by Wole Soyinka
Alas, some of our supportive foreign embassies in Nigeria did swallow this “revelation” without any qualification and reported to their governments, which began to distance themselves from the opposition movement. This would have been a minor nuisance, on balance, since we were also positively served in other ways by this egregious piece of fiction. Certainly it played havoc on Abacha’s peace of mind; all reports indicated that it contributed to imbuing in him a holy terror at the very mention of W.S. or NALICON.
Such fears were further bolstered on a daily basis by a formidable weapon in our armory: Radio Kudirat, sponsored by Sweden and Norway, with some help also from the U.K.’s Westminster Foundation. I had made the acquisition of the radio, formerly named Radio Democrat, my obsessive priority from the moment I had stepped into exile and embarked on my diplomatic shuttle. Radio Freedom had played its part, but it had been limited in coverage, vulnerable, and intermittent. Much too soon, it had fallen silent altogether. With the powerful and secure transmitters of Radio Kudirat, however, the entire nation was covered. Almost everyone tuned in to its two-hour transmissions every evening, including soldiers in their barracks. Prisoners behind walls looked forward to this daily treat, huddled around transistor radios brought in by their wardens. No single event boosted the morale of the opposition as did reports of its corrosive effect on Abacha’s equilibrium filtering back to us. The regime struck back in a number of ways, employing the same instrumentation of propaganda. One of its most sinister plots was to circulate rumors in the prison where the former head of state Olusegun Obasanjo was being held that a Wole Soyinka squad was on its way to storm the prison and rescue the inmates. In the confusion, of course, the former head of state would be gunned down.
GENERALLY, I PREFERRED working quietly and individually. Indeed, it would be an understatement to say that I am more than allergic to being a part— especially a leader—of a delegation. However, a scouting mission undertaken by Kayode Fayemi with his long-standing colleague, the ebullient, irrepressible Tajudeen Abdulraheen, a roving new-generation pan-Africanist, resulted in our most sustained, structured diplomatic offensive in Africa, with generous help from the Canadian government. The UDFN divided the continent in two, after identifying those governments that might be persuaded to pay attention to what was happening to us in Nigeria. Two delegations took off, not particularly bubbling with optimism, but at least we would leave no room for later excuses—Why didn’t they come to us? We would have helped.
It proved a sound recommendation. A number of the government leaders we visited either feigned ignorance of or were genuinely uninformed about the degree of repression in Nigeria. If the latter were true, one could only wonder what their diplomatic representatives were doing to earn their salaries and privileges, what kind of reports even a mentally retarded but innately honest observer could possibly relay home except that the most populous nation in Africa was rapidly sinking into a state of power insanity that shamed a continent to whose aid nearly the entire world had rallied—however belatedly— when it was confronted by the humiliation of apartheid. If my remarks to the bosses of those diplomats resulted in only one of them being deprived of his sinecure, those mostly frustrating visits, undertaken as an unavoidable duty, would have been worth it.
The tour was not a total loss, however. There were at least two noteworthy encounters with African leaders, though drastically divergent in the impressions they made on me. One was with the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, who, as it happened, occupied a very special position in relation to our struggle. None other than Moshood Abiola, the elected Nigerian president, still in prison, had funded Museveni’s revolt against the tyrannical misrule of Milton Obote, the former Ugandan president, who had been dethroned by the homicidal buffoon Idi Amin Dada, restored by the idealistic Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, yet proceeded to surpass, it is arguably estimated, the atrocities unleashed on that nation by Idi Amin, the “Conqueror of the British Empire.” I was on my best diplomatic behavior and resisted a strong impulse to remind Museveni that our fight was also that of his benefactor, especially when he took time off from our urgent concerns to pontificate about the “grammar-spewing intellectual elite” who should be held responsible for the woes of the African continent.
I had not known that this was a familiar Museveni line of peroration, or I would have spared myself the irritation. Still flushed with the victory of his guerrilla movement, he received our delegation late into the night. It was difficult to envisage him as a guerrilla fighter, since he proved to be a poor listener—a guerrilla in the bush must listen, common sense dictates, even to the language of the leaves! The Ugandan leader struck me as being more suited to his former profession as a schoolteacher, and an opinionated one at that, with an often embarrassing estimation of the profundity of some of his most commonplace notions or comments. Still, once we succeeded in dismounting him from his hobbyhorse, he proved quite positive. Abdulraheen, then resident in Uganda, ensured that our host and I ended up in an inner room, where we spoke with greater confidentiality. Contact continued for some time afterward, through a specially assigned minister. Nothing material emerged from this supportive direction, however, though we were able to ensure that Abacha’s regime received no comfort from Uganda, especially within the Commonwealth. Proposed meetings with our contact minister each time he was due in Europe had a way of being called off at the last moment. Still, I had to accept the fact that Alice Lukwena’s Lord Resistance Army was stretching the headmaster’s attention to the limit in the northern part of the country.
