You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  Today, even after the tragic denouement, I am mildly surprised to find that it is not anger or bitterness I feel as my mind traverses the few years since then—only sadness, tinged of course with renewed pain, as I recall the responses of those leaders. In the main, very few of these heads of state of the Commonwealth—former colonies of Great Britain, from Canada through Asia and Africa to Australia—despite their varied experiences of humanity, had ever encountered, except in history books, the likes of Sani Abacha. Maybe even now they still believe that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and others were all mutants, perhaps created by undetected spores that spilled out of some secret Chernobyl, or by the singular gas seepage from our neighboring Cameroon’s Lake Nyos that killed, in the 1980s, hundreds of sleeping victims between night and dawn. These leaders conveniently forgot the lesson of Idi Amin Dada within their own club of nations. The majority of their foreign ministers, ambassadors, advisers, political analysts, and so forth were versed in bloodless briefings, attuned to cynical lobbies, cocktail and diplomatic reception circuits where the formal attire is camouflage for both viper and dove, and the garb of atrocities is shed at the door with a crested visiting card. The rest, like the rulers they served, were potential clones of the Abacha breed and simply wondered what the fuss was all about.

  I knew Sani Abacha—no, not personally, though we had met twice. It was simply his type that I knew intimately, a species that I had studied closely, lectured and written about. I did not share the confidence of the others, but I was hopeful—at least at the start. And it was just as well. We were all doomed to be eviscerated by an invisible blade wielded by a psychopath from a place called Abuja. My only saving grace was that I had already felt its thrust, long before the noose tightened around Kenule’s neck.

  Even now, I still relive those moments of intense isolation that leave you truly “spaced out”—as in spinning in outer space—an alien among supportive, courteous mortals, a feeling that clings to you, knowing that, among the teeming population of that island, you are one of the mere handful of creatures—no more than two or three, one of whom was Ken’s son—who know with absolute certainty that a mass murder is about to be committed, yet you are powerless to stop it or persuade anyone to believe you. My final moment of certitude came from a chance crossing of paths.

  On the streets of Auckland, where I exorcised my restlessness and frustration with incessant walking between appointments, a car drew up with young Ken, the son of the condemned man, and some workers from the Body Shop and other NGOs who were looking after him. Ken leaped out, holding a cyclostyled statement from Shell, the oil company. If ever there was a scripted form of Pontius Pilate washing his hands before handing Christ over to his executioners, this would be its very corporate equivalent! If anything untoward happened to the Ogoni Nine, the statement declared, others were to blame—the agitators whose aggressive tactics only hardened the mood of the military regime and undid all the careful work of silent diplomacy being undertaken by their company, and well-meaning others.

  Yes, we were to blame, not Shell! Not the oil-exploration companies. Not the military regime, its corporate allies, its kangaroo courts, but us! I handed back this tract of self-exoneration, company unctuousness, and—it seemed clear to me—accessory knowledge. In my distraction, I thought I had spoken aloud, and flagellated myself long afterward for an outburst that lacked consideration for the son’s presence. But he assured me much later that I had the sequence of events all wrong. For what I thought I had blurted out without thinking was “He’s dead. They’ve decided to hang them. This statement— Shell knows of the decision already.” Even today, however, the words still ring in my head as I thought I had heard them, clear as the tolling of a funeral bell.

  Walking myself into a state of total exhaustion from a sweaty pace around the humid streets of Auckland, mostly along the harbor, I began to feel somewhat dizzy. Recognizing why—I had had only my usual morning espresso that day—I entered a restaurant off the beaten track, where I attempted to stuff my insides but again mostly drank. Then, instead of returning to my hotel, I went to the improvised office of the Body Shop. It was abandoned; the volunteers were between hotels, waylaying and canvassing whatever delegates they could. I knew why I remained there in that abandoned office—it was to await the news. I did not wish to be found, did not wish to be invited to join in canvassing one more statesman or delegate. I returned to my hotel room only when it was late and news of the confirmation of sentence by Abacha’s military ruling council had been formally announced.

