You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  MI O R’IKU L’OJU E —no, I read no death in his eyes. Neither did any of his insurance colleagues in Cairo, where, according to reports, he performed his accustomed gastronomic feats and enlivened the gathering of brokers. We parted company in London, his plaints pursuing me into my taxi because I would not change my flight, return to Nigeria via Cairo, and share with him the excitement of his induction into the marvels of Egypt.

  A week later, working in my study in Abeokuta, a car drew up. I recognized it from the window and went to open the door. It was Gboyega, Femi’s personal chauffeur.

  “I’ve been asked to come for you, sir.”

  “When did he return?”

  “Just two days ago, sir.”

  “And he’s been working nonstop in his office as usual, I bet.”

  I thought I detected a faint hesitation, but he said, “Y-yes, sir.”

  “Well, tell him me too, I’m still tied to my desk. When I’ve cleared it— maybe by the weekend—I’ll see him.”

  His next words came out in a rush. “Please come, sir. It was Madam who sent me, not him. He’s taken ill and been rushed to hospital. It is quite serious, sir.”

  “Femi? In hospital?”

  “It happened in his office. They sent for Dr. Soyanwo. He ordered an ambulance, but it did not arrive in time, so a car took him to hospital.”

  I broke loose from the spell and dashed back into the house. An hour and a half later, I was by his bedside at Ibadan University Teaching Hospital. Femi had begun the fight for his life.

  It was a stroke. Two seizures, it would seem. When the first had happened, Femi had thought he had merely had a fainting spell. He had come to, found himself on the floor, and somehow succeeded in pulling himself back to his desk. Then he had been stricken a second time. One of his secretaries had looked in and found him on the floor.

  His wife, Folake, who now sat beside him, visibly distraught, had taken the call at home, but she was merely informed that her husband was feeling poorly and a doctor had been summoned. Next she learned that Femi had been taken to hospital. Her first thought was to send a driver to go and find “Prof,” bring him over from wherever he was and whatever he was doing. Now she sat with her head bowed, wringing her hands. As soon as she saw me, she was convulsed afresh with sobs.

  I sat by his bedside, looking at my friend, a drip in his arm and a tube up one nostril. His discomfort was nearly palpable; he tossed about and unconsciously tried to rip the tube from his body, so his other arm had been tied to the bed. Sometime later, Femi opened his eyes, rolled them toward me, and tried to speak. I gestured to him to be quiet—there would be time enough for that. He appeared to fall asleep again but mostly tossed around in a state of half consciousness. A doctor entered, an acquaintance. He patted me on the shoulders and tried to convey his sympathy. His examination over, I followed him outside, and we discussed Femi’s condition.

  Two to three hours later, I said to Folake, “You can go home now. Go and pack his things and send them over, then get some rest yourself while you can. There is nothing more you can do here.” It took the doctors and me a long while to convince her to move.

  FEMI’S CONDITION did not improve. The decision became unavoidable: he would have to be flown abroad for specialized treatment. Inevitably, and with a sense of belatedness, I remembered how Femi had tried to interest some doctors to start a home-based diagnostic hospital. It was an idea that had come from his annual checkup in the favorite health spot of the nation’s politicians, top military, and other well-heeled members of society. Once Femi had found himself in a queue behind the then prime minister, Tafawa Balewa, ruler and ruled equalized by the bleached hospital smock that covered their otherwise naked bodies, by the urine and excrement samples and diagnostic cards that they carried as they moved from one room, cubicle, or window to the next. It was typical of Femi’s creative mind to seek remedies at home: If I must carry my own shit in my hand, why should I do it abroad rather than here? He tried to interest a few doctors in the idea—my own brother, his namesake, among them. He asked them to prepare estimates and offered to put up the working capital. Whatever stage his efforts had reached at the time of his illness, they were clearly too late to help him. The premier teaching hospital in the nation lacked even the drugs required to stabilize his condition before he could be flown abroad.

