You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  MY INTERACTIONS WITH BABANGIDA were, needless to say, of a qualitatively different character from those with his fellow dictator, Olusegun Obasanjo, who, additionally, came from the same part of the country as I—West, Yoruba, and Abeokuta—though I am also part Ijebu. With Obasanjo, I ritually arrived with my own wine bottle or two tucked under the arm, knowing that my host—and thus his staff—did not know the difference between burukutu and Beaujolais. That weighty problem did not arise with Babangida, since this was one devil with whom I dined only at my own table. With Babangida, my interventions were precisely named—issue-specific interventions, though I do recall two exceptions when our discussions ranged broadly, as had been more common with Obasanjo. Sometimes those sessions with the latter also took place in Oje Aboyade’s home, over lunch. Obasanjo appeared to find his thinking aggressively stimulated by our unorthodox approaches to many issues, and of course he loved to be thought capable of holding his own intellectually. Fights were routine. He did not take kindly to being caught wrong-footed. He needed, sometimes pathetically, to be right! Oje once called him an economic illiterate—he was out of office at the time—and it rankled in his mind for years afterward. I suspect it still does, even with Oje dead. Babangida, by contrast, never seemed to mind being proved wrong; he carried out his own decisions anyway.

  My meetings with Babangida invariably took place in his office. There were exceptions, of course. Once I trapped him in the Nigerian High Commission in London to demand the fulfillment of a pledge to Michael Manley, the progressive Jamaican leader, during his electoral contest with the U.S.-backed candidate, Edward Seaga. Babangida had offered help, but the money had never been sent. I had been involved in that initiative and now found myself being battered by messages from Jamaica. The honor of Nigeria was at stake, but that was never under my custody; what I desperately needed was my peace of mind.

  George Dove-Edwin, the Nigerian high commissioner and a friend, was hosting a reception for his president and promised to telephone me once the crowd had left. He did, let me into his residence, and pointed to a large reception room, cautioning that he would deny any knowledge of how I had gotten in—Babangida had wished to see no more visitors that day. My entry was muffled by a thick-piled carpet, and the dictator heard nothing. Slumped in a crested chair at the opposite end of the long reception room was a figure of— there was no other world for it—pathos. For minutes I stood watching this symbol of power, lost in thought, bereft of power and panoply, just another human being who had succumbed to common fatigue, sought a few moments’ peace, sunk into its tantalizing solace even as he was already lamenting its looming departure. I felt somewhat remorseful that I had broken in on a moment when, it was plain, he truly needed to be alone—even rulers deserve their moment of peace, after all. Then I recalled that his own negligence or tardiness had disrupted mine, and I coughed to rouse him. He looked up, visibly startled, then annoyed, and snapped, “How did you get in?” I replied, “All right, I’ll go away,” making no such move. Grumpily, he waved me to a chair.

  Fifteen minutes later, we had reached agreement on the modalities of the transfer. I monitored its movements over the next week. Only after I was assured that it was in Michael Manley’s possession did I consider any lecture invitations that might take me anywhere close to the West Indies.

  FAR MORE EXHAUSTIVE was another closed-door session in his private jet, an unscheduled tête-à-tête that took place on the way back from Egypt, where I had once again undergone one of those reunions with Egypt that have set me wondering just what that fascinating nation and I have against each other! That visit, however, provided one of the three occasions in Babangida’s eight-year governance when I obtained a one-on-one meeting with him for truly in-depth and wide-ranging discussions—the Nigerian rumor mill that peddled my access to him on a daily basis notwithstanding.

  This infrequency of encounters with IBB was not due to indifference on my part. Whenever circumstances urged the possible usefulness of a meeting with this ruler, I picked up the telephone or contacted my collaborator Ojetunji Aboyade—on Obasanjo’s recommendation, Babangida had secured the services of my friend as his economic adviser. However, while the rest of the nation called this dictator “Maradona,” my name for him was “Artful Dodger” or “the elusive aparo.” The flight from Egypt was a godsend, a space without distractions. Babangida slid a panel across the middle of the plane, and the rest of his entourage were shut out. Nothing disturbed a continuous session of about one and a half hours—no telephones, no whisper from a briefed aide tapping his pad to indicate a next, fictitious, appointment or waiting dignitary or delegation. There was nowhere to go, except by parachute.

