The revolutionary power of comics | Somto Adjuluchukwu | TEDxTudu
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwc0csIRe0E Video ID: Rwc0csIRe0E ============================================================ [Music] you see above it narrates a battle between two ages of beliefs one of them is the angels and another's is our traditional beliefs which is the gods in simple terms child growing up might get to see our gods and our spiritual beliefs as diabolical whereas a grandmother might look at it just as culture it shows that over time in the years that we've lived and how time has passed were beginning to realize that our culture has slowly been eroded to be the backbone and we have embraced foreign religions foreign spiritual ethics and called it ours basically one of our most distinctive and powerful attributes is our spiritual beliefs were also storytellers and is within the spiritual beliefs that we find the core of our system we turn into Africa or the Europe return goes beyond a physical location it's your state of mind it's your state of heart and it's your state of spirit the comic looking above is a comic called spirit laws it's the biggest crossover event comic book in our universe vortex has published over 60 comic books in the past three years and we've made a series of animated short films and in every single story that were telling we try to embrace our culture in the most innate way not just in the surface way growing up one of the things that hurt me the most was not the fact that these superheroes didn't look like us but the fact that these superheroes didn't just live the life that I was living they didn't see the things that I was seeing every day there were no masquerade festivals there was no Dibya there was no person with feathers around his body and shaking carries all the things I saw in Nollywood films never reflected in a DC about my comics and that bothered me so I would say that Africa doesn't have a lack of narrative in terms of the stories being told but the problem is the direction on which our stories are being told many a time were forced to confirm to what the white hand standards are what the foreign standards are what imposed standards are and colonialism has gone beyond even being something that was taken away from us in terms of our art or in terms of our displacements the colonialism has gone in as encrypt so much into a society that you don't even need to leave the continent to be colonized you know starting my company in 2015 to 2018 my mom thought I was crazy because I studied economics I had an economics background and she's like you're gonna start making comic books and cartoons how are you gonna like fend for yourself you know like nobody makes comic books and cartoons that makes any money and I'm like yo I have something to tell I have a story to tell I want to tell these stories I want to you know I want to break out from the cycle I feel like I'm not going to be able to tell that narrative using matrixes and econometrics and numbers and tables and even if someone can that's not me and so the first thing we started with was really Lala which was the middle name of Mandela which actually means to pull the tree the branch of a tree but colloquially means troublemaker so in that face of mind with the it was a form of rebellion obviously I was in a phase of mind where I needed to pull the branch of a tree for the fruits to fall down you know when you see a mango tree and it's ripe you're not gonna speak to the mango even if it's yellow the police job that is gonna job it doesn't work that way you gotta pull it you know you got a cost of trouble you got offset the tree and that's how he got it and between 2015 to 2018 those were like the deeper struggles of my life you know but it turned into a mental struggle and a spiritual journey and that's when we arrived at Kong Ghana in 2019 the beginning of this year Kangana is a swahili word that means togetherness and the only true way that we can actually come together to achieve our journey to the land of gods where we are right now is by doing it together and that was a massive resolution at the point in time when we began to start this journey to exports in african culture our first comic book we ever made was called mama juju it was very tough because was a book for kids and the moment at the moment you know we'll be a Comic Cons in the moment local Comic Cons Lagos Comic Con and then there was a book festival they had in Accra you know we still come out here and the moment they see juju they're like not now I can't read this you know but the the mess of it was MooMoo juju we had to make a lightness out of our black magic we had to make people we have to make it an educational system to know dear gods now if I ask people how many people here know Zeus and Poseidon and the rest of them y'all gonna raise your hands it's okay for for black kids watch Harry Potter but it's not okay for a black kid to say oh I want to be like Shawn go I want to carry the axe it becomes know this child needs a spiritual intervention like right now where's the past oh you know but yet our pastors are blowing breeze and everybody's falling down but that's not creepy it's not you know what is creepy is the fact that my child wants actually personifies and idolizes a black man that was once I came and did phenomenal things while walking on earth we need to acknowledge our history we need to accept our mythology as part of our history we need to accept our spirituality outside Christianity or Islam as part of our culture we need to practice it even if it's not in the most active way but in terms of going for festivals the new young festival you need to go for that the festival in a quill we need to go for that and not just for the