What’s missing will be found. Or maybe nothing that’s missing should be found. Maybe the missing scenes in the final cut of The Man Died are also its final hums. A place of reinvention. 

Since the film’s Special Premiere for Wole Soyinka’s 90th Birthday at the Alliance Francaise in Lagos and The Africa Centre in London, July 2024, it has won numerous awards, namely, Best Director at the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards 2025; Best Screenplay Award at the Carthage Film Festival, Tunis and African International Film Festival, Lagos; Best Audience Choice Award at Eastern Nigeria International Film Festival; Best Film That Tackles an Important African Issue’ at the Luxor African Film Festival.

The Man Died continues to be featured in film festivals internationally, including Accra StreamFest, Labone Dialogues; Jo’Burg Film Festival, African Film Festival, Atlanta; Nollywood in Hollywood; Festival de Cine Africano y de la Diáspora, Costa Rica; and it’s a 2025 New York African Film Festival Official Selection, among others.

Sir John Akomfrah, the pioneering Ghanaian-British filmmaker and a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective—alongside Lina Gopaul and others—says, “The Man Died is that rare thing in contemporary African cinema.” 

Wole Soyinka asked Amkpa to direct this film, about a moment in his life that symbolizes his commitment to truth and justice. During the Nigerian Civil War from 1967 to 1970 between Nigeria’s federal government and the secessionist state Biafra, Soyinka wrote an article calling for a cease-fire, and also crossed over to Biafra. He was accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels and imprisoned for 27 months—22 of which he spent in solitary confinement. He was released in 1969.

Soyinka’s choice was precise. Apart from Amkpa’s captivating visual storytelling and intellectual depth, is his ability to transform absence into a powerful cinematic presence. He is an intuitive filmmaker. With each viewing, I uncover a subtle yet significant gesture. It is this resonant quality that led to this sequel interview.

The Man Died leaves us questioning: Maybe our trauma isn’t ours to pass on. Maybe death is a preparation for the next life, and life pulses at the frequency of death. Maybe we can never know exactly what happened. Maybe once we get something back, we have lost it.

Amkpa and I continue our conversation in Bristol, where he hasn’t returned to since 1993—the years when he played a doctor in the BBC series, Casualty, and was cast as the ghost in Anthony Minghella’s 1990 film, “Truly Madly Deeply.” There, the three words he continuously uses, And so on, crescendo. Robert Frost’s line comes to mind: “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”

Except for Amkpa, life—like his signature rhythm and beat, And so on—reverberates with the same tenacity as desire does when it dares us to reimagine its contours.

—Nathalie Handal for Guernica

Nathalie Handal: Theft is an important part of the film’s plot. There is the theft of Wole Soyinka’s freedom. The theft of the things he created in custody. The theft at home. In the journey of a film, some important and intriguing parts didn’t make the final cut, can you speak about them?

Awam Amkpa: As a team we wanted to have a broader perspective of what was going on in Wole’s life beyond his incarceration and conflict with the Nigerian government. One of the most poignant was the impact of his activities on his domestic life. How did they impact the life of his then-wife Laide and their children? They too were tortured by his arrest, detention and the uncertainties of his life. Asking him details provoked resistance because it meant swinging into more intimate aspects of the domestic conflicts. I had to be careful with how to access that information. I had the advantage that Makin Soyinka, one of his children from that period, was an associate producer. The screenwriter Bode Asiyanbi did a broad questionnaire for him to ask his mother. The responses we got were what we used to build her character in the film because Wole didn’t write about her in the book. Although the entire book was dedicated to her for her resilience, there was a domestic conflict in that space, and we didn’t want to make that the subject of the film. Instead, we wanted to make it an access point to developing the character of Laide.

Nathalie Handal: What challenges did that pose?

Awam Amkpa: It’s tempting when you’re doing a biopic on a character to put other people in that secondary perspective. Instead, we put her almost like a parallel perspective. We wanted to show her in all her complexities, and all the range of her emotions. 

