When the 47th edition of the Toronto Film Festival begins on September 8 in Canada, a film adaptation of a Nigerian play will be screened for audiences made up of actors, directors, producers, cinematographers, screen writers and sundry professionals in the film industry. The play is Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman directed by Biyi Bandele-Thomas for Ebony Life Media.
As most Nigerians and the rest of the world are now sadly aware, Bandele-Thomas passed on Sunday August 7 in Lagos. He will not be at TIFF to witness the reception – good or bad – of the drama he helped bring to life on screen. In 2013 when Half of Yellow Sun was screened at TIFF, the director, Bandele, was on hand to receive rave reviews and praises for his directorial debut. The film adaptation of Death and the King’s Horseman would have made it his second appearance at the famous film festival in all of North America. Not anymore!
Biyi’s death caught the literary community in Nigeria unawares. No one expected it and all were devastated by the announcement on Monday August 8 via his daughter Temi that his beloved father had passed on.
“Biyi was a prodigiously talented writer and filmmaker, as well as a loyal friend and beloved father,” Temi wrote. “He was a storyteller to his bones, with an unblinking perspective, singular voice and wisdom which spoke boldly through all of his art, in poetry, novels, plays and on screen. He told stories which made a profound impact and inspired many all over the world. His legacy will live on through his work.”
THEWILL couldn’t resist asking some of his colleagues what they remember of the prodigiously talented writer, director and photographer. In his response, Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, senior journalist, writer and poet agrees with Bandele’s daughter. For one, they were both students of University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University.)
“He started out as Biyi Bandele-Thomas,” Uzoatu writes, “and shocked the literary world with his amazing precocity. He was admitted to my alma-mater Great Ife (University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University) after I had graduated from the school where Professor Wole Soyinka was our Head of Department. He won the International Student Playwriting Competition with his play “Rain,” and travelled to London to receive the prize and did not return to his studies at Ife. He then published his first novel The Man Who Came In From The Back Of Beyond. He made a great career of publishing novels, writing and directing plays, undertaking still photography, and making movies. He earned plaudits for his theatrical work on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the filmic rendition of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half Of A Yellow Sun, and a Yoruba language adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s Death And The King’s Horseman entitled Elesin Oba – The King’s Horseman scheduled to premiere at Toronto International Film Festival this year.”
Like most of his compatriots, Uzoatu says that hearing of Bandele’s death was such a shock. “It was such a shock hearing of the death of the all-round man of the arts I fondly called Boy Biyi. We always had our animated discussions on all aspects of the arts in the Surulere, Lagos home of our mutual friend Adewale Maja-Pearce. I 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 that he always posted on Facebook. I met him in London when I went to take a BBC short story prize, and he wondered that I was so unassuming unlike other Nigerian writers who printed “Writer” on their complimentary cards! He published my work in Homeland News that the venerable Tunde Fagbenle founded in London. Biyi passed away aged only 54, but he did enough work in his lifetime to ensure that he will never die.”
Toni Kan, writer, poet, PR man and now staff of Globacom, reminisced thusly on the tireless and total artist, insisting that most people remember Bandele as the director of Half of a Yellow Sun. “For many, their first reference to Biyi Bandele is as the director of Half of a Yellow Sun. But long before that novel and film and Chimamanda, we had known him as Biyi Bandele Thomas the Kafanchan born “fabu master” who dropped out of the University of Ife after winning an award in London.
“Biyi Bandele was, at heart, a story teller. His books, The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond and The Sympathetic Undertaker: and Other Dreams, both published in 1991 were dreamy and magically realistic books filled with fantastic tales and so the “fabu master” appellation. His critically acclaimed novel, Burma Boy (The King’s Rifle) which was about the experiences of African soldiers in World War 11 showed Biyi at the height of his storytelling abilities. Aside novels, he also wrote plays successfully adapting Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to the stage but it was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun that brought him to the attention of a whole new audience and who came to know him as Biyi Bandele sans Thomas and not as a novelist or playwright but as a film director.”
For Helon Habila, professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University Fairfax in Virginia, Biyi’s death was as shocking as it was unbelievable. Speaking with THEWILL midweek from his base in the U.S., he asked whether it was true that Bandele had died.
“I have been following him on his Instagram page where he used to post his professional photo shots of Lagos,” Helon recalled to the newspaper. “I even saw some of them on Saturday and they are truly brilliant.” The following Sunday, Bandele was dead.
From his base in Canada where they would no doubt have met at TIFF had Bandele been alive, another professor of African Studies, Nduka Otiono, wrote in his Facebook account how he never met with the late filmmaker despite several attempts.
“I never met Biyi Bandele but we got to share some close conversations about life and art, off and on,” Otionoi reminisced. During a visit to Nigeria in 2019 I tried to connect with him in Lagos but his long hours of shooting a film and my own demanding research schedules frustrated it. His passing on Sunday left me wondering what I could have missed in the last email he sent me. Without going into the other deeply personal details of the long mail, I’d like to share a slice of the prodigious work he was up to as a way of celebrating his life of commitment to the creative arts.”
The interchange between Otiono and Bandele is testament to the latter’s very busy schedule as a writer, director and poet, a tireless and total artist. “The past few weeks have been incredibly busy for me,” Bandele began by telling his friend and colleague in Canada. “Aside from working on Faraday Okoro’s directorial debut “Nigerian Prince” as an executive producer alongside Spike Lee, I am currently writing and directing a feature documentary on Fela Kuti for the BBC and the Toronto International documentary festival Hot Docs. I’ve also just finished writing my first novel since Burma Boy. “it’s called Gregory Conga, Lagos Area Boy and it took three years. To keep body and soul together during that time since my kind of fiction has never attracted big advance fees from publishers, they have always been written on spec) I have in that time been a resident artist at NYU and – currently – an arts-by-fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. I’ve also just been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to spend the 2019-2020 academic year carrying out research at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. These are all prestigious awards and I count myself fortunate.”
It is a common practice for writers to acquaint themselves with their works in progress, a novel or collection of poetry near completion, say, or one just begun. That was exactly what Bandele did in that one-paragraph piece to Otiono.
Concluding, Otiono says that “such was Biyi’s busy creative life and humility about his towering achievements. Realising that he did not add to the long list of his works-in-progress anything about Elesin Oba, his latest film adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, which is scheduled to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, suggests the many works he must have had in his creative foundry.”
For now, Bandele’s family and the literary community are left wondering what happened, why so soon, the same way families of professors Pius Adesanmi and Harry Garuba would have felt in March 2019 and February 2020. Pius was consumed in an Ethiopian airline crash in March of that year. As for Harry, it was leukemia that got him. Though Bandele’s family has not let on the cause of death, it was no less shocking to all as Pius’s and Harry’s – intellectual superstars and rising stars in the ever widening constellation of the Nigerian literary firmament cut down in their prime.
Pius was only 48. Harry was 61 and Biyi just 54.
Michael Jimoh is a Nigerian journalist with many years experience in print media. He is currently a Special Correspondent with THEWILL.
