by Wole Soyinka
Nine months later, having battled America’s Homeland Security to a losing standstill, he was back on African soil, the interim spent in a holding pen for uninvited visitors. His spell, however, netted quite a few new acquaintances, both within the detention centre and outside, through telephone calls and even correspondence with human rights defenders, charity organizations, and lonely ladies. The most valuable of these were the internal ones—the visiting Christian chaplains of indeterminate denomination but with links to a West African mission in Liberia. For a while the visiting ministry from the Nation of Islam occupied the detainee’s sightlines. Those ministers of Louis Farrakhan’s office for prison affairs were vastly interested in the Nigerian prisoner of conscience, and their chapter generously lavished the mandate of zakat on the martyred guest, over and above the call of scriptures. He strung them along, ensuring the dividends that came with the battle for his soul from two rival camps. The tussle lasted as long as his stay while he weighed his options, deciding in the end that the Christian fellowship came closer to his schemes for personal salvation. When the moment came and the federal bus returned to ferry his group to the airport, it was by no means a noticeably depressed illegal, unlike most of the other deportees, who was returned to his continent of birth.
He did not return to his precise departure point, however. Tibidje succeeded in persuading his captors to return him not to Nigeria, the land of persecution, but to Liberia, the land of liberty. He had discovered through discourse with fellow inmates and some light reading that Liberia enjoyed a special quasi-colonial status with the United States, and this worked to his advantage. Somewhere along that trajectory, the future minister of souls announced that he had discovered his true calling—evangelism. It had proved a most educative stay, he declared, a sea change in his life. The detention camp at that time was not entirely inhumane. The food was edible and sufficient. There was a small donated clutch of books and journals that passed for a library, mostly of a religious nature. These included, predictably, the scriptures of both the Christian and the Islamic faiths. The small cupboard also boasted Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, Thomas Merton’s writings, and other works of the spiritual quest and upliftment.
The presence of the Kama Sutra was intriguing. The favourite story was that it had been donated by one of the inmates, who succeeded in convincing the duty officer that this was the bible of a Hindu sect that was officially recognized by the United Nations. Thus it would amount to a violation of UN laws, to which the United States was a signatory, to exclude it. On leaving, Tibidje relieved the facility of its embarrassing presence. Inmates could also watch television to their heart’s content, and even engage in pro bono legal consultations. His mind was kept busy, and he enjoyed the solidarity of the visiting prelate, whom he even began to assist in his impromptu services in the camp. His eventual arrival in Monrovia was thus straight into the warm embrace of the chaplain’s associates, who again took him under their tutelage.
It proved a learning period. Among other assets acquired during his Newark internment, Tibidje was now able to assert—and in all truthfulness—that he had been to the USA and had indeed spent several months under the mentorship of a servant of Christ. He had an accent to prove it and could nasalize his syllables as persuasively as any native American—indeed, Dennis Tibidje’s vocal register was no longer recognizable, not even by his former associates, the yahoo-yahoo boys. The wanderer had begun the long odyssey to homeland.
Misfortune dogged him, though. Hardly had Tibidje landed on Liberian soil than the civil war erupted, courtesy of a certain ex-sergeant major named Sergeant Doe. The accidental immigrant was not a rash youth. He escaped into nearby Gambia, then crossed over into Senegal. It was pure instinct and his strong point. Tibidje always obeyed when inspiration called upon him to move.
Senegal being a French-speaking nation, Tibidje’s stay in that largely Muslim nation, which had a highly cosmopolitan temperament, was thus of the briefest. That made him sad, as he found the ambiance most conducive, surrounded as he was by a minority but socially upscale and accommodating Christian populace. He soon made his way into Sierra Leone, aided by the evangelical network that crisscrossed the West African coastland in a multiplicity of imperial faiths. The itinerant apostle made a decent living out of a career as “visiting” or “substitute” preacher. He even appeared occasionally on televised revivalist marathons as warm-up speaker to the resident star of the religious turf. Home Nigeria remained the ultimate destination, however—be it Delta or Lagos, home beckoned. Home was where he was resolved to cast down his bucket and found his apostolic realm. Each passing day, month, year, was a mere passage of apprenticeship, and Tibidje was a conscientious learner. More importantly, he was a network builder and an impressive preacher. Even in Ivory Coast, where the language was again French, such was the dynamism of his message—and delivery—that interpreters nearly launched a civil war in the contest to serve him.
Real war appeared to dog his footsteps—it was that era—but such unpleasantness only provided pertinent material for his pilgrim’s progress, contributing to narratives of ordeal by fire. It enabled sermons of miraculous deliverance from the hands of warring factions, virtually at the point of death, horrors piled on horrors, salvation in complementary dosage. He held congregations spellbound, hallelujah-bonded for the preservation of a man clearly destined to propagate the word of God. His lasting regret was a failure to secure a slot in the pulpit of the imitation St. Peter’s Basilica in Yamoussoukro, the grande folie of the erstwhile leader, Houphouët-Boigny. This was due to a sudden conflagration in the politics of Ivory Coast, an escalation of conflict that soon earned her laurels in the internecine bloodletting that now distinguished the once-peaceful West African states. Still, such grim vicissitudes merely provided further stirring material for eleventh-hour deliverance homilies. Who could fail to identify with the itinerant apostle on the very edge of being devoured by the pet crocodiles of the late leader, into whose residential moat the drugged commandants of an embattled faction had thrown him, just for the fun of it. Such reminiscences, alas, were missed by the majority of Ivorian congregations—Apostle Tibidje had already moved on. Next stop the Republic of Ghana.
