AKWA IBOM STATE UNIVERSITY JOUNAL OF ARTS

One of the most pressing concerns facing Nigeria today is environmental degradation, with oil spills, deforestation, and pollution posing enormous threat to public health and the environment. Nigeria’s film industry, Nollywood, serves as a reflection of the country’s social and environmental realities. From corruption and poverty to politics, Nigerian cinema has tackled a wide range of thematic issues that shape the nation’s identity. Through close readings of Black November, Milkmaid, Shanty Town, and Gangs of Lagos, this study shows how filmmakers convert contaminated environments into cinematic testimony and transform marginalised bodies into agents of insurgent visibility. Drawing on eclectic theories of Anthropocene, a subset of Ecocriticism, Capitalocene and Ecocinema, the study notes that Nigerian cinema functions as a counter-archive of slow violence. The paper argues that contemporary Nigerian cinema constructs what may be called toxic landscapes and insurgent scenes, aesthetic and narrative formations through which environmental violence, infrastructural abandonment, and ecological inequality are rendered visible and politically legible. Moving beyond a narrow petro-centric framework, the paper buttresses the fact that Nigerian films articulate a broad environmental justice discourse encompassing oil extraction, desertification, urban toxicity, rural displacement and cultural dispossession. These films challenge the normalisation of ecological harm and reframe landscape as a site of persistent struggle for environmental justice. While acknowledging the contradictions of commercial cinema, the paper notes that the Nigerian screen culture remains a crucial arena where environmental injustice is narrated, contested, and reimagined and environmental advocacy is sustained and conveyed to a larger audience across the world.

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