You Must Set Forth at Dawn (76 page)

I realize that the “him” is none other than me. I had earlier felt a hand on my throat, desperately clutching at my windpipe and attempting to choke me. It has happened twice already and I peeled off the hand, not even thinking that it was the same hand, but those of different people trying to save themselves from falling or being crushed. But I had felt the choke hold, so when I feel the hand again, I grasp it and turn to look for its owner. The next moment the hand is torn from mine and I catch a faint glimpse of its owner being borne halfway down—no, not deliberately, simply from the sheer weight of the crowd. The gray “French” suit looks familiar—I last saw it in the VIP lounge, but the chaos is so overwhelming that I cannot recall who was wearing it. Suddenly a voice rises in song, strongly, taming the din:

Kaabo o, ku abo
Kaabo o, ku abo
Omo a b'ile soro, omo a b'ile soro
K'ilke y'anu, ka a bo
⁶³

 

And something gets through to me at last. It is a song I last heard in my paternal hometown, Isara, the song with which I was received at the entrance to the town and led in procession to the oba's palace, where the
oba
and his chiefs and priests had laid out a triumphal gathering for the returning “son of the soil.” At that unforgettable welcome by the town, even the highest of the chieftaincy hierarchy had been caught unprepared for a unique moment, very rare in occurrence. This was when the potent
egungun,
the most numinous and dreaded of the ancestral guardian spirits of the town, emerged. As it whirled around, it made a sudden leap toward the table of honor and, in one swirling movement, enveloped me in its garments so that I vanished completely from the sight of mortals. For what seemed an eternity, I was shrouded, sucked into the dark abode of ancestors. One moment I was watching, a spectator like the rest, and suddenly I was no one, drained of all palpability, transported from plain daylight into the immensity of an eclipse, from within which the voice of the
egungun
rose in spells and incantations, invoking blessings from the living, the dead, and the unborn. This face, whose features I could not discern in the total darkness of the charged tent, chewed on a kola nut and squirted its grainy juice into my face, unhitched a gourd from within the recesses of its linings, sloshed the contents into its mouth and spat it onto my face, then unleashed a stream of invocations that seemed to emerge from the very bowels of the earth. Then the voluminous tent was lifted and the
egungun
rose to its height and raced out of this charged circle, headed toward its sanctuary, acknowledging no one else, not even the oba, his handlers in hot pursuit, clearing the way to ensure that he did not touch any other being until he had completely melted from human sight. It was a sudden, breathless emanation, and it left the gathering paralyzed with awe.

This song, now filtered through the enveloping twilight, was one that I would permanently associate with my reception, living, into the bosom of the ancestors. Its accent differed in the mundane setting of an airport, but it swept me back to that day when, without being an initiate, with no warning and no self-preparation, I partook of communion with the deepest mysteries of earth, and the munificence of the ancestors.

Omo a b'ile soro, omo a b'ile soro
K'ilke y'anu, ka a bo...

 

Oh yes, finally, at this homecoming, I feel deeply stirred, but the tangle of arms and bodies brings me back to the present, struggling not to be dragged down and probably inducted—literally this time—into the realm of the departed as we battle our way to the waiting vehicles. Finding some hidden energy from nowhere, I succeed in forcing a stop even as I am borne onward, my feet now barely touching the ground. I find my voice and take back some control of the situation.

A despairing appeal for order: “Listen, please! All of you, listen to me! I want nobody to get hurt. No one must get hurt today, not at this homecoming. So please, stand aside, and let us move toward the car.”

Someone loudly demands that I should address them.

I belt out a few sentences above the din, and somehow, we make it to the line of cars. In front of the jeep, I see the wearer of the gray French suit being resuscitated. It is Arthur Nwankwo, it was he whose hand had been at my throat, clutching for support as he was overcome by waves of dizziness. Finally, he had collapsed and fainted, fortunately being rescued before he was trampled upon by the crowd. I am hustled into Olu Agunloye's jeep, but still the crowd will not let go. There are hands banging on the windows and clinging to fenders, bodies splayed on the hood. Again, the feeling of déjà vu, recollecting the nightmare drive from Idi-iroko to Ipaja during the demonstrations to terminate Babangida's rule. The police are frustrated. I open my window, thinking to shake a hand or two—a kind of symbolic good-bye for now. A great mistake, and I curse myself for failing to learn from the earlier grabs at my arm. This time, I come really close to dispensing with a ligament or socket—I am not sure which, but something definitely feels as if it has given. Then the arm is somehow extricated and the vehicle takes off. I sink back into the obscurity of the jeep with relief.

No, there is no question about it this time—at long last, my viscera yield and concede:
I am back in the place I never should have left.

