You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  “Yemi, who is dead?”

  “Dead? No! Oh no, just wait, I am trying to—”

  “Yemi, what’s the bad news?”

  “Bad news? No, exciting news. But wait, of course you couldn’t have heard . . . ”

  Finally, at some point, he ran out of delaying prefaces and side commentaries and came to the point. When he did, I sighed and shook my head. “You too! You mean you failed to learn from last year?”

  He shook his head vigorously. “No, no, this time, it looks like it. Solidly. The press have been all over UNESCO.”

  “Yemi, I am tired. I need to sleep.” And I went off to the bathroom. He followed.

  “You have to start thinking what to tell them. How are you going to handle it? And there’s a journalist from Stockholm who is coming here any moment.”

  I screamed, “You invited him here?”

  That was the ultimate betrayal: Yemi, the normally protective Yemi, had allowed a journalist to invade my (his) sanctuary.

  “I haven’t had any rest myself since yesterday. You’ll find out when you get to UNESCO.”

  I disappeared into the bedroom. I heard the phone ringing incessantly. I indignantly refused to take any calls and crawled into bed. Finally there was one I had to take—it was Anne-Marie, the secretary of ITI. She wanted to know when I was arriving at the meeting, because, she said, the press was going mad.

  “Did you invite them?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then ignore them.”

  “I can’t do that. You’re the only one who can send them away. We can’t function here. They’ve taken over the entire frontage of rue Miollis. No one can do anything.”

  “Anne-Marie, I am going to sleep. And then I shall turn up for the meeting two hours late, as already agreed. Good night—or good morning, if you prefer.”

  “You’ll have to go and face the press sooner or later,” Yemi offered.

  “Yemi, aren’t you supposed to go to work?”

  He shrugged. “All right, I’m off. But look, er . . . I promised that journalist. His newspaper sent him all the way from Stockholm, so it’s a serious matter, you know. He explained to me—as soon as the decision is made, the committee starts tracking you all over the world. Please, when he comes, let him in.”

  “Yemi, I don’t live on speculations. I came to Paris for the ITI meeting, and that’s all I have on my mind.”

  The bell rang. “Aha, I think that’s him.”

  “He’s your guest. You do what you want with him.”

  I pushed deeper into the bed while his voice pursued me. “I made him promise he won’t even attempt an interview. All his newspaper wants is for him to be with you when the news is made official. That’s all.”

  Now, at this stage, surely something must have begun to give. I have gone over and over those moments, trying to discover when it was that my wall of disbelief and/or indifference began to crumble, the moment when I said to myself, Suppose it is true after all? I’m afraid I have never recovered that moment. I think the slamming of the door as Yemi let in the journalist could have been it; I cannot swear to it. I was sure of only one thing—I wanted, needed, my two-hour sleep before confronting the executive of the International Theatre Institute, where I presided over a group of genuine theater artists, researchers, and theater historians, as well as ideological apparatchiks from the Soviet bloc, for whom even administrative choices entered a party-line framework. The Berlin Wall was not yet down. One required, ideally, a solid night’s sleep before dancing on such a trampoline. Deprived of that, nothing should disturb a measly two-hour preparatory sleep, duly fortified by a double espresso. Through the sheets I heard Yemi say good-bye as he left for work, assuring me that he had extracted from the correspondent a promise that I was not to be disturbed, that he was prepared to wait, and that all he wanted was to be the first to see me after the news was formally announced.

  I ignored him and pulled the blanket closer around my head, heard the door slam as Yemi left for work. About two minutes passed in the marvelous, soothing silence of his apartment, so high up that the demented traffic noise below arrived through bales of cotton fluff, and all the neighbors had gone to work. I sank effortlessly into the first stage of sleep. Any moment, and I would be wholly gone—when suddenly, there were voices in the apartment. Who else now? Who else had this sole journalist let into the apartment? Cameramen? I threw myself out of bed and marched into the living room. Well, there he was, and all alone, this Nordic figure humped over the television set and twiddling the buttons! I watched him for some time, and then he turned around and saw me.

