Set in 19th-century Òsogùn in what is now Nigeria, Yorùbá Boy Running opens with 13-year-old Àjàyí reporting a premonition to his mother about dark days ahead. A week later, the town is surrounded by Malian slave raiders and Àjàyí is kidnapped along with his mother, sister, best friend and neighbours. He is taken to Lagos and sold to Portuguese slavers preparing to ship their human cargo to the Americas. But they are intercepted by the British navy, which releases Àjàyí in Sierra Leone, where he is recruited by missionaries. From there, he is put on a path that leads to him to study at Oxford and become a celebrated preacher, linguist and abolitionist who meets Queen Victoria.
A remarkable tale of barbarism and resilience, Yorùbá Boy Running is the final work by the Nigerian novelist and film-maker Biyi Bándélé, who died in 2022 aged 54. Weaving in Africa’s colonial history and imagined – and improbably comic – conversations between warring Yorùbá factions, it is based on the real-life story of Samuel Àjàyí Crowther, who was kidnapped in 1821 and sold into slavery. Crowther secured his freedom and went on to become the first Black Anglican bishop in west Africa.
Actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who starred in Bándélé’s directorial debut Half of a Yellow Sun, is the narrator, expertly navigating the book’s huge cast of characters and dramatic tonal shifts. For Bándélé, Yorùbá Boy Running was personal, as it had a connection to his own family history. From the opening dedication, we discover that his great-grandfather was a slave who was liberated and who returned home to start his life again.
• Available via Penguin Audio, 7hr 15min
Further listening
The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers
Helen Lewis, Penguin Audio, 9hr, 6min
An examination of an overused word, Lewis’s study spans Renaissance artists, popular music behemoths and the big beasts of science as it asks why some are labelled geniuses and others are not. Read by the author.
Notes to John
Joan Didion, 4th Estate, 6hr, 33min
Julianne Moore narrates this posthumous collection of diary entries from the late 1990s, written after Didion began seeing a psychiatrist. The entries are composed as if she were addressing her late husband John Dunne, and record her depressive episodes and fears for her daughter Quintana.
