You Must Set Forth at Dawn (3 page)

THE HUMAN LANDSCAPE that I left behind has been altered irreversibly, deeply pockmarked with craters of loss. It was already nearly unbearably depleted with the loss of OBJ, the irrepressible Femi Johnson, but that a feature familiar on both the personal and national terrain, Ojetunji Aboyade, should vanish within a mere three or four weeks of my departure seemed a perverse act of some vengeful deities—but to what end? To impart an already conceded lesson on mortality? And the timing, so soon after my escape, seemed cruel.

My escape had become known only when I resurfaced at a press conference at UNESCO toward the end of November. Two weeks later, I was back next door to Nigeria, in Cotonou in Benin, a place populated largely by Nigerian nationals, especially the Yoruba. My family had been smuggled out to join me for a Christmas/New Year reunion that might be the last for—who could tell how long? Our mainstay in Cotonou, Akin Fatoyinbo, himself once a prison actor in a Kafkaesque scenario under the regime of an earlier dictatorship—that of Generals Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon—chose to break the news to me without any preliminaries. I was working at my improvised desk in our bungalow, rented for the season, when he drove in from Lagos. His face was stone as he placed the newspapers before me, wordlessly. A thick black banner across the front page seared my sight as my eyes encountered the definitive pronouncement: PROFESSOR OJETUNJI ABOYADE DEAD! I swept the bunch of papers off the table, leaped up, and walked away into the bedroom.

It was an indelible warning. By the end of this exile, the human landmarks to which I had grown accustomed would vanish, just like this, irremediably. Oje—hardly anyone ever called him by his full name—had been my vice chancellor at the University of Ife, later renamed Obafemi Awolowo University after the death of the politician and sage Awolowo, a first-generation nationalist of Yoruba stock who never lost his political fire until his death in 1984. I never really knew how my attachment with Oje had developed and deepened, but it was perhaps inevitable. He was one of that breed of tireless intellectual spar-ring partners, cunning at fashioning theoretical propositions that were guaranteed to provoke you and keep you in animated debate until lunch dissolved into dinner and then into late supper.

The news of his death left me with an irrational suspicion of a conspiracy of progressive abandonment by friends and colleagues, a sinister plan of deprivation of a valued landscape. Oje's cerebration was first nature, as if the gray matter in his massive head churned compulsively and could find relief only in controversy. As a hunting pupil, however, he was a total disaster. All he did was provide light relief at any outing: “Oje, that was yours! Why didn't you shoot?” And Oje would shrug: “I didn't want to waste a cartridge.” So we nicknamed him “Silent Gun,” in contrast to Femi, who became “O. B. Lau-lau!” Femi needed no prompting to blast away at anything that stirred the foliage. The Silent Gun was anything but silent, however, as we filed through the bush paths toward the killing fields; indeed, his voice was raised the lustiest as we startled farmers, villagers, and sometimes cattle drovers, all marveling at three—occasionally more—obviously mad, conspicuously
akowe
⁵
types, belting out their “Aparo
⁶
Hunting Song,” which I had set to the tune of the spiritual “There's a Man Going Round Taking Names.” I replenished it with new verses during outings, each addition a giveaway for the result of the day's hunt. Such a day might begin buoyant and demolition-primed, end with the equivalent of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Sauntering out with it was not uncommon for the day to end in a chastened recessional:

Till I fill it full of lead
I can hear it simmering gently on the flame

 

An aparo's waiting yonder with my name
It goes, quaw-awk, quaw-awk, quaw-awk— it's my game
It just won't go to bed

 

So, don't invite yourself to dinner chez moi
In this hunting clan, the merrier means fewer
As our forebears' saying goes
If a hunter counted his woes,
He would never invite a friend to dinner
—
which you are!

 

THE YEAR 1994 was closing on the brutal reign of Sani Abacha, and the stream of dissidents into exile had begun to increase. As if he had timed it with his annoying, statistical mind, Oje chose the final hours of that year to subsume all other flights into exile under his own irreversible departure, also filling mine with a warning of many frustrations to come. Close by, a mere four- or five-hour drive to his Ibadan home, where he had passed away, and an hour farther north toward Awe, his burial place, I was left to fume that I could not be present at his funeral, could not bid good-bye to an organism that had grown on me over the years. All that was left was to mourn his departure from exile through a surrogate. I was given no time to sink into this new loss and absorb the blow in my own way—no! My farewell words were awaited, and a contact had agreed to pick up the message the following day.