  Now I had only one thought: to get out of New Zealand! I had an engagement in Japan—a gathering of Nobel laureates—but we were not expected for two more days. That was just too bad. I sent a message but did not really care whether or not I was met, or if I upset the protocols that appear to be encoded in the national genes of the Japanese. I had only one goal in mind—to escape the island that would shortly host a wake for complacent heads of state, their political advisers, and their pundits. They would fashion statements of indignation and perform other accustomed rites of assaulted dignity. That would be their problem; it was no longer mine. The statement from Shell may not have been a death warrant, but it was so clearly a death certificate that I no longer thought of Ken as being in the world of the living, and I had no wish to encounter politicians and statesmen after the event. Above all, I most certainly did not wish to speak to the press. “So what is your view on these executions, Mr. Soyinka?” Finally, I did not wish to witness the agony of a son when the now-inevitable hole in his life yawned before him. All of this sent me looking for the next plane out of Auckland heading in the direction of Tokyo, where I knew I would have a clear two days alone before I was again obliged to face the world.

  I only obtained relief from this irrational dread of being pursued when the plane was airborne and out of New Zealand airspace. After arriving in Tokyo, ensconced in a temporary suite by my polite hosts, I awaited the expected.

  IT CAME IN THE MORNING, in the form of a young journalist, ushered into my suite by a geisha-attired woman who had been specially assigned to look after me, sitting just outside my room at all times—I later discovered—as if my hosts from the shimbun, the publishing house, feared that I might go into a depression, do some kind of harm to myself. Ken Saro-wiwa and his eight companions, the young man said, had been hanged at Port Harcourt prison, shortly after their appeal was rejected by the Supreme Military Council of Sani Abacha.

  Never were hosts more gentle, more sensitive, self-retiring yet solicitous. The editor of the newspaper house, the sponsor of the conference, called on me. His brief stay was virtually soundless. In the most delicate manner, he indicated that the contents of the envelope that he was leaving on the table were for me to use in any way I wanted, that it was a gift of sympathy from his fellow executives who wished to ensure that I lacked nothing, yet were conscious of my likely preference to be alone. If I wished to look around the city, however, I only needed to inform the lady by the door and she would get in touch with his office. Even the choice of the young journalist who broke the news could not have been more deft. He looked more like a medical intern with a practiced bedside manner, tried to hide his astonishment (and relief) that I took the news so well. How was he to know that I had prepared myself, that I had left Auckland wondering only how soon the killing would be carried out? He tip-toed his way out, saying that he knew I would wish to be alone. Not that he forgot his calling—he left his card on the table by the door. If at any time I wished to make a statement, he would remain on call.

  Being prepared for the worst is always one thing; confronting its stark actualization is another. There is a point at which the mind threatens to fold up, succumbing to its own destructive power of evocation. How does one erase the image of a friend and comrade suspended in the immense loneliness of a prison yard? This was worse than mere depletion. My human landscape appeared to me irremediably desecrated.

  The laureates, when we finally gathered, were f
ounts of humanity. Mikhail Gorbachev, architect of glasnost and perestroika, whom I was meeting for the first time, seemed awkward in his anxiety to offer solace. Mostly, he shook his head in bewilderment. “How could such a thing happen?” he repeated over and over. Was it really possible? Could a regime act with such brutality? And then, businesslike: “What should other governments, individuals, and organizations do?” About this he was specific—boycotts, sanctions, expulsion from world organizations—anything but platitudes! Gorbachev’s horror was palpable. He was the first to sign the document of condemnation and call to action that I prepared and proposed to my colleagues as a collective reaction. All the laureates signed it, joined by our Japanese counterparts from various disciplines. This was one of the many posthumous resonances for Ken and his cause, but it was I who benefited from the therapy of having it vociferously adopted at the plenary gathering.

