You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  He gave a mock salute. “Yes, Commandant!”

  “And don’t forget to insure yourself... I volunteer to be your beneficiary.”

  Femi’s trepidation at such assignments was genuine. Equally genuine, however, was his relish of them! He reveled in the business of flattening letters and cash into false compartments of his suitcase, making clandestine phone calls from the public phone in the lobby of his hotel rather than from his room, trying out different verbal codes to disclose his identity and that of the person whose intermediary he was. Our insurance broker carried out his mission to the letter, and then some! He undertook a long, roundabout journey by road to meet Ngugi’s wife, delivered the funds—to which, needless to say, he had added his own generous contribution, unasked. Instead of joining the organized safari tours with his colleagues, Femi spent two days in Kenya awaiting the contact that had been sent to penetrate through to Ngugi in prison. He met other contacts, wrapped up his mission, and landed in Lagos still wreathed in the high state of euphoria that only commenced—on his admission—once his plane had left Kenyan airspace. Then he eased himself into his accustomed role as the life and soul of the returning delegation for the rest of the journey, they little suspecting what their extrovert colleague had been up to while they were indulging in the fleshpots of Nairobi. Micere wrote a long, glowing report of his performance. They continued to correspond for a while after his return.

  ORLANDO MARTINS, a famous Nigerian film actor who could boast of having had Paul Robeson and Ronald Reagan as his screen companions in the 1950s, had retired home to Nigeria. Now he was old, alone, and incontinent. Femi moved him to his sumptuous home in Iyaganku, the setting of many gourmandizing soirées, set him up permanently in his guest chalet, paid all his medical bills, and ministered to every want, whim, and caprice—and Pa Orlando, as he was fondly known, was more than a trial for Job and all the saints. There Pa Orlando stayed, bullied the cooks if his food was too salty or under-salted or ... Take it away, I’ve told you I don’t want it swimming in oil . . . and this time don’t forget the ow-nions! There he remained, Femi’s terminal guest, and Femi paid all the funeral expenses....

  . . . O R THE CHILDREN of the villagers where we sometimes went to hunt, victims of all kinds of diseases that defied treatment. Femi would arrange for them to come into town and be examined by doctors. Sometimes he would assign a car and a driver to ensure that they came regularly for treatment until cured....

  “AJOJE L’ODUN” — “The joy is in the sharing”—was his favorite refrain. And he lived it! Many experienced this only in those summational occasions that he particularly relished, such as his Christmas parties. Even now, nearly two decades later, at Christmastime, the city of Ibadan still undergoes the pangs of bereavement—and this extends beyond the middle class to which he belonged, since his festive hand extended to stewards, drivers, and his acquired hunting families, who were mostly farmers or working-class. No, he did not invite Ibadan’s ten million population to his home, but to listen to complete strangers speak in awe of the famed parties, they must have believed he did. Both for those who shared his bounty and for thousands of Ibadan’s inhabitants who never ate from his table, Femi Johnson was synonymous with the transformation of Christmas/New Year’s into one huge feast that could only have been dreamed up in pagan Rome. It became a recognized institution—no one gave a party on the last Saturday before Christmas, that was OBJ’s day. You did not give a party because you expected to be invited, and if you were not on his guest list, some of your likely guests might be, and between the two, you did not stand a chance with a rival party. All likely guests were headed for the party at Iyaganku, where two or three live bands played till early morning and a film might be screened. At least three roasts, over which the host had personally sweated all day, were now ready for their piecemeal internment.

  Literally, the table groaned under the weight and variety. The Lebanese section was standard. He had visited Lebanon quite early in his career—then as an employee in the insurance business—when Lebanon was still Lebanon and the business center of the East. He never tired of narrating the experience, and it was mostly—food! A whole roast sheep—and, as a special mark of honor, he had been served the eyes. Then the creamy dips—hummus, tahini, taramasalata, and labneh—and on to the spiced, scented pine nut rice, grilled eggplant, and—oh yes, what had constituted for him the most hilarious delicacy when he discovered what they were—sweetbreads! He had many Lebanese friends in Ibadan, and there was one Lebanese restaurant that later became his Sunday-dinner haunt. It was owned by the Haddad family, and there Femi would be found religiously with his family, armed with a couple of bottles of wine. It was this restaurant that mostly catered his Christmas parties.

