You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  The accused’s acquittal was predictable. Emboldened by the judgment, the two men sued their tormentor for defamation and won substantial damages. The immediate damage was more far-reaching, however: Babangida—willing or unwilling in the first place—could take shelter behind a threatened legal interdiction, and he did. All we had left was the assertion of his innocence and the hope of a leak from within the evident conspiracy at the very highest level of Babangida’s security organization. The independent commission was stillborn. It was left to the rest of the nation to continue the search for the truth— with one hand tied behind the back and a leg amputated.

  Stockholm and Back

  ONLY TWO YEARS BEFORE THE NOBEL, I HAD RECEIVED THE ENRICO MATtei Award for the Humanities, and the Enrico Mattei Foundation was basking in the satisfaction that it had recognized my work before the Nobel Academy did. Now, on the way to Stockholm, I received an invitation from the foundation to pass through Italy as a guest. I accepted with alacrity. I find Italy and Italians congenial in the main, and I was ready to leave Nigeria for a while, with its recent memory of the murder of a friend who had roused himself from his bed to celebrate my award.

  Though I am basically irreligious—certainly in the sense of not being a worshiper at any shrine—the notion of sacrifice, or saara, the surrogate, is one that I share with most faiths, Christianity included. Certainly saara in the Yoruba traditional mode was routine even in the Christian household into which I was born. Childbirths, funerals, supplications to ward off danger whether from birthing or voyaging: from the pastor himself, the head of the Anglican church, all the way down to his catechist or lay readers, the bookseller, the organist, and the extended neighborhood of Christians, Muslims, and orisha devotees, hardly any household did not respond to such milestones or occasions with the saara, when food was cooked and taken around to neighbors and children were invited to the celebrant household to eat, drink, and play with the children of their hosts. To me, saara has always been instinct.

  No, I was not in fact making saara for myself. I have, I like to think, a very personal, intuitive understanding with my protector demiurges. They take when they please. When I lose money or anything valuable, I tell myself that the insatiable demons have been at it again. I once lost—in 1962—my only manuscript of The Strong Breed, a play that dealt—interestingly—with the notion of sacrifice! Such a loss, for a writer yet pubescent in his career, was not easy to absorb. After the shock, I consoled myself by saying that the gods of creativity had really been out for their tithe. When, a year later, nearly to the day, I felt a sudden surge of total recollection, sat down, and tapped out the one-act play nonstop, I merely groused at the invisible light-fingered deity: What took you so long?

  Sacrifice, preferably as a voluntary act, is part of communion. Once, every New Year, it was de rigueur that I sacrifice a ram for my family—or, to be specific, for my children. At least, it was them I thought about. Saara is simply a way of life. A powerful attachment to this function was thus responsible for my first act after I left for Rome, thinking of all I had done or left undone. Foremost on my mind was the large Nigerian contingent—taking up half a Boeing 707— that would be attending the ceremony. I sent a message to my sister Yeside to ensure that, before the plane took off, she would get hold of a hefty white or black ram, slaughter it, and distribute the meat to neighbors and family.

  I also hold the view that there should be no beggars in society, that it is the responsibility of the state, the community, to look after its less fortunate, either create a means of livelihood for them or else house and feed them in some kind of commune, not leave them on the streets, dependent on the uncertain generosity of others. Mostly, I do not offer money to beggars. My visit to Italy—en route to Stockholm—proved to be one of those occasions when I contradicted myself yet again.

