Dul Johnson
Dul Johnson (born 16 September 1953) is a Nigerian filmmaker and author. He began his career as a drama director with the Nigerian Television Authority, Jos, and worked for many years before retiring into independent filmmaking and teaching. His best-known films include There is Nothing Wrong with my Uncle (a cultural documentary), The Widow’s Might (a feature film), Against the Grain, Wasting for the West, and Basket of Water. Early life and education Johnson was born in 1953 in the small village of Zamlaka in the present-day Langtang North Local Government Area of Plateau State. He was born into a polygamous family, the fourth of Kongdak's 10 children. The family moved when Johnson was five years old from Zamlaka in the north to Gina in the south of Langtang, where he learned shepherding and blacksmithing. However, Johnson moved back to the north to attend primary school from 1961 to 1965. He was returned home in 1965 due to sickness, missing one academic year. When he returned to school in 1967, his father sent him to his maternal grandmother at the foot of the mountains at Timwat, a period of his life Johnson later described in his short story, "Living with Shadows". Johnson was inspired to start writing about his own life while in Form Two of secondary school, when he read The African Child by Camara Laye, who like Johnson was the son of a blacksmith, and wrote of topics he could relate to. In secondary school Johnson also began acting on the stage, participating in the production of one of Ngugi's early plays and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. This interest increased when he entered university, where he also began writing and directing stage plays. Career In 2010, Johnson won a writing fellowship to Brown University in the United States, where he wrote most of his first novel, Deeper into the Night. At Brown, Johnson was able to meet notable writers including George Lamming, Chinua Achebe, John Edgar Wideman, Ama Ata Aidoo and the writer and director of the INP. He also staged a small Nigerian festival as part of which he contributed his works of fiction and a film in progress. He later took a residency at Ebedi in Oyo State, Nigeria, visited Goa for the International Film Festival of India in 2012, and went to Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2013 where his film There is Nothing Wrong with my Uncle was in a festival. Works Johnson has published five major works: Shadows and Ashes, Why Women Won't make it to Heaven (short story collections), Ugba Uye: The Living Legend (a biography), Deeper into the Night (a novel) and Melancholia (a play). The last two were presented to the public on 28 October 2014. As well as writing plays, Johnson has also produced poetry, journalistic writing and short stories. In the 1970s he wrote plays for radio (Rima Radio, Sokoto) and for the stage, some of which were produced while he was an undergraduate. One of his productions received