You Must Set Forth at Dawn (42 page)

And the elections in Jamaica? Could Nigeria aid the progressive candidate, Michael Manley, to regain power? Oje and I had met the former prime minister, now opposition leader, during a lunch in his honor at Ota Farm, the retirement place of Olusegun Obasanjo, then courting the role of elder statesman. Manley was visiting at the invitation of the Guardian Newspapers for its annual lecture series. Tentatively but optimistically, he had expressed hopes that Nigeria might match the dollars that the United States was pouring into the campaign of his rival, tagged a creation of the CIA, Edward Seaga. His cause had been embraced not only by Oje and me but also by the former head of state Obasanjo and the Guardian editors spearheaded by Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi. There were hints that Babangida was already well disposed toward some help.

Outside, Dodan Barracks remained watchful and pensive—it was still so when I took my leave—as if it were only waiting for the departure of the notorious busybody to explode.

The
aparo
survived. If the coup makers had only taken the trouble to consult me, I would have advised them that his fate was already decried in those scattered feathers, which were all that remained when the Artful Dodger fell to a dramatist's gun but remained destined for the greatest escapist performance of his career.

Dinner with an Avatar

HE MOST EXPENSIVE DINNER I EVER ATE IN MY LIFE TOOK PLACE DURING A period of great continental—indeed, global—exultation. I did not choose the menu, the wines served were just about average, I have forgotten details of half the company that framed the large round table at the edge of the Parisian skyline, but I have never regretted or begrudged such unintended extravagance for one moment. I could not even write it off as tax-deductible. Even in 1990, I had yet much to learn about the world of taxation.

The individual at the heart of that dinner, the truly honored guest who honors that often dubious accolade, remains, even today, blissfully unaware of how he came to upset my monthly budget. No, he did not belong to the host of devils for whom the long spoon was invented; only those who jailed him for most of his mature life perceived him as such. For that angelic host, a political progressive or liberation fighter (being only another expression for a Communist) was the human clone of Satan, and they had resolutely advertised that dinner guest as being one.

Out of the blue into my Abeokuta redoubt came an urgent message from the French Embassy in Lagos. The chargé d'affaires—the ambassador was away—wondered if I could travel to Paris the following day for a very important dinner being hosted by President Mitterrand. The embassy was standing by to do everything possible, anything at all to ensure that I was present.

I gave my
ha-ha
chuckle reserved for all outlandish proposals, sent the courier back with empty hands, and returned to whatever was then preoccupying me in my backwater township. Back came an even more intense plea from Lagos. The French president was insistent, my presence was considered vital. And now some further elaboration followed: it was not a state/official dinner but a private one. And it was not François Mitterrand who was offering this dinner but the foundation named for his wife, the Danielle Mitterrand Foundation. A private dinner, yes, but naturally the presidency was involved; thus the invitation had been routed through the embassy. The strange proposal began to attract my interest—to fly to Paris for a dinner; this would be no ordinary dinner, since it could not possibly belong to the typical exhibitionist nature of a dinner-on-the-whim in which some of our Nigerian tycoons indulge—
“Abi k'a ti e sere lo si Paree, ka gbagbe awon olosi ti won npe ra won
l'oselu?”
⁴⁵

More details came tumbling through. The dinner transcended privacy—it was secrecy itself. It would take place in the roof garden restaurant of the Théâtre National Populaire, in whose long-suffering bowels I had smothered
la langue française
in Joan Littlewood's quixotic production of Conor Cruise O'Brien's Les Anges Meurtriers in 1971. Then came the detail that should have preceded all others: Nelson Mandela was visiting Paris—one of his very earliest ports of call after his release—to consult privately with some French businesses and nongovernmental institutions. The Danielle Mitterrand Foundation was “sponsoring” the visit and had invited to this closed dinner in his honor some ten to twelve guests.

Nelson Mandela in Paris? And I was invited to dine with him? If only that morsel of enticement had been served first, I would have been in Paris before the envoy arrived back at his station in Lagos!

