The world is about to discover the value Mount Zion Institute of Christian Drama (MZI) brings to the village of performance. More critically, what this emerging theatre arts school teaches in contribution to both academic and professional woodfire discourse, has the potential to re-echo after decades. The validation to this premise is founded on operational dexterity beyond 35 years. A phenomenon that can maintain consistency of impacts this long is phenomenal. It affirms the reasons for the alumni communities expanding beyond Africa to North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. People who drank from this same well have taken cups, gallons even tanks to other nations feeding thirsty mouths.
The test of organisational trustworthiness is vested on the product in the hands of the masses. One of the good products of MZI is Mike Bamiloye’s Ultimate Power originally called Agbara Nla in 1993 – the year of its birth. Agbaranla from 1994 onwards, shook Nigeria. The adults of those years who are still alive, children who are now grown adults, and people who were not born at the time but came to see the motion pictures all seem to be living testimonials.
While it is easy to be caught by the aurora of the flame, putting in obscurity the hand fanning the glow; there is a backend due attention. In his article, published November 30, 2019; Dr. Bamiloye explains writing the script of Agbaranla on his knees beside the bed:
The scripting was going on in a retreat place, mostly on my knees beside the bed, then, I heard the Holy Spirit saying to me:
“Ask of me, she has another name, a secret name apart from Paulina.” Then, I stopped writing and began to pray that God would give me her secret name. Then, the name “Aya-Matangha” came out of my mouth as I prayed in tongues. The Lord stopped me and said, that is the secret name: “Aya-Matangha.”
Unknown to Dr. Bamiloye, Matangha is an existing name in the underworld. Details of sources of such assertion are not within the scope of this intellectual.
The script development experience of Dr. Bamiloye is unique. Every writer has a spirit who travels. On the desk, writing with paper and pen or a key-padded device, the writer journeys in realms calibrated in dimensions. These realms writers access have been measured by scholars. In his 1976 article The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy, Wole Soyinka typifies this realm the “chthonic abyss.” Soyinka was not the first to conceptualise the world mortally unreached. Earlier, in The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche, there is a world representation separated from the eye and hand where art is born. The spirit of the writer is a meta traveller. Authors have written about events and technologies we now live to interact with. But the chief of all spirits is the Holy Spirit – the unwritten author of Agbaranla.
What this new version of Agbaranla- The Return unveils is an excitement waiting to wreck normality. The makers of this film, the Mike-Bamiloye Brothers promise it is bigger, deeper and broader. Given the community of impact Mount Zion Faith Ministries has wielded since 1985, organic distribution and marketing is expected and predicted. As Agbaranla enters cinemas October 1st 2026, people are rolling. Anyone who has seen the first version is even more eager. Diaspora communities crowd-book popcorn vendors. All the people want and say is “October, here we come.”
