You Must Set Forth at Dawn (8 page)

But I never thought of backing out at that point. I had come this far, I had decided on the training, and in any case, the juggernaut was rolling and I was strapped within it. To the two officers conducting the proceedings, this was purely routine. There were several more of us to put through the same ritual, and I guessed that neither was really listening to the responses we recruits were uttering. So I put on my thickest Yoruba accent, ensuring that nothing intelligible emerged from my throat. The administrator of the royal oath naturally assumed that this African could not really cope with the Queen's English—that is, if he was listening at all. As if it mattered in the slightest! My signature in the register was an affirmation of the oath I had taken—legal and binding! Still, I clung to the crumb of consolation that the oath had not truly passed over my tongue, which, as soon as I left the induction room, I proceeded to rinse, with others, in the bar with a glass of celebratory sherry—cost threepence, subsidized mess price.

Now came payment time, premature and politically unthinkable! I packed up my supply kit, tucked it into the farthest corner of the neglected attic of my lodging in Ash Grove—where, for all I know, it may still be gathering dust today—and vanished. One thing I was sure of: there was bound to be further correspondence before I was press-ganged and sent to camp, formally arrested and court-martialed, and/or deported. I sent off a letter saying that a mistake had been made. I am a citizen of Nigeria, I explained, not of Great Britain. There was silence from wherever the menace had emerged. Later on, I discovered that the deployment office may have had a legal question on its hands. If I had been a native of Lagos, it would have been a different matter. Lagos was a colony, and its citizens carried a kind of quasi–British citizen passport which made them colonial subjects of Britain. I, on the other hand, being from the interior, belonged to the second-class citizenship of the extended British Empire. As such I was a “protected” being, not a colonial subject. It was the only time I felt grateful to be classified as a second-class citizen.

The war soon ended, mercifully, and Her Majesty's army lost all interest in me. I would not smell any form of training until some months later, when the Soviet Union, taking advantage of the West's misadventure in Suez, invaded Hungary, and a volunteer student training camp opened in Nottingham in the North of England. I signed up immediately. This was closer to the kind of training I needed. I must state this clearly: I did not intend to go into Hungary to fight, but there were support functions that I felt I could perform for the cause of those nationalists in return for my training. A black face would be far too conspicuous in the midst of such a war, and sympathetic though I was to the Hungarian national cause and the right to take up arms to repel a bully— even an ideologically progressive one—I had my priorities and could not really see how a black face would be justified in slinging Molotov cocktails in the streets of Budapest. The prospect of getting killed in a strange land that I knew only from history books and for its robust red wine Egri Bikaver struck me as grotesque—a black festering corpse alone in a snow-clad street, all other casualties vanishing into the protective coloring of their natural environment? On the other hand, that prospect was balanced by the lure of acquiring the experience of urban warfare, which, according to the news bulletins, was largely what the Hungarian nationalists were waging against superior forces—Molotov cocktails against tanks, street-to-street fighting. It looked like a perfect rehearsal opportunity for what we had conjured up—
Destination, Johannesburg!

Given the unpredictable situation in Hungary, the uncertainty of my position resulted in my writing a rare letter to Essay—my father—taking him into my confidence. It seemed only fair, in case I was wounded, taken prisoner, or worse. Only years later did I find it curious that I ever imagined that his response would be at least sympathetic, albeit disapproving. Instead, it was scathingly dismissive. I could picture him seated at his desk, his pen moving swiftly and noisily over the lined sheets: “You were sent over there to study. In any case, charity begins at home, so if you feel inclined to jeopardise your studies by succumbing to some warlike urge, kindly return home and make this your battlefield.” It was such an infuriatingly rational response that I refused to write him another letter for even longer than usual. And the abrupt end of the conflict appeared to have taken his side. The Hungarian resistance collapsed and any further discussion became academic, with him having won the argument by default. I felt intensely annoyed and held him personally responsible for the defeat of the Hungarian nationalists.

