Biyi Bandele-Thomas 
68
BIYIBANDELE-THOMAS: 
An Undertaker or a dreamer? 
Clapham Junction - since there were at 
least three similarly named stations in 
the area - half submerged by tall shrubs 
and the rear elevations of typical 
architectures, not only in this southern 
part of London but also for the most of 
the city. Now, we can only imagine that 
this backdrop and its incessant offstage 
noise of rail movements would be a 
constant source of inspiration for him. 
Biyi's seat is thus inclined in such a 
manner that its backrest points in this 
direction. 
He wakes up late each morning, maybe 
because he also comes in late each 
evening: early morning phone calls to 
the apartment were replied to with grunts 
of a sleep-dazed voice. 
And then after about the tenth hour of 
the day he either poured himself a glass 
of orange juice or some tea, which is to 
say nothing of the cigarettes which were 
out of Biyi's lips only when he was 
asleep, and faced up to his writing table 
and chair in order to drive himself into 
some creative writing. And this, I heard 
not only Biyi complain, but many other 
writers I rubbed minds with in Britain, 
was the most dreadful part of the life of 
full-time creative writers - the 
compulsion to write. If you live by 
writing then it leaves no room to wait 
for moods that would favour creativity. 
Inspiration or the lack of it becomes 
insignificant often. Especially when you 
begin to get successful and commissions 
are coming your way. Biyi for example 
told me that he has been booked up till 
1996, faced with a procession of 
commissions for the theatres, 
broadcasting stations and publishers. 
These fortunately (?) always come in 
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of his first film for BBC Television that 
we watched in his Battcrsea home; titled 
DAPO ADENIYI 
Even God is Not Wise Enough which 
has scenes shot in some of London's 
tube stations, echoes of the rail drums 
that surround Biyi Bandele-Thomas in 
this his writing chamber scarcely can be 
found in any of his writing , most of 
which were composed in the setting I 
have described. 
But there was an irresistible aspect of 
his life to notice that, fortunately can be 
found repeatedly replicated in his 
creative-works.This is thedisorderlincss 
of Biyi's house! My first visit met him 
scrubbing, moving tables, knocking 
down beds, tumbling books down from 
their high wall shelves. To enter his 
kitchen we had to climb up on heaps of 
household utensils, disused cans 
abandoned along the way, most 
obstructively. He assured me thai he 
was only trying to rearrange the house. 
change the position of tables, beds anil 
chairs. He paid, I thought, a 
disproportionate amount of time 
cleaning cobwebs, dust and spider's 
tracks from window panes and door 
lintels. But on my second visit, a couple 
of days afterwards, I was welcomed by 
a much similar visage except that, this 
time the former movements had been 
successfully completed and a new set of 
movements embarked upon. Rugs were 
crowded by shoes and heaps of personal 
effects as before. In his recent play 
produced by the Gate Theatre on 
Pembroke Road in mid July titled Two 
Horsemen, he opens with this 
description of the habitation of his two 
characters: 
'A room somewhere: adirty, scrap filled 
certainly seen kinder days. A kerosene 
stove, pots and plates. A hurricane lamp 
and newspapers flung carelessly 
everywhere. A coin-operated telephone 
is situated by the door'. (Amber Lane 
Press, Oxford, 1994) 
This is not really peculiar to him: most 
artists invariably write, paint or carve 
themselves into their works. And as 
Nadine Gordimer recently wrote in her 
tribute to Wole Soyinka, all the works 
of any particular author arc essentially 
only one story, resumed from work to 
work, even cutting through the edges of 
genres and in some cases, arts forms. In 
Biyi's case, acharacter( which we would 
suspect to be his very self) reoccurs, in 
thin veils, similarly from novel to novel. 
The Sympathetic Undertaker's hero 
(Heinemann, 1991) and The Man Who 
Came in From the Back of Beyond's 
(Heinemann, 1991) are in this same 
sense variations of the same person. 
