You Must Set Forth at Dawn (61 page)

Always with a succession of tightened jaws, grimaces, silent imprecations, moments of deflation, elation, imprisoned laughter—well, one could always chuckle afterward, but at the time... hardly a laughing matter.

The Germans were a mixed bag. The junior minister of home affairs, who had the attitude of an undertaker deprived of a corpse, had been unbearably curt. My visit was not even so much on behalf of our own struggle as in solidarity with our German chapter; NALICON had begun to sprout chapters in several countries. The chapter had joined forces with a group of Nigerians who had fled—or claimed to have fled—Abacha's persecution and had entered Germany illegally. They had sought sanctuary in a church, backed by its servants of God and their followers, but the earthly ministry was determined to evict and deport them. Our reception by this thin-faced undertaker hovered between diplomatic incivility and downright rudeness, the ultimate and unpardonable expression of which was—according to our German-domiciled Nigerian liaison—his failure to offer us coffee and biscuits! Knowing nothing of these protocols, I was still left with his vocal nuance and body language—and were they eloquent!

I responded by signaling an end to the meeting. I summoned my best Humphrey Bogart lopsided smile, got up with my “entourage” from our now clearly confrontational side of the table—the setting appeared to be always: government on one side, delegation on the other, (missing) line of coffee/tea/ sparkling water and biscuits in the middle—and announced that there appeared to be no point in continuing with the session. My relief was unbounded on discovering that our Nigerian facilitator was even less of a diplomat than I; the missing coffee and biscuits, he insisted, demanded a stronger response, a total diplomatic rupture, maybe a challenge to a duel at dawn, sabers drawn on the banks of the Rhine.

Germany did make up for the boorish undertaker, however. The first opposition radio, Radio Freedom, enabled by the dissident general Alani Akinrinade, had been set up in early 1996 and was functioning inside Nigeria. Its range was limited, but it nettled the regime sufficiently for it to secure the expertise of the German Dornier company in the effort to track down the source of transmission. I flew to Germany. The foreign minister himself, Klaus Kinkel, was more than generous and affable when I again invaded the Rhineland—protocol of coffee/tea/biscuits being anything but lacking. Kinkel, whose grasp of profound issues was rather disparaged, we learned, by his compatriots, displayed an appreciable sense of humor when I reassured him that I had not come to deprive the German company of legitimate business. However, forget that biblical promise “Seek, and ye shall find,” I urged. This is a time to
seek, but not to
find.
Take Abacha's money and contribute a small percentage to our movement. The minister chuckled loud and long; he guaranteed the former but declared that it was beyond his ministerial powers to make a business enterprise part with hard-earned money. Still, through Kinkel's influence—or at least with a nod in that direction, I am persuaded—two of Germany's foremost foundations made contributions toward some of our logistical requirements, in addition to their own efforts at assisting some of our younger, imperiled writers.

Contradictions in the actions of some foreign governments remained baffling. An especially annoying instance was the plight of Cornelius Adebayo, a former governor of Kwara state in northwestern Nigeria. Having barely eluded a hit squad from Abacha, he headed for Ivory Coast, where he applied to enter Canada. But he found himself stuck for more than a year while both exile groups made strenuous representations, putting pressure on the Canadian government to allow him in, assuring its officials of Adebayo's bona fides. For an otherwise supportive government, this was a game of impenetrable ambiguity and cruelty that left a fugitive stranded in a place that was meant to be a temporary stop. It was incomprehensible, since the same Canadian government had shown itself so uncompromisingly hostile to the Abacha regime that it had been forced to close its embassy in Nigeria!

