You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  The decision to meet him at all had been a most difficult one, fraught with warnings. The most forceful had come from the young officer in military intelligence who had revealed to me the existence of the secret telephone in Obasanjo’s bedroom, and its number, to facilitate direct contact. Yet even he could not bring himself to wholeheartedly endorse the final meeting. His distrust of his superior officer was unambiguous. Such warnings were responsible for my writing down, then memorizing, the precise words in which I proposed to deliver Victor Banjo’s message. If I were arrested and brought to trial, I wanted to ensure that my words would not be distorted or taken out of context.

  That simple precaution would generate a not inconsequential footnote years later, in 1980, during an encounter between Obasanjo and myself. Our destinies had long taken off in different directions, and Obasanjo himself had served as a military head of state.

  I had crammed my lines so efficiently that I still remembered them years afterward, when Obasanjo published his account of the war in My Command. There, among other lies, he claimed that I had asked him to name his price for letting Victor Banjo’s troops through the West! Even combatants who have done their best to disembowel each other in wartime do embrace and carry on with life afterward, and so, although Obasanjo’s betrayal of the very event of our meeting was certainly the most crucial factor that led to my incarceration, I found—to my pleasant surprise, I think—that I could meet him afterward without rancor. I experienced no obstacle to resuming our brief and untoward relationship on a new footing and was able to collaborate with him on a number of national schemes when he became head of state.

  What I found impossible to stomach, however, were his constant attempts to rewrite—and tendentiously, to boot!—a history of which I had been a part, in no matter how minor a role. And so, both privately and publicly, I was drawn into the repetitive, excruciatingly boring and frustrating imposition of setting him right whenever—in order to secure a temporary advantage, often petty but distracting—he resorted to twisting the true narrative of events. Following the publication of his book, and after the ensuing bout of public exchanges, we met in the home of Ojetunji Aboyade, then vice chancellor at the University of Ife, who sometimes complained that he felt that his life mission was to act as referee and conciliator during our frequent wranglings.

  It was virtually no contest! I began by reciting from memory my opening statement to him on the occasion of our “Follow-follow” meeting, word for word. Then, not nearly so precisely but as close to exactitude as made no difference, even by his own admission, I repeated his comments, questions, my responses, and his final statement. Even the unscripted exchanges were still fresh in my mind; one passes much time in total recall in the quiet of prison solitary confinement! The recalled exchanges were so logical in their content and sequence that Obasanjo could only stare, dumbfounded. I accused him of coming armed to our meeting, contrary to our agreement. He laughed and admitted it. I repeated yet again that I had offered no opinion, no comment on the message I had brought, had said nothing that could be remotely construed as an attempt to sway him one way or the other. Obasanjo remained mute for several moments, then gave his familiar schoolboy-caught-in-the-act mischievous smile and—apologized! Aboyade gave his verdict, exhorting me to accept his apology as gracefully as he had proffered it.

  And that should have ended this matter—but Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo, “conqueror of Biafra,” would not have acted his true self if he had not seized the next opportunity of a public disagreement in the media to repeat, and in the very language that he had himself repudiated, the falsehood he had tried to implant in the public perception. One such occasion was his failure to obtain election as secretary-general of the United Nations, a failure that he attributed to me, with some justification. In common with a number of civic organizations, we had warned that he was not fit to be placed in charge of such a body on account of proven human rights violations that continued even on his private (militarized) farm after his tenure of office. Nettled, Obasanjo exhumed a discredited account of our encounter during the civil war and commenced a new round of doctored narratives.

  Lies should never be allowed to lie. I seized the next anniversary of Victor Banjo’s Midwest invasion—September 1980—to organize a public lecture at the International Institute of Public Affairs, Lagos, simply to denounce once again, and authoritatively, the man’s compulsive need to consolidate a private invention, demanding to know why it is never sufficient that one accept sole responsibility for one’s deeds, for better or worse, without being compelled to deal with the emendations of others, who are mostly impelled by concerns for their career, their image, or psychological needs.

