The Nigerian civil war broke out in 1967. Many say that the war was inevitable, driven by long-simmering ethnic and economic tensions. As a literal amalgamation, Nigeria is often thought to be too diverse to hold together as a single nation-state. The economics of oil only add fuel to the ethnic fire. But as Wole Soyinka, played by Wale Ojo in The Man Died (2024), states, “Ojukwu and Gowon have thrust the nation into an avoidable war. War is ugly! And the people trying hard to stop it are the true Nigerians.”
For his efforts to broker peace, Soyinka was imprisoned and spent twenty-seven months behind bars; twenty-two of them in solitary confinement. Soyinka was already a thorn in the side of the military government, having held up a radio broadcast, at gunpoint, two years prior, to protest and potentially overturn an election he deemed unfair. During the war he organized an opposition to the government’s prosecution of what he called a genocide and even traveled inside Biafran territory to plead with successionists, which is what ultimately drew the government’s ire. The story of Soyinka’s time in prison is detailed in his “prison notes,” also called The Man Died, published in 1972.
The cinematic adaptation of that story began making the festival rounds in 2024. Directed by Awam Ampka—professor, playwright, painter, curator, and filmmaker who studied and has long collaborated with Soyinka—The Man Died is courageous and poetic. Rather than a documentary, like its near-twin, Ebrohimie Road (2024), which covers roughly the same period of Soyinka’s life, The Man Died is a fiction feature evocatively inspired not only by Soyinka’s prison notes, but his other writings, his own memories, and the memories of those who knew him at the time. Like Ampka’s paintings, this new film renders Soyinka and the story of his imprisonment impressionistically, emphasizing social and emotional truths over historical and personal accuracy.
Ampka has assembled an impressive array of talent to achieve what many observers of the Nigerian film industry have long awaited: an adaptation of the country’s world-renowned literature. Wale Ojo’s performance of Soyinka—a tall order for any actor, but particularly for a release aimed at a Nigerian audience—is admirable and effective. While not quite capturing the sonorous, refined baritone of Soyinka’s voice, Ojo deftly combines the soaring intellectual and moral conviction of the Nobel prize-winning writer with the frailty and bewilderment that seeps through his written account of the experience. Other notable performances include Sam Dede’s chilling portrayal of Yisa, the police investigator whose relentless attempts to break Soyinka, and gather the names of other supposed traitors, are ultimately unsuccessful. Dede is perhaps best known for his roles as vigilante gang leaders in early Nollywood video films. In The Man Died, his ability to intimidate and express outrage is eerily turned on one of the nation’s heroes, generating an uncanny sense of the erratic power of an emerging dictatorship.
The darkness and capriciousness of dictatorial power carry through to the lighting and cinematography, which emphasize dullness, the flat tones of concrete and rust, which enhance the sharpness of Soyinka’s critique and his vibrant intellectual life outside of prison. Indeed, the script by Bode Asiyanbi reimagines the timeline of the book, sacrificing the story of Soyinka’s many months imprisoned in Kaduna to explore his path, first to arrest, and then to solitary confinement, through flashbacks and glimpses of his friends and family outside the prison walls. Many liberties are taken with Soyinka’s story, some of them touching on very sensitive issues, including Soyinka’s strained relationship with his wife and his infidelities, as well as his relationship with poet Christopher Okigbo, who famously took up arms on the Biafran side. These kinds of liberties provide impressions of Soyinka’s mind and private life, which ultimately do a better job of capturing the emotional toll that the war took on both the man and the nation.
The fine lead acting, Ampka’s fearless direction, the beautiful camera work, and the evocative script all come together under the expert production guidance of Femi Odugbemi, a veteran of Nigerian cinema. There are some aspects of the film one could critique, such as anachronisms like left-hand drive cars and LED light bulbs. A radio announcer, supposedly broadcasting on January 15, 1966, refers to the coup d’état executed that day as “Nigeria’s first coup,” seemingly prescient that it would be followed by a counter-coup six months later (and several others in the decades to follow).
Ultimately, The Man Died has a kind of academic quality to it, rather than the overwrought and overacted international award-bait with which it might be compared. This could be considered one of the film’s virtues. We have reached a milestone where a Nigerian scholar and artist has worked with major figures in the Nigerian film industry to quite successfully bring Nigerian literature and history to the screen in a way that has confounded many others in the past.
This particular adaptation is also very timely. The key message of the film is that, whereas millions of actual people died in Nigeria’s civil war, the person living through injustice who does nothing about it might as well have died.
