African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling: Nigerian Novels and Film

Ben Okri opens The Famished Road with a river that becomes a road, and a road that stays hungry because it was once a river. The novel's narrator, Azaro, is an àbíkú (ah-bee-KOO) — in Yoruba tradition, a child who is born, dies young, and returns to the same mother again and again unless the cycle is broken. The book won the Booker Prize in 1991. It was also shelved, in bookshops and on syllabuses alike, under magical realism, a few spines along from Gabriel García Márquez. That shelving decision has shaped how African folklore in contemporary storytelling gets read ever since, and it rests on a thinner foundation than most people using the label would guess.

Here is the relationship in one sentence. Nigerian folklore-driven fiction and Latin American magical realism do not share a root and are not connected by influence in the ordinary sense; they are a case of parallel invention, joined late by a critical convenience that hardened into a fact.

What follows traces how the field came to believe otherwise — where the label was made, how it travelled, and what it does to four Nigerian works when you press it onto them. Two novels and two films: Okri's The Famished Road (1991), Kunle Afolayan's The Figurine (2009), Chigozie Obioma's An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), and C. J. "Fiery" Obasi's Mami Wata (2023). All four ask what standing an inherited belief has inside a modern story. Two of them answer one way and two answer the other, and the label flattens the difference.

Where the label was made

The phrase begins with a German art critic. In 1925 Franz Roh published Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus, describing post-expressionist painters who rendered ordinary objects with such flat clarity that the objects went strange. No spirits, no folklore, no novels. A painter's term for a painter's problem.

It crossed the Atlantic and changed hands. In 1949 the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier wrote a prologue to El reino de este mundo proposing lo real maravilloso — the marvellous real. His argument was that in the Americas the marvellous is not a technique a writer applies but a condition of the ground itself. And the specific ground he pointed at was Haiti: the revolution, and the Vodou of enslaved and freed Africans and their descendants. Carpentier's marvellous real was drawn, in significant part, from West and Central African belief that had survived the Atlantic crossing and gone on living.

That is worth pausing over. The most influential ancestor of the label now routinely applied to Nigerian novels was itself built by a Cuban writer looking at African-derived practice in the Caribbean.

Then came the step that made a genre. In 1955 the critic Ángel Flores published "Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction" in the journal Hispania, and a mood acquired a canon and a start date. Other critics, Luis Leal among them, disputed his account almost immediately, but the container existed now. Cien años de soledad arrived in 1967, in English in 1970, and the Latin American Boom gave publishers a category that sold.

The last step was academic. Through the 1980s and 1990s, comparative literature departments needed a shelf for novels out of Nigeria, India, Ghana and elsewhere that did not behave like European realism and were not fantasy either. Magical realism was the passport that got them through the door. Salman Rushdie in 1981, Okri in 1991.

So the chain runs: a term for German painting, a prologue about Haiti, a journal essay that manufactured a genre, a publishing boom, and finally a piece of teaching shorthand. Between Roh's canvases and Azaro's road there are four handoffs and a marketing category. What the field believes it has is a tradition. What the record supports is an itinerary.

What was already on the page

The dates do most of the arguing here.

In 1938, Daniel Olorunfẹmi Fagunwa published Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀, generally counted the first full-length novel written in Yoruba. It sends a hunter into a forest thick with spirits and moral tests, and it was written for Yoruba readers in Yoruba, decades before any English-language critic needed a name for it. Wole Soyinka translated it in 1968 as The Forest of a Thousand Daemons.

In 1952 Faber published Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard, which follows a man into the land of the dead to retrieve his tapster, in a prose that runs on Yoruba narrative logic and Tutuola's own English. Dylan Thomas reviewed it admiringly in The Observer, and the admiration did something double-edged: it made Tutuola a literary curiosity in London at the same moment it made him famous. A number of Nigerian critics were uneasy for exactly that reason, worried that a metropolitan appetite for the strange was being fed rather than an author being read. Neither the enthusiasm nor the unease had anything to do with Latin America.

In 1958 Chinua Achebe put an ọgbanje child at the centre of a household in Things Fall Apart — Ezinma, whose ìyí-ụ̀wà, the buried object tying her to the spirit world, is dug up so she will stay. Achebe was not decorating a realist novel. He was describing how a specific Igbo community accounted for repeated infant death, and he wrote elsewhere, in his 1975 essay on chi, about Igbo cosmology as a system of thought rather than a set of images.

