You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  Oro Festival! It said it all. I could have been in Isara, my paternal village, within an identical warren of mud houses that are so familiar in a typical Yoruba town. Even the red baked earth, with its mild contortions and undulations, mimicked Isara. When the masquerade arrived, it went from house to house, decanting blessings and receiving tokens of the people’s gratitude. I remained outside, beside the door, in the shadow cast by the roof of the house under that strong moon, watching this denizen of the spirit world flit from house to house, vanish within, and emerge a few moments later with his retinue. Around us, retreating and advancing, was the whine of the bullroarer. Seated on the ground, my legs stretched full length, I rested my strained back against the wall of my dwelling for the night, shirtless, basking in the night of Oro that the firmament appeared to honor with such a vast, luminous sky. Or perhaps it was the otherworldly Oro that chose to call human attention to the splendor of that night by ordering all terrestrial lights extinguished. Certainly—and how could it appear otherwise to a voyager who had just survived the hostility of the night forest?—it seemed to me that I had never known a night so deep, so eternal and serene. All rage was gone, all physical pain subsided. I chuckled to myself as I recalled that moment of panic, now remote and unreal, when I had thought that the busybody at the departure wharf had no other mission in life but to haul me back to Abacha’s insatiable dungeons. My sense of peace was like a velvet cape that floated down to cover my seminudity. I could not stem a wave of nostalgia for what I had known, longing for what could be, lamenting how simple life really was: a cold shower, a cold beer, and then an ancestral presence that roamed the night to touch a people deep down, within that secretive space where their communal soul resides.

  An Oro spirit mask whirled gradually in my direction. It was a most unnerving moment, because, a microsecond before, I had happened to look down to my right side, my eye caught by a twin spot that was boldly reflecting in the moonlight, glowing so brightly that I thought a pair of fireflies had settled on my skin. I saw what it was and was deeply embarrassed—had I broken the taboo? For they turned out to be the luminous bead of the Glock. I had retained this incongruous object next to my skin throughout the journey for self-defense. It had become such a part of my attire for so many months past that I had come to feel undressed without it. Thus, after my shower, even here, I had routinely restored it to its place, beneath my waistband. I snatched at it, yanked it out, and stuck it under my buttocks. I was in the shade of the roof, however, and no one appeared to have observed anything unusual. The masquerade procession moved to accept me into a community into whose bosom I had been thrust so unceremoniously. Oro spun around and around before me while I watched listlessly. One of his attendants offered me a kola nut over which Oro had whispered some incantation. It was all so familiar, albeit an infrequent manifestation. With only a variation here and there, this was a scene that tended to insinuate itself, unbidden, into telling moments of my existence. I took the kola nut and bit into it. Oro chanted what were clearly prayers in a low tone as one who communed with intimate forces. Silently, spontaneously, I muttered mine alongside his own. It was a deep, heartfelt, impossible craving: I prayed that the peace of this night, this pool of infinite solace, might endure forever.

  DAWN ENDED THE magic of the night, ushering in a harsh pronouncement on my future existence. I stayed yet another night on the way to the Beninois capital, Cotonou, in Ouesse, in a hotel, to be alone and to ease myself body and soul into that future. I had need also to shop for mundane items: a pair of casual sandals and a shirt, but, most important, a new hat to hide my giveaway head of hair. Abacha’s agents, we knew, had already infested Cotonou, thick as flies. I kept, as the expression goes, total “radio silence,” even toward my family. My companions to the edge of the forest would have returned with news that my departure had been without any untoward event and that there had been no sign of pursuit.