A year or so after our meeting, while our struggle was still on, we did meet again, this time in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, where we shared a podium. I was still appreciative of the attention Museveni had paid us in Uganda and so was able to react indulgently when he resumed his patchy pronouncements on African history, half-baked theories of African social development, and whatever else, all delivered magisterially and with a bland indifference to the thematic assignment of the panel. Afterward, I ran into some of his aides and implored them: “Look, you people must really try and place your man under some kind of restraint, or one day soon he’ll be taken to task on a public platform and ridiculed.” They broke into laughter, and one replied, “Professor Soyinka, why are you complaining? You only had him for an hour and then you’re gone; we undergo this every day. We can’t escape him.”
Impossible to imagine a greater contrast than Paul Kagame, then only the vice president of a nation that had undergone a near-unspeakable horror, the likes of which the African continent had never experienced in oral or recorded history. No visit that I undertook, either on my own or in delegation, could have been more poignant, yet more bracing, than that to Rwanda, where Kagame’s liberation forces had routed the genocidaires and were pursuing them into neighboring countries but mostly into the Central African jungles. At the same time, a government of restoration was being positioned, confronted with the impossible task of suturing the mangled nerve endings of Rwanda’s national being, restoring confidence in its corporate existence. Kagame, seven foot plus, every inch exuding intelligence and discipline, was a formidable force to encounter, and without any effort on his part to appear one. Even when he said “I am a fighting man,” it was a statement that spoke of a disciplined vocation, delivered without a trace of bravado. It was a considered summation of a personal temperament that was also validated by the Rwandan circumstances. The same objective assessment informed his accounts of some of the horrors perpetrated by the Hutus on both Tutsis and Hutu objectors and his accusation of French complicity, and justified his decision to terminate French as an official language of the nation. It made his confidence credible when he stated that despite the seemingly terminal sentence on national unity, his mission of reunification was already predetermined.
With the same grounding in reality, Kagame went on to explain that it was necessary for him, the victorious Tutsi, to cede the top position of president to a member of the H
utu tribe while contenting himself with being the political second in command. A number of Hutus had also been victims or else had been coerced into collaborating with the murderers. It was essential for the purposes of rehabilitation that one of the majority Hutu be seen as occupying the top position. We had, however, built up an intimacy so quickly and effortlessly that he admitted—with a slight, apologetic smile that lit up his wafer-thin face, sculpted like a wedge of the abata kola nut—that yes, it was a temporary arrangement. When the fighting part was over, it was indeed likely that he would take over the political reins—but: “The arrangement suits me. I’m a fighting man. I love fighting.”
One of the continent’s extremely rare breed of leaders, I thought, and if there was a moment in our search when I felt that yes, we could confidently entrust our people into the hands of one man, it was there, in Rwanda. Indeed, recalling my brief student flirtation with soldiering, I could not help thinking how fortunate it was that Her Majesty’s government had been unable to call on such a talent in its recruitment exercise. Kagame is a leader beside whom one would willingly march into battle and indeed relish the moment of confrontation with an overwhelmingly superior force.
The morning after our meeting was one that I awaited with dread, but it was a solemn obligation, not one that could be evaded. One should see, even if one had already imagined. We were driven around to two or more of the “museums” that had been created to document the killing rage of Rwanda, testaments yet again to the unfathomable propensity of man that leads him to butcher and mutilate his own kind. Among such memorials was the optimistically named Mandela’s Park. There were others that were simply plain fields, with rows upon rows of white crosses. We visited a hut stacked high with skulls, hundreds and hundreds of skulls, some with bullet holes, others with the unmistakable gash of the machete, a curator calmly dusting the exhumed skulls and skeletons. The most poignant was a church into which the victims had fled, several deliberately lured with the promise of sanctuary, before the Hutu army, assisted by the vigilante killers—the intehamwe —was summoned. The bodies, now skeletons, were left exactly where they had fallen. These were the clothed skeletons, and the stories of their deaths were superfluous. The most enduring image of all was a baby’s skull with a panga still embedded in it.
THESE WERE NOT, of course, victims of war but of organized butchery; nevertheless, the lessons remained sobering and apposite, reinforcing a constant openness on the part of our opposition groups to dialogue at every turn. Not that NALICON or UDFN ever made direct overtures to the Abacha regime—any such initiative, we knew, would only have provided material for hilarious propaganda. To every leader whom we did meet, however, we took pains to stress that same message—that the Nigerian crisis could still be resolved by dialogue— and we ensured that we did not turn our backs on any such opportunity.
Abacha’s first reach toward us came early, toward the end of 1995, through Vice Air Marshal Ibrahim Alfa, my beanpole friend who had revealed the details of Abacha’s visit to him on the eve of the 1993 coup. Alfa’s message was direct: “Abacha wants to negotiate. He says, choose your time and place, send your representatives, and he’ll send his.” Ibrahim took back my answer: “First, free all your prisoners.” For months I heard nothing further. Then came an apologetic message from Ibrahim, advising me to ignore any further invitations, not just from him but from any other direction. “The man is not serious,” he said, “he has other plans, and I hate being used for a charade. He’s only pandering to public opinion, wants to be able to claim that he’s made overtures to the opposition.” Ibrahim resigned his commission as go-between and ambassador extraordinare and returned the use of the jet plane assigned to him from Abacha’s fleet.
