You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  All he said was “The TV covered your meeting with Babangida.”

  “Already? It went quite well. Move.” The light was fading fast. “It’s over there by the tree.”

  “They’ve shot them,” he said.

  I heard only the word “shot,” so I nodded and moved forward, not taking my eye from the spot. “Oh yes, it landed over there. Let’s go find it.”

  “Vatsa and the others. It was on the six o’clock news, just as you were driving in.”

  The world froze before my eyes. “Shot who? What are you talking about?”

  “This afternoon. About an hour ago.”

  I said, stupidly, “But the Council . . . they were not to meet until late this afternoon. That’s when the final appeal would be decided.”

  “They met earlier. At three-thirty. They confirmed the sentence, and the accused were taken straight from their cells and shot.”

  My mind unwound itself like a clock, timing our activities. We had left Dodan Barracks around a quarter to twelve. The Council was not even supposed to meet until five o’clock; the secretary had spelled that out in specific terms when he had made the appointment. Their comprehensive agenda would probably take them late into the night, even beyond midnight. Who had moved the meeting forward? Why? My mind was in complete rout, asking questions haphazardly. Where was Chinua? And J.P.? Had they learned of the disastrous end to our intervention? What part had Babangida played in all this? Had it all been a game to him?

  And then—horror of horrors!—could our intervention have accelerated the process that led to these executions?

  Seyi had been standing in front of me, but I did not know when he left. I next saw him holding out the dead bird. I shook my head, waved him away, and walked back to the house.

  My sense of isolation was overwhelming. Too depressed to work or sleep, too depressed even to think, I dragged myself to Ibadan the following day. It was the only spot on earth from which I could search for a sliver of light to relieve the futility that appeared to lie in ambush for any endeavor in a humane cause. I developed an allergy toward the very sight of a military uniform for a long while after, including even photographs in the news media. I began to think that maybe I was on the wrong planet, certainly in the wrong part of it. This man had given his word! If it had all been a game, I really did not want to know these people. For another week, I considered leaving the country, going into voluntary exile for a year, maybe longer, maybe going away altogether and making my reasons public, returning only when the country had returned to democracy.

  ABOUT TWO MONTHS LATER, I ran into the secretary whose “brother,” or close relation, had been among the casualties of that military justice. “Oh, Prof, I had been hoping I would run into you. IBB wanted me to pass on a message.”

  “I don’t wish to hear it.” And I turned away brusquely.

  “But you should, you should.”

  “No, thank you, I do not know IBB. I do not wish to know him.”

  He smiled, somewhat ruefully. “I can understand. But then I also had a message of my own for you. In fact, I already asked J.P. to pass it on to the rest of you.”

  I stopped, and he continued, “That Council meeting—you should know what transpired at the meeting.”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. I really am not interested.”

  “Prof, listen, you know I was affected. I lost a brother, he was virtually a brother to me. But I know you’ll be interested in the truth. Babangida put up a fight, a really good fight for the lives of those men.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He did, Prof. You see, these soldiers, they have their way of doing things. There was a point when the chairman of the judicial panel said to IBB, ‘Look, oga, we are all agreed on what needs to be done. If you cannot put your hand to it, then please step aside.’ ”

  “What do you mean? Were they asking him to resign?”

  “Prof, all I can do is give you a report of how that meeting went. I think it’s only fair that you know that IBB kept his word. He has been most anxious that you know it. He begged me to find you and let you know. And I swear, that decision really broke him up, it really did.”

