You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  “That can’t be true!” he challenged the minister. “I was with Wole in Ibadan throughout that day; you can check with my wife and a number of other people whose names I will provide you. All day, including dinner. He could not have been at that meeting as alleged. That confession must be a forgery. It’s a frame-up.”

  Enahoro was taken aback. He asked Femi how sure he was of his facts. Femi swore that he was ready to back up his statement anywhere. The minister asked him to write a formal letter to that effect, which Femi did the following day, making sure that Enahoro had it in his hands before he returned to Lagos. To further engage his interest, Femi reminded Enahoro of his own past predicament as a “fugitive offender”—the title of Enahoro’s account of that experience—and of the voluntary role I had played in the efforts to prevent his extradition.

  Tony Enahoro replied, “Oh, that was then. This is war, you know. The rules are different.”

  Curiously, I found myself in agreement with Tony Enahoro—it was war— and I never held his indifference against him, which was just as well, since we were destined to join forces two decades later against a far more detestable foe, the dictator Sani Abacha. Even so, I must confess that I was rather nettled at the baldness of the dismissal. I suppose one always nurses a secret expectation of some kind of reciprocity, even if it exists on a purely rhetorical level. As for the statement that Femi handed to him the following day, that was the last he ever heard from Tony.

  FEMI HAD CAUSE to be a hundred percent certain of my alibi. Not only had I been with him most of that crucial day, I had again involved him in my course of action, imposed a chore on him—which was to find me a new hiding place. It had become necessary to “go under,” even while remaining active. His house was now “hot,” and I had no wish to implicate him any futher in this latest entanglement. Tongues from the police and military intelligence were indeed fanning the wind toward my person, and I still had some urgent tasks ahead, tasks that required total seclusion. I also needed a secure place for the two or three final meetings that were left—with members of my group, for instance, even with Bola Ige, and indeed one or two military contacts. I could no longer go to people but could get them to come to me if I succeeded in finding a secure venue. Obasanjo was the sole exception—we had agreed to meet at Jericho.

  Femi went away to make inquiries, returned with information about an expatriate civil servant who had gone on leave. His house was unoccupied; not even the servants’ quarters were tenanted. Femi obtained the number and address of the bungalow—in the Iyaganku government quarters, virtually under the nose of the police—and drove me casually past the house in daytime while I looked it over. Close to the police though it was, it was most obligingly secluded; the expatriate owner was a kindred spirit, he believed in a surround of lush vegetation. Best of all, it had a functioning telephone.

  Later that night, he dropped me by the fence, armed with a torch and the now regulation hamper of food and drinks. Gaining entrance through a window was easy. Once assured of entry, I told him to get lost. “Don’t come near me again. From now on, you don’t know me, never saw me in your life. If I am absolutely desperate for some item, I’ll telephone or get a message to you somehow. You can bring it at nighttime, drop it at the point where you’ve just let me off, and keep going. You’ve done enough, you’ve done more than you should have done. Now get out and look after yourself.” The shocked look on his face was a marvel to see, but he saw at once that I was in deadly earnest, sensed at once that this bout of conflict with a military government, and in wartime, was far more serious than my earlier political skirmishes.

  I underestimated Femi yet again, forgot that he did not willingly let go of some space of collaboration. The many times when I denied him participation, he succeeded in inflicting on me a sense of betrayal, as if I had deprived him of a natural entitlement that was well within his conspiratorial competence. He insisted on driving me to the rendezvous. In vain I impressed on him the fact that I had my arrangements well in hand, that one of my own group was far better equipped to handle any untoward situation, but, most important of all, he would be exposing himself to unnecessary risks. He flared up—“Why shouldn’t I? If I get arrested, well, what exactly would they charge me with? That you had dinner in my house, told me to drop you at the petrol station and return for you after an hour—since when did that add up to a crime? You’re going to meet the man in charge of zonal security on some crucial national matter, leaving from my house—everybody knows you stay here, after all. So I drop you and pick you up again, what’s wrong with that?” And then the clinching argument: “In any case, we know each other. I’ve done insurance for him and his colleagues—we get on quite well. In fact, I’ll say hello to him as I drop you.”

  I drew the line there, surrendered the others. Just drop me at the petrol station and take off, I insisted. As it happened, the rendezvous was close to Femi’s home. He would pick me up at my hideout after dark, take me to the encounter, I would satisfy his burning curiosity over a late dinner, and then my man—not he—would return me to my base.

  I got busy on the telephone, even as I continued to ask myself, Do I really want to meet this man? More meetings with his junior officers followed where we debated that issue.

  I had already delivered the core of Victor Banjo’s message over the telephone, but Obasanjo wanted very much to discuss it in some detail. I knew what the truth was: he needed to ask questions. Questions to help him decide which side to support? Or questions that might yield snippets of intelligence for securing his own base in aiding the federal cause? It was all very suspicious, and, to make matters worse, the character references from his own officers were not especially reassuring; the kindest word that summarized their assessment of their commanding officer was—cagey. The situation in the Midwest remained fluid; indeed, there was a lull for several weeks, as if the federal government and Biafra were weighing up each other, or else—which was more likely—waiting to see which way the West would respond to the new situation. Fighting had not yet flared up on the next obvious front: the border between the West and Midwest. The West itself was undergoing its final moments of fence-sitting, never mind the stout declarations of allegiance to the slogan of “One Nigeria”!

