You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  The irony of my night ride through the Nigerian forests would remain lost on me until much later. That is, I did not even recollect at the time that, only a year and a half before, I had been forcing my way into Nigeria in a nearly equally outlandish manner, through a series of man-made obstacles that were no less determined than Nature’s slip soil, gullies, boulders, and tree branches that sometimes threatened to decapitate my driver and me. Even a mild equivalence in the police role had not been lacking—a tense moment at embarkation, when I clearly identified a man as a border agent, but one who was cold sober and intense, and I wondered if I had not left my departure till too late after all. The precautions we took had been thorough enough—only a handful of people had been involved—so I had full confidence that our security had not been breached. The arrangements had been in place for months and only awaited my decision to activate them: false trails, improvised exits, the familiar hunting expeditions that were so well known to the SSS that its code name for me was “Antelope.” As a matter of fact, I did find that rather troubling, if not downright unflattering. Was this all they thought of me? As game to be hunted down and eaten? Not that I was after anything glamorous, I did not aspire to any of the more lordly species—assuming that the SSS had been generous enough to have offered me a choice. After all, the name I had chosen for myself during the 1983 fight in Oyo state against an earlier fascism, that of the National Party of Nigeria, was the modest “Tracker.” Still, I consoled myself that perhaps “Antelope” was a concession to my supposed elusiveness, or my passion for hunting. If I hoped, however, that my namesakes in the bush would learn that we were now bound together in this unsolicited naming rite and lose their suspicious attitude toward me during my incursions, I was mistaken. They continued to make our encounters as meager and as frustrating as possible.

  For the urban denizens, I had loudly announced plans for rehearsals of The Beatification of Area Boy, to keep the SSS reassured of my continued presence in the country all through December. We tied down the obvious government spy squad around my office by having my car driven there with regularity even when I was nowhere near the office and maintained a semblance of normal activity through the usual stream of callers, some of whom had been given appointments that I never meant to keep—they would understand everything in due course! That ruse must have worked well enough, since the SSS detail along Lalubu Street continued to haunt my office dutifully for a full week after my escape, when I finally presented myself at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris for a press conference. Sani Abacha went berserk and dismissed the top echelon of the immigration officers at the Idi-iroko border, through which he naively presumed that I had made my escape.

  Yet, at the departure point, an unmistakable agent had surfaced who pretended to be just one of the nocturnal crowd. While we waited for the canoe to arrive, he hung around, avidly scanning my features whenever he thought I was not looking, quickly taking his eyes off me when I turned my gaze on him. When a rough meal of watery beans and gari58 was prepared for my escorts and me, famished as I was, I took one look at it and my expression showed that I would prefer to fast until we reached the Benin side. This volunteer minder could not wait to offer to dash over to a not-too-distant goods shack where he could obtain some bread and tinned sardines, and even a bottle of stout. I told him, factually, that I did not drink stout but lied that I was not hungry. If he had insisted, I would have accompanied him, as I had also resolved not to let him out of my sight until we left.

  The tensest moments came as we began to board the canoe, after the loading of goods was done. This helpful figure of indeterminate functions took out his flashlight and began—quite unnecessarily but acceptably—to beam it against the floor of the craft, guiding the feet of the passengers. When it came to my turn, however, he shot the beam straight into my face and kept it there. I pushed his hand away. Even with his eyes hidden by his flashlight, behind all his unctuous concern for my safety, I could see a pair of fevered eyes fastened on my face, attempting to recollect its features—or was it memorize them? I hoped it was the latter, but, prepared for the worst, my hand closed around the Glock pistol I still had strapped to my waist. After that grueling ride, which had brought me just one river’s width from safety, I firmly decided I was not about to become an actor in any weepy movie of last-minute reversals, where the fugitive, with one foot virtually on the soil of freedom, is dragged back into captivity to the wailing of violins!

