You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  It boils down, ultimately, to one’s personal confidence in determining the length of spoon with which one dines with the devil and one’s ability to keep a firm hold on it. This involves deriving no advantages, no gains, no recompense in the process—if anything, expending oneself both materially and mentally for the attainment of a fixed and limited goal, retaining one’s independence of action. Most delicious of all is the ability to walk away from the dinner table, flinging a coin onto it as a tip for the host.

  There is a further consideration: in far too many African nations, the comparative index of brutality, contempt for the rule of law, and abuse of human rights between some so-called democracies and military dictatorships leaves dubious space for absolutes. One has only to consider Kenyan “democracy” under arap Moi or the stale tobacco ash end of the Hitlerite Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, masquerading as a passion for land restitution. Within Nigeria, the lesson is served by the contrast between the 1975 military regime of Murtala Mohammed on the one hand, and the 1979–83 fascistic and wastrel “democracy” of Alhaji Shehu Shagari’s National Party of Nigeria (NPN; successor to the NPC)—and so on throughout the continent. Those who insist on inhabiting the real world find themselves subjected to the clamor of what can and deserves to be extracted from usurped authority on behalf of a nation, on behalf of the nonstatistical, palpable humanity that constitutes one’s vital environment. For a temperament such as mine, it has never been possible to shunt aside—not for any prolonged period—a sense of rebuke over how much is lost daily, wasted or degraded, how much proves irretrievable, damaged beyond repair, through maintaining a position that confers the self-righteous comfort of a purist: nonnegotiable distancing.

  A line must be drawn, however; across from mine will be found the murdering regimes—of an Idi Amin, an Emperor Bokassa, a Sergeant Doe, a Mobutu Sese Sek0 . . . and of course, a General Sani Abacha. Behind them are ranged those who forbid all planning for, discussion of, or anticipation of a return to democratic rule, setting the stage for life dictatorship—such as General Buhari. Other categories survive on individual assessment. Notwithstanding such finicky distinctions, however, dining with the devil remains undeniably a mined board—prone to misunderstanding, betrayal, public skepticism, getting the fingers nicely toasted, mud all over one’s face, and so on. Sublime intentions are detonated by a diabolical joke—of which one promptly offers itself in all its madcap, cautionary amplitude; but first, a few paragraphs on the devil in that affair.

  SOME CLOSE ASSOCIATES have suggested that I secretly nurture a death wish. They base this claim on the fact that despite what would appear to be the single-minded efforts of one General Olusegun Obasanjo to push me beyond the borders of existence, we remain—albeit qualified—friends. I find it difficult to explain this undeniable paradox, except to shift the responsibility somewhere else and insist that, in some unfathomable way, fate appears unbending in its resolve to throw us together, through events, mutual acquaintances, the frequent opposition and less frequent coincidence of interests, and so on, both in and out of office. Of course, one is never bereft of choice, but I also have a tendency—I have come to admit—to thumb my nose at the machinations of fate, daring it to do its worst or else know that I am also equally compelled to turn its interventions in a productive direction. Flirting with fate and emerging relatively unscathed tend to go to one’s head, however, which might partially explain why one appears to travel down the same mined road again and again.

  Observing, and even interacting at close quarters with, someone who is completely without scruples is, frankly, irresistible. One speaks here of a political leader who—to cite a notorious instance—graces the dedication of the new official residence of his Senate president one night, dines, puts on a performance as the life and soul of the party, mixing gregariously and clowning with other guests, and dances with the senator’s wife, knowing all the while that he has already perfected the plot for the senator’s removal from office, which he executes a day or two later. Poor Chuba Okadigbo, he never quite recovered from the blow. Indeed, his death from pulmonary complications from police tear gassing during a rally to protest the rigging of Obasanjo’s 2003 “reelection” was due partly to psychological enfeeblement from that earlier shock.