  I emitted a sound that hopefully translated as a rasp of skepticism, indifference, and disgust. Even as the man spoke, I had already decided to use my own sources to check on the various roles played by the members of the death-dealing Council. I wanted to know if these men of iron wore two faces or more. And then I checked myself in midstride—what did it matter in the end whose voice had steamrolled the accused into their graves? Were they not all an indissoluble part of the collective machinery of killing? I recalled who had cast the deciding vote that had sent General Ilya Bisalla to the stake after the panel had deadlocked over verdicts on the Dimka coup mayhem that had overseen the assassination of General Murtala Mohammed in 1976. It had been none other than my erstwhile military collaborator—and adversary, and friend of sorts— General Obasanjo. And there was the purported role of the affable General Ike Nwachukwu, who had also chaired a panel on yet another coup attempt that had sent several soldiers to the execution stake. I had not known him then, but some years later, it would prove to be the same Nwachukwu, as Babangida’s foreign minister, who would provide a support base when I came to engage in secret diplomacy—an attempt to bring South Africa’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Nelson Mandela together in an effort to terminate an even more brutal cycle of revenge killings.

  Predictably, the mood passed, even sooner than I had anticipated. First, I believed the young functionary, whose brother had been among the executed. Mostly, however, there were causes to be pursued, a fellow being to be rescued, a screaming injustice to be redressed, lives that could be made more bearable, and even an insufferable limb of the same power structure that had to be restrained, punished, or even amputated—cashiered from the army—using the same agents of destruction while they remained in power and could not immediately be displaced.

  EVEN WITHOUT THE rebuff by Vatsa’s fate, the trio of literary “elder statesmen” knew that any intervention by them, after the next attempt to topple Babangida, in 1990, was doomed from the start. Even by Nigerian standards, it had been exceptionally bloody. The mood of the military could be gauged in advance, and the reprisals that followed bore it out, evoking an image of the gutters of Lagos clogged with blood. No fewer than eighty officers and soldiers—mostly from the Middle Belt of the nation—had been led in batches to the execution stakes. It became known as the Orkar coup, after one of its leaders, Gideon Orkar, and earned notoriety not merely from the bloodiness of the attempt but from the unusual agenda of the coup makers, outlined to the nation in their very first radio broadcast. No fewer than five states from the far North, identified as bastions of feudal hegemony, were to be excised from the Nigerian national entity. They were to be cast into limbo, to find their fortunes as best as they could or else reform themselves along specified lines and only then apply for reabsorption into the Nigerian state! The conditions for their readmittance would be revealed in further announcements, the broadcast promised. It was a unique agenda in the history of coups d’état.

  Funded by a businessman, Great (his real name) Ogboru, an invading force had successfully trained in secret, undetected for months, in the fenced compound of a fish depot in Ikorodu, some thirty kilometers from Lagos. One section seized the national radio station in Ikoyi while the other moved on Dodan Barracks and shot its way right into Babangida’s bedroom with the single-minded purpose of eliminating him, together with his family. From all reports, Babangida seized a submachine gun and fought back but was stopped and spirited out by his bodyguards.

  The machine gun mounted on the armored car stationed for the protection of the seat of government had earlier been spiked by an insider, and the young aide-de-camp who rushed to man the gun for the defense of his master was easily mown down. The invaders decimated the sparse force that remained for the defense of Dodan Barracks while others sought out the senior officers of B
abangida’s government. The attempt would have succeeded—even if short-lived—but for an incredible act of neglect by the coup plotters: their failure to disable the telephone lines. Mobile phones were a rarity in 1990, even within the military. Where they existed, they were so temperamental as to be mostly superfluous. This enabled a missed target, the chief of army staff, who happened to have departed earlier from his anticipated location—quite a bag of glitches!—to make probing phone calls, determine the leaning and situation of his respondents, and mobilize loyalists. Suitably reinforced, that officer, Sani Abacha, launched a counterattack while the coup makers were already celebrating their presumed victory. The rest was a rout, and Babangida’s government exacted a terrible vengeance on the losers.

  The afternoon of that coup attempt, I was present at the scene that would witness the fiercest battle—Dodan Barracks itself. It was symbolic of my relationships with power that this bloody battle would erupt virtually on the heels of the only other tête-à-tête that I could count as a meaningful, extended discourse with that dictator. This time, it was a one-man “coalition” undertaking a rescue mission, and not just for a fellow poet and his fellow accused but for an endangered species—the entire national entity called Nigeria.