  How ironic it seemed. Here was a product of the Soviet Union, which was once defined by—and still is sometimes inconceivable without—a Stalinist mentality. A product, perhaps even a sometime participant, in the operations of that most brutal era, the era of mock trials, banishments to arid wastelands, torture, forced psychiatric “medications,” executions that saw the end of so many artists, writers, thinkers, workers, and peasants—yet here he was, actually shaking his head in disbelief at the crime of a dictator in some distant land called Nigeria. Gorbachev, with the unusual signature patch of a red birthmark on his forehead, hamming it up with the Japanese, donning and strutting around in the “peace jacket”—or was it “love jacket”?—that was presented to each of us. And his ebullient wife, Raisa, basking in the approbation of a world that had faced down a totalitarian monstrosity whose internal collapse owed so much to the resolve and planning of her husband and his fellow conspirators. I spent most of my stay observing Gorbachev, a once-powerful lord of a wide swathe of the globe, for all the world at peace with himself, oblivious, to all appearances, or maybe simply reconciled, to the ironic fate of “the prophet that has no honor in his own land.” For by then, Mikhail Gorbachev’s own people had turned on him. He was now fair game for every woe that had befallen the once-all-powerful nation, most especially its economic collapse. Greatly reduced in public reckoning, I thought, had become the great gift of liberty. The euphoria of freedom had all but evaporated within the Soviet Union.

  The absurdities—albeit deadly—of ideological somersaults in the play of nations, the cruelties and absurdities of individual fates, all joined forces with personal self-revelations of that timely company—solemn, comic, self-mocking, an intercultural potpourri of experiences and futuristic schemes—to act as gradual restoratives to a battered psyche, contest its debilitation by ghosts of a horrific bereavement. I turned my mind to practical duties. The most efficacious antidote for grief—which I learned from the death of my friend Femi Johnson—comes in a practical conscription of the mind, its redirection toward some practical task, however distanced, but related. In Femi’s case it had been quite simply the single-minded task of bringing his body home. I pursued his exhumation, accompanied him home from Frankfurt, and reinterred him in the cemetery of the Chapel of the Resurrection at the University of Ibadan. For Ken, not even knowledge of his remains was permitted; it was all classified, held close to the triumphalist chests of a predatory class, the military rulers. But his cause remained intact, one that, I quietly swore, we would someday bring to fruition.

  Ken Saro-wiwa’s death also served as a well-earned rebuke to my fatalism in exile. At least I enjoyed the freedom to go in search of a resting place, in case Abacha did succeed in fulfilling his plans for me. Saro-wiwa’s relatives were not even permitted access to his body. Some reports claim that it took four attempts to hang him, others said it took more. What is undisputed is that the initial attempts failed, that he was taken down from the scaffold while his companions were executed, so that he witnessed it all and then took his turn.

  I was left with the sense of a compulsive burden of debt to Ken, his companions, and their cause. Not even my long poem, written nearly a year after his death, “Calling Josef Brodsky for Ken Saro-wiwa,” which I failed twice, at Emory University and in Purcell Hall in London, to read to the end in public, overcome by emotion, seemed to discharge that burden. Indeed, both the title and subterfuge—fastening on Josef Brodsky, the Russian dissident poet, as a courier between Ken and me—was self-revealing....

  I play

  The simple messenger, dared thus far

  To link two kindred souls from worlds apart

  In passage to the other world

  I had tried and failed to write to, for, in memory of, in homage to, in posthumous dialogue with Ken after his death, yet I needed to, needed to purge my psyche of yet another failure, one that, unlike the death of Moshood Abiola, had involved a desperate effort from the moment that I knew, with absolute certainty, that Abacha was resolved on Saro-wiwa’s death. Dirging his end through another combative soul was the formula that finally worked.

