Last night’s episode of Ojukwu began ominously by introducing us to the village’s Great Priestess, whose head is half-shaved and fanned up like a black crow’s wings. She arrives the Elders’ Council meeting with a message: an unclean maiden had desecrated the stream of the river goddess and she must appeased quickly otherwise men will start to die. In appeasing her, three men from two neighbouring villages including Umu-Ojukwu must partake in a cleansing ritual.
Meanwhile, Udoka’s wife is….pregnant! How did we know? She’s in the compound pounding palm nuts in a mortar with her step children Adanna and Uremma (which is weird, now that I’m thinking about it) and the next thing she scampers away to a corner and throws up. It’s so bad that she loses consciousness. But there’s more going on: the Great Priestess is consulted and after she’s brought to the semi-conscious body of Udoka’s wife, the Great Priestess informs everyone that there’s a darkness lurking around her, which might claim her life and that of the unborn child.
Also, the baby’s gender is revealed to be male. Two baskets of corn, the male offspring from a she-goat and the first udara fruit that falls in Udoka’s farm in the morning, are all what’s necessary to avert the malicious darkness. There’s so much darkness in last night’s episode that it manifests as men attempting to rape Uremma, Udoka’s daughter. She’s stopped in the forest and harassed by two young men who happen to be Aku’s son. “Give us what we want and we will let you go” they say in brash command. But guess what: Uremma beats one of them up and she’s later joined by Agu, the wrestler. The scene is interesting for how it tackles rape but it’s also unrealistic. Uremma, played by Mary Njoku, is physically big and she draws strength from that attribute. But not every woman is endowed with that kind of frame. And not every woman would be lucky.
We still don’t know who the unclean maiden is, and why Udoka’s new wife is haunted by darkness. Guess all these will be revealed by next episode.
When Bernard Dayo isn’t writing about pop culture, he’s watching horror movies and reading comics and trying to pretend his addiction to Netflix isn’t a serious condition.
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