  Fifty hours after my departure from Abeokuta, I was in Cotonou, announcing myself at the reception booth of the French Embassy. The French ambassador in Lagos had sent word ahead—he was one of the few in on the secret, and indeed a willing contributor to one of my other optional escape plans. On my way to the embassy, I stopped at a café. As I fortified myself with an espresso, it struck me as a wryly defining moment of transition. Kola nut and coffee, both courted for their caffeine, yet culturally divergent in their essential natures—the ritual apprehension, cultural significance, and social symbolism of one, and the straightforward, consumerist absence of complication of the other. I needed no further reminder that the brief idyll of the night of Oro had indeed been a blissful culmination to the violence of exodus. The world of the espresso was worlds apart from that of the ritual kola nut of which I had so unexpectedly partaken. If I had any inclination to return to my cactus patch, it was now too late. I had submitted myself to an unalterable rite of leave-taking, and the prediction that lingered in my mouth was that of the kola nut, bitter and gritty.

  Diplomatic Recruit

  HERE WAS AN OLD ENEMY AWAITING ME IN EXILE. OFTEN, MY OUTSIDE ENgagements had been conditioned by his real or projected presence in the environment. Invitations to conferences, workshops, lectures, and so on were subjected to a selective process based on avoidance of this implacable foe as the first principle of well-being, or indeed survival. Alas, the first casualty of my new state of exile, I soon realized, was—volition. I had lost the right to choose my engagements. I was also precluded from taking refuge in hibernation like some of the most sensible mammals on Earth, as obligations forced me into that enemy territory again and again. After a few days’ grace, Old Man Frost—to give him his nom de guerre—arrived in all his malevolent majesty to welcome me formally into exile, his “keen tooth”—thus certified by the non-tropical-blooded Bard himself—only a fraction less dreadworthy than Abacha’s vampiric fangs. My talismanic adoption, since student days, of Shakespeare’s “Blow, blow, thou winter wind . . . thy tooth is not so keen,” hummed through tenderized nostrils, was sheer bluff, lacking in true defiant conviction, as invisible icicles scythed through successive layers of padding.

  “Freeze, freeze, thou winter sky. . . .” My reinduction took place on my way to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a short stay in Paris and London, weighing options. One winter blast sliced through my trousers as I stood outside Boston’s airport, awaiting transportation. No one had informed me that my sentence of exile would be served in the Arctic wastes. How could I have forgotten that this climatic zone shared the same latitude as Cornell University, whose topography—so reminiscent of my own university at Ife— had actually succeeded in holding me down in the years between 1984 and 1987! That was a record three years in succession, but then I was still imbued with the masochistic recklessness of a borderline middle age. Even so, I had found more reasons to travel back to Nigeria than were warranted by necessity, and, in the end, offers of a tenured association had fallen on frozen ears.

  Now, ten years later, one visitation of the northern wind from the Great Lakes activated my rights to limited choice. Ahead of the next winter, I bade adieu to my disconsolate academic host, Skip Gates, and fled southward to Emory University in Atlanta, much closer to the tropics. A surprise lay in wait: Old Man Frost had leapfrogged ahead of me, and I actually arrived during the infamous 1995 blizzard, Atlanta’s first since the 1930s, I was told! I did not believe one word of that and felt like suing the university for deception over my working environment.

  Still, the treachery was not repeated the following year, nor the next, and I settled in—a sarcastic expression if ever there was one—to be joined by my now intolerably menaced family, whose exit was also another cloak-and-dagger episode. Preparations were aided and abetted by the French ambassador in Lagos, Garrigue-Guyounaud, while my younger friends—Yemi Ogunbiyi, Olu Agunloye, and others—carried out the physical part of decoys, espionage, disinformation, and the eventual passage of the fugitives to safety. From friendly Cotonou, I mo
nitored their progress, and we traveled back to Atlanta together via Paris, where the U.S. Embassy awaited them with the necessary papers. It was a huge weight taken off my mind. The surveillance over their residence in Ikeja had reached a pitch of intensity that signaled the likelihood of some imminent development of a sinister kind. Additionally, our man in Abuja, “Longa Throat,” had urged their evacuation, and that had settled all further equivocation.

