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Biyi Bandele
Biyi Bandele, 13 October 1967 – 7 August 2022, was a Nigerian novelist,
playwright and filmmaker.
He was the author of several novels, beginning
with The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond (1991), as well as writing
stage plays before turning his focus to filmmaking.
His directorial debut
was in 2013 with Half of a Yellow Sun, based on the 2006 novel of the same
name by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Yorùbá Boy Running, is his posthumous novel.
Published Books
yoruba boy running
In this book, Bándélé is turning to history for inspiration. Like Burma Boy,
which drew on Bándélé’s father’s stories, Yorùbá Boy Running was partly
inspired by the history of Bándélé’s great-grandfather, who, like his
protagonist, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was formerly enslaved.
At the age of 13, the real-life Crowther was captured with his entire family
and most of his village by Fulani slave raiders, taken to the slave
barracoons on Eko island, or Lagos, as Portuguese merchants named it, and
eventually sold off to transatlantic slave traders. The slave ship, bound
for Brazil, was captured by British navy boats, and Crowther was set free.
He was settled in Freetown, Sierra Leone, which was founded for returned
enslaved men and women.
What Bándélé brings to this well-known story is his ability slowly and
painstakingly to build his protagonist’s character, not just as the public
figure known to every schoolchild in Nigeria – the first black man to be
ordained a bishop by the Anglican Church of England, the first African to
earn a degree from the University of Oxford – but also as a father, a son, a
husband and a citizen. The book paints a vivid picture of an emergent Lagos,
with its slave markets and its vibrant Saro (returned slaves) community; its
king, Dosunmu, was forced by the British to sign a treaty at gunpoint,
ceding away his kingdom for its “protection”.