  It could be a case of letting one’s writer’s instinct take one too far, but, perverse though it may seem, I have remained genuinely fascinated by a complex figure who is convinced that he dominates his environment and thinks he acts the part—but who is, basically, a fortunate recipient of the largesse of fate. After all, how many soldiers, after the bulk of a civil war has been fought and won by others, find themselves positioned to receive the articles of surrender from the enemy, thus appropriating the mantle of the architect of victory? Not one to leave any loopholes in his claims to that laurel, however, the soldier signals his entry into yet another turbulent profession—that of the writer—by producing one of the fastest-written war histories ever—My Command— remaining blithely indifferent to furious rebuttals of its details by his comrades in arms.

  Through a regional balance in military politics—not from merit, such as participation in the critical coup—our subject becomes the number two in the next military regime. The number one is assassinated after only six months in office, and the war hero becomes head of state by default—and not of just any banana republic, but of the most populous, wealthiest nation on the African continent. He escapes the fate of his predecessor and ends a high-casualty-rate career unscathed, in grateful retirement on his farm, escorted into our shared hometown, Abeokuta, on a white horse with drums and bugles. All agree that the honor is deserved, since, unlike most African leaders, he voluntarily relinquishes power. The gesture catapults him to international notice. Thereafter he settles back into civilian life, but not quite, since he begins diligently to lay the groundwork—establishes an African Leadership Forum, and so on—for becoming a respected statesman, mixing with the powerful in international fora and hosting them in turn on his Ota farm.

  The saga has not ended. Fate again intervenes, and the hero finds himself arraigned before a brutal dictator, one General Sani Abacha, on treasonable charges, earning a death sentence that will be commuted to a lengthy prison spell. A little more than two years of prison life, and his persecutor is assisted into eternity in a subtle palace conspiracy—never mind any claims of his succumbing to excess sexual ecstasy. All this takes place without his lifting a finger, except perhaps to attract the trusty’s attention. The military, thoroughly discredited as a ruling class and beset by international ultimatums, realizes that its time is up but has no intention of giving up power. And so our hero— now an accredited civilian—is released from prison, formally pardoned, and pressed back into service, but now as an “elected” civilian president.

  I suppose I subconsciously acquired the attitude that, as a writer, I had proprietary rights over such a phenomenon, and since he was already indebted to me by an act of treachery on his part, I began to regard him as a private preserve for compensatory study. In any case, Obasanjo is quite personable—much of the time—and it was not difficult to respond to his evident desire for cerebral company; like most rulers, he desperately wanted to be accepted as a political and economic strategist and thinker. Was I evincing a touch of masochism? Or perhaps the death-wish proposed by my colleagues? No matter; our hero represented a model of power of an unusual—and dangerous—kind, most especially as he remained basically insecure and thus pathologically in need of proving himself, preferably at the expense of others. That is one unambiguous assessment that is pronounced by nearly all Obasanjo’s acquaintances. Interacting with him at close quarters thus involved—again, at a subconscious level—testing one’s confidence in one’s own invulnerability, somewhat like those traditional charms that warriors swear by as bullet deflectors: they wore the charms but still ensured that no one was pointing a gun at them.

  Also, to my intense chagrin, I have been forced to conclude that even advancing years
have failed to eliminate from my system a parental inheritance: a missionary streak. Detecting a productive, even sometimes imaginative, glint in the compost of the soldier turned politician is not difficult—Obasanjo is a man of restless energies—and a waste of human potential is something against which a missionary upbringing revolts. A bullish personality, calculating and devious, yet capable of a disarming spontaneity, affecting a country yokel act to cover up the interior actuality of the same, occasionally self-deprecatory yet intolerant of criticism, this general remains a study in the outer limits of a sense of rivalry, even where the fields of competence and striving are miles apart.