  What happened was this: I found myself on the receiving end of further generosity from the Enrico Mattei Foundation, the ENI (AGIP) people. I was set up in a luxurious hotel where if I chanced to sneeze, the management came running. I was not allowed to pay for anything. I was provided with an escort who was extremely pleasant and charming but talked my head into a coma. She was entrusted with a budget for shopping—outfitting me for the cold of Stockholm. I picked a modish coat that looked as if it would withstand the promised day of the Apocalypse when Hell itself freezes over. It took me a whole half hour to decide on that coat—I who normally whisk in and out of a shop with two shirts, two undershirts, four underpants, and two pairs of trousers while the average shopper is still spinning in the revolving door. In the end I did not even buy the coat at the shop where I first saw it but only on encountering it again, after I had purchased a pair of fur-lined dress boots whose soles were guaranteed not to slip on ice. What else? The budget was not yet exhausted, so off we went again—didn’t I need some handkerchiefs? Socks? A shaving set? Anything else I would like to do?

  Well, it so happened that the restored Sistine Chapel was just being opened to the public, amid great controversy. Had it been aesthetically enhanced by the cleanup or banalized by the face-lift, in tonalities rendered garish and bereft of emotional appeal? The controversy had raged throughout the European artistic world. I remarked offhandedly that it would be interesting to view the frescoes I had last seen as a student. However, the queue that we drove past put paid to such thoughts. It wound itself endlessly around and around the Vatican walls, then disappeared into a sloping tunnel in a distant neighborhood. I shook my head.

  The following morning, I received a call. An hour later, we were walking into the chapel through a side entrance where a curator’s assistant was waiting for us. He made his apologies—the notice was short and he had earlier commitments—and left us alone. Thus began a private, exquisitely privileged viewing of the ceiling and other murals before the chapel was open to lesser mortals. If there is one aesthetic thrill over and above what is engendered in contemplating works of art, it is the internal dialogue with such works in a space of unabashed selfishness, a discovery that I made through attempts to address the strange phenomenon of millionaire collectors who pay fortunes for “hot” works of art that they cannot publicly display, share with others, or acknowledge openly as being a member of their extended family. To the questions “Why do they do it? What do they derive from it?” I came to the conclusion that the essence of art induces a certain communicant dimension that is best apprehended in a space of private solace, even when the object of contemplation is of criminal origin. It thus becomes easy to picture—and understand—these high-heist millionaires in their secret bunkers, contemplating their possessions with the morning espresso before going out into the philistine world of Mammon that, paradoxically, also provides the means to this very private, aesthetically charged space.

  Not having the means to engage whatever local Mafia happened to be art-inclined in transporting the Sistine Chapel, or indeed any individual canvas or sculpture, from across the globe to Abeokuta, I luxuriated in the unanticipated viewing space of the Sistine Chapel, emptied of virtually all humanity. The only trouble was my charming escort, who would not stop talking, insisting on giving me a guided tour even though I continually reminded her that I had visited that chapel years before it was closed down for restoration. When she began to gush over what she referred to as the “contact point” of creation—the finger of God animating the prone figure of Adam or something along those lines— I reached the end of my tether and was ready to explode. Fortunately for both of us, I recalled that this again was the donor deity at the game of exactions— operating through Esu, the mischievous one—taking his own share of my pleasure by inflicting such unnecessary agonies on me. It was hard though, very hard. I left the Sistine Chapel persuaded—what with my escort’s Italo-American accent still rattling in my ears—that the Nobel had condemned me to a life where the savoring of unalloyed pleasure no longer existed. One way or another, I would always encounter a fly in the froth of my palm wine.

  Considering th
e foregoing, I should seek no excuse for breaking my rules later that night. Ordering a sacrificial ram for the home front was one thing, but this other—what came next—was truly out of character. However, I appeared to have been receiving, receiving, receiving! And so, walking down the steps of the Piazza di Spagna, where Rome’s beggars of every national origin congregate, suitably rid of my escort, I began to experience an unusual urge. I walked around for a while, stopped at a bar to prime myself, then left the piazza with my hands clutching fistfuls of lire but stuck firmly in my pockets. After some dithering, I turned around by a circuitous route and returned shamefacedly to another bar. I knew I needed to, was deeply impelled to, would have no peace unless I did, but was equally resolved not to submit to the unusual urge. Finally, I had had enough of my shilly-shallying. I selected a quiet Gypsy woman with an infant, one of the nonaggressive kind rather than the intrusive, even truculent breed. I am preternaturally immune to the other kind—those who thrust their stumps in your face in front of hotels or at traffic jams or bare their bodies to expose acid-eaten flesh that looks like some nightmare creation of Hammer Studios.

