FEATURE FILMS

THE MAN DIED

The Man Died is the story of Wole Soyinka’s 27 months incarceration by the Nigerian government in 1967 at the cusp of the civil war.

He was famously seeking a truce between Biafra and the Federal Government to allow time for a negotiated settlement of the conflict. It is fundamentally a personal account. Essentially, the subject found refuge from the brutality inflicted upon him by retreating into and living within his own mind. At times, he drifted about the frontiers of madness, hanging on to his self by a thread. At other time, he pondered, listened, watched, like only the truly otherwise unoccupied can.Importantly, he managed to scrounge paper and a pencil from time to time and record his journey of ‘motionlessness.’Wole Soyinka, born July 13, 1934 in Abeokuta, Ogun State Nigeria to a clergy father and trader-activist mother, is a poet, playwright, memoirist, essayist and political activist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

https://themandiedmovie.com/the-man-died/

EBROHIMIE ROAD

A Museum of Memory, Directed by Kola Tunbosun, July 2024 release

The documentary centers around Wọlé Ṣóyínká’s campus home on Ebrohimie Road, University of Ìbàdàn as a central character in the story of his life. In 1967, he was arrested there after having returned home from a visit to Biafra for a personal intervention in the Nigerian Civil War that was just breaking out. These events have been already recounted in The Man Died (1971), You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006), and other works. It was there that he returned to from jail, and from where he went into exile in 1971. He never returned to Ìbàdàn, choosing to take up a role at the University of Ifẹ̀ in 1976, where he retired in 1985, a year before winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This house played host to many friends, family, and associates over the years while Soyinka was in solitary confinement, and features in his years of employment with the Ibadan University. And it was in that house where, in October 1969, after his release, he granted a famous interview to a Ṣọlá Ọdúnfá, a journalist from Daily Times to express himself about the war and the events that got him locked up.

Ebrohimie Road examines how the personal became the national, through the recollection of central and peripheral characters; how a small campus residence became witness to some of the most significant issues in Nigerian social, political, and literary history, many of which remain unresolved; and how ecological changes contribute to the erosion of history and a sense of place. Through stories, visuals, and historical records, Tubosun unearths what makes Ebrohimie Road more than just a campus street or physical location, but a place of history and a museum of memory.The cinematographers of the film include Tunde Kelani, Jordan Wyatt, and Curtis Boggs. The film is supported with a grant by Open Society Foundation and Sterling Bank Nigeria”.

ELESIN OBA - THE KING'S HORSEMAN

Death and the King’s Horseman is a famous play based on a historical event in Nigeria in the time of British colonial rule of the country. It tells the story of Elesin, the king’s horseman. He was prevented from committing ritual suicide by the British colonial powers. The play was written by Wole Soyinka in 1975. After studying theatre in the UK, Soyinka returned home to newly independent Nigeria in 1960. He threw himself into researching Yoruba culture, song and dance. The play was ultimately the fruit of this research.

Death and the King’s Horseman is set in the Oyo Kingdom in south-west Nigeria in the early 1940s. Oyo tradition demands that Elesin Oba, the king’s horseman, must commit suicide before the king is buried in order for his spirit to lead the king’s to the great beyond. But Elesin Oba failed in his duty. The story ends on a tragic note – his son, Olunde, has to return from studying medicine abroad to commit suicide in place of his father.

https://www.netflix.com/gh/title/81332042