ESSAY WAS RIGHT, though he did not know it at the time, although “prescient” would be a more accurate expression for his proposed amendment to my battle plans. Indeed, I often wondered if, once I had become embroiled within my own borders, he did not wish from time to time that he had encouraged me to go and take my chances on the Hungarian front! By then, of course, he no longer had a say in the matter, because in the meantime, in company with my University of London/Porchester Terrace master planners, I had made a startling discovery!

The nationalists, the first-generation elected leaders and legislators of our semi-independent nation, had begun to visit Great Britain in droves. We watched their preening, their ostentatious spending, and their cultivated condescension, even disdain, toward the people they were supposed to represent. There were exceptions, but, in the main, they did not appear to have emerged from the land and people we had left behind when we journeyed out to acquire some skills and learning. While we dreamed of marching south to liberate southern Africa, they saw the nation as a prostrate victim to be ravished. We accepted invitations to their public talks and informal meetings, even partook of their lavish receptions. Some were stark illiterates, though full of bombast. This strange breed was a complete contrast to the nationalist stalwarts into whose hands we had imagined that the country could be safely consigned while we went on our romantic liberation march to southern Africa. The exceptions engaged us in serious discussions, outlined their vision not only for the nation but for the continent, and pleaded earnestly that we hurry home and join hands in building the future. Most of the time, however, as we ran eagerly to welcome the protagonists of the African Renaissance, we were bombarded by utterances that identified them as flamboyant replacements of the old colonial order, not transforming agents, not even empathizing participants in a process of liberation.

Some turned students into pimps, in return for either immediate rewards or influence in obtaining or extending scholarships. Visiting politicians financed lavish parties for one sole purpose—to bring on the girls! They appeared to have only one ambition on the brain: to sleep with a white woman. For that privilege, in addition to discarding the dignity of their position, they would pay more than the equivalent of our monthly student allowances. We watched them heap unbelievable gifts on virtual prostitutes, among them both British and continental students. It was a lucrative time for willing “escorts.” We were not prudish; we drank and danced with them till cockcrow and took women off them between their first drink and last boast. But, we asked ourselves, were these men, who routinely conducted themselves with such gracelessness, the true representatives of a national mandate? And their version of the message of the committed minority that also urged our early return home was “Come back quickly and stake your claims. The earlier you position yourselves, the bigger your slice of the national cake!”

I recall one publicly humiliating instance: a revered national figure in a highly sensitive political position got so carried away with his date that he paid for a one-night stand with a check, at the bottom of which, just in case his scrawl was indecipherable, he had written his name, complete with his official position. The girl, a brilliant student from an upper-class British family but a notorious nymphomaniac, flounced to our table at the students' cafeteria and flaunted the check in our faces, asking loudly what kind of a would-be independent nation would produce a political leader who could act so stupidly. I could so easily blackmail him with this, she boasted. We succeeded in coaxing the check away from her—a medical student promised to introduce her to a new, “virile” boyfriend if she surrendered it. She agreed, and we destroyed it. She was completely indifferent to the money—it was sufficient that she had our “national figure” in her power.

One scandal after another was hushed up by the British Home Office, which was the main sponsor of many of these “study” or “familiarization” tours—familiarization, that is, with British-style democracy, its institutions and bureaucracy. The Crown agents, the main purchasing and forwarding agents for the colonial governments and visitors, continued to ship home luxury items for our overnight Croesuses; reams of indents—the order forms—and payment demands flowed between Nigeria and the United Kingdom as the august visitors blithely took possession of goods and ignored the payment half of the transaction. Often, the Home Office stood indemnity.

Their conduct on home territory, from the news that reached us, appeared to be of the same nature. The pan-African project was becoming farcical. The alienation of many of the first-generation leaders was total, and, for the first time, we began to wonder if the power relationship between the political elite and their people was not paralleled by that between the Boers and the black South African majority—a master-servant relationship, the monopoly of privilege by a minority, with its complement, the denial of rights or human respect to the people. We read in this a double betrayal, an act of treachery from within. We came to only one conclusion: the writers and artists brigade could wait— first, it was essential to secure our rear. The weapons of confrontation need not be the lethal kind; we could join forces with the progressives, make trenchant use of the pen and the stage, propagate progressive ideas, mobilize the people, and expose their betrayers. The contested arena would be strewn with words and polemics, not soaked in gore. My adopted muse would remain Ogun, but only he of the biting lyric.

