by Wole Soyinka
The only addendum the new regime and its collaborators has is to: ENSURE THAT CHIEF M.K.O. ABIOLA DOES NOT BECOME THE PRESIDENT OF NIGERIA IN WHATEVER FORM.... Let me state here categorically that this is not a prediction at all. It is a preconceived plan of the new regime, exposed by an insider. . . .
THE IMPORTANT REPORT SENT TO ME TODAY: A NOTORIOUS GANG IN THE NIGERIAN ARMY has completed their plan to assassinate Chief Moshood Abiola as a “final settlement of the ABACHA /ABIOLA war” in a “no victor, no vanquished way.” Believe it or not, if the report given to me is anything to go by, Chief Abiola’s death could come within a few days or before the end of September. This may look ridiculous, unthinkable or like an outright fabrication, but believe it or not, it is true. Tell Prof and other pro-democracy groups both abroad and at home to mount a very intensive pressure on Abdulsalami to release Chief M.K .O. Abiola now!
The new regime would fail to protect Chief Abiola from his assassins because it has not been able to persuade them to rethink the Nigerian national question.
They might even seize power from Abubakar in order to achieve their destructive plan. These people are hell-bent on destroying the corporate existence of Nigeria rather than see Abiola become the president.
The last leg in the relay through which the message had traveled was none other than my son Ilemakin, who had long since thrown himself into the struggle on his own, slipped out of the country and begun to carry out some missions for the democracy movement. The desperate appeal finally reached its destination on my last day in Vienna, but only after the departure of Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations. A day earlier, I had been locked in a tête-à-tête with him for nearly an hour and a half. He seemed quite relaxed; the human rights conference that had brought us both to Austria appeared to have fulfilled all the aims of the United Nations, and Kofi Annan was now looking forward to his next mission: to travel the next morning to Nigeria, where he would visit the new—decidedly interim—head of state, Abdulsalami Abubakar, and of course see Moshood Abiola in prison. Neither of us required any urging to accept that we had to meet and talk before his departure.
My patience was severely tested by his “reasonableness” . . . Yes, yes, Wole, an opportunity has opened up now with Abacha’s death, and we musn’t waste it. A lot can be achieved, the crisis can now be resolved, but, you know, you must tell your people also to be reasonable. The opposition simply has to be reasonable.
Reasonable? Were we being unreasonable? After nearly thirty years of military rule, the last five under the most repellent of the species, we were asking for the immediate release of the elected president and all remaining political prisoners and the setting up of an interim government headed by Abiola, the legitimate president—an interim government that would last a year, maybe two. In tandem, the nation’s representatives would meet at a sovereign national conference to ascertain the real will of the people and lay the ground for the next elections while reviewing the terms of association of the constituent parts of the nation. Then general elections. What was unreasonable about such proposals? Indeed, what alternative was there? I had the sinking feeling that Kofi was traveling with a prepared script, a script already agreed between the United Nations and a caucus of Western governments. The program of our democratic coalition was not to be part of that script.
Warning of the death threat to Abiola was delivered into my hands only after Kofi Annan had left for Nigeria and had even held his meeting with the prisoner! If I had received it earlier, I would have submerged all political discussion under the urgency of bringing Abiola out of prison immediately! Certainly I would have served formal notice on the United Nations, insisted—for whatever it was worth—that its secretary-general refuse to meet Abiola except at liberty, in his own home, surrounded by his family and political associates. We had learned from experience to trust any warning from “Longa Throat.” It was too late, however; Abiola was already dying, his organs weakened by a devilish regimen of slow poisoning. It will all come out in its full byzantine details—of that, I live in total confidence.
So our discussion—and my principal concerns—were taken up mostly with Nigeria’s future, not with any thoughts of danger to the man at the center of it all. By the end of that meeting, so convinced was I that that future had already been decided by others that I sent messages home immediately, urging that all pressure should be mounted on the visitor to make him listen to our program and press it on the new landlord of Aso Rock, General Abdulsalami. And yet I warned in the same breath that it would be futile anyway. Such were the frequent contradictions that defined many moments of that democratic undertaking. Futility stared one in the face, but inaction was far more intolerable.
