The treasonous state and postcolonial precarity: Femi Odugbemi’s Makoko as ‘victim documentary’
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it