  And so—a familiar scenario for a teaching hospital—an all-out search! In all of Ibadan, the drugs could not be found. Throughout Lagos also—once the nation’s capital and still its commercial center—this critical drug was equally unavailable! Finally news came that a pharmacy in a most unlikely city, Ilorin, had a small stock in store. A driver was dispatched. In anticipation, the air ambulance was alerted, perhaps even the same plane that had once flown his brother, Bolus, to Germany after a horrifying motor accident. It would take off from Germany as soon as the word was given, fully equipped for any emergency. The news grew graver by the day. A blood clot had been discovered in Femi’s brain, and now we were looking at what, for us laymen, was going to be critical brain surgery. Suddenly, time was ranged against us. In the meanwhile, Femi tossed between full consciousness and partial incapacitation. He understood all that was going on around him, was lucid enough to mutter one of his favorite mantras from time to time: “Iku lo m’eja kako.”48

  It was a familiar self-mocking lament for a moment of frustration, for any form of constraint—no different, for instance, from an inability to embark on or expand a business venture owing to a lack of an opening or capital. Only after the event, rewinding the reel of our last moments together in all their detail, did its prophetic pertinence strike me or anyone else. In any case, I was preoccupied with practical concerns: How quickly could I wind up my affairs, reschedule appointments, and so on and prepare to join Femi in Germany?

  FEMI WAS BROUGHT out from the ambulance; his stretcher was laid on the tarmac for some fresh air, awaiting his transfer into the ambulance plane. The clearance papers for the plane’s departure were being processed. I stood some distance away, to let him and his wife have a few moments alone before his departure—she had just been told that there would be no room for her in the plane. My eyes swept over trees, horizon, tarmac, and parked planes, contemplated the slim craft that would bear Femi away, then came to rest on the stretcher. In obedience to some strange pull, I walked slowly back toward the couple. Femi must have heard my footsteps, because he tried to move his head and see behind him, but he only succeeded in rolling his eyes skyward, then tried to extend his scope of vision to embrace whatever it was that approached.

  As I looked down on the stretcher, I received a jolt, rather like an electric shock, a crude intimation of finality. Nothing had prepared me for the plea for help that I encountered when my eyes looked into my friend’s. His, glassy and mud brown, rolled upward to encounter mine, eloquent in their depth of bewilderment. What is happening to me? they pleaded. Help me up out of this pit, just help me emerge from this darkness. Femi’s eyes appeared to dissolve and sink into a deep, endless tunnel, fathomless. I stood above these opaque windows and stared into their roiling recesses, encountering nothing but space, just space, infinite space into which I was violently pulled, so that I felt weightless. I came to and found that I had leaned over and encased his free hand in both of mine.

  I withdrew slowly, chilled to the bone, acknowledging that he had withdrawn himself from the world, even as my hands left his. For I knew, in that moment, that I had left Femi at the very end of the tunnel, within that fathomless space, that the friend who lay on that stretcher would not return home in the form we knew—and cherished.

  DESPITE THAT MOMENT, I was unprepared when the news came. I had permitted myself to banish the sad, eloquent glimpse that I had received of Femi’s certain destination and restored him in my mind to his familiar surroundings. That dark presentiment, I decided, had been nothing but the product of my own fears. The doctors, the omniscient ones, had sent word back that we could banish all anxiety. From
being extremely grave, there had been an upward swing in his condition, said the experts. I telephoned the hospital and received their reassurance—the pressure on his brain had eased, his condition had stabilized to such an extent that the surgeons were now prepared to operate on him. He was alert, could speak, and was fully aware of his surroundings and of the preparations for the operation. He had even shown signs of recovering his habit of self-deprecation. What stupid fears! It was in a buoyant mood that I prepared to ensure my arrival in Frankfurt in time for his operation or as soon as possible afterward, taking as much work as I could with me. Every moment I could spare would be spent with him during the period of his convalescence.

  I was on my building site when the news came. The workers had left for home, and I had gone there to look at the progress they had made and, as always, marvel at my temerity in expanding the scope of the house I had planned originally—just a cottage with plenty of grounds. The Nobel Prize had, however, engendered grandiose ideas—a writers’ annex, no less, to play host to three or four writers, artistes, or researchers for a few months every year. It was an ambitious concept, one that was still within my means at the time, but of course it played havoc with the original, quite modest architectural plans. Once modified, they dragged in their wake further modifications as the building progressed. Femi’s words constantly rang in my ears in absent complaint: “I want to be involved in the project, you hear, make sure I am involved in it right from the beginning.” The hell, I thought, you built that Golden Pillar, Broking House, from scratch, keeping me out. You’ll see this only after it has been roofed and is ready for occupation!