Wryly and incongruously, at such moments would float to the surface of my mind one of my mother’s favorite aphorisms, with her comic Yorubization of the key English word “trying”: “Itirayi ni gbogbo nkan”—“The trying is all.” Wild Christian applied it to a full gamut of incompatible situations—from the shrug of resignation that followed a failed attempt to charge exorbitantly for her goods to falling with full relish on the dubious results of an exotic recipe that she was attempting for the first time. Abiola was—like the French Socialist president François Mitterrand, which is where the similarity ends— a dogged disciple of the doctrine of itirayi. It was not his first attempt to become the president of Nigeria. A Yoruba from the South, his first, overconfident foray was ridiculed and scuttled by a feudal cabal of the North who found it laughable that anyone outside their privileged caucus should even dream of ruling the nation. They took his money—lots of it—but openly derided his ambitions. Abiola made a strategic withdrawal, bided his time, launched himself on a philanthropic crusade, broadened and reinforced his political base. At the second outing, he succeeded. And for that, Abiola was killed.
I AM TEMPTED to hold this last loss responsible, above other candidates, for a homecoming that appears almost completely devoid of emotion, the focus of one’s struggle having been violently sucked into a void. But it goes beyond the depressing weight of such absences. I am not returning to any abandoned territory, since this is where I have remained by compulsion, almost with debilitating intensity, these past five years.
Instinctively, I turn toward the window when the captain announces that we have entered the Nigerian airspace. The plane’s shadow dances over a few minarets and walled cities of the North. We are still some distance from our destination; the full length of the Nigerian landmass has yet to be crossed. For a moment I think I have caught a glimpse of an oasis, but it is only the sun’s glint on a flat, corrugated iron roofing, undoubtedly a factory. My mind moves to the fate of my own house, the modest foundation dream. Now, that I had effectively abandoned, perhaps in self-defense, brick by red brick and beam by beam, including its wild, ample grounds, where I had experimented and succeeded—against all odds, I was told—in cultivating the wild, now rarely seen agbayun, that stubborn berry that coats every morsel of food for hours afterward with a natural sweetness. The lore, backed by generations of frustrated farmers, was that it never fructified in captivity. Through trial and error, by varying the combination of sunshine and soil, moisture, shade, and whatever else I could recall from my amateur flirtation with viniculture, I produced a freak success, a feat of which I was inordinately proud, since I am no farmer. The oldest and the youngest in the family, Tinuola and Folabo, are the family’s green thumbs. Femi, next to me in age—“Jamani,” to distinguish him by his childhood nickname from his namesake, OBJ—is the fisherman. I took to hunting. Cultivating the agbayun was also an irony, as I do not like sweets and only gave the berries away.
There was also my minifield of wild mints. When I retired from the Nigerian university system in 1985, thinking of various occupations for survival, I considered a project for freezing or drying my wild mint for sale, especially to bars and teahouses around the world. Fantasizing myself as a small-scale trading maverick, one who identified, produced, and markete
d a select item or two in demand, virtually from my doorstep, making a living out of it to sustain a retirement into purely creative pursuits—this has long been a favorite pastime of mine. I suppose it was my fascination with the world of Wild Christian, that modest trader in a medley of commodities, that promoted such fantasies. I knew it would come to nothing, but it provided moments of unmatched bliss to sit in those ample verandas, survey my lordly domain, and weave my magic carpet of a life of interdependency between the arts and the farm. The mini-grove of wild mints and the agbayun were doomed to remain contemplative vistas, nothing more. I enjoyed watching them grow, sniffing the air around them and accompanying their flights to myriad cities in air-sealed bags. But all I did was lace the occasional drink with the mint leaves and distribute the agbayun berries to friends. A few hundred were forgotten in my freezer, where they duly rotted when the infamous electrical supply took even its feeble charge away for prolonged periods that coincided with my absences from home.