  I emptied the lire into her hands and fled. Even so, my urge to make saara locally remained unassuaged. I took a few more turns around the piazza, dodging from time to time into the side streets, doused my—totally paranoid— sense of embarrassment with a shot of grappa in a bar, then surged out again. And suddenly there he was, the scruffy, bearded twentieth-century Michelangelo of indeterminate origin. I dashed across the road, transferred the other fistful of notes, the rest of my Enrico Mattei shopping budget, into his unbelieving hand, and vanished around the nearest street corner. Out of his sight, I waited a few moments, then walked back to peek around the wall. The incredulous, then rapturous expression on his face was worth the Nobel Prize a hundred times over. I was now free to proceed to the main business of the evening: seeking out a small, secluded, no-frills trattoria with an instantly recognizable ambiance of the single-minded “Eat” as in “Eatalian,” far from the maddening world of tourists. I embarked on a very private celebration of my unexpected award, a simple ritual that I had imbibed from my friend Femi Johnson: I ordered a sumptuous dinner.

  It was meant to be a solitary act of celebration, but in fact, I was not completely alone. I had never met any of the other Nobelists, but, going through the list of my designated classmates for that year, I had been struck most pleasantly by the name of the laureate in medicine who, to round off good auguries, was a native of the very country that was playing pre-Stockholm host to me; that name was Rita Levi-Montalcini. I ordered a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino!

  STOCKHOLM. THE ELEGANT GRAND HOTEL, overlooking a canal, sleek yachts, cruise ships, and well-lit piers. My obligatory event—the acceptance speech before the academy—appeared to have gone well. The Nigerian contingent was enlivening the staid streets with colors, textures, and exotic sounds. In short, all was well with the world, and only one dread hung over my ease: Would I escape before the descent of snow?

  It was the night before the award ceremony itself, virtually midnight. I had settled down to sleep and was awakened by the phone. The voice was extremely querulous.

  “I wish to speak to Professor Soyinka.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Who is this? It is a man looking for his wife everywhere. Tell Wole Soyinka to send down my wife.”

  “Excuse me, but who is this speaking?”

  “Who? Why do you ask me who it is speaking? Who are you, in any case? I said I wanted to speak to Wole Soyinka. Isn’t this his room?”

  “I am Wole Soyinka, and this is my room. Now, who are you, and what do you want?”

  “You’re Wole Soyinka? You are Wole Soyinka? And you ask me what I want? I am telling you to send down my wife right now. Or bring her to the phone. I know she’s in there with you.”

  The last mists of sleepiness were shredded from my eyes, leaving me not merely wide-awake but fully alert. And now the man began to unburden himself, lumbering back and forth in tones that were successively belligerent, maudlin, coarse, and deferential. “Why should you be having a party in there with other people’s wives?”

  “First of all, Mister Whoever-you-are, I am not having a party—”

  “Don’t lie to me. You are a famous man, and you shouldn’t be lying. Do you think I can’t hear noises in the background and music being played?”

  “—secondly, I do not know your wife. And now I am going back to sleep.”

  And I put down the telephone, angry that the hotel staff had put a call through to my room when, as was my habit, I had instructed that all incoming calls should be blocked. The entire stay so far had been organized with impeccable efficiency, and I couldn’t understand how there could have been such a serious slipup. I took the precaution of going to the doors and double-checking all the locks. It was a sumptuous, sprawling suite, with doors leading to the kitchenette, another door to the balcony. This bizarre awakening might spring further surprises.

  Again the phone rang. I picked it up, and before I could even say a word, the same voice was ranting at me: “Mr. Soyinka, will you please tell your boys to give me back my wife.”

