You Must Set Forth at Dawn (12 page)

The Transcription Centre for African Arts and Culture in London, managed by Dennis Duerden, the art historian with the Albert Einstein head of hair, was the central magnet, a dependable refuge for many impoverished or simply displaced writers and artists, especially from South Africa—Ezekiel Mpahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Mazisi Kunene, and others—reminding one that there was still a world out there with even more intractable problems, both political and artistic. Even the campaigns against the atom bomb, the Aldermaston marches, provided spaces of political recuperation, since the problem of nuclear destruction did not reach down into a personal core of identification but was widespread as a diffuse, generalized concern with millions of unknown others—
Orun ma
a wo, orun ma a wo, ki nse oro enikan.
²¹
By contrast, the affairs of the Western Region of Nigeria seemed to have possessed me in a very personal, obsessive way.

After my 1960 return to Nigeria, fortuitous timing enabled me to participate in the Aldermaston marches twice. It was both an act of solidarity with former colleagues on the march and a chance to renew a rather specialized sphere of acquaintances, among them the pipe-smoking British philosopher with the willful shock of white hair, Bertrand Russell. My encounters with him remained largely tantalizing, but I was impressed by his contempt for American racism and British colonial policies in Kenya. Outside the marches, we met in a soggy British café or two with other admirers and disputants, but also in his own home, thanks to my friendship with his secretary, Ralph Schoenman. Ralph was a white American fugitive from Mississippi who had once spirited a black youth away from near lynching and barely escaped evisceration as a “nigger lover.” The youth was a budding blues writer and singer who had watched as his father was lynched, and it was thanks to a fragment of one of his compositions, retained by Ralph, that I came to experience, vicariously, the fatalism and despair in victims of Jim Crow culture:

Sometimes, I feel I could kill a man
Just for being good lordy, just for being good. . . .
Little black mother with my heavy child
Take that child out of here.
Take him out and leave him there
Before he find he's black

 

Ralph appeared to devote every free weekend to perorating in Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park. His interest lay in two topics only: the atom bomb and American racism. I wandered to his spot from time to time, fascinated by his ability to repeat the same two speeches over and over again without the slightest variation, not even in tempo or inflection.

In Joan Littlewood's theater of sheer lunatic genius at Stratford, England, sometimes an entire day or more would be passed moving from rehearsals to bar, then to a restaurant and back again. Even though she knew you would be long gone before performance, if the spirit moved Joan, she assigned you a character onstage—or urged you to create your own. The problem began when, struck with the possibilities of that moment's intervention, it became an obsession, and she turned on the spigot to hose you down with her most elegant spiel:
Damn you, fuck face, you can take off for your fuckin' country, be back in
time for performance, can't you? What's keeping you in that fuckin' place anyway?
They're all fucked up, I hope you know that, they don't have room for fuckin' poets
there, anyone can tell that. Gerry, you tell him the fuckin' truth. Tom Driberg
knows the fuckin'lot, he's a friend of Nkrumah, you know, and he says he's the only
one worth a shit!

But it's off to a literary conference in Italy hosted by a San Giorgio Foundation in Venice. I had never been to Venice, and so not even Joan's persuasive skills would keep me from going there. Just as well; it turned out to be one of those bashes tailored for an unemployed dramatist on the run from polite creditors! The organizers at San Giorgio thought nothing of making available six different brands of wine during coffee breaks. And where else would I have run into W. H. Auden? Stephen Spender I had already met. Feeling always unsure—not exactly insecure but lacking absolute self-assurance—in my relationships with older, established writers (some of whom had provided the subjects of my student essays!), it was a relief to find myself adopted—indeed appropriated, fusslessly monopolized—by the two icons of British poetry. W. H. Auden's face—I have read at least a dozen descriptions of that phenomenon, so I'll add mine—struck me instantly as a compressed lump of volcanic lava in controlled convulsion.

They took me in tow, unveiling the surprises of the local culture, including the glass factory where I bought a delicate, spiral-lined decorative flask that has miraculously survived all displacements to this day. For an operatic performance, the duo proceeded to commandeer the subscribers' box of the Venice-domiciled Guggenheim heiress, where the audience, instead of keeping their eyes on the stage, swiveled around at every opportunity toward
the
box. I assumed that the two doyens of poetry were the objects of attention. I was wrong! Stephen Spender had planted a rumor that I was an African prince on a world tour and a special guest of Peggy Guggenheim. My habitual plain Yoruba smock, nothing flowing or trailing, nothing at all exotic, was sufficient to lend minimal credence, and the opera habitués could not have their fill of gawking. The Guggenheim heiress owned her own palazzo—palazzi came in different sizes, and hers was certainly above medium range—and it was be-fittingly stocked with artworks from classical antiquity to the modernists. Sculptures—open-air and gallery-cloistered—jostled for attention with priceless paintings; she threw her collection open to public viewing at set hours.

Stephen Spender's concoction, it turned out, was only half the story. For the heiress, he and W. H. Auden had planted a slight variation: an African prince with a large entourage, a collector and patron of the arts, was on a world tour. Happily, she surrendered her opera box to the prince and his entourage— which of course ended up as just the two English poets. Later, they explained the thinness of bodies in the box to her by claiming that they had learned only at the last moment that the “entourage” was not allowed to sit with His Highness, so they had been allocated seats elsewhere in the circle. I was somewhat puzzled—they were her friends anyway and could borrow or share her box any time they were in Venice—so I asked them, Why the fib? Spender nodded gravely as he explained in his gentle, reasonable voice that the poor girl had more money than she knew what to do with, so she should have something money can't buy—royalty.

They of course owned up to the convoluted deceptions afterward. The heiress was sending her private gondola to bring us to lunch, and the continuing absence of an entourage had became impossible to explain. W. H. Auden persisted in distracting me from feasting my eyes on her collection—“Don't miss it when she turns her arse, dear boy. She had it sliced off, surgically, you know, flattened it, so she could wear those Charleston dresses of the Swinging Twenties.” Poetry, literature, and cultural issues were not neglected—the foundation's agenda occupied the conference hours—but neither was mischief by that deadpan duo, a wildly differing image from what I had built up from reading and studying their poetry.

Not a note of mischief, by contrast, did I ever detect in their Paris counterpart Pierre Emmanuel, but rather an abundance of good humor and a warm urbanity. In addition to writing poetry, Pierre was both historian and social philosopher. He completed the small circle of the expatriate company of which I greedily availed myself as respite from tilting at windmills in my own local landscape. A member of the board of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, he also occupied some kind of position in the French government. Ironically, usually in a fit of frustration, I sometimes experienced intense bouts of resentment against them all, on both sides of the English Channel, but only for my inability to conjure up their presence at will, including their roosting spaces— living room, bar, restaurant, concert, or seminar setting—and vanish into their contrasting, uninvolved environments, if only for an hour or two, a day or more. Quite early in our encounters, perhaps fresh from a contestation with some of my Francophone colleagues—the Mauritian poet Édouard Maunick and the Congolese Tchicaya U Tam'si, some of whose uncritical advocacy of la
civilisation française
triggered off my periodic bouts of mild Francophobia—I would accuse his nation of brainwashing its colonial subjects into becoming mimic French. Pierre's indulgent response was to reward me with that uniquely French moue of the lips, accompanied by a hand gesture of modest negation unknown to any other nationality of my knowledge—and a prolonged postprandial afternoon would be taken up with his defense of French colonial history.

My enduring education by Pierre Emmanuel, however, took a different form; I was inducted into the secret of controlling garlic breath—a few coffee beans, chewed slowly—“so next time, you won't have to turn down the chicken cacciatore on account of the garlic.” Pierre had accurately guessed why I had turned down his recommendation, the specialty of the restaurant where he had once hosted me, observed my reaction as the waiter described its recipe! I warned him, however, that not all the coffee beans in Colombia or Kenya could meet the requirements of a friend of mine named Femi Johnson, who ate garlic as if he wanted to drown in its juice. “Well, bring him over if he is ever in Paris, and we'll try a few garlic recipes together,” he said. I did, sooner than either thought likely. Femi visited Paris after traveling with a Nigerian drama troupe to the Nancy Festival, while I attended to an engagement at the Sorbonne. I halfheartedly participated in their garlic-saturated lunch in Pierre Emmanuel's apartment, as we continued the former discourse on the comparative merits and demerits of French and British colonial policies, the simmering cauldron of Nigerian politics totally banished or at least relegated to a niche within the larger context of world politics, colonialism, and its consequences. It was one of the unmatchable luxuries of this period, entangling one's mind in any tissue except what was being spun in the political looms of my Western Nigeria.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), founded to promote freedom of speech and cultural expression, was always a generous host. It occupied offices in Boulevard Haussmann and operated like a more formalized version of the Transcription Centre in London, that dependable host to passing African writers. It also had a far more efficient machinery and clout for mobilizing international outcry when such writers were endangered. Funds from the CCF went into projects of our own Mbari Club in Adamasingba, that cultural roosting place that doubled as a venue for artistic manifestations and political intrigues. The literary and intellectual European journal
Encounter,
edited by an American expatriate, Melvin Lasky, his neatly bearded face a passable but fleshier copy of Lenin's, was the British window on artistic trends in a post–World War II era, and a voice that did aspire to some objectivity during the Cold War.

Like so many other writers and artists from the African continent, I always looked forward to meeting Melvin, who had a wide-ranging mind, full of cultural schemes. In turn he had toured the continent, spending several days in Nigeria. One evening, as I drove him in my Land Rover back to his hotel, close by Ibadan's pioneer television station—WNTV: First in Africa—I swerved suddenly to ensure that I did not miss a large, shiny snake attempting to cross the road. I appeared to have succeeded. I reversed the car, and there it was, stopped in its tracks but still writhing in the light of the headlamps. I ran over it two more times to make sure it was quite dead; still it continued to writhe. So I reached for the engine crank behind me and descended, ready to apply the coup de grâce, Melvin wisely declining my invitation to join in the fray. It turned out to be no snake at all but a discarded filmstrip—very likely thrown out by the television station! Melvin used the incident to end the narrative of his African excursion, published in
Encounter
—his concluding words continued to ring in my head for some time afterward: “In Africa, you confront a serpent, and it turns out to be a filmstrip!” How I often longed for his mots justes to be uniformly true!

Soon enough, we would discover that we had been dining, and with relish, with the original of that serpentine incarnation, the Devil, romping in our postcolonial Garden of Eden and gorging on the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge! Nothing—virtually no project, no cultural initiative—was left unbrushed by the CIA's reptilian coils. The first All-African Congress of Writers and Intellectuals in Makarere, Uganda, after the wind of independence blew across the continent, had been sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and
Encounter.
The same source infiltrated
Transition
magazine, the pioneering journal of ideas in postcolonial Africa, under the editorship of an East African Indian of Brahmin extraction, Rajat Neogy. Not one of us had the slightest suspicion that a certain U.S.-based Farfield Foundation, which lavishly expended its resources on the continent's postcolonial intellectual thought and creativity, was a front for the American CIA! When the scandal blew open, Melvin Lasky did not deny having had direct knowledge of the fact. My mind flew immediately to Pierre Emmanuel, who was on the board of the Congress, hoped fervently that he was as ignorant of the origin of these resources as was most certainly Stephen Spender, who attempted to rescue that truly stimulating journal
Encounter
from its tainted origins by taking over the editorship and seeking fresh resources for its continuation.

The struggle for the continent's ideological adhesion was not, however, strictly bipolar, a contest between East and West, between KGB and CIA, whatever names under which their cultural surrogates operated. It raged between one European country and another in varying degrees of subtlety and seduction. What mattered to us was that it provided numerous platforms for the cultural vanguard of the contested continent. With a somewhat less disinterested outward reach than, for instance, Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, there was also Germany, with her own courtship of Africa's immediate postindependence writers and artists, opening up venues in Berlin, Erlangen, Tegel, and Munich to Francophone, Anglophone, and Lusophone writers. Perhaps because the Scandinavian countries had no colonies, they appeared to be less inhibited, and perhaps less calculating, at pursuing a collaboration with the African liberation struggle—they had no excess baggage from the past!—and sought to channel that continent's creative and intellectual surge into a close association with their peninsula. Black American jazz musicians, some fleeing from the draft for the Vietnam War, had found refuge in Sweden, enlivening her nightlife. Perhaps this also triggered off a special interest in the continent of origin itself—it was difficult to tell. All that mattered was the evident and open-minded reach of that region into African arts and literature, leading to encounters between the two cultures in which we were more than ready to participate. As for Germany, she had lost her African colonies, but some cultural links remained, and her cultural front, the Goethe-Institut, was determined to reinforce those links and give the Alliance Française and the British Council a good run for their money. The rivalries guaranteed days of greedily imbibed camaraderie among African products of the colonial adventure on neutral grounds, nurturing—without conscious intent—a renaissance hankering for the generation's creative energies. Kindred spirits, with different levels and contexts of embattlement, engaged in a moving feast of cultural and political narratives of comparative fortunes—Tamsir Niane of the Republic of Guinea, a refugee in Léopold Sédar Senghor's Senegal, safe from the increasing paranoia of Sekou Toure, the revolutionary turned dictator of the Republic of Guinea, quietly assuming proprietorship of infamous torture cages that would not be exposed until years later; Ama Ata Aidoo, her playwright career just beginning, and Kofi Awoonor, poet and novelist, basking in the progressive limelight of their Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah; Okot p'Bitek—
Song of
Lawino
—who would later drink himself to death in Idi Amin's Uganda; David Rubadiri, the soft-spoken but steel-willed Malawian poet, cautioning his listeners about the increasing authoritarianism of the Malawian ruler, Hastings Banda; the South Africans, in their own unique category of the displaced, gradually reconciling themselves to an inevitable armed struggle; Taban lo Liyong, a poet solidly entrenched in his Africanity, unlike Tchicaya U Tam'si, the Congolese poet with the game leg who remained incorrigibly French yet passionately black, reading his moving poem to the lynched American boy Emmett Till; Camara Laye, author of the elegiac childhood reminiscence
The Dark
Child,
seated at a café terrace in Erlangen, his eyes turned toward the mercury skies as he sighed,
“Regardez! Ici, ce n'est pas un pays. En Afrique, il y a de soleil,
il y a du riz, il y a de piment, mais ici”
—and again a dolorous sigh—
“ce n'est pas
un pays.”
(“Take a look at that! This is not a country. In Africa, you have the sun, there is rice, and there is hot pepper sauce, but here—no, this is not a country.”)