Growing up I remember watching mount zion films and Helen Ukpabio films with their religious plots with motifs of heaven consciousness, witchcraft and the paranormal. I will never stop saying that those movies had the most macabre looking characters I have ever seen. My parents faithfully waited to buy the sequel to each of the "Ultimate Power(Agbaranla)" series and then I was made to watch these "Christian" movies because they were supposedly good for my five year old spiritual life.
If watching Perilous times, married to a witch, power to bind or any of the so called Christian films I was subjected to watching as a kid did anything good for my spiritual life I wouldn't know. What I do know is that those movies left me highly traumatized and with recurrent nightmares of eyes getting plucked and Witches with male penises ( Helen Ukpabio has issues).
I grew up with the consciousness that if you ate biscuits or ate puff-puff during a class mates birthday at school there was every probability that you would find yourself flying at night and chanting "puff-puff", "puff-puff" in your sleep. That was the classic example of how children got possessed that parents used with their children in the last years of the nineties. There was also the true life story everyone's parent seemed to know about but never who's story it was. It was the story of the child who didn't eat biscuits and sweets shared during a birthday but instead left them in the pockets of his school uniform where they metamorphosed into a dead human thumb.
This were stories that nightmares were made of, and my parents would tell this stories to us over and over again, if they didn't see how pale our faces looked or the giant goosebumps on our bodies I would never know. While I always politely declined food when anyone offered them to me, the stories I had been told and movies I had watched made me acutely suspicious of everyone. Everyone was a potential witch or wizard, myself inclusive you never know even the smallest things could make you possessed by a legion of angry demons like not closing your eyes tight enough or saying Amen loud enough when an exorcism(deliverance session)was taking place in church.
You had to look as pious as possible, your hair covered up, any hair attachment or make up of any sort was prohibited after all they had been manufactured in the lagoon by marine spirits and Mammi water(mermaids). Using a coloured lip gloss or heaven forbid red lipstick automatically meant that you had entered into a covenant with Lucifer and there where even deliverance sections(exorcisms) where people confessed to getting initiated by "pomade" to prove this theory.
So tell me why I wouldn't grow up bigoted, mistrustful and highly judgemental, tell me why I wouldn't see a woman with a zillion tattoos on her body(the mark of the beast)and immediately call her the spawn of Satan and the Lucifer's hench woman.
If I did that however I would have been wrong just like my parents before had been wrong, she with her "marks of the beast" had saved a boy written off by the rest of us as Ifot!(Ibibio for witch) because of his peculiarities or may be lack of them. She wasn't what I had become, she wasn't a witch hunter.