  My “boys!” Now, what was this new development in the mystery of the missing wife? I became rather intrigued. Numerous speculations flew through my mind. Who was this man? Could there have been a case of mistaken identity, or was it a thoroughgoing setup gone wrong?

  By now it was well past one o’clock at night.

  “So now it’s my boys who took your wife? Listen, I’ll give you one minute to make sense,” I warned, “and then I shall call the police.”

  The words came tumbling out. “Call the police! Call Interpol if you like, and then you’ll have to explain if you have been brought to Stockholm to abduct other people’s wives. You all came to my nightclub. You danced with my wife, and then you took her to your hotel to continue partying. I want her back, and now you’re pretending she’s not there. You may think you’re world famous, I don’t care if the world thinks you’re famous, that doesn’t give you the right to go around breaking up my marriage. . . . Hey, talk to me, Mr. Famous! Answer me, will you? . . . Hello . . . hello. . . . are you there? If you think you can hang up on me . . .”

  At last something rang a bell. Earlier that evening, some of the “boys” had indeed invited me to accompany them to a nightclub. They had been at the club the previous night and had been effusively welcomed by the lady proprietor. She had invited them to return the following night—indeed, to make her club their late-night haunt throughout their stay—but had also sent a special invitation to me to accompany them. She was a collector of sorts, and in addition to the nightclub, she ran an African arts gallery. Her husband was from one of the East African countries. The “boys” painted a glowing picture of the nightclub, decorated with African motifs, serving African snacks, and playing African music. I asked them to convey my regrets to the lady, however, having made the decision to avoid any potential incidents, to which even the most staid boozery is always prone. I began to picture what had happened: the “boys” must have gone there and left with the hostess to continue partying elsewhere.

  As gently as I could, I tried to explain to him where he might find his wife— not at the Grand Hotel, where all the Nobelists were lodged, but at one of the other two hotels where the Nigerian contingent was staying. He repaid me with an earful.

  “Oh, are you still there? Why do you continue to talk to me from upstairs? You’re too big to come down and talk to me? I am standing here in this cold lobby while you’re enjoying yourself in the warmth of your room. You can’t do the polite thing and come down to talk to me, is that it?”

  For the first time since that telephone intrusion, I had found something that interjected a light note into the proceedings. The thought of me going down to this enraged and basically incoherent stranger, already smarting from the loss of his wife’s companionship, maybe with lurid thoughts in his head of a gang of randy Ni
gerians taking turns warming up her Swedish or whatever blood, was so idiotic that I laughed out aloud. That only sent him into a new bout of rage.

  “You may laugh at me, sir. Because you’re a big man and I am a nobody. But let me tell you, I have my rights. I am also a human being and won’t be trampled on by you.”

  I cut short my merriment. “I am laughing at you because you dare take me for a moron. You actually expect me to leave the safety of my room to come and confront you, a total stranger in a strange hotel in the middle of the night? Now, listen, I am going to put down the phone, and if you dare call back again, I guarantee you’ll sleep in a police cell tonight.”

  I put down the phone and dialed the operator. Our hosts had not even left it to us to take the initiative of instructing the operator about calls. Instead, we had been consulted about how we wanted calls and other forms of intrusion to be fielded. Any caller whose name was not on the list simply did not get through, and of course a “block” message was sacrosanct. So how . . . !

  The operator explained that the man must have been calling from within the hotel, probably from the lobby, thus bypassing the switchboard. He could only do that if he had my room number, however, and how he had managed to obtain it was a mystery. So I asked the operator to connect me quickly to the hotel’s security detail. “There’s a lunatic in the hotel lobby,” I informed him. “You’ll find him at one of the house phones, still trying to dial my room.” Moments later, the security officer phoned back. Yes, indeed, there had been a man, an African, at the phones, but he had left just a few moments before. The guard had looked outside, and he thought it was the same man he had seen getting into a car.