In many ways, the diplomatic field remained part of the battlefront, and once an eruption of that battle took place in a rather odd way. Long after the event, echoes of a day of—what else could have been responsible?—paranormal attack would assail my ears, a day when turbines of a hydroelectric power churned uncontrollably, pursued me from meeting to meeting with commissions of the European Parliament, vindicating my instinctive designation of water as an unruly tenant of the human intestines, especially its aerated version and when taken on an empty stomach! Never had a delegation's leader felt so mortified as a swallowed concertina or Scottish bagpipes insisted on participating in serious exchanges. All stomachs do rumble occasionally, but this was a marathon! In vain did I contract my stomach muscles, change seating positions, cough energetically, punch the offending guts surreptitiously under the table—all that provoked was a subversive will of its own, while my interlocutors did their best to pretend that a seismic event was not taking place right there, across the table. And it was not one of those one-off days when the work is done at one meeting, two, or three, all humanely spaced out. No, it had to be the day of the serial killer rounds, when one was ferried from room to room, from building to building, with little recovery time in between. Nothing, not even a quick lunch, could silence that windbag until after the last of the day's engagements. I was left to wonder if Abacha's long arm had finally caught up with me, since we knew that he engaged a round-the-clock squad of marabouts both to guarantee his survival and to pursue his enemies across the waters. No other explanation was possible, since the purpose was to undermine the talks—and this was evidently a stomach in demonic possession!

Even before the return of Abiola to the country, to be followed by his arrest, the United States had been a primary target of the opposition's diplomacy push. Less than a year into my exile and soon after the birth of NALICON, I requested the U.S. government to assist in dismantling the Korean-trained killer squad set up by Sani Abacha and placed under the command of the notorious Major Hamza al-Mustapha. Our contacts in Abuja—code-named “Longa Throat”—had supplied details of their secret location, a nondescript hotel in a crummy section of Abuja, their methods of operation, and a draft list of their targets. An overseas section was also being assembled; hence the resolve of the regime to establish consulates in Atlanta, where I was teaching, and also Houston, which had also been identified as a den of Nigerian dissidents. I passed the details on to Susan Rice, then at the Africa desk of the State Department, requesting assistance in dismantling or at least destabilizing the killers' operations. Not long after, the squad struck down Alfred Rewane, a close associate and backer of Abiola, right in his bedroom, shot him through a pillow placed over his head. They had gained entry into the protected home by using a fake delivery van that claimed to have come from Rewane's own factory. Kudirat, the combative wife of that ill-fated tycoon politician Abiola, had been another prominent victim, shot in a busy Lagos street. A number of other assassinations and disappearances have since been traced to this sinister force, including the failed attempt on the life of the proprietor of
The Guardian
newspapers, Alex Ibru. He survived but lost an eye and some fingers and remained badly traumatized for years.

Susan Rice, together with a fortyish, serious-faced colleague, Marc DeShaezer, had been part of a triumvirate with whom NALICON maintained direct contact in the White House. Occasionally, Anthony Lake, Clinton's national security adviser, would wander into his subordinate's office as well, as if by accident. A rather thoughtful, intellectual-looking type, Lake would listen intently to the discussion for some moments. Later, we met privately in his office. Rice and DeShaezer leaned significantly to the anti-Abacha cause, while the third, whose name my mind stubbornly refuses to retain, was insecure, pugnacious, and a miserable listener. I distrusted him on instinct, even before we had a sharp exchange. With no attempt to disguise his resentment, he groused that everyone expected the United States to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. I reminded him that most of the world's raging infernos had leaped from U.S. and European campfires. As the U.S. policy appeared to begin to shift toward accommodation of our enemy, I fantasized my invisible self slipping into his stuffy little office to catch him working on sneaky memos that advised against us, slipping them in the dead of night under the office door of his boss without the knowledge of his colleagues.

