and othersLike the protagonist of the Yoruba book Boy Running, Biyi Bandele started running at a young age. At 14, he won a school essay contest. In his 20s, he won a radio play script, Rain, and in 1990, moved to London. He got off to a good start there, publishing his first novel, The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond, in 1991. This was the start of a prolific and multifaceted career that sadly came to an end with Bandele’s sudden death in 2022, aged 54.
At the time, he was putting the finishing touches on a film adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s play, Death and the King’s Knight, which focuses on death and redemption and is now streaming on Netflix as Elesin Oba: The King’s Knight.
The forms of his work were as diverse as his subjects: he moved from writing radio dramas to stage plays to novels and short stories, then directing for film and TV, before turning to street photography in his later years. Articles about his new life in Britain appeared alongside articles about Nigeria, a country he left at a young age, before the collapse of the country’s education system, before the reign of terror of General Sani Abacha and the death of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa – before most of the events that now make up the stories of the new generation of writers. His subjects are therefore more diverse, more eclectic, and much harder to categorize.
But his penchant for historical material is clear, from his stage adaptation of Chinua Achebe’s novel Breakdown, set in pre-colonial Nigeria, to the film adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozu Adichie’s civil war novel Half a Yellow Sun, to his own 2007 World War II novel, Burma Boy. The latter was one of the few novels written by an African author about African soldiers in World War II, and it signaled Bandele’s growing ambition and confidence as a writer.
Formally, it’s both a war story and a coming-of-age story, in the vein of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy. But what really makes it stand out is how the author skillfully uses farce to capture the horrific realities of war. The protagonist, 14-year-old Ali Banana, is drawn to the romance of wearing a military uniform, but ends up fighting for the British against the Japanese in the unromantic, malaria-infested jungles of India and Burma. Told in the form of a Hausa folktale, it’s a masterful work, and most readers took it as a sign of things to come. But then the novel fell apart. His attention gradually shifted to film direction, and we now know that he was working on his posthumously published novel, Yoruba Boy Running, all along.
Here, too, Bandele looks to history for inspiration: Just as Burma Boy is based on the story of Bandele’s father, Running Boy is inspired in part by the history of Bandele’s great-grandfather, who, like its protagonist, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was a former slave.
In real life, Crowther was captured by Fulani slave hunters at the age of 13 along with his entire family and most of his village, and taken to a slave fishing camp on Eko Island (which Portuguese traders named Lagos), where he was eventually sold to slave traders across the Atlantic. His slave ship bound for Brazil was intercepted by a Royal Navy vessel, and Crowther was freed. He settled in Freetown, Sierra Leone, a city built for returned slaves, men and women.
After newsletter promotion
Crowther’s fictional story, like the real one, is an incredible tale of perseverance, dedication, and triumph over hardship. When his talents became apparent to white missionaries, they welcomed him into their ranks. And so began his enduring success, this time not as an escapee from slave traders, but as a unique career as a teacher, preacher, linguist, author, and abolitionist.
What Bandele brings to this famous story is the ability to slowly and painstakingly build the character of his protagonist, who is not only a celebrity known to every Nigerian schoolchild – the first black man to be ordained a bishop by the Church of England, the first African to receive a degree from Oxford University – but also a father, a son, a husband and a citizen. The book paints a vivid picture of an emerging Lagos, with its slave markets and vibrant salo (returned slave) community. Dosunmu, the king of Lagos, is forced at gunpoint to sign a treaty ceding his kingdom to the British for their “protection”.
For me, Bandele’s greatest achievement is the opening section of the book, which is largely devoted to recreating life in Crowther’s hometown of Osogun circa 1821, before tragedy struck. A drunken, greedy king is surrounded by sycophantic courtiers, waiting for slave-hunting raiders to strike the town. The section reads like a play, with carefully choreographed entrances and exits, lyrical language, a shocking sense of humor, and dramatic action. Here, for example, there is an exchange between the king’s entourage and an overbearing emissary of an even more overbearing rival king, whose partner is taken into a palace chamber and beheaded.
“Ibn Ayyuba,” said Ibn Saidi. “Where is Ibn Ayyuba?”
“Your brother’s messenger,” Akogun told him, “wishes to have his beard shaved.”
“Razor?” Ibn Saidi’s throat suddenly went dry and he swallowed.
“Yes, he was shaved,” Akogun said. “Fortunately for him, the royal barber was nearby. He sharpened his razor and did it this way and that way, just like his father and his father had done, and before our eyes, Ibn Ayuba’s beard was gone… and, alas… his head was gone too.”
The wit and dramatic timing are reminiscent of Wole Soyinka’s work. But one does not read a posthumous novel expecting a perfect ending. Not every section of the book is as elegant or original as the opening. The editors have done a great job of organizing and marking each section with dates and thematic headings, making the story’s complex chronology easy to follow. We should all be fortunate and grateful that the author has left us with this final volume of an illustrious career that began so long ago in Kafanchan, Nigeria, and was running towards a bright future far away in London.
