You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  Stephen Spender’s concoction, it turned out, was only half the story. For the heiress, he and W. H. Auden had planted a slight variation: an African prince with a large entourage, a collector and patron of the arts, was on a world tour. Happily, she surrendered her opera box to the prince and his entourage— which of course ended up as just the two English poets. Later, they explained the thinness of bodies in the box to her by claiming that they had learned only at the last moment that the “entourage” was not allowed to sit with His Highness, so they had been allocated seats elsewhere in the circle. I was somewhat puzzled—they were her friends anyway and could borrow or share her box any time they were in Venice—so I asked them, Why the fib? Spender nodded gravely as he explained in his gentle, reasonable voice that the poor girl had more money than she knew what to do with, so she should have something money can’t buy—royalty.

  They of course owned up to the convoluted deceptions afterward. The heiress was sending her private gondola to bring us to lunch, and the continuing absence of an entourage had became impossible to explain. W. H. Auden persisted in distracting me from feasting my eyes on her collection—“Don’t miss it when she turns her arse, dear boy. She had it sliced off, surgically, you know, flattened it, so she could wear those Charleston dresses of the Swinging Twenties.” Poetry, literature, and cultural issues were not neglected—the foundation’s agenda occupied the conference hours—but neither was mischief by that deadpan duo, a wildly differing image from what I had built up from reading and studying their poetry.

  Not a note of mischief, by contrast, did I ever detect in their Paris counterpart Pierre Emmanuel, but rather an abundance of good humor and a warm urbanity. In addition to writing poetry, Pierre was both historian and social philosopher. He completed the small circle of the expatriate company of which I greedily availed myself as respite from tilting at windmills in my own local landscape. A member of the board of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, he also occupied some kind of position in the French government. Ironically, usually in a fit of frustration, I sometimes experienced intense bouts of resentment against them all, on both sides of the English Channel, but only for my inability to conjure up their presence at will, including their roosting spaces— living room, bar, restaurant, concert, or seminar setting—and vanish into their contrasting, uninvolved environments, if only for an hour or two, a day or more. Quite early in our encounters, perhaps fresh from a contestation with some of my Francophone colleagues—the Mauritian poet Édouard Maunick and the Congolese Tchicaya U Tam’si, some of whose uncritical advocacy of la civilisation française triggered off my periodic bouts of mild Francophobia—I would accuse his nation of brainwashing its colonial subjects into becoming mimic French. Pierre’s indulgent response was to reward me with that uniquely French moue of the lips, accompanied by a hand gesture of modest negation unknown to any other nationality of my knowledge—and a prolonged postprandial afternoon would be taken up with his defense of French colonial history.

  My enduring education by Pierre Emmanuel, however, took a different form; I was inducted into the secret of controlling garlic breath—a few coffee beans, chewed slowly—“so next time, you won’t have to turn down the chicken cacciatore on account of the garlic.” Pierre had accurately guessed why I had turned down his recommendation, the specialty of the restaurant where he had once hosted me, observed my reaction as the waiter described its recipe! I warned him, however, that not all the coffee beans in Colombia or Kenya could meet the requirements of a friend of mine named Femi Johnson, who ate garlic as if he wanted to drown in its juice. “Well, bring him over if he is ever in Paris, and we’ll try a few garlic recipes together,” he said. I did, sooner than either thought likely. Femi visited Paris after traveling with a Nigerian drama troupe to the Nancy Festival, while I attended to an engagement at the Sorbonne. I halfheartedly participated in their garlic-saturated lunch in Pierre Emmanuel’s apartment, as we continued the former discourse on the comparative merits and demerits of French and British colonial policies, the simmering cauldron of Nigerian politics totally banished or at least relegated to a niche within the larger context of world politics, colonialism, and its consequences. It was one of the unmatchable luxuries of this period, entangling one’s mind in any tissue except what was being spun in the political looms of my Western Nigeria.