  It is necessary to make a distinction: this is not to deny that I would have preferred that Obasanjo accede to Banjo’s request. It is simply that I had set out with the resolution not to attempt any persuasion or—to use Obasanjo’s own favorite word—apply any “pressure” on him. I stuck scrupulously to my brief, delivering a “plain, unvarnished tale” and consciously avoiding any futher expansion of the danger I had already incurred by meeting with an unreliable factor in the developing scenario. I could not rule out recording equipment having been installed in his car; after all, a telephone had preceded him, the commandant of the vast Western domain, into his bedroom, and he had known nothing of it! Far too many details in personal memoirs are not even slips of memory but self-serving fiction. Obasanjo wanted to ingratiate himself with his superiors in Lagos, even to the extent of claiming that I had asked him to name a price for his “treason”—against which temptation he had of course presented an armor of loyalty that could not be dented by filthy lucre! Not once, in my entire involvement in this saga, did I encounter any situation in which “ten pieces of silver” ever featured. Ojukwu neither discussed nor offered any, nor did Victor Banjo propose it. Then who was financially placed to ask our man to name his price? This courier, who hardly ever balanced his monthly salary?

  Just as unprincipled was the so-called confessional statement read out by the then minister of information, Anthony Enahoro, on behalf of the government—about my alleged meeting with Banjo in Benin, the attempted purchase of arms, and so on—all baseless, cynical concoctions by the government, concerned that the provable extent of my activities might not provide sufficient grounds for holding me in prison indefinitely or for convicting me of some heinous offense in a court of law. Still, it was wartime, and on balance my activities could easily have resulted in a kangaroo trial and execution or other extrajudicial solutions of a terminal kind. None of these consolations reduces the intensity of one’s violent dislike to being lied against. Watch even a notorious Nigerian thief defending himself in a court of law: “Your Worship, why do they keep accusing me of stealing a chicken? As God is my witness, all I stole was a goat!”

  It must be admitted that many coup makers on the continent—and Nigerian career officers are no exception—sell their allegiances, indeed, put themselves out for hire by businessmen for instigating a coup. This was a real development that came years later, definitely long after the civil war and even after the coup d’état that ousted the regime of Yakubu Gowon, a coup that no one could possibly accuse of having been prodded by moneyed interests. We simply were not in the buying and selling business, and in any case, we had no funds to throw around. Even if we had, we would not have spent such funds on dubious allegiances. I owe it to the memory of Victor Banjo to contest such dishonorable, even unsoldierly, distortions of his motives and conduct; to testify, above all, that he had not acted to promote Biafran secession or aid Ojukwu’s takeover of power in Lagos. If anything, Banjo felt that he himself should take over power, and, confronted with the two discredited combatants who were propelling the nation toward a bloodbath, those of us who were self-described as the Third Force had no doubt whatsoever that Banjo represented the most viable corrective.

  Obasanjo’s response at the end of our nocturnal ride through the sleeping streets of Ibadan, a respo
nse that I would later transmit to Victor Banjo from my hideout, nearly word for word, was this: “Well, tell him I have taken an oath of loyalty to Lagos. There are other routes to Lagos—by water through Okitipupa, for instance. If he makes it to Lagos and takes over, well, my oath of loyalty is to Lagos, and I’ll stand by that. But to let him pass through my Western command, that would be betraying my oath of loyalty. Whoever is in power in Lagos—that’s the person to whom I owe my allegiance.” Words to that effect, not nearly as close to the original today, I am sure, as my recollection of them in 1980 in the Aboyade home, with both husband and wife as audience, but close enough.