  The dismal proceedings of Kenule’s murder in a Port Harcourt prison were videotaped on orders of the dictator, who held viewing sessions afterward with some of his officers, not all of whom knew in advance to what macabre feast they had been summoned. A witness has since revealed that one of the dictator’s young aides fainted during a viewing. Abacha turned around and laughed. “Look at him,” he mocked, “and he calls himself a soldier.”

  I am persuaded that I have always known that human aberrations such as Sani Abacha exist; I have learned to identify them since childhood, although, of course, mostly by intuition at that age. It is sufficient, a modest life mission, to ensure that such monsters do not enjoy the last laugh, do not rob individual beings of the fundamental right to a dignified life and a dignified exit, afflicting one’s living thoughts with echoes of the brutal laughter of power over the courageous, farewell words of a fighter or the tread of triumphal boots that desecrate the peace of that rightful bequest from the cradle—the cactus patch.

  “Lord, receive my soul,” Kenule Saro-wiwa shouted as he stepped on the scaffold, “but the struggle continues.”

  Within such a commitment, I believe, is captured the essential teaching of that paradox, the Yoruba god of the restless road and creative solitude, the call of the lyric and the battle cry: Ogun.

  Arms and the Man

  NOW WE COME TO THE QUESTION: WOULD WE HAVE RESORTED TO ARMED struggle to rid the nation of the dictatorship of Sani Abacha? How does one come to terms with issues of pacifism and violence, make peace with their moral questions? Did we actually begin preparations for armed struggle?

  The question of willingness to take up arms against a cruel despot was not one with which I found myself suddenly confronted. I had once resolved it in a minor mode during the Western Nigerian uprising of 1964–65, which had necessitated the takeover of the broadcasting station in Ibadan. Several within the opposition movement, however, found themselves faced with what, for me, was familiar though not fully settled territory. I have pondered numerous times the many faces of violence, its limpet attachment—it would seem—to the very genes of humanity. I could not deny its existence in some accommodating space within mine. I felt no special urge to pry it off and exclude it absolutely from the means of retrieval of a people’s violated dignity, a community that defined my own existence as a human being. A monster had reduced us, collectively, to a plantation of slaves, and the word “liberation” could not be restricted to being a mere rhetorical device.

  I was burdened with a special responsibility beyond mere leadership. Not many within the movement could claim to have been thrust, as I was, with an uncanny predilection, into situations that straddled the divide between peace and violence, compelling a constant review of the imperatives of both, each circumstance a unique instruction on its own. I had not escaped even the Irish “troubles.” During my stint as a fellow in Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1970, I was invited to lecture in Belfast at the very height of the violence. Our lod
gings were situated on a street whose entry points were heavily sandbagged positions—in what had once been a normal, cozy neighborhood. I arrived at night, thus missing out on the sight of the fortifications. I woke up early the following morning—a Sunday—and sauntered out in all lordliness, little dreaming that eyes were watching me from behind curtains, taking note, passing on news of an intruder through the local bush telegraph. The streets were eerily empty, a sensation that eventually percolated through to me, even though I felt no particular alarm. I had, however, set up a panic among my hosts: a black face in the streets of Ireland, at that time in 1970, meant only one thing—a serving soldier in the British forces and thus fair game for the IRA. Search parties were immediately sent out, and later, we were formally informed that an IRA cell had been alerted.

  A year or so later, I would find myself setting up a meeting between the Irish Provos and the “Regulars.” Only one and a third names have stuck to my memory from that experience: Seamus Towney and, the one-third, Mac-something. One side wanted a return to the violent days; the other was for a political solution. The two factions had just begun to tear each other apart, and an effort was being initiated, before the conflict became irreversible, to come to a resolution. During the run of Les Anges Meurtriers in Paris, Joan Littlewood, in whose Blackheath home I would sometimes meet not only the literary but the violent compatriots of the playwright Brendan Behan, asked me one day if I could find a safe house for the two factions in Paris. They had agreed to meet in secrecy and resolve their differences.