You Must Set Forth at Dawn (5 page)

Perhaps the memory of its one dedication still hovers around the estate. At the first anniversary of Femi Johnson's death—or, more accurately, of his reinternment—the foundation received its first guest, an absentee guest and permanent resident. Then the estate came alive, peopled, that one time, by the very creative tribe it was meant to serve. I try to recollect the animated faces and voices . . . the poet and journalist Odia Ofeimun; the critic Biodun Jeyifo; the poet and playwright Femi Osofisan; Tunji Oyelana and Jimi Solanke, musicians and actors; the singer and lifelong collaborator Francesca Emmanuel; Bola Ige, a lawyer and politician but friend of the arts and occasional poet . . . then we formally named a wing for our late friend, slaughtered a goat, and consumed gourdfuls of palm wine and cases of its bottled and labeled expatriate siblings. Celebrating Femi Johnson's life? Or assuaging our loss yet again? No matter, he was one of us, actor and singer even though a businessman, and we were sealing his present memory into those walls.

The memories, yes, but the physical casing of the idea? Mentally abandoned—at least, so I continue to hope—flushed into the thin stream that I had widened into an artificial pond, past the catchment groves of repose along the watercourse, now certainly silted up or covered in an oily slick that oozed lazily from that strange soil. I remind myself that I once abandoned even the cactus patch, a bristling phalanx of thorned markers to which I had assigned the role of covering my remains—yes, that was the ultimate proof of my detachment. It was due especially to the dismissal of that last attachment that, faced with the real possibility that I might be killed in exile, I seized greedily on a chance encounter, a revelation, on the island of Jamaica. I imbued the event with a fated dimension, read it as a solemn pronouncement and offering from predecessors to the ancestral realms. Alas, even that substitute would prove treacherous, impressing on me all over again the lesson I thought I had mastered—never to call deeply to anything as mine, never to become attached, not even to a prospective burial ground.

IN 1990—IN MY NOTATION, the Year of Mandela's Release—when he made Jamaica one of his earliest stopping points for his reunion with the living world, I made a startling discovery on that same island. If Nelson Mandela was discovering the space of freedom on a global scale, I was also discovering a micro-world that was founded in freedom. Thus did I embark on a pilgrimage that would begin as a sentimental, and evolve into a morbid, attachment.

The timing of my presence in Kingston, Jamaica, with Mandela's—even though we never did meet on that soil—imbued my discovery with an indefinable sense of augury, but then, let it be recalled that, like a large portion of the world, I had carried the calvary of Mandela and the struggle against apartheid South Africa in my head for longer than its continental replacement, the horror of an Abacharized Nigerian nation. Apart from participating in the mandatory “Free Mandela” marches, disinvestment campaigns, lecture sessions, anti-sanction-busting commissions, and so on, I had presented an early student play at London's Royal Court Theatre,
The Invention,
on the insanities of the apartheid system. Decades after that production, I titled a collection of my poems
Mandela's Earth and Other Poems,
and it seemed the most appropriate gesture, as I prepared for Stockholm in 1986, to dedicate my Nobel acceptance speech to him. (That was the speech in which, to my eternal chagrin, I listed Montesquieu among the contributors to European racist thinking—may the shade of Montesquieu find it in his ancestral heart to forgive that libel!)

To find myself again in Kingston for a lecture engagement in 1990, for the first time in nearly fifteen years, just as the entire city was emptying itself out for Mandela, was already more than sufficient. It was a symbolic gift that I regarded as personal, not shared with the millions of ecstatic hordes that had labored for and now celebrated his freedom. To discover a portion of my own homeland in that far-off place at the same time—now, that was a miracle that could be wrought only by a Mandelan avatar!

For it was only on this visit, my second ever to that island, that I was made aware of a slave settlement called Bekuta, a name that immediately resonated in my head as none other than the name of my hometown, Abeokuta. This centuries-wide reunion with my own history sent a tingle down my vertebrae— an encounter with descendants from my own hometown on a far-flung Caribbean island, in the hills of a onetime slave settlement called Jamaica?

The group of slave descendants who founded the settlement, in flight from the lowland plantations, had sought out a hilly terrain that would prove nearly impenetrable for their pursuing owners but would also remind them of home. They found it in the county of Westmoreland and settled among its rockhills, naming it Abeokuta. Yemi Adefuye, the Nigerian high commissioner in the West Indies, had already become acquainted with this history and could not wait to arrange a visit. What was only an academic though exciting discovery for him and others was, in my case, a most affecting experience. I found it strange indeed that during my first visit to Jamaica, in 1976 for Carifesta—the Caribbean Festival of the Arts—no one had thought to mention the existence of this settlement or propose that we pay it a visit!

A famous Nigerian, now also deceased, had preceded me on this voyage of private discovery, I was informed. This was Fela Sowande, a composer, but a totally different spirit from his younger and more famous namesake, the “Afro-beat king” and iconoclast Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Sowande had been completely overwhelmed—he had broken down in tears. This older cousin would exact his emotional revenge on me some years later, unintentionally, for it was his symphony Obangiji, based on melodies from our common birthplace, that, unexpectedly swarming out of the violin and cello strings of the Swedish orchestra as I moved forward on the Stockholm stage to receive the Nobel Prize, nearly succeeded in making me a victim of the shamelessness of tear ducts. It was a brief but tense struggle! The rockhills of origin stood me in good stead, but it could have gone either way. (The horror of it—the immaculately pressed, ribboned, and sashed master of ceremonies, the Swedish prince consort himself, compelled to lend me his handkerchief!) Really, the Stockholm ceremonials should not spring such surprises on middle-aged susceptibilities!