  The sudden roar of the canoe’s outboard motor drowned the sounds of any orchestra waiting in the wings, and the facial inspector leaped back onshore. It took no more than five minutes, and we crossed the innocent stream that demarcated the spaces of two nations. The “wharf” on the Benin side was a broad, flat slab of rock on which the reverse-track contraband was already waiting, laid out in neat rows. There were a few minutes to wait while the motorcycles, then the bales of merchandise, were off-loaded. I stood apart from the jostling bodies, staring across the stream, this moment of separation branding itself onto a template of infinite sadness.

  For one who had sworn to himself that no tyrant would ever again chase him beyond the bounds of his nation, it was a moment of bitter defeat. Even when the choice is willingly made, exile sinks into one as a palpable space of bereavement. At that moment, I believe I died a little.

  What I tasted in my mouth was worse than ashes; I distinctly felt the crunch of cold cinders between my teeth, and it set them on edge. The river-bank was spare of cover on the Benin side, so now that we had parted company from dense, overhanging foliage, the clouds also parted to bare the landing of all subterfuge in a wash of moonlight, as if to ensure that this place of leave-taking would be deeply etched on my mind—every detail of that moment, the stolid slab of rock basalt, the bales of smuggled goods, the practiced motions of the passengers as they emptied the canoe of jute bags, outsize cartons, cylindrical portmanteaux that I thought had disappeared with the advent of cheap, infinitely expandable plastic suitcases, “Ghana-must-go”59 bags, sealed baskets, and tied-up bundles. With the casualness of practiced hands, the canoe operators piled rolls and boxes in improbable shapes across the carriers of the now off-loaded motorcycles or hauled them onto the heads of waiting porters. Already the canoe was spluttering toward the opposite bank, and the question that came to mind was—When again? In that moment of self-pity, the line that sprang to my mind came straight from childhood, when I had made a habit of appropriating to myself those lyrical lines that the Bible could offer. I tried to recollect—was this from the Song of Solomon or the Psalms of David? By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept . . .

  . . . except that I did not feel in the least like weeping. A huge wave of rage swept through and engulfed me, voiding all other emotions. Would he triumph in the end, the tyrant who had brought this upon me? Just how much was required of any individual in his lifetime? Was my life now bound together with that of a killer, albeit in absolute power, in a struggle to the death? How long would it take before a savaged people woke up, recovered their sense of worth, and knocked him off his pedestal into a hole so deep that generations to come would seek his remains in vain? What role would I play in this, for how long, and at what cost? The rest of my life? Would I perish in the attempt? Mercifully, there was not much time for further self-pity. All too soon, it was time to climb back on the pillion and resume the journey, riding at a more humane pace through the Benin forest.

  THE INSIDES OF my thighs ached. These were muscles that had never been subjected to an endurance test, and I marveled yet again how the body so easily takes for granted every strand of muscle or ligament that makes it function, forgetting that some simply never come up for use in years or even decades. Even if I had been a chronic jogger, it would never have occurred to me to prepare my inner thighs for a ten-hour journey on a motorcycle pillion. Three times I was compelled to ask my pilot to stop while I walked up and down, improvising exercises to regain circulation and loosen up the muscles as they were repeatedly assail
ed by severe cramps. They ached so badly that I began to fear that I might have done permanent damage to myself, some calamity such as uncontrollable muscle spasms in the future. For a hapless passenger, with nothing to do except stay glued to the seat of the motorcycle, the night passage was fertile ground for the direst imaginings. In addition to three stops, I was thankful when we came to streams that had to be forded or when we stopped to refuel the tank from the spare jerry cans with which we were amply supplied. I was even thankful for spills in sudden marshes or loose soil. As we rode deeper into the forest, my face was steadily lashed by branches. My driver would do his best to sound a warning as a branch loomed up around a corner and he ducked, but it was mostly pointless. I took vicious slashes, began to wonder if the branches were exacting vengeance for the nocturnal disturbance of the peace of the forest. I could hardly complain; my companion took far more whipping than I did.