Alas, that willful deity would refuse to bow to mortal preferences within his dual nature!

Reunion with Ogun

A SPECIAL BOND, A VERY PERSONAL COMMUNION, WITH THE ROAD HAS remained an essential part of my relation with the physical world from so early in childhood that I can no longer recall how I came to embrace, almost osmotically, the road as the fusing agency. This went beyond the merely physical— the road's linkage of Isara, my father's birthplace, and Abeokuta, my maternal origin, where I was also born and mainly raised. The forest paths and lanes that laced the rust-roof farmsteads and lush farms fed the rudimentary roads between villages and towns, providing a seamless weave of mystery and discovery. The women traders from Isara, heads pressed down with bales and baskets, who trod those roads and pathways every market day laden with merchandise, perfumed the household in Aké, the rockbound parsonage of childhood. They were caravans from distant lands, their indigo-dyed feet covered in red laterite as they filed into our backyard, bringing the exotic, animistic world of Isara into the Christian aura of Aké. Then, right from my first journey between those two axes of my then total existence, in a wood-paneled lorry, jammed against basketfuls of vegetables, yams, dried fish, beads and trinkets, bales of
adire, kijipa,
and
aso oke,
¹⁷
the still vegetal passages opened up into a succession of way stations before the final destination. The road was a magic lantern whose projections, by some potent hand hidden in those dense forests, unwound like a sash of multiple designs on which we rode from marvel to marvel.

This revelation of the road's infinite resources endured for a while, competing with the railway, which had an ambiance all its own, its rhythmic raucousness subdued, turned even mesmerizing between stations by the pristine awesomeness of the nature through which it snaked, leaving the viscera suspended between a pastoral innocence and the chants of commerce that began with an echo and invocation of the names of the market outposts—Olokemeji, Otta, Wasimi, Lafenwa. . . . The women were my first mystics of the road, but they were no less palpable, powerful, and political. It was the same women, or their market companions, who formed the vanguard of the assault on the feudal bastion of a repressive monarch, the Alake of Abeokuta. Despite the support of the colonial district officer, they routed him and sent him into a prolonged exile.

With the years, the magic of the road would begin to dissipate, but not so completely that, by the year of my first homecoming at the end of my study stint in England in 1960, I could not recover, or maybe simply stubbornly imbue, this ageless sibling with something of its childhood retentions whenever I motored along the highways. The five-year interruption in England and Europe did, through the road's pure functionality, its place on the landscape as an efficient conveyor belt, sober me down somewhat, but not entirely. A special responsiveness remained, even patches of its mystic rapport.

Is it necessary to admit that I felt little of that mystic rapport with the highways of Europe? Maybe there were once gods in Europe, but they are all dead or have migrated elsewhere—except perhaps those in the isolated crags and music of Wales, the poetry and drama of the Irish, the extant rituals of the Celts, and the fjords of Scandinavia. Greece has kept her gods—the peaks and gorges of Delphi remain eternally god-suffused. Also, grudgingly perhaps, the Carpathian Mountains of Yugoslavia. The new gods and goddesses of Europe, alas, were mainly to be found on the cinema screen and on the pop stage; confronted with their iconic eruptions, I was able to understand, at last, the true meaning of pagan adulation.

It was good fortune that I could return home—where the gods were still only in a state of hibernation—under conditions of personal independence. I arrived on the wheels of a Rockefeller fellowship on New Year's Day of 1960 to research traditional dramatic forms. My most essential piece of equipment was a Land Rover, and that vehicle became an extension of myself through which I negotiated relationships with the overall society. I penetrated east, north, south at will and toured the entire West African coast on the trail of festivals and performing companies, keeping touch with gods and goddesses everywhere and celebrating their seasons, encountering and savoring exotic names such as Dorma Ahenkro, Koton Karfi, Maiduguri, and Ouagadougou, constantly at war with self-installed lords of remote inland borders who held the keys to the gates of some invisible, paradisial independencies that presumably floated above the artificially divided peoples of West Africa.