I looked for solace of sorts in recalling how I would sometimes remind him—whenever he proved difficult—that I should, after all, be credited with having prolonged his life, or, more accurately, with having thwarted an earlier claim on his life. In turn, he rejected my claims, insisting instead that all that the “lifesaving” episode revealed was what a soft underbelly was hidden beneath my public carapace. No sooner had he survived the illness that nearly took him away than he took to regaling any willing listener with details of my “unmanly” conduct at his bedside at the Lagoon Hospital in Apapa, Lagos. For Oje, it was the ultimate demystification, the explosion of the Kongi
⁷
myth, a reading that he relished and refused to abandon.

He was being prepared for his departure to Germany in an ambulance plane, a necessary recourse, alas, that was itself a damning commentary on the state of hospitals within the nation and the faith of the rulers in a national health service. That consideration presented no problems for the then dictator, Ibrahim Babangida—nor indeed for any of the heads of state before him. Babangida was not about to lose his top policy adviser; he ordered Oje Aboyade's immediate evacuation.

When the moment came to wheel him into the vehicle, however, I balked.

“Well, fly safely. And get yourself back here soon.”

His eyes opened wide in disbelief. “You're not coming to the airport with me?”

“No, thank you. I already feel superfluous.”

“But that budgetary provision you're so concerned about—the IMF relief package—we could discuss it some more on the way to the airport.”

At that point, I came clean. “No way,” I said. “I saw Femi off at the airport, and he never made it back. I am not accompanying you.”

“I don't believe this!” he shouted. “Look at you! All your
sakara
⁸
—beneath it all, soft. You're scared stiff. No, worse, you're superstitious.”

I shrugged, unmoved. My mind was already made up. Into the earth-hugging ambulance, yes, but to follow and watch him being loaded into the winged counterpart, taking off into the same ozone that had swallowed Femi forever—out of the question! “Call me what you like. I am not coming with you. I accompanied Femi virtually into the plane, and he vanished forever. This time, no. This way, I know you'll be back in no time.”

“Coward! I will never let you live this down.”

“I'll survive that. Femi is not around to help you make a perpetual feast of it, so once again—journey safely. I may visit you there, I may not. The beer is very good in Germany, by the way. Tell the doctors to pin the placard ‘One Man, One Beer' by your bedside, where you can see it. It will get you up and about in no time.”

MY FINGERS FELT considerably lightened, and I began to tap out his graveside tribute, invoking the earlier match that ended in his favor....

Oje Aboyade had had a close brush with death about four years before. Even
the specialists at the German hospital who performed the lifesaving operation on
him marveled at his survival. He became, in e fect, a sideshow for the students at
the teaching hospital; they all came to examine his case notes and gawk at the miracle man. His recovery was total, and it most certainly was not that ailment which
finally took him away. After that “refurbishment,” and coming as he did from a
long-lived family, I most confidently expected him to outlive the rest of us and
would often say so. That was careless; I should have remembered the Nigerian
killer factor. Simply defined, it is the stressful bane of the mere act of critical
thought within a society where power and control remain the playthings of imbeciles, psychopaths, and predators.

Oje's close-cropped head, grudgingly pocked with a few white tufts, rose before me, the deceptively mild roundness of his face lightly lined with cicatrices of his Awe origin. His name was an instant giveaway, to the knowledgeable, as scion and heir of the family ancestral masquerade, the
oje.
So proud was he of this legacy—deemed “heathen” by the disciples of Christianity and Islam— that he ensured that the names of his two male children bore the prefix
Oje,
yet he was an unfailing Sunday worshiper at his church in Bodija Housing Estate and even some kind of deacon.