  The “summit” had proved long in the setting up, and the list I took with me had built up over time, all items rehearsed in advance in meetings with my coconspirator, Ojetunji Aboyade, the chairman of his Presidential Advisory Council. Our meetings invariably began with some frustrating brain beating that would later end in Oje saying, “Look, why don’t you talk to him? Maybe if it came from you, from the outside . . . I think he’s beginning to find me predictable.” Some moments later—not especially enthusiastic but not totally unwilling—we would put through a phone call and attempt to set up an appointment. Usually accepted, and with vocal enthusiasm, it would suffer one postponement, then another, until the issues were perhaps overtaken by events. This time it was different; Babangida had conscientiously reserved an afternoon when he was truly free of distractions.

  That afternoon, April 22, 1990, was a holiday; thus it was just as any day could be wished when one is impelled by serious matters that require a long discussion with the principal executive officer of a nation—unaccustomedly quiet, devoid of the routine officials and visitors, not forgetting the army of hangers-on. From my entry into the waiting room and, almost immediately, into his office, I encountered virtually no human beings. Even the few plainclothes security officers appeared to be in a state of suspended animation.

  When one has strayed into an arena only hours before a life-and-death drama is already in its final rehearsals, it is not possible to forget, later, what one did or said within such a charged space. A creepy sensation intrudes— afterward—insinuating that one had somehow participated, albeit unwittingly and disconnectedly, in setting the stage for the coming upheaval. It was late afternoon, but far from dusk. For the first time, my encounter with Babangida was unhurried. The dictator had finally, with all serious intent, carved out the time I had insisted upon for an undisturbed, leisurely voyage through a turbulent list. Recalling the intense absorption on both sides and the thoroughgoing nature of our discussion, an invisible observer might have wondered if the fate of a nation was being decided within those walls, if perhaps all the postponements had been orchestrated by some mysterious force simply to ensure that I was present that afternoon, an afternoon without the slightest distraction—just the dictator, myself, and the specter of death.

  Learning, a few days later, that the quiet young officer in mufti who had ushered me in and out had perished in the ensuing action only added to my mind’s perturbation, imbuing an afternoon of straightforward exchanges, in retrospect, with a fatedness. That gentle, anything but warlike, face of the young officer, Bello, haunted me for some time afterward, as if it had hovered around the discussion, a silent moderator whose final act was to be the sacrificial lamb, an omen of and surrogate for his master’s close encounter with death. The invaders, after all, did hold Babangida by a sheer hairsbreadth away from the precipice of extinction. Indeed, the effect was still with him, months later, when we next met in Abuja. That was at a luncheon where Nelson Mandela, the guest of honor, sat between us. Babangida was haunted by memories of that night of close reckoning. He could not shake the topic free of his emotions at the time, as he yet again outlined the course of events to his sympathetic guest.

  “There was no indication,” he repeated again and again with a sense of wonder, so unlike what I expected from a soldier whose trade is dealing in and warding off death, “nothing at all, not a sign to indicate that anything was amiss. In fact”—and he leaned across Mandela for the sixth or seventh time, as if I were the sole remaining source of reassurance or earthing device to the world of rationality—“the professor was with me that afternoon. We were in my office, a long afternoon when we covered so much ground. Did you notice anything, Wole, any sign at all?”

  I shook my head.

  “I was mostly alone,” he continued, settling back, his eyes still wide with the wonder of death, death that had come calling, very close, barely missed, “just a few security officers and my aide-de-camp, you know, the young officer”— again he leaned across—“you remember him, don’t you, Prof? He was the one who was killed, did you know that?”

  From deep within Babangida’s eyes, as he recounted these events, shot the shafts of fear that must have assailed him when Orkar’s men had broken into his bedroom. Mandela appeared awestruck, turned to look at me in amazement: “You were present?”

