You Must Set Forth at Dawn (38 page)

THE SECOND VISIT, at least a year later, was a more elaborate affair, carefully planned but rich in melodrama. It immediately acquired a certain mythical status—at least in the town of Abeokuta, later spreading out via Lagos circuits. The commencing national honeymoon with the smiling dictator had frayed at the edges; awaiting him this time was a clutch of some truly disillusioned critics, led by my pugnacious friend Sesan Dipeolu. Ses—as he was known to close associates—was a retired librarian from the University of Ife school of leftist disputation, but even there a maverick, ready to associate with progressive groups, but strictly on his own, nondoctrinaire terms. A balding sixtyish, Ses appeared to lend his face to a permanently puzzled look, as if trying to recollect the last resting place of a yet-uncatalogued acquisition. He became a different being, a bull terrier, however, when engaged in a bout of contumacy, even at moments when he found himself in basic agreement with the premise of the debate.

We anticipated a lively afternoon of some unsparing examination of the policies and governing style of the unsuspecting guest, but the manner of IBB getting to my house—yet in a state of incompletion—easily overshadowed the intellectual or political quotient of the afternoon. It acquired, predictably, numerous variations, in Abeokuta most especially, taking impetus from the moment when the Alake of Abeokuta, the paramount king of Egba, was heard to exclaim after the event, “Hare! Wole Soyinka t'iwa ree s'eyi? L'oju gbogbo wa ne e ro gbe head of state sa lo!”
⁴²

The Alake had good cause for his umbrage. It boiled down to this: that we had “abducted” the dictator from the state banquet—with his connivance— and whisked him to my uncompleted house in the jungle fastness of Ajebo. His chief of staff, Sani Abacha, holding down the fort in Lagos during his boss's extended tour, later expressed outrage at the foolhardiness of his superior, who had actually trusted his safety to a known dissident, allowing himself to be driven to an unknown destination with only a half dozen or so of his secret service and leaving his mighty armed convoy behind at the venue of the banquet.

What shocked me, however, as we returned our captive to his venue, was that, despite nearly two hours' absence, all the guests had remained in their position! I had not anticipated this. If the guest of honor vanishes and all eating and speechifying is over, the obvious course of action is—go home! Maybe the soldiers and civil servants—military governor, even ministers and commissioners—were obliged to remain, but what reason on earth had the private individuals, independent citizens—including the traditional monarch— for hanging on? Protocol, I was later informed, and that was the day I discovered that protocol was an eight-letter word, brother to the expletive that involuntarily escaped my throat!

MY INTERACTIONS WITH BABANGIDA were, needless to say, of a qualitatively different character from those with his fellow dictator, Olusegun Obasanjo, who, additionally, came from the same part of the country as I—West, Yoruba, and Abeokuta—though I am also part Ijebu. With Obasanjo, I ritually arrived with my own wine bottle or two tucked under the arm, knowing that my host—and thus his staff—did not know the difference between
burukutu
and Beaujolais. That weighty problem did not arise with Babangida, since this was one devil with whom I dined only at my own table. With Babangida, my interventions were precisely named—issue-specific interventions, though I do recall two exceptions when our discussions ranged broadly, as had been more common with Obasanjo. Sometimes those sessions with the latter also took place in Oje Aboyade's home, over lunch. Obasanjo appeared to find his thinking aggressively stimulated by our unorthodox approaches to many issues, and of course he loved to be thought capable of holding his own intellectually. Fights were routine. He did not take kindly to being caught wrong-footed. He
needed,
sometimes pathetically, to be right! Oje once called him an economic illiterate—he was out of office at the time—and it rankled in his mind for years afterward. I suspect it still does, even with Oje dead. Babangida, by contrast, never seemed to mind being proved wrong; he carried out his own decisions anyway.

My meetings with Babangida invariably took place in his office. There were exceptions, of course. Once I trapped him in the Nigerian High Commission in London to demand the fulfillment of a pledge to Michael Manley, the progressive Jamaican leader, during his electoral contest with the U.S.-backed candidate, Edward Seaga. Babangida had offered help, but the money had never been sent. I had been involved in that initiative and now found myself being battered by messages from Jamaica. The honor of Nigeria was at stake, but that was never under my custody; what I desperately needed was my peace of mind.

George Dove-Edwin, the Nigerian high commissioner and a friend, was hosting a reception for his president and promised to telephone me once the crowd had left. He did, let me into his residence, and pointed to a large reception room, cautioning that he would deny any knowledge of how I had gotten in—Babangida had wished to see no more visitors that day. My entry was muffled by a thick-piled carpet, and the dictator heard nothing. Slumped in a crested chair at the opposite end of the long reception room was a figure of— there was no other world for it—pathos
.
For minutes I stood watching this symbol of power, lost in thought, bereft of power and panoply, just another human being who had succumbed to common fatigue, sought a few moments' peace, sunk into its tantalizing solace even as he was already lamenting its looming departure. I felt somewhat remorseful that I had broken in on a moment when, it was plain, he truly needed to be alone—even rulers deserve their moment of peace, after all. Then I recalled that his own negligence or tardiness had disrupted mine, and I coughed to rouse him. He looked up, visibly startled, then annoyed, and snapped, “How did you get in?” I replied, “All right, I'll go away,” making no such move. Grumpily, he waved me to a chair.

Fifteen minutes later, we had reached agreement on the modalities of the transfer. I monitored its movements over the next week. Only after I was assured that it was in Michael Manley's possession did I consider any lecture invitations that might take me anywhere close to the West Indies.

FAR MORE EXHAUSTIVE was another closed-door session in his private jet, an unscheduled tête-à-tête that took place on the way back from Egypt, where I had once again undergone one of those reunions with Egypt that have set me wondering just what that fascinating nation and I have against each other! That visit, however, provided one of the three occasions in Babangida's eight-year governance when I obtained a one-on-one meeting with him for truly in-depth and wide-ranging discussions—the Nigerian rumor mill that peddled my access to him on a daily basis notwithstanding.

This infrequency of encounters with IBB was not due to indifference on my part. Whenever circumstances urged the possible usefulness of a meeting with this ruler, I picked up the telephone or contacted my collaborator Ojetunji Aboyade—on Obasanjo's recommendation, Babangida had secured the services of my friend as his economic adviser. However, while the rest of the nation called this dictator “Maradona,” my name for him was “Artful Dodger” or “the elusive
aparo.
” The flight from Egypt was a godsend, a space without distractions. Babangida slid a panel across the middle of the plane, and the rest of his entourage were shut out. Nothing disturbed a continuous session of about one and a half hours—no telephones, no whisper from a briefed aide tapping his pad to indicate a next, fictitious, appointment or waiting dignitary or delegation. There was nowhere to go, except by parachute.

But first—Egypt! Some pristine secret lurks in that nation that makes it a setting for some of my most enduring episodes of pure chagrin! On this occasion, as I was taking my ease in my own environment, along came a frantic message from the Egyptian president through his ