You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  “My big brother,” said Buthelezi, “I am only too happy to do anything to bring me closer to my very own senior brother, whom I have always considered my leader. You may inquire of the de Klerk government. Throughout, I insisted that I would not talk to any of them until Brother Mandela came out of prison. Unlike the others, I refused to accept this spurious self-government. What for? Our leader was still in prison. Brother, I am glad it is someone like you calling me, and if there is anything you are able to do to bring us both together—are you sure we cannot meet before my flight? Maybe if you flew into Gatwick, we could have some minutes together before I take off.”

  I assured Chief Buthelezi that I could not perform the magical feat of getting into London before he took off, not even if I took the Concorde. I heard his sigh of disappointment. Whatever other impression I received of the KwaZulu chief, this much was certain: he was truly eager to seize any chance of mediation.

  Buthelezi sounded most embittered. He felt that he had not been duly appreciated, that his strategy for confronting apartheid had been misunderstood, unjustly misrepresented, and vilified. We spoke—or more accurately, he spoke—for nearly an hour, and the burden of it all was that a wedge had been driven between him and Nelson Mandela by “the hothead extremists” of the ANC. “Those people hate me!” he wailed. “They want to destroy me!”

  As I admitted to Nadine Gordimer when I succeeded in contacting her in turn, I detected strains of paranoia even across the transatlantic circuit. Chief Buthelezi accused the ANC of committing atrocities against his people; I reminded him, very gently, that the ANC had accused his KwaZulu warriors of virtually the same crime. In the end I asked him once again: Would you meet Nelson Mandela if such a meeting could be brought about? His response was a most grateful yes. There was no coyness, no playing hard to get. Buthelezi was ready for dialogue.

  MY LAST CONVERSATION with Nadine Gordimer administered, without doubt, the ultimate chagrin of my “diplomatic” shuttle. I was now armed at least with Buthelezi’s consent and could not wait to convey this to her. She, like Nelson Mandela, had already warned me of the ANC’s fervid democratic catechism— I encountered it so often, delivered like a creed of religious submission, that I would mentally recite it even as it was intoned by yet another ANC affiliate, including one or two of its writers. It went beyond liturgy, however. Indeed, it effected, and was acted upon with, such conformity, being virtually synonymous with “party discipline,” that it could be counted upon to prevent Nelson Mandela from taking any step without the full approval of the Executive Committee. Nadine was therefore hesitant but agreed to lay “The Plan” before the ANC—Mandela and Buthelezi to Nigeria or wherever, secretly ferried thither in one of Babangida’s presidential fleet.

  Some days and several more postapartheid funerals later, I was off to Cairo to lay ambush for a heavyweight pair from within the ANC caucus, courtesy of information from my “reformed” Marxist acquaintance of the Lisbon exchange—or was it in fact Nadine? I am no longer certain. Perhaps the unexpected softening of the formerly doctrinaire revolutionary of the Lisbon encounter had imbued in me an inordinate optimism. No matter, I sought help from the embassy in Cairo, specifically requesting the young man who had rescued me from the near debacle of the All Africa Games. He had been posted away, but his replacement was only too eager to lend himself body and soul to the scheme. He succeeded in tracking down the elusive ANC voyagers, who, it appeared, were on a fund-raising mission. The young diplomat also sent a message home in case there was need for a rapid follow-up by Babangida or his foreign minister. I was not overanxious to meet the two travelers without an intermediary or at least some indication about their probable disposition. Nadine could help, and I was due to phone her anyway, since she had finally undertaken to lay the proposal—albeit without great enthusiasm—before the next meeting of the ANC Executive Committee. That meeting had now taken place.

