You Must Set Forth at Dawn

by Wole Soyinka

  As soon as he took over after Sani Abacha, Abdulsalami blithely announced that all exiles were free to return home. We found this extremely hilarious. There we were, subjects of “wanted” posters all over the country offering rewards for our capture—the posters had mostly been torn down or defaced, as a matter of fact—but the reality was that charges of treason, a capital crime, still hung over our heads. Abacha’s men were still on the loose. Any policeman or soldier could arrest us on sight or shoot us “for resisting arrest.” In what kind of a world, we asked, was this former associate of Abacha living? Did he understand how deeply the Abacha machinery had burrowed into the normal safeguards against arbitrariness? Had we survived Abacha’s roving death squads all over Europe and America only to walk into a trap at home?

  Cautiously, however, we had to admit the possibility that the new man might be serious. He had the treason charges against us formally withdrawn and their cancellation widely publicized. Even more remarkable was the fact that as soon as he began to plan his first overseas trip a few weeks after taking office, he was already instructing ambassadors to the nations on his itinerary to track me down and arrange a meeting. The democratic movement decided that we had nothing to lose. And so we met at the Palace Hotel in New York City. We set down unambiguous terms for meeting—this was strictly political business, not a courtesy visit. Next, to avoid that latter coloring and ensure that we did not find ourselves trapped among the usual train of appendages who had trailed him from Nigeria to Europe, where their ranks had been swelled at every stop, and who were now virtually swarming around him in New York, we insisted that the meeting should be set for a time when he had rid himself of his train. Most emphatically, I did not wish to run into the man who had become known as the King of ING—Ernest Shonekan, former head of the Interim National Government.

  When the elections of June 1993 were abruptly annulled by Ibrahim Babangida, the nation became too hot for even that survivalist to juggle in his nimble hands. Violent demonstrations—especially in the West, where the winner, Moshood Abiola, came from—compelled him to “step aside,” but not so far aside as to disinterestedly do the right thing, which was to hand over power to the elected president. He prepared a cushion—the Interim National Government—to break his fall, then named a pliant fall guy to head a nation of a hundred million restless souls. Babangida often deluded himself in presuming to understand the psychology of Nigeria’s peoples. In nominating Shonekan to the position of head of state, he assumed that the Yoruba would be content with the swap—one Yoruba, any Yoruba, as long as it was one Yoruba for another! This crude gesture of appeasement only incensed the Yoruba. On the one hand, there was a president elected by the entire nation; on the other, a puppet nominated by a disgraced dictator who was bent on clinging to the last shreds of authority. Shonekan became a pariah among his own people.

  Ninety days after his illegal occupation of Aso Rock, he was unceremoniously tossed out by Abacha, but even one hour in office would have sufficed for the company servant. It was still something to place on his résumé. To this today, this Egba king is probably the sole mind in our shared hometown, Abeokuta, that harbors the notion that he was ever a functional chief executive of the Nigerian nation.

  It is one thing for a dog to cringe under the lash of a sadistic master; it stretches the pathology of cravenness to watch the whipped creature follow the same master around, licking his hand, whimpering for scraps, jumping to “fetch it” when a training stick is tossed, then racing to ingratiate itself with that master’s replacement in competition with a hundred attendant curs in a roving kennel. After serving Sani Abacha in various menial roles, the presence of Ernest Shonekan in Abdulsalami’s entourage even before the new dictator was a month at the head of affairs was a truly unsavory sight. We singled him out as one individual whom we absolutely did not wish to encounter during our meeting. It went beyond the one individual objection, however. We had to take measures to ensure that our visit was perceived for what it was—not a courtesy visit but a formal encounter with the new man at the helm of power, without any encumbrances.