  The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), founded to promote freedom of speech and cultural expression, was always a generous host. It occupied offices in Boulevard Haussmann and operated like a more formalized version of the Transcription Centre in London, that dependable host to passing African writers. It also had a far more efficient machinery and clout for mobilizing international outcry when such writers were endangered. Funds from the CCF went into projects of our own Mbari Club in Adamasingba, that cultural roosting place that doubled as a venue for artistic manifestations and political intrigues. The literary and intellectual European journal Encounter, edited by an American expatriate, Melvin Lasky, his neatly bearded face a passable but fleshier copy of Lenin’s, was the British window on artistic trends in a post–World War II era, and a voice that did aspire to some objectivity during the Cold War.

  Like so many other writers and artists from the African continent, I always looked forward to meeting Melvin, who had a wide-ranging mind, full of cultural schemes. In turn he had toured the continent, spending several days in Nigeria. One evening, as I drove him in my Land Rover back to his hotel, close by Ibadan’s pioneer television station—WNTV: First in Africa—I swerved suddenly to ensure that I did not miss a large, shiny snake attempting to cross the road. I appeared to have succeeded. I reversed the car, and there it was, stopped in its tracks but still writhing in the light of the headlamps. I ran over it two more times to make sure it was quite dead; still it continued to writhe. So I reached for the engine crank behind me and descended, ready to apply the coup de grâce, Melvin wisely declining my invitation to join in the fray. It turned out to be no snake at all but a discarded filmstrip—very likely thrown out by the television station! Melvin used the incident to end the narrative of his African excursion, published in Encounter—his concluding words continued to ring in my head for some time afterward: “In Africa, you confront a serpent, and it turns out to be a filmstrip!” How I often longed for his mots justes to be uniformly true!

  Soon enough, we would discover that we had been dining, and with relish, with the original of that serpentine incarnation, the Devil, romping in our postcolonial Garden of Eden and gorging on the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge! Nothing—virtually no project, no cultural initiative—was left unbrushed by the CIA’s reptilian coils. The first All-African Congress of Writers and Intellectuals in Makarere, Uganda, after the wind of independence blew across the continent, had been sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter. The same source infiltrated Transition magazine, the pioneering journal of ideas in postcolonial Africa, under the editorship of an East African Indian of Brahmin extraction, Rajat Neogy. Not one of us had the slightest suspicion that a certain U.S.-based Farfield Foundation, which lavishly expended its resources on the continent’s postcolonial intellectual thought and creativity, was a front for the American CIA! When the scandal blew open, Melvin Lasky did not deny having had direct knowledge of the fact. My mind flew immediately to Pierre Emmanuel, who was on the board of the Congress, hoped fervently that he was as ignorant of the origin of these resources as was most certainly Stephen Spender, who attempted to rescue that truly stimulating journal Encounter from its tainted origins by taking over the editorship and seeking fresh resources for its continuation.