It was in Ghana, a zone of comparative stability, that he would later declare he had his first epiphany. It happened in the middle of a reverberating delivery in a football arena in Kumasi, a revivalist crush of tens of thousands where he was again a last-minute substitute preacher. Right in the middle of an ecstatic peroration, he stopped suddenly. Something he had just said, something that had just slipped from his throat, compelled an instant sound rewind in his head. It took him back to the beginning of that very utterance, the root of the resonance, a moment that equated a lightning illumination from a clear sky. It left him dazzled and tongue-tied before an audience of equally riveted thousands. Therefore, flock to the site of prophecy wherever you find it, seek out the prophet’s site where dwells the spirit of the Lord…and he stopped, stunned by the clarity of a message that slammed into his standard exhortation with the fist of inspiration—the prophet’s site. Contract into…prophesite!
He looked nervously around, hoping that no one else had caught that creative slip, or at least that it had not registered with anyone in that audience with apostolic ambitions. The flash momentarily unnerved him, as it inserted profound doubts in his mind—could it be that he was after all the genuine article? That he had indeed responded to an authentic call to prophesy? Prophesite! Why had all his predecessors failed to formulate such an exquisite, indeed mellifluous name for a place of spiritual quest? Could it be that he was, unbeknownst to himself till now, truly…called? It took days of nerve-racking self-doubt before he fully reassured himself that he had not deviated from his true calling—a skillful, creative spiritual trafficker. At the end of that flash of illumination, he packed bag and baggage and hit t
he road. He was now the proud possessor of a Volkswagen camper, equipped with recording gadgets and a loud-hailer powered from the car engine, always prepared for an impromptu revivalist session. Accompanied by three faithful adherents, one of them a substitute driver, he headed east. It was time!
Not back to Port Harcourt, however, not immediately, indeed nowhere near the south, where he had made friends and acquaintances of starstruck celebrities. There was need to ensure that sufficient time had passed, that no one remembered him in his earlier home emanation. He returned to the nation of happiness able to count on a trickle of corresponding associates along the west coast, and even southwards in South Africa, some of them notorious for spiritual remedies that included swallowing live snakes and mice for keeping the devil at bay. On the home front, he renewed contact with a voluntary array of scouts, enablers, and enforcers, some of them turned full-time revolving clients of security forces and prison yards.
Men—and increasingly women—of God, even from rivaling faiths, enjoy a remarkable status in the nation of happiness. There appeared to be, at base, a willingness to join hands in solidarity of purpose. Hardly had Tibidje concluded his first sermon in a converted commodity goods warehouse than he found himself sought after in upper-middle-class circles. One should also credit him with success in creating an air of mystery that intrigued men and women of the faith and eased his passage into the middling, then higher echelons of power. Tibidje hardly needed to advertise his debut as a new entrant into the potential arena of spiritual largesse. Before his departure from Ghana, his scouts had fanned out ahead of his triumphal reentry and returned with their findings. The recommendation was the city of Kaduna, its population reputedly divided near evenly between two warring faiths. The now full-fledged apostle arrived with a clean-shaved head, oiled and gleaming. He grew a beard that brought his appearance closer to a black charcoal sketch he had retained of the sage Nostradamus. Each environment had its own needs, the people their special thirsts and hungers. He felt “called” to preach the gospel of peace in Kaduna, a city that was gradually evolving into a microcosm of Liberia, Sierra Leone, or Ivory Coast. Kaduna was, however, none of these. In no way could it be likened even to Maiduguri in the northeast, hotbed of religious fundamentalists, permanently under siege. It was troubled, but it was comparatively peaceful. For a returnee in need of an untroubled profile yet high on spiritual hormones, Kaduna was both secure and promising. It did not take long for him to make contact with the governor, who was young, untested, ready for any prospect of conciliation for a divided city. A senior civil servant paved the way.
“If only we can in some way restrain these killers,” lamented the governor, receiving Tibidje on a courtesy visit. The visitor did not miss a beat.
“Have you tried making contact and paying them off? Throw money in their midst and leave them to fight over it.”
His credentials as a veteran of West African wars lent him authority. Within Nigeria itself—Tibidje knew that history—a governor of Kano State, known as the Suave Appeaser, had done exactly that, paid off a sect known as the Maitatsine, the undercredited predecessors of Boko Haram. The Maitatsine warred primarily against orthodox Muslims—these were the real enemies of man and God, who disgraced the black race by genuflecting to false prophets, the slaving apostles of Arab descent! The Maitatsine were incensed by all who rode in any mechanical conveyance. The punishment for all such infidels was strangulation with the bicycle chains of the two-wheelers on which they pedaled to work and worked the market. They waylaid workers, held up trains, captured the males and enslaved their women, fortified enclaves, and set up governance within governance. That governor’s solution had been to dine with the devil, not even with the proverbial long spoon but directly across a festive board, with takeaway packages in tens of millions.