Aboyade had been deeply immersed in a project in Ibadan, the Development Policy Centre, long before I fled into exile. The seed of the idea had been sown as far back as 1978, under the military regime headed by General Olusegun Obasanjo—who would later resurface as a civilian head of state in 1999. That original idea for a civilian think tank had ended up as yet another military appropriation, becoming the Centre for Strategic Studies located in the far north, in Kuru. General Obasanjo blithely assumed that Oje would still agree to direct the new institution, but no. It was not what he had envisioned. Not only had his idea been purloined, it had become militarized. Stubbornly but patiently, he persisted with his original vision and finally began to see it take material form twenty years later. During that earlier inception, I frequently accompanied Oje in the search for a suitable location, and we settled on an estate being developed near the Asejire Dam, just outside Ibadan. I sat with him through several brainstorming sessions with Obasanjo in Dodan Barracks, Lagos, then the seat of government, poring over blueprints. A year before Oje's death, the original idea was back within Ibadan, on a somewhat more modest scale but as a fully civilian institution, independent of any government dictation.

Encumbered by other preoccupations, I drifted into and out of the resurrected project, though we would discuss its progress in the usual speculative manner. About four years before his death, Oje took me to the site, where the offices were in quite an advanced state of construction. He had already recruited his team and earmarked my own office space—typically informing me of this with the utmost casualness and no prior consultation.

I wandered around—it seemed a logical retirement home for an aging author and itinerant lecturer who, I had long acknowledged about myself, would remain creatively restless right across the border of senility. The environment was finely balanced within but fully shielded from the sprawling city of Ibadan. Already, the site seemed charged and vibrant, pulsating with intellectual energy—but then, I admit I am biased. Construction sites are often inspiring spaces for me, potent with inchoate forms, and knowing that this one had materialized out of sheer persistence and aspired to become a warehouse of cross-fertilizing minds, it was inevitable that I would imbue even the slurry-caked cement mixer, temporarily silenced, with intellectual fecundity. Sometimes it seemed a pity that a polished, elegant edifice should ever replace the chaotic terrain of the architectural muse in labor, but of course one is ultimately consoled by beauty of a different kind—hopefully! An addict, I wandered over mounds of sand and gravel, stepping over uprooted stumps and negotiating reinforced concrete pillars. Pools of water from recent rains stagnated on the concrete flooring.

There were some smashed rocks, mostly flat slabs, scattered over the grounds, dug up during the laying of the foundation. Oje's collaborator and architect, Alhaji Adetunji, voiced a plaint about how or where to dispose of them—they did not fit into his landscaping scheme. Oje only pretended to mull over the problem; he was already nodding his head mischievously in my direction. The look on his face said clearly “There's your godsend; you couldn't ask for a more accommodating scavenger.” My house in Abeokuta—which to him was the structural expression of all unregistered idiosyncrasies—was then approaching completion. I also pretended to think it over. A few days later a truckload of shale slabs and stones was dumped on my grounds, with a message that if I wanted any more, I would have to organize their transportation myself. That was typical of the Alhaji, a self-effacing person who would say very little but act spontaneously and generously. The slabs and rocks went into the paving of the frontage of my Abeokuta home—and the far more restricted Essay Foundation for the Humanities.

The circumstances of Oje's departure resurrected twinges of that far more ancient, far closer bereavement, the leave-taking by my father, Essay, one that also took place in absentia, owing yet again to the exigencies of my political choices. My prison memoir,
The Man Died,
recently published, had not endeared me any more to the regime in power and was unofficially banned from circulation. The dictatorship under which I underwent that prison spell—that of General Yakubu Gowon—still ruled our lives in 1972. It was nowhere near as vicious as Abacha's but not so benign that I dared fail to concede to my mother—the “Wild Christian” of my childhood memoir,
Aké
—the reasonableness of her warning when she learned of my plans to risk a return home. Her message to me was in character: “By all means, come home. I'll even send you a first-class ticket. Understand, however, that you'll be coming for two funerals, the other one guaranteed by such folly.” I remained in London. Wild Christian survived her life companion by several more years and then was kind enough to transmit to me, in her own way, the moment of her passing away. Booked to fly to Ghana for a meeting on the fated day, indeed, already standing at the check-in counter, my feet turned leaden. I refused to take the final, routine step for my boarding pass. Instead, I turned around and drove back to Ife to await—I did not know what. Doors and windows were locked to give the illusion of absence while I awaited whatever it was that had made me turn back.