You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  “Why should we fight among ourselves?” Mandela asked, somewhat rhetorically. “If it were possible, I would go and meet Buthelezi tomorrow, even tonight. I know him. He respects me. If he and I were to sit down today and thrash it all out, all these unnecessary killings would stop.”

  Mbeki again interjected. His tone was stiff; it cut through the mellow ambiance like a party-line diktat. “His atrocities against our members are unforgivable. We cannot sit down and talk to such a man. There is nothing to be gained by it. For a dialogue to take place, there has to be a talking point. With Buthelezi there is none.”

  I thought Nelson Mandela looked rather sad and wistful. Obviously he did not share Mbeki’s view. His smile was, however, not quite one of resignation. It could have been my hyperactive antennae, but I had the distinct impression that Mandela’s statement did not quite correspond to his inner intent, that he was biding his time. Certainly that surmise was contradicted when he said, “Well, you’ve heard our comrades. If the Executive Committee were to learn that I accidentally ran into Buthelezi and exchanged a ‘good morning’ with him, there would be a riot!”

  I turned to Mbeki. “I hope you realize what you’re saying. You are leaving yourself no choice but to kill him. You’ll have to kill him. And you know where that might lead.”

  Mbeki gave a slight shrug but said nothing further, at least not on that subject.

  By the following morning, the glow of an intimate evening with my—and the world’s—favorite avatar had dissipated. It took no special political instinct or intelligence to understand the urge for reprisals. My recollection remained focused on the sharp separation between Nelson Mandela’s thinking and that of his “young Turks.” Even the body languages of those two—Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela—spoke volumes, and the contrast read out a stark warning. I returned to Nigeria far uneasier than when I had set out for dinner—and had begun to consider if it was not time for another dinner with my reigning devil, the real one this time, but a pliable one!

  THE TRUTH WAS, I realized, that my student-days obsession with South Africa had merely gone into hibernation. Now it was bludgeoned awake as the figures of fatalities rose sharply by the day. No-go zones between Inkatha- and ANC-controlled areas in various cities—Johannesburg and its suburbs most notoriously—had become battlegrounds, streets turned into open spaces of death. The predicted was taking flesh; the broken white power had regrouped and begun to exploit divisions between the fraternal enemies. It became difficult to understand—how was it possible that no influential African nation had stepped in, brokered peace between the warring duo, and left the Boer diehards stuck to the starting blocks of their devious plots? It was the looming taunt that haunted me: See, we hand over power to them, negotiated power, that is, and all they do is slaughter one another. The suspicions, clashes, and killings were not new, nor were the jostling for political advantage and the fear of being overwhelmed by a more powerful partner in any struggle. It was not a situation that was peculiar to South Africa; liberation history has not been niggardly in its instructional scripts.

  The continent needed a South African success! South Africa’s task of recovery, black majority–ruled but in partnership with the rest of the nation, would be made less arduous—it seemed obvious—if, during its uncertain period of transition, she had a staunch shoulder within the black continent itself to lean upon. The obvious candidate was Nigeria—her size, her resources, her manpower. As so often happened, the motions began in Oje Aboyade’s home. Could it . . . Was it possible that we could play a role in this? Oje became caught up in the idea, activated his direct line to the Artful Dodger.

  My first demand, in outlining a plan for a Mandela-Buthelezi encounter to Ibrahim Babangida, was absolute secrecy. Knowing the torrid ideological space that demarcated the ANC from Inkatha, the very idea of creating a bridge left one exposed. If the plans miscarried, we had to assure ourselves, in advance, of the means of a dignified withdrawal and a stout public denial of any attempt to intervene. Despite the substantial support it had received from successive Nigerian governments, the ANC leadership was especially jealous of its independence. The party was obsessed with its self-image of ideological purity, ostentatiously contemptuous of Nigeria as a nation that lacked political direction or a progressive ideology. The mood within that party hierarchy was not so different from that of the Bolsheviks toward their “liberal” and “bourgeois” allies after the success of the revolution—ANC considered its struggle disciplined and “correct” based on the class analysis of history. By contrast, Nigeria was a spoiled, rich brat, a crude succession of hotchpotch dictatorships and feudal conspiracies. That nation had done no more than its duty in offering diplomatic and material assistance to the South African liberation fighters, perhaps more than any other African country except Libya and the “frontline” nations—Tanzania, Zambia, Angola, Namibia, and Mozambique. There was no reason for any expression of gratitude or special recognition. The ANC was morbidly afraid of contamination by the directionless nature of Nigerian society. Once the apartheid regime had fallen, it set out to distance itself from such an embarrassing benefactor.

