You Must Set Forth at Dawn (29 page)

PART IV

Dining with
the Devil—and
an Avatar

Olori-Kunkun and
Ori Olokun

A Preamble on Menu, Service, and Table Manners
at the Devil's Dinner Table

 

DINING WITH A CERTAIN BREED OF HYBRID HUMANITY—THE MILITARY, IN its earthly manifestation—is not without its problems, but not any that is insurmountable for those who are not truly hungry, unless of course one takes the view that experiencing acutely, albeit vicariously, the hunger of others can be considered a self-serving rationalization. It is the easiest leap for those who believe, in any case, that there is a bit of the devil in most of us—
there but for
the grace of God go I,
and so on. Given half the chance, in a nation like Nigeria, I sometimes feel I would betray, with guaranteed provocation over critical choices, the dictatorial devil in me! One's social and moral responsibility, however, is to curb such a propensity, especially its abuses, not only in oneself but in others. Ultimately, there is the question of motivation and goals. I have had many good reasons to work up a good appetite for that diabolical repast, though I dare not deny that a number of such meals have left me with acute indigestion, symptoms of which persist today!

A public cause, a clamorous need, sometimes imposes choices that appear, on the surface, to contradict one's democratic convictions and, indeed, lifelong pursuits. The dilemma of dining with the devil, of cooperation, interaction, even of the most limited kind, with an unelected regime, will always remain a cross upon which committed democrats, reformers, radicals, and such, in any authoritarian corner of the globe and especially the African continent, occasionally find themselves impaled. It is one that I have confronted quite openly but resolved effortlessly and unapologetically—even arrogantly, as I was once accused of doing by a television interviewer. What had nettled him was that I insisted that I did not owe him or any other mortal an explanation for my choice, since I considered all justifications superfluous when collaboration is clearly undertaken on behalf of life—and even, occasionally, progressive politics, policies, or creativity.

Or could he also have taken umbrage at my response when, accused of having “sold out” to the military, I retorted, quite truthfully, that not even the entire Nigerian nation, with all its oil wealth, could afford me? That was one of the burdens that came with the Nobel Prize—plain, matter-of-fact, commonplace declarations that had not raised an eyebrow during my pre-Nobel existence suddenly became problematic after that event: “Oh, are you saying that because of . . . are you now bigger than the nation?” At such moments, one longs to tell the nation where to stuff its colonial pride. Mercifully, a rational commentator took time out to explain the obvious: W.S. meant simply that his convictions were not for sale.

That particular confrontation occurred over my role in creating a Road Safety Corps under a military regime, to stem the notorious hemorrhage on Nigerian roads, especially on the Ibadan–Ife road. I named it the Slaughter Slab, since it was mostly on this macadam altar that I habitually scooped up my students' brains after filling them with knowledge. Issues of life and death constantly strike me as deserving more than a genuine or merely rhetorical purism. Certainly I have never undergone any angst in this respect. I concede legitimacy to the uncompromising, no-contact position, whose validity may be equally argued, but it is a position that often strikes me as an unaffordable luxury on a continent like ours, where the culture of militarized government appears to have developed remarkable resilience.

Even in late 2002, the once-democratic constant, Ivory Coast, underwent the once-unthinkable—a military coup! Unthinkable? Ivory Coast's long-sustained policy of exclusionism—
ivoirité,
the elegant word for the disenfranchisement of even fifth-generation “foreigners”—was a purulent boil that finally burst open, providing one military section a righteous cause for selfingratiation into civic acceptance, albeit of a sectarian nature. Nigeria, with its recent exhilarating experience of exorcising the military incubus in 1999, had already undergone two scares. Still, the same Nigeria went on to play Big Brother, wielding a big cudgel in 2004 to terminate military adventurism in São Tomé. Not to be outdone, Guinea-Bissau followed São Tomé only a month or two later, while Togo, in the same West African region, attempted an original variant in 2005: the military made a crude effort to install a son of the deceased dictator, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, in office, against the provisions of the Constitution, simply to entrench surrogate military rule.

It boils down, ultimately, to one's personal confidence in determining the length of spoon with which one dines with the devil and one's ability to keep a firm hold on it. This involves deriving no advantages, no gains, no recompense in the process—if anything, expending oneself both materially and mentally for the attainment of a fixed and limited goal, retaining one's independence of action. Most delicious of all is the ability to walk away from the dinner table, flinging a coin onto it as a tip for the host.

There is a further consideration: in far too many African nations, the comparative index of brutality, contempt for the rule of law, and abuse of human rights between some so-called democracies and military dictatorships leaves dubious space for absolutes. One has only to consider Kenyan “democracy” under arap Moi or the stale tobacco ash end of the Hitlerite Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, masquerading as a passion for land restitution. Within Nigeria, the lesson is served by the contrast between the 1975 military regime of Murtala Mohammed on the one hand, and the 1979–83 fascistic and wastrel “democracy” of Alhaji Shehu Shagari's National Party of Nigeria (NPN; successor to the NPC)—and so on throughout the continent. Those who insist on inhabiting the real world find themselves subjected to the clamor of what can and deserves to be extracted from usurped authority on behalf of a nation, on behalf of the nonstatistical, palpable humanity that constitutes one's vital environment. For a temperament such as mine, it has never been possible to shunt aside—not for any prolonged period—a sense of rebuke over how much is lost daily, wasted or degraded, how much proves irretrievable, damaged beyond repair, through maintaining a position that confers the self-righteous comfort of a purist: nonnegotiable distancing.