In 1976 Soyinka published Myth, Literature and the African World, which argued that Yoruba metaphysics — Ogun, the transitional gulf between the worlds of the living, the dead and the unborn — was a legitimate ground for serious drama, and that European critical frames kept mistaking that ground for ornament. He was making the case, twenty years before the label became unavoidable, that the label would be a mistake.

By the time magical realism arrived as the standard descriptor for this body of work, the work had a fifty-year head start.

Four works, side by side

The test of a label is what it does when you apply it. Set these four against each other on the same criteria.

The last row is the one that matters. Two of these works keep the audience suspended. Two do not suspend anything. Calling all four magical realism puts them in one box and throws away the difference between them.

The undecided ones: Okri and Afolayan

Azaro sees spirit companions calling him back, and the world of The Famished Road never blinks or explains. Okri has said in interviews, more than once, that he does not accept magical realism as a description of his work — that what a European reader files as magic was, in the world he was raised in, simply part of the accounting of what is real. The novel's refusal to resolve is not coyness. It is a narrator with a wider ledger than the reader's.

Afolayan's The Figurine does something structurally similar with a camera. Two young men on national service find a carved figurine of Araromire in an abandoned forest shrine; the story attached to it promises seven years of good fortune followed by seven years of ruin. The film then delivers seven good years and seven terrible ones, and near the end lays out a chain of ordinary human causes — jealousy, deception, coincidence — that would account for all of it without the figurine. It does not tell you which reading is correct. Nigerian audiences argued about the ending for years, which is a fair sign the film did its job.

What both works are doing is a choice about the audience, not about belief. Okri and Afolayan build a story that a viewer who holds the cosmology and a viewer who does not can each watch to the end without being told they are wrong. That is a hospitality move. It is not the same thing as hedging, and it is certainly not the same thing as treating the belief as a special effect.

The declared ones: Obioma, Emezi, Obasi

Then there are the works with no ambiguity in them at all.

An Orchestra of Minorities is narrated by a chi. In Igbo thought, a chi is the personal spirit or portion assigned to each person, bound to them and answerable for them; the proverb onye kwe, chi ya ekwe — if a person agrees, their chi agrees — is one of the most quoted formulations of the relationship. Obioma's narrator is the chi of a poultry farmer named Chinonso, testifying about him before Chukwu. There is no question inside the book about whether a chi exists, because a chi is doing the telling. Obioma has been consistent in interviews that he is working from Igbo cosmology and that magical realism is the wrong frame for it.

Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater (2018) goes further. Its narration is shared among ọgbanje selves inhabiting one body, and Emezi has written publicly that they do not treat this as metaphor — that the ọgbanje reality is the reality the book is written from. A reader may hold that at whatever distance they choose, but the book is not offering a second explanation.

Obasi's Mami Wata, shot in stark black and white and set in a coastal village, works the same way on screen. Mami Wata — the water deity known under many names along the West and Central African coast and across the Atlantic diaspora — is not a hypothesis the film tests. She is the ground the village stands on. The film's tension is about whether the intermediary who speaks for her still has authority, and what a community does when outside power and internal doubt arrive at once. That is a story about faith and legitimacy, not about whether the deity is real.

These three are not being ambiguous with restraint. They are starting somewhere else.

What the video industry did without asking

The critical debate never much troubled Nigeria's video-film business, which is instructive.

The standard origin story is that Nollywood began in 1992 with Living in Bondage, an Igbo-language direct-to-video release produced by Kenneth Nnebue, in which a man enters a wealth pact that costs his wife her life and is then haunted by her. It sold enormously and set a template.

That origin story is itself thinner than the belief attached to it. Yoruba travelling theatre companies had been making films for years before it — Hubert Ogunde's troupe, Ola Balogun's Ajani Ogun in 1976 — and other video releases preceded 1992. The 1992 date is a convenient marker that became a founding myth, which is the same species of tidying that produced magical realism as a genre with a start date.