  It was typical of the irrationalities that sometimes marked our skirmishes. After all, the funds that had enabled me to make a start had come from Femi in the first place. On the advice of my bank manager, I had placed a substantial chunk of my Nobel Prize money in a fixed deposit for the first six months, where, if it conformed to habit, it was supposed to earn me some interest. I had not realized that after the expiration of the first six months this deposit would be automatically reinvested for the next six months, and so on and so on, unless I gave instructions to the contrary.

  Blithely, a month or two after the first half year, I attempted to withdraw what was needed to shore up my grand project with gravel, clay blocks, cement, steel rods, and labor. Nothing doing, said the bank manager, your money will not be available till the end of the year. Femi, amazed as usual at my naiveté in money matters, immediately wrote a check for what was needed to break ground, purchase material, and rescue my building schedule.

  Now I stood alone on a mound of gravel, surveying my domain wistfully, wondering how soon I might see it finally materialize into the edifice I could picture so clearly in my mind. Motunde, my young ward and grounds manager, drove up in my jeep. She had long since finished her own work and normally would have had no cause to return to the building site. I wondered what determined visitor had penetrated my rented home and sent her racing to warn me. Though she was young enough to be taken for my daughter, I would often wonder if our roles were not really reversed—she the patient, indulgent guardian and I a precocious but unpredictable ward. That was the way she had resolved to relate to me, to my frequent amusement.

  I watched her take her time descending from the jeep, then walk slowly toward me. To her normal expression of ambiguous, often unsettling affection was now added the quiet but determined air of one who had come to take command of a crisis situation. This change in her bearing was familiar, and I simply waited for her to reveal the cause. When she came close, she stood still and looked at me wordlessly for some moments. Then, abruptly, she shook her head as if to rid it of some unbearable pressure and turned her gaze away, as if she wanted me to follow that gaze beyond the twilight gathering over the rim of the surrounding hills and see what I feared to know. I understood instantly. I think I let out a deep sigh, walked away from her, and stared into space.

  She walked over to stand facing me, her large eyes bathing me in compassion. I asked her to leave, said that I wanted to be alone. She did not argue. I wandered off the building grounds, walking along the red laterite tracks that passed for roads. I did not feel bereaved or sad. I felt nothing but rage—rage at myself for permitting hope, even having seen what I had in the dark glassy tunnel of my friend’s eyes. How could I have permitted myself to be so blinded by the pronouncements of mere doctors when I had glimpsed the truth and bidden him good-bye? For it was that moment on the tarmac that returned to rebuke me, the definitiveness of my gaze into the opaque tunnel and my encounter with the abyss of emptiness. If I had kept faith with that unambiguous intimation, I would by now have ceased grieving and could have turned my foreknowledge into a source of strength from which others, more needful, could draw solace.

  INVOLVED OR NOT in the planning, designing, or laying of brick on brick, Femi was integrated into this house yet struggling to take shape. His laughter and interminable stories formed part of the foundation, echoed in advance of the raising of the walls. It was impossible not to see him striding from his bedroom—assigned to him right from the designing—to the dining room, groaning with fatigue as he took off his boots on a return from a hunt in my own locality, reminiscing on the highs and lows of the day, already looking forward to the next outing. It seemed incredible that there was nothing physical left of Femi to inhabit the grand undertaking, nothing but an elusive shadow that I vaguely grasped as an impossible absence.

  It is only when a house has been lived in, when its walls have been pawed, its doorstep scraped by feet, and its humanity defined by the blend of human sweat, waste, and cooking that it may earn the right, through some accident of abandonment, to become a ghost house. Without having once leaked at the roof, however, without having squeaked at the doors, echoed with music, eavesdropped on a domestic quarrel, or played voyeur at the rites of love, this mere statement of intent, crisscrossed only by foundation channels, pocked by excavated mounds of sand and stacked clay bricks—my home to be, my long-dreamed-of sanctuary—had suddenly become a ghost dwelling.