  The British High Commission intelligence network, for once, had been caught on the hop, though we were to learn later that it had not failed completely—the high commissioner did report the likelihood of the Midwest crossing to Yakubu Gowon’s government but could not pinpoint the date. Much, so much, now depended on the decision of the Western command. It was a military situation, and not even the governor of the West could make that decision, as he had no forces under his command. Banjo was holed up in Benin. The bulk of the federal troops, weapons, and logistical resources was bottled up in the Northern sector, since the Midwest had earlier refused to allow any fighting on its soil—a position that was no longer tenable. The federal government desperately depended on the West holding firm to the federal cause. In short, one man now held the key, and that was the officer in charge of the Western Area Command, Olusegun Obasanjo.

  Several of Obasanjo’s officers had no sympathy whatsoever for the federal cause. It was not that they were against a unified nation; no, they simply felt that the internal arrangements of the existing national entity were lopsided, weighed in favor of Northern privilege. Even within the army, they knew what it was to be second-class citizens—given the chance, they would be Biafrans! Again the question remained suspended: Should I really meet this man or not? It all boiled down to the fact that, in the view of his own officers, Obasanjo could not be trusted. He could set a trap, have me arrested for “consorting with the enemy” or whatever. And so they insisted on leaving such a risky decision to me, even while stressing that a voice like mine might just do the trick. There was not much time. Finally I abandoned all further hesitation and I called him once more. Obasanjo remained more than eager to meet.

  The venue remained Jericho, at a petrol
station in a quiet part of Ibadan. Again we set out the conditions: both to come alone, unarmed and unaccompanied. Even then, I continued to battle with unresolved doubts—going underground and operating from there seemed a far more rational option. In the end, it was probably those frenzied four or five days of intense cloak-and-dagger meetings (of whose existence Femi would be kept completely oblivious) with Western leaders—politicians, labor leaders, even senior police officers—that tilted the scales. Time was running out for Victor Banjo and his version of the Third Force, and the leader of that incursion continued to await a sign from the West. I had no further contribution to make, no more unfulfilled chores. I was drained. It was time for a decisive act. I agreed to deliver yet again—but this time face-to-face—the message I had brought back from Biafra, one that had been given to me in Enugu—not Benin!

  Femi picked me up as agreed. I had already organized a driver, one of our group, to wait for me by Christopher Okigbo’s now abandoned and locked-up domain, Cambridge House, a mere walking distance from Femi’s house. I tried a last-minute variation: would it not be simpler, I suggested, for him to drop me by the waiting car and go home, and I would join him for dinner and the eagerly awaited debriefing? OBJ would not hear of it. Well, would he at least drive past the road junction by Cambridge House, where my man was waiting, and pause long enough for me to change his instructions? Was it all right if I told the fellow to tag along, follow us to the rendezvous but continue straight on, just checking that we were safe? My friend, addict of intrigues, ignored my sarcastic tone and generously gave his consent.

  Neither Obasanjo nor I, it turned out, kept strictly to the agreed conditions of our meeting. In my own case, however, the failure was unintended. Femi at the wheel, we stopped by the desolate Cambridge House to brief the waiting driver of the slight change of plans. He was to follow us the short distance to the petrol station, drive past, and park his car at a distance from where he could ensure that the other side kept to the bargain, then return to Cambridge House to await my return.

  At the petrol station, Femi pulled up in the shadow cast by the street lighting off the low enclosure wall. A few moments later, Olusegun Obasanjo’s Volkswagen Beetle drew up, stopped at the other side of the pumps. With a Yoruba cap, an ikori, firmly pulled over my forehead, I walked across from where we had parked and jumped into the seat beside him. From the shadow of the wall, Femi turned around to go home immediately—keeping at least to the terms of our agreement. Obasanjo took off just as fast in the direction of nowhere, followed, however, by a car that—he would later admit—was his security detail. That uninvited guest was spotted by my own Third Force driver, who promptly threw out all instructions and followed the intruder. The agreement had been broken, and he considered his original instructions no longer valid.

  And my good friend O. B. Johnson? As he recounted it to me later that night, he had indeed been headed home when he observed through his rear mirror that Obasanjo’s vehicle had acquired two tails. Trust my friend: he turned around and followed the convoy of three vehicles, sensing foul play! Spotting the anomaly was not difficult. The sight of any vehicle on the streets at night was sufficient to generate attention at such a time—a partial, largely self-imposed curfew was being observed on Ibadan streets, and in any case, Onireke was a very quiet part of Ibadan at that hour. Thus began the only comic relief that would come my way since my return from Biafra.

