You Must Set Forth at Dawn (4 page)

Just as they had both done at my father's death, ignoring the fact that I was now home and, with my siblings, had begun to immerse myself in the tasks that fall on the children, Oje and Femi took charge of much of my own portion of the arrangements, aided by Yemi Ogunbiyi, a former student who had become a colleague at Ife. Wild Christian's funeral also took place in our second hometown, Isara, and she was buried next to her husband. I was able to perform my ritual functions as
omo oloku,
one of the “children of bereavement,” unlike at my father's funeral, when Oje and OBJ had stood surrogate. Their functions at his funeral were anything but ritual. They smuggled in a tape on which I had recorded my farewell, including lines from Dylan Thomas's poem to his dying father, and ensured that it was played at the funeral service. With both friends and accomplices gone, it was just as well that I had no more parents to lose!

My mother's warning over Essay's funeral had not been misplaced. Secret service agents—my eternal chaperones!—swarmed the routes leading to the town, convinced that I would attempt to sneak into the country. They converged on the church and, on hearing my voice over the loudspeakers, concluded that I had eluded their net and was delivering the funeral tribute in person. Soon enough, they discovered the mechanical source of the voice and, once the service was over, swooped down on the church in an effort to seize the tape—but why? To reassure their bosses that I had not shown my face after all, that it was only my disembodied voice that had evaded their roadblocks? Or to interrogate the tape and find out by what agency it had landed in the church? No matter, my two collaborators took charge, even succeeded in hiding the recording machine itself, a bulky Grundig, from the police agents and ensuring that the tape remained where it belonged—with the family. Under Abacha, those agents would not have waited until the funeral service was over. They would have stormed the place of worship, arrested the tape recorder, and carted off the officiating prelates for interrogation!

ON MY POLITICAL LANDSCAPE, easily the most accusing void, created by one who had been central to my mission in exile these past five years, was that of the industrialist Bashorun Moshood Kashimawo Abiola. Abiola was the elected president of a nation who never did preside over more than his home, his vast network of businesses, and finally his place of detention. It is a pointless habit, one knows, to label what is clearly the crime of others as a failure in oneself, but that irrational speculation sometimes lays claim to such a place in our reverses. Abiola's death was one of unmatchable, lingering cruelty. Robbed of victory, imprisoned and isolated from human contact for nearly four years, and then, on the eve of his second victory, a victory that was signaled by the death of his jailer and usurper of his mandate, Sani Abacha, to end up— wasted!

What the democratic aspirations of the nation had anticipated, following the sudden death of Abacha in June 1998, was a search for a negotiated future in which, logically, Abiola, the imprisoned president-elect, would play a central role, in all likelihood as the head of an interim government of national unity. No one of any note still denied that he had won the 1993 elections for president. Then, one month after the death of Sani Abacha, in the presence of a delegation of U.S. officials—Thomas Pickering, a former ambassador to Nigeria; Susan Rice, President Bill Clinton's assistant secretary of state for African affairs; and others—Abiola was served the cup of tea that has now attained legendary status in the nation, for he suffered a seizure minutes after that cup, collapsed, and died. I try to recall if ever there was a Tantalus in Nigerian history or mythology, but no one seems adequate. Only D. O. Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode, the hero of
Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale,
⁹
buried up to his neck in captivity, victim of a vicious palace conspiracy, comes close, but that was a tale that at least offered its readers the moral reward of a rescue and a happy ending.

The truth, I know, will come out someday. Four years to effect his murder, but murder him they did in the end, and I cannot but feel that it was due to some insufficiency on our part, on mine, though I do not really know what I, or anyone in the democratic struggle, could have done to prevent it. It continues to strike me as grossly unfair that, a few days before his death, I should have been caught up in Vienna by a faxed message warning of his imminent murder. Because of that warning, and despite its futility with regard to both time and means, I tend to drag with me a nagging element of blame. It was small comfort that I would discover later that I was not the only recipient of the message whose text so clearly verged on the hysterical. Even at its most level, matter-of-fact register, this was a source we had learned not to take lightly. In this instance, the frame of mind of this specific writer—we named our key information sources collectively “Longa Throat,” after Richard Nixon's nemesis, “Deep Throat”—appeared to have affected his use of upper- and lowercase:

The only addendum the new regime and its collaborators has is to: ENSURE THAT
CHIEF M.K.O. ABIOLA DOES NOT BECOME THE PRESIDENT OF NIGERIA IN WHATEVER FORM.... Let me state here categorically that this is not a prediction
at all. It is a preconceived plan of the new regime, exposed by an insider. . . .