  PART VII

  Nation and Exile

  The Road to Exile

  I never feel I have arrived, though

  I journey home. I took the road

  That loses crest to questions. . . .

  IBRAHIM BADAMASI BABANGIDA, THE GENIAL DICTATOR, HAD TAKEN THE nation for a long and twisted election ride that lasted nearly five years. From his first proclaimed date for handing over power to his ousting in 1993, when he “stepped aside,” Babangida set up commissions for the “return to civilian rule” and took his time studying their reports. He decided on election dates, postponed them, banned and unbanned politicians at will, detained some and released them, set down rules and impossible conditions for the registration of parties, set the same rules aside, promulgated two ideologies—a little to the left and a little to the right—created two political parties that would supposedly reflect both, wrote the party constitutions, built two identical headquarters in the capital of each state of the federation, subsidized individual contenders simply to engender false hopes, changed the balloting system, the registration system, the primary system, and so on, then began all over again. Finally, in May 1993, bowing to pressure from the international community, the dictator permitted the elections to take place.

  The voting was completed, with more than two-thirds of the results released into the public domain by the Electoral Commission and showing a clear indication that Bashorun Abiola was headed for a victory, when Babangida annulled the entire process. His response to the avalanche of cautionary articles, satirical cartoons, public rumblings, threats, reasoned advice even from within the military, and passionate denunciations that inundated private and public spaces and the media was to remain holed up in his fortress, silent. By now I had given up all hope of reformation of a fumbling yet manipulative mind. I resisted all appeals to resort to the telephone, call the dictator, and remonstrate with him. Indeed, I contributed only
one published tract—“There Is Life After Power, IBB”—and that only after much persuasion from multiple directions, including within the military. Not for the first time, I felt that words had reached the limit of their effectiveness. In the adage of the Yoruba, the dog that is fated to lose its way in the bush will remain deaf to the hunter’s whistle.

  It was the final insult, a contemptuous thwarting of the popular will. There was a lull, a period of utter disbelief; then civic movements commenced plans for contesting such brazen arrogance. I had traveled to Europe to wind up overseas commitments in readiness for what promised to be a protracted struggle when, on June 26, 1993, the people took to the streets. A graduated strategy of protests and street demonstrations was swept aside by public impatience—or even, possibly, by the regime’s agents provocateurs, the government’s massive countermeasures being already primed for preemptive action. I had been part of the planning, so I really did not have much of a choice—I prepared to return to Nigeria. It turned out to be the kind of a journey that, in calmer moments after the event, I would come to regard as a mirror reflection of the nation’s journey toward democracy—every bit as laborious, twisted, and unpredictable, an obstacle race devised and overseen by the wily manipulator to whom Nigerians had given the name “Maradona.”

  I was frankly annoyed that yet another crisis was devouring my life, making me shortchange other constituencies—principally the creative. Once again, a part of myself was being placed on hold, and it was clear that this was going to be a long hold. I wound up my affairs as fast as I could, then braced myself for yet another period of turmoil.

  The main uprising was in Lagos. Lagos has always tended to be volatile, and, additionally, Lagos was the base of the dispossessed president, even though he was an indigene of Abeokuta. On the morning of June 27, I was at Charles de Gaulle airport, ready to board my plane. So were dozens of other passengers bound for Nigeria. Then came the announcement that all passengers dread—at least those who have anxious ones awaiting their arrival or business to attend to at the end of the flight, or who simply want to get home, shake the dust of alien lands off their feet, and sleep in long-abandoned beds. No, the flight was not postponed, delayed, or canceled. It simply was not going to touch down in Lagos. Owing to unrest in Nigeria, and in Lagos especially, the airline had been advised not to fly into Lagos. It would go only as far as Cotonou. Dissatisfied, I spoke directly to a flight officer. The report that his airline had received was that rioters had taken over Lagos, traffic was halted everywhere, and the entire city was paralyzed. Fatalities had occurred in double digits. There was mention of a curfew.