‘He knew this was going to be the last story he wrote’: the epic legacy of literary maverick Biyi Bándélé

In early August 2022, Biyi Bándélé had a conversation with his editor, Hannah Chukwu, about the novel he was working on, Yorùbá Boy Running, after which he sent her a revised version of the manuscript. On the following day, the 54-year-old film-maker, playwright and novelist took his own life, leaving behind an impressive and strikingly varied body of work: the film adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which took seven years to make; stage versions of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Lorca’s Yerma; poetry, screenplays and several novels including 2007’s Burma Boy, which told the story of his father’s harrowing and brutal experiences as a British army soldier in the second world war. His was a talent unrestrained by genre, medium, geography or period.

Yorùbá Boy Running tells the story of Samuel Àjàyí Crowther, whose life spanned the 19th century and took him from abduction and enslavement, via abandonment in Sierra Leone, back to Nigeria and a life in the clergy that ended with him becoming the first black bishop to be ordained by the Anglican church. In his foreword to the book, the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, whose play Death and the King’s Horseman was Bándélé’s final film adaptation, points to the intensely imaginative and vivid approach the novelist took to his subject. His “mix of the anecdotal, archival and inquisitional” style parts company, says Soyinka, with “the slave narratives to which we are more accustomed. It disorientates, yet inducts one, at a most primary level of intimacy, and even self-identification, into the realities of capture, enslavement and displacement; eases one deftly into a milieu of the slaving occupation as an existential norm, and one that was near inextricably intertwined with the trajectory of colonialism in west Africa.”

The actor and novelist Paterson Joseph first encountered Bándélé when he was cast as the lead character, Busi, in Bándélé’s 1993 television play Not Even God Is Wise Enough, which was directed by Danny Boyle. Busi is “a sort of Billy Liar figure”, explains Joseph, in and out of trouble and taking refuge in a fantasy life. “Those stories that we went through, and the world that he inhabits, is a world of the absurd, which was very surprising when you think about 1993, how few black protagonists we had on British television that weren’t cliched in some way. This character had a real sadness about him and yet he was very, very funny because of his bewilderment about the world. He’s a man in search of his father, in basic terms, and he’s also a boy, really, in search of himself.” Joseph recalls a scene in which Busi is in a subterranean public lavatory and, apparently, encounters Dr Livingstone; another in a courtroom, where he wanders across the lawyers’ benches. “There’s something about his writing,” says Joseph. “It’s sort of maverick: it knows the rules, but it wants to disobey the rules to see what happens.”

Bándélé’s daughter Temi is an artist who has just graduated with a first from Ruskin College in Oxford. Part of her portfolio, she and her mother, the producer Andrea Calderwood, tell me, is a steel sculpture called “Ajebutter”, a Nigerian expression for a child who’s slightly spoiled. Laughing, Calderwood remembers Bándélé warning her against putting butter in Temi’s food when she was being weaned lest she turn into an ajebutter. She also recalls the couple bringing a just-born Temi on to the red carpet at Cannes when one of Andrea’s films was featured at the festival: “People still ask me, ‘How’s the baby?’ Such a strong image of Temi there in her pouch. I say, ‘She’s 22.’ That’s how people remember us. But it didn’t really cross our minds that that was an unusual thing to do, to take Temi with us. For me, it was fantastic. Biyi really encouraged me to be brave about that.”

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Temi recalls her father exhorting her to read, watch and listen from as wide a cultural palette as possible from a very young age. When she was a schoolchild, he would – unbeknown to her – submit pieces of her creative writing to competitions; as a young man, after he had left his home town of Kafanchan in northern Nigeria for Lagos, he had done the same for himself. More recently, Temi would help with his research, borrowing books from the London Library and then dispatching them to him wherever he was.

Bándélé lived in numerous places, often photographing and documenting life from New York, Lagos and Brixton. Calderwood has been struck by his focus on the multiple strands in Samuel Àjàyí Crowther’s life, and relates it to Bándélé’s own sense of himself: “That’s something that’s struck us lately, going back through the story of his life, and going back through the photographs: all the different identities that Biyi embodied. And I think that’s something that he always wanted to impart to Temi, that everything’s possible.”

It’s a sentiment that’s echoed by Bándélé’s longtime friend and the outgoing artistic director of the Young Vic, Kwame Kwei-Armah: “It’s his searing intellect and his inability to want to compromise on form or message. When many of us were very specifically black or very specifically British, he was really global in that he was Nigerian and he was British and he looked at the world in an expansive way, so that identity wasn’t a kind of narrow binary. The play that changed nearly everything for me was his adaptation of Aphra Behn [in 1999]. That was a perfect combination of dramaturgical rigor and poetic heart, at a time where we were not used to all of those things coming out of a black mind. I just remember seeing it at the RSC, and then listening years later to the recording that the BBC made. He’d written with such an insight into the human spirit.”

Chiwetel Ejiofor, who starred in Half of a Yellow Sun and who narrates the audiobook of Yorùbá Boy Running, also speaks of Bándélé’s penchant for weaving together different registers in his work, sometimes drawing on melodrama and soap opera to narrate difficult experiences, always playing with light and shade: “Pre-civil war, post-independence Nigeria was a very specific area that Biyi was interested in, it spoke to him quite profoundly. The philosophical, intellectual dynamics that were at play at that time in Nigeria influenced him and he was very excited to explore that. He also brought with him a certain humour and distinct aesthetic that I think is interesting – and very surprising.”

Related: Yorùbá Boy Running by Biyi Bándélé review – a historic hero

When Temi was about five, there was an exhibition of Benin bronzes to which her father took her, along with a camping stool and paper and pencils; he sat her down to draw them. It’s evident from all she and Andrea tell me that creativity was Bándélé’s key mode for interpreting and understanding the world. “Yorùbá Boy Running is an epic novel,” Calderwood says. “And I think he lived his life on a grand scale.”

I ask them whether they think that his creative restlessness, his constant search for the next artistic challenge, would have allowed him to be happy with the completed novel, given his death by suicide. Temi believes so: “He knew it was going to be the last words that he was writing. And you can really feel the energy of that; he knew that this was going to be the last story that he wrote. And he made sure that we knew that it was finished, and he made it very clear that he wanted it to be published.”

What do they hope for this final work? “He really wanted it to be the beginning of multiple conversations that would happen when he wasn’t here,” says Temi. “I think he was ready to give that to the world.”

Calderwood adds: “He started writing at 13, so he had been writing for 40 years. And he’d achieved so much in that time with his novels and his plays and his films, he had told so many stories. I love the way that Temi’s putting it: this was the conversation that he wanted to start, because conversation with Biyi could be endless.”

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

• Yorùbá Boy Running by Biyi Bándélé is published by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply