You Must Set Forth at Dawn (23 page)

She too had learned of the manhunt. She entered the car and we arrived on campus—again sticking to the back routes, joining up with the road that led to the College of Technology. My intention was to remain in the car some distance from the Abadina post while she went in and brought out whoever she found in place; there was always the possibility that the police had tracked it down and now had it under surveillance. That final base scuttled, I would wait for dark, then head for one of the unofficial border-crossing points to a safe house, or even, if the situation demanded it, into the neighboring country.

At the barrier that separated the College of Technology from the University of Ibadan, however, a policeman was waiting, armed with a rifle. He looked into the car, blinked, and sighed. That was the first and only sign I would obtain that the manhunt had extended to the peripheries of the university campus. Crestfallen at what he had to do, the policeman pulled me aside and, as if he knew what had brought me back, quickly whispered that he would escort me wherever I wanted to go before turning me in “in case”—his whisper went even lower—“in case there are urgent things you wish to take care of— sensitive documents and things like that. They will come and search your house, you know. It's the least I can do for you, Mr. Soyinka.”

Not one shred of misgiving did I entertain. I had learned to read faces and voices—with varying degrees of accuracy, admittedly. In this case, I was more than a hundred percent certain of the man's sincerity; this was not a trap. We dropped off Betty Okotie, whom I sent off to Femi with news of my arrest. I visited our last operational base, closed it down, and dispersed the lingering faithful. Then, with my policeman still in charge, I stopped at my university quarters on Ebrohimie Road, informed my family that I might be away for a while, enjoyed a light but tasty meal, shared by my police captor—I did not know when next such tastes would be afforded me—and set off on the route to prison detention.

A tussle then began for my body. The governor of the Western Region, Colonel Adeyinka Adebayo, anxiously discussed my situation with some of his commissioners, knowing that one of them, Bola Ige, would convey his assessment of my predicament to me. Adebayo stood his ground for some time and stalled my repatriation to Lagos. Any interrogation, he insisted, should take place in Ibadan, where I had been arrested. Indeed, he later sent me assurances in my place of detention that I would not be removed from Ibadan, only to send the same emissary, some days later, to tell me that it had been agreed that I should proceed to Lagos, but that he had received an assurance from Yakubu Gowon that he personally wanted to see me and ask me some direct questions about my visit to Biafra. I would leave in the morning, the governor said, escorted by his own people, and would be back in Ibadan that same day.

I had to smile at that! The truth, of course, was that most of the West, including the governor and his cabinet, was against the federal regime but lacked the means to enforce its will. The time had passed when the Western Region government, backed by its Leaders of Thought, could demand that all non-Western troops, bluntly described as an army of occupation, be removed from the West. With Banjo's military incursion into the Midwest state, Gowon had further consolidated his authority all over the nation. The slogan “To keep Nigeria one / Is a task that must be done” meant that there could be no fence-sitting. Centralization—was anyone surprised?—had made a dramatic come-back. You bowed to the central authority in totality or were considered to have ranged yourself with the rebels—spelled d-e-v-i-l-s! You were an agent of destabilization, fifth columnist, neocolonial agent, never mind that it was the former colonial masters, the British, who were standing solidly behind the regime. Gowon was riding on a high crest of nationalist fervor, and nationalism meant: no Balkanization. The very name “Gowon” was turned into a quite clever acronym: “Go On With GowOn.” Civil servants “voluntarily” donated a percentage of their salaries to the war effort, to a special fund called Troops Comfort Fund.

Regarding that “patriotic” exercise, there was one exception, one of a virtual handful, who defied that hysterical phase of patriotism. This was my elder sister, Tinu, then deputy principal of the Nursing School of the University Teaching Hospital, Lagos. She had nothing against keeping Nigeria one, offered no opinion regarding how one should go about it, but as long as her brother was in prison detention without trial, nobody had better touch her take-home pay! She refused to sign the “voluntary donation” form and declared her lack of interest in comforting any troops. Throughout the entire period of national jingoism—indeed, throughout the war with Biafra—no one dared touch Tinu's salary.