  This attitude would later cause vocal resentment in Nigerian leadership circles—the ANC (Mandela) was accused of pointedly traveling around the world immediately after his release but refusing to step into Nigeria en route to say “Thank you”! Babangida nursed the same feelings of resentment, grumbling that the ANC leadership was made up of arrogant ingrates. No matter, he soon warmed up to the idea of doing this one thing—acting to stop the looming bloodbath. He had nothing to lose by a little investment; if it worked, his image would receive a boost on the international screen.

  Babangida agreed to send his foreign minister, General Ike Nwachukwu, to talk to me. Nwachukwu, with his impressive “soldierly” bearing, was one of those Nigerians who could claim to belong to any part of the country. Born of an Igbo father and a Fulani mother, this general had grown up in the North, where he also spent much of his military career. During the civil war, he had remained steadfast to the federal cause. He spoke Yoruba with hardly a trace of an accent, while his English carried a faint upper-class tinge that was probably consciously cultivated from contacts with the British officer class during his military training in England. Hausa tripped effortlessly from his tongue. Nwachukwu was markedly urbane in manners—the result perhaps of his numerous sojourns in Lagos as well as his training spells and attachments in various countries. We met in Yemi Ogunbiyi’s house, the rendezvous for many semiofficial encounters that took place, of necessity, in Lagos. The general arrived in an excitable state and announced that Babangida had offered to make a plane from his official fleet available to Mandela and Buthelezi. They could fly secretly into Nigeria for a meeting, or indeed to any part of the world agreed between them. Then came Ike Nwachukwu’s own proposal, one that virtually took my breath away.

  Bubbling with enthusiasm, Nwachukwu outlined a plan for the Ooni of Ife, the historic ruler of Ile-Ife and acknowledged spiritual head of the Yoruba, to lead a full-fledged delegation of royal heads into South Africa! Chief Buthelezi, the amiable general reasoned, was a traditional chief in his own right. So was Nelson Mandela—the general had done some homework, I had to give him that! In his view, this shared background held the key to netting the two frisky fishes. The Ooni of Ife, accompanied by a galaxy of crowned Nigerian heads from all corners of the nation, would fly into South Africa in Babangida’s private jet. The Ooni would summon his two fellow (but junior) royalty to his presence. He would then chide them for their belligerence— undoubtedly in the special language that traditional chiefs all over the continent use when they are among their own kind. He would say to them, presumably, “Look here, fellows, it’s time we crowned heads and chiefs sorted out this problem. We understand one another; we cannot afford to dent the prestige of our crowns in public”—not exactly Nwachukwu’s words but definitely the spirit of his plan. The Ooni of Ife would load them into the presidential jet an
d waft them into a Nigerian seclusion, where our local kings would act as arbiters. After which the combatants would embrace, and the continent would live happily ever after. The world would see that we in Africa have time-tested ways of resolving our problems. I listened. Ike Nwachukwu was so carried away by the sheer originality of his plans that he failed to glimpse anything of my reaction, which was one of plain, undisguised horror.

  When I narrated the evening’s encounter to Oje, we both conceded that the general meant well but that it would be best to leave the Ministry of Foreign Affairs out of the project, using that department strictly for logistical support. Thus did I come to embark on my initiation into the world of shuttle diplomacy—an activity that I clearly underrated until firsthand experience taught me differently. The one-off Nigeria-Senegal FESTAC experience had proved a most inadequate training ground; the emphasis this time was on the word “shuttle,” not on the diplomacy. In any case, diplomacy of any kind requires, above the necessary training or experience, a very special temperament.