  A deprived childhood like Obasanjo’s, on his own admission, also makes for some measure of indulgence, at least in explaining his deep-seated sense of insecurity. As his need to prove himself degenerated to obvious sadism, however, one is obliged to compare him with his own townsman Moshood Abiola. Both had similar deprived backgrounds and attended the same school, yet they differed drastically in openness and generosity. It is significant that Olusegun Obasanjo, since he became elected head of state over the corpse of the popularly elected Abiola—who breathed his last under confinement by the same Abacha—finds himself physically unable to utter the name of his thwarted predecessor, even in official speeches. The ex-general routinely dismisses all proposals to raise a memorial to the politician, including the resolution of the Nigerian legislature that the Abuja sports stadium be named after a man who was formally crowned “Africa’s Pillar of Sports,” by the Organization of African Unity.

  Perhaps it is this sense of rivalry, the fear of being surpassed, even by ghosts, that thoroughly defines the personality of the general. While, for instance, the majority of the nation clamored for the designation of, and some states continue to mark, June 12, that day in 1993 when a disciplined people went to the polls, united in the resolve to terminate military rule, as Democracy Day, Olusegun Obasanjo persists in imposing May 31 on the nation, this being the date, in 1989, when he was sworn into office after his emergence from prison. A veteran journalist, Kole Animashawun, writing in The Vanguard, summed up the general who came back from the dead in a unique expression: “His ego is bigger than his head.”

  The size of the general’s ego was not uppermost in my mind, however, when I invited myself to dinner in 1978. When a prize such as Ori Olokun, the long-lost bronze head of a principal Yoruba deity, shimmers so alluringly within the sight of an olori-kunkun,40 one may be forgiven for forgetting the long spoon, even with full knowledge that a swishing tail may be hidden beneath the khaki uniform.

  TEACHING AT YALE UNIVERSITY some years after this misadventure, I found myself neighbor to the ase41-driven scholar Robert Farris Thompson. He taught African art history and generally did his best to infect his colleagues and students with whatever Yoruba spirit of possession had presided over his birth— possibly even his conception. If Robert had his way, a pilgrimage to the land of the Yoruba would be a condition for everyone who wished to become an alumnus of Yale or, indeed, any higher institution in the United States. Thompson had the same enthusiasm for certain kinds of music and films, and this was how I came to see what was at the time considered a “cult” film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Since the attraction of The Temple of Doom had temporarily displaced the shrine of Orisa in Thompson’s general vocabulary, my curiosity was aroused. Thus, one afternoon, I set out to watch the film in the company of my once student, then colleague, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr.

  I regret to say that I did not enjoy the movie. From the opening sequences, I began to squirm. It was as if, albeit on a drastically reduced scale—no competitive spectacle, cliff-hanger risks, or lethal pyrotechnics—I were watching a souped-up documentary of one of my better-forgotten undertakings. My feeling throughout was that I had been deliberately set up to be lampooned by Steven Spielberg in the storyline, without even the consolation of a love angle. I was grateful for the darkness that covered my blushes.

  The beginnings were nearly identical. I was close to the end of a seminar in my office when the departmental secretary entered and announced that some colleagues were waiting to see me, on an urgent matter. I dismissed my class a few minutes early—no, unlike in The Temple of Doom, there was no lubricious student bursting at the boobs who sidled up to leave me with a long, caressing look and a lascivious invitation—and ushered in my visitors. There were three of them: Akin Isola, a playwright and professor in Yoruba studies; Wande Abimbola, another professor in Yoruba, an academic as well as a practitioner of the mysteries of Ifa, the Yoruba system of divination; and Olabiyi Yai of Linguistics, a Yoruba whose nationality, of the Republic of Benin, served yet again to remind one of the disservice that the European powers had done to the African continent in their arbitrary division of that continent into so-called national entities. How could I have failed, by the way, after watching Temple of Doom, to be struck by the coincidence that it was yet another professor of the Yoruba extended family—Thompson—who had been responsible for my presence in the theater, or that I was watching this sumptuous takeoff on my own escapade in the company of yet another scholar, Skip Gates, who was undergoing his own phase of Yorubaphilia in the persona of Esu, the deity of the random factor and reversals, and quirky messenger of the deities!