  Long before the array of food dazzled his guests, however, Femi would have already entered the festive mode. He supervised every aspect of preparation— except the autonomous Lebanese department, which had become adept at ignoring his constant emendations once his main list had been accepted. And so, apart from his own assignment, which was to turn the pink cadaver of a pig or ram into a work of art, pleasing to the eye and glorious on the palate, Femi busied himself with supervising—that is, choreographing the field of consumption. He was especially delighted with the traditional-food department: the women and their young assistants (usually their children) among huge clay pots and pans, plucking, stoking, kneading, pounding, turning farina, boiled yam, and cassava flour into eba, iyan, amala, and fufu, Femi among the bubbling vats of seafood, venison, beef, mutton, and vegetable stew, the cracking noises of giant snails being separated from their shells, and the numerous chickens browning on the spit.

  “Awon iya ndi aro”33—and his eyes would sparkle, surveying the field of the busy women—“just the sight of them all over the compound, bent over the fires and cooking pots, vegetables being washed and sliced, meats being cut up and slapped into the huge basia34 of oil all day long—yes, that’s the best part of it. The festive atmosphere of preparation, even more than the result.”

  But this was not always part of him, not at the start of the sixties, when we first became really acquainted. It was not part of him, and he wanted no part of it. Later, he would become quite candid—but perhaps only with me—and mock himself over that phase of his choice of a lifestyle, when, in his own words, he must have cut the appearance of a displaced Englishman.

  I DID NOT REALLY set out to change him. I accepted him as he was. But then, I was not about to change, either, or accommodate him when my temperament revolted profoundly against his inclinations. Certainly I was not about to join him at lunch or dinner eating boiled carrots, potatoes, tasteless fish fillet or steak, or lamb chops and soggy cabbage—all of which I rejected after my first full year in England, 1954–55, when I dutifully ate anything that was put before me. It was my health strategy for that strange, cold, and dismal land that existed, surely, solely to ensure my death from a thousand cold-related diseases!

  My reasoning went thus: British weather was unfit for human habitation, yet the Britishers, including their young, vulnerable children, somehow survived it—the evidence was apparent in the many geriatrics who littered the landscape. The explanation could only be found in the kind of food they ate. Thus, for a stranger to survive, he had better submit to their diet, right down to the last revolting speck of mashed potato and the disgusting lick of brown gravy that covered the tasteless slab of undecipherable meat. I ate it all. Some items were less unbearable than others, certainly the breakfasts—oats or cornflakes, kippers, eggs fried or scrambled, bacon and sausages, slabs of bread with butter and marmalade, mugs of tea or synthetic coffee with milk and sugar—I was yet to lose my sweet tooth! British breakfast was quite enjoyable, but the rest—! Well, I ate it all, dutifully, as one swallows medicine. On the dot of twelve months from my first day in England, however, I deemed my body to have built up sufficient resistance to survive winter, fog, smog, clammy rains, and darkness at noon. I began to pick and choose, discovering
the hideouts of Indian restaurants and the one or two Italian, whose choices were limited to spaghetti bolognese or napoletana.

  It was therefore quite a shock to find, in the heart of Ibadan, any human being, and a Nigerian Yoruba to boot, who actually served, of his own volition, British cuisine. I would sit with Femi and his family at the dinner table, nursing a mug of beer, but I reserved my stomach space for dinner at home or in one of Ibadan’s “sharp corners.”

