Lagos

Lightning strikes, trees crash down, dams collapse, savannas burn, humans get charred. In the end there is only red desert sand, lifeless earth, as far as one can see. Already the one minute intro to the documentary Global Warming – Nigeria Under Attack reveals that the audience is not to be convinced by subtle means. The project, a joint production of the German Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Nigerian Ministry for the Environment, has become a reality-horror film. A shock therapy, that is, to rescue Africa’s most populous nation out of its nature polluting, waste producing, oil burning state of trance. “Mother earth is exposed to a serious assault,” says director and environmental activist Desmond Majekodunmi already at the beginning of the movie. Surrounded by angry lightning and flaming hellfire he adds: “Now the earth strikes back.”

Stefan Cramer, director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Lagos, admits straight on that the movie, which he set off, sometimes uses a polarizing, even dramatizing tone. The question is when should drama be considered appropriate if not for this topic?

The 17 million city of Lagos has neither a working sewage system nor a waste disposal system that deserves that name. More than half of the population has no access to clean drinking water, in the open canals at the roadside bubbles a black broth. Thousands of wildly soot emitting cars entangle themselves everyday in miles long traffic jams and cover the whole city under a milky carpet of smog. If the prognoses by all the well-known climate research institutes come true only half as bad as predicted and the sea-level will rise by one or two meters till the end of this century, huge parts of Lagos and other coastal regions of Nigeria will be permanently covered by water. Since the country at the same time is covered more and more by the sand coming from the North, where the Sahara buries the land like a fiery storm, the habitable part of Nigeria could shrink to a fraction of its current size within decades. Considering the fast-paced growth of population, the political implications of possible refuge movements and the danger of epidemics after floods one can easily conclude that the end time tone of the movie is not at all an exaggeration.

The academically qualified marine biologist Cramer, who has been engaged in Africa for 40 years, had the idea of this project when seeing the award-winning documentation An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. The film of the former US presidential candidate popularized the topic two years ago in America and Europe. Cramer was impressed by An Inconvenient Truth but he also knew that the movie would not work in many parts of Africa. “Due to poor school education, especially in the natural sciences, there is a lack of basic knowledge that is necessary to understand Gore’s movie,” says Cramer. How can one understand the climate change if one never heard of carbon dioxide before? Cramer had a desire to find a language for his film that transports sufficient scientific and political information as well as appeal to the seeing and hearing habits of the Nigerians.

The director Majekodunmi therefore mixed classic documentary passages with elements of the Nollywood-Cinema, which has been so successful in Nigeria. He shows children who pass out in front of smoking power generators, crying mothers and in the happy end smiling young men who plant trees. Global Warming – Nigeria Under Attack is not a cinematographic masterpiece but it could be the pilot of a new genre, which then had to be called “Education Soap”. “Time will show if we reached our goal. But it is a first try,” says Cramer.

Whether or not this experiment works out will also be determined by the question how many of the 140 million Nigerians will actually see the movie. For a few days, it has been available on DVD, this week it will be shown on TV for the first time – on three different channels at the same time. The core of the distribution strategy centres immediately around the most important target group: school children.

The Böll Foundation and the National Ministry for the Environment have prepared some sort of road-show to screen the documentation in as many secondary schools in Nigeria as possible. In Lagos, many schools have introduced so called climate clubs, where youths can discuss the topic. However, Cramer’s secret hope is that the movie will also spread further through pirate copies – the most classical and fast way of distribution in Nigeria. He says: “If I can buy the DVD in front of my office on the street, then I know that I did not do anything wrong.”