MY LAST TELEPHONE CALL, made from my home, where I shared a meal with my police captor, was to Femi. He was still in his office. I told him that there was a message—concerning rehearsal schedules—on its way to him through one of the Orisun company. To this I added tersely: “This is just for information. You are
not,
repeat,
not
required to be at these rehearsals. I have no idea how long they might take. This is a different play altogether, and—I already warned you—there is no longer any role in it for you. So take a sabbatical, will you? Understand?”

His voice was heavy with sadness and foreboding, but it did say that he understood.

The Conquest of Civilian Pride

WO YEARS AND FOUR MONTHS LATER—A YEAR AND TEN MONTHS OF IT spent in solitary confinement—I emerged from Kaduna prison,
³¹
armed with a rehearsed slogan. It was my chosen antidote to the national jingle, which continued to set my teeth on edge: “To keep Nigeria one / Is a task that must be done.” I had nothing against the oneness of the nation called Nigeria— indeed, as I once remarked, why should I wish to add yet other consulates to my rounds of visa applications? The travails of my passport, sometimes three stuck together, under the hostile frowns of immigration officers searching not only for their nation's visa but for space on which to place their stamps, were sufficient to warrant a subjective opposition to the infestation of the global map with new national entities! What I did contest was the basis on which a nation calls itself one, a crucial debate that was easily obscured by cheap, meaningless slogans. I had long resolved that this basis could be one thing only: equity among the constituent parts—in short, political parity, also known as political justice for the parts within the whole. And so, as I descended from the plane at Ibadan airport in January 1969 and found myself confronted by the press, I had only one statement for them: “To keep Nigeria one / Justice must be done.”

Then came the shock. The then chief justice of the Federation, a scion of Egba royal stock—that is, from my own birthplace—felt compelled to respond to my slogan. Though it had no immediate relevance to the purpose of his next public outing, the worthy judge could not wait to declare that justice not only existed in the nation but was well and thriving! The media were after me immediately, eager to offer a platform for me to take the battle to him. I declined the bait, yet I was deeply troubled. Unknown to him, the judge had set me the first puzzle in my reintegration into society. I needed time to digest what struck me as a most unnecessary self-interposition between a government with which I was undoubtedly at war and myself by the symbol of an institution that I had not assailed in any way. It was such a gratuitous intrusion that I feared it had a deeper meaning that was yet hidden from me, something my long absence from society had made me miss. Why—I asked myself—should a supposedly independent judiciary concern itself with the grouching of a known dissident? Was that institution now a mouthpiece of the state?

I was thrown into a mental quandary. I had not, after all, addressed or assailed the formal structure of justice, and I assumed that this was obvious. Alas, my prison existence, in a circumscribed world with its limited but coherent relationships of objects and events, its internal logic that defines the very nature of routine, had totally unfitted me for such an arbitrary, adversarial interjection. It was my first test on returning to the real world, and I was thrown off balance. I recovered an emotion that I had long forgotten:
fright
! Was this what was in store for me after even such a brief confinement—a mere two years and four months, no matter how endless it had appeared at the time? What had become of the nation? Its civic institutions? How deeply had the militarized state eroded their foundations? Suppose the state had chosen to bring me to trial after all; where was the impartial arbiter into whose hands my fate would have been thrust? Only at that moment, when indeed there was no longer a likelihood of being brought to trial for any crime, did I first experience fright!

Was the statement of the chief justice intended as an official affirmation of the
justice
of the war? The definitive word on the tragedy? What was the view of his peers on the Supreme Bench, those who were Igbo or sympathizers, or perhaps had lost friends and relatives in the war? He was, after all, only a first among equals.