  I laughed. “No, that’s not what he meant.”

  Babangida looked lost. “But, Prof, you were there. We spent over an hour, no, more than that, over an hour and a half in my office. . . .”

  “I meant I left some hours before the invasion.”

  “Oh yes, of course. But I mean, did you notice anything? Anything suspicious at all?”

  “Nothing ominous,” I affirmed. That there had been no sign of a warning seemed to matter to the seasoned coup maker—not that he worried the issue as a practical security consideration. It was simply that it appeared to have acquired a kind of mystical relevance. Months after the event, Babangida sounded as if he remained entranced by this omission, found it weird, deeply unnatural, that the coup makers had sent no warning sign of their intentions.

  “Prof had come to see me on a number of national issues. You do remember what a wide range of topics we covered?” Of course I remembered! And I remembered also thinking afterward how lucky it was that the army traditionally opted for dawn or nighttime to stage its coups. Suppose the invading force had chosen to break with tradition; it was a public holiday, so there was not much movement about. In my view, that quiet, unprotected afternoon seemed perfect for such an adventure—after all, surprise, springing the unexpected, is integral to military strategy.

  The difference between Babangida and Obasanjo had struck me most forcibly that afternoon of the Orkar coup—they both were frustrating in different ways. Babangida hardly ever argued in an oppositional manner; he listened and took notes, interjecting a comment from time to time or else giving an explanation about why a policy had been made in the first place, but always with a hint that it need not be so, that if the situation changed tomorrow, the policy would change. Nothing ever appeared cast in stone when you spoke to Babangida, who, either by temperament or practice, nearly always presented a reasonable persona. He did not hesitate to agree with you; then, of course, he later proceeded to do the opposite of what you thought he had agreed to.

  Only once during the exchanges did I see his face harden in an automatic, bunker rejection, and that was when we came to the sore subject of his intervention in the University of Ife, where he had ordered the dismissal of some of the academic staff—all acknowledged leftists and radicals. It was as if I had bumped against a boil. He launched into a catalogue of the destabilizing activities of which the dons had been accused. I asked him how he had come by such
information, and he kept fingering, casually but suggestively, a folder that he extracted smoothly from a drawer in his desk, as if that action fulfilled all the requirements of rebuttal that the subject demanded. Had he personally ordered the dismissal of the dons? No, he assured me, it had been the decision of his minister of education—only to trip himself up some moments later in a flash of anger that conceded that he had either given or approved the order.

  And thus it went all afternoon, a relaxed but occasionally charged exchange, with us unconscious of the armored tanks being repositioned around us, others being rendered useless by some undetected readjustments of their working parts, the final touches being put into place for the execution of what would go down as the messiest coup attempt in Nigerian history—a deadly broth of the arcane and the ruthless. While we probed aspects of a national malaise, skirmished over factors and culpability for the blatant culture of corruption that had become synonymous with Babangida’s government, an array of serving officers and ex-servicemen had begun to slip out from their training grounds in a fish depot in Ikorodu, twenty-five kilometers away, infiltrate Lagos as passengers in public transport and private vehicles, regroup, and take up positions to await the descent of darkness.

  Unusually, there had been no rumors. The nation—and Lagos—went about its business. Obalende, one of the gateways to Dodan Barracks—the usual hive of swarming humanity, of jostling “danfo” buses, touts and passengers hustling and querulous, steamy and grime-clotted, its nightlife gearing up to encroach upon and eventually take over the daytime market life, was only slightly more subdued than usual, on account of the holiday. Quietly, in air-conditioned complacency, we continued our discussions. The nation was close to explosion unless a virtual U-turn in economic policies was effected soon— did he agree, and did he intend to act to provide relief or face the ire of Labor? Babangida appeared to be confident of having taken the measure of organized labor yet was willing to readdress the implications of the Structural Adjustment Programme.