Nathalie Handal: Did Christina Oshunniyi who played Laide ask any questions that Wole Soyinka didn’t want to answer?

Awam Amkpa: A lot. She asked about how the motivations should be seen. She asked: Did you think he really loved her? 

I answered, absolutely. Now, was it the kind of love she was looking for in their relationship? Those were the questions I left for Christina as a motivation for her as an actress. I needed to direct the actor’s visceral response to this dilemma. Is this the love that Laide had acquired, or is this the love that she’s still looking for? And that’s the way we pitched that character; it’s almost like she got him back and was losing him again. Perhaps she wants him to be a different kind of person. And that different kind of person occasionally comes into direct conflict with who he is—a very restless person who always wants to get involved.

Nathalie Handal: In the opening film sequence when Wole is hunting, his grandfather’s words return because he was close to him:  Wole, your parents are Christians. They want you to turn the other cheek. You will have to fight. You will be involved in many fights, but there are some fights that you cannot fight by yourself. 

Awam Amkpa: We did that deliberately as the opening to show that the film is not portraying a messiah for Nigerians, but a person in conflict between what looks like a messianic impulse and relevance to the people on the ground. 

Nathalie Handal: When he was in detention, Wole Soyinka was denied access to reading glasses, reading and writing materials. Can you speak about his reaction to this violation?

Awam Amkpa: For a person who lives in the imaginary world, this was torture. In prison, they gave them a chewing stick, a kind of birch from a tree used in place of a toothbrush. It has antiseptic elements. He sharpened it and made it a pen. 

Nathalie Handal: Where did the ink come from?

Awam Amkpa: He made the ink from the droppings of cockroaches. He would crush them together, grind them, and put water in them which created a brownish kind of ink.

Nathalie Handal: How did he know how to do that? 

Awam Amkpa: I don’t think it was a question of what he knew how to do. Rather, what drove him was his need to find a way to create something that is color that would help him write. He used a nib created from wood with the ink he created.

And with the toilet paper, newspaper scraps, anything that anybody who happens to be passing by his cell could drop off that was in a written form, he would collect them, make a pulp with them in his cell, use water and create his own paper. Sometimes he would try to find means of fortifying the toilet paper.

It would almost be like starting the process of the paper all over again before it became thinned out into a toilet paper. He would put them all together and then create sheets. His cell was raided from time to time but they never really found these papers. Because they would see them as trash. 

Nathalie Handal: In the film, we see him stealing a pen from a doctor. Why did you choose to use that scene instead?

Awam Amkpa: Because some of the writings in prison were also from pens he stole. Wole doesn’t have fantastic handwriting, so how does he write even on this fortified paper? 

He called the ink he created S-O-Y-I-N-K. If we had a three-hour film or a series, it would be intriguing to show his torture and attempt to transcend all these constraints. But we didn’t have that, and we had to be economic. That was why we only saw the theft of the pen.

Nathalie Handal: In the film, despite all odds, he managed to get the poems out of prison and to Laide. But these poems disappeared and have never been found. These missing poems remain a difficult memory.

Awam Amkpa: It took a lot of effort to write these poems and find a way through his networks to get them out of the prison. He didn’t have the opportunity to organize his friends to get those poems, and if he sent them to friends, they too could be incarcerated. He sent them to his wife through his network because that was the easiest. But then the wife’s response was intriguing. On one hand, she felt it might mean he was dead. Or that the trauma and torture were ongoing. Or she might have felt tired of all of it. We left it open-ended deliberately. 

Nathalie Handal: She called the police in the film.

Awam Amkpa: Because the guy who brought the package was trying to extort money from her for the service of stealing these messages. We put it in the film to provoke questions. 

Nathalie Handal: Makin Soyinka is one of the producers, as well as her son. Did he ask his mother what she was thinking?

Awam Amkpa: We asked him to but he didn’t as his mother had declared silence on it, and so had Wole. That’s another movie, the search for those poems. Did she burn them? If she did, why? Or did somebody trash them?

