On Biyi Bandele
Since his unexpected death on 7 August 2022, a lot has been written about Biyi Bandele’s life and work by colleagues, friends, family and fans. How he started his writing career as a precocious 14-year-old, by winning an award, and how another writing award, the international student playscript competition award, which he won for his script Rain, took him to London in 1990. He hit the ground running once he got there, publishing his first novel, The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond, in 1991. This was followed by further novels and stage plays and radio plays. It is amazing how prolific he was; it is also amazing and how much of his earlier fiction and plays don’t get talked about much.
His output was as diverse as his subjects. Work about life in his new home in England sat alongside pieces about the Nigeria he left at quite a young age. He left before the inordinate lecturer strikes and school closures and the collapse of Nigeria’s education system, before the June 1992 election protests and the death of Moshood Abiola, before General Sani Abacha’s reign of terror and the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa. He left before most of the events that would become the go-to subject matter of a new generation of writers – writers who’d begin to come of age over a decade after Biyi left Nigeria – and because of that his subject matter is more diverse and eclectic, much harder to classify. His writing career began just before the rise of the celebrity African authors, the Caine prize, the big book deals, the celebrity media interviews; and he was lucky for that because he was spared all the noise and the distractions and the pressure that often comes with that kind of exposure.
And yet, to some of us, Biyi was not unnoticed. He was the name on our lips when he won his award and left the country to pursue his writing career; I guess we saw him as an exemplar, a possibility that one could make it solely on talent and hard work and ambition, in an environment that was becoming gradually darker and more restrictive. I particularly was inspired by him because of how much we had in common: I was born the same year as him, he was older than me by just one month, and like him I was born in the north, not more than a few hundred kilometers from where he was born in Kafanchan; he moved to Lagos to pursue his writing career, I did the same; he won an award and left Nigeria, I did the same; and we ended up making our home away from our country in order to become the writers we wanted to be. The only difference between us is that is break in writing came early while mine came relatively late – although we were the same age, I didn’t publish my first novel until over a decade after he published his.
I met Biyi for the first time when I went for the Caine Prize ceremony in London in 2001. His play Brixton Stories was being premiered and he kept a ticket for me and the other Caine Prize shortlistees. After that I was to meet him again about twice, the last time being over a decade ago. Like most people, I’d rediscover him through his movies and TV dramas: Half of a Yellow Sun, Fifty and Blood Sisters. A lot has been written about them.
What hasn’t been written about much is his photography, particularly the series he started posting to his Instagram in June, and only stopped about two days before his death on 7 August. He had been returning to Lagos and quietly taking these pictures, and now I can only describe them as Biyi’s last love letter to Lagos, his paean to a city we all love to hate. They capture a city that is loud, proud, brash, industrious, inventive, self-reliant, one foot stuck in tradition and the other stretched towards the modern. There are pictures of women shopping in the narrow corridors of Balogun Market, of children laughing, of handicapped athletes throwing around a ball, of young lovers looking directly into the camera. The pictures are accompanied by helpful, sometimes terse, often witty commentary by the artist. There are sunny days and cloudy days. There are people playing music on a roof, and beautiful twin sisters shyly look down from the camera, laughing. The pictures capture the mood and the atmosphere of these Lagos streets with the care and precision of a painting. Among the few pleasures of living away from home is that each return becomes a rediscovery. He was seeing them, these ordinary Nigerians, and making us see and rediscover them, just as he was.
Perhaps it was this joy of rediscovery that made him gravitate to classics like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which he adapted for the stage, and Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, which he adapted for the screen. Perhaps it was his way of trying to rediscover the past, almost as if, having missed most of his country’s recent history, nothing would satisfy him beyond going all the way into the distant past depicted in these works. His most ambitious novel, Burma Boy, is one such excavation, set in an inflection point in Africa’s history. In it he painted a picture of ordinary Nigerians, like his own father and my father, who fought for Britain in Burma, one of the Second World War’s bloodiest theatres; a war they didn’t understand and in which, despite the discriminations and humiliations, they still managed to acquit themselves with honour and dignity.
Biyi’s last film, we are told, is an adaptation of Soyinka’s tragedy, Death and the King’s Horseman, for Netflix. How ironic that his last work is a rumination on death, and how sometimes the pleasures of this world can interfere with our sense of duty. Elesin Oba, horseman to the recently deceased king, must hurry and join his king in the great hereafter, for the very health of the universe depends on this. But the horseman is, alas, sidetracked by the pleasures of this world, including wine and women, leading to unimaginable catastrophe. And yet, the horseman is able to redeem himself, to some degree, in the end. Perhaps, what the play is showing us is the possibility of such redemption and self-reinvention, that art is never a straightforward journey but one filled with twists and turns. But that it is okay to falter sometimes, that is what it means to be human.
If Biyi’s life as an artist taught us anything, it is the possibility, and the necessity, of such self-reinvention. There’s so much unfettered joy and freedom in these street photographs. The artist’s gaze is turned away from any outward expectation and is firmly fixed on what is in front of him in an expressive, pure and honest way. Through each eye in these pictures the artist is looking back at the viewer, saying, ‘I see you.’
