Biyi Bandele: A Multifaceted Legacy in Literature and Film

Biyi Bandele (born Biyi Bandele-Thomas; 13 October 1967 – 7 August 2022) was a Nigerian author, dramatist, and filmmaker. He penned multiple novels, starting with The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond (1991), and composed stage plays before shifting his attention to directing films. His first directorial effort came in 2013 with Half of a Yellow Sun, adapted from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2006 novel of the same name.

Early Life
Bandele was born to Yoruba parents in Kafanchan, Kaduna State, northern Nigeria, in 1967. His father, Solomon Bandele-Thomas, was a veteran of the Burma Campaign in World War II when Nigeria was still under British rule. In a 2013 interview with This Day, Bandele spoke of his aspiration to become a writer: "When I was a child, I recall that war often came up in conversations with my father... That was likely one of the factors that drove me to become a writer." At the age of 14, he won a short story contest.

Bandele spent his first 18 years in the north-central part of the country before relocating to Lagos in southwestern Nigeria. In 1987, he studied drama at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, having already started working on his debut novel. He won the 1989 International Student Playscript competition with an unpublished play, Rain, before securing the 1990 British Council Lagos Award for a poetry collection.

In 1990, at 22, he moved to London, carrying the manuscripts of two novels. In 1991, his first novel, The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond, was published, followed by The Sympathetic Undertaker: and Other Dreams. He received a commission from the Royal Court Theatre. In 1992, he was awarded a bursary from the Arts Council of Great Britain to continue his writing.

Career
Writing
Bandele’s literary work spanned fiction, theatre, journalism, television, film, and radio.

He collaborated with London's Royal Court Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) while also writing radio dramas and television screenplays. His plays include: Rain; Marching for Fausa (1993); Resurrections in the Season of the Longest Drought (1994); Two Horsemen (1994), selected as Best New Play at the 1994 London New Plays Festival; Death Catches the Hunter and Me and the Boys (published together in one volume, 1995); and Oroonoko, an adaptation for the RSC of Aphra Behn's 17th-century novel of the same title. In 1997, Bandele successfully dramatized Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart. Brixton Stories, Bandele's stage adaptation of his novel The Street (1999), premiered in 2001 and was published in one volume with his play Happy Birthday Mister Deka, which premiered in 1999. He also adapted Lorca's play Yerma in 2001.

Bandele served as writer-in-residence with Talawa Theatre Company from 1994 to 1995, resident dramatist with the Royal National Theatre Studio (1996), and the Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, in 2000–01. He was also the Royal Literary Fund Resident Playwright at the Bush Theatre from 2002 to 2003.

Bandele wrote about the influence of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), which he watched on a rented television set in a railway town in northern Nigeria:

"And so although I had yet to set foot outside Kafanchan, although I knew nothing about postwar British society, or the Angry Young Men, or anything about Osborne when I met Jimmy Porter on the screen... there was no need for introductions: I had known Jimmy all my life."

Bandele's novels, including The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond (1991) and The Street (1999), have been praised as "rewarding reads, blending wild surrealism and wit with political engagement". His 2007 novel, Burma Boy, was described by Tony Gould in The Independent as "a fine achievement" that gave a voice to previously unheard Africans.

At the time of his passing, Bandele was working on a new novel titled Yorùbá Boy Running, which was originally slated for release in 2023 but later rescheduled for July 2024. The novel, featuring an introduction by Wole Soyinka, was partly inspired by the life of Bandele's great-grandfather, who, like the novel's protagonist Samuel Ajayi Crowther, had been formerly enslaved.

Helon Habila, reviewing Yorùbá Boy Running in The Guardian (London), wrote: "The fictional Crowther's tale, as well as the real-life one, is a remarkable saga of perseverance, dedication, and triumph over adversity... What Bandele brings to this well-known narrative is his ability to gradually and meticulously build his protagonist's character, not just as the public figure recognized by 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 editors have done a superb job of organizing and signposting the different sections with dates and thematic headings, making it easier to follow the sometimes intricate chronology of the narrative. We are fortunate and thankful that the author was able to leave us with this capstone to his illustrious, though shortened, career that began long ago in Kafanchan, Nigeria, when he began his journey towards a distinguished future in distant London."