paragliding for like the festivities in it the actual festivals following them as they carry the calabash from city to city from town to town you know understanding why they do these things you know makes our spirituality and our culture remarkable excellence and the way forward the chips was grounded it keeps us connected and it keeps our mental resolve in one place our individuality and our singularity in our spiritual beliefs is our development and the moment that we can realize that and bring those two together were taken a step to the land of gods we created a new terminology when we started making our comic books and we call it spirit fiction African story is driven by mythology culture and traditional spirituality / philosophy with this we were able to research and go deep into diverse cultures from the Dogon tribe in Mali and how they covered astrology before any technology discovered astrology astrology is so deep and so vast that King Khufu pharaoh Khufu of the Egyptian Empire who literally designed the pyramids in Giza which were one of the first pyramids ever would go and war against the tribes of Mali just to get the information on the astrology and then when he finally attained that a stroller that a stroller as that astrology you will find out that that was the Age of Enlightenment medicine mathematics geometry everything advanced to tomorrow they can build structures like the pyramids it was so deep and so in-depth that if you ask the basic American where the Egyptians got their knowledge from they're gonna tell you was aliens your only understanding is by coming in tune with nature and that's what make up and that's what makes African spirituality so powerful the fact that it's in line with nature when they look for healing they go to trees when they when they look for food they kill the animals with respect that is the power of African spirituality it respects the earth it respects the sky it respects everything around us you know not trying to be a pastor right here the spirit lone an alternate world where the major events of the spirit universal core it coexist parallel to today's reality on earth majority of the stories that went on in our universe had to deal with things that I heard when I was growing up you know I'm from Nigeria so a lot of things I might say might not be relatable you know but we had Madame Khoikhoi you know we had clifford OG we had their baku you know and so many other stories i wanted to bring this story to life i wanted kids to grow up not looking at themselves like they needed to wear tights and a red cape and we're batman cow on top of their head for them to feel like superheroes i want them to understand that is spirituality alone already made them superheroes and if they got a deeper understanding of that they could rise they could soar and that was what led us to our 60 comic books that we published over the past three years those are a few more of our projects that we worked on over time the two titles that you're looking at right above you are two projects that got featured on comic book resources as top 15 most influential black characters in the world when this happened to us we realized that what we were doing was beyond us just writing stories under a table in the studio hiding and just creating we realized that what we were doing was setting the pace for an entire generation we were lighting the candle and putting up beacons for generations behind us that would actually begin to see that actually begins to take pride in their culture now actually begins to speak about their culture wherever they may be in the spoil you know and that actually changed the narrative for us in terms of how far we could go with storytelling and the entire narrative so getting a large following a king thing that we had to do was begin to switch it to language language is one of the biggest barriers that we have how can a child somewhere in a remote area in the west of Africa have a big breakthrough in science if he has to learn English first there is already a large huddle ahead of him if I had to learn English before I discovered how to make a biological experiment work it makes it ten times more difficult the planet around us is designed to give us everything that we need our language is our power our language is our truth how many kids how many children today in the new millennium Millennials grow up in a home where local languages are being spoken to them it's eerie it's everyday it's a dying culture we need to understand the importance of our language how to transcend our language into our benefits and how to use that as a wave to cross over into the land of gods so that's one thing we started infusing in our comic books local languages pidgin English a lot of our readers unfortunately which were international because they got drawn into comics faster than our people could slowly began to even embrace it because we'll put glossary at the back where we get to explain what these words were and that kind of opened up into a whole new pride we need to take pride in our language and also we take pride in our language and put it at the forefront of our education we're still going to be behind in the development of the new world if you look at countries and civilizations like the Japanese the Chinese the reason why they can create their own island they can create their own oasis and then dive within their oasis and create all kinds of growth and shown their back to the world they have their own Google they have their own Twitter and then the confidence that they have to have their own and create their own and neglect that of the world which is the West is from the power of their language from a five-year-old kid is learning Mandarin and doing ABBA costs like his a wizard but in