  Babangida agreed with our proposal to proceed step by step, making private contacts rather than a royal blitz through the debris of apartheid. I would first of all explore the mood within the ANC very tentatively and discreetly, next move toward a tête-à-tête with Mandela, possibly involve Archbishop Desmond Tutu, then track down Buthelezi. After that, we would consider how best to inveigle the two principals into a secret tryst in a place and at a time of their own choosing, a presidential jet always standing by to take off at a moment’s notice. Babangida would send funds to the embassy in Washington to take care of my traveling expenses.

  Thus came my saga of meetings—more accurately described as ambushes— and of telephone calls from one end of the globe to another, wondering who had hypnotized then brainwashed me into such an undertaking. Compelled to isolate the most defining of these encounters, I would list three. One was a long walk down a Lisbon avenue with an ANC Communist, late into the night. Another was a telephone discussion with the Inkatha leader, Chief Buthelezi. The third was the last of my telephone exchanges with fellow writer and ANC antiapartheid stalwart Nadine Gordimer.

  IT HAD BEEN a long day in Lisbon, a series of sessions—and receptions—at one of those encounters between “North” and “South,” in 1991. I shared the podium with Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, then beginning to enjoy his honorable retirement from the presidency of Tanzania. We were interacting for the first time since the Pan-African—resurrection—conference in Dar es Salaam in 1973, a year in which General Yakubu Gowon had been consolidating his dictatorial rule of Nigeria. It was at this chaotic gathering that the original credentials of the Pan-African movement as an all-come, nongovernmental forum had been formally buried.

  One after the other, suspect voices were censored, in response to pressure from their governments. Nyerere submitted to some diplomatic arm-twisting from Lagos, and I was successfully excluded from one speakers list after another. Walter Rodney, the author of the seminal work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, suffered a similar fate, even though he was actually resident in Tanzania. He was “invited” by the Tanzanian government to absent himself from Dar es Salaam during the conference. To pass the time, I did my best to demonstrate solidarity with a liquid product of that socialist nation, this being the most affordable accompaniment to Tanzanian cuisine: some Roman Catholic priests, fooled by the climate and soil of the Dodoma region in northern Tanzania, had engaged in a valiant effort to cultivate grapes and—table wine! Perhaps that product has improved since then, but, like the experience of a gathering that was intended to breathe new life into the pan-African movement, I was rewarded only with a sour taste in the mouth and a prolonged sense of corrosion of the stomach lining.

  LISBON WAS, OF COURSE, a different setting and a far more composed affair: a North-South dialogue. It seemed a perfect pointer. If North and South could dialogue, so could South and South or, in my immediate context, ANC and Inkatha. That a senior member of the ANC was also participating in the conference was a further signal that the stars of dialogue were in the ascendant. I had begun with brief but encouraging snatches of discussion with Nyerere as we sat on the podium, the coffee breaks and reception being hotly contested for by far too many claimants. The ex-president was leaving Lisbon that very night, so I had to seize the few minutes in between the speeches of other members of the panel, and over interjections from the floor. I promised that I would get in touch with him through his secretary, call on him in Tanzania if necessary. It would be no exaggeration to claim that I had engaged his interest—or at least that he was intrigued by the idea.

  The ANC delegate was, however, the immediate target. As the conference ended, I asked him to take a walk with me toward my hotel, little suspecting that I was about to undergo a renewed induction into a troubling mind-set that bears so much responsibility for the deadly strains of revolutionary rhetoric. I had encountered it on numerous occasions, but perhaps it was the setting of the preceding exchanges of the day, an encouraging contact with that man of vision Julius Nyerere, one of the least doctrinaire of progressive leaders on the continent, that left me so ill prepared. For the bespectacled, flaxen-haired, fortyish white militant responded to my plea that a solution be quickly found to the internecine killings with this: “The ANC is still at war. Nelson Mandela is like a general of an army. Generals cannot pause to take note of the loss, or potential loss, of lives—it’s all entered into their calculations in advance.”

