Abstract
This is an autoethnographic study about a Nollywood actor/filmmaker who desires to retell his father’s story of being convicted of plotting to overthrow the Nigerian Military Government in 1986. The work represents a personal account of the impact of growing up under a repressive coup culture in Nigeria as reflected in the reconstructed accounts of the memories of the 1976 Dimka coup d’état. In the Nollywood film 76 (2016) by Izu Ojukwu. The focus of this study is the analysis of the visual representation of history and memory in this film vis-à-vis the reconstruction of private memories of the researcher’s personal family experience 10 years later in the failed 1986 Vatsa coup d’état. This analysis provides the resources for autoethnographic reflections through which meaning is made of these personal experiences. Juxtaposing the inward and outward experiences of the two very similar events, creates a space for interrogating the public and private aspects of Nigeria’s coup culture and how these interactions continue to shaped the lived experiences of Nigerians. This is a deeply personal story cast in the mould of a documentary proposal for a critical autoethnography as explained by (Holman Jones, 2016) which combines both Bochner’s (2000) evocative autoethnography and Anderson’s (2006) analytical autoethnography to drive social change. The hope is that the stories of loss, pain, revival and hope in this study will ignite in the reader the fire to dream of new possibilities in research writing as well as a new country not held back by its traumatic past but spurred on by the hope that what is re-imagined can indeed be reality. Key Words: Analytical Autoethnography, Autoethnography, Coup, Critical autoethnography, Documentary, Epiphany, Evocative autoethnography, Historical films, Identity, Marginalisation, Memory & history, Myth, Nigerian coup culture, Nigerian history, Nigerian Military Government, Nollywood, Personal narrative, Screenplay, Traumatic history.
M.A. (Audiovisual Communication)