As the island slowly recovered from the hangover of Mandela's visit, I could not wait to answer the call of Bekuta. There I encountered one of my yet living ancestors, the oldest inhabitant of the settlement, frail, as one would expect a being of more than a hundred years to be. Now, let no one dare tell me I do not know an Egba face when I see one! The parchment tautness of her face, the unmistakable features of the Egba death mask, captured so immutably in Demas Nwoko's
¹⁰
painting
Ogboni,
attested her origins distinctly against any skeptical voices. Not much motion was left in her body, or else her body rhythm, I was certain, would have reinforced what her face pronounced. As she became bedridden, she ordered her bed moved to the window that overlooked the rockhills. Now all she sought was that her eyes would open and close on those rocks, dawn and dusk, until her final moment.

She was the sole survivor of the original settlers. Her voice was still remarkably strong. Did I imagine the unmistakable Egba twang in her Jamaican patois? Of course I did, but what a conceit to let it linger in the resounding chambers of one's head!
Oh yes, the real name is A-be-o-ku-ta
—never did music sound so tanned, so ancestral in authority—
but it gradually became corrupted to Bekuta. I tell them all the time
—
the name is A-be-o-ku-ta, but how
many of them can remember that? They don't even remember what it means, un
less I remind them. I was a child when we came here. When our people dance for
you and cook you
fufu, ewedu, jogi,
and other foods from home, no one come tell
you that we descendants of slaves from A-be-o-ku-ta. But yes, much has been lost.
The government help a little, they come here sometimes, bring visitors, and the local
council preserve our history by staging shows every year. We observe the seasons of
the gods . . . Sango, Obatala, Ogun
¹¹
. . . we used to have a babalawo,
¹²
but I don't think anyone remember how to read Ifa
¹³
; anymore . . . some of the children go away
and never return . . . in fact, the best dancers are the older ones, they the ones who
keep our traditions alive. They teach their children, but the children not very interested.
They only do these things when there are important visitors, so I don't know
what going happen when the older ones die o f. . . .

Shadowed by soaring rockhills—if the god Ogun sought congenial habitation, it would be nowhere else—they danced for us the sedate, ceremonial steps of the Egba, and fed us dishes whose recipes had been carefully preserved from the vanished home. These were the life exiles, generation exiles, those who had died to a faraway homeland and awakened to a new earth, exiles to whom the call of origin had thinned over time and dissipated into the winds of passage, drifting with mists from the cascading waters of Bekuta rockhills and evaporating the same way. It vanished wistfully into the territory of legends, of the deities of mountains and valleys, was fleshed out in purely performance modes that increasingly underscored its now vestigial status. Recollection stepped gingerly into temporary recovery spaces of town halls or school fields, ever submissive to the present. The exigencies of that present—careers, economic survival, politics, and the rest—reinforced their supremacy over memory or sentiment. After each emergence, the adaptive masks and costumes of origin reentered their normal abode of camphor-saturated boxes and shelves—until the next festive or commemorative occasion.

Not the sheerest thought of that vivid state of suspended animation, exile, had I entertained on my encounter with that settlement in the Year of Mandela's Release. I was paying a call on family and preferred not to see the sparse population of Bekuta as exiles but simply as one of the many branches of the Egba—a clan of wanderers who had vanished into the forests one day and could not readily find their way back. Regarding my own future, exile was simply not on the divination board.

Three years later, all had changed. A new dictator, Sani Abacha, an identical agenda—the perpetuation of military rule—but a different cast of mind, and with an increasingly ruthless, ever-widening network to act it out. The thought of real death—not the remediable conceit now of exile as a mimic death— became an insistent, strident companion. As I set out on one mission after another, in pursuit of what surely, simply had to be the vital key to repossession of one's real space, my mind took refuge in Bekuta. It was not a morbid condition, just a matter-of-fact possibility that stared me in the face. Agitated by the thought that some misguided friends or family would take my remains to Nigeria, I announced openly that, if the worst happened, I did not want Abacha's triumphant feet galumphing over my body and would settle for the surrogate earth of Jamaica. And I began to make preparations to buy a patch of land in Bekuta.

FATE, I CONCLUDED, lured me back to Jamaica for the next, determining visit in 1995, barely two years into the exile that followed the ascent of Sani Abacha. The vehicle was
The Beatification of Area Boy,
a play that was originally intended for Lagos but was now headed for production in the land of the Rastas. Bekuta beckoned. My first free weekend in Kingston found me motoring through the hairpin bends of the mountain road toward Westmoreland. I could not wait to transfer the deed to my cactus patch to Bekuta.

Motoring with me was Gerry Feil, my American friend and filmmaker, whose bulk belied his restless energy, with permanently irritated features that grumpily matured with age into a passable double for the patriarch of the Flintstone family. He arrived in Kingston with his daughter, Anna, titled my wine-daughter, a special relationship that came from her ceremonial induction into wine from childhood, a rite of passage that is de rigueur in my own household, where the mother has a choice of being a voluntary accomplice, is herself immobilized by a generous dosage, or else is locked in the toilet until it's all over. Such sustained devotion to the cause of wine must have been mystically transmitted to the oenophile nobility of France and resulted in my most treasured recognition, to which even the Nobel takes second place. During a lecture visit to the University of Tours, the vice chancellor and I were dragged off to a deep underground
cave,
a multichambered grotto. There, over feeble protests at my unworthiness, I was inducted into the Commanderie de la Dive Bouteille de Bourgeuil et de St. Nicolas de Bourgeuil, a centuries-old order that boasts as members Rabelais and Voltaire, among other illustrious humanists. It was definitely the highlight of my career.