You Must Set Forth at Dawn (63 page)

The morning after our meeting was one that I awaited with dread, but it was a solemn obligation, not one that could be evaded. One should
see,
even if one had already imagined. We were driven around to two or more of the “museums” that had been created to document the killing rage of Rwanda, testaments yet again to the unfathomable propensity of man that leads him to butcher and mutilate his own kind. Among such memorials was the optimistically named Mandela's Park. There were others that were simply plain fields, with rows upon rows of white crosses. We visited a hut stacked high with skulls, hundreds and hundreds of skulls, some with bullet holes, others with the unmistakable gash of the machete, a curator calmly dusting the exhumed skulls and skeletons. The most poignant was a church into which the victims had fled, several deliberately lured with the promise of sanctuary, before the Hutu army, assisted by the vigilante killers—the
intehamwe
—was summoned. The bodies, now skeletons, were left exactly where they had fallen. These were the clothed skeletons, and the stories of their deaths were superfluous. The most enduring image of all was a baby's skull with a panga still embedded in it.

THESE WERE NOT, of course, victims of war but of organized butchery; nevertheless, the lessons remained sobering and apposite, reinforcing a constant openness on the part of our opposition groups to dialogue at every turn. Not that NALICON or UDFN ever made direct overtures to the Abacha regime—any such initiative, we knew, would only have provided material for hilarious propaganda. To every leader whom we did meet, however, we took pains to stress that same message—that the Nigerian crisis could still be resolved by dialogue— and we ensured that we did not turn our backs on any such opportunity.

Abacha's first reach toward us came early, toward the end of 1995, through Vice Air Marshal Ibrahim Alfa, my beanpole friend who had revealed the details of Abacha's visit to him on the eve of the 1993 coup. Alfa's message was direct: “Abacha wants to negotiate. He says, choose your time and place, send your representatives, and he'll send his.” Ibrahim took back my answer: “First, free all your prisoners.” For months I heard nothing further. Then came an apologetic message from Ibrahim, advising me to ignore any further invitations, not just from him but from any other direction. “The man is not serious,” he said, “he has other plans, and I hate being used for a charade. He's only pandering to public opinion, wants to be able to claim that he's made overtures to the opposition.” Ibrahim resigned his commission as go-between and ambassador extraordinare and returned the use of the jet plane assigned to him from Abacha's fleet.

There was a falling-out. Abacha had Ibrahim's bank—Alpha Bank—listed among “distressed banks” and imposed impossible conditions for its recertification. He attacked Ibrahim's other businesses and sought to pauperize him for his refusal to openly endorse the dictator's regime. They had a confrontation, during which Ibrahim protested, “Sani, why are you doing this to me? You know my bank is solvent.” Abacha feigned surprise, swore that he had nothing to do with the harassments and would look into the mistake. Ibrahim read the signs, withdrew from his normal Lagos/Abuja beat, and retired to the safety of his village in the North. He died not long after. It was impossible to determine if his death had come naturally or been assisted.

The second and final overture, several months later, was the stuff of melodrama. It involved a famous “seer” who had warned the superstitious leader that his salvation lay in finding a common ground with the opposition, specifically with W.S., who, he warned, was protected by “a certain aura.” Abacha must be credited with an evenhandedness in this respect: he dealt with both Muslim marabouts and Christian prophets, plus a sprinkling of indeterminate psychic consultants whose gory prescriptions had provided some of the content of my play
King Baabu.
So hush-hush was the operation with the “seer” that the religious leader was persuaded to host some kind of church convention. Abacha's secret service personnel then dressed up as reverend delegates and went into secret sessions with the “seer” to decide on the best approaches to the archdissident. They reported back to their boss, and the search then began for an emissary who could be trusted by the designated opposition leader. Someone remembered that my son-in-law, Tola Onijala, was a diplomat in the Foreign Service— and that was how Tola became the dictator's emissary to me in Washington.