  MY FATEFUL MEETING with Obasanjo concluded, I took up permanent residence in the hidden bungalow, where I dared not switch on the lights at night. It was from this bungalow that I telephoned Obasanjo’s reply to Banjo in Benin, verbatim. I kept up communication with him, acting as intermediary between him and his increasingly impatient collaborators in the West—our faithful colleagues at Oniyanrin telephone exchange ensured that no one was tapping the lines. I would phone and exchange notes also with Banjo’s sister, Mrs. Ogunseye, then lecturer in librarianship at the University of Ibadan, in an attempt to assess this warrior’s likely, real, immediate, and/or long-term intentions, to understand why he remained in Benin playing governor or administrator or kingmaker, why he had taken the irrational step of proclaiming yet another secessionist state—the Midwest—instead of moving straight to Lagos and dislodging Yakubu Gowon’s government.

  Haba! The people of the Midwest had not requested their own independent state à la Biafra, so what was the point? On the contrary, they were seething—at least in the non-Igbo parts of the state—under what they read as a Biafran force of occupation. In any case, why should Banjo, an outsider, attempt to donate independence to a people whose neutrality had been breached and who were now drawn into a widening conflict? Each night I issued the same plaint, with ever-increasing desperation: What was keeping him in Benin? We spoke in coded language: Grandfather is gravely ill. The doctors say they must operate tomorrow; any further delay and it will be too late—do you understand that? Can you make it to his bedside in time? The theater is fully equipped, but the clinic itself may shut down any day . . . there is a problem with the expatriate sta f; the nurses are threatening to walk off the job . . . and so on. And Banjo would reply, yes, definitely he would be at the clinic in the morning. Most definitely. And again his supporters in the West would prepare to facilitate his passage.

  Then he was recalled to Enugu by Ojukwu, who had become suspicious of his procrastination, only to be sent back again to his Benin command. Time seeped away, the initiative and all its advantages shifting day by day to Lagos. Banjo no longer appeared to be the independent operator who had set out from Biafra at the head of a force that was motivated, at least, by some ideological pretensions. His public pronouncements became more and more erratic and contradictory, while our position underground turned increasingly precarious. The uprising that was planned to accompany his entry and provide a popular base for his incursion began to lose momentum. Whatever public support he enjoyed in the West was gradually eroded as the federal government, thoroughly panicked and poised for flight at the earlier stages, uncertain which officers and commands it could count upon, recovered from its fright, rallied wavering support, mobilized, and moved against the invaders. The role played by the British mission at this critical time in shoring up the confidence of the regime has yet to be fully narrated; it certainly was not a negligible factor. The result was all that mattered; Victor Banjo’s dawdling in Benin had closed down one possible chapter in the direction of Nigerian history—with whatever consequences, good or ill.

  The moment came when everyone, even the most ardent optimist, knew that Victor Banjo would never make that crossing to Lagos. He had left it till too late, and now the federal government had repositioned its forces and was moving in to recapture the Midwest region. It was time to disband.

  I had become worried for the safety of many of those with whom Banjo had also made direct contact, his sister, Mrs. Ogunseye, most especially. Banjo telephoned her constantly, sometimes passing messages to me through her, especially if he had missed a call from me. Otherwise, he appeared to dispense with caution, depending on the state of his mood, brimming with confidence or desperate and frustrated. Then he would speak unguardedly, mentioning by name politicians and even military officers from whom he expected support, complaining of their lack of action.

  What he had expected these people to do exactly, I never really understood. Of course plans for a popular uprising in his favor the moment he moved into Lagos had been agreed upon—but that the people should mount such demonstrations ahead of his arrival? Or perhaps invite him in to come and declare an independent Western state, as he had in the Midwest? The West was submerged under federal guns! But Banjo’s telephone calls to many individuals— politicians, labor leaders, intellectuals, and others—in the West and Lagos merely grew wilder. He telephoned even Obafemi Awolowo, harangued Yakubu Gowon, spoke to Adeyinka Adebayo, the governor of the Western state, rebuked several of his military colleagues, both die-hard federalists and sympathetic ears. Telephone lines were constantly tapped—after all, we did some tapping ourselves—and I feared that Victor’s careless conversations with his sister would get her into trouble, and over nothing. It fell to me, finally, to tell her to cut off all communication with her brother and begin to act to protect herself. She agreed to take no more calls from Banjo.