  But first—Egypt! Some pristine secret lurks in that nation that makes it a setting for some of my most enduring episodes of pure chagrin! On this occasion, as I was taking my ease in my own environment, along came a frantic message from the Egyptian president through his ambassador and my own government: Would I kindly present myself in Cairo for a very special honor? The occasion was the elaborate opening ceremony of the All Africa Games, 1989. The invitation sounded attractive—sharing a podium with Nadine Gordimer and our Egyptian counterpart Naguib Mahfouz, whom I would meet for the first time ever!

  The notice was short and the timing awkward. The Egyptian ambassador and IBB, however, appeared to take turns, independently, applying pressure on me—some seasoned diplomat from our Foreign Office was definitely latched onto Babangida’s ear! There were the usual arguments—the symbolic union of three African Nobelists, three African tribes on show, Arab, African, and South African white—promoting a deracialized African, pan-African solidarity. Babangida was himself flying in to join the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, as co-chairman of the Games. I finally thought of one way of easing the strain on my interrupted routine: since it mattered so much to the continent and to him, would he kindly find me a seat on his official plane? He was more than willing.

  I planned to join his flight in Abuja, the capital, but a delayed morning flight from Lagos put a stop to that. Babangida’s plane waited as long as the protocol arrangements awaiting him at the Cairo end permitted, then took off without Mubarak’s one-third continental symbolism. As the regretful phone call informed me of the plane’s departure, the Egyptian ambassador, who had dutifully come to see me off, appeared to be seized by an attack of Saint Vitus’s dance. I sought to calm him, opening my palms toward the heavens to indicate that we must all bow to the inevitable. It had the opposite effect. He immediately threw himself into a fermentation cauldron of solutions. He would get me into Cairo, he swore, even if he had to accompany me on camelback! Finally—the Egyptian national airline was due in Lagos the following morning on an onward flight to Cairo. He would come personally, ticket in hand, and escort me onto the plane. A happy ending glowed on his face, nearly infecting me.

  The following morning, it was not the airline ticket that called on me, however, but the loyal yet desperate representative of the Egyptian government, incoherent with apologies. Your Excellency, please, you have to be there! An administrative hitch, I am sure. It’s the preparations for the Games . . . you know, the o ficials are all preoccupied with nothing else. And bureaucracy, yes, bureaucracy, that’s our problem. The ticket has not been wired, but for the sake of Africa, Your Excellency, you have to travel. Permit me to assure you, Professor Your Excellency—as soon as you land in Cairo, the Egyptian government will refund your travel expenses. The ceremony will more than compensate for this minor inconvenience. Your friend, your colleague, Mahfouz is waiting to receive you, it will be a historic moment. Historic! Believe me, Excellency, this is as much as my job is worth, if I do not bring you to Cairo. The faxes and telexes have been coming fast and furious from the presidency. The ticket is guaranteed. An administrative hitch, nothing else. I’ve contacted Egyptian airlines, but unfortunately the ticket has not arrived. The embassy—ah, alas, we have no immediate funds. . . .

  With not the sheerest thought th
at I was headed for yet another contretemps in the land of the pharaohs, a masochistic streak disguised as race solidarity, I headed for the airport on the authority of my credit card. I quashed a deep-down apprehension as it tried to rise to the surface, those earlier visits that had led me to question if I had been an Egyptian in a previous life—as Fela Anikulapo appeared to have believed of himself. Did my prior sojourn involve some negative, unfinished business in that Nile estuary? Certainly the consistency with which any entry into Egypt results in some level of misadventure—from the hilarious to once life-threatening—has begun to alarm me. Perhaps my mummy is lying in one of the catacombs of the pyramids or, more resentfully, a skeleton of one of the slaves slaughtered to accompany the pharaohs into the afterlife.

  Egyptian civilization, as persuasively demonstrated by the scholar Cheikh Anta Diop in The African Origin of Civilisation: Myth or Reality? and supplemented years later by Martin Bernal in Black Athena, had its origins in the black race, so who is to say if Ogun, my demiurge of war and creativity, did not in some distant age leave his mark on that land, some form of antibodies that now distort the intended trajectory of his followers who happen to stray into Egypt? Something is definitely askew somewhere, calling perhaps for rites of exorcism. I fully intend to delve into the mystery on my next visit, which, to succeed, must scrupulously avoid all traces of officialdom!

