YORÙBÁ BOY RUNNING

Time and space are willfully shifted around in this historical fiction inspired by the life of a Nigerian-born man who, after having been enslaved, became a clergyman, linguist, and abolitionist in the 19th century.

Samuel Àjàyí Crowther (ca. 1809-1891) set an astonishingly triumphant example for his fellow West Africans in his rich, accomplished lifetime. After he was freed from Portuguese slavers by Britain’s Royal Navy and left in Sierra Leone, he added the first and last names to the one he’d had from birth, studied languages, and was eventually ordained an Anglican minister. He translated the Bible and other church texts into Yoruba, became the first African bishop of the Anglican Church, and campaigned against the slave trade throughout his life. This posthumously published novel by Bándélé (1967-2022), who was also a celebrated playwright and filmmaker in his native Nigeria, presents an impressionistic, mostly nonlinear narrative of this extraordinary life, beginning with Àjàyí’s childhood in his hometown of Óṣogún just before it is laid siege by the “Malian swordmen” who sold its thousands of residents into slavery. He tells his mother of a premonition he had of a god of “health and well-being” looking malarial, a sign of troubles ahead. Bándélé imposes his own imaginative resources on this and subsequent events of Crowther’s life. Only occasionally do Bándélé’s imaginative projections lead him to an anachronism—“We have heard of white men who turned the ocean into a highway,” Ájàyí’s mother tells him early on—but not often enough to obstruct the novel’s rich stew of historical perspective, storytelling brio, and humane insight. He shows as much acumen in staging conversations between the older, much-traveled Crowther and the people of his erstwhile homeland as he does in rendering a real-life meeting Crowther had with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, whom he holds spellbound when he recites the Lord’s Prayer in Yoruba. The novel’s collagelike approach to Crowther’s story not only gives a rich sense of the dimensions of his achievement, but also offers a keener, broader perspective as to the nature of African slavery and those who were complicit in its execution, making Bándélé as effective a historian as he was a dramatist.

You’ll leave this book fulfilled in knowledge of its main subject, yet still yearning to know more.