Nathalie Handal: Did Wole Soyinka remember any of the poems, a stanza, a line?

Awam Amkpa: He claims that they went back into the other works that came out after prison. But it was the authenticity of that moment that was lost. If you look at the other thefts in the story, you can see how anyone could want to focus on theft in the film. 

You begin to see that the authenticity of the trials he transcended and the material he created was stolen by the loss of those poems. 

The artifact of the moment was lost. 

Nathalie Handal: On the other hand, the theft of his beloved statues had another outcome. He found all of them. Maybe the poems are reborn in the act of finding these statues.

Awam Amkpa: In a way, we also introduced that to avoid creating villainy out of the wife’s possible actions. We didn’t want her to be a villain when the materials came and disappeared in the homefront where she was in charge. She was also there when the statues were lost. But she was the one who led the rescue mission, as a way to regain their relationship. But how does she restore her integrity? Even if it was Wole’s brother who stole and sold the statues.

Nathalie Handal: She might have trusted that the brother was acting in Wole’s best interest.

Awam Amkpa: The household was managed and violated by Wole’s brother. But it still comes back to her. Just like what happened to those poems comes back to her. 

When Wole came home and saw that his office was violated, his artwork stolen–that theft devastated him, especially when he found out that it had been committed by a member of the family.

Nathalie Handal: Who and where were they recovered from?

Awam Amkpa: From various people that his brother sold them to—mainly art collectors and expatriate professors who were returning to the UK. Laide had gone to some of the send-off parties, saw them and asked that they not take the works away, and maybe even compensated them.

Nathalie Handal: Another intriguing and missing scene touches on how mathematical principles helped Wole Soyinka survive, despite the fact that he has mentioned not caring much for math. 

Awam Amkpa: The mathematical experience is in relation to the confined space he was in. How he would pace in that space for exercise. How he mentally measured the length and the breadth of the cell and his movements, as his pacing was calculated in relation to the geometrical dimension of the space. But it was also a way of producing a map of thinking. A map of a survival structure in that cell rather than being at the mercy of the torturers. A mapping of how he would take interrogation, translate it into this emotion, and ways of beguiling and/or of resisting interrogation, and then what he would use to fight back, including starvation. The mathematics was a reasoning structure for him, and he would replay it until it became almost like a mathematical theorem. The number of days he stayed was calculated using these mathematical permutations.

Since he couldn’t write or read, he had to find other ways of keeping himself mentally in charge, otherwise they would have stolen his mental ability to take care of himself. 

Up till today, if you’re with him for a few minutes, you’ll hear him hum. And you’ll see that even his body language communicates a thinking process in patterns. He has a hearing impairment, so the older he gets, the louder the hums.

Nathalie Handal: The humming has to do with the mathematical thinking process?

Awam Amkpa: It does because it’s about recall, repetition. If he has a song in his head, he will break it down mathematically into the structure and the patterns of the rhythm. He will pace to it. He will hum to it. It’s about dimensionality within the physical dimension of being in solitary confinement and the dimension that he has no access to; how he can imagine the dimension of the sky, the dimension of the city he’s in, the dimension of the spaces of activity. This was a very physically active guy who went hunting. So how does he remember all of that? 

Wole discovered mathematical permutations to look at the dimensions of his being physically  and metaphorically in a confined space. But, more importantly, metaphysically, because he is deeply spiritual about African metaphysical processes. 

Nathalie Handal: He wrote about the African conception of tragedy, inspired by Yoruba mythology, in the chapter entitled The Fourth Stage in his book, Myth, Literature, and the African World. Unlike Western tragedy, that often centers on individual flaws and fate, Yoruba-influenced tragedy portrays the hero’s downfall as a disruption of cosmic and moral-spiritual order, which affects the entire community. 