My forays outside Nigeria were infrequent, but they triggered a habit of marveling at a meaningless separation. Ghanaian, Togolese, and so on—just what did these terms mean to those who were so described? Culture and language differed within each nation as frequently and as profoundly as they found identities across the borders of such nation spaces; the arbitrariness and illogicality of their groupings hit any traveler in the face—and remained meaningless to a huge majority of those whom the borders enclose or separate. It was true of the preindependence entities, and it is still mostly true today.

The road and I thus became partners in the quest for an extended self-discovery. Early morning was my favorite hour; you caught the road's exhalation as it rose from the tarmac with the sun's heated awakening, piercing the early mists in a proprietorial mood—you owned the road and all that lay revealed along its rises and plunges, its contortions, and its arrow directness on both flatland and crests that sometimes appeared aimed at a horizon shimmering at the very edge of the world. Even the rarest encounter with another vehicle in that sublime hour was an act of generous concession on your part; it was only your early-morning kindness that permitted it to trundle past, another wraith from the bowels of the earth.

I would throw a few clothes into what I called the “Mungo Park” trunk that remained permanently screwed down into the back of the jeep. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could substitute for setting out at that hour of the gods' retreat. Then, over the next days and weeks—Akure; Idanre, the mountain retreat of Ogun; Kaura Namoda, a landscape of baobab sentinels ushering the traveler into Sokoto and the sonorities of the muezzin; the return track, hugging the Dahomean border; Kishi, cornfields into the horizon; Iseyin, weavers' looms under lean-tos; Abeokuta, balanced on boulders; and—Lagos. I camped in villages or in the truck, or sometimes gratefully enjoyed the courtesy of rest houses built for the colonial district officers, where the uniformed waiter, immaculate in standard attire, service-conditioned from colonial days, would pad in gently in the morning with a tea tray. . . .

But I did not ask for tea!
Yes, master,
he (old enough to be my father or even grandfather) replies, setting down the tray and pulling back the curtains. . . . No! Leave that alone, I'm not awake. . . .
Yes, master,
he replies, pulling the curtain open all the way. . . . Will master like me to make fried or scrambled eggs
with the toast?
Oh, you house-trained antiquated robot, master would like to scramble Papa's head for breakfast! It was surreal! But for those stubborn early-morning rituals, such interludes of luxury were only too welcome.

I suppose the “University of Ibadan” logo had much to do with such undeserved courtesies—the university counted for something in the early 1960s, and nowhere was reverence for any symbol of learning more solemnly manifested than in the hinterland. I sometimes arrived in the midst of a festival, the turbaning of a village head or a wedding, where I became an instant honored guest. I was confronted with deep dishes of pounded yam, steaming stews and venison, gallons of fresh-tapped palm wine or the most exotic bottled brands, which had no business being in such rural, isolated corners of the world.

Another trajectory took me through Oyo, city of the fiery god Sango, leathercraft, and decorated gourds; Oshogbo, watched by her river goddess, Osun; Ilorin; Bida of glass beads and hennaed women!—then Minna, scattering hordes of monkeys and apes; plump, mouth-watering guinea fowl all the way to Kaduna, Kano, and Maiduguri of dry dust, turbaned horsemen, and minarets, from which the obvious route back was to hug the Cameroon border to the east—Yola, Markurdi, and the confluence of the great rivers Gboko and Abakaliki—pounded yam and roadside venison—Awka of furnaces and open smithies—then a plunge southward into the riverine areas, Ikot-Ekpene of outsize
ekpe
masks; Calabar of fiery
ogogoro
¹⁸
and light-toned pulchritude; the sweep of the Niger through Port Harcourt, gathering toward its assignation with the sea; sleepy Sapele, pontoons and potfuls of pito
¹⁹
; then historic Benin and her outsize coral bangles, bronzes, and women's landscaped coiffures. . . .