  And so we went into a relaxed version of the kind of security routine to which we had become accustomed when Abacha’s agents were roaming the world at will. In getting to the rendezvous, for once, the restraining kennel insultingly known as a New York taxi came in handy in more ways than one; within it, one was truly invisible from the outside. Cooped in the constricted space with one’s nose against the armored divider between driver and passenger, the fare is rendered incognito since the knees are drawn up to the face and the body sunk into the most uncomfortable seats ever designed for public transportation. It was a measure of my newfound liberation that I proceeded to vent, with my colleagues as captive audience but in full agreement, my long-pent-up aggression against this New York model of the taxi, also proliferating throughout the nation. No other word for it, those vehicles are rude, downright rude! That a driver deserves his protection from armed, usually drug-crazed urban bandits is one thing; that a modern nation, famed for space-age designs, one that had known the humane and commodious Checker cabs, could fail to design taxis that are considerate and respectful, yet protective of the driver, had always struck me as typical of an attitude of contempt for fare-paying humanity, as well as an indictment of the supineness of passengers from all over the world or a testimony to their forbearance. What, I now proposed, would prevent a one-day universal boycott by tourists as well as natives against such insolent conveyances? Or a blockade of the streets against them through civic action . . . It made a pleasant change to be able to launch a vitriolic outburst against a long-resented necessity that could not answer back. With a sense of relief, I knew I was already recovering my taste for earthshaking issues!

  We had decided, as a base, on an Italian bar cum restaurant opposite the hotel, where we kept a lengthy watch on the premises to see who went in and came out. Sola Adeyeye, the mercurial secretary-general of the umbrella organization the UDFN, had taken on the task of inspecting the locality and securing our vantage point. I would wait in the bar until he and the third member of the team, our vice chairman, Julius Ihonvbere, were absolutely certain that all unwanted visitors had disappeared. Only then was I to enter the hotel and join the others. Wearing one of my lighter disguises, I shot out of the taxi trap— though “clambered” would be a more accurate word for the contortions needed to exit that mobile pit!—dived into the bar, and ensconced myself in the left corner by a window from which I could view the street without being seen. Adeyeye went into the hotel to negotiate my movements with Dr. Ibrahim Gambari, the ambassador to the United Nations who was in charge of Abdulsalami’s visit; it was he who had finally tracked me down and arranged the encounter. So anxious was Gambari to ensure that “you do not suddenly decide on one of your vanishing acts” that he came over to the bar to assure me that all was clear and would I now follow him so as to avoid the wastage of even one minute? I asked, Where is Sola? Sola came charging through a moment later to insist that I stay put. The hotel lobby was still filled with all the unwanted and undesirable, he said. Julius followed shortly and confirmed it. I was quite contented with my position; the bar appeared to be sufficiently stocked for a prolonged siege.

  Eventually Gambari prevailed on us to transfer into the hotel. The environment was not yet fully sanitized, but he proposed—quite reasonably—that we wait in his own room. That way, he could take us up to Abdulsalami’s suite at a moment’s notice, once the last visitor had departed. How he must have regretted his quite practical proposal—but that would come later. For now, the regret was all ours—we could not have chosen a worse moment. An elevator was just disgorging the last set of stragglers as we stepped into the lobby, and we were obliged to run the gauntlet. Several handshakes, hugs, and backslaps later with the not-so-leprous among them—even so, it seemed an eternity—we fled into the sanctuary of Gambari’s room, where a few ladies, wives of some of the accompanying officials, also appeared to have foun
d a haven. Among them was Gambari’s wife, whom, to my now recurrent chagrin—considering that she had hosted me to sumptuous meals in calmer days, as she reminded me—I did not recognize! Gambari left us to our devices while he went up and down on his protocol duties.

  On the coffee table were some publications. A picture on one cover stood out conspicuously—the photograph of the deceased dictator. Mentally, I retitled him “Quadruple D”—Diminutive, Demented, now Deceased Dictator. But why was it so conspicuously displayed? Worse was to be revealed. On the cover of this lavishly produced volume of selected speeches was the note “With a Foreward [yes, Foreward] by General Abdulsalami, Head of State”!