  It was indeed a most expectant one-man intervention force that made the call, joined by the embassy official, who had entered into the spirit of the chase. It was the briefest of my telephone exchanges with Nadine on the subject, but it had the effect—perhaps because of her own ambiguous position over the project—of transporting me vividly into the distant conference room where Nadine had introduced the initiative. I could almost swear that I saw each face seated around a table at the other end of the continent as the putative life expectancy of “The Plan” was summarily terminated. Nadine gave off a kind of throaty giggle; it was either a subconscious echo of the guffaws that had rent the discussion room or an embarrassed reaction of her own. Still, she eventually broke through her giggle to report, “The meeting broke up in a bout of derisory laughter.”

  I think a spasm of shock must have surged across my face because the diplomat sitting across the hotel room half rose from his chair, appearing more concerned with my well-being than with any message from a distant South Africa. He looked anxious as he asked me if I was all right. My reply was a revelation of my inner projections, even to me: “She’s just informed me that they are laughing all the way to the cemetery.”

  Of course, those were not Nadine Gordimer’s words. They were, however, the words I used also when I telephoned Oje Aboyade at home to signal the termination of my mission that very night. I asked him to be certain to transmit the message to Babangida just as I had phrased it and to let him know that I now considered the idea stillborn and was returning my meddlesome self to more rational pursuits. I was not born for the diplomatic world.

  THE NO-DIALOGUE rhetoric continued for some months, escalating in intensity even as the sheer statistics of reprisals settled into a numbing spiral. Then one day, several select assassinations and indiscriminate massacres later, including the detonation of bombs at political gatherings, right on the heels of yet another fire-breathing ANC bulletin that promised to wipe out Inkatha and Inkatha’s like response, news emerged that Nelson Mandela had quietly shunted aside his Executive Committee and traveled out on his own to meet Buthelezi.

  Not, I am certain, that Mandela ever accommodated the latter designation within his rich humanism—but the avatar had transcended the “general.”

  PART V

  All the World . . .

  Night We Improvise

  USUALLY ONE SEES THEM IN STILL PHOTOS—IMAGES OF DYING CATTLE IN a land overtaken by drought, now landmarked by carcasses and skeletons, withered shrubs, and dry water holes. Occasionally, however, the video camera takes charge, lingers over a calf that is reduced to nothing but skin stretched over a cage of ribs and the final contractions of emaciated muscles. Flies settle and crawl over what remains of moisture on the prostrate beast, mostly around the eyes, ears, and nostrils. It makes a feeble attempt to lift itself, scuffing dirt with the sides of its hooves, then settles back on its side, immobile. Its enlarged eyes stare blankly into the lens. This disproportioned frame with extended ribs sinks slowly into immobility. At some point, you know the calf is doomed, its life slowly ebbing into the sands. The lens lifts toward the desiccated horizon, rises directly upward to reveal a cloud of swooping vultures, suspended, circling, blotting out the pitiless sun.

  What I have tried to convey here—complete with circling vultures—is exactly what a director sees as he watches his play die slowly on the stage: the convulsions, the evident lack of nutrition, but above all the ebbing away of any animating spirit. And though the director-cowherd may turn away from the pathetic sight as often as he wants or flee the theater, the image remains branded on his retina and haunts him even in the bar where he has taken refuge. It hangs from the ceiling above the bed on which he has flung himself in despair. He knows the vultures are circling. On the review pages, the corpse is exhumed, mocked, and disemboweled and its tattered shrouds hung up as a warning to all other foolhardy adventurers. This, in fact, is almost a deed of mercy, a kind of public therapy that dissipates the intensity of the agony of the previous night. Nor is one speaking of the malicious or simply uninformed critic, the revele
r in fascist power whose ex-wife is probably bleeding him to death through alimony and who must bleed someone else in revenge. No, when the playwright or director knows that a death has been enacted onstage, and not one that was called for by the script, he simply bleeds internally and goes into hiding.