The expected flight tickets had not arrived. The chargé d'affaires implored me to buy my own tickets. Once I arrived in Paris, I would be reimbursed, and of course hotel bills and other expenses would be taken care of. The scenario sounded familiar, it would happen again and again, but pity that individual— never mind Bertolt Brecht!—who has no one to call a hero. There was no way I could miss an intimate dinner with Nelson Mandela, a first direct encounter since he had been released from prison! Have passport, will travel. Visa was waiting. Off I flew two nights later, with nothing beyond the proverbial toothbrush. The refund never did materialize, but there was more chagrin to come— even the settlement of my hotel bill took on an embarrassing drama of its own: I had to pick this, of all visits to Paris, as the occasion on which to lose my wallet!

François Mitterrand attended the dinner, stating demurely that it was his wife's event, not his—“I have been invited only as a husband.” Mandela's team consisted of his wife, Winnie; Cyril Ramaphosa, strongly touted at the time as Mandela's successor; and Thabo Mbeki, who, however, ended up snagging that coveted position. Then there were Peter Brook, the British director and an old friend—author of, among others, The Empty Space—and some others of the artistic/political world whose names my brain failed to register. I was seated at the round table next to my favorite avatar, Nelson Mandela. All was resplendently well with the world, and especially the African world—well, almost!

It was one of those long-dreamed-of evenings. Shortly after my collection of poems
Mandela's Earth and Other Poems
had been published in the United States, I had run into a woman friend of an African National Congress (ANC) official during a disinvestment rally at Cornell University, where I was then teaching. When she informed me that she would be traveling to South Africa soon and had the channels to ensure that messages would reach Nelson Mandela in prison, I gave her a copy of the poems. I added, however, that this was not the real copy I intended for him. That copy, I swore, would be delivered to him by my own hands, and I would read a verse or two to him as he sat in the full freedom of his living room. The lady shook her head in pessimism, wondering if such a day would ever come about in her lifetime. I, brimming with optimism, pronounced a date beyond which, I swore, apartheid would not last.

It was not the first time I had done that. At a lecture at the Polytechnic School of London in 1972 during the exile that followed my spell in Kaduna prison, attacked perhaps by some kind of mantic rage, I pronounced the year 1985 to be the terminal year of apartheid. No, not “about,” “around,” “before,” “not long after,” or anything else but precisely—1985! A few years later, as the magic date approached, I lost my nerve and extended the date by five years! When the cataclysmic event did materialize, it came with such suddenness that even this prophetic medium was caught completely off guard. So now, seated by my very special prisoner at a round table in a restaurant that offered a panoramic view of the mother of the modern revolution, I felt deeply fulfilled— but also troubled.

As postapartheid elections for the governance of South Africa moved from mere speculation and negotiation to the hard realities of campaign rallies, electoral registers, and ballot boxes, violence—especially between former victims, toned alike by decades of humiliation, disdain, and denial—threatened to tear the emerging nation apart. The daily news from South Africa, and the commonest analysis of the array of forces that had brought down the apartheid government, spoke of a brutal aftermath that would ensue from the rival political claims of the African National Congress and the Inkatha movement of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the traditional head of the Zulu. The extreme Afrikaner Right was well placed to exploit these differences, and it did. It was not sufficient to brand Buthelezi as a dyed-in-the-wool feudalist, reactionary, and stooge of the Boers. If he were, if that last especially were his entire political tendency, then the worse for the victory over apartheid! What mattered was that he should not be thrown by default, fully kilted for war, into the enemy camp—like Jonas Savimbi of Angola in his turn—through the careful tending of his political amour propre by a common enemy. Above all, Buthelezi was not without a fanatical following, even if not all of the KwaZulu nation favored his politics. Perhaps a civil war in South Africa would be short-lived; all the same, its consequences would be devastating for the continent.

Conversation turned, inevitably, to this retrogressive phase, which was already agitating the world, its grisly killings gleefully registered by certain foreign media. Knowing heads were wagging in smug satisfaction. It was still early in the bloodletting rage. The figures had moved from single digits to double and were now approaching triple. The question on the minds of the genuinely alarmed was predictable, and I turned to Mandela and asked, “Would you agree to meet with Buthelezi if he offered to meet with you?”

Mandela did not pause one second. “Of course I would. He was the first person I telephoned when I came out of prison. We have spoken on the phone several times, and I have suggested to our party that we meet him and find out just what he wants. However, within the ANC, we try to do things in a democratic way; otherwise we would commit the same errors as the regime we are trying to replace. Unless the ANC authorizes it, I cannot meet with him.”