  It was an inauspicious beginning. What message was this meant to convey? That the new military regime wished to enshrine the legacy of Sani Abacha? I browsed rapidly through Abdulsalami’s introduction, then passed the book to Julius. He flashed through it, sighed, and passed it to Sola, who took one look at the cover and instantly exploded. His reaction was most telling of our individual states of mind, since it was not much different—I later reflected—from my earlier tirade against the insolence of New York taxis.

  “Look at this! This is a book printed at great expense to be distributed to the whole world, and those illiterate officials can’t even spell.”

  His outburst took us by surprise.“What? Spell what? What has spelling to do with it?”

  “Didn’t you notice? Don’t you see how they’ve spelled ‘Foreword’?”

  I hadn’t noticed, but now I did. I sighed. “Is the spelling something to bother about?”

  “It’s a disgrace. Look, this is supposed to be our window on the world. Everything that comes out of an embassy represents the image of the nation. It should be meticulously prepared, every dash and dot!”

  Between Julius and me, we succeeded in bringing the discussion back into focus. “Two things strike me as sinister,” I observed. “You can tell that this collection was in preparation while Abacha was alive. No doubt it was part of the campaign to turn him into a world statesman—remember, Nigeria has been trying to win a seat on the Security Council. The publication was clearly not ready by the time Abacha died, but did they pulp the copies or hide them away in some warehouse? No, they actually held off on the final production until they could co-opt the new head of state into writing a foreword.”

  “I bet Abdulsalami did not write that foreword himself,” Julius observed.

  “I bet he didn’t even bother to read it,” I agreed and proceeded to share the picture I had formed of what was clearly a typical con operation.

  “Some bureaucrat—special adviser or whatever—goes to the new boss and says, ‘Sir, we need some kind of continuity. It would look good in the eyes of the world if you paid a tribute to your predecessor. Here is a prepared text, sir. We are close to grabbing a seat on the Security Council, and this publication will clinch it. Once you’ve done your part in this—just this foreword, sir—you can put Abacha’s regime behind you and carry on with your own program, et cetera, et cetera.’ That’s one possible scenario.”

  Both Julius and Sola nodded agreement.

  “The second is—a million dollars or two have been voted and cornered by someone for this publication and a number of other Abacha sanitization projects. With Abacha dead, the lucky ministry in charge—Information or Foreign Affairs, very likely the latter—knows that there is no point in going ahead with it. But are they about to give up that loot? No way. In all likelihood they’ve pocketed the bulk of it. So they rush through the publication, get Abdulsalami to endorse it. They print maybe two hundred copies, just enough to decorate the reading desks of a few of our embassies all over the world and send to foreign embassies in Nigeria. They tag several zeroes onto the end of the number they’re supposed to have printed and distributed—all in the name of campaigning for a seat on the Security Council. And that’s it! Who’s going to bother about that particular budgetary item once Abacha is gone? It has fallen in the crack between two regimes.”

  Julius nodded. “Could be a combination of both scenarios.”

  “But the least they could do is spell ‘Foreword’ correctly!”

  There was nothing I could do to suppress Sola’s spelling bee in the bonnet. Unconsciously, we had all transferred to a vastly reduced territory of rights and wrongs, competence and improprieties, all nonlethal, on which the built-up passions of the past years were being gradually expended—from insolent taxis to spelling mistakes!

  During welcoming pleasantries, that is, as each side keenly summed up the other, I was tempted to transmit to our host greetings from his regular Israeli chauffeur and watch his reaction. Then I decided against it. Who could tell if we would have to renew opposition against this new man and what form it might take? Instead, as soon as we were settled into our seats, I offered him the publication.

  “What signal is this publication supposed to send? Is it an endorsement of the Abacha regime? Is it a message, a warning to the nation that this regime intends to walk in Abacha’s steps, or what?”

  Abdulsalami looked baffled, turned the booklet over in his hands, and turned to his ambassador for clarification. Gambari spluttered and launched a most curious counterattack: “But, Prof, what does this mean? You mean you were rifling through my private papers?”