  For I never did meet Mahfouz. Nadine Gordimer did not appear. No mention was made of any national honors. I was not received at the airport. Hotel rooms were nonexistent. A taxi driver, to whom death in a motor accident was obviously no death at all but preparation for his next, elevated reincarnation, maybe as a priest of Isis, all but ended my career on the road between the airport and the hotel, courtesy of the tourist desk at the airport, which eventually located some vacant form of habitation. It turned out to be a kind of athletes’ transient lodge.

  I got busy on the phone and left a message with the embassy—surely someone must know of my arrival. The message that remained stuck in the desperate larynx of the abandoned VIP was, however, much richer: W.S. speaking, you know, national treasure, special invitee of President Mubarak, yes, it’s I, the Akinlatun of Egba, the Akogun of Isara, one-third African symbolism at the All Africa Games, commander of the Order of the Niger, et cetera, et cetera, who was to have hitched a ride in the presidential jet but was unpatriotically prevented by some domestic airline— yes, it’s me, I made it on my own but don’t quite know where I am and what to do. This contretemps is happening all over again— HELP! For hours afterward, I awaited rescue. None was forthcoming. History, my cyclic bugbear, appeared to be the presiding muse at these All Africa Games.

  After a few hours spent pondering this latest round of déjà vu on my Egyptian incursions—not least of which was a painful recollection of my truncated participation at the laying of the foundation stone of the Library of Alexandria—I was ready to depart. It seemed fated. Somewhere in one of those tombs was the unappeased ghost of a wronged ancestor—mine—and my energized physical aura from the land of the Yoruba had once again aroused its millennial resentments, seeking redress or absolution at my hands. I turned for help to the front desk—literally a desk—and asked for a copy of flight schedules heading anywhere out of Cairo. Even that motion reeked of a mimicry of the past.

  Moments before I was to leave for the airport, however, a car screeched to a halt in front of the dormitory and a flustered young man, tall and thin in his well-tailored but flapping jacket, leaped out and introduced himself as a diplomat from the embassy. He had just picked up my message. In a few more minutes I was reinstalled in another hotel, less Spartan, where, it turned out, reservations had indeed been made for me. At the desk, the young man inquired if there was any message from the Egyptian government for his guest. There was none. He then took off to track down his Egyptian counterparts to ensure that I had the necessary passes required to enter the stadium, promising to be back in time to accompany me to my seat—security being rigorously enforced. He returned in no time, crestfallen. He had been unable to find anyone who knew anything of my visit, much less of my being a special guest of the Egyptian government or personally of the president, Mubarak! I told him to go back to his duties; I was more than content to wander through the streets of Cairo, return to the hotel in time to watch the opening spectacular on television, then catch the first flight out of Egypt the following day.

  He would have none of it. This windswept young diplomat, whose fragile frame totally belied his energy, took me in tow on one of the wildest drives in my nomadic career. He bullied, raged, and forced his way through barriers of security checkpoints with nothing but his diplomatic credentials and inadequate passes—he had not planned to go near the stadium until this challenge arose. At one stage, while his driver whimpered and cowered, he rode shotgun on the car bumper, screaming and cursing, directing the driver to an alternative checkpoint wherever the resistance proved unbreachable, until he delivered me right into the sanctum sanctorum of the VIP sector, just to one side of the presidential box.

  The show began, and we were treated to a sumptuous display of the glorification of the Egyptian president, Mubarak, in between snatches of a grand parade of the pharaohs, the sphinxes, and passages of Egyptian history and heritage. Where, however, were the black Egyptians? Egypt, after all, had boasted a black pharaoh or two.

  Babangida, it turned out, fared no better at the hands of Egyptian protocol. It had been announced in Nigeria that he would launch the Games jointly with Mubarak, but the Egyptian organizers appeared to have forgotten that little detail. Mubarak’s broad shoulders, sheathed in an impeccably turned suit, undertook the onerous task, while Babangida sat passively in the presidential box, for all purposes just another spectator. I do not think that Nigerian-Egyptian relations were enhanced by the undoubtedly impressive extravaganza of that very Egyptian occasion. The beginning of a Yoruba-Egyptian rapport also suffered yet another setback, as the Akinlatun of Egba, Akogun of Isara, et cetera, et cetera, was left with yet another African solidarity hole in his pocket.