I proceeded to review the immediate actuality of our national being, given the costly, devastating war that was now, thankfully, drawing to a close. War, after all, must be considered an abnormal event in any nation's life. To start with, by the very nature of war, all norms of justice are surely set aside. You do not invoke some code of jurisprudence to decide whether mercenaries should fight your war or foreign pilots be brought into a conflict to bomb one side or the other into submission. Once the shooting has begun, attempting to obtain a court order for the restoration of the status quo ante between the combatants is an absurdity; the deciding role has been conceded to force majeure, with or without the restraining hand of national or international realpolitik or the Geneva Conventions. Thus, somewhere within the nation called Nigeria, some feeling of a suspension—at the very least—of the expectation of justice had to exist, some plaint of unmerited affliction, of deep-rooted suffering. Any thinking being must surely concede that elementary probability! There had to be innocent victims, both individual and community. The Biafrans, major actors in this war, assuredly nursed a feeling of injustice. The Midwest Igbo, first compromised by their kin from across the Niger, then “liberated” by federal forces and slaughtered in batches for “collaborating” with the Biafrans, must feel engulfed in blood founts of injustice. The minorities of the delta region, forced into an unwanted entity called Biafra and brutalized, had surely undergone at the hands of Biafrans a monumental injustice. The very process of their liberation must have caused some undeserved suffering, thus breeding a sense of double injustice. Justice denied, injustice unmerited, even as expressions of the barest possibilities, surely existed beyond dispute. What, then, I continued to demand of my captive audiences—close friends and comrades—what problem could the chief justice possibly have with that?

Mentally, I began looking over my shoulder with a burgeoning paranoia. It was not quite how I had envisaged my induction into normal existence. I was made more acutely aware how deeply that commodity called justice, however qualified, was central to my self-apprehension and ordering of the human community, and it was not a healthy feeling. The world, I felt, was out of tune if the pinnacle of the structure of justice considered it necessary to assume the responsibility of responding to a man who had just emerged from a confinement to which he had been consigned without trial, most of it solitary confinement, who had been lied against without a means of defending himself. If only in his own right, for no other cause besides his own, this emerging recluse surely had a right to proclaim a prima facie case of injustice, since he had never been brought to trial for any crime. The legitimacy of a chief justice was nonexistent outside the basis of Nigerian ground rule:
deemed innocent until proven
guilty! But the main shock for me was the fact that anyone at all, apart from a recognized government mouthpiece or a political adversary, should assume the responsibility of attempting to counter what, at most, should be considered no more than the rhetoric of defiance!

I was truly obsessed with the need to find a meaning—so compulsive must have been my need for clarity after my prison sojourn. Everything had to make sense. I had to find a logical process, a credible sequitur to what had gone before, a rational cause in any situation that aspired to produce an effect. I worried about this statement as a dog does an unraveling ball of wool, little realizing that I was taking it so personally! The chief justice had not, after all, sentenced me to prison. I wore out the patience of my handful of listeners: Did the man interpret justice in the titular sense—that is, “justice” as in chief justice of the Federation? Did he imagine that I had cast doubts on his existential definition or indicted his functional reality? What had happened to the national edifice, its pillars, in my absence?