These heroes peter out into two persons 
in the play Two Horsemen except that 
here they significantly depart from the 
characteristic legacies of ihe previous 
hcrocscvcn though we must still suggest, 
not significantly enough to severe their 
umbilical link with the others. Biyi 
himself or indeed some other 
enthusiastic reviewer might want to 
contest this claim on the grounds that 
Two Horsemen indeed must have 
preceded the novels and so, the 
protagonists of the play namely Banza 
and Lagbaja are older creations than 
Rayo in The Sympathetic Undertaker 
and Pithcanthropus or Early Man or 
Maude Beso Maude in The Man Who 
Came in the Back of Beyond, bearing 
in mind that it was the earlier version of 
this play that took Bandele-Thomas to 
review 
69
England in 1990 when it won a college 
drama competition and also earned a 
grant for its production. What this simply 
adds up to then would be to reverse the 
chronology of our earlier submission 
that Rayo and Maude breathed 
themselves into Banza and Lagbaja to 
now say that it was Banza and Lagbaja 
that transferred some of their own 
essential traits to Rayo first and then to 
Maude. But let us prove our case of 
similarities between Biyi's heroes. Rayo 
is the wild child archetype who pours 
disdain on all known traditions, he is 
brilliant and given to asking profound if 
embarrassing questions from his mother. 
He is also a literary eccentric who delves 
at every opportunity into giving 
narration from his favourite literature 
books to his younger brother (the 
nameless storyteller) who is 
disinterested. In the end, Rayo runs mad, 
not unexpectedly, and the bulk of the 
book takes the form of recapitulations 
from his past told to the story-teller. 
Maude, a literature teacher is however 
already pronounced mad by his students 
who watch all his eccentric mannerisms 
and receive his bombastic literature 
discourse with amusements. 
Maude however picks interest in the 
story-teller (a student in his fifth-form) 
and lures him to his teacher's quarters 
on the school compound and proceeds 
first to tell him gory tales about himself 
and then even more appalling tales of 
his own invention. Banza and Lagbaja 
however are equally bizarre but share 
none of the intellectual bents of the 
earlier two except in their language and 
in the very world which they inhabit 
that are as other-worldly as Rayo and 
Maude. To put it straight, Banza and 
Lagbaja are anonymous persons, 
perhaps non-existent persons who only 
inhabit the edge of each other's 
imagination. In some stage through the 
play we read where one character 
introduces himself to his neighbour: 'I 
am your father.' And then suddenly he 
is not so sure anymore. He tells him yet 
again that, 'I shot you and you died.' 
Again he begins to doubt if he shot him 
dead but corrects himself in time and 
says 'Oh you resurrected.' 
Biyi told me much about himself that I 
see played out in his drama, his novels 
and in his BBC film. He had grown up 
in Kafanchan in northern Nigeria, born 
to frequently bickering Yoruba parents 
(one an Ijebu, the other Egba) who 
would pick each other up and abuse 
each other as 'you bloody Ijebu' or'you 
bloody Egba', thus occasionally 
prompting the children to cut in and ask 
which was their own identity: Egba or 
Ijebu! 
He also had exciting childhood 
escapades climbing up mango trees and 
once in a while breaking the heads of 
unwary wayfarers. Are we then surprised 
to find this duplicated in Rayo and his 
junior brother (the story-teller's) life? 
Not only this, his mother was a devoted 
member of the church of the Cherubim 
and Seraphim, which predictably, Biyi 
himself attended through his childhood 
years in Kafanchan. 
The film,£f«ji GodisNot Wise Enough 
which is an expose on the life of British 
Nigerians in the city of London has 
scenes taken from services of the 
Cherubim and Seraphim Church in 
England - obviously informed by 
materials from his own background back 
home. He confirmed this to me however 
and said: 
'I am fascinated by these people. No 
doubts because of my own mother." 
This film, like Biyi's drama boasted of 
no plot, no real story-line. The main 
character is a British-born Nigerian who 
is only trying to scrape a living from his 
entitlements with the social security 
department. But as is characteristic of 
Biyi, he has no real identity in the end 
but is only living out the fantasies about 
himself created in the world of his own 
imaginations. He runs into an apparition 
(a young Nigerian girl) in the 
underground trains, imagines himself 
crowned in a pop-house gig, his dream 
girl beside him, obstructs traffic and is 
brought to answer charges against him 
in a London court-room, tells the court 
and j u r y off and climbs up tables 
stomping out into the street in spite of 
the hot pursuits of the police. 
Finally he weds his apparition who also 
commits suicide under a Bakerloo 
couch, goes to visit his heart-broken 
father on his death-bed (the actor playing 
this role, Biyi told me, was actually 
dying of AIDS in real life, although it 
was unknown to Biyi and other crew 
members at the time of the shooting, 
and the man has now died since. Let me 
add in this parenthesis as well that I was 
to meet another sufferer from the AIDS 
virus in the company of Biyi on 
Nottinghill High Road, an actor as well; 
Biyi assured me that he was now waiting 
patiently only for the ultimate moment.) 
