Nigerian Literature: "Nollywood Has Been Adapting the Wrong Things"

(By Danny Nsa) - There is this pain that comes from reading a Nigerian novel so good you finish it and immediately start grieving that it does not exist as a film yet. You close the book. You stare at the ceiling. You think about the casting. You imagine the score. Then you pull out your phone to search if there is any production news, and there is nothing. Just Nigeria doing what Nigeria does sitting on gold and pretending the ground is ordinary. 😩 

    We need to have this conversation seriously, because Nollywood has been adapting the wrong things. While filmmakers keep recycling the same enemies to lovers storylines and the same evil mother in law who needs deliverance, there is an entire library of Nigerian literature that would genuinely stop the internet cold if someone pointed a camera at it. 

    Start with Teju Cole's Open City. Julius, a Nigerian German psychiatrist wandering through New York and Brussels processing loneliness, history, and memory and then a revelation in the final pages that completely dismantles everything you thought you were reading. It will not be explosive neither would it have chase scenes. It would just be psychological devastation delivered quietly. That ending would have cinema audiences sitting completely still for four minutes after the credits rolled. The conversations it would ignite about male violence and selective memory in Nigerian culture alone would trend for a week. 

    Then there is Elnathan John's Born on a Tuesday, which is the book Nollywood is too afraid to adapt because it would require real courage. A young northern boy swept into religious extremism, political thuggery, and the slow collapse of moral certainty. Nigeria has been dancing around this story for decades, producing films about Boko Haram that feel like they were written by people who have never left Lagos. Born on a Tuesday is the version that actually lives inside that world, and it would be devastating and necessary and deeply uncomfortable for everyone watching, which is precisely why it needs to exist. 

    Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come is another one that should have been a prestige film years ago. Enitan's coming of age story set against the military dictatorship era is the kind of material that would make international festivals lose their minds a portrait of Nigerian womanhood, class, friendship, and the particular suffocation of growing up in a country that keeps breaking promises to its own people. The friendship between Enitan and Sheri is one of the most honest female friendships in African literature, and no Nollywood film has ever portrayed women like that. Not even close. 

    Nollywood has the talent. The last few years proved it Gangs of Lagos, A Tribe Called Judah, Breath of Life, filmmakers clearly leveling up technically and narratively. But there remains a fundamental reluctance to sit with real literary complexity. Bollywood adapted The White Tiger. Hollywood turned Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty into a series. South Africa is slowly mining its own literary tradition. Nigeria has Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie, Nnedi Okofor a lineup that could power a decade of prestige content and the industry mostly behaves like these books exist in a different country. 

    Purple Hibiscus should have been a full theatrical film already. Not a student project. Not a straight to streaming afterthought. A proper production with a director who understands silence, because that novel is built entirely on silence the silence of a house where the wrong person holds all the power. Kambili's internal world, her obsession with Papa, the way violence lives in the spaces between sentences that is exactly the kind of material that wins awards and starts arguments and makes people call their mothers afterward. 

    The market is there. Nigerian audiences are clearly ready for difficult, layered storytelling Behind the Scenes proved that grown men will cry publicly in cinemas if the material earns it. The readers have always been ready. Someone just needs to stop being afraid of the source material and trust that the literature already did the hardest work. All Nollywood has to do is show up and not ruin it.