Perhaps the memory of its one dedication still hovers around the estate. At the first anniversary of Femi Johnson’s death—or, more accurately, of his reinternment—the foundation received its first guest, an absentee guest and permanent resident. Then the estate came alive, peopled, that one time, by the very creative tribe it was meant to serve. I try to recollect the animated faces and voices . . . the poet and journalist Odia Ofeimun; the critic Biodun Jeyifo; the poet and playwright Femi Osofisan; Tunji Oyelana and Jimi Solanke, musicians and actors; the singer and lifelong collaborator Francesca Emmanuel; Bola Ige, a lawyer and politician but friend of the arts and occasional poet . . . then we formally named a wing for our late friend, slaughtered a goat, and consumed gourdfuls of palm wine and cases of its bottled and labeled expatriate siblings. Celebrating Femi Johnson’s life? Or assuaging our loss yet again? No matter, he was one of us, actor and singer even though a businessman, and we were sealing his present memory into those walls.
The memories, yes, but the physical casing of the idea? Mentally abandoned—at least, so I continue to hope—flushed into the thin stream that I had widened into an artificial pond, past the catchment groves of repose along the watercourse, now certainly silted up or covered in an oily slick that oozed lazily from that strange soil. I remind myself that I once abandoned even the cactus patch, a bristling phalanx of thorned markers to which I had assigned the role of covering my remains—yes, that was the ultimate proof of my detachment. It was due especially to the dismissal of that last attachment that, faced with the real possibility that I might be killed in exile, I seized greedily on a chance encounter, a revelation, on the island of Jamaica. I imbued the event with a fated dimension, read it as a solemn pronouncement and offering from predecessors to the ancestral realms. Alas, even that substitute would prove treacherous, impressing on me all over again the lesson I thought I had mastered—never to call deeply to anything as mine, never to become attached, not even to a prospective burial ground.
IN 1990—IN MY NOTATION, the Year of Mandela’s Release—when he made Jamaica one of his earliest stopping points for his reunion with the living world, I made a startling discovery on that same island. If Nelson Mandela was discovering the space of freedom on a global scale, I was also discovering a micro-world that was founded in freedom. Thus did I embark on a pilgrimage that would begin as a sentimental, and evolve into a morbid, attachment.
The timing of my presence in Kingston, Jamaica, with Mandela’s—even though we never did meet on that soil—imbued my discovery with an indefinable sense of augury, but then, let it be recalled that, like a large portion of the world, I had carried the calvary of Mandela and the struggle against apartheid South Africa in my head for longer than its continental replacement, the horror of an Abacharized Nigerian nation. Apart from participating in the mandatory “Free Mandela” marches, disinvestment campaigns, lecture sessions, anti-sanction-busting commissions, and so on, I had presented an early student play at London’s Royal Court Theatre, The Invention, on the insanities of the apartheid system. Decades after that production, I titled a collection of my poems Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems, and it seemed the most appropriate gesture, as I prepared for Stockholm in 1986, to dedicate my Nobel acceptance speech to him. (That was the speech in which, to my eternal chagrin, I listed Montesquieu among the contributors to European racist thinking—may the shade of Montesquieu find it in his ancestral heart to forgive that libel!)
To find myself again in Kingston for a lecture engagement in 1990, for the first time in nearly fifteen years, just as the entire city was emptying itself out for Mandela, was already more than sufficient. It was a symbolic gift that I regarded as personal, not shared with the millions of ecstatic hordes that had labored for and now celebrated his freedom. To discover a portion of my own homeland in that far-off place at the same time—now, that was a miracle that could be wrought only by a Mandelan avatar!
For it was only on this visit, my second ever to that island, that I was made aware of a slave settlement called Bekuta, a name that immediately resonated in my head as none other than the name of my hometown, Abeokuta. This centuries-wide reunion with my own history sent a tingle down my vertebrae— an encounter with descendants from my own hometown on a far-flung Caribbean island, in the hills of a onetime slave settlement called Jamaica?
The group of slave descendants who founded the settlement, in flight from the lowland plantations, had sought out a hilly terrain that would prove nearly impenetrable for their pursuing owners but would also remind them of home. They found it in the county of Westmoreland and settled among its rockhills, naming it Abeokuta. Yemi Adefuye, the Nigerian high commissioner in the West Indies, had already become acquainted with this history and could not wait to arrange a visit. What was only an academic though exciting discovery for him and others was, in my case, a most affecting experience. I found it strange indeed that during my first visit to Jamaica, in 1976 for Carifesta—the Caribbean Festival of the Arts—no one had thought to mention the existence of this settlement or propose that we pay it a visit!
