‘He knew this was going to be the last story he wrote’: the epic legacy of literary maverick Biyi Bándélé

The film-maker, playwright and novelist finished his last book, Yorùbá Boy Running, the day before he died in 2022. Now, loved ones and collaborators, including his daughter Temi and longtime friend Kwame Kwei-Armah, celebrate the passionate man behind the work

In early August 2022, Biyi Bándélé had a conversation with his editor, Hannah Chukwu, about the novel he was working on, Yorùbá Boy Running, after which he sent her a revised version of the manuscript. On the following day, the 54-year-old film-maker, playwright and novelist took his own life, leaving behind an impressive and strikingly varied body of work: the film adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which took seven years to make; stage versions of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Lorca’s Yerma; poetry, screenplays and several novels including 2007’s Burma Boy, which told the story of his father’s harrowing and brutal experiences as a British army soldier in the second world war. His was a talent unrestrained by genre, medium, geography or period.

Yorùbá Boy Running tells the story of Samuel Àjàyí Crowther, whose life spanned the 19th century and took him from abduction and enslavement, via abandonment in Sierra Leone, back to Nigeria and a life in the clergy that ended with him becoming the first black bishop to be ordained by the Anglican church. In his foreword to the book, the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, whose play Death and the King’s Horseman was Bándélé’s final film adaptation, points to the intensely imaginative and vivid approach the novelist took to his subject. His “mix of the anecdotal, archival and inquisitional” style parts company, says Soyinka, with “the slave narratives to which we are more accustomed. It disorientates, yet inducts one, at a most primary level of intimacy, and even self-identification, into the realities of capture, enslavement and displacement; eases one deftly into a milieu of the slaving occupation as an existential norm, and one that was near inextricably intertwined with the trajectory of colonialism in west Africa.”

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