  The breeze that tongues were fanning in the direction of my person had turned into a powerful wind! By now we had ample proof that Obasanjo had disclosed our conversation to his bosses in Lagos, passing it over the telephone, with his own deadly slants, to Gowon. The young officer from military intelligence was the first to alert me, offering to spirit me to a safe place. Several others urged flight, insisted that I disappear altogether. I did not require too much persuasion and began to prepare. Bayo Oduneye, a young colleague in the Ibadan University Theatre Arts Department, became one of the many peripheral—but quite innocent—bit players in the escalating drama. He offered me his Volkswagen Beetle, in a kindred spirit to Femi Johnson’s: “Take it. If you find some means of sending it back, do so. If not, whenever you’re settled, send word where I can go and pick it up.” He had friends in the military and had also learned that there was an unannounced dragnet for me—indeed, who did not know it by then?

  My arrest, in fact, need not have happened. Halfway to safety, going by habit through a mental checklist, I pulled over with a shock. There was a base— one of a handful—used by the veterans of confrontations with problematic governments. Seasoned over the years from neophyte volunteers in the Western electoral struggle of 1964–65 into organized cadres by the time of the civil war, their commitment had transferred to the cause of what now called itself the Third Force. Now they were standing by, ready to ignite popular demonstrations in support of Victor Banjo once he crossed over into Lagos. More alarming still was the fact that they had links with other groups all over the West and Lagos—even I did not know, by this time, how widespread they had become, since some of these links were run by politicians—but they had turned most restive since the West had begun its protests against federal military presence in the West, decrying it as “an army of occupation” and demanding its removal.

  I had suddenly realized that my final instructions to disband were extremely likely to have missed this very special base. It was tucked away in Abadina village, the site of the University of Ibadan, close to the farms of the Agriculture Department. It was a most convenient place, the humble quarters of a junior university employee, situated virtually at the very edge of campus. Additionally, a drivable swathe, the handiwork of an agricultural tractor, bypassed the main entrance to the university and led directly onto the road to Oyo and from there to a number of safe houses in any direction, including back to Ibadan or Lagos or, in extremity, in the direction of Shaki and a choice of smuggler
s’ routes to the border with the Republic of Benin. There were no telephones in that part of Abadina, so it could be reached only by a human courier. Its very security meant, however, that it had received no news from me of the changes in events.

  I became worried that the members, still congregating around that post, might embark on some harebrained action of their own. Failing to hear anything, they might act impetuously, endanger themselves, and decimate the remnants of the organized civilian opposition to the regime. Agitated, I turned back and drove undetected for the hundred kilometers to Ibadan. On the way I stopped at the Mbari Club at Adamasingba to pick up any idle member of my acting company, the Orisun Theatre, to act as courier. Only the tall, statuesque Betty Okotie, an early member of that company, was available.

  She too had learned of the manhunt. She entered the car and we arrived on campus—again sticking to the back routes, joining up with the road that led to the College of Technology. My intention was to remain in the car some distance from the Abadina post while she went in and brought out whoever she found in place; there was always the possibility that the police had tracked it down and now had it under surveillance. That final base scuttled, I would wait for dark, then head for one of the unofficial border-crossing points to a safe house, or even, if the situation demanded it, into the neighboring country.

  At the barrier that separated the College of Technology from the University of Ibadan, however, a policeman was waiting, armed with a rifle. He looked into the car, blinked, and sighed. That was the first and only sign I would obtain that the manhunt had extended to the peripheries of the university campus. Crestfallen at what he had to do, the policeman pulled me aside and, as if he knew what had brought me back, quickly whispered that he would escort me wherever I wanted to go before turning me in “in case”—his whisper went even lower—“in case there are urgent things you wish to take care of— sensitive documents and things like that. They will come and search your house, you know. It’s the least I can do for you, Mr. Soyinka.”