Both have something in common: they are seasoned creatives who have straddled the world. While one is more of a writer and filmmaker, however, the other is obsessed with dance. No wonder, when they mounted the podium in Lagos on Sunday, 17 August, 2025, they had a lot to engage the audience with.
The first is scholar, writer pan-Africanist, Bunmi Oyinsan; while the second is Qudus Onikeku, founder of QDance and an indefatigable dancer. At the beckon of Oyinsan, who was unveiling her new novel, A Ladder of Bones, members of the arts community had gathered at the JK Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, Onikan. For them, it was a beautiful reunion with Oyinsan, who was the Chairman of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Lagos State chapter, in the 1990s before she relocated to Canada.
Among those who rallied round her were his successor at ANA, Chief Kayode Aderinokun; The NEWS Publisher, Kunle Ajibade, and his wife, Olubunmi Ajibade; and star actress, Joke Silva. With Co-Founder of the Committee for Relevant Arts (CORA), Jahman Anikulapo, as the anchor, Oyinsan read from A Ladder of Bones. The stories of Enilolobo and other characters in the novel thus ignited some discussion. The Enilolobo phenomenon – the art of going and returning – particularly provoked serious thinking about Nigeria’s/nay Africa’s history, culture, politics, potential and dilemmas.
Interestingly, Onikeku, who is also in charge of the JK Randle Centre, has done some work in this direction. One of such is ‘Re-Incarnation’, which centres on walking around cyclical times of birth, death and rebirth in a continuous way ‘because we don’t believe in the lineal occurrence of life after death’, A video of ‘Re-Incarnation’ was shown at the event, with Onikeku and Oyinsan agreeing on the fact that the youths and children need reorientation on the essence of African culture, history and spirituality.
A Ladder of Bones is a powerful novel about five young Africans grappling with personal histories and the legacy of violence. As legendary Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart seeks to smash the myth in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Oyinsan, in the new work, counters the glorification of colonisation in Ellen Thorp’s Ladder of Bones. According to her, it is a fallacy to say that the intention behind the British Empire and other European empires was noble or altruistic. The colonialists did not do Africa a favour, she insisted.
Oyinsan, whose husband, Soji Oyinsan, a filmmaker, was also present, said, ‘In her (Thorp’s) version, she presents British colonisation in Nigeria as noble and altruistic. A lot of us know that that is nowhere near the truth. Of course, unless you are telling Badenoch. So, she presents colonisation as altruistic and the efforts of the missionaries and administrators as to civilise the land said to be devastated by tribal warfare, slave trading and other issues.
Her position draws on the popular trope that the British Empire and other European empires did the fantastic work to get Africa developed. Beneath that paternalistic language and this so-called righteous intention lies the real history of brutal conquests that we were never taught in school, of cultural erasure and inter-generational trauma we are still grappling with. So, my novel deliberately signifies on Ellen Thorp’s title where ‘Ladder of Bones’ symbolises the sacrifices of the colonial agents, I reclaim it. I jam it to highlight the human cost of colonisation’.