  “Oh, I am sorry if I disturbed you. You are, of course, Wole Soyinka.”

  I stared at him through bloodshot eyes. He continued, “Your cousin let me in. I was trying to tune into Bernard Pivot’s culture program. That is where the announcement will be made.”

  At which point I surrendered all further thoughts of sleep. I shut the door and went into the bathroom to take a shower. It was better going to the ITI meeting than staying cooped up with this journalist.

  I took my time, dressed, and got ready for UNESCO. I brewed some coffee and then, realizing I wasn’t really being gracious to my cousin’s guest, decided to offer him some. He accepted gratefully, and we both sat in the living room for what I expected would be only until we finished our coffee. Then I would leave him to his own devices. If he chose to follow me to UNESCO, that was his business. But he soon put paid to all that.

  “Everybody is waiting for you at UNESCO,” he said, as if he had read my thoughts.

  “So I’m told. There must be a back way of getting in for my meeting.”

  He smiled. “I don’t think you’ll be having much of a meeting. I don’t think there is much work going on at the UNESCO Annex right now. When I left, the excitement was really high.”

  I decided to take him on. “You know something? This nonsense happened last year also, only it happened at home, in Nigeria. The press there behaved exactly the same way as the reporters here appear to be doing. It came to nothing. I was just as far from taking them seriously then as I am now. I don’t believe in speculations.”

  He shook his head. “Oh, I think this is more than mere speculation, Mr. Soyinka. My newspaper specially sent me to track you down and—”

  “Oh yes, that’s right. To do what, exactly? I warned my cousin that I am not giving any interviews.”

  “No, I don’t want an interview. Although of course, if you do wish to say anything . . .”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s fine, that’s absolutely fine. All I need is that you allow me simply to be with you until the announcement is made. That’s all. We’re not asking too much.”

  I shrugged.

  Then he saw the radio and dashed toward it. “I’d better put this on too. The radio may broadcast it before Pivot.”

  So the man began fiddling with the tuning knobs of the radio, seeking to lock in on the arts program. Then he would dash across the room again, tune the television set to another program, then return it to Bernard Pivot. Across the room again he dashed—always at a crouch—to try another radio channel. I saw his face becoming anxious, and quite frankly, I began to enjoy his discomfiture. There was I, a candidate for this much-envied prize, ensconced in a room with a journalist who was waiting on tenterhooks for the announcement, and all I was thinking was, Serves you right; this will teach you not to indulge in idle speculations. I think I must have a sadistic streak somewhere in me after all, because I really was enjoying the creases of anxiety that began to form on the man’s face. He kept muttering to himself, “But it’s eleven o’clock now, well, almost.” A few minutes later: “But now it’s actually past eleven. The announcement was to have been made at eleven.” And he actually looked at, then shook his watch. He made the occasional check with me, as if I had agreed to be his fellow news monitor: “You didn’t hear anything, did you? Do you think I missed it on the radio?”

  The Norwegi
an, or Swede, was interrogating the radio when a man walked into Bernard Pivot’s program and handed him a piece of paper. Pivot excused himself, adjusted his glasses, and read it, then faced the discussion panel while the camera focused on him. “Breaking news,” as the Americans call it, and Pivot smoothed out his piece of paper and made his statement. The Swedish Academy had announced the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1986, and the winner was—the writer from Nigeria . . . and he managed to garble my name. Across the room, the Nordic journalist continued his frantic struggle with radio static.

  I suppose it is time to attend—as honestly as one can—to some personal dissection. The first admission I must make, and truthfully, is that I did not sense any quickening of my pulse. Did I know this writer? I was not sure. Was I asking, Did I hear right? No, I did not ask such a silly question. My French was sufficiently competent, the man had referred to the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he had coupled my name with it. So there it was. The trouble was that the announcement had been made in the most ordinary fashion, quite routinely, so it did not really tie in with all the excitement with which I had been confronted from the moment I had stepped into my cousin’s apartment, beginning with his long rigmarole. Nor was it linked to the Scandinavian gentleman still fiddling with the radio controls and wearing a lengthening frown on his face.