There was a falling-out. Abacha had Ibrahim’s bank—Alpha Bank—listed among “distressed banks” and imposed impossible conditions for its recertification. He attacked Ibrahim’s other businesses and sought to pauperize him for his refusal to openly endorse the dictator’s regime. They had a confrontation, during which Ibrahim protested, “Sani, why are you doing this to me? You know my bank is solvent.” Abacha feigned surprise, swore that he had nothing to do with the harassments and would look into the mistake. Ibrahim read the signs, withdrew from his normal Lagos/Abuja beat, and retired to the safety of his village in the North. He died not long after. It was impossible to determine if his death had come naturally or been assisted.
The second and final overture, several months later, was the stuff of melodrama. It involved a famous “seer” who had warned the superstitious leader that his salvation lay in finding a common ground with the opposition, specifically with W.S., who, he warned, was protected by “a certain aura.” Abacha must be credited with an evenhandedness in this respect: he dealt with both Muslim marabouts and Christian prophets, plus a sprinkling of indeterminate psychic consultants whose gory prescriptions had provided some of the content of my play King Baabu. So hush-hush was the operation with the “seer” that the religious leader was persuaded to host some kind of church convention. Abacha’s secret service personnel then dressed up as reverend delegates and went into secret sessions with the “seer” to decide on the best approaches to the archdissident. They reported back to their boss, and the search then began for an emissary who could be trusted by the designated opposition leader. Someone remembered that my son-in-law, Tola Onijala, was a diplomat in the Foreign Service— and that was how Tola became the dictator’s emissary to me in Washington.
He brought the same message as Ibrahim Alfa: a meeting at a venue of our own choosing and without preconditions. Again I made the obvious response: before I would even bring the proposal before the UDFN and NADECO, there had to be one precondition, and that was the release of all prisoners. Tola argued that my purpose was being defeated by such insistence. I warned him— in confidence—of Ibrahim Alfa’s assessment of these overtures, an assessment that I fully shared. We had no time for cosmetic meetings that would then be presented to the world as serious attempts at resolution.
Tola held on to his conviction that Abacha’s proposed meeting offered the best venue in which to present such demands. If we insisted on that precondition and the meeting was aborted, the nation—and the world—would blame the opposition, and the prisoners would remain Abacha’s hostages. Finally I said, “All right, we’ll make it a test. He’s merely attempting to buy time to consolidate his rule, but take back the message that we’ve agreed to meet without preconditions. Our representatives will be ready whenever he is.”
That was the last we ever heard of Abacha’s accommodational intent. No one in the opposition lost a second’s sleep or let down his or her guard in deference to Abacha’s approaches. On his part, at some moment that was difficult to determine but was definitely after these overtures, Sani Abacha raised the stakes in his assault on all opposition. Officers whose loyalties were deemed suspect fell victim to attacks by “armed robbers,” while others, like one luckless Customs officer, Omitola, a cousin of the fugitive general Alani Akinrinade, were disposed of in bomb explosions. After the death of Alani’s cousin, his office was raided, and, naturally, bomb-making equipment was “discovered” in all its sophisticated glory. Originality was given scant consideration, since a check bearing Akinrinade’s signature was also found within the car—just as a copy of Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died had lain beside the body of the journalist Bagauda Kaltho in the bathroom of the Kaduna Hotel. It was a season of maximum saturation of every known elimination device, including, as would later be discovered, poisoning, which, in all likelihood, was the cause of a number of sudden, mysterious deaths, especially within the military.
No one was excessively surprised when, after what he must have deemed a decent interval, the no-nonsense, “incorruptible” General Buhari agreed to serve Sani Abacha, manning the so-called Petroleum Trust Fund with a free hand to dispense millions as he pleased. At home and abroad, the specter of assassination hovered over every mind. Plots were manu-factured to resolve the nightm
are of resistance through the route of judicial lynching, and opposition figures were rounded up, cynically accused of responsibility for the assassination of their own colleagues!
As for the external opposition that continued to elude his roving assasins, Abacha unleashed a novel weapon—not original, but certainly unprecedented in its unprincipled inventiveness and its venomous intensity. He resorted to the weapon of slander.
A Digression on the Power of Slander
The spate of assassinations intensified, but assassinations were not only of one kind. Protecting ourselves against the obvious, we had overlooked the other kind—that of character. Not that it mattered; that is one assault weapon against which no human individual or organization has ever invented an adequate response. The Sani Abacha propaganda unit went into action and commenced its toxic rampage with the launching of the most virulent publication in the history of propaganda, the cynically titled Conscience International.
My son Ilemakin was the first to alert me to the existence of the journal; he had seen it on sale in a London magazine store that specialized in off-mainstream and foreign journals. My picture decorated the cover, which of course was designed to attract the curiosity of Nigerian, and indeed African, readers. Within Nigeria itself, it was not on sale but was distributed free. Once, at a high-society wedding in Ibadan, a few dozen copies were unloaded on unsuspecting guests, who eagerly grabbed their copies and took them home, only to discover the putrid contents.