  A Pen Coalition

  GENERAL MAMMAN VATSA, A HEAVYSET OFFICER WITH A DEEP-CUT RADIATing cicatrix that identified him instantly as being from one of the minority ethnic groups in the North, was an unusual soldier, a versifier on social themes and private thoughts. Vatsa courted Nigerian writers and artists and dearly wished to be counted as one of them. Shortly after my spell in prison and the publication of my account of that experience in The Man Died, he wrote some verses in protest of what he considered an unbalanced attitude in my book. Critical though they were, I was rather touched by this approach from a man of war, very different from the more usual “What! Is he still talking? He should thank his stars he got off with his life!”

  Later we met, and I was again taken with his apparent thoughtfulness on the problems that confronted the nation. We never became friends, but I found him quite amiable and progressively disposed. During the presidency of Shehu Shagari and his party, the NPN, I made the LP record Unlimited Liability Company, dedicated to the ineptness and corruption of that government and the general decay of society. When it was launched at the Museum Kitchen garden at Onikan, Lagos, I was surprised to find this military man present. He sat quietly at his table and bought thirty copies of the record—for distribution to his military colleagues, he said.

  I preferred to keep him at a distance, naturally, though I studied him keenly from habit. When a high-ranked military officer attends a “subversive” event, such as the launching of a sarcastic record against the government, and takes such material back to the army mess for distribution, he warrants some extra attention. It was just as well, because Vatsa would later defend—indeed, as it turned out, actually instigate and direct—a raid on the home of Obafemi Awolowo, the former opposition leader of the Unity Party of Nigeria, when the inevitable coup took place in 1983 and the civilian dictatorship of Shehu Shagari was overthrown by the reputed man of discipline General Muhammadu Buhari.r />
  Obafemi Awolowo was not a member of the ousted government but in opposition. He was rumored to have in his possession some sensitive documents that related to the $3.8 or $4.1 billion scandal that had remained unresolved during the previous two regimes. Acting under orders, undoubtedly, Mamman Vatsa undertook a raid of Obafemi Awolowo’s home in Ikenne, looking for “classified documents,” but never revealing the subject of classification. The writer and “factionist” Kole Omotoso interacted closely with Mamman Vatsa, through his functions as president of the Association of Nigerian Authors. During their discussions on Nigerian politics, Mamman Vatsa defended the raid, even threatened that Awolowo would be placed on trial for being in unauthorized possession of classified documents. It was an empty boast, but that was Mamman Vatsa.

  Still, Vatsa, who had been placed in charge of Abuja capital territory, did his duty by the literary tribe to which he wanted so badly to belong. He allocated some property toward the project for a writers’ village in Abuja and even supplied a military transport plane to take the writers to their annual conference, landing the association’s executive in hot water among some of the members for getting too close to, and accepting favors from, an unelected regime, even for the benefit of writers. Quite a few writers did take the purist line: no accommodation, in any form, with any military regime. Others believed that a silver lining—as long as it was not pocket lining!—could be mined from the darkest clouds. It all made for lively polemics, sometimes pitting the genuine puritans against the merely rhetorical contenders for the halo of the holier-than-thou.

  Now, however, Mamman Vatsa was in deep trouble. Vatsa and Babangida had been bosom friends right from childhood. Their wives were reported to be equally close. Vatsa may have been merely tolerated in the regime of Buhari and Idiagbon—the story was that he had virtually forced himself on those coup makers and was fobbed off with the then-lightweight post of minister of the Federal Capital Territory. True or not, with the ascendancy of his friend Babangida, Mamman Vatsa came fully into his own. He was retained in his earlier position, but the ministry became as powerful as Mamman chose to make it. Mamman lived the good life. He devised a cape for his attire and referred to himself as “emperor” of the Federal Capital Territory, which he ran with a free hand, apportioning valuable real estate to individuals and corporations according to his private laws.