He brought the same message as Ibrahim Alfa: a meeting at a venue of our own choosing and without preconditions. Again I made the obvious response: before I would even bring the proposal before the UDFN and NADECO, there had to be one precondition, and that was the release of all prisoners. Tola argued that my purpose was being defeated by such insistence. I warned him— in confidence—of Ibrahim Alfa's assessment of these overtures, an assessment that I fully shared. We had no time for cosmetic meetings that would then be presented to the world as serious attempts at resolution.

Tola held on to his conviction that Abacha's proposed meeting offered the best venue in which to present such demands. If we insisted on that precondition and the meeting was aborted, the nation—and the world—would blame the opposition, and the prisoners would remain Abacha's hostages. Finally I said, “All right, we'll make it a test. He's merely attempting to buy time to consolidate his rule, but take back the message that we've agreed to meet without preconditions. Our representatives will be ready whenever he is.”

That was the last we ever heard of Abacha's accommodational intent. No one in the opposition lost a second's sleep or let down his or her guard in deference to Abacha's approaches. On his part, at some moment that was difficult to determine but was definitely after these overtures, Sani Abacha raised the stakes in his assault on all opposition. Officers whose loyalties were deemed suspect fell victim to attacks by “armed robbers,” while others, like one luckless Customs officer, Omitola, a cousin of the fugitive general Alani Akinrinade, were disposed of in bomb explosions. After the death of Alani's cousin, his office was raided, and, naturally, bomb-making equipment was “discovered” in all its sophisticated glory. Originality was given scant consideration, since a check bearing Akinrinade's signature was also found within the car—just as a copy of Wole Soyinka's
The Man Died
had lain beside the body of the journalist Bagauda Kaltho in the bathroom of the Kaduna Hotel. It was a season of maximum saturation of every known elimination device, including, as would later be discovered, poisoning, which, in all likelihood, was the cause of a number of sudden, mysterious deaths, especially within the military.

No one was excessively surprised when, after what he must have deemed a decent interval, the no-nonsense, “incorruptible” General Buhari agreed to serve Sani Abacha, manning the so-called Petroleum Trust Fund with a free hand to dispense millions as he pleased. At home and abroad, the specter of assassination hovered over every mind. Plots were manu-factured to resolve the nightmare of resistance through the route of judicial lynching, and opposition figures were rounded up, cynically accused of responsibility for the assassination
of their own colleagues
!

As for the external opposition that continued to elude his roving assasins, Abacha unleashed a novel weapon—not original, but certainly unprecedented in its unprincipled inventiveness and its venomous intensity. He resorted to the weapon of slander.

A Digression on the Power of Slander

The spate of assassinations intensified, but assassinations were not only of one kind. Protecting ourselves against the obvious, we had overlooked the other kind—that of character. Not that it mattered; that is one assault weapon against which no human individual or organization has ever invented an adequate response. The Sani Abacha propaganda unit went into action and commenced its toxic rampage with the launching of the most virulent publication in the history of propaganda, the cynically titled
Conscience International.

My son Ilemakin was the first to alert me to the existence of the journal; he had seen it on sale in a London magazine store that specialized in off-mainstream and foreign journals. My picture decorated the cover, which of course was designed to attract the curiosity of Nigerian, and indeed African, readers. Within Nigeria itself, it was not on sale but was distributed free. Once, at a high-society wedding in Ibadan, a few dozen copies were unloaded on unsuspecting guests, who eagerly grabbed their copies and took them home, only to discover the putrid contents.

Each issue was devoted, nearly exclusively, to one prominent opposition figure at a time. I had the dubious honor of launching the series: Vol. 1, No. 1. At the very first glance, my mind leaped in the direction of the anti-Semitic product of the czarist era that was later absorbed into the armory of Nazi propaganda,
The Secret Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
That feeling of empathy with an ancient, visceral violation did little to lift, in moments when I recollected its contents, the mottled cloud that would suddenly envelop my innermost space, even in the midst of the most energetic public activities.
The
Protocols
had been directed at an entire race of millions; this was dedicated to a single individual, meant to be absorbed by just one human psyche without a dissipation in numbers.