Awam Amkpa: Yes. It’s about mythologies and mythologizing, and playing with myth and mythologizing as a metaphor. I would call some of his metaphysical plays “mythoclastic.” In other words, you see a myth or concept that guarantees certainty, yet that certainty is a ploy to talk about uncertainties. He questions tyranny of any kind. Hence the title of the book, The Man Died. It’s about the man who dies if he is silent in the face of tyranny. The whole idea of mathematics stems from that and isn’t a simple process of calculations. 

Nathalie Handal: It’s metaphysical.

Awam Amkpa: It’s creating structures in his mind, their patterns, the rhythm through repetition and the dimensionalities, not just in the physical but in the metaphysical. 

Nathalie Handal: Wole was tortured, and he witnessed the torture of others—the missing torture scenes seem to be present in soundscape.

Awam Amkpa: Torture was not just silent or physical, it was also loud. The jailhouse, the prison was loud. You could hear screams of people being tortured and beaten up, people in states of despair. He was enveloped by the sounds of torture, of incarceration of different kinds of individuals in that space. 

Nathalie Handal: The journalist at the end of the film brought a telegram to Wole, and the telegram just said, “The man died.” What’s the missing story behind that?

Awam Amkpa: The telegram at the end of The Man Died is really about a journalist who wrote about the excesses of government. 

If you remember in one of the party scenes, after Wole escorted the nurse out, and he came back, there was a young man who shook Wole’s hands to say, we admire your fight against injustice. You also see him when Wole was first detained. 

In reality, Wole saw that young man being violated by policemen. He was also incarcerated and tortured. They had to send him overseas for medical help, and he died. 

Nathalie Handal: The man who died is that journalist. Why is that not clear in the film?

Awam Amkpa: Even in the book, it’s almost like a microcosm of a macro idea of people who resist tyranny. It basically says, if you tolerate tyranny, you are physically dead anyway. 

Nathalie Handal:  If you don’t resist, you die. 

Awam Amkpa You’re dead already. I flipped the meaning and its relationship with time as the man—the journalist—died when he dared to speak out. So, we deliberately brought it to the end of the film to show that it’s not over. It is a repeated ritual. 

You actually provoked that when you were questioning that transition to the end of the film. 

Nathalie Handal: Did you press Wole on some issues that he did not want to answer?

Awam Amkpa: We were pressing very hard for him to recall an incident that happened over fifty years ago. Some of the traumas he had transcended or locked up somewhere in his psyche, and we kept pressing those buttons. He resisted by saying, just because you want to make a good film, that doesn’t mean you are entitled to some of my trauma. 

He almost felt like the silences were part of his therapy, because everybody wanted to know exactly what happened.  

For Wole, the trauma is not about a paralyzing existential situation. It’s more a catalyst for reinvention. 

Some of the trauma he told us later, but there were some elements of the story that he didn’t disclose because they would upset a lot of people who were alive at that time. We only introduced one of them, the nurse. 

Nathalie Handal: Is there something missing that you personally wanted to add?

Awam Amkpa: The story of the impact Wole has on Nigerian society. He was one of the founders of the first fraternity in African universities. I would have loved to be able to go into that space because these are groups of people who are the spaces of resonance of his spirit of resistance, through a movement that was physical and still exists in every corner of Nigeria. 

I wish the film structure allowed me to show it almost as a cliffhanger looking at the kind of impact that he’s had, particularly on Nigeria, but also globally. The global part is fine, but the private part is not fully told and well told because that fraternity is a private society and its privacy is sometimes shrouded in secrecy. The mystery and the mythology of this group is also part of its identity. It’s a huge story that I wished I was able to even put as a signal in the story, but I couldn’t. Maybe one day.

Nathalie Handal: As much as he’s revered, there are also people who feel he’s caused harm. Do you want to say anything about that?

Awam Amkpa: I will not be an impartial adjudicator, but yes, there are people who disagree with him intellectually, artistically, and in the field of human rights. I made a film where I talked about the way we are socialized in post-colonial Nigeria, wherein ethnocentrism is a way of being, and it actually stops people from properly seeing those people who are anti-ethnicity. He was consistently anti-ethnic and anti-any ideology or religion. This led people to question if he was insulting their religion or political ideology.