THE IMPORTANT REPORT SENT TO ME TODAY: A NOTORIOUS GANG IN THE NIGERIAN ARMY has completed their plan to assassinate Chief Moshood Abiola as a “final settlement of the ABACHA /ABIOLA war” in a “no victor, no van
quished way.” Believe it or not, if the report given to me is anything to go by, Chief
Abiola's death could come within a few days or before the end of September. This
may look ridiculous, unthinkable or like an outright fabrication, but believe it or
not, it is true. Tell Prof and other pro-democracy groups both abroad and at home
to mount a very intensive pressure on Abdulsalami to release Chief M.K .O. Abiola
now!

The new regime would fail to protect Chief Abiola from his assassins because
it has not been able to persuade them to rethink the Nigerian national question.

They might even seize power from Abubakar in order to achieve their destructive plan. These people are hell-bent on destroying the corporate existence of Nigeria rather than see Abiola become the president.

The last leg in the relay through which the message had traveled was none other than my son Ilemakin, who had long since thrown himself into the struggle on his own, slipped out of the country and begun to carry out some missions for the democracy movement. The desperate appeal finally reached its destination on my last day in Vienna, but only after the departure of Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations. A day earlier, I had been locked in a tête-à-tête with him for nearly an hour and a half. He seemed quite relaxed; the human rights conference that had brought us both to Austria appeared to have fulfilled all the aims of the United Nations, and Kofi Annan was now looking forward to his next mission: to travel the next morning to Nigeria, where he would visit the new—decidedly interim—head of state, Abdulsalami Abubakar, and of course see Moshood Abiola in prison. Neither of us required any urging to accept that we had to meet and talk before his departure.

My patience was severely tested by his “reasonableness” . . . Yes, yes, Wole, an
opportunity has opened up now with Abacha's death, and we musn't waste it. A lot
can be achieved, the crisis can now be resolved, but, you know, you must tell your
people also to be reasonable. The opposition simply has to be reasonable.

Reasonable? Were we being unreasonable? After nearly thirty years of military rule, the last five under the most repellent of the species, we were asking for the immediate release of the elected president and all remaining political prisoners and the setting up of an interim government headed by Abiola, the legitimate president—an interim government that would last a year, maybe two. In tandem, the nation's representatives would meet at a sovereign national conference to ascertain the real will of the people and lay the ground for the next elections while reviewing the terms of association of the constituent parts of the nation. Then general elections. What was unreasonable about such proposals? Indeed, what alternative was there? I had the sinking feeling that Kofi was traveling with a prepared script, a script already agreed between the United Nations and a caucus of Western governments. The program of our democratic coalition was not to be part of that script.

Warning of the death threat to Abiola was delivered into my hands only after Kofi Annan had left for Nigeria and had even held his meeting with the prisoner! If I had received it earlier, I would have submerged all political discussion under the urgency of bringing Abiola out of prison immediately! Certainly I would have served formal notice on the United Nations, insisted—for whatever it was worth—that its secretary-general refuse to meet Abiola except at liberty, in his own home, surrounded by his family and political associates. We had learned from experience to trust any warning from “Longa Throat.” It was too late, however; Abiola was already dying, his organs weakened by a devilish regimen of slow poisoning. It will all come out in its full byzantine details—of that, I live in total confidence.

So our discussion—and my principal concerns—were taken up mostly with Nigeria's future, not with any thoughts of danger to the man at the center of it all. By the end of that meeting, so convinced was I that that future had already been decided by others that I sent messages home immediately, urging that all pressure should be mounted on the visitor to make him
listen
to our program and press it on the new landlord of Aso Rock, General Abdulsalami. And yet I warned in the same breath that it would be futile anyway. Such were the frequent contradictions that defined many moments of that democratic undertaking. Futility stared one in the face, but inaction was far more intolerable.