The journal was produced under the direction of a Chief Abiola Ogundokun, an infamous politician who had served under Shehu Shagari, president of the nation between 1979 and 1983. Ogundokun's real claim to fame was that he had jumped bail in the United States after being charged with rape in a Baltimore hotel. He returned home a fugitive in disgrace—but not in the eyes of Shehu Shagari, who promptly made him a director of a government-owned chain of newspapers. Thereafter he was allocated one hatchet job after another, a series of dirty undertakings that even some of the notorious enforcers of his political party, the NPN, would not touch. Year after year, regime after regime, Ogundokun's career underwent the usual ups and downs until Abacha's talent scouts spotted him in a condition of abject penury. He was clothed, fed, set up in an office in Abuja, and generously supplied with funds. His assignment: to publish a journal of unprecedented grossness in the history of the Nigerian yellow press, as an offensive against all real and imagined threats to Abacha's regime.

Collaborating with Abacha's point man was the similarly qualified Major R.O.A. Salawu, who had been drummed out of a state organ that owed its existence to my initiative—the first Road Safety Corps in Nigeria, probably in all of the African continent. The Corps constituted my “citizen response” to the insensate slaughter on the Nigerian roads, especially between Ibadan and Ile-Ife, where I lectured, a veritable “slaughter slab” that devoured my colleagues and students and made a mockery of my efforts to fill the latter's brains with knowledge. Major Salawu, alas, proved to have been more preoccupied in the nonhumanitarian aspects of the undertaking and eventually found himself, at my insistence, charged in court with more than thirty counts of stealing, forgery, conspiracy, and so on. Then came the Abacha coup and the trial was stalled, and stalled, and eventually hiccupped to a stop. The thieving major was mysteriously reabsorbed into the same organization, which, being the brain-child of the now-exiled dissident, had become a nest of subversion in the dictator's mind. The Corps was undermined, its autonomy and public integrity badly compromised. It was only a matter of time before Salawu teamed up with his soul mate, Chief Abiola Ogundokun, in the service of the greatest reprobate of them all, General Sani Abacha.

In a lighter mood, I sometimes speak of the earth-shaking achievements of fellow Nobel laureates whose discoveries bestow palpable luster to the Nobel directory of recognition. Some have solved the riddle of DNA, others have transformed communication technology, yet others have found the cure for hitherto incurable diseases, and so on and on. None of them, however, except this writer, I boast, has ever waxed a musical record. (For all I know, this may be an unfounded claim, but it makes a good story!) That record, an LP, was titled
Unlimited Liability Company.
It was made in 1983, at the height of the profligate rule of the National Party of Nigeria. One solitary verse in the lyrics, in the vernacular pidgin English, was devoted to the U.S. escapade of Ogundokun:

Another Director is a Wanted Man
He commit rape for Washington D.C.
He run come home, you give 'am bigger post
As Director of a chain of newspapers

 

The randy chief had never forgotten nor forgiven.

The least putrid ingredient in this toxic broth—from which the rest can be imagined—was the invention of a daughter, then twenty-seven years old, whom W.S. was supposed to have fathered on one of his students. So thorough was the propaganda work that a physical daughter was launched, albeit furtively, on society. A most garrulous young lady, she visited members of my family, circle of friends, and colleagues, an ex-governor or two, and others to advertise her parentage. Obviously not so well coached, however, or perhaps weaned on pulp novelettes, she volunteered a slight embellishment: she was the daughter of a housemaid in my family employ, and knowledge of her true paternity had come through a deathbed revelation by her mother. While we battled Abacha from abroad, the young lady, named Yinka—to rhyme with Soyinka, perhaps?—was welcomed among the well-to-do, ate free in restaurants, partied in discos and nightclubs, all expenses on the house, and generally lived off a land peopled mostly by Sani Abacha's opponents. Her claims did not alarm me as much as the dangers posed by her infiltration of my family and circle of colleagues. I took action as soon as I learned of this new “family member” and caused a letter to be circulated through her known haunts, though this did little to stem her freeloading career.