While separate artistic productions, the book, MORINADE, Fabunmi’s Princess and the upcoming epic ‘Kiriji’ film, by Lateef Adedimeji and Mo Bimpe, are from a common historical stable; both driven by a shared theme - bringing to dramatic life, arguably the most important and the most momentous civil war ever fought in the territory now called Nigeria and very possibly in West Africa.
In the popular imagination and not just in Nigeria; but the rest of the world, civil war in Nigeria is a synonym for the Biafran conflict. But while the 1967-1970 war ignited by the Biafran secession was an important conflict, it was not consequential, because it changed nothing. A war sparked by an attempt at secession by a section of the country, ended with the country remaining united. Everything remained the same. Nothing changed.
On the other hand, the 19ᵗʰ century Kiriji or Ekiti Parapo war changed everything. Without this 16-year civil war, the last of a series of Yoruba revolutions and bloody conflicts triggered by the collapse of the Oyo Empire in the early 19ᵗʰ century; without the Kiriji war Nigeria would not have been created. That is simply a fact. It was the Kiriji war that opened the door to the complete conquest of Yorubaland, by the British, who before the war were stranded on a marshy, largely barren lagoon on the tip of the Atlantic, (Lagos) and at the wars end, with the Yoruba’s utterly exhausted by nearly a century of internecine strife, the entirety of Yorubaland with its lush land and fertile soil had fallen under the domain of the Union Jack. Nigeria would soon follow.
For too long, this all-important war which changed the trajectory of West African history has been ignored, dismissed, or minimised not just by European and more unforgivably Nigerian historians, but also, shockingly by the arts community, with little or no serious dramatisations of this totemic conflict. A war where Yoruba blacksmiths, forged rifles and even cannons rivalling those produced in Europe, which is one reason Britain finally decided to end the conflict!
Art not only brings history to life, but it also takes it to audiences largely indifferent to academic studies of the past. Everybody has heard of Julius Caeser. The odds are that far more people heard about him from William Shakespeare (a playwright) than all the distinguished Professors of history past and present in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. No one would have heard of the Trojan war without a poem called the Iliad. And millions more were drawn to read it by two modern day actors, Brad Pitt and Eric Bana in the 2004 Hollywood epic, ‘Troy’. Far more than people than centuries of studies by eminent experts on Greek history had drawn to cherish the wonders of antiquity.
The coming film Kiriji, is the latest gem off an increasingly sophisticated production line of historical Yoruba films such as Lishabi, Bashorun Gaa and Jagun Jagun. It is also the most important as it moves the spot light to not only the longest of the 19ᵗʰ century Yoruba civil wars but the most earth shifting, the most historically pivotal.
What Kiriji shows on the screen, my book, MORINADE, Fabunmi’s princess dramatises in this new explosive book, which explores the war through the intensely personal experiences of those who lived through it. Both capturing stories told by ourselves, (in my book, straight from the descendants of Fabunmi Okemesi, my great great grandfather)- not western historians, the distilled knowledge passed down through generations, now immortalised on screen and script.