I saw both Thabo Mbeki and Cyril Ramaphosa prick up their ears. An unsmiling Mbeki said, “They are killing our people. Buthelezi is power-mad, and he stops at nothing. He wants to create his own power enclave within South Africa. The ANC has not struggled for that. It is not possible to hold a dialogue with that kind of person.”

Winnie Mandela's lips grew taut, a contrast to her matronly beauty, which appeared to glow from the glossy skin of a newly bathed and oiled African child. She interjected, “The worst of it is that he actually allies with the National Party. They join forces to eliminate ANC cadres.”

“We know where he's headed,” Mbeki reaffirmed. “What he doesn't know is that we are waiting for him.”

Ramaphosa gave me the impression of a businessman at a board meeting, measuring the opposition but very much in control, secure in the confidence of the majority of stakeholders, whose interests are safeguarded by his reassuring presence. I could not help contrasting these battle-scarred activists with the delicate, nearly fragile, soft-spoken Danielle Mitterrand. Equally arresting were the wax features of François Mitterrand, which had earned him the title of “the Sphinx” from his national media—had he undergone a face-lift at some time that had left his facial muscles paralyzed? It was a thought that flitted through my mind as I succumbed to one of my accustomed flashbacks—my first-ever encounter with the Socialist president when, at the urging of Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor and peace laureate, he had hosted a meeting of Nobel laureates in the early spring of 1987.

THAT DEBUT AT the Elysée Palace was not one of my most entrancing recollections. François Mitterrand received his guests with a nearly wooden, impassive face. Since he had taken the trouble of conferring on me the order of Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur some years earlier—instigated, I am convinced, by his minister of culture, Jack Lang—I felt it behooved me to rehearse in advance a sentence or two of appreciation in French. As we shook hands, I delivered them in—surely—impeccable French. The man did not bat an eyelid. Did he even look me in the eye? No, he was a mummified presence that appeared to have been installed solely to gaze across my shoulder at some ancient history, visible to none but him! Yet the French ambassador, who had performed the award ceremony in Lagos, had assured me that Mitterrand had taken a personal interest in the conferment and would have preferred that I come to Paris to receive the medal directly from him—oh, those flattering diplomats! I was now convinced that the man could not have distinguished me from Mobutu Sese Seko, the terror of Zaire. It was rather unsettling. Not a tweak of a smile, only some murmur that I could not decipher and a rather limp handshake. If I had not rehearsed those two sentences to perfection, I would have developed a permanent inhibition over any future attempt to communicate in that language—the only explanation that would have made sense being that I had failed to make myself understood. Still, he proceeded to declare the conference open and left us to our devices.

An unscripted occurrence during the conference did, however, serve to compensate for my initial discomfiture—in a rather curious way. In the midst of solving all the world's problems in the elegant chamber, now festooned with cameras and microphones, one of the laureates collapsed and fell from his chair. I leaped up instinctively to go to his aid, only to feel, the next moment, the restraining arm of an inner calm. I began to laugh silently at myself and ordered that eager self to sit down and relax. Our colleague had collapsed among the cream of the world's medical brains and skills—at least they were considered so by the Nobel Foundation—so what sort of aid did I imagine I was going to render?

I sank into an instantly apprehended but all too infrequently experienced state of detachment from the world of purpose, devoid of all anxiety. Something unsettling had taken place, yes, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that was required of me. Others in that hall were superlatively equipped, a collective wealth of experience and familiarity with every ailment in the world. I distanced myself even further from my accustomed self in order to relish this generous isolation from all the furor, from the palpable concern that was evident in the others; I wallowed in the unaccustomed condition of absolution that derived from the competence of others. I basked in my unsought enrollment in the world's unskilled and irrelevant population, immersed myself in the sheer luxury of revelation—
Right now, at this very moment, you are useless,
nobody needs you! Enjoy it while you can.
It was a paradoxical potency, to be able to sink oneself in inertia yet feel masterful—through others—for doing nothing, for being incapable of doing anything. My confidence was supreme; all would be well. An ambulance had been summoned, but I was not interested in details. “What do you think happened?” my next-seat neighbor whispered, tortured by the thought that the first-ever gathering of this nature—at least, that he was attending—might end in tragedy. With the most limpid of offhand gestures, eased naturally from my overabundant tranquillity, I calmed him, assured him that it was nothing, that our colleague would be up in no time.