A crowd looks over a grave in God’s Wife, the 2024 short film by the fast-rising Nigerian filmmaker Dika Ofoma. At the centre is Nkiruka, the woman whose husband has died. When she shrugs off her brother-in-law’s embrace, we know something is askew. We soon learn what: He wants a relationship with her and threatens to remove her from her marital home if she refuses, a threat delivered in the confidence that he is backed by tradition. After an older woman warns against resisting—“You can’t raise your daughter by yourself”—Nkiruka gives in. But this does nothing to ease the guilt she, a devout Catholic, feels over her relationship with a man she’s not married to.
After nights spent with her brother-in-law, she is reduced to tears by her husband’s grave, muttering prayers of contrition. Another night, he has his way with her even though she is on her period. And if she thought he would spare her during lent, a holy season in the Catholic calendar, she couldn’t be more wrong. God’s Wife interrogates the culture of misogyny attending widowhood in southeast Nigeria. As with other works in Ofoma’s small oeuvre—A Quiet Monday (2023) and A Japa Tale (2023)—it asks us to ponder the effects of large-scale cultural events on small, personal lives. We are invited to see how much injustice Nkiruka, whom Onyinye Odokoro plays as a long-suffering medieval saint, can bear before snapping.
Although less prevalent today than some years ago, stories abound of in-laws disinheriting widows, especially in the absence of male children. Grieving women are made to perform “ajadu nwanyi,” mourning rituals among Igbos which often makes inhumane demands of widows, forcing them into long spells of isolation and demanding that they shave their heads. An early scene shows women complicit in sustaining this practice: an older woman forcefully cuts off Nkiruka’s hair, while two other women watch. The scene also sets the tone for the swaths of Christian symbolism to come: the three women form a menacing triangle around Nkiruka, evoking the Triune God.
Spanning 15 minutes, God’s Wife also shows the clash between Christianity and indigenous traditions long witnessed in southeast Nigeria. The region has the country’s highest Catholic population, owing to a long-standing relationship with the Church, going back to the late 19th century with the arrival of the French Spiritans, an evangelical priestly order. This relationship would deepen during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70) when the Church provided significant aid to Igbos, who were coping with mass starvation caused by the federal government’s blockade strategy.
But it has not been a frictionless affair, and Catholicism has often been at odds with local customs. As recently as the 2010s, many people in the Diocese of Akwa, in Anambra, protested the Church permitting women to pour sand into their husbands’ graves, believing it a bad omen for the widows’ to-be suitors. This tension between the Church and local traditions provided ample fodder to home videos in the 2000s, from Narrow Escape (1999) to Festival of Fire (2002), two films where the Christian God emerges as victorious.
The most popular films about oppressed widows also come from that era. For example, The Mourning After (2004), directed by Jimi Odumosu, brought mainstream attention to the cruel tests that widows in southeastern Nigeria undergo to prove their innocence in their husbands’ death—such as being forced to drink the bathwater of their husbands’ corpses. Anyone who watched those films would detect God’s Wife’s kinship with the old Nollywood era, particularly because even though there are about 15 million widows in Nigeria, they have not been the priority of mainstream films in the last decade. Filmmakers have long intuited that comedies and crime thrillers, rather than depressing tales of oppressed women, make better box office sales.
Ofoma is clearly tipping his hat to the home video era. This film, for instance, co-opts plot points from Ajadu, a 2001 film directed by Simisola Opeoluwa, whose own widow also sees her Catholic beliefs chafe against the levirate marriage tradition. And when Ofoma lets his camera linger on a picture of baby Jesus, Joseph and Mary, he is referencing a similar shot in the older film. He is also enjoining us to ponder the subtext lurking underneath the portrait of this iconic Jewish family, a frequent invitation in this film where characters say little and images speak volumes. He seems to be signalling that Nkiruka’s predicament transcends eras and cultures, that even the Mother of God would have suffered her own share of misogyny had her husband left the picture, perhaps from doubting her story of an Immaculate Conception.
For all its homage to the home video era, God’s Wife is distinctly modern and stands out for its hyper-minimalism. But for a 17th-century motet playing at the end, this film is entirely shorn of non-diegetic sound. This allows for noticing details usually at the margins of perception: the jangling of keys, the nocturnal chirping of crickets, the muffled, faraway noises of children at play. The goal is to simulate the mundanity of real life and to forgo all sentimentality. The locked-off shots, echoing Yasujirō Ozu’s tatami shots, also serve this purpose. The silences and stillness work as an effectively jarring contrast to the twist at the end, which is implied to be anything but quiet and mundane.
Another striking quality of this film is its nuanced rendering of its female protagonist, who experiences cycles of strength and vulnerability. Oppressed women in home videos tend to be inveterate victims, often needing a saviour and rarely saving themselves. Ajadu’s widow is saved only by male intervention, when her long-lost and now successful son suddenly returns. Meanwhile, feminist-aspiring contemporary films tend to overcompensate, with their implausibly impregnable female protagonists. Nkiruka embodies a balance of defiance and diffidence. She spurns her brother-in-law. She walks back on her decision. She protests. She surrenders. And ultimately, in a final scene ending on a knife edge, she takes matters into her own hands. This way, God’s Wife recalls Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé, a 2004 film whose women are active enforcers of their own salvation. Ofoma has avowed the iconic Senegalese filmmaker as a major influence.
Anyone looking to quarrel with this film would say that it does not treat Igbo culture as complexly as it does its protagonist, and they would be right. This kind of layered treatment feels necessary, given Nollywood’s usual framing of Christianity as the white knight to the accursed beasts of local customs. Catholicism is not quite a civilising force in God’s Wife, but, like Nkiruka, it still feels like a bride defiled by an outdated Igbo practice. But it would be unfair to hold it against this film, for the simple reason that its 15-minute runtime can allow only a certain level of detail. When the closing insight of this stripped-down, contemplative and unsentimental film is revealed, it lands convincingly. We are left with a bleak forecast: a culture maltreating a significant part of its population will ultimately eat itself, like an ouroboros.♦
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Michael Aromolaran is a religion and health journalist interested in telling stories with a deep historical perspective. A former sub-editor at The Culture Custodian, his works are in The Punch, OpenCountry and OkayAfrica. He lives in New York and is a master’s student at New York University, where he also works for the Ethics and Journalism Initiative.