  A death is, of course, vastly different from a disaster, that unscripted incident that inflicts on the director no worse consequence than the loss of a handful of hair or a temporary homicidal or manic fit. Most directors know them firsthand, especially those first nights when everything appears to go wrong— lines are forgotten, the set collapses, a crucial technical effect is premature, or the lead actor has a seizure in midsentence. Such mishaps are gradually remedied, especially in a theater culture where the critic understands his or her trade from within, as part of the creative totality of the dramatic occupation, and does not confuse his role with that of a feudal executioner whose only function is one of instant decapitation.

  It goes without saying that from the commencing decision to stage a play, irrespective of the process that brings it about, through the casting of actors to the end product, the director bears the ultimate responsibility—including even the choice of the play—for what appears on stage. He or she basks in the glow of a successful production and remains the architect of his or her own woes. However, I am certain the actual goings-on behind the scenes, which vary from the hilarious to the tragic, often prove more riveting than the actual public product, having driven many a director close to suicide or onto the psychiatrist’s couch. Yet again, many unorthodox, unsung, and unacknowledged remedies have been known to rescue if not the theatrical event itself, at least the actors and company’s spirit from collapse. Such efforts give the word “improvisation” a totally new meaning and may eventually lead to a new understanding of theater sociology. But first, to put that elastic theater routine in its place, a case against that very directorial equipment: improvisation.

  Joan Littlewood and a Lumumba Fixation

  In 1970—but perhaps the notion had been gestating long before then—the erratic genius Joan Littlewood got it into her head that only one man of the entire black race could take on the role of Patrice Lumumba, the martyred leader of the newly independent Republic of the Congo, in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Les Anges Meurtriers. That man was none other than Wole Soyinka, recently emerged from prison detention in Nigeria. Perhaps some kind of parallelism was working on her mind—the nation of Congo just emerging from Belgium’s colonial detention, W.S. regaining his liberty from a military power? So obsessed was Joan with the idea that she refused to fill that part while I was still struggling to regain my passport, rendering even my appearance in Paris somewhat precarious. For Joan, that was only a minor problem. She continued to rehearse other scenes, confident that the spirit of Lumumba would eventually descend on the Nigerian government.

  It did. I traveled to Paris after the other actors had been at work for more than three weeks, leaving me even less than that to master my role. The performance company was a mini–United Nations. There were French film actors, used to playing detectives and/or romantic leads—such as Jean-Pierre Aumont, with his record of pairing with quite a number of glamorous stars. Others were straightforward stage actors. The black Francophone actors— Senegalese, Congolese, Malians, et cetera—were a mixture of professionals and amateurs; the Congolese were musicians who had never stepped on anything but a concert platform. Naturally, the director press-ganged the musicians into acting roles. The list was rounded out with British and Irish actors; Joan liked to have around her a sprinkling of tried-and-tested products of the Joan Littlewood method, based on the principle of inspired lunacy and a blithe disregard of the playwright’s text, stage instructions, intentions, even language. Such a radical proceeding had transformed and invigorated the British theater of the sixties and seventies, and Joan was now ready to destabilize French theatrical concepts with her unique style.

  I was only a few days into rehearsals before I concluded that Joan Littlewood was mad, stark raving mad, and that the only person who deserved to be institutionalized before her was myself. She knew that I did not speak French, yet she had insisted on casting me in a play to be performed in la langue française. With nothing more than proficiency in reading the language, never having conversed in it, I had agreed to act in that medium. At least I had an excuse: I had emerged from prison detention not long before, so it could be claimed that my mind was still somewhat scrambled. What excuse did Joan have?

  The French—as the world knows only too well—are extremely language-proud. They can forgive most things, including even watering down their wine, but they take strong exception to the murder of their language. The British complement in that company spoke with an accent that, even to my untutored hearing, was perhaps fractionally worse than mine. In addition, however, I had the terrible disadvantage of not being able to hear French at that stage, having never interacted with the Francophone world for any meaningful period. In short, I never could understand what the other actors were saying even after I had mastered my lines.

