By: Tomilola Adejumo
Everyone remembers the moment the world stops being soft. Not in the romanticised way that foreign films like to portray it, but in the specific, oddly quiet way it happens to Nigerian children. The moment you realise that your parents are not divine. That they do not know everything, and in some cases, might not even know very much. That life will not hand you explanations. That it is possible to grow up believing in stories that start to sound shaky once your voice begins to change and your body starts to ache in new places.
Maybe it happened when your father forgot your birthday. Or when your mother apologised for shouting but didn’t quite manage to say she was wrong. Maybe it happened in church, on a dry Sunday when the sermon felt off. Or at a funeral, watching someone’s body disappear into the ground. Or maybe it was just a random moment on a danfo ride, when the conductor yelled, the road was angry, and your reflection on the window made you look like someone you had not yet become. Whatever it was, it was the beginning of something quiet and irreversible. A kind of loss without a funeral.
That ache. That confusion. That devastating realisation that being young in Nigeria is not soft or cinematic or pastel-filtered. That is what coming-of-age films are supposed to hold.
But they don’t.
We produce over two thousand films a year. Two thousand. And yet, we cannot name five Nigerian coming-of-age films that make you feel like crying in the dark because someone finally put your puberty in 4K.
Where are the stories of confusion? Of loneliness? Of soft heartbreaks and awkward conversations? Nowhere. They were arrested for loitering.
Instead, we get the same thing every time. A woman who cannot cook. A man who cannot zip his trousers. A mother-in-law who came to Earth to destroy joy. And somewhere in there, jazz. Because why not?
Apparently, growing up is not cinematic unless someone dies, confesses to witchcraft, or slaps someone across a table so hard the plates fly.
But what about the girl in Osogbo who wants to become a DJ and tapes magazine cutouts to her wall? What about the boy in Enugu who cries because his best friend called him soft in public? What about the girl in Kaduna who just failed JAMB and is now asking God if He perhaps meant something different for her life?
Where are those stories?
Gone. Untold. Or worse, edited out because the producer said, “This one no get action.”
Meanwhile, American youth are falling in love under fairy lights. British youth are depressed in scenic lighting. Indian youth are having identity crises while dancing in the rain. Korean youth are— no one really knows what they are doing, but it is beautiful and painful and scored by a piano.
And Nigerian youth? They are skipping to adulthood like the country is chasing them.
In Nigerian films, everyone is either a villain with lipstick or a saint with trauma. You get five minutes of their childhood before something explodes. Someone is poor and pregnant. Or rich and wicked.
There is no middle. No confusion. No sweat-soaked hostel corridors. No midnight BRT rides home while your earphones lie to you that life will get better.
Apparently, you are not allowed to be unfinished in Nigerian cinema. You must already be someone. You must already have a backstory. You must already have an accent. You must already know what you want: marriage, money, or madness.
But what if you don’t?
What if you are just nineteen and confused and secretly Googling “is it normal to hate everybody in your house?” What if you are just trying?
No. Try again next year when your confusion can become a plot twist.
Our films don’t believe in adolescence. Not because it is not real, but because it is not dramatic enough. You know how many beautiful stories you can tell in university alone? But no. Instead, Nollywood hears university and immediately downloads cult, sugar daddy, strike, and aristo.
Where is the girl in 100-level who finally gets her own room and realises that freedom is just loneliness with extra expenses? Where is the boy who reads Things Fall Apart and has a full-blown identity crisis? Where is the girl who eats rice and ketchup for four days straight because she is broke and cannot call home because her father already thinks she is unserious?
Cinema. Cinema. Cinema. But we are wasting it.
Coming-of-age is not just a genre. It is a time capsule. It is how a country tells itself, this is who we were before we became who we are. Every nation that takes its identity seriously makes space for it. The Americans did it with The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Breakfast Club, Boyhood, Lady Bird, and Eighth Grade. The South Africans did it with Tsotsi. The Koreans have made it an art form. The British have coming-of-age in their bloodstream. The Indians blend it with dance and heartbreak and existential dread.
In Nigeria, fast-forward.
We skip the long summer where nothing made sense. The year your breasts arrived before your self-esteem. The first time you got your period and were too afraid to tell anyone. The week a lecturer told you you are not serious in front of the whole class, and you laughed with everyone, but went home and cried. The moment you sat in a hostel hallway, holding your stomach and wondering if it was pregnancy or food poisoning.
All of this is cinema. But we refuse to see it as such.
Instead, we get two options. Rich and depressed. Or poor and struggling.
The middle class? Vanished like national power supply. Those people whose accents fluctuate because they watched Top Boy? Those kids who sneak out to dance rehearsals, argue about feminism on WhatsApp, and lie about crushes in church? Where are they? No camera for them.
And the worst part? The fear.
The fear that quiet films will not bang. That a boy crying in a classroom will not sell tickets. That a film with no slaps, no sugar daddies, and no miracle pregnancies is a waste of time and will not work at the box office. But is it really?
The films that stay with us — Lady Bird, Aftersun, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Moonlight — they whispered. They took something small and let it bloom. They made you care about a stare. A sigh. A silence.
But we do not like silence here. We fill it with music. Dialogue. Incantations. Or a slap. We do not want to feel small feelings. We want to feel earthquakes.
But you know what is louder than a slap? A moment that feels too real to look at.
Imagine this. A girl in Ibadan, waiting for her period. Her best friend just japa’d. Her sister just moved back after a failed marriage. Her parents are not speaking. She wants to write a poem about it, but instead she runs away for two days and eats puff puff under a bridge with a boy who smells like Rexona.
No villain. No twist. No jazz.
Just the terrifying freedom of becoming.
That is the movie. And it would change lives. But no. We are too busy filming part nine of Married to My Husband’s Mother’s Maid.
The truth is, many Nigerian adults do not want to remember adolescence because they never got to live it. We skipped it. We jumped from PHE class to survival mode. And our films reflect that.
Our cinema is full of people who are already wounded. Never people getting scratched. Already wise. Never lost. Already married. Never curious.
So we keep performing strength. We tell stories that scream. Because silence feels like weakness. Because softness feels like failure. Because becoming feels like a waste of time if you are not there yet. We make films that reinforce forgetting. That punish softness. That reward performance. That celebrate becoming, but never ask how we got there. We are a country of people who keep trying to move on from ourselves.
The directors are here. The writers are waiting. The actors are young and brilliant and online. The hunger is there.
All that is missing is the green light.
When it comes, I hope we will see a Nigerian film that dares to sit in the softness. To watch the 200-level girl cry on her mattress after failing a test. To let the boy in church realise, for the first time, that he might not believe. To capture the night two friends fought and never spoke again.
When that film comes, it will not just tell a story. It will give thousands of Nigerians the language to say yes. That was me. That is still me.
And perhaps, finally, we will learn how to grow up with grace.
Tomilola Adejumo is an emerging writer from Lagos, Nigeria, with a published work featured in Punocracy. Her upcoming publications include pieces in The Kalahari Review, Shallow Tales Review, African Writers magazine, and Efiko Magazine. Tomi shares engaging stories, ranging from thought-provoking to nostalgic, funny, and haunting, on her Substack page, Thoughts Archive. She is on Twitter at @earth2tomi.