  The struggle for the continent’s ideological adhesion was not, however, strictly bipolar, a contest between East and West, between KGB and CIA, whatever names under which their cultural surrogates operated. It raged between one European country and another in varying degrees of subtlety and seduction. What mattered to us was that it provided numerous platforms for the cultural vanguard of the contested con
tinent. With a somewhat less disinterested outward reach than, for instance, Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, there was also Germany, with her own courtship of Africa’s immediate postindependence writers and artists, opening up venues in Berlin, Erlangen, Tegel, and Munich to Francophone, Anglophone, and Lusophone writers. Perhaps because the Scandinavian countries had no colonies, they appeared to be less inhibited, and perhaps less calculating, at pursuing a collaboration with the African liberation struggle—they had no excess baggage from the past!—and sought to channel that continent’s creative and intellectual surge into a close association with their peninsula. Black American jazz musicians, some fleeing from the draft for the Vietnam War, had found refuge in Sweden, enlivening her nightlife. Perhaps this also triggered off a special interest in the continent of origin itself—it was difficult to tell. All that mattered was the evident and open-minded reach of that region into African arts and literature, leading to encounters between the two cultures in which we were more than ready to participate. As for Germany, she had lost her African colonies, but some cultural links remained, and her cultural front, the Goethe-Institut, was determined to reinforce those links and give the Alliance Française and the British Council a good run for their money. The rivalries guaranteed days of greedily imbibed camaraderie among African products of the colonial adventure on neutral grounds, nurturing—without conscious intent—a renaissance hankering for the generation’s creative energies. Kindred spirits, with different levels and contexts of embattlement, engaged in a moving feast of cultural and political narratives of comparative fortunes—Tamsir Niane of the Republic of Guinea, a refugee in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Senegal, safe from the increasing paranoia of Sekou Toure, the revolutionary turned dictator of the Republic of Guinea, quietly assuming proprietorship of infamous torture cages that would not be exposed until years later; Ama Ata Aidoo, her playwright career just beginning, and Kofi Awoonor, poet and novelist, basking in the progressive limelight of their Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah; Okot p’Bitek—Song of Lawino—who would later drink himself to death in Idi Amin’s Uganda; David Rubadiri, the soft-spoken but steel-willed Malawian poet, cautioning his listeners about the increasing authoritarianism of the Malawian ruler, Hastings Banda; the South Africans, in their own unique category of the displaced, gradually reconciling themselves to an inevitable armed struggle; Taban lo Liyong, a poet solidly entrenched in his Africanity, unlike Tchicaya U Tam’si, the Congolese poet with the game leg who remained incorrigibly French yet passionately black, reading his moving poem to the lynched American boy Emmett Till; Camara Laye, author of the elegiac childhood reminiscence The Dark Child, seated at a café terrace in Erlangen, his eyes turned toward the mercury skies as he sighed, “Regardez! Ici, ce n’est pas un pays. En Afrique, il y a de soleil, il y a du riz, il y a de piment, mais ici”—and again a dolorous sigh— “ce n’est pas un pays.” (“Take a look at that! This is not a country. In Africa, you have the sun, there is rice, and there is hot pepper sauce, but here—no, this is not a country.”)

  We did not require much urging—few, if any, passed up the opportunity for such encounters. Some were already domiciled, by choice or by circumstances, in the home of their colonial patrons. For others, each invitation was a respite, a banquet to be savored, sometimes greedily devoured. We met, debated, wined and dined, pursued amorous prospects, and felt recharged. . . . All too soon, it was time for each to return to a different clime and terrain and confront his or her own serpents.

  In 1983 I fulfilled a long-held craving: to visit postrevolution Cuba for the first time. An invitation arrived from Casa de las Americas and found me more than ready. It was an invigorating respite, not unexpectedly, debating the purpose of art and ideology with the Cuban intellectual vanguard of the revolution. A former Royal Court colleague, the working-class playwright Arnold Wesker, somewhat self-conscious in his custom-tailored Mao suit, was at least well suited for a photo call when news came unexpectedly that he had won a prestigious prize. All ideological tussle was forgotten as we suspended the agenda and moved into the celebration mode in the Casa, continuing late into the night. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? found unexpected popularity among working-class revolutionaries—it seemed a paradox, this rite of exorcism between a middle-class American couple being so totally divorced from the ideological concerns of a world in turmoil. Then a four- to five-hour harangue by Fidel Castro at the Conference of Socialist Architects with a fear building up in me that I was watching a personality cult in the making, one that might breed a nation of revolutionary sycophants. A tour of the island, visiting the high-water landmarks of the revolution. Starved for wine by the rationing policy in Havana, we found the countryside more accommodating. In a modest seaside restaurant where we stopped for lunch, a cask of robust red wine, allegedly “washed up” from a Spanish smuggling vessel, was unstoppered in our honor by the straight-faced restaurateur, who appeared unfazed by the presence of the revolutionary watchdogs. We did not get to Santiago de Cuba until late that night, blissfully drunk.

  I fell in love with a dancer in Havana, came close to eloping with a widow in Santiago de Cuba, ate frogs’ legs in a restaurant for the first time, and marveled at the Cubans’ technical ingenuity in keeping ancient Yankee Cadillacs purring smoothly with improvised spare parts. From time to time, the question of Albee’s play would come up, our fellow confreres still amazed that such a play should find a place in a revolutionary environment. Ritual, I offered, ritual. Ritual is largely classless; and a debate erupted, as stridently as when I had offered that proletarian art—like the arts of indigenous peoples—had its secure place but should not be permitted to tyrannize over individual departures that offer insights outside the blinkers of the party line. What was remarkable was that the Cuban revolutionaries, in the main, agreed, but the European socialists—in the main—deplored the notion as bourgeois.