Biyi's film, though lacking in the usual 
symmetry of a linear story-line, is a 
statement on the trials of the Nigerian 
youth, especially the British-born who 
has to adapt to the vagaries of an 
alternative society in Britain and faces 
conflicts more within himself than with 
the society that in one sense appears 
considerate and in another, cold and 
anonymous. 
The film which was neither a serial nor 
a series but was only one late night 
broadcast spoke, as I said, by means of 
unrelated snap-shots from the thoughts 
and day-dreams of a man on a personal 
trial. It was also a commercial success 
in a way, like Biyi's earlier play 
produced at the Royal Court Theatre on 
Sloane square titled, Marching For 
Fausa. The budget for the film which 
BBC television mopped up was a 
staggering 600,000 pounds. The second 
movie, Bad Boys would cost BBC as 
much. 
Asked about how he has been coping 
with his alienation from the Nigerian 
society and culture, he said he has had to 
face this problem even back in Nigeria. 
On his return to south-west Nigeria from 
the north, family friends and relations. 
70
he recollects, were quick to adopt the 
unsettling epithet 'Molla' him, meaning 
'Mallam'. Which was a comment of 
cultural and social alienation. 
With the ever-enlarging community of 
Nigerians in Great Britain and even the 
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Africa, this was useful for local and and popular annual event in Harare 
and the 1994 Fair was no exception. It 
has been described as a 'crossroads for 
world literary cultures' and is rapidly 
expanding in terms of breadth of 
participation and trade opportunity. The 
facts are as follows: two hundred and 
twenty-six exhibitors, four hundred 
publishers represented, thirty-eight 
countries represented, one thousand 
and one hundred trade visitors on trade 
days, and estimated business transacted 
- over Z$2 million. 
Two traders-only days were introduced 
last year, after suggestions were put 
forward in 1993, to facilitate the setting 
up of contacts and the transaction of 
business which is surely one of the 
central aims of a book fair. The fact 
that thirty-three thousand members of 
the public visited the ZIBF may be 
impressive, but the real success of the 
fair should be judged by what came out 
of it in concrete publishing terms, by 
the results of the activities and events 
that were organized. These were 
extensive: 
ZIBF served as the venue for an 
African Publishers Network (APNET) 
Board meeting. Such meetings are vital, 
given the diverse geographical 
locations of its members. 
The APNET Publishing Resource 
Centre was officially launched. 
APNET has been compiling its own 
transformation of parts of cosmopolitan 
London to an extension of Nigeria, a 
writer like Biyi has useful reminders of 
life at home almost on a daily basis, 
coupled with the vast library he has 
managed to keep for himself. He is 
equally undaunted by the uneasy feeling 
unique collection. This was shipped to 
Harare last year. 
Forty-two South African publishers 
were represented - an appropriate influx 
following the political events in that 
country. They included multinationals, 
independent presses and small 
innovative publishers. The opening up 
of South Africa and the spreading 
of its publishing wings beyond its 
borders must impact on African 
publishing soon. Contact with 
South African publishers should 
make this a positive and effective 
3] Friday 28 July — Saturday 5 August impact. 
The First African Rights Indaba 
was held on the twodays preceding 
the fair. This was a crucial meeting . 
which should practically affect 
African publishing in terms of 
rights protection and trading in 
rights and licences. Publishers were 
strongly encouraged to look into 
selling rights overseas as well as 
buying the rights to publish 
overseas books here. ZIBF '95 will 
host a buyers/ sellers meeting and 
there are also plans for a Phase 
Two Indaba. 
A Writers' Workshop was held to 
support the theme of Science and 
Technology. Its title was 
Accessible Science and tackled 
the problems of the writer in 
verbalizing complex scientific. 
of producing almost exclusively for a 
foreign world and culture, seeing that 
the whole universe itself is merging, 
metamorphosing into one unitary and 
homogeneous fold, more anxious than 
ever to learn about life in lands beyond 
their immediate surroundings. [GR! 
regional writers whose books need to 
be relevant but also professional. 
The Fair was visited by a twenty-sevenperson 
British publishers' outward 
mission which was en route to South 
Africa. This will result in more 
international publicity. IGRI 
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ia 
ZIBf 95 
Applications are invited for 
participation in the 1995 ZIBF 
sponsored exhibitors programme. 
Applicants should be prepared to 
participate in a full 3-year 
development programme during 
which their participation at the 
ZIBF will be on a sliding scale 
ranging from total sponsorship to 
waiving of stand fees only. 
Interested parties can obtain 
application forms from: 
ZIBF 
78 Kaguvi Street 
Harare 
Zimbabwe. 
Early application is advised to 
avoid disappointment. 
II 
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