With its gay Nigerian protagonist, Walking with Shadows, Funmi Iyanda’s movie adaptation of Jude Dibia’s 2005 novel, promises ambition but is, ultimately, a modest step in the long journey of contending with the extent of Nigerian (in)humanity.
When we first meet the main protagonist of Walking with Shadows, Ebele ‘Adrian’ Njoko, on screen, his life is about to be upturned. A colleague with a vendetta will out him as a gay man, a revelation that sets into motion a cascade of consequences. Not too much about his life has been given away yet but we know up until that point that Adrian is what society might consider a model young man: he has the high-paying job, the wife, the child, and, naturally, a buried secret.
The façade soon crumbles, setting an unsteady stage for what remains the most ambitious Nollywood production with an LGBTQ+ character at its centre. Walking with Shadows began life as a novel written in 2005 by Jude Dibia. Several years later, Funmi Iyanda, former TV star and media icon, fulfilled a longstanding wish to turn it into a film. Directed by the Irish debutante, Aoife O’Kelly, Walking with Shadows charts the excruciating unravelling of Adrian’s life after his closely guarded secret comes to light...
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