  “Bourgeois” was also enemy territory in the United States of the 1960s, and was sometimes interchangeable with “white,” “racist,” “segregationist”— against all of which the black writers were producing a powerful body of revolutionary work. That visit, in 1964, was a lavish concourse, openly sponsored by the U.S. State Department, its intent being to bring virtually all of Africa to dialogue with the United States. No expense had been spared. All disciplines—from the arts and sciences to economics, philosophy, and possibly even religion—were in attendance, making it look as if Africa had been emptied of all analytic, creating, or governing structures for this grandiose effort to capture minds in the open contest between the ideological blocs, East and West. Africa was a much-sought prize, and one side at least, the West, was prepared to spare no expense to grab it and keep it within its orbit. I said to my colleagues, “Listen, we had better indulge to the fullest”—we did—“because it will never happen again.” It never has!

  It was a chance not to be missed, seeking out kindred spirits in the combat zones of the black nation within the outer embrace. The Spirit House of Leroi Jones—later Imamu Amiri Baraka—hovered between a monastery and a revolutionary training school, joined in a regimen of rigorous discipline and leader worship that was nearly cultic in character. It was wildly different in style and mood from the more democratic setting of the Lafayette Theater in Manhattan, also a revolutionary den for black liberation and equality, where Ernie McLintock, Ed Bullins, Ben Caldwell, and others held sway through their plays, smoked marijuana, needled the white establishment, and warned, just like Leroi Jones and others of that movement, of the apocalypse to come, unless . . .

  Into others’ battle zones or cultural oases—those visits were valued furloughs, interjections of comparative sanity, since even the insanities of others, as long as one remains sufficiently detached, inject a sense of proportion into one’s close concerns. Every planned escape was guaranteed to be curtailed, however, and thus, ultimately, I was constantly left feeling shortchanged afterward. Still, they were much-needed interruptions in what was fast becoming
an existence dominated by the politics of the immediate, demanding instant response. Sometimes the curtailment of the duration of such external relief was of my own ordering, not of any urgent summons from home that stemmed from an unexpected and menacing development. There would come that moment when the mind revolted. I would look around, listen to the conversation around me—a pretentious note, perhaps, a preposterous proposition, an artificial ardor, a comfortable liberalism or armchair radicalism—and the wine would turn flat on my tongue, my mind would go blank, leaving only the rebuke: What are you still doing in this place? The following day would find me at the airport, headed back to that region of the world that would come to be dubbed the “wild, wild West” by a young military officer who, undergoing his Sandhurst training during the Western Regional elections, had no inkling of the political destiny that lay ahead of him.

  Wanted!

  The most extended break from the gathering firestorm of the West came from the Commonwealth Arts Festival of 1965; then it was back to base to have one’s face rubbed in the conduct of the Western regime, aided and abetted by the federal government, increasingly arbitrary, vindictive, and desperate. My series of sociopolitical sketches—Before the Blackout, The New Republican, and so on— had served to calm the rioting conscience for a while, and the urge to intervene in a more direct way would have been stilled—perhaps—but for one afternoon of sheer serendipity.

  Saturday was the weekly concession to a full-bodied Nigerian menu in the Femi Johnson home. Otherwise, my friend Femi, then married to an English wife, would dine on steak and gravy, lamb chops and mashed potatoes, fish and chips, shepherd’s pie, and all the other delicacies that could be found on any English table. My presence in the Femi Johnson household whenever I found myself in Ibadan on a Saturday afternoon had thus become routine. I went there to be overfed! The warm reception of my play The Road, most especially through a review by Penelope Gilliatt of The Observer, had been gratifying, but that was no solace for nearly two weeks of the barely tolerable to execrable restaurant fare that one could afford in 1965 London. I had accepted a new position in the English Department of the University of Lagos but had yet to settle into my office. A huge craving for some solid Nigerian cooking had thus been stored up, and the first Saturday afternoon after my return I could hardly wait for Ibadan and Femi’s gourmandizing company. In truth, I was suffering from double starvation: I needed to catch up with the news and explore the ongoing politics of the West that had taken the gloss off my theater debut at the Commonwealth Arts Festival.