An American film, Welcome to Shelbyville, was recently premiered at the US embassy in Abuja. Tunji Ajibade, who was among the audience, reports that Nigeria has a lot to learn from the film, whichhighlights religious differences among people, while focusing on the need to live together in harmony.

The setting was a small US town, Shelbyville, in Tennessee, southern part of the United States of America. Welcome to Shelbyville, that was the film's title. Yes, anyone was welcome, but no one from Somalia, please.  And definitely, no one who was a Muslim. That was at the onset though.

First, the Director of the film, Kim Snyder,  had her own introduction to make. The intention of the programme is to make independent documentary films that provoke people to share energy on issues that have wide impacts, she said. And the film is about people – how they think about their country, how they co-habit in a small place with different kinds of people and different kinds of religion.

The film, shot just before the presidential election of November 4, 2008, started out on November 3, 2008, extended to the Inauguration day of January 20, 2009, and then beyond. There was a whole range of emotion captured in this period based on the landmark events that caught the world's attention, and also cut across the United States.  First, the worry of the day before the election was that Somalis were arriving town. Eight hundred of them were in Shelbyville alone. That was not the only problem; they were Muslims. People remembered 9/11 attack, and they fretted about being killed. They talked about jobs being taken from them, some of the Somalis, such as Hawo Siyad, a nurse back in Somalia, were already recruited at Tyson, a large scale chicken suppliers. But the problem didn’t start with the Somalis. It had been before the Somalis arrived. It was first between whites and blacks. Then came the Mexicans.

The struggle was the same when the Somalis arrived, but everyone worried more because the government had shouted 'terrorists' for so long in its war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this was not the rabidly racist 1950s and 60s when anyone could go out and begin to bash heads on the basis of colour. The law offers protection now, so there was not much anyone could do about the latest arrivals, except to complain. Yet the attacks were vicious, and accusations came from both sides. Americans say they could hardly talk to any of the Somalis, few of whom could speak a word of English.

The Somalis say the same; they talk of walking down streets and people staring at the hijabs on a woman or rawani of an Imam; and their friendly ‘hello’ often went unanswered. There was outrage on one side, there was hurt on the other.

One side had its local newspaper leading the attack on foreigners whom some claimed are from a stone age. The picture of war-ravaged people on CNN didn’t help matter.  How could people come from such setting to come and live in Shelbyville, or America,  was the question on many lips.

The Somalis  were doing what they could to survive though. Their kids were in classrooms. Adults too attend Lucy’s classes to learn English. This teacher took time to encourage her students to see the positive rather than the negative in people, and to try harder to bring the other side to their side. But it was a tough task.  However, there was something about a town where people had problems and they objectively sat down to talk about it. The fact that shepherds in churches saw opportunity to help others as the head of the church, Christ, enjoined them also helped. Positive messages about the humanity of every human first, before they are christians or muslims, coming from the altar could be potent.

There are lessons in all of this for Nigerians who were in the audience on that occasion; one of the reasons, Robin Sanders, the U.S Ambassador to Nigeria, said she was happy to have it premiered in Nigeria. And she has a point. In a country where there is so much polarisation on the basis of religion and ethnicity, the film has significant messages for Nigeria.

Snyder’s film was a documentary, but it had all the ingredients of a successful film. There was a plot, there were the characters who were almost actors showing all the range of emotion as occasioned by the circumstances of their daily lives  and there were  problems, just as  there were  solutions proffered to resolve them.