  Now, regarding that little problem, learning one’s lines, how did Joan Littlewood solve it? With a tape recorder, into which she had all Lumumba’s lines recorded. And that tape recorder—with earphones when necessary—played into my ears every waking moment: eating, drinking, walking, defecating, right up to the moment of falling asleep and first thing on waking up. A French-speaking Lebanese, “Nadine,” was attached to me as speech coach. This also helped, especially as we grew closer and closer and thus spent time in each other’s company over and above the call of duty—an intense relationship that, but for my other marriage in Nigeria—national politics—would have resulted in elopement.

  The lines were crammed and some intelligible delivery mastered. Instead of a correct French accent, however, the language-finicky audience would be treated to the experience of listening to their proud heritage passed through a Lebanese-Yoruba wringer. One problem still remained: how to ensure that Mr. Lumumba could understand what the others were saying in about ten different accents at any given moment. This was beyond even Joan Littlewood’s genius, and it was left to me to find my own salvation.

  The route to that salvation was, however, made nearly impassable by the methodology of the director herself, Joan, the compulsive improviser. She encouraged her performers to play around with both text and action onstage, especially during performance, more than content to have these altered from one show to the next. Well, improvisation is all very well when you can understand what the other person has just improvised. It’s no good improvising “Have they dined?” when your bodyguard has just informed you that mercenaries are blasting their way into your bedroom.

  Seizing a moment when the company was assembled onstage, I pointed out to them the marvelous example of the precision actor and French elocutionist Jean-Pierre Aumont, who played the U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, shot down in his plane over the turbulent Congo. This actor was so precise, so coordinated, that you could time his physical gestures and vocal gradations in advance, calculate the precise distance his fingers would travel as he moved to slide the handkerchief out of his breast pocket, pause at a dramatic angle, then raise his hand to mop, ever so gingerly, the sweat beads on his forehead. John Wells—one of Joan’s British imports—and I speculated that there were the exact same number of sweat drops on Aumont’s forehead at every performance. Certainly no one could fault the precision of his movements onstage, and his deployment of the French language manifested the same daunting precision. His bloodless performance was, of course, a matter of taste.

  Improvise your heads away—I warned them all—when you are interacting with one another, but not with me. You will get only the response I have crammed with such difficulty. I won’t pick up what you’ve just said, and if by chance I do, I shall not attempt any French composition. Not only that, I know how long you should take to deliver your speech. If you exceed the time limit, I will come in, wheth
er you’re done or not.

  John Wells, the satirical writer/actor, was the worst offender. He was the original Esu46 behind the scenes, a totally irrepressible agent of mischief and with a horrible accent from which any music lover instinctively recoiled. That did not faze him one bit, and he remained incorrigible till the end of the run. Sometimes he would say, “You’ve ballsed up things pretty badly here, Mr. Lumumba, haven’t you?” knowing very well that I would still follow with my response, “Yes, we’re very proud of the start we’ve made.” Fortunately, his accent was mostly incomprehensible to French audiences.

  Now, that was where Jean-Pierre Aumont was a godsend. His lines never varied and were delivered to within a tenth of a second either way, night after night and performance after performance. In return for the disdain with which he regarded the International Conglomerate of Accents, however, the company spent most of the time sending up his undeniably robotic performance. I was the only one without that consolation; I needed every ounce of concentration—onstage and offstage—in those terrible weeks that saw my politics of African liberation overcome all rational judgment, making me the fellow subversive of a madcap director in the demolition of the French linguistic heritage.

  YEARS LATER, PRESIDENT FRANÇOIS Mitterrand conferred on me the prestigious title of Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur. The ceremony was conducted by his ambassador in Nigeria. Some years after, the earlier-narrated conference of Nobelists hosted by Mitterrand took place, and I found myself at the Elysée Palace, my spoken French vastly improved and a brief thank-you speech, memorized, rippling off my tongue like an above-average vin courant. I was taken aback by what appeared to be a set, inhospitable expression on his face as he offered me a limp handshake. For a long time, I could not understand what I had done to deserve such a rebuff.