Historical Fabulations and the ‘Potentially Queer’ in New Nollywood Epics
Nigerian filmmakers are working to reanimate cultural histories through the production of exciting epic films. These films offer narrative openings to uncover histories of African queer life.
In the opening scene of the film Ẹlẹṣin Ọba, Odunlade Adekola, playing the titular king’s horseman, is seen stretched out on an elegant bamboo bed, adorned with raffia leaves and beautifully patterned adire. He is flanked on all sides by beautiful women, most of whom are only clad around their waists. They all reach for the king’s horseman, who reclines, basking in the excess of sensuous attention around him. Many who saw the film or who at least know Wole Soyinka’s original play, Death and the King’s Horseman, from which the film was adapted, would know that the scene was setting the stage for a story about the horseman’s lascivious greed and, in the climax of the story, his ultimate failure to perform his sacred duties. A second look at the scene, however, suggests a possibility of queer reading—a vision of group intimacy, bodies clustered together on the single bamboo bed, women leaning sensuously towards the horseman and in the process, against one another.
The image of this scene was courted by a litany of criticism from viewers who had the opinion that nudity is a very recent touch in Nigerian cinema, probably only serving a mimetic role in relation to American cinema. Others welcomed it as realistic and celebrated the boldness of actors who can animate such scenes. While the image generated no public reading of queerness (in the way it is generally used in contemporary lay discourse), it seemed to unsettle a significant number of viewers to show how images of sex and modes of embodiment are central to how we define culture.
Ẹlẹṣin Ọba is one example in a growing list of epic dramas that New Nollywood (characterized by its turn to ‘more open-ended and less didactic’ narrative tropes) has taken up in the last few years. From Anikulapo to House of Ga’a, the epic continues to make its mark as an important cinematic genre, captivating younger audiences and engendering new curiosities about cultural histories. Scintillating as these epics have been to collective memory, they continue to elicit questions about how much can be remembered against the backdrop of protracted interjections of histories and ancillary erasures.
Nostalgia-driven as they are, these films are wrought in highly poetic Yoruba, showcasing colourful traditional clothing and steeped in the educative lores of African spiritualities. Speaking in an interview about his 2022 film, Anikulapo, award-winning filmmaker, Kunle Afolayan, tells us that, ‘The Yoruba story is even yet to be scratched… Trust me, if you dig deep into the Yoruba culture, the Igbo culture, the Hausa Culture, the Ibibio, Benin… you will not…want to do anything in English because all these cultures have deep stories.’ While one might be somewhat weary of the implicit danger of essentialism in his comment about a coherently contained structure that is ‘the Yoruba culture’, many would sympathize with the moral imperative of this project of recovery—the need to excavate, especially for a younger generation of Nigerians who are so disconnected from these realities, a repertoire of stories that will tell us about our pasts...
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