  The U.S. Embassy in Paris also had a message for me—at least, one of its diplomats did. I was given a draft letter being prepared to protest the action of one Arpad Bosch, a highly placed official of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), an affiliate of the United Nations. This international civil servant had chosen to award WIPO’s highest recognition, a medal for the defense of intellectual property, to one Sani Abacha for his championing of intellectual rights. Arpad had even traveled to Nigeria for the honor of decorating the dictator in person. Such an act was typical of the grotesque gestures that would surface from time to time on the part of the international community, and they never ceased to baffle me. Are you sure? I asked. It was true enough. Could it be, I suggested, that Abacha had undertaken to pursue foreign book royalties for Nigerian authors, mistaking them for oil royalties? The transit through Paris took a little longer than we had planned, but in the end the action was formally repudiated and the official forced to leave the organization.

  This was symptomatic of my new role within the exiled opposition, and I took it in stride as an additional compensation for the stress I had undergone in extracting my family from danger. Similar battles were already being fought elsewhere as the foreign handlers of the Nigerian dictator sought to buy him respectability in the outside world, including attempts to name professorial chairs and fellowships after him at some American universities. The luckier of these institutions were those about which we had preknowledge; they could at least withdraw before the opposition publicly intervened and the scandal blew wide open. The others—two or three at least—were forced to make painful and embarrassing withdrawals, returning funds that they had already added to their coffers.

  Hardly had my family begun to adjust to Atlanta when Winter’s unconscious ally Sani Abacha won the fight to set up a consulate in Atlanta, now rated as the major bastion of opposition in his estimation—higher than New York and Washington—once it came to his ears that W.S. was hibernating there. Abacha’s millions triumphed over the scruples of the City Council, and his killers were brought to rest right on my doorstep.

  As I was obliged to travel extensively, my family was left vulnerable. This sinister addition to Atlanta’s residents left me with no choice but to move them as far from Atlanta as I could—first to Rancho Cucamonga, then Upland, always on the other side of the American landmass, and— southward—in California. My peace of mind reasonably secured, I was free to extend myself as much as duty required. Only my head of department, his secretary, and the university president, William Chace, knew that I no longer lived in Atlanta. My activities were organized on an ad hoc basis, while I stayed at the Emory Conference Center Hotel. Student lectures, seminars, public interventions— including a memorable public dialogue with Archbishop Desmond Tutu—and other engagements took place en route to other parts of the world or the United States.

  When Abacha declared me a wanted man in 1996 and placed me—with a number of others—on trial for treason, Chace, a most astute political being and former antisegregation activist, immediately read the implications and placed me under police protection. When the dictator’s specially created smear brigade began its offensive through the publication of an obscenely libelous journal under the cynical name of Conscience International, circulated worldwide, with a special complimentary copy to Emory’s president, he promptly raised the level of protection. The university police, usually in mufti, met and escorted me going through the airport and kept a watch on my safety, until I learned to “forget” to notify them of my movements. Not all the protestations of my head of department, the even more solicitous Rudolph Byrd, could persuade me to change my seemingly careless disposition. It was not that I underestimated the risks, but by then, we had an effective organization. I simply preferred the less obvious measures that our membership in Atlanta and environs—including a strong presence of Nigerian taxi drivers—willingly provided.

  I HAD NOT left Nigeria by the hazardous route just to imbibe the air of foreign climes, and I soon set about gathering a number of exiles—students and workers—together to create the National Liberation Council of Nigeria (NALICON). There was already an opposition movement, the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), in existence. It had been formed within Nigeria by a combination of former military officers and political veterans who had finally resolved to challenge Sani Abacha’s dictatorship.

  In late 1995, NADECO issued a number of ultimatums to Sani Abacha, the most crucial of which was a deadline by which to quit office. Abacha responded in a way that should have been predictable to those seasoned politicians and men of war: he came down heavily on them and scattered them to the four winds. Using brute force—arrests, firebombing, and bullets, as well as economic blackmail; forcing banks to call in their loans, pauperizing their businesses, and so on—he quickly brought some to their knees, while the more resolute fled into exile. They regrouped and resumed their activities outside. To the intense resentment of several of its members, I did not consider for one moment being part of NADECO but was more than ready to collaborate with it in every way. With the exception of two or three members, I was tempera-mentally ill suited to that company. One of their principal spokesmen had already compromised himself badly with Abacha, having canvassed for a business contract, and on terms that provided the dictator some of his earliest propaganda coups against the opposition—he had simply published the outrageous terms of the proposal.

