The treasonous state and postcolonial precarity: Femi Odugbemi’s Makoko as ‘victim documentary’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawn from a chapter in my current book project on Afropolitan Humanism, a term I use to designate the humanist vision that informs Femi Odugbemi’s cinematic output as a leading Nollywood film director/TV producer, my article demonstrates the humanitarian uses to which Odugbemi has put his screen media work as a socially committed filmmaker. Focusing specifically on his documentary, Makoko (2016), I argue that the film is a visual account of urban victims of postcolonial misgovernance. I suggest that what the documentary unveils is a Nigerian state that subjects its citizens to the power of social death. I contend that the real victims of Nigeria’s necropower that the film documents are the innocent and vulnerable children in the Makoko slum in Lagos. I also argue that as a social purpose documentary, Makoko documents and bears witness to a suffering humanity tucked underneath the underbelly of the resplendence of Lagos as a postcolonial megacity, and that the film is indicative of Odugbemi’s passionate and relentless socially conscious artistic efforts to challenge a failed postcolonial system that is indifferent to human suffering and other forms of social anguish.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".