Kang Quintus Films presents Kang Quintus (Nganu), Azah Melvin (Meukeuna), Alennae Menjget (Mbussi), Hakeem Kae Kazim (Akwa), Ayuk Gareth (Kum), Yimbu Emmanuel (Njoya), Askia (Caro), Screenplay, Enah Johnscott, Kang Quintus; Exec. Producer Kang Quintus; Director Kang Quintus; Director of Photography Takong Delvis Mezzo. © 2023.
The byword for Nganu, is: “The following film contains depictions of sexual violence and domestic abuse, which some viewers may find troubling.” Nganu could be the most gut-wrenching story you’ve ever watched, hence the warning. It is a 2023 Cameroonian tale of the most depressing concocted by Enah Johnscott, the screenwriter. But it doesn’t tell you the worst part; it is no sale gimmick. If you muster patience and watch this film past a third of it, you could be a brave person and not as soft-hearted as I am. But go ahead; you may find a character once in our villages resembling Nganu, and you could draw a parallel. He is typical and violent, with a devil raging in his heart and soul, and nobody cares to find the cause of his problem. You may, of course, find that out downstream as you float with the course of events.
As Google could have it, Nganu has tragic flaws, a destructive streak, a lack of self-awareness, and a blindness to danger. At curtain up, in medias res, a little boy witnesses his father bludgeoning his mother to death as she yelped for his mercy. After the flashcard–Nganu–we witness a grown Nganu beating and choking his woman while her son’s looking for talking back at him. Like a therapeutic dose after abusing his woman and feeling satisfied, he sparks on a toga, heaves out a heavy fume, and then to his son: “Take this money, rush and buy weed. Come! I spat on the ground. Come back before it dries out.” His little son scampered along. Such is the impoverished environment with the terrified mother and son in this hovel of a household of Nganu.
There’s a moment in Nganu when the camera turns in a closeup of the boy’s tear-stricken cheeks, helplessly and haplessly looking as his mother crawls on the floor and yells, “Please help me!” If this scene doesn’t make you shed a tear or two, my friend, you aren’t emotionally shoved into this story; by this story a worst human degradation by a man who treats his wife and child like a piece of shit. And the whole world was like not hearing her cry while her man seats, smoking marijuana, oblivious of her pain.
Nganu was raised in a household where his father beats and raised hell with his mother. He had the right, and many times so, to jump on his father and smoother him. He couldn’t; he still had a dint of culture lodging in his ribs about respect and not raising a fist against a father. He grows up knowing the only way of raising a family is by beating on your wife and terrorizing the children. At a mature age and now having his own family, he carries with him the abusive tradition he imbibed from his father. Day in and day out, he beats on a woman he calls his own, and a young kid he calls his son witnesses all with terrifying eyes. He has nothing in common but sends him on a drug errand. The communication in this house starts with beating his wife, raping her even when she’s on her menstrual period and ends with sending his teenage son to buy him a drug.
In a local community where life only pertains to playing checkers and telling jokes, Nganu doesn’t fit in. Whenever he mingles with his neighbors, with the hubris he carries with him, he feels he doesn’t belong to lower communities. His presence among his fellow villagers always ends up in a fight, with someone getting into a fight with him and him getting someone’s face bruised. But the village as a community already knows he is a woman beater, and to him, that is a dent in his wing. When his woman could tell a neighbor shopkeeper that she wasn’t married to him, and the shopkeeper threw it in his face at the checker game, he went ballistic at the poor woman when he went home. He almost smoothers the poor woman to death by choking her.
Guess what? The same community that he disdains shows him the way forward. In a radio broadcast, the government of Cameroon announced that it was looking for conscripts to join the army to fight the Boku Haram insurgence, and he enlisted. One could say this was his way out of the quagmire of life he was in. He enlisted and went into the Cameroonian army, passed out and served the state in short assignments, and finally returned home to his village. Yet he returns to an empty home: His wife has abandoned the house, got married, and is even pregnant with an older man, and his only son has joined the weed gangs (culture he had given him to buy him weed) in the streets. See him enter his living room and sit in the chair; everything around him spells desolate and squalor.
Enah Johenscott and his cow-writer, Kang Quintus, created Nganu as a tragic character bound for doom. Not quite a second into the film, we witness, as young Nganu would witness, his mother’s incessant abuse and eventual bludgeoning to death by his father. Like a character we saw in Private Storm (2010), pp. 297-299, Nollywood Movie Reviews Vol 1. Ramsey Nouah (Alex) could leave his home with a rage thundering in his heart after having endured so much abuse from his stepfather, who calls him at last, “You bastard.” Nganu carries the heavy weight of experience into manhood and transfers the same demon to his family.
He took off one day and wandered to the army without saying goodbye to his wife and son. The family (if family we could call this) went about with their lives. Meukeuna (Azah Melvin), his so-called wife, marries Mbussi (Alennae Menjget), the only enterprising businessman at the village thoroughfare, with who he had had numerous fights, told him about the national conscription in the army. Everyone thinks he will find redemption by joining the Cameroonian military, and I was the same. Can you see his face during the military graduation, when families come to embrace their loved ones, and he comes out and finds no one waiting for him? What loneliness and abandonment! Then he goes home to a desolate, empty hovel with no one to greet him. The first time he rejoins his son, there’s an altercation. Just as the son isn’t happy with the father, the father isn’t. They slap at each other and cry with each other––a scene to behold; they are both pieces of shit.
His union with his only son, who had retained the only father-son relationship from him, was to go and get him weeds, in his absence, had become a weed king. And a bad one at that. The entire weed gang in the village is at war with Kum. Yet, he must stand between the gang and his son. And to save him against the gang, they are both shot dead. What a tragic end for Nganu and his son, Kum (Ayuk Gareth). Indeed, Johnscott and Quintus created this one-dimensional (flat) character, and not even the military changed him.
Ayuth