  All three of us responded almost at the same moment. “Private papers? A publication on your coffee table, displayed with other magazines? What are you talking about! Was this not meant for distribution?”

  A sweaty Gambari then went into some long-winded explanation. He had received the publications from the ministry, he said, but they had been prepared a long time before and been designed—our guess had been right—to promote Nigeria’s campaign for a seat on the Security Council. Obviously they couldn’t be discarded, Gambari claimed; a lot of money had gone into the publication, and so, to make it current, the head of state had been invited to provide a foreword....

  Bang on cue came our secretary-general’s explosion: “And these people couldn’t even spell ‘Foreword’ correctly!”

  “Sola, could you . . . ?”

  The new head of state appeared intrigued, insisted that Sola should have his say—“No, no, I think it’s an important observation. I really want to hear about this.”

  Our S-G needed no further prompting. Sola Adeyeye, a smallish, disproportionately dynamic scientist whose movements sometimes suggest to me what a tree sprite must be like if it existed in real life, is propelled by an inner force that feeds on the nearest anomaly in the way that life or humanity expresses itself, with a blithe unconcern for its immediate context. Then his eyes distend, his arms stiffen into lightning rods as he irradiates the object of attention with instant passion! I often suspect that it has to do with his occupation, that of a biologist, where the minutest specimen must be subjected to an expository procedure that more or less renders all items equal under the microscope. He launched into a tirade on the general sloppiness of our embassies abroad, pummeled the bureacracy, excoriated the level of decay in public service that could possibly result in the disgraceful misspelling of such an important word. Abdulsalami clearly felt—or had decided that he should be seen to be—seriously concerned with this distraction. Inwardly, I fumed, wishing I could leave the two of them alone to thrash out the finer points of spelling, diplomacy, Nigerian image abroad, and so on while I awaited their conclusions in the Italian bar across the street. Julius struck the posture of the urbane international executive that he was—an intellectual who happened to be working for a foreign foundation at the time but who had not hesitated to throw himself into a political fray that now approached some form of conclusion—or respite. I looked to my deputy—he was nearer—to kick Sola surreptitiously on the ankle, but he seemed to be totally oblivious or indifferent to my impatience. It seemed ages, but finally we did get back to substantive issues. Our guess was right, however: Abdulsalami had not seen the finished product. Now he wanted to know everything about the publication.


  It was a relief when Sola Adeyeye’s background as a preacher, rather than a grammarian, took over some moments later—he was a Baptist who sometimes took to the pulpit in his church. Without a break in rhythm, he now launched a fiery and robust sermon directly at Abdulsalami—whatever god the soldier believed in, thundered our secretary-general, that god stood over him at this crucial moment of Nigerian history. Such a god would call him to strict accounting if he failed to toe the path of rectitude! A short span of time had been allotted to him, Abdulsalami, to rescue the nation from the morass into which it had been plunged by Abacha’s regime. Adeyeye’s eyes bored into the startled general, his beard stiffly pointed like a painting of one of the Old Testament prophets. “If you believe in any god, sir, if you believe that Allah is waiting for all of us on the Day of Judgment, you will ensure that you do not fail the nation at this critical moment.” Abdulsalami’s face appeared to weather the onslaught like that of a trained soldier who finds himself unexpectedly under fire, nodding from time to time in subdued agreement.

  Julius followed, albeit in a different mode. Methodically, he outlined the position of the joint opposition movements over the period of transition. From his briefcase, he extracted copies of the memorandum from the conference of both internal and external groups that had been rapidly organized after Sani Abacha’s death by the Centre for Development and Democracy, headed by Kayode Fayemi, one of the few structures that had emerged from and survived the democratic struggle. That meeting had been marked by a vastly different atmosphere from earlier encounters—for the first time, participants had not been obliged to sneak out through secret routes and return the same way, every step fearful and anonymity rigorously maintained. Now all was in the open, and while apprehensions remained about the intentions of the new regime, it was impossible not to be infected by the euphoria that clearly had enveloped the gathering.