In July 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stood on the TEDGlobal stage and gave a talk that would resonate across classrooms, conferences, and creative industries for years. In “The Danger of a Single Story”, she spoke of the risks of telling only one kind of story about a people, a place, or a group. “The problem with stereotypes,” she said, “is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
Sixteen years later, in a social media landscape where memes often cloak the uncomfortable, a new Nigerian film unearths another kind of neglected narrative. Kemi Adetiba’s film, “To Kill A Monkey (TKAM)”, challenges the single story of sexual exploitation, a story often centred solely around women victims and male aggressors. One of the most jarring moments in the series is when Efemini, down on his luck and desperate for money, approaches his boss, Madam Adunni. Rather than offer him help, she insists on sleeping with him before giving him money.
The power dynamic is unmistakable and the coercion is not hidden. And yet, the scene from the film was quickly meme-ified as is the culture with many Nigerians; we often make a joke out of everything. One tweet, meant as a joke, read: “Love me some Madam Adunni o 😂 Women in male-dominated fields, love to see it!”
To some, it was comedy. But to those who looked closely, it was a reminder that the internet, and perhaps society at large, still struggles to take male sexual abuse seriously. In trying to find humour, many missed the point that this wasn’t just a “power move” or “feminine dominance.” It was coercion and sexual exploitation.
Rewriting the Victim
There’s an uncomfortable silence that surrounds male sexual exploitation in Nigerian society. The image of the male victim conflicts with dominant notions of masculinity. Men are expected to be strong, in control, immune to vulnerability. When they are violated, especially by women, the default response isn’t always sympathy. Sometimes it’s disbelief or mockery, like the kind of tweet I shared earlier.
The film, “To Kill A Monkey”, doesn’t try to sensationalise this issue. Instead, it sits in the awkwardness of it. Efemini carries his pain silently, like so many men do in real life. And that silence is perhaps the film’s loudest scream. Of course, Kemi Adetiba isn’t the first Nigerian storyteller to hint at male vulnerability. Still, she may be one of the few willing to portray it as a product of systemic exploitation rather than a narrative afterthought because the exploitation happened more than once.
The Intersection of Power and Desperation
What makes Efemini’s story even more piercing is its context. He’s not some middle-class man with multiple options, but a broke man. For someone like Efemini, survival comes with compromises. And that’s what his boss exploits, his body and his situation. This reminds us of a more uncomfortable truth that sometimes, coercion is not about brute force, but about who can afford to say no, and who can’t.
In many ways, the film demands our understanding. It tells us to look at stories we’ve overlooked and ask, “What haven’t we been seeing?” Just as Adichie urged her audience to seek complexity and resist flattening people into single narratives, Adetiba calls on us to widen the lens. It’s an invitation to unlearn our assumptions and embrace nuance, not trying to compete with women’s stories of abuse. To see that men, too, can be victims. That sexual exploitation is not a female-exclusive experience.