orí. Punishment for something the family had done—or failed to do.

We inherited these explanations before we inherited the language to question them.

I believed some of them myself.

I was a child, and I was looking at the world through the eyes of the culture that raised me. But growing older has forced me to revisit some of the things I once accepted without question.

Today, as Festival Director of the African Indigenous Language Film Festival, I spend much of my time thinking about stories: the stories Africa tells about itself, the stories we preserve, the stories we distort—and, perhaps most importantly, the stories we are afraid to tell.

One of those stories is mental health.

And the more I listen, the more uncomfortable I become.

Because behind our silence are people suffering quietly. Behind the labels are families carrying shame. Behind the spiritual explanations are human beings who may need medical, psychological or social support.

And behind the fear is something even more troubling:

our failure to understand.

This is not an argument against African spirituality or tradition. Far from it.

It is an argument for asking whether the explanations we inherited are still serving the people who need us most.

Because when we call illness a curse, we may stop looking for treatment.

When we call suffering possession, we may stop listening.

When we call difference shameful, we may hide the person who needs our community most.

And when we repeatedly tell these stories in our films, we risk turning prejudice into culture and stigma into entertainment.

That is why I believe African cinema has a difficult question to answer:

Can we tell a different story?

Can we move beyond witchcraft and possession without abandoning our identity?

Can we challenge harmful beliefs without insulting the cultures that produced them?

Can our filmmakers create stories that replace fear with understanding—and silence with conversation?

For me, this is no longer simply a question about cinema.

It is a question about who we are as Africans, and how we choose to see one another.