Rice exhibited a quiet intelligence and a deceptive guilelessness that could easily throw one off guard. Once, when we met her in her office after a spate of bombings began at home, she looked me in the eye and asked, without any preliminaries, if I were behind the campaign. The directness was unexpected, but I returned the look and told her no. The subject of violence having been broached, however, I asked her in turn—emphasizing that it was a purely hypothetical question—what the position of her government would be if the opposition found that it had no choice but to take up armed struggle. Not to plant bombs all over the place, but suppose we asked the government to open up some abandoned facilities in the United States for the training of volunteers— such mothballed facilities were scattered all over the American landscape— what would be the likely response? She appeared to mull that over for some moments, but in fact, the answer was already obvious on her face—after the Iran-
contra
affair, the United States was not overanxious to support any acts of insurgency, real or hypothetical. I imagined not, I replied, and there the matter ended.

It was, most ironically, South Africa that handed us our bitterest defeat. Civil society—the labor union, writers' groups, Chamber of Commerce, the individual institution known as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and other public leaders—remained staunch, but the attitude of the government slid from lukewarm to the level, in one instance at least, of sabotage. This took place during efforts to weld all outside-based opposition groups into one. Toward that end, a congress was organized in Johannesburg in 1996, on the invitation of civil society. Kayode Fayemi and Olaokun Soyinka, my son, shuttled between London and South Africa, consulting with civic leaders, government officials, and representatives of the ruling party, the ANC. The go-ahead was given by the South African government. Passports were gathered and sent in a bunch to embassies in London and Washington for visas.

At the beginning, all went smoothly. Then, with no explanation other than that “instructions had been received,” the London embassy not only stopped issuing further visas but became passionately attached to the passports when we moved to retrieve them. The timing was nearly fatal. Delegates had taken leaves of absence, wound up their affairs, and geared themselves up for the journey. Some had purchased their own cut-price tickets, nonrefundable. We could not change the dates. I turned to Norway for help, specifically to Jan Egeland, the secretary for foreign affairs, with whom I was already acquainted. The spontaneous response of the Norwegian government easily counted as one of the very high moments of our embattled existence. Visas were issued in record time, a number of flight tickets donated to the effort. Our friends in South Africa would not accept a shift of venue, however, refusing to accept a surrender of
their
democratic rights to the political whims of their government. It was a matter of principle, they said, and insisted that the conference be held as planned.

South African visas being already in the possession of half the delegates, there was only one solution: we ended up holding the conference simultaneously at two venues. I presided over the South African group in Johannesburg on the first day, while a colleague, Professor Ropo Sekoni, held the fort in Oslo. I then flew overnight to Norway and chaired the final session. A two-way flow of faxes and telephone lines united the two groups, making it possible to make joint decisions. When it was all over, I was left wondering whether it had all been a merely imagined event or one that had actually taken place. The minutes, resolutions, plan of action, and lists of participants, fortunately, testified that it had. Over and above mere records, however, was the testimony of the human body in silent protest—on the flight back to the United States, I remained without recollection of time passing, without any awareness of the plane taking off or landing.

I HAD HARDLY recovered from that exercise when, thanks to a meeting with the South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, a former prisoner of apartheid, we found an opening through which we could advance the newly unified organization from the beginnings made at the Johannesburg/Oslo meetings. The George Soros–sponsored Goree Institute in Dakar, of which Breyten was a board member, agreed to facilitate the second meeting of the umbrella group, now going by the name of the United Democratic Front of Nigeria (UDFN). That gathering took place over strong diplomatic representations by the Abacha regime. The Senegalese government replied that it did not make a habit of intervening in “cultural” meetings, which, to the best of its knowledge, this was meant to be, since it was sponsored by the Goree Institute.

It was a moment to be savored, the solidarity of the Senegalese government with the democratic cause and the coming together of twenty-seven organizations spread all over the globe, from Australia to Canada. Alas, the affliction I sought to escape in NADECO traveled with the luggage of a handful—a mere quartet, American-based—of the delegates. It served to increase my bewilderment at the craving for position and power in human disposition, one that seems especially absurd when an intervention in the fate of millions is initiated from the position of a weak challenger. It proved to be a near death at nativity; a movement that had been formed to liberate a nation from the very bane of power found itself enmeshed in a tawdry tussle for position.