  Occasionally, we ran into night caravans of smugglers, strung out in a line, loads of every form of merchandise on their heads, but mostly of cloth and plastic vessels: plates, bowls, and other utensils, flasks. They had obviously come up from the Lagos factories and had a ready market in Benin and Togo, neither of which, I presumed, had any such factories. Using the clandestine routes meant that they could not only avoid payment of duties but also escape harassment by rapacious Customs officers, whose exactions could prove even more onerous than the legal Customs duties. From not too far off, muffled by dense vegetation, came the sound of a truck engine, retreating. I guessed that the driver had taken his passengers as far as he could on a barely motorable route, disgorged them, and was returning to the collection point for the next group. It struck me again and again as absurd, this separation of peoples into artificial nations, peoples who, despite their occasional wars, nevertheless regarded one another as one of a racial kind. Now they had to brave the forests and unpredictable border patrols in order to ply their time-ordered trade, gather at feasts of reunion, and celebrate their ancestral bonds.

  I thought then of the people of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso, to the northwest of Nigeria, of whose annual homecoming for the obsequies of the departed I had learned during my research days. That custom was only a focus for a much larger purpose, however. At this annual festival, all the people came together, both from the nation’s metropolis and from beyond the borders of the nation that had once been known as Upper Volta, bringing news, retrieving relationships, and “burying” those who had died outside the community, but now with appropriate rites that involved weeks, even months, of preparation. I wondered if I would one day be brought home, even symbolically, to rest among my own people.

  It was then, I now believe, as the motorcycle plunged southward into the Republic of Benin, placing a stamp on my exile, that I formulated the last wishes for my remains, which became an obsessive catechism: If I should die outside my own borders, bury me in whatever alien land I expire in—as long as Sani Abacha still bestrides the nation at the time of my death! The thought of Bobo-Dioulasso set off the fear, and I recoiled in horror at the prospect—that the gloating feet of such a ruler should trample over the same soil that held my remains. It would later become an all-consuming dread, perhaps the only visceral fear that I nurtured throughout my years of exile. I imparted strict instructions to my family: let no well-meaning relation even think of bringing my body home as long as that monstrosity holds sway over the portion of earth that I consider my own! Lost on me was the irony that, only seven years before, I had been incapable of one moment of tranquillity until I had brought home the remains of my friend Femi Johnson and reinterred him in the earth of Ibadan.

  WE HAD SET out from Oyo just before daybreak in order to hole up at Iseyin until the motorcyclists joined us for a ride that would begin before the onset of darkness. It was a routine safety precaution, but in fact, I needed a final ramble in the woods, if only as a token farewell. Two birds fell, and I sent them back to Francis with my escorts. Now I wished I had kept one—a small fire, a rushed barbecue, bliss. Instead, nothing had passed my lips since morning. I thought briefly of the streams we had forded and dismissed them—they were not the answer to my thirst. With the prolonged privation, my mood had hardened, my concerns had undergone a drastic change! Democracy, Sani Abacha, the SSS, and the rest of the impositions of the world faded into irrelevance. The moment the motorcycle wheels began to churn deeper into the Republic of Benin, with the bush track yielding to motorable though still untarred road, all my worldly and spiritual desires took on a marvelous simplicity, a reduction to the barest essentials that were projected onto two events and two events only. They shimmered behind eyelids that were caked with squashed moths and other winged life of the night, wracking me with anticipation.

  One was a long, cold shower. Next, a long, cold beer. For both, at that moment, I was prepared to barter even my cactus patch. My throat was caked with dust; I felt I could taste pollen, bugs, and grime all the way down into the remotest coils of my intestines. The prospect of the materialization of those two events took on an agonizing intensity. After a ride of another two hours, the lights of human habitation replaced the swarms of fireflies that sometimes turned the bushes into fantasy groves, suggesting possible sources of inspiration for Fagunwa’s Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale.60 I felt my tongue rattle in the dried gulch that passed for the cavern of my mouth and I swallowed hard in the agony of expectation. The sparse lines of electric poles meant only one thing: beer, and refrigerated! I began to look out for familiar signs that would indicate the watering holes of the inhabitants of that region of Benin.

