So many moons ago, Islamic converts known as Malians passed through a town called Osogun on their way to many an expedition. They were usually in their thousands.
Osogun, at the time, was under the leadership of a king whose romance with Portuguese liquor was legendary. He was most times too drunk to rule, too drunk to walk unaided, so drunk that palace eunuchs had to carry him and too drunk to tell his left from his right on the day a seer came visiting to deliver a message of impending doom.
Long story short: he was useless.
Ajayi, the one his mother called Father because of his resemblance to her father, was one of the boys growing up in Osogun at the time this alcoholic sat on the throne. Before the seer’s visit, Ajayi’s sleep was ambushed by dreams, taken hostage by dreams about Osanyin, a Yoruba god, but the more Ajayi dreamt, the more confused he was about what the god was trying to reveal to him. His mother and sister’s inability to help him make sense of the situation left him convinced that things were about to fall apart, that doom was imminent.
The Malians’ prolonged presence in Osogun as his dreams intensified worried him and made him wonder whether they had something to do with his feelings. These Malians bought and sold slaves, but they always avoided taking slaves from Osogun because the town served as no more than a transit point for them.
Was this about to change?
The question troubled the young lad and helps drive the plot of Yoruba Boy Running, Biyi Bandele’s historical novel, which re-imagines the life and times of a great son of Yorubaland, Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, famed for, among other things, translating the Bible to Yoruba and creating the wrong impression that Esu and Satan are one and the same.
The novel is posthumously published, the second of Bandele’s works to be so released. The first was his Netflix adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, which was made in Yoruba and titled Eleshin Oba. He directed the movie for Mo Abudu’s Ebony Life Studios.
In Yoruba Boy Running, we encounter men proclaiming God’s greatness even as they behead their fellow men. We see men playing God and others eager to sell their conscience to gain the whole world. We see sons of the soil betraying the land of their birth and others simply being men; flawed and fallible.
The book also shows us love, betrayal, disloyalty, fanaticism, greed and how with the right support, what appears insurmountable becomes easy.
The novel raises several posers, one of them about the gods and their (in)ability to stop the slave trade and traders.
This novel does more than just re-imagine Ajayi’s life as a boy in Osogun and as an adult away from and back home, it also re-interprets Dandeson’s life. Dandeson was Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s son.
Yoruba Boy Running invites us to interrogate the culture and tradition of the Yoruba and their gods as we drink deep from the well of wisdom of these interesting and forward-looking people. It also shows us and reminds us of a part of the slave trade that is not often talked or written about. We have heard and read more about men who used Christianity to pillage Africa. Bandele’s Ajayi story raises the spectre of black men screaming “Allahu Akbar” while perpetuating evil.
This novel, with an opening scene that is lyrical, dramatic and humour-laced, shows us how Ajayi graduates from running for his dear life to running towards a fantastic future as a teacher, linguist, author, preacher, and more.
In a way, the novel is also a story of Lagos, the Lagos of the Dosunmu era and its place as a human trafficking hub as well as home for returned slaves known as Saro. We see a Lagos forcefully taken over by the British at gunpoint.
In Yoruba Boy Running, Biyi Bandele has left us an intricate, brilliant and exquisite novel, one that seals his place as a great mind and for this, we can’t but continue to remember his life marked by “running” from one artistic achievement and adventure to the other.
Olukorede S Yishau is the author of In The Name of Our Father, Vaults of Secrets and After The End. He is on X as @YishauOlukorede