  Back to 1978 and Ife campus, however: it turned out that my visitors had come to solicit my help in an unusual undertaking. Why me? First of all, they were aware that I did have some kind of access to the then military head of state, Olusegun Obasanjo, and this was a matter that required cooperation at the highest possible level of government. Next, there was the matter of the recently concluded Festival of Black and African Arts, the notorious jamboree that had guzzled millions of dollars and earned the nation the ire of at least half of the visitors for its shoddy preparations. Perhaps the single most significant event of that festival, however, was one that never did take place: this was the repatriation of the original of the symbol—and logo—of that festival, chosen in the confident belief that it would be released by its keepers and put on display.

  A famous ivory mask from Benin, exquisitely carved and detailed, remained safely esconced in the vast labyrinths of the British Museum in London. It had been looted in the equally famous sacking of the Benin Kingdom by a British expeditionary force in the late nineteenth century, launched in reprisal for an earlier humiliating encounter between a Captain Phillips and King Overawhen, the paramount ruler of the Benin Kingdom, whose ancestry, one line of legend insists, was none other than Yoruba! The Phillips expedition had insisted on being received by the king during one of his most sacred retreats, when the oba was not permitted to see any strangers. His Majesty’s Britannic servants were not to be denied, however, and they forced their way into the city, with gruesome consequences. Such insolence was not to be countenanced! Orders were issued to mount a punitive expedition, and they were carried out with equally gruesome efficiency. Numerous treasures, the spoils of war, were shipped back to England—to offset the cost of the war, the British dispatches stated with admirable candor. Among them was the ivory mask, allegedly the head of a Benin princess.

  Now, in 1976, the Nigerian minister of culture, a scion of the Benin Kingdom—none other than Chief Anthony Enahoro—felt that this was an opportunity to bring back at least one of those treasures. The diplomatic bag was scorched to and fro with dispatches from both sides—At least lend us the damned thing for the duration of the festival! pleaded Nigeria. Nothing doing, said the British Museum. The British government was, of course, “powerless to intervene”—the autonomy of the British Museum being regretfully but conveniently cited as the insurmountable obstacle. Condescending arguments—such as that the Nigerian nation lacked the means, will, or sense of value required to preserve its precious heritage—require no comment.

  I had not stinted words, alas, in expressing my umbrage at both sides— against the British government for its hypocritical double-talk and against our own caretakers, a supposed military re
gime, for their uncreative approach. From the moment the Nigerian government requested the return of the mask, all was lost! The British government would never part with it, since to do so would only set a precedent for demands for a wholesale repatriation of all art treasures plundered by colonial forces to their rightful homes. Indeed, in a moment of righteous rage at ancient wrongs, I went so far as to offer advice that the government should stop drawing further attention to the mask, since it would only place its illegal guardians on the alert. The mask was stolen property, and the aggrieved had a right to reclaim their property by any means. What I proposed instead was that a task force of specialists in such matters, including foreign mercenaries if necessary, be set up to bring back the treasure— and as many others as possible—in one swift, once-for-all-time, coordinated operation.

  Since that unheeded advice, in 1984, a live trophy in the shape of a former minister, the infamous Umaru Dikko, has been kidnapped from London, bundled to Stansted Airport, crated, and loaded into a cargo plane, awaiting repatriation to Nigeria. It was an amateurishly planned, clumsily executed operation under the regime of General Buhari, yet it could have succeeded but for the accident that Dikko’s live-in mistress happened to have watched it all from the window. She had the presence of mind to take down both the number and description of the car, even before alerting the police. The ineptness of the kidnappers—who had spent months studying Umaru Dikko’s movements— could be summed up in the fact that they failed to notice that his mistress routinely waved good-bye from an upper window when he left the house in the morning. The police found the drugged minister in his crate, together with an Israeli doctor whose task was to pump him full of sedatives at intervals on the flight back to Nigeria. The majority of the nation was waiting to welcome him, even more enthusiastically than the military.