What is not in dispute is the scale of what followed, or its independence. The video industry built an audience of millions on stories where spirit forces, sacrifice, ancestral obligation and church power are all live elements, and it did so with no critical apparatus, no festival circuit and no interest in whether a European term applied. Its audience largely shared its cosmology. The vocabulary that came from outside for these films was rarely respectful; "juju film" as an outsider's shorthand carries a long colonial-era history of using the word as a slur for other people's religion.

The more recent screen work reclaims that ground deliberately. The Surreal16 Collective — Obasi, Abba Makama and Michael Omonua — titled their 2021 anthology Juju Stories and took the word back. Makama's The Lost Okoroshi (2019) turns a Lagos security guard into an Okoroshi masquerade spirit and lets the city deal with it. Afolayan's Anikulapo (2022) sets a weaver and the reviving akala bird in the old Ọyọ world. On the page, Nnedi Okorafor lands aliens off Bar Beach in Lagoon (2014) and hands part of the telling to Udide, the spider-artist of Igbo story; she coined africanfuturism specifically so her work would not be read through a diaspora-centred frame she had not chosen.

A generation of makers is picking its own terms. That is the part of this story that is actually new.

Where the connection ends

There are four distinctions a careful reader should not blur.

Àbíkú is not ọgbanje. They are related and distinct: àbíkú is Yoruba, ọgbanje is Igbo, and while both name the repeatedly returning child, the attendant explanations, the markings, the household responses and the literatures around them differ. Treating them as one word with two spellings does to Nigerian traditions exactly what "magical realism" does to Nigerian novels.

A novel is not ethnography. Okri, Obioma and Emezi are making art from inherited material, and none of their books is a reliable account of how anyone practises anything today. Ancestor veneration, Ifá divination and the many forms of coastal Mami Wata devotion are living practices with their own custodians; fiction borrows from them and does not represent them.

Diaspora work is not a copy. Writers working from London, Lagos or the American Midwest are not reviving something dormant or diluting something pure. They are inside a tradition that has always moved.

Ambiguity and ontology are different projects. Okri and Afolayan build a story two kinds of audience can both finish. Obioma, Emezi and Obasi write from inside a cosmology and let the audience adjust. One label covering both erases the most interesting decision each of them made.

Names and terms

• Àbíkú — Yoruba, roughly "born to die": a child understood to be born, die young, and return to the same mother.
• Ọgbanje — the Igbo counterpart, related but with its own body of story and household practice.
• Ìyí-ụ̀wà — in Igbo accounts, a buried object tying an ọgbanje child to the spirit world; finding it is meant to end the returns.
• Chi — in Igbo thought, the personal spirit or divine portion belonging to each person.
• Chukwu — the great or supreme God in Igbo cosmology.
• Mami Wata — a water deity, or family of water deities, honoured under many names along the West and Central African coast and across the Atlantic diaspora.
• Okoroshi — an Igbo masquerade tradition, in which masked figures embody spirits during specific seasons.
• Lo real maravilloso — "the marvellous real," Alejo Carpentier's 1949 term, the direct ancestor of literary magical realism.

Where scholars disagree

This is a live argument, and it is worth naming the sides rather than pretending one has won.

One position holds that magical realism remains analytically useful. Brenda Cooper's Magical Realism in West African Fiction (1998) reads Okri alongside Kojo Laing and Syl Cheney-Coker and argues that the mode names something real about writing produced at the seam between systems of knowledge, and that a shared term makes cross-regional comparison possible at all. On that view, refusing the label costs you the ability to see a genuine global pattern in late-twentieth-century fiction.

The other position, held by most of the Nigerian writers themselves and by a good deal of recent criticism, is that the term imports an assumption the works do not make — that realism is the default and everything else is a departure from it. If a chi narrates the book, nothing has been added to reality; the reality being described is simply larger than the critic's.

Both positions are arguable. What is not arguable is the paper trail, and the paper trail is short: German painting in 1925, a Cuban prologue about Haiti in 1949, an American journal essay in 1955, a publishing boom, a syllabus. The confidence with which the term now gets applied to African folklore in contemporary storytelling far outruns anything in that record.

The myth is that when a Nigerian novelist or filmmaker puts a spirit into the story, they are doing what García Márquez did — adding the marvellous to the real, in a mode invented elsewhere and borrowed. The more accurate version is that they are almost always working inside a cosmology their first audience already holds, and the only thing borrowed is the label a distant critical industry reached for when it ran out of shelves.