From Show Dem Camp to My Father’s Shadow: Wale Davies’ Multidimension

Wale Davies is not in a hurry when he talks about himself. He knows the weight of memory, how easily it slips through fingers, how often it bends to myth. For most of his career, audiences have known him as Tec, one half of the Lagos rap duo Show Dem Camp, whose albums have carried the warmth of palm-wine guitars and the coolness of late-night confession. But in recent years, another Wale has been making himself known—one who is less interested in the intoxication of rhythm than in the shadows that linger behind it.

That shadow is, quite literally, his father’s. Wale was only four when his father died, leaving behind fragments: a scent, a voice, a silhouette half-remembered in family stories. His younger brother, the filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr., was even younger—barely old enough to hold a coherent memory at all. For decades, the brothers circled around this absence, speaking about it occasionally, but never fully confronting it. Art became their way of returning to the wound. For Wale, music offered a vocabulary of loss and belonging. For Akinola, cinema provided a canvas on which memory could be reconstructed.

Their collaboration, My Father’s Shadow, is the convergence of those paths. The film, which premiered at Cannes in 2025, is set in Lagos in 1993, a moment when the country seemed on the verge of something different. The June 12 election, which promised a democratic renewal, collapsed in betrayal, leaving Nigeria suspended in a haze of hope and anger. Against this backdrop, the film imagines two brothers spending a day with their estranged father. It is both personal and political, a story of intimacy folded into the larger story of a nation in turmoil.