“Death And The Kings Horseman” Has Been Adapted Into A Film

“Elesin Oba , The King’s Horseman,” premieres at the Toronto Film Festival.

“Elesin Oba, The King’s Horseman” is an adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s book “Death and the Kings Horseman” which is also based on Nigerian historical event of 1943.

Set in the Oyo Empire, the king’s horseman according to tradition is to perform the ritual suicide, following the dead king to the afterlife.

Distracted by pleasures of the flesh, leading to a deadly clash with the British authorities and forcing his spirit to roam the earth, spelling doom for the land and its people.

The Netflix film was directed by the Biyi Bandele who recently
passed on.

While speaking to a media source about his passing TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey said of his work, “Biyi worked with such ease in the way and manner that he went about directing. We will miss that … and how he was able to understand the Yoruba culture, our traditions, those nuances that are truly Nigerian.”

In Bandele’s directors note, it is said that the late director wrote of the original text by Wole Soyinka, “Death and the King’s Horseman” to be “the most deeply and fundamentally Yoruba of all Soyinka’s plays,” so much so that translating it from English was “the only way to make the film immediately accessible to a global audience.”