A famous Nigerian, now also deceased, had preceded me on this voyage of private discovery, I was informed. This was Fela Sowande, a composer, but a totally different spirit from his younger and more famous namesake, the “Afro-beat king” and iconoclast Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Sowande had been completely overwhelmed—he had broken down in tears. This older cousin would exact his emotional revenge on me some years later, unintentionally, for it was his symphony Obangiji, based on melodies from our common birthplace, that, unexpectedly swarming out of the violin and cello strings of the Swedish orchestra as I moved forward on the Stockholm stage to receive the Nobel Prize, nearly succeeded in making me a victim of the shamelessness of tear ducts. It was a brief but tense struggle! The rockhills of origin stood me in good stead, but it could have gone either way. (The horror of it—the immaculately pressed, ribboned, and sashed master of ceremonies, the Swedish prince consort himself, compelled to lend me his handkerchief!) Really, the Stockholm ceremonials should not spring such surprises on middle-aged susceptibilities!
As the island slowly recovered from the hangover of Mandela’s visit, I could not wait to answer the call of Bekuta. There I encountered one of my yet living ancestors, the oldest inhabitant of the settlement, frail, as one would expect a being of more than a hundred years to be. Now, let no one dare tell me I do not know an Egba face when I see one! The parchment tautness of her face, the unmistakable features of the Egba death mask, captured so immutably in Demas Nwoko’s10 painting Ogboni, attested her origins distinctly against any skeptical voices. Not much motion was left in her body, or else her body rhythm, I was certain, would have reinforced what her face pronounced. As she became bedridden, she ordered her bed moved to the window that overlooked the rockhills. Now all she sought was that her eyes would open and close on those rocks, dawn and dusk, until her final moment.
She was the sole survivor of the original settlers. Her voice was still remarkably strong. Did I
imagine the unmistakable Egba twang in her Jamaican patois? Of course I did, but what a conceit to let it linger in the resounding chambers of one’s head! Oh yes, the real name is A-be-o-ku-ta —never did music sound so tanned, so ancestral in authority— but it gradually became corrupted to Bekuta. I tell them all the time— the name is A-be-o-ku-ta, but how many of them can remember that? They don’t even remember what it means, unless I remind them. I was a child when we came here. When our people dance for you and cook you fufu, ewedu, jogi, and other foods from home, no one come tell you that we descendants of slaves from A-be-o-ku-ta. But yes, much has been lost. The government help a little, they come here sometimes, bring visitors, and the local council preserve our history by staging shows every year. We observe the seasons of the gods . . . Sango, Obatala, Ogun11 . . . we used to have a babalawo,12 but I don’t think anyone remember how to read Ifa13; anymore . . . some of the children go away and never return . . . in fact, the best dancers are the older ones, they the ones who keep our traditions alive. They teach their children, but the children not very interested. They only do these things when there are important visitors, so I don’t know what going happen when the older ones die o f. . . .
Shadowed by soaring rockhills—if the god Ogun sought congenial habitation, it would be nowhere else—they danced for us the sedate, ceremonial steps of the Egba, and fed us dishes whose recipes had been carefully preserved from the vanished home. These were the life exiles, generation exiles, those who had died to a faraway homeland and awakened to a new earth, exiles to whom the call of origin had thinned over time and dissipated into the winds of passage, drifting with mists from the cascading waters of Bekuta rockhills and evaporating the same way. It vanished wistfully into the territory of legends, of the deities of mountains and valleys, was fleshed out in purely performance modes that increasingly underscored its now vestigial status. Recollection stepped gingerly into temporary recovery spaces of town halls or school fields, ever submissive to the present. The exigencies of that present—careers, economic survival, politics, and the rest—reinforced their supremacy over memory or sentiment. After each emergence, the adaptive masks and costumes of origin reentered their normal abode of camphor-saturated boxes and shelves—until the next festive or commemorative occasion.