Wryly and incongruously, at such moments would float to the surface of my mind one of my mother's favorite aphorisms, with her comic Yorubization of the key English word “trying”:
“Itirayi ni gbogbo nkan”
—“The trying is all.” Wild Christian applied it to a full gamut of incompatible situations—from the shrug of resignation that followed a failed attempt to charge exorbitantly for her goods to falling with full relish on the dubious results of an exotic recipe that she was attempting for the first time. Abiola was—like the French Socialist president François Mitterrand, which is where the similarity ends— a dogged disciple of the doctrine of
itirayi.
It was not his first attempt to become the president of Nigeria. A Yoruba from the South, his first, overconfident foray was ridiculed and scuttled by a feudal cabal of the North who found it laughable that anyone outside their privileged caucus should even dream of ruling the nation. They took his money—lots of it—but openly derided his ambitions. Abiola made a strategic withdrawal, bided his time, launched himself on a philanthropic crusade, broadened and reinforced his political base. At the second outing, he succeeded. And for that, Abiola was killed.

I AM TEMPTED to hold this last loss responsible, above other candidates, for a homecoming that appears almost completely devoid of emotion, the focus of one's struggle having been violently sucked into a void. But it goes beyond the depressing weight of such absences. I am not returning to any abandoned territory, since this is where I have remained by compulsion, almost with debilitating intensity, these past five years.

Instinctively, I turn toward the window when the captain announces that we have entered the Nigerian airspace. The plane's shadow dances over a few minarets and walled cities of the North. We are still some distance from our destination; the full length of the Nigerian landmass has yet to be crossed. For a moment I think I have caught a glimpse of an oasis, but it is only the sun's glint on a flat, corrugated iron roofing, undoubtedly a factory. My mind moves to the fate of my own house, the modest foundation dream. Now,
that
I had effectively abandoned, perhaps in self-defense, brick by red brick and beam by beam, including its wild, ample grounds, where I had experimented and succeeded—against all odds, I was told—in cultivating the wild, now rarely seen
agbayun,
that stubborn berry that coats every morsel of food for hours afterward with a natural sweetness. The lore, backed by generations of frustrated farmers, was that it never fructified in captivity. Through trial and error, by varying the combination of sunshine and soil, moisture, shade, and whatever else I could recall from my amateur flirtation with viniculture, I produced a freak success, a feat of which I was inordinately proud, since I am no farmer. The oldest and the youngest in the family, Tinuola and Folabo, are the family's green thumbs. Femi, next to me in age—“Jamani,” to distinguish him by his childhood nickname from his namesake, OBJ—is the fisherman. I took to hunting. Cultivating the
agbayun
was also an irony, as I do not like sweets and only gave the berries away.

There was also my minifield of wild mints. When I retired from the Nigerian university system in 1985, thinking of various occupations for survival, I considered a project for freezing or drying my wild mint for sale, especially to bars and teahouses around the world. Fantasizing myself as a small-scale trading maverick, one who identified, produced, and marketed a select item or two in demand, virtually from my doorstep, making a living out of it to sustain a retirement into purely creative pursuits—this has long been a favorite pastime of mine. I suppose it was my fascination with the world of Wild Christian, that modest trader in a medley of commodities, that promoted such fantasies. I knew it would come to nothing, but it provided moments of unmatched bliss to sit in those ample verandas, survey my lordly domain, and weave my magic carpet of a life of interdependency between the arts and the farm. The mini-grove of wild mints and the
agbayun
were doomed to remain contemplative vistas, nothing more. I enjoyed watching them grow, sniffing the air around them and accompanying their flights to myriad cities in air-sealed bags. But all I did was lace the occasional drink with the mint leaves and distribute the
agbayun
berries to friends. A few hundred were forgotten in my freezer, where they duly rotted when the infamous electrical supply took even its feeble charge away for prolonged periods that coincided with my absences from home.