No Nigerian writer has courted and flirted with danger and death like Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka but the abiding irony is that among his peers, he is the one who has lived the longest.
His 90 long years on earth have been defined by fearlessness and a fecund zest for life.
Awam Amkpa’s film, The Man Died based on the memoir of the same title attempts to show us where that fearlessness and joie de vivre comes from. The film shares in its opening minutes a quote that is attributed to Wole Soyinka’s grandfather – Death is never the end of a man, fear is.
In the kernel of that aphorism lies the answer to Soyinka’s fearlessness and seeming disdain for personal safety in the sacrifices he has made over the years for the common good akin to the role of Eman aka The Carrier in his play The Strong Breed.
Possessed of a keen nose for sniffing out injustice, Wole Soyinka is not one to let it lie and in playing that role he has become in many ways the conscience of the Nigerian nation. In prison an officer confronts him with a direct – “Why are you always disturbing the peace of the nation?”
In another scene with bosom friends Bola Ige (Temilolu Fosudo) and Femi Johnson (Abraham Amkpa), Soyinka’s passion for action elicits a sarcastic “then go back to the campus and write a play about it” from Bola Ige.
Awam Amkpa’s film runs for about two hours. Based loosely on Soyinka’s prison memoirs, it takes certain narrative liberties in the service of dramatic intensity.
Amkpa’s directing is light and deft and in the end presents us with a film that does not drag or flag with two hours zipping by swiftly. In doing so, he also succeeds in avoiding the Nollywood propensity for melodramatic telling instead of evocative showing.
The Man Died conveys the mood of the book, evoking as it does the cause of the war and Soyinka’s subsequent involvement and in doing this, Awam employs “voices on the radio” as technique. This device does not only provide authenticity but propels the narrative while ultimately providing context around the first coup, the counter coup, the pogroms, secession and military action which in the voice of General Yakubu Gowon was “necessary if the territorial integrity of the nation is threatened.”
The Man Died is a film that compels you, especially as a Nigerian, to pay attention to the seasons of anomie that have blighted the nation called Nigeria especially as it concerns tribalism, religion and language even as Soyinka makes the point that “I am sufficiently blind to tribe, religion or tongue.”
Considered from this perspective, The Man Died becomes a necessary and needed historical primer of Nigeria’s brutal civil war but it is to the director’s credit that it is a piece of art that does not descend into crass propaganda, hagiography or mere proselytizing.
A good example is Soyinka’s meeting with Victor Banjo (William Idakwo) and Phillip Alale which provides historical context that is important in understanding why Banjo ended up at the stakes having been accused by Ojukwu of treason despite spearheading Biafra’s lightning speed capture of Benin City.
The narrative balance is achieved mostly thanks to the excellent script by Bode Asiyanbi and the superb casting. AMVCA winner, Wale Ojo is brilliant as Wole Soyinka. In character, he is playful, politically engaged, flirty, and given to “vampiric tendencies.” In prison, he does not shy away, like Elesin Oba in Death and the Kings Horseman, from partaking in surreptitious “last suppers” with the well-cast Morenike played by Segilola Ogidan.
The director, Awam AmkpaYisa, the E-branch officer played by acclaimed actor and academic, Sam Dede is another stand-out member of the cast. Engaged throughout the film in a pun-filled cat and mouse game of interrogation with his detainee, he is at once sly and conniving, menacing and ingratiating but ultimately dangerous with a sadistic bent. The scene where Soyinka’s wife Laide (Christinah Oshunniyi) visits him in prison will leave you traumatized. In the film, Awam Amkpa leads us to an explosive climax between the two something I do not remember reading in the book, but which works excellently in film.
Bola Ige and Femi Johnson, bosom friends to Wole Soyinka are well represented in the movie as thermostats for regulating his impulsive need for action.
The profile shot of Biafran leader, Emeka Odimegwu Ojukwu (Similoluwa Hassan) is uncannily reminiscent of the real personage while Kelvin Mary is spot on, especially also in profile, as Christopher Okigbo.
Ropo Ewenla nails his short but scene-stealing turn as the sly Olusegun Obasanjo. The scene where he digs into the folds of his agbada to extricate a kolanut is the stuff of memes.
The comic interludes are well timed and executed. When Soyinka is discovered providing advice to a fellow detainee the guard sneers – “you are inside prison and you are counseling someone”
There are also morsels of humour to be filched in the attempt by the Superintendent (Norbert Young) to beef up his credentials. “I fought in Congo. If you don’t believe me go and ask the late Aguiyi Ironsi.”
The only issue with the casting lies in the voices. Christopher Okigbo had a thick Igbo accent which is completely missing. Wale Ojo mimics to some successful degree Wole Soyinka’s clipped British accents same for the actor who plays Ojukwu but they could have done better.
Another issue is that the dramatic boon presented by the three-car-convoy when Soyinka meets Obasanjo is not fully mined. It could have been expanded into a more dramtic car chase.
But these are niggardly concerns.
The meeting between Okigbo and Soyinka is poignant and evocative and goose bump inducing. Watching from a position of historical awareness, Okigbo’s “a man’s got to do what he’s got to do” is “onion-cutting” moving.
Femi Odugbemi who produced the film for Zuri24 has noted in interviews that in making the film they strove for “historical and cultural accuracy” as a film that speaks to “to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of oppression.”
While that aim is achieved to a large extent especially in prison where the costume and make up department deserve kudos for their ability to convey Soyinka’s physical decline on account of his hunger strike but it also opens the film to deeper scrutiny. The cars, for instance, are all left hand drives in a period piece which takes place at a time when it was not so.
The Man Died is important as a historical testament of a nation told from the point of view of a writer, activist and politically engaged intellectual who has interrogated the failings of the Nigerian state for over a half century. It is also important for providing context around the most disruptive incident in Nigeria’s history especially in the face of the persistent erasure of the subject from our educational curriculum.