  Saturday afternoon at OBJ’s was, however, a different matter. Then the table went totally native. Eba, amala, iyan, with half a dozen stews to choose from— this was where I first knew that food was more than simply getting something down into the stomach as fusslessly as possible, that eating actually involved a self-surrender that rendered homage to Opapala, the deity of hunger. The family—and this included his British wife, Barbara—ate! They consumed with a gusto that bordered on celebration—yes, the celebration of food. Michael Olumide, the involuntary instigator of the broadcasting holdup, was a regular at the Saturday-afternoon phenomenon. He matched Femi morsel for morsel, but Femi, his napkin always tucked into his shirt collar like a bib, had the edge on him. Lunch began at about one o’clock, but rarely was the table cleared before four or five. It was true that in 1960, when I first witnessed Femi’s weekend splurge, I had been away for four years, and perhaps I had forgotten that that was how people ate at home. But no, there was my own father as contrast, his picky style of eating. Even my mother, Wild Christian, who was a far more conscientious trencher lady—neither of them, and certainly none of the grown-ups around me, had eaten such single-minded quantity. I watched the Johnson family in fascination—nothing in my childhood, adulthood, or foreign sojourn had prepared me for such an elemental performance!

  It became a challenge. I could not accept that even mere children—the oldest was then no more than twelve—could consume more than I did. I went without food for a full day before joining them, then two days, after which I refused to push that particular remedy any further. Would stomach exercises help? How did one expand one’s stomach capacity? I had no idea. It always ended with my gasping for breath while Femi and others carried on as if the world of food were on the verge of extinction.

  Next to the joy of eating, however, was perhaps Femi’s love of the city of Ibadan and, conversely, our shared, visceral repugnance for the overgrown city of Lagos.

  LAGOS, OPENING UP TO a motorist from the interior like the fetid tail of a strutting rooster, was a city from which we both instinctively recoiled—quite unlike hundreds of thousands of Lagosians who swear that they cannot bear the provincialism of other towns, even of the large beehive of Ibadan. For them, there is no life outside—or after—Lagos!

  The day that Femi formally repudiated Lagos and established himself as a de facto citizen of Ibadan, the modern heartland of the Yoruba commercial world, was not too long after the end of the civil war and my release from prison under Gowon’s military rule. That he should take the precaution of entering in his will a wish to be buried in Ibadan was a shock only to his family, not to those who truly knew him. I did not know the contents of his will, nor had he ever thought to mention any of its provisions to me, yet an alternative to Ibadan as his resting place was a possibility that my mind could not remotely contemplate when Femi collapsed in that city but drew his last breath in a hospital in distant Frankfurt.

  The end of the Nigerian Civil War in 1969 brought with it a false economic optimism that swelled the population of Lagos, the national and business capital, beyond rational management. What was already a city under stress had become a clear case of swarming, warring, multiple personalities, lacking all coherence and identity. If there was any character left to Lagos by the end of the sixties, it was that of a khaki-and-camouflage ubiquitousness, with the civilian agbada and babanriga,35 or a three-piece-suited mendicancy that fawned on the former. Together, they squeezed Lagos until it choked on its own vomit, then stomped on the writhing corpse of a city whose human vitality was rivaled by none other in all of black Africa.

  Femi was still an employee of a brokerage firm—Law, Union and Rock—in charge of the branch office at Ibadan. Then one day, he received a letter that would have set many Lagosian—or indeed, provincial—minds aglow: he was not only promoted to a high executive position in the business, he was to take up this new position at the headquarters of the firm in Lagos. Uncertainly, with a visage that belied an elevation in status and spoke more of a prison life sentence, Femi asked me to go house hunting with him. The quietude of Kaduna’s prison solitary still dominated my response to crowded places, and I had avoided Lagos since my release. The mere thought of that raucous, overwrought space set off alarms in my nervous system, and I demurred. I found a hundred excuses: lectures, rehearsals, family impositions, unexpected overseas engagements. It soon became clear that my friend would keep putting off his search until I was free to go with him. There could be no more evasion—I got ready for my first visit to Lagos since my release from Kaduna.

