Background: Nigerian popular television had increasingly engaged indigenous African cosmologies as narrative frameworks, yet scholarly analysis of how these systems were represented with cultural fidelity remained limited. Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry) productions centring Yoruba traditional belief offered a productive but underexamined site for interrogating the intersection of indigenous epistemology and postcolonial media practice. Purpose: This study examined Aníkúlápó: Rise of the Spectre (2024), a Nigerian Netflix series, as a cultural text engaging Yoruba cosmology, death rituals, and spiritual obligation. It investigated how the series constructed metaphysical order, moral accountability, and political authority, and whether these representations sustained or merely aestheticized African indigenous frameworks in postcolonial media production. Method: The study adopted a qualitative design employing cultural textual analysis across all six episodes. Three complementary strategies were applied. Narrative analysis traced how ritual elements structured character motivation and plot development. Semiotic analysis decoded the symbolic functions of key objects including a ritual amulet, palm wine, and cowries. Cultural criticism evaluated representational authenticity against Yoruba ethnographic scholarship. The framework drew on theories of ritual practice, liminality, gift exchange and reciprocal obligation, and postcolonial African cinema criticism. Results: The series effectively visualised Yoruba beliefs about the soul's journey after death, the moral weight of interfering with divinely ordained death, and the binding nature of spiritual obligations between the living and the dead. The protagonist functioned as a psychopomp, a figure who guided souls between realms, whose unresolved threshold existence drove the central conflict. However, the series failed to sustain its cosmological logic as spiritual debts were deferred without consequence, sacred objects were reduced to plot devices, and patriarchal structures constraining female characters were depicted without critical interrogation. Conclusion: The study demonstrated that the representation of African traditional religion in popular media required sustained engagement with the philosophical frameworks underlying ritual practice rather than visual spectacle alone. Cosmological coherence and critical depth proved essential accompaniments to aesthetic ambition for such productions to serve as meaningful vehicles of cultural transmission. Contribution: This study provided the first systematic thematic analysis of the series as both a ritual enactment and a postcolonial media text. It advanced scholarship on African cosmologies in popular media, indigenous ritual performance, and Nollywood's evolving role in cultural preservation, offering a replicable analytical model for examining ritual representation in African screen media.
Theophilus Adedokun (Wed,) studied this question.