  The lamps on the tubular poles were virtually transformed into advertising beacons for that single commodity—a supremely chilled beer. I understood, for the first time, the essence of mirages, since, from time to time, I could swear that I saw a sweaty beer bottle thrust itself out of a billboard and reach toward me, cold to the touch, only to melt away again into the dark surroundings of the pool of illumination provided by the motorcycle lamp. Then, in a reversal of normal expectations, instead of the lighted road lamps becoming more frequent as we approached the first township, they stopped abruptly, even though the poles retained their precisely spaced levitations from the dark and their lamps, unlit, were visible in the moonlight. When we entered Tchaourou, the nearest border town to our point of incursion, only the moon provided any glimmering of light. Then I observed that there were no lights visible in the houses, not even the town center, which, to make matters worse, appeared completely deserted. It was not long past midnight, so what kind of town was this? Clearly not a rural habitation, yet the inhabitants appeared to have retired with the poultry.

  It turned out that, most inopportunely, we had timed our arrival for the Oro61 Festival of Tchaourou. No one was permitted in the streets, all lights were extinguished—not even a cigarette could be lit out of doors—and women in particular could not be seen. It also meant, of course, that the late-night bars were closed.

  My guide could not have been more disconsolate as he returned from conversing with a cluster of men who sat on their porch, speaking in low voices. He soon grew cheerful, however, and assured me that the situation would be remedied somehow once we were safely within the compound of his “uncle.” It also meant having to find his uncle’s home with his lamp switched off. This was no simple task. Our destination proved to be a kind of way station for travelers of both night and day who had good reason to evade encounters with Customs officers and the police. The house was just outside the township itself and could be approached only by two-wheelers such as ours. Threading our way toward it between the warren of houses was no different, it struck me, from swerving around natural obstacles in the forest, except that here, they were recumbent goats and sheep, upturned cooking pots and pails, stacks of firewood, open hearths, pestles and mortars propped against walls in narrow passages, even water wells—all had to be carefully navigated. Fortunately, the moonlight was generous. We made it safely, my pilot stopping to speak to two or three of the
locals and deliver messages.

  When we arrived at the household of his “uncle,” the welcome was spontaneous but also instinctively wary, marked by curiosity. Even in my disheveled condition I stood out conspicuously, an obvious stranger. Eyes followed me, but no questions were asked. Perhaps my pilot operated by telepathy, or the whispered conversations he had held earlier had involved couriers racing ahead through hidden passages, for, unknown to me, a miracle lay in wait. I had barely time to note that the “uncle” in whose home I had been billeted had his radio tuned to news from Nigeria when, courtesies over, he pointed to a seat, then waved toward a low table.

  Standing in splendor on that table was that which I had spotted from the moment I entered the room but from which I had stolidly turned my gaze, fearful that a sudden visual assault might make it vanish. But—yes—it was indeed a bottle of beer, moist and cold to the touch, the loveliest object that fugitive humanity could ever hope to set eyes upon. In a moment, its existential mission was fulfilled. It sat depleted but transfigured in the effusiveness of my gratitude. Next came the other half of the unspoken covenant. A crude shed in the open yard, with only a token cover to shield its user from passing eyes— within it stood a bucket of water. I threw all inhibition to the winds, peeled off my clothes, and began to scrub the dust, grime, and squashed flies off my body. And my hair received a rare soapy cleansing; it had become a haven for every species of bug and moth that ever coursed the night paths of the tropical forest, my hat having flown off early on the ride. When I was hardly done, my ears picked up a long-forgotten sound that suddenly violated the calm of the night.