  It went beyond business compromises, however. The first “getting-to-know-you” meetings with NADECO made it clear that this was a ponderous organization, top-heavy and with competitive egos. Singly, its membership boasted experience and dedication; collectively, however, they tended to indulge in peripheral contests that consumed time and eroded their political credibility. There was a civil service approach to the making of tactical decisions for the overthrow of a tyranny. NADECO became an even more difficult working partner with the arrival of my favorite political maverick, Chief Tony Enahoro, who, paradoxically, thrived on endless meetings, copious minutes, points of order, standing orders, and the moving and seconding of motions, counter-motions, and amendments to motions. Worse still, his arrival appeared— without his intending it—to galvanize the already simmering rivalries within the movement, causing them to burst open. It was difficult to associate the combative chief with the same activist who had challenged Sani Abacha in the streets of Lagos and barely escaped with his life. I began to avoid meetings that should normally have enhanced our collective efforts, since they led nowhere and only ate up time and scant resources—flying across the Atlantic Ocean or the American landmass deserved some concrete justification in planning and results! Bickering was tearing that group apart, amid intrigues and the politics of ranking. Little did I know that NALICON, especially when it moved to expand its membership, would come close to foundering on the same boulders of petty ambition.

  Actual undertakings were a different matter, and there collaboration was not too difficult, especially on the diplomatic front. The case for the Nigerian people against a despotic regime had to be placed before the world, the international community challenged to come to the aid of the people. This was one activity into which I was immediately co-opted, both through expectations and my own objective recognition of my “international profile,” which placed me at an advantage. It did not take long, however, for a long-held suspicion to harden into an absolute certitude—if I were destined for a late-life change of career, it was not meant to be the diplomatic profession. Though I could turn myself into a yo-yo like the famous Middle East shuttle
diplomat, I was still no Henry Kissinger. Still, willy-nilly, this became my primary field of assignment.

  The average human composition—the range in which I group myself—has ensured that there is a limit to how many heads of state the body is built to encounter; how many ignorant—willfully or genuinely so—foreign affairs ministers it can educate, how many cause-famished pressure groups it can co-opt; under how much solidarity by human rights organizations it can bask; how many meetings of EU/UNESCO/UNO/OAU caucuses it can attend; into how many diplomatic gatherings it can be escorted like Dresden china or else gate-crash; how many “working” lunches, dinners, and so on, it can absorb; how many congressmen and -women and parliamentarians—feisty, outraged, or impotently sympathetic—it can lobby; how many bureaucracies it can infiltrate; how much mealy-mouthing it can stand; how many compromises it can withstand; how many promises are left for it to believe in; how many immigration officers it can mentally eviscerate; how much debt—both moral and material—it can accumulate; how many slanderous countercampaigns it can endure; how many safety measures it can tolerate; how many distractions it can overcome; how many betrayals it must anticipate. . . . Every day, it seemed as if I had reached the end of my tether, yet I dared not give up.

  I accosted uncertain prospects, not even always within the targeted nations themselves but in their embassies, sometimes in a hotel suite where a head of state, a foreign or defense minister, or simply an influential politician was visiting and an ambush could be hastily organized, especially for leaders from the African continent. Great Britain after the ascendancy of the Labour Party, a willing Canada, a sometimes ambiguous France, a consistent European Union, and the United States—at least at the beginning—were the most sustained recipients of such diplomatic importunings, sometimes undertaken by our collaborator, NADECO, and sometimes jointly. But at least NADECO had two experienced hands in this field, perhaps even more: one had been a minister of foreign affairs, the other a career ambassador.