‘The Herd’ as a Filmic Narrative of Banditry and the Poetics of Trauma in Nigerian Cinema

Nigeria’s fifteen years of escalating crisis of banditry have generated new cultural texts attempting to narrate the psychological and social dimensions of violence. This paper examines The Herd (2025), a recent Netflix original film centred on ransom kidnapping in central and northern Nigeria. It argues that The Herd functions as a trauma narrative that encodes fear, bodily vulnerability and communal disintegration through silence, fragmented dialogue and narrative disruption. Through the close reading of selected scenes, the paper demonstrates that the film reframes banditry not as discrete political events but as traumatic processes that reshape memory, identity, agency and community. Trauma theory, which is central to the argument, frames banditry as a continuum rather than a singular violent incident. The film’s fragmented temporality, bodily disintegration and unresolved ending function as narrative strategies that reproduce the structural experience of trauma. The analysis further reveals how The Herd situates trauma within conditions of state absence and insecurity, contributing to the developing canon of Nigerian insecurity narratives by foregrounding survival, psychological rupture and the persistence of fear beyond captivity.

Keywords: Banditry Trauma Kidnapping Nigerian Cinema Narrative

Author

• Yvonne Ikpemhinoghena Ewedemi
  Babcock University
  ewedemi0120@pg.babcock.edu.ng