In some mountainous areas—Obudu, Idanre, Enugu, the Jos Plateau—in moments of utter sublimity, the road winds like a cummerbund around the sagging waists of clouds, slicing off the peaks and dipping vertiginously into bottomless basins, a trampoline strung across treetops on which you know the gods take their night's repose. Reluctantly I take my leave of them, head back into Ibadan or Lagos, where the muck, dust, and grit of weeks were dissolved in beer and highlife bands in the nightclubs—Victor Olaiya, Roy Chicago, Eddie Okonta, Bobby Benson—and the more intimate air of the juju bands— Orlando Owoh, Dele Abiodun, Denge, or the appropriately named one with the high-pitched voice, Tunde Nightingale.

The road was dust, laterite dust for the most part, or narrow ribbons of macadam, but reasonably well maintained, some no smoother than quiltwork. Pontoons, not bridges—there was no Lokoja bridge, no Asaba–Onitsha bridge, none between Warri and Sapele, only pontoons. The few bridges that interrupted the stretches of highway were single-lane bridges that could take only one vehicle at a time, and some were even shared by the railway line.

Indeed, it was while waiting for a pontoon at Lokoja that the doyen of the indigenous-language novel, D. O. Fagunwa, would vanish in the most mysterious manner, as mysterious as his novels, which formed our fictional sensibilities from childhood and peopled that accommodating world with its strange characters—
Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale, Irinkerindo Ninu Igbo Elegbeje,
and so on. I translated the first into English as
The Fearless Hunter in the Forest of a Thousand Demons
and thereafter wisely gave up my ambitious project to translate
all
his works, so taxing did I find the density of his Yoruba usage!

There are so many versions of Fagunwa's death—or disappearance—but all agree that he was standing by the Niger River in broad daylight, waiting for the pontoon to take his motorcar across the river. Perhaps he strolled along the embankment and slipped—here the versions diverge—but he was never seen again, nor was his body ever recovered. It was as if he had been claimed by one of those very creatures that crowded his imagination and were vividly brought to life in his works, as if one of them had emerged from that naked sunlight, visible to him alone, taken his arm, and led him off into the unfathomable habitations of the mind.

IT WAS NOT all idyllic, nor was death always mysterious, even awe-inspiring, in the manner of Fagunwa's disappearance. Like the many faces of Ogun, god of the road, the road was also a violent host. I stared into the many faces of death, but most often death just taking its leave, its back indifferently turned on heartbreak and destruction. In the early sixties, just after independence, the bridges that had been inherited from the departing British not only were narrow and rickety but some were suspended, it seemed, between earth and sky, between the worlds of the living and the ancestor, attached to some mysterious anchor that was invisible to all but their original engineers. They appeared to lie in wait for unconscious participants in some infernal lottery. These—in addition to the still, neatly broken forests—mostly formed the backdrops to the scenes of death that were enacted before me so often in the West African interior, as if the ritual audience they awaited had to be a stranger.

By the side of the road, a small cluster of men and women, mute, isolated still forms, their faces partly hooded. Strewn around them, the shattered contents of what were once tall jute bags. Now the kola nuts are strung around their feet, outsize chromatic beads under the early sun. Only when one sees a row of corpses, neatly laid side by side, does one grasp the inexorable loneliness of mortality. The stillness confers on the senses a replete, understated solitude that the frenetic realms of community, service, friendship, love, and other relationships routinely obscure. A vehicle or two upended, torn, mangled, wrapped around a tree, or simply neatly chipped, a fatal slice taken off its corner, or else nothing but a telltale swathe through the forest and the camouflage of shrubs and trees that the errant vehicle had pulled around itself like a resentful shroud. A jagged opening through the railings on one side of the bridge might narrate the beginning of a trajectory that ended on the distant rocks below, waters swirling around a few scattered pieces of metal and wooden body frame, all unearthly still. Such tableaux instigate the reconstructing functions of the mind, instantly at work to figure out the progression of events, stringing the vanished sequences together. Without that, the laid-out forms could well be outer-space forms in suspended animation, awaiting revival on arrival at their destination, or else wrapped-up exotic tubers, levitated from within the deepest recesses of the earth.