Nathalie Handal: Wole has said I’ve prepared for my death, I’m prepared for dying, and you’re an important part of this journey. It seems the fact that there’s a preparation for death relates to the title, The Man Died—which of course also means something else—but in a way, there’s this link. He seems to be saying I’m preparing for death because I’m not actually going to die, even if I might not be around? 

Awam Amkpa: He is 90 years old. He’s a very organized person. As a writer, he has organized different chapters of his life. He has published some of them, and is still writing and publishing, but he wants to ensure that everything is organized rather than accidental. 

Wole has always been preparing for death, but the question is, is death a terminal event or a transition? And from all his writings, plays, dramaturgy, and philosophical writings, he talks about death as a transition rather than a terminal event. So, by that token, he’s always been preparing for that transition. That’s why he takes this daring action to say, I’m gonna go prevent the soldiers from killing and plunging the country into war. If I die in the process, I really won’t die. I will only die if I do not do something about it.

If you read the body of Wole’s works in what we’ll call the metaphysical plays and novels he’s written, you will see that for him, death is a transition. And the essence of being human is what he constantly celebrates. That humanism is what expands the connections between human beings. 

Nathalie Handal: Like the missing poems, the physical manifestation died but they are alive.

Awam Amkpa: The essence of the poems lived because the essence is the resistance to any kind of tyranny.

Nathalie Handal: The handwriting is difficult to decipher. What are we missing when we see his handwriting?

Awam Amkpa: The movement of the lines in his calligraphy. 

Nathalie Handal: His calligraphy?

Awam Amkpa: His own invented calligraphy. You see a rhythm to the way he signs his name. This is something that you find people have talked about when they look at other languages, like the Arabic language, and how the calligraphy is written, you see that it’s not like the Gutenberg idea of individual letters, but it’s about the joining and the flow of the join. You see that in most African languages and in the way poets, performers, and artists think. That flow is so critical, that mellifluous idea of items is so important. It’s not just about the lines; it’s really about the flow.

Nathalie Handal: While you were creating this film, you did a stunning painting of Wole Soyinka, which you’ve gifted him. The colors are luminous, and that luminosity is a spirit. In the body of your painterly work, there’s often no face. This one as well. But you’ve managed to capture his face. Nobody can miss him. Can you speak about this painting—which sighs, stirs, sings.

Awam Amkpa: It’s conceptually about abstraction. Symbolism. About taking over from just the utilitarian idea of a person or a theme. There are moments where you want people to go into deep reflections, because as an artist, you want that response to be in partnership, in rhythm with what you’re doing. That painting for me was like asking myself, over the 40 years now that I have known him, what does Wole look like? 

I want to capture an essence that’s abstract, deeply symbolic, and has multiple dimensions. I’m working on a two-dimensional structure, and I want to use the colors to give it the other dimensions. The colors do not harmonize. Like how in music, you are contrapuntal, the colors in the painting are contrapuntal to each other in order to create almost like a sculptural idea on a two-dimensional surface.

Nathalie Handal: Tell us about the colors you used.

Awam Amkpa: I chose red, orange and cadmium yellow, and then I made my own color for his hair. There are too many paintings, pictures, drawings about his hair. It’s almost like a halo, right? And gray now. I wanted to do something else. I was looking for the best color that would capture it, and none of the primary colors did. I had to mix my own paint—it’s almost like a cobalt blue, but it’s lighter. 

Nathalie Handal: It seems you mainly wanted to go into a deeply symbolic space. That the multicolored template of the painting is meant to capture the rhythms, emotions, and sense of perspective that you have of him. I see your colors as the missing words. 

Awam Amkpa: Yes, the painting was a meditation about what Wole means to me. His essence to me is more spiritual now than physical. That spirituality is what I tried to capture with the colors, dimensions, abstractions. And so on.