Pausa

Editi Effiong's Black Book is a metaphor for violence in Nigeria

It pains me to admit that I enjoy listening to Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City Football Club manager, given that I’m a Manchester United fan and I’ve been on the receiving end of several rounds of pain since he took his current job. Guardiola is a deeply intelligent man with the amusing tic of having his brain run at 100 miles per hour while his mouth struggles to keep up at only 70 miles per hour. But when you pay attention closely (and listen multiple times) you’re often rewarded with some valuable insight into football. You can summarise Guardiola as a man who is absolutely terrified of any form of chaos on a football pitch - I often joke that when Guardiola wakes up in a cold sweat, it is because he had a nightmare that his team conceded a goal from a fast and chaotic counter attack. One of his defining principles is what he calls salir en corto - coming out with short passes. The basic idea is that as his team moves from their own defence to attack the opposing team’s defence, they do it slowly and in compact formation i.e. using short passes with teammates staying close together. What motivates this is not that it can be beautiful to watch but the aforementioned terror Guardiola feels - if they lose the ball when ‘coming out with short passes’, by definition their players are always close by to quickly swarming the opponent and regain the ball.

To make all this work properly - and to ensure that chaos is absolutely avoided on the pitch - Guardiola does not just rely on drilling the salir en corto principle into his players over and over, he relies on a specific type of player to do the job for him. He calls that type of player Pausa. Matias Manna, an Argentine coach who has spent more than a decade studying Guardiola, described a Pausa this way - “Without them, the players who charge ahead quickly aren’t where they’re supposed to be when your team lose the ball, which is going to lead to a counter-attack for sure, leaving the defenders outnumbered.” In other words, the Pausa is the person on the pitch who helps to ensure chaos never happens. He sees and thinks several moves ahead and instinctively understands risk and reward - if I play this pass over 70 yards, there is a 30% chance that it doesn’t reach the intended recipient and we are suddenly facing a counterattack that leads to a goal against us. So he doesn’t play the pass. In service of Guardiola’s fear of chaos, the Pausa exerts control on the game. It is not that a Guardiola team cannot win a game that has descended into chaos, it is that for Guardiola, whatever is on the other side of that chaos is too much of an unknown and is never worth the risk.

Football gives my brain a lot of pleasure so you will forgive me that analogy. This was what I thought about while watching Editi Effiong’s Netflix blockbuster, The Black Book. To stretch the analogy beyond football to regular human affairs, Pausa can be a person or a moment. In a movie that runs longer than 2 hours, the Pausa moment arrives as early as the 20th minute when a phone call is made to decide the fateful shooting of an innocent young man on which the movie turns. Here, someone is given the choice of pulling the trigger - making that long range risky pass - or pulling back because they don’t know the kind of chaos that lies on the other side of the risk. They take the risk.

You can view the movie as 2 parts either side of this Pausa moment. in the opening scenes, we are treated to some pretty spectacular violence in the course of a kidnapping. And yet it was nothing to compare with the violence on the other side of the Pausa that was not taken. Bodies begin to drop for fun and by the end of the movie, it is impossible to keep an accurate tally of the dead. That ‘second half’ of the movie was infinitely more violent than the ‘first half’ which was already red hot. And here we learn perhaps the most important lesson of the movie - that violence alters people and that whatever the current temperature reading of a society’s violence, it can always get hotter.

Much of Nigeria’s story can be understood this way. Yes, conflagrations often have their origins in individual actors making rational decisions in the moment that they have no way of predicting how bad they might get. But many people never learn even when there is an abundance of historical data to guide their future behaviour. No Policeman or armed official in Nigeria can today claim not to know the risk on the other side of shooting dead a defenceless person. They take it anyway. No Governor can claim not to know the risk in arming civilians in the name of boosting security. They do it anyway. The end result is that everyone slowly but surely comes to tolerate a higher level of violence around them. Even those who start and participate in the violence do not seem to appreciate the risk on the other side of the chaos. In the aforementioned opening set piece of The Black Book, in a scene that should not be funny, one belligerent listens to the adrenaline coursing through his body and declares that it is time to up the stakes. He is promptly shot.

This different levels of tolerance of violence can be seen in what makes the news in different countries. Recently a cult clash in Sagamu, Ogun State claimed at least 20 lives. The violence was, incredibly, linked to the death of the musician, MohBad. It was, though, merely the excuse for what was the latest round of violence in a place where the baseline has been permanently raised over the last few years. And yet, here is what the Police public relations officer had to say about the latest round: “I was in Sagamu between 2006 and 2008, and there was no single cult clash throughout the period.” There was a Pausa, it was missed. Violence go up. Some other countries might go into a nervous breakdown if 20 people were killed in one day. In Nigeria, that’s just a day of the week starting with T.

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The Black Book is not a perfect movie. There is a journalist that seems to have too much time when she’s doing risky stuff. Relative to some other African countries with long liberation movements that became pawns in the Cold War, Nigeria is not awash in Russian made AK-47s or the type of semi-automatics that are liberally used in the movie. I would have liked to see in their place locally made guns. The movie can also feel like two different stories that run parallel to each other such that by the end of the movie, you may be forgiven for thinking the film roll had been swapped without you noticing. The story is also a very familiar one, which partly explains why it has been such an incredible hit across the world.

But it does not need to be perfect. It cost a lot of money and it showed. Several boundaries were pushed and, being an amateur photographer myself, I much enjoyed the ‘film look’ of the movie. It was a labour of love by Editi Effiong and it is getting the recognition and love it deserves.

The Black Book can be understood as the story of any number of violent incidents in Nigeria that have their roots in injustice and how the people in the vicinity of the resulting violence are permanently altered into accepting higher levels of disorder and bloodshed around them.

Pausas. There are not enough of them in Nigeria.