our generation our children if even grown up in the village for example need to go back to learn English from learning English they learn how to dress English then they aspire to school abroad and that's where we lose it half of the die half of the people that we call their sport in the past 10 to 15 years have come from aspiring to be there the new colonialism doesn't even require us to be put on a ship anymore we want to be colonized hi my name is Soto I want to be colonized literally that's how it is your parents encourage you to be colonized know about that's it spaghetti let's have cake let's do ice cream let's do burritos I'm like what you know you know you walk around and then it's it gets terribly more difficult to find a standard restaurant in fact the best restaurants do you see selling African food on the corner side on the streets that already shows us where we are we need to step into the land of gods and we need to stop colonizing ourselves because that's the biggest system that's the biggest trap over the past four years we're moving into our fifth year next year who have amassed over 30,000 subscribers from across the globe and the reason why I mentioned is numbers for you it is cuz if the world can look at the black panther and decide that we're gonna make millions of dollars from the black panther he only tells me one thing African culture is commercial its commercial as for the TEDx sake it is commercial in the most commercial way possible the biggest lie that they tell us one of the biggest lied that they tell us is the international acceptable content as a content creator as a movie maker the moment you are trying to break out into the world the first thing that it begins to tell you is that is it international compliant are you doing this are you doing that are you shooting it like this is it recorded this way that is the lie of the international market so have you tell a narrative that is mundane that is repetitive that is controlled and that is a lie it's the biggest lie all cultures are commercial how many of you here watch anime yeah now anime makes trillions of dollars maybe not trillions that's a huge exaggeration because because because now that on a whole new level would be an Apple but it's not Apple the anime makes millions of dollars annually we look at titles like Naruto we look at shadows like Dragon Ball Z they have defined our world they have controlled the universe of animation in fact the animation industry moved from being in the Disney from the 30s all the way down into the 2000s and then in the age of the 2000s it's now anime when you look at Netflix the bulk of the animation content is anime and they don't speak English in anime all cultures are commercial Africa is commercial as heck the year of the return I was poised to do an artwork for the year of the return you would see the floating creature who is called Orie with a staff above he's in full regalia of African attire he represents an African that has truly embraced the spirituality his flock in the multitude that you can see coming from the African map represents the return we need to understand that the return goes deeper than the location what are you embracing what are you taking back home coming back to experience the culture to experience a bit of afro nation over there a little bit of a frogella maybe get a little bit of Booker food on the side that's not returning returning is understanding your purpose as an African child as African descent as African origin is taking pride in your culture is taking pride in your spirituality it's not the color of your skin Drake is black you know it's not the color of your skin the biggest lighter they tell you is restricting you to the color of your skin no longer in the moment then you step into a place and you have the mentality that I am black you have failed you were human but you are African and that's not your location it's who you are inside and that's how it's always going to be and any other narrative is a lie we need to understand that the comic book that we have called the land of God speaks about the little girl caucus year born in New York her father Nigerian her mother American she comes back into Nigeria on a holiday to see her grandmother and discovers a miracle the AG kiwi on seeing this mirror she plays around with it a little bit and then when put in a hand through it finds out that I had passes just right through the mirror she's curious she's 13 years old she doesn't know what to do so she runs through the mirror and she gets chopped in this land of gods let's get trapped in the land of gods you know in this land of gods she realizes that the deities are war and a lot of things are going askew and she's been prophesied to have come come back that the half born child half God half man who African is going to discover that mirror and walk through it and stop the land of gods from impending doom every single return is a solution every single return is changed every single return is advancement don't take that opportunity or that decision as a holiday its purpose and we need to achieve that purpose we need to discover the land of gods a lot of us will come back to Africa but we would not find the land of gods we need to find the land of gods it's not black magic black magic is a white man's term for what they do who have never called it black magic they came into our country they saw all the wonders and they called it black magic maybe because we were black and it's magic so if that's the definition you want to take that's the only definition you should take and the way you should see when you think of black magic my name is Tom Tarr jewry Chikku representing vortex Corp and I'm so proud and grateful to be here thank you so very much appreciate