1
A quadruped of the deer/antelope family.

2
Same as above.

3
A large specimen of the rodent family.

4
See
Aké: The Years of Childhood.

5
Indicating the educated type—from an office clerk to a doctor, lawyer, professor, etc.

6
A fast-flying wildfowl of the quail/partridge family.

7
The name of a character from the author's play
Kongi's Harvest
that was in turn adopted by others as his nickname.

8
Bravado.

9
The Fearless Hunter in the Forest of a Thousand Demons

10
Nigerian painter and sculptor.

11
Yoruba deities.

12
Diviner, priest of divination.

13
The Divination Corpus.

14
People of Bekuta.

15
Yoruba traditional social music.

16
A weird, unique being.

17
Tie-dyed and woven textiles.

18
A gin distilled from wine of the palm tree.

19
A beer made from millet.

20
In 1992, the memoirs of a former colonial officer, Harold Smith, were ready for publication but suppressed by the British government. The author sent me the manuscript, in which he revealed that he had been ordered by the Home Office to take part in the rigging of the 1959 elections. In his own words, “It was the British who taught Nigerians the art of rigging.”

21
“The heaven is falling, the heaven is falling,” is hardly a one-man preoccupation.

22
“You are a weird being. A weird being.”

23
See Kayode Eso, The Mystery Gunman.

24
“Let everyone go his own way.”

25
These include my own in
The Man Died,
where a number of individuals still needed to be protected.

26
“They shall not pass!”

27
Fried bean-cake.

28
My Command
(Ibadan: Heinemann, 1980).

29
That is, what then developed was that the follower found himself followed by another follower, and so on.

30
The con man fakes death, but another con man will bury him.

31
See
The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka.

32
“You don't know what you did?”

33
“Women at the festive hearth.”

34
A wide-mouthed metal cooking pot.

35
The northern version of the
agbada,
usually made of stiffer material.

36
A succubus.

37
“I shall show appropriate gratitude.”

38
“Ogun is my witness!”

39
I read no death in his eyes.

40
Literally, “a stubborn head.”

41
The word of mystic potency; the invocatory pronouncement that brings things into being.

42
“Incredible! Was it our Wole Soyinka that did this to us? You mean he actually snatched the head of state right from under our noses?”

43
An energetic dance of the Eastern Igbo people.

44
Nigerian slang: to breathe life into a good story.

45
“What do you say we take off for Paris for a quick spree and forget these ragamuffins who call themselves rulers?”

46
Yoruba god of mischief, the unpredictable factor.

47
Literally, “one who dies with the king”; an unregistered power courtier.

48
“It was death that curled up the supple fish.”

49
Boss; master.

50
“Master Wole, Lagos is not good.”

51
“Lagos is in chaos.”

52
“You have to chase him out for us.”

53
“They recognize no one.”

54
A flat corn-and-coconut candy.

55
Local popcorn.

56
Curses.

57
A corn mealie, popular in northern Nigeria.

† An eastern Nigerian delicacy made from the chopped-up head of a sheep or goat. ‡ “Prof, this radio that we lack, it is causing us much grief.”

58
Farina made from cassava.

59
The local name for an all-purpose jute bag, later notorious for underhand dealings.

60
The Fearless Hunter in the Forest of a Thousand Demons—trans. W.S.

61
A masquerade of the male secret cult.

62
M. Wesley Swearingen,
FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose
(Boston: South End Press, 1995).

63
“Welcome, welcome / You who speak and the earth / Opens its mouth in wonder / Welcome.”

Acknowledgments

FIRST ACKNOWLEDGMENT GOES TO MY RELAY OF EDITORS, ANN GODOFF, Ileene Smith, and Will Murphy. To this heroic triad, I extend, additionally, one hand in sympathy, and the other as a sign of exoneration for any flaws in this tract, since I am quite certain that these are the result of my own decisions.

For data checks, I am deeply indebted to Kunle Ajibade, Tunde Awosanmi, Laolu Akande, Etienne Galle, my French translator, and Bankole Olayebi, my Nigerian editor. They have had to compensate for the diary I have never kept and for a kaleidoscopic mental gadget that sometimes pretends to the function of memory, not to mention the loss of useful documentation, the result of raids on my home during the Nigerian season of dictatorship insanity or simply of a peripatetic existence.

My gratitude to the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, and the International Institute of Modern Letters, University of Nevada, for conditions of attachment that enabled me to devote some time—in between global crisscrossings—to another biographical undertaking, one which, in my more rational moments, I had sworn I would not extend beyond “the age of innocence,” as delimited in
Aké: The Years of Childhood.

Lastly, it would be churlish not to acknowledge the industry of those assiduous scribblers whose monographs, conference papers, and so forth, on the life of this subject finally goaded me into abandoning a rational decision: not to pursue the task of recollection and reflection beyond the age of innocence— calculated at roughly eleven and a bit. While, unlike those authoritative voices, I still hesitate to claim definitive knowledge of the subject, I can at least flaunt the advantage of having lived with him all his life, without even a day off, which is far longer than has any other being on the literary planet.

 

WOLE SOYINKA is a writer of global stature, the first African ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Soyinka was imprisoned in Nigeria for his opposition to dictatorship. He is the author of
Aké: The Years of Childhood
and
Climate of Fear,
based on the prestigious Reith Lectures he delivered on the BBC. He now divides his time among Southern California, the United Kingdom, and his homeland.

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