Barracoon to cloth

It is easy to see how a novelist could have found inspiration in the life of Samuel Àjàyí Crowther. Born c.1809 in a Yorùbá kingdom in what is now southwest Nigeria, Àjàyí was snatched and enslaved by Muslim raiders from further north in 1821; he was then rescued from a Portuguese slave ship by the British navy and taken to Sierra Leone, where he converted to Christianity. Ordained as a clergyman during a visit to England, he borrowed the name Samuel Crowther from a missionary. He later moved back to his homeland, translated the Bible into Yorùbá and became the first African bishop in the Anglican Church. He died in Lagos in 1891.

For Biyi Bándélé (1967–2022), a Yorùbá novelist, playwright and film-maker who completed the manuscript of Yorùbá Boy Running days before his unexpected death, telling Crowther’s story was an personal project. A dedication informs us that the author’s great-grandfather was a liberated slave who came home, like Crowther. The novel is rooted in extensive research, including Crowther’s writings, with gaps filled by the author’s riotous imagination.

With exquisite precision and originality Bándélé constantly wrongfoots the reader. The book is made up of ten parts of disparate lengths and styles, reflecting the rupture between the life Àjàyí knew as a boy in the bustling town of Òşogùn, steeped in the worship of spirits and ancestors, and the horror of enslavement, followed by his transformation into Crowther, a man of the cloth, linguist and traveller. The chronology jumps forwards and backwards, and Yorùbá names and words abound. Our close attention is richly rewarded: as the protagonist hurtles from one world to another, his mind changing beyond recognition, so Bándélé’s prose mutates in tone from exuberance to sobriety, from the epic to the intimate, from bawdy humour to glacial understatement.

The first two parts, set in Òşogùn in 1821, are the longest and most baroque, describing the run-up to the raid by warriors known locally as the “Malians”. Bándélé paints a vivid group portrait of Àjàyí, his family and his best friend, as well as a grotesque one of a king perpetually drunk on palm wine and lusting after maidens; we meet a courtier dripping with malice and ambition, a rich woman who dares to defy royal power, and various other townsfolk who pursue their passions and vendettas, oblivious to the Malians camped just outside the town gates. When they attack they burn everything they can, enslaving most of the population. Bándélé shifts from farce to tragedy and back, with lewd jokes suddenly giving way to scenes of sheer terror or gruesome violence.

There are mesmerizing repetitions of words or phrases, evoking epic oral poetry. In one scene the newly enslaved Àjàyí searches for his sister among the captives penned together in a barracoon:

He saw the face of Àjíké the dyer.
He saw the face of Tóyèje the hunter.
He saw the face of Táíwò the midwife.

The litany continues with the blacksmith, the tailor, the iron-smelter, the nut oil-maker and two dozen other townspeople, powerfully conveying the destruction of an entire community.

The later sections feel sober, even elliptical, in comparison, as Crowther absorbs Christian beliefs and European culture. Sections of his life unfold in a linear way; others feature as vignettes, including a striking scene in which the clergyman visits Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in Windsor to discuss the slave trade. Crowther recites the Lord’s Prayer to them in Yorùbá – an encounter described in Victoria’s diary.

Crowther’s legacy is a subject of debate because of his support for British colonial expansion in West Africa, which he saw as a means of ending the slave trade there. Britain had by then abolished slavery and taken it upon itself to enforce the ban on everyone else, sometimes using this as a convenient argument for seizing control of other people’s lands. Bándélé does not guide us to any particular conclusion about this. “The heft Crowther possessed, while it lasted, was considerable. He used it to pursue the driving passion of his life, which was to end the slave trade, by any means necessary”, he writes.

His editor, Hannah Chukwu, says his greatest fear for the book was that it would be perceived as pandering to the white or British gaze. But Yorùbá Boy Running doesn’t pander to any fixed position: it is a testament to Biyi Bándélé’s courage and integrity that, in this age of strident polarization, he chose not to shy away from moral complexity.

Estelle Shirbon is a Reuters journalist who worked in Nigeria from 2005 to 2008 and is now based in London

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post Barracoon to cloth appeared first on TLS.