  Aghast, I looked at his pale face lit by the safe streetlamps of a safe Lisbon avenue. It was smug and self-righteous, a composure that, paradoxically, approximated a Buddhist state of the resolution of all the seeming contradictions of a world of pain and strife. It required no thinking; I knew at once that this marked the end of that dialogue. I abandoned my plan to stop at a bar and engage him in a productive discussion, preferably over some Portuguese tapas and vinho verde. Denial of my right to free speech by Nyerere—whom I deeply admired in any case—was one thing. Collaboration—indeed, rhetorical justification of internecine slaughter in the name of revolutionary theology— was another. I turned abruptly. It was a most inauspicious beginning to the promise of a diplomatic career.

  “Well, good night,” I said. “Try to remember, however, that it is not people like you who are getting killed. And it is not your community that is being destroyed.”

  He looked shocked; perhaps the thought had not occurred to him till then. More likely, no one had ever uttered words in his hearing that conveyed this simple, stark truth. The following morning, he called me and promised to see what he could do within the ANC Executive Committee on his return to South Africa.

  My hunt continued for a sympathetic and influential mind within the ANC. All that we sought, after all, was that both Mandela and Buthelezi should know that there was an avenue that could be used to meet discreetly—just meet, talk, and hopefully discover that there was no forked tail hidden beneath either pair of trousers.

  I encountered several dead ends and near misses. Thanks to my former student Henry Louis Gates, Jr., then a full-fledged professor at Cornell University, I learned that Winnie Mandela was to attend an investiture at Duke University, where she would also deliver a lecture. I headed for that beckoning rendezvous, posting messages ahead. By the time I arrived in North Carolina, Winnie had called off the event, owing to some emergency recall from home, and traveled back to South Africa.

  Buthelezi was also a near miss. The chief had been tracked down in Canada and was expected to remain there for some days before traveling on, consumed with his mission of jettisoning the “collaborationist” label that stuck to him stubbornly. I was then in London. Based on his schedule, transmitted by the Nigerian Mission in Ottawa, I flew to Canada and found that our planes— most probably—had passed each other in the ozone layer. This was getting tiresome, but it was too late to complain. In addition, to one blinded by the dazzle of the prize in view, the quarry always seemed no further away than the arm could reach. Ther
e was a fast connection to London to be made through New York, and thus to that city I headed on the next available flight. This time, however, I had learned not to place all reliance on the intelligence network of embassies or be at the mercy of the sudden dispositions of these moving targets. Armed with his phone number and hotel address, I took the precaution of first calling Buthelezi from the airport while awaiting the flight to London.

  It was just as well. Buthelezi was packing his bags and would shortly head for Gatwick Airport en route to Johannesburg. All the party leaders appeared to be on the move, even the still-ruling National Party of F. W. de Klerk, preparing for the first postapartheid elections, raising funds, and seeking international recognition and/or understanding of their policies. The ANC, for instance, had mounted a campaign to overcome the general perception of its being a Communist-dominated organization. De Klerk was propagating a scheme for opening up the Nationalist Party to non-Boers, nonwhites. Buthelezi was contesting his “collaborationist” label.

  And so my dialogue with Buthelezi took place over the phone—I have yet to encounter him physically. He spoke volubly, making an obvious effort to sound reasonable and objective, but came through as a man deeply aggrieved and hurt—Nelson Mandela was right. Buthelezi forcefully reminded me that, despite having acceded to the “homeland” policies of the apartheid government, he had stoutly refused to accept the offer of the status of an “independent” nation—unlike other Bantustans—by which the regime had sought to consolidate the apartheid ideology and weaken liberation thinking. It had created a false sense of national sovereignty; the ruse was so transparent to the world that it remains a mystery even today that any prescient leader could pretend to have been taken in by its touted theology of mutual cultural and political respect: separate but equal.