  I continued to sip my coffee and watched him return to his chair, from which he proceeded to give his undivided attention to the Bernard Pivot program. It ended some twenty minutes later, and now the man really looked defeated, totally baffled.

  “But that’s the end of the program,” he announced piteously.

  I nodded in agreement.

  “But what happened? The official announcement should have been made. It was supposed to be on Pivot’s program.”

  “Do you mean, the Nobel Prize in Literature?”

  Irritated, he snapped, “Of course. At eleven o’clock.”

  I told him, matter-of-factly, “But it was announced.”

  He looked thunderstruck, and I saw immediately what was going on in his mind: he had been chasing the wrong quarry. But I wasn’t being mischievous in prolonging his agony. I think that, in taking my time, I was also passing the news to myself. I did not feel I owed the intruder any special treatment, so there was no reason why we should not both learn of it at the same time, my absorption rate having been slowed down, probably, by the transatlantic flight.

  “Well, well, what . . . ? Who? Tell me.”

  I shrugged, I think. “You were right. It was me.”

  Now he really was staring wide-eyed. “You? But when? What happened?”

  “You were fiddling with the radio. Someone walked up to Pivot and handed him a piece of paper. He looked at it, and he made the announcement.”

  “It was you? Well? Well?” Now his voice was accusing. “But why didn’t you call me? That’s what I was waiting for.”

  I was not sure how to answer him, how to explain it, so I simply reminded him, “You didn’t ask me to.” I picked up the coffee cups and took them to the kitchen.

  “But you are saying nothing,” the man protested, following me. “What are your reactions? What do you feel?”

  Did he expect me to fall down in a faint? Or burst into a Yoruba ululation? I did not understand the man’s question. Just what did he want? What was the idea behind coming to trap me in my cousin’s apartment—so he could report on my reactions? It seemed to me that the world—or his section of the world—was quite mad. Immediately, of course, the phone had to ring, and it was Anne-Marie on the line. “You have to come here at once. You simply have to come. Nobody can move or get past the press corps. This place is a mad-house.”

  “I did not invite them. Get whoever invited them to get rid of them.”

  “You’re not being reasonable. Please try and be reasonable. They know already you’re in Paris. There is no way they’ll leave here unless you come.”

  “I am not coming,” I insisted, and I meant it. Suddenly, all I wanted was the accustomed peace and quiet of my cousin’s apartment, or something better. My next course of action, I felt, what I really wanted for myself, was to throw out the journalist and resume my interrupted sleep. I shook my head ruefully as I rinsed the coffee cups, realizing it was too late for that prospect, what with the lethal stuff I had just swallowed.

  “Well,” snapped Anne-Marie, “don’t complain if they invade your hiding place.”

  I hadn’t thought of that, but Yemi evidently had, because a few moments later, he was charging into the apartment, ready to drag me to UNESCO, with the aid of the French gendarmes if necessary. I decided to go quietly. I saw the face of the journalist, intently reading my own, looking for what, exactly, I still had no idea. He followed us to UNESCO and disappeared among the crowd.

  As Yemi drove toward the frontage of No. 1, rue Miollis, I regretted my decision. I suddenly realized that there was an option available, one that I should have taken, and that was—to head in the opposite direction, toward Charles de Gaulle airport, and disappear from sight. But then I would have needed the cooperation of my cousin. For what struck me was that there were no more microphones, no more cameras, no more tripods, flashbulbs, or notepads left anywhere in the world. All had been miraculously and aggressively assembled at No. 1, rue Miollis. I was attacked—there is no other way of describing it— by a bristling, rearing, snarling pack of hunting hounds straining at the leash, blotting out the world of reality. For the first time, I understood how the metaphor “newshound” came about. I tried to duck back into the car, but Yemi, abandoning all cousinly responsibilities, had pulled away, leaving me at the mercy of the rampaging horde. Questions ripped through the air like tracer bullets. I mumbled inaudibly, mostly to myself, asking where I had thought I was heading when I first set pen to paper, then found that someone had managed to take charge and was imposing some kind of order, so that I could at last make sense of a few questions and provide some coherent but uninspiring answers. I was then dragged through the melee and hustled into the office where the ITI executive meeting had assembled. A bottle of champagne appeared miraculously, and now I was feeling safe among my ITI colleagues; never before had I appreciated what a lovable, harmonious family this was, until I had run the gauntlet of the press.