  IT WAS, AS I FEARED, a descent into imagined hell. All semblance of community had vanished. The noise, the frenzy, the disorder! This was a labyrinth of clogged alleys and overburdened streets, dark mounds of indeterminate sludge, tinsel imports on sales racks or in pedestrian motion, festering carrion, abused and abusive humanity that called itself a city. We looked at four or five houses, and I noticed that Femi’s inspection grew more and more perfunctory, more fault-finding and downright dismissive. What went on in his mind, he did not tell, but as for me, I was being driven through a built-up habitation of gaudiness and stench. Gutters were packed with garbage, and rivulets of gelatinous fluids overran the streets. Motorized traffic was a series of hiccups, a fractional circulation of the wheel each quarter hour, no more. The famous Broad Street, then renamed Yakubu Gowon Street, swarmed with a humanity that raced, lemminglike, to some destination of guaranteed perdition. Soldiers were in command everywhere, sheathed in khaki, more often than not a camouflage of ignorance and illiteracy yet with the assumed carriage of a superior race, conquerors from an alien planet, masters of arbitrary humiliation. Ita Faji cemetery, a green area where multitudes had once taken shelter during their work breaks and students had read under the trees in daytime and under streetlighting all night, had vanished, made way for a monstrosity called the Lagos Secretariat.

  Of course it had not all happened overnight or begun with the military. The signs were already present at independence time, when the famous Supreme Court, a masterpiece of tropical architecture—solidly constructed, with airy corridors, wide wooden-louvered windows, and a warren of staggered rooms that allowed for the blissful circulation of air and people—was torn down limb by limb, erased from Tinubu Square. In its place was constructed a sterile fountain of cantilevered concrete pancakes—a gift, it was said, of the Lebanese community.

  I was close to weeping in the year of independence, 1960, as the metallic ball swung again and again against the stubborn walls, which refused to yield without a fight. We had fought for the preservation of that building, pleaded that it be turned into a museum—if indeed a completely new Supreme Court building was required—but no, some purblind urban planner prevailed on his minister to decree that it make way for the Lebanese fountain, whose brief span of gushing glory, its ascension day on the wings of a thousand doves—or pigeons—would diminish to a trickle, dry up altogether, then turn into just another garbage bin for shopkeepers and food sellers. As for the pigeons let off to celebrate its opening, many vanished in twos and threes, trapped by the locals and turned into pigeon kebabs. Reading their fates at the wheels of motorcars in Lagos rush hour and the makeshift weekend fires around Tinubu fountains, the rest took off to unknown places—probably back to the peace of the cedar groves of Lebanon.

  The rot of Lagos had begun long before I vanished behind prison walls, but in the two years of my absence, plus the year after my release when I had studiously avoided entering that city, Lagos had accelerated deep down into that pit
of decay that is the complementary face of unplanned, greed-motivated development. Greed for unoccupied real estate produced the violation of virtually every available green space. The lush swathes of land in Ikoyi, the residential retreat of the colonial elite, now enjoyed by the new black colonial aristocrats and lucky civil servants, were being torn up to raise more residences for the equally rapacious military elite who were steadily consolidating their grip on the nation. The famous royal palm tree–lined “Love Gardens” of Onikan had lost nearly four-fifths of their territory. Lagos was choking with mimic high-rise buildings. The city no longer breathed; it coughed, sputtered, and spat phlegm. Even the beachfront, the marina, had been encroached upon all along its length. The oil boom had not been formally inaugurated, but it was clear that some people knew something that others did not, because it was simply illogical that so soon after a costly, inhuman war there could have been such an accelerated pace of costly patchwork development of the capital city.

  The canals that threaded Ikoyi and Onikan, bringing fishermen and even passengers to the markets of Sand Grouse at Oke Suna, flowed at a somnolent pace behind the police headquarters at Obalende, opened into the lagoon behind Broadcasting House, and lapped the shores of the University of Lagos— the canals were being sanded in, “reclaimed.” Nothing but stubbornly retentive memory and nostalgia came to the rescue to serve as a tenuous backcloth to my radio play A Scourge of Hyacinths and its stage version, From Zia with Love, set in a prison overlooking a Lagos canal. A network of overpasses was under frantic construction, its necessity justifiable, perhaps, yet nothing but land greed demanded that the canals themselves should be sacrificed. This concrete burden slung across contracting land summarized the condition of the city: Lagos was collapsing on itself, suffocating the expanded road network that had to service a swollen administration, business, and incessant building projects. The traffic, which was guaranteed to crawl at any time of day throughout Lagos and its environs, was the ultimate expression of the general stagnation.