Join us at the J. Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture & History on Sunday August 17 at 5 pm for an engaging conversation themed ẸNÍLỌLÓBỌ̀, inspired by my new novel A Ladder of Bones.
SUNDAY August 17, Canada-based multiskilled artiste — writer, filmmaker, culture scholar and culture advocate — Dr Bunmi Oyinsan, will unveil her new novel, A Ladder of Bones, at the JRandle Centre, otherwise known as the Centre for Yoruba Culture and Heritage, Onikan, Lagos.
The event will feature readings, a conversation and a performance.
A former Chairman, Association of Nigerian Authors (Lagos chapter), at the centre of the event, will be her engagement of her primary constituency here, the Lagos literary community, to which she was a constant presence before she relocated to Canada in the 2000s. She has remained a recurring contributor even while living abroad.
Announcing the event, Oyinsan, who broke into the limelight with her script Ti Oluwa Ni’le, which became a famous TV series in the 90s, is considered a precursor of the television series of today. Produced by her husband, Dr Soji Oyinsan, the series also preceded the Nollywood films of today when it was directed for film by the inimitable Tunde Kelani.
Oyinsan’s first novel, Silhouette, was adapted into a 26-episode serial on the Nigerian Television Authority, NTA, titled Dreams. She has gone ahead to demonstrate her skill and interest in script writing and film production with such works as Owuro Lojo, Golden Cage, We The People and Aditulaye-Toyosi. Oyinsan has also authored a major biographical work on Dr. Abimbola Silva, Nigeria’s first female medical doctor, is currently working on a documentary that is taking her and her husband, Soji, across continents.
NB: Read more about her at: https://www.africanwriter.com/i-was-born-a-feminist-bunmi-oyinsan/
In the invitation to today’s event, she wrote on her Facebook page on Saturday:
“Join us tomorrow at the J. Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture & History for an engaging conversation themed ẸNÍLỌLÓBỌ̀, inspired by my new novel A Ladder of Bones.
This is a hybrid event; attend in person or join us virtually via the link below:
Join Zoom Meeting
Topic: ẸNÍLỌLÓBỌ̀
Date & Time: Aug 17, 2025, 05:00 PM West Central Africa
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89030313670…
ID: 890 3031 3670 | Passcode: 997711
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In explaining the import of the book, she had written:
Signifyin’ on the Empire: Reclaiming the Narrative in A Ladder of Bones
IN Ladder of Bones, Ellen Thorp presents the colonial project in Nigeria as a noble mission, an endeavour driven by selfless administrators, missionaries, and traders determined to tame a land “devastated by centuries of tribal warfare and slave trading.” Her framing echoes the familiar trope of the benevolent empire, wherein British intervention becomes the catalyst for African civilization and progress. But this account, draped in paternalistic language and righteous intentions, belies the brutal realities of conquest, cultural erasure, and the enduring scars of colonization.
My own novel, A Ladder of Bones, was born out of a refusal to accept this narrative at face value. By echoing Thorp’s title, I deliberately “signify” on her work, a practice rooted in Black literary traditions that critique and subvert dominant texts through ironic mimicry. Where Thorp’s “ladder of bones” may evoke the sacrifice of colonial agents who supposedly built modern Africa with their own martyrdom, my novel reclaims that imagery to expose the human cost of colonization and its lingering shadows. The bones in my story do not support a noble ascent; they mark the trauma buried beneath progress narratives, the forgotten bodies and broken spirits on which modernity was erected.
My Ladder of bones stretches far beyond the colonial officers and missionaries that Thorp centers. It is constructed from the lives of child soldiers, exploited migrants, displaced people, and survivors of generational trauma across the African continent and its diaspora. These are not grateful beneficiaries of empire but complex individuals navigating the wreckage left behind: across Sierra Leone, Jamaica, Liberia, and Canada. The novel weaves their experiences together to ask: What does freedom mean when it emerges from a foundation of domination? What remains when the colonizers have gone, but the structures of neocolonialism remain intact?
Thorp’s closing image: a queen celebrated by “happy, well-dressed children” in a now-prosperous Lagos, epitomizes this troubling erasure. It sanitizes history, reduces the colonial encounter to a before-and-after photo shoot, and positions imperial rule as a civilizing force. In contrast, A Ladder of Bones insists on reckoning with what was lost, what was violently reshaped, and what continues to be contested. My characters do not stand on the shoulders of British saviors, they rise in spite of them, haunted by the past and entangled in systems that were never dismantled, only repackaged.
If Thorp’s book seeks to memorialize empire, mine seeks to complicate memory itself. It asks readers to consider how stories are told, who tells them, and what truths are obscured in the process. By writing A Ladder of Bones, I aim to shift the lens, from colonizer to colonized, from benefactor to survivor, and illuminate the ghosts still walking the halls of postcolonial modernity. It is not a response born of bitterness, but of insistence: that our stories matter, that our bones speak, and that we will not allow history to be rewritten without us.