Indeed, in seven years away from the land, Tibidje found that much had evolved in that part of the nation. The forbidden fruit was no longer motorcars and motorcycles but books. The written word. Now armed soldiers sprang up everywhere, setting roadblocks with zigzag rites of passage for vehicles, passengers compelled to disembark, walk across a cordon sanitaire with bag and baggage while the emptied vehicles proceeded to the other side after a stringent overhaul. Martyrdom had taken on a new meaning, and to add to his horror, martyrdom was no longer content with willing submission to persecution and death or even self-immolation in a cause, but required the immolation of nonconsenting adults and children, anywhere, anytime, in motor parks, marketplaces, schools, and allied institutions, in leisure places and workplaces. Churches presented themselves as the most provocative targets, joined much later by spiritual fence-sitters, considered worse than the real kafri. Prudence counseled Tibidje to establish his contemplated temple on the southern side of the dividing bridge. The theme was visible, palpable, ready-made as if for the first conscious symbolist: the physical bridge was man-made and inevitably a symbol of separation. He would be the spiritual bridge, the messenger of peace and healing. It was convenient that those two problematic virtues, peace and unity, were also embedded in the national anthem. Tibidje co-opted the line, plus the snatch of tune in which it was clothed, into his opening sermon every Sunday and as dispersing doxology. The governor was impressed. Tibidje drew on the Newark internship of nearly a year’s close confinement with the two religious streams. He was a godsend of an intermediary, the governor confided to his advisers, and a natural conveyor belt for appeasement funds. Millions exchanged hands, and perhaps a fair portion remained stuck en route. Suspicions flared. “We paid all that was agreed up front,” wailed the governor. “Here are my witnesses, and I even have the receipts.”
Tibidje smiled complacently. “It is exactly as I predicted. The money has divided them. They cheat one another and there is no more trust between them. Now leave the rest to God—He’ll make them fight one another to the death.”
Problems of like nature appeared to dog Tibidje. His timing could not have been more untimely. Boko Haram had designated the same period for the activation of its sleepers, pursuing its own unification agenda across the bridge of division. Other, not so religious voices claimed that it was not Boko Haram at all but frustrated protection racketeers who had lost patience awaiting the promised windfall from their elected governor. The consequence was all that mattered. The complacent lines of military buffers were breached one deadly night. Insurgents sneaked through, fanned out, and unleashed their pent-up proselytizing ferocity. Tebidje’s headquarters, only halfway up from foundation but already in weekly service, was consumed in a baptism of fire. The governor hesitated. He was still upset by the funds that had inexplicably gone missing. In the end, however, he decided to leave everything in the hands of Allah and instructed his aide to send a message of sympathy—but don’t overdo it, he ordered.
This much all conceded to Tibidje. He was endowed with one asset—a loyal following, an inner core, carefully cultivated, perhaps no more than between four and six at a time. He saw generously to their welfare and in turn they looked after his business. His early-warning system and instinct for survival were honed with every adverse situation. With his experiences along the ECOWAS—another unification project—he was not altogether unprepared when his yet unconsecrated church—ritually, that is—was razed to the ground and two of his lieutenants slaughtered. It was a gruesome setback, a violent deterrent. Tibidje was human, he did not pretend to be anything else, and thus he considered abandonment. Indeed, he had begun to contemplate a second incursion into the United States, this time on a one-way ticket. A new name. A new history. A new beginning. A new life. As emotions struggled in the soul of the repatriated son of the land, however, he looked back on the past and encountered a chastening spectre: a mission unfulfilled! A life in limbo. Deep within him, something rebelled. He recalled pledges, pledges of youth, made to himself and his peers.
The preacher’s stoicism in reconciling himself with that adversity was nowhere more brillian
tly manifested than when, not long after the violation, he stood in the middle of fallen roofs and tottering supports that had once housed his ministry, feet scuffing ashes and cinders, and preached his valedictory sermon. It was a never-to-be-forgotten spectacle. With a reflective pate bared to the diminishing light of dusk and a quivering beard that seemed to invoke the wrath of earth, he reminded his followers that destruction had shifted from Christian places of worship only and now embraced even mosques. The Muslim fanatics had begun to inflict even worse brutality on their fellow believers. There was only one response: the unity of the assailed. The wand of faith had fallen into diabolical hands and needed to be rescued, cleansed, and restored to men and women of good will, be these Christians or Muslims. That united will must rout the revelers, an undiscriminating plague that made one and all prospective victims, in spiritual mayhem. It was at this moment that Brother Tibidje sought and received his own counsel—out of evil cometh good. The solution, as a structured, sustainable birth, struck him in the face with such dazzle that he gasped for breath. He went down on his knees, even though wearing his best preacher trousers—straight from the Kaduna main street Souls for God Drycleaners Ltd., a black pair, striped dark grey—and rededicated himself to what was now his prime mission: the ecumenical pursuit. It was not quite epiphany, but it came close.