YORÙBÁ BOY RUNNING

270pp., hardback, d.w., Hamish Hamilton, London, 2023

ISBN: 9780241562697

Introduction by Wole Soyinka.

A reimagining of the life of freed slave, Anglican minister, missionary, linguist and abolitionist Samuel Àjàyí Crowther (c. 1809 - 1891).

In 1821, when he was thirteen years old, Àjàyí was captured by Fulani slave traders and sold to Portuguese slave traders. Before the slave ship left for the Americas, the British Royal Navy freed the captives and took Àjàyí and his family to Freetown, Sierra Leone. Cared for by the Anglican Church Missionary Society, Àjàyí was sent to school, converted to Christianity and named himself after English vicar and missionary Samuel Crowther. Having abandoned his Yorùbá culture, he worked as a minister and missionary in what is present day Nigeria and was consecrated as the first African Bishop of the Anglican Church in 1864. He translated the Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer into Yorùbá and compiled a Yorùbá dictionary, grammar and vocabulary.

"Just when you think you know all the African slave heroes – those superhumans who were abducted and sold, only to rise above their condition and give back to the societies that sold or enslaved them–you meet Ajayi Crowther. Yoruba Boy Running, Biyi Bandele’s final gift to world literature, is as important and as riveting as it is generous, raising Ajayi Crowther to a place beside Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass and Phillis Wheatley" Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, author of Kintu

Novelist, playwright and filmmaker Biyi Bándélé (1967-2022 ) is the author of the novels The Sympathetic Undertaker, The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond, The Street and Burma Bay. Born in Nigeria, he lived in Lagos and London.