  To adapt one of Fela Anikulapo’s antiestablishment songs—“Wetin follow be say Follow-follow follow Follow-follow.”29 I turned in my seat, looked back quite openly, and saw what was going on. Obasanjo drove in a way that might suggest that he was merely taking precautions, attempting to throw off any incidental tail, and I pretended to “swallow-swallow” the deception. I have sometimes wondered how an aerial shot of those minutes of the pursuit would have looked, with cutbacks to vehicle interiors and the bewildered faces—and thoughts—of the various occupants! It continued through the twists and turns of Ibadan roads for several minutes before Obasanjo somehow succeeded in losing everyone, including his own security detail. The soldier wore a loose agbada. I took the opportunity of the first lurch to lean into him. Of course he was armed, as he would cheerfully admit years later in the home of Ojetunji Aboyade, our perennial peace broker, when we reviewed the events of that night. “Me? I am supposed to be a soldier, do you think I would agree to meet someone just from Biafra, in the dead of night, on a deserted street, without protection? I would deserve to be court-martialed!”

  In the flickering lights of the streetlamps, each of us tried openly to assess the other. Even beneath his agbada, I could discern the beginnings of a slight paunch, while his face bore the recognizable tribal marks of Owu stock, one of the branches of the Yoruba. The Owu are reputed to be pugnacious by nature; there was, however, nothing remotely soldierly about his bearing. His expression remained inscrutable, but his voice sounded relaxed, even self-confident, and he asked his questions as if the answers carried no import that extended beyond the two occupants of the car. There was nothing whatsoever to indicate which way he felt about the war, no sense of his awareness of the critical position in which he found himself. He sounded more like a village headmaster who was awaiting the visit of a schools inspector and wanted to know all about the likely areas of interest of the visitor. His face became animated, taking on a queasy slyness, only when he asked how I had come to know about the telephone in his wardrobe.

  Again I tried to justify the physical encounter to myself. The core of Banjo’s message had been delivered. The man’s insistence on our meeting therefore had to be his need for a direct “character reference”—in short, to see the messenger in person, assess his genuineness, and hopefully believe in the truthfulness of his message: that in breaching the neutrality of the Midwest, Banjo was not acting for Biafra but planned instead to bring the war to an end. Again and again Banjo had urged me—as if I needed any urging!—to emphasize this to Obasanjo: “This is not a Biafran army, and this is not a Biafran agenda.” I was to detail how he had persuaded Ojukwu to let him train an independent force ostensibly to promote that leader’s ambitions. The training had gone on secretly in the Midwest, right under the nose of David Ejoor, the military governor, who had remained genuinely oblivious to such activities. To obtain both men and weaponry, Banjo had had to agree to train and move an independent force through the Midwest, sack the center, and install a regime that would endorse Biafra’s secession. However, there Victor Banjo’s and Ojukwu’s interests were supposed to part company. Banjo was solidly against the secession.

  However, Nigerians are weaned on the caution “Cunny man die, cunny man bury am.”30 Victor Banjo understood clearly—as I also did even from my single encounter with Ojukwu—that the warlord meant to take over the nation. It was a view that has since been confirmed by some of the historians from the Biafran side. It was equally clear that Victor Banjo meant to ignore Ojukwu’s ambitions once he himself had seized Lagos and was guaranteed the support of the Western command. Banjo then intended to take over the nation, including Biafra. I do not believe for a moment that he meant to terminate the secession by force of arms; indeed, that would have been nearly impossible, considering the fact that his liberation force was made up largely of Biafran soldiers. Guaranteed the support of the Western Region in overwhelming numbers, however, Banjo could have ensured that any ambitions of Ojukwu in the larger national context were successfully thwarted. Banjo’s immediate constituency was the West, and he needed, at the very least, some form of assurance from the Western leaders. This was why he was desperate that his message to Obasanjo be couched in unambiguous terms: “Tell Obasanjo that the liberation forces at my command do not wish to fight on Western soil. All we seek is unimpeded passage to Lagos through the Western Region.”

  This was the message I reiterated to Obasanjo that night as we drove through the deserted streets of Ibadan warrens.

  But now a necessary digression on the minor but instructive theme of re
visionism in purported historical narratives, using as an intimate example the notorious fictionalizing of my telephone exchanges and eventual meeting with Olusegun Obasanjo during those crucial nights when the fate of a nation hung in the balance and one man held the key to its future—at least its immediate future. That man of fluctuating destinies Olusegun Obasanjo would later become a military head of state, a prisoner of another military dictator, an occupant of death row, and then a civilian president—albeit elected under extremely dubious circumstances—in 1999 and, under even more discredited circumstances, in 2003 (see Supreme Court Judgement, Buhari vs Obasanjo, 2004 ). Obasanjo has earned himself a reputation as an assiduous chronicler of the immediate past, but one most prone, alas, to the extreme latitudes of creative license.

  The mission that I had undertaken just before, during, and immediately after the Midwest invasion was to transmit Victor Banjo’s objectives to Obasanjo. I was to tell him in very bald terms that Banjo wanted unimpeded passage to Lagos, that he wished to avoid a battle in Western Nigeria—finis! This was the exact message I delivered. What I did or said outside that meeting was a different matter, and this included how my future activities were influenced by Obasanjo’s response to the message that I had delivered to him.