  The press would not leave so soon, and we decided to adjourn an impossible meeting. Already I had made up my mind: I would have to escape from UNESCO, then flee Paris on the next available flight, whenever that was. I never wanted to see a news camera, flashbulb, or microphone again for as long as I lived. All I could think of was the 2.6 hectares of bushland that I had acquired and on which I had already laid the foundations of a modest cottage. The vista that opened up before my eyes was W.S. thrashing through the dense forest to that patch of absolute tranquillity, forsaking the world forever. I had not taken the full measure of what I had gotten myself into, but if it was anything like what confronted me at the UNESCO Annex, beginning with what should have been a routine arrival in my cousin’s apartment, I wanted no part of it. “Abeokuta, here I come” was all I could think as I gulped down the champagne, looked around the conference room at the faces of my colleagues, and apologized silently for the abandonment that was coming to them, if only they knew it. I had made up my mind to retire from the world, simply—disappear!

  Thorns in the Crown

  AND THEN CALAMITY STRUCK, AND FROM A TOTALLY UNEXPECTED DIRECTION. I arrived in Nigeria on October 14, to what came close to being a national mood of euphoria, formally abetted by the wily IBB, who sent his minister of culture, Tony Momoh, to spring an ambush as I arrived at the airport. Accompanied by carefully selected colleagues, among them J. P. Clark, Tony Momoh brought with him a letter that conferred me with national honors. It was a carefully executed fait accompli, but one that was not especially difficult for me to accommodate. By October 1986, Babangida had been in office for two years, and at that time—a fact that many Nigerians find most convenient to forget— could lay claim t
o the approval of much of the nation, in whose mind the terror reign of Buhari and Idiagbon was still fresh.

  That Nobel-induced festive mood came to an abrupt—and bloody—ending. It had not lasted even a week when the nation was plunged into mourning, relieved only by a surge of outrage. An unprecedented event had taken place in Nigeria: assassination by a letter bomb. The victim was an investigative journalist whose biting columns had disturbed the peace of many complacent crooks in government.

  Dele Giwa was breakfasting in his study with a London-based colleague, Kayode Soyinka—no relation—when he opened a parcel that had just been delivered to him by a motorcycle courier. He took the full brunt of the explosion on his lap. His guest was blown across the room, with permanent damage to his eardrums. Nothing remained of Dele’s thighs and legs but pulp.

  Only a few weeks before, Dele Giwa, a copublisher and editor of Newswatch, Nigeria’s earliest version of newsmagazines in the format of Time and Newsweek, had been summoned by Babangida’s head of national security, Colonel Halilu Akilu, where he had undergone an encounter that had shaken him to his heels. He later confided in his solicitor, Gani Fawehinmi, that he feared for his life, and additionally he raised a public outcry. Dele Giwa claimed that Akilu had accused him of gunrunning, or of possessing knowledge of gun-runners and dissident groups who wanted to overthrow or destabilize Babangida’s government. The charges were so preposterous that Dele Giwa had only one conjecture: this was a red herring, designed to prepare the ground for his already decided elimination.

  A few days after his public outcry, Halilu Akilu telephoned to assure him that all was well, that the charges had been thoroughly investigated and there was nothing to worry about. To reassure him even further, Akilu informed Dele that President Babangida wished to speak to him to allay his fears. Later still, the security chief again telephoned Dele Giwa to ask him for directions to his house, informing him that Babangida wished to send him some documents. This was the background to the well-publicized remark that Dele Giwa made on receiving the package. As he proceeded to open it, he observed to his guest, Kayode Soyinka, “This must be from the president.”