A line must be drawn, however; across from mine will be found the murdering regimes—of an Idi Amin, an Emperor Bokassa, a Sergeant Doe, a Mobutu Sese Sek0 . . . and of course, a General Sani Abacha. Behind them are ranged those who forbid all planning for, discussion of, or anticipation of a return to democratic rule, setting the stage for life dictatorship—such as General Buhari. Other categories survive on individual assessment. Notwithstanding such finicky distinctions, however, dining with the devil remains undeniably a mined board—prone to misunderstanding, betrayal, public skepticism, getting the fingers nicely toasted, mud all over one's face, and so on. Sublime intentions are detonated by a diabolical joke—of which one promptly offers itself in all its madcap, cautionary amplitude; but first, a few paragraphs on the devil in that affair.

SOME CLOSE ASSOCIATES have suggested that I secretly nurture a death wish. They base this claim on the fact that despite what would appear to be the single-minded efforts of one General Olusegun Obasanjo to push me beyond the borders of existence, we remain—albeit qualified—friends. I find it difficult to explain this undeniable paradox, except to shift the responsibility somewhere else and insist that, in some unfathomable way, fate appears unbending in its resolve to throw us together, through events, mutual acquaintances, the frequent opposition and less frequent coincidence of interests, and so on, both in and out of office. Of course, one is never bereft of choice, but I also have a tendency—I have come to admit—to thumb my nose at the machinations of fate, daring it to do its worst or else know that I am also equally compelled to turn its interventions in a productive direction. Flirting with fate and emerging relatively unscathed tend to go to one's head, however, which might partially explain why one appears to travel down the same mined road again and again.

Observing, and even interacting at close quarters with, someone who is completely without scruples is, frankly, irresistible. One speaks here of a political leader who—to cite a notorious instance—graces the dedication of the new official residence of his Senate president one night, dines, puts on a performance as the life and soul of the party, mixing gregariously and clowning with other guests, and dances with the senator's wife, knowing all the while that he has already perfected the plot for the senator's removal from office, which he executes a day or two later. Poor Chuba Okadigbo, he never quite recovered from the blow. Indeed, his death from pulmonary complications from police tear gassing during a rally to protest the rigging of Obasanjo's 2003 “reelection” was due partly to psychological enfeeblement from that earlier shock.

It could be a case of letting one's writer's instinct take one too far, but, perverse though it may seem, I have remained genuinely fascinated by a complex figure who is convinced that he dominates his environment and thinks he acts the part—but who is, basically, a fortunate recipient of the largesse of fate. After all, how many soldiers, after the bulk of a civil war has been fought and won by others, find themselves positioned to receive the articles of surrender from the enemy, thus appropriating the mantle of the architect of victory? Not one to leave any loopholes in his claims to that laurel, however, the soldier signals his entry into yet another turbulent profession—that of the writer—by producing one of the fastest-written war histories ever—
My Command
— remaining blithely indifferent to furious rebuttals of its details by his comrades in arms.

Through a regional balance in military politics—not from merit, such as participation in the critical coup—our subject becomes the number two in the next military regime. The number one is assassinated after only six months in office, and the war hero becomes head of state by default—and not of just any banana republic, but of the most populous, wealthiest nation on the African continent. He escapes the fate of his predecessor and ends a high-casualty-rate career unscathed, in grateful retirement on his farm, escorted into our shared hometown, Abeokuta, on a white horse with drums and bugles. All agree that the honor is deserved, since, unlike most African leaders, he voluntarily relinquishes power. The gesture catapults him to international notice. Thereafter he settles back into civilian life, but not quite, since he begins diligently to lay the groundwork—establishes an African Leadership Forum, and so on—for becoming a respected statesman, mixing with the powerful in international fora and hosting them in turn on his Ota farm.

The saga has not ended. Fate again intervenes, and the hero finds himself arraigned before a brutal dictator, one General Sani Abacha, on treasonable charges, earning a death sentence that will be commuted to a lengthy prison spell. A little more than two years of prison life, and his persecutor is assisted into eternity in a subtle palace conspiracy—never mind any claims of his succumbing to excess sexual ecstasy. All this takes place without his lifting a finger, except perhaps to attract the trusty's attention. The military, thoroughly discredited as a ruling class and beset by international ultimatums, realizes that its time is up but has no intention of giving up power. And so our hero— now an accredited civilian—is released from prison, formally pardoned, and pressed back into service, but now as an “elected” civilian president.

I suppose I subconsciously acquired the attitude that, as a writer, I had proprietary rights over such a phenomenon, and since he was already indebted to me by an act of treachery on his part, I began to regard him as a private preserve for compensatory study. In any case, Obasanjo is quite personable—much of the time—and it was not difficult to respond to his evident desire for cerebral company; like most rulers, he desperately wanted to be accepted as a political and economic strategist and thinker. Was I evincing a touch of masochism? Or perhaps the death-wish proposed by my colleagues? No matter; our hero represented a model of power of an unusual—and dangerous—kind, most especially as he remained basically insecure and thus pathologically in need of proving himself, preferably at the expense of others. That is one unambiguous assessment that is pronounced by nearly all Obasanjo's acquaintances. Interacting with him at close quarters thus involved—again, at a subconscious level—testing one's confidence in one's own invulnerability, somewhat like those traditional charms that warriors swear by as bullet deflectors: they wore the charms but still ensured that no one was pointing a gun at them.

Also, to my intense chagrin, I have been forced to conclude that even advancing years have failed to eliminate from my system a parental inheritance: a missionary streak. Detecting a productive, even sometimes imaginative, glint in the compost of the soldier turned politician is not difficult—Obasanjo is a man of restless energies—and a waste of human potential is something against which a missionary upbringing revolts. A bullish personality, calculating and devious, yet capable of a disarming spontaneity, affecting a country yokel act to cover up the interior actuality of the same, occasionally self-deprecatory yet intolerant of criticism, this general remains a study in the outer limits of a sense of rivalry, even where the fields of competence and striving are miles apart.