When Nigerian filmmaker, Biyi Bandele, died in August 2022, the cause of his death was not disclosed.
Then, his daughter Temi Bandele, announced that he died at the age of 54.
However, fresh facts have emerged that the UK-based writer and theater enthusiast took his own life.
In a report published on October 13, The Guardian UK reported that Bandele committed suicide a day after he 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 filmmaker, playwright and novelist took his own life,” the newspaper reported.
It continued, “He left 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.”
Temi told the newspaper that she believes her father was content with his last work, ‘Yorùbá Boy Running’.
She said he knew it was going to be his last words. “And you can really feel the energy of that,” Temi said.
“He wanted it to be the beginning of multiple conversations that would happen when he wasn’t here.”
Bandele’s final film is an adaptation of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s play, Death and the King’s Horseman.
It explores real-life events in the 1940s Oyo Kingdom in West Africa, in which the king’s horseman was required by tradition to die by ritual suicide and follow the Alaafin (ruler of Oyo) into the afterlife.
Bandele, in a tragic twist, did not live to see the release of perhaps his most triumphant film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September, a month after the director’s death at the age of just 54.
He was buried in Lagos, Nigeria.
Bandele’s sudden death shocked the literary and film communities. He was mourned by family, colleagues and friends worldwide.
The writer was born on October 13, 1967 in Kafanchan, Southern Kaduna to parents from Abeokuta, Ogun State.
Bandele was studying dramatic arts at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Ile Ife, when he won the BBC Playwriting Competition, and thereafter relocated to England where he had a flourishing career as a writer.
He co-directed Blood Sisters, a four-part Netflix Original series by EbonyLife Films.