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It has now been officially confirmed that Nigeria’s celebrated novelist, playwright and filmmaker committed suicide on August 7, 2022. He died a day after sending a copy of the manuscript of his last novel, Yoruba Boy Running, to his editor, Hannah Chukwu. Biyi Bandele stated with finality that it was his last creative work. The next day, he was dead.
He started as Biyi Bandele-Thomas and shocked the literary world with his amazing precocity. He was admitted to my alma mater, the then-University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University. Prof Wole Soyinka was our Head of Department in Dramatic Arts before Biyi Bandele’s admission. The fire of creative arts burned relentlessly in Biyi Bandele, and he was, from the beginning, determined to conquer the world of literature.
He won the International Student Playwriting Competition with his play “Rain”, travelled to London to receive the prize, and did not return to his studies at Ife. In 1991, he published his first novel, The Man Who Came In From The Back Of Beyond, which featured the younger brother of my classmate and friend, Owei Lakemfa, as the fictional protagonist named Lakemf. The BBC World Service broadcast his play The Female God and Other Forbidden Fruits in 1991.
In his second novel, The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other Dreams, there is the story of the First Lady Mamagee of a country called Zowabia, who poses for a photograph with a group of monkeys only for the editor of Zowabia News to write the caption like this: “In the picture above, the Lady Mamagee is standing third from right.”
The poor editor was beaten to a pulp by irate State Security people for stating that “the Lady Mamagee – First Lady for short – was standing third from the right or even right from third in a picture which she took with monkeys, and to wit, in a picture in which she happened to be the only human being!”
In 1992, he was awarded the coveted Arts Council Bursary in Britain to support his creative writing drive. He extended his frontiers to screenplay writing when he penned Not Even God is Wise Enough, which the BBC produced.
Born in Kafanchan on October 13, 1967, Biyi Bandele made a prodigious career of publishing novels, writing and directing plays, shooting still photography, and making movies.
He earned plaudits for his theatrical work on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the film renditions of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half Of A Yellow Sun, the 2015 London Film Festival masterpiece entitled Fifty, a season of the MTV drama season Shuga, the first Netflix Nigerian Original series Blood Sisters, and a Yoruba language adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s Death And The King’s Horseman entitled Elesin Oba – The King’s Horseman premiered at Toronto International Film Festival.
It was such a shock hearing of the death in Lagos on Sunday, August 7, of the all-round man of the creative arts I fondly called Boy Biyi. It traumatises me now that I have learnt that he took his own life.
We always had animated discussions on all aspects of the arts in the home of our mutual friend Adewale Maja-Pearce in Surulere, Lagos. I once invited him to join us at a made-for-television discourse on JP Clark’s work, but he could not make it due to the exigencies of Lagos. While in Lagos, he devoted time to street photography, which he always posted on his Facebook page.
I met him in London when I went to take a BBC short story prize, and he wondered cheekily that I was so unassuming, unlike other Nigerian writers who printed “Writer” on their complimentary cards! He published my work in Homeland News, which the venerable journalist Tunde Fagbenle founded in London.
Biyi passed away at the age of 54, but he did enough work in his lifetime to ensure that he would never die. The Biyi Bandele truth is that he came ahead of his time and ensured he covered all the lanes before his early departure.
As an Egba man from Abeokuta in Southwestern Nigeria, born in Kafanchan in the North, Biyi Bandele earned the distinction of becoming a citizen of the world. An intensely private person, he let his prolific work do the talking for him without ever veering toward self-promotion in any way.
He won the world’s respect in his self-effacing manner as he devoted all his time to creating timeless works. He could comfortably fit into any part of the world but retained an eternal love for Lagos, the city he eventually died in London, England, is another city that loomed large in the Biyi Bandele oeuvre as exemplified in his 1999 novel, The Street, in which the eccentricity within the multi-racial assemblage finds meaning in the expression: “people reaching out to one another, searching for love.”
His 2008 novel Burma Boy tells the horrific story of the Second World War, which his father fought in, but Biyi brings humour to the story of the fourteen-year-old protagonist, Ali Banana.
What is striking is that Biyi reached out to all beyond any borders of paternity, maternity or consanguinity. Discrimination did not rank in his lexicon. Humour was his veritable vehicle, and he shared with me a love for the folkloric hero of the fiction of the Muslim world, Mullah Nasruddin, who, in one of his stories, told his wife not to put a stone slab on his grave when he dies because he would not want to knock his head against the stone when ascending to heaven!
In announcing his death on Sunday, August 7, Biyi’s doting daughter, Temi, broke not a few hearts this way: “Biyi was a prodigiously talented writer and filmmaker, as well as a loyal friend and beloved father.
He was a storyteller to his bones, with an unblinking perspective, singular voice, and wisdom that spoke boldly through his art, poetry, novels, plays, and on screen. He told stories that made a profound impact and inspired many people worldwide. His legacy will live on through his work.”
His posthumous novel, Yoruba Boy Running, tells the gripping story of the pioneer Christian prelate Bishop Ajayi Crowther. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka wrote the foreword.
Biyi Bandele was the quintessential global citizen, at home on all continents. Trying to understand how he found the time to do all the work in his considerably short time is astounding.
It suffices to celebrate that Biyi Bandele believed in his art and stayed the course of breaking borders and building lasting bridges.
English (US) ·