It was an unsettled period of intense speculation. Perhaps it was a continued variation of that phase in prison when I had created totally theoretical problems and sought to solve them mathematically—a subject I had hated in school—just to pass the time. Solitary confinement is a state in which one creates a microcosmic but coherent world, albeit a world of the lowest hierarchy. The prisoner's condition depends, first, on the will of his principal jailers, far removed from his predicament, and next, on their immediate agents, who regulate his day-to-day existence. Below those levels, however, the prisoner is the complete master of his universe, and that universe is regulated—if only for sanity—along strict, objective lines. Mine was certainly a world that was populated by trivia, by the mundane, but its very ordinariness was ordered and predictable. An improvised pen remained exactly where you chose to hide it, day after day and week after week. If by chance it was discovered, that probability had long been built into reality and thus became a logical development. My ink—
soyink,
I called it—was developed experimentally, but, once perfected, it followed the laws of supply—and quality—precisely as anticipated. The trusty left your food tray on the same spot day after day, and you reciprocated in like manner when you were done. Toilet paper was supplied—one roll for so many days. So were cigarettes. If there was a change—a rare occurrence—in the routine, there was a reason for it. When the superintendent paid a surprise visit, that also slid into a niche of normality—a surprise visit was exactly as it should be, a surprise. And so on and so on. Any unpredictable or irrational element was banished from that universe as a phenomenon that belonged to other hierarchies where one was not in control. By contrast, the environment from which I had been forcibly removed two years before, which I was now reentering, I began to discover was a more palpably humanized terrain, yet one that refused to answer to the name of logic and coherence. It did not guarantee the security of the predictable or rational explications of the unexpected.

MY REEDUCATION WAS GRADUAL, and of course it began with recollections of what daily existence had been like before my detention. The chief justice had unknowingly administered a salutary shock. I now learned to recognize that I had been released from prison into a paradox—a nation that wallowed in triumphalism yet was under subjugation. It was a society that fed contentedly from a common trough of humiliation but paraded itself as the People of Victory. Paradox did not exist in my prison environment; hence my disorientation by the quite commonplace response of a chief justice. I did not immediately recognize the nation I had left behind, yet my absence had not really amounted to much in a nation's life. Perhaps if nearly two years of those twenty-eight months had not been spent in solitary confinement—if, for instance, I had had steady contact with visitors, newspapapers, radio—I might have been inducted into the altered psyche of the nation, and would have been better prepared for the norm of citizen sycophancy and self-abasement that had replaced the self-esteem on which we had earlier ridden, as the rightful place for a people who had no history of internal subjugation. A new social culture had, however, emerged in civil society: allegiance to the military and a need to promulgate the righteousness of a war now in its final days. I had done nothing more than provide Justice with its own opportunity; there was, apparently, more than one means of contributing to the Troops Comfort Fund!

With victory go the spoils of war. Civil society lay at the feet of the conquerors, and within that civil society were many who had genuinely cheered, even sacrificed for, the war of oneness. For others, the military had become enthroned as the new elite, and the level of fawning and jockeying to be merely noticed and smiled upon by any pretender in uniform already spoke of a nation that was loudly pleading to be crushed underfoot. The army was only too willing to oblige, the message ground into public consciousness—of young and old, big man and nonentity—that there was a new overlordship sprung to life in full formation, that the ragged boot of the lowest corporal rested permanently on that rung of the ladder where the hands of the civil engineer, the business tycoon, the university professor, the crowned head, and even the cleric competed for a hold that might eventually haul up the rest of the body one more step. And as each military boot scraped itself onto the head of the civic worthy below, that head turned upward with a most ingratiating smile and received the full dollop of the scrapings in its wide-open mouth.

With the entrenchment of the military, the season of unsolicited résumés began:
Please, sir, I am available for a Parastatal Board membership, diplomatic
posting, one-man management board, administrator, commission of enquiry, tenders board, et cetera, et cetera.
There were, of course, uplifting exceptions, individuals who turned down lucrative temptations and chose to stick to their professions, as well as hundreds of unknowns who simply refused to accept any act of humiliation by a soldier, even fought them physically at the risk, sometimes the cost, of their lives. Such was the lady radiographer Dupe Oke, who was slapped by a soldier at a roadblock at Idi-ayunre, some miles from Ibadan. Her crime was no more than failing to understand what exactly the soldier demanded of her. She opened the boot of her car for inspection, opened her glove compartment, but the soldier kept jabbering more instructions. “I'm sorry, I don't understand what you want,” she finally said, and was rewarded with a slap across the face. “You no understand, you no understand what? You think I come here waste time for grammar people like you?”