How Inua Ellams Brought African Folklore and Poetry into the ‘Doctor Who’ Universe

The poetic passage highlights episode writer Inua Ellams’ control over a story that deftly weaves African folklore into the Doctor Who universe. In ‘The Story & the Engine,’ the fifteenth Doctor – played by Rwandan Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa, the first Black actor to play the role – lands TARDIS in Lagos, Nigeria for a haircut. However, his favorite barbershop has been overrun by a new barber (Ariyon Bakare) and his companion Abena (Michelle Asante), and they’ve taken shop owner Omo (Sule Rimi) and three others hostage. Over the course of the episode, the quest for revenge turns into redemption.

Ellams, an acclaimed poet, playwright and long-time Doctor Who fan, brought the time-travelling figure to an African location with praiseworthy emotional depth and moxie. It’s the result of years working as a cultural connector, bridging the gap between a beloved canon in British pop culture and an area that the well-traveled show has barely explored.

“I’ve been watching the show since I lived in Lagos and even before that, I sort of knew what I could and what I couldn’t do going into it,” Ellams tells OkayAfrica over a Zoom call. The episode is also accompanied by a written prequel of how a young Omo met the Doctor, a nod to the ‘How I spent my holiday’ format prominent in many Nigerian elementary schools.

Born in Nigeria’s middle belt city of Jos, Ellams lived in Lagos for several years before moving to the UK in 1996. He grew up listening to folk tales from multiple Nigerian cultures and watching British television. Moving to the UK expanded the cultural touchpoints he came in contact with, shaping his approach to his art. That distinctness bears out on The Story & the Engine, which is in conversation with his acclaimed play, Barber Shop Chronicles, and two of his poems, while hiding a few Easter eggs.

Below, Ellams discusses his work on the episode and his core as a poet.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

OkayAfrica: What was your approach to writing this episode?

Ellams: I’ve written a play called Barber Shop Chronicles, which was on here in the UK, and it was set in six different barbershops across five African cities – Lagos, Kampala, Nairobi, Accra and Johannesburg – and one in London. The showrunner of Doctor Who [Russell T Davies] came to see the play years ago and really, really loved it. So when I was pitching stories for Doctor Who, he just said, “What would happen if the doctor walked into one of your barbershops?” That’s where the story came from; it was just to bring the doctor into my world, and the play is sort of in a parallel universe to the world of this episode. So they are related but not quite the same.

What’s it like having to work with the weight of the Doctor Who universe? Did you put any pressure on yourself or was it a case of “Oh, I know what I’m doing?”

The weight of expectation was heavy going into the meeting, but the showrunner just allowed me to do what I wanted. There were script editors, Doctor Who fans and researchers who could steer me if I was going way too far from the canon. However, because I’ve been watching the show since I lived in Lagos and even before that, I sort of knew what I could and what I couldn’t do going in.

[Generally,] what’s on the screen is what I intended in terms of emotional complexity, depth, the characters, the vengeance, the sadness, the joy and everything. There’s one tiny thing which I don't think people have really caught: the three men in the barbershop – besides Omo, the initial proprietor of the shop – are Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, and at the end when they prostrate before the Ghanaian goddess, I was trying to apologize for the Ghana must go fiasco [in the 1980s].

How much were you able to merge your Nigerian upbringing and ‘Doctor Who’ fandom into writing this episode?

I was born in Jos. My father was Muslim and from Edo State, my mother was Christian and from the Isoko [ethnic group]. In my household I was hearing stories from the Bible and stories from the Quran. My mum shared bits of Isoko folklore, my father told stories from his culture and his mother was Hausa, born in Kano. At the same time, I was going to visit my grandparents and I was hearing Nigerian folk stories. I also grew up watching British television.

Was it a deliberate choice to spotlight the growing Black heritage in the Whoniverse with an episode set in Africa and featuring a cameo of Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor, considering criticisms of the show going “too woke”?

First thing is that I’m not sure what woke means, [or how it works] in the context of Doctor Who. Woke seems to be an umbrella term for anything people think is too different or too progressive or too individualistic. In the context of Doctor Who, we’re talking about a character who was invented after the Second World War. He comes to earth, he doesn’t have a gun or a shield, you understand this is a man who doesn’t want trouble. All he has is a screwdriver, which means all he wants primarily to do is to fix things.

So I don’t know what it means when people say the show or the Doctor has gone too woke; Doctor Who is doing things that Doctor Who has always done. The difference is he now has an African appearance, but the things he’s doing in this episode are things he’s always done. It’s just that he can move differently in different places because of the color of his skin, in the same way that James Bond couldn't infiltrate Aso Rock, given the fact that he won't blend into Nigeria.

The fact that he looks the way he looks means we can tell different stories and he can move differently in certain corners of the world, and I hope there’s enough time and bandwidth and money to explore what kind of stories can be told with the doctor’s current appearance.

How do you retool your abilities as a seasoned poet and playwright for work like this that’s meant for a broader audience?

First and foremost, and I say this without trying to sound arrogant or conceited, I’m an artist, which means I make art. I’m not specifically a writer for hire, where people come up with a story and give it to me to write. The stories that I write come from me, which means I have to be invested in the story in order to do it justice. Everything I write comes fundamentally from my heart and at the core of myself is poetry. I wake up thinking about poetry and I go to bed thinking about poetry.

The first story that we hear in the episode, about Yo-Yo Ma, that’s actually a poem taken from my last book of poems [The Actual]. The poem is called ‘Fuck Time’ and the poem after that is called ‘Fuck Drums,’ which is actually about Doctor Who. I mentioned the Doctor as an expression of Afrofuturism. This was in 2020, before Ncuti was even announced as the doctor. What I’m trying to say is I’ve been writing this stuff for a long time.

I’ve been writing poetry for a long time and I keep finding interesting ways to weave it into everything that I write. Even the bits where the barber – who is named Adetokumbo at the end – is explaining all the gods that he is, it reads like a lyric poem because that is how I intended it to be read and understood. Where the poet starts and the screenwriter starts is another issue, but my primary job is to entertain my audiences and that means always having to negotiate. So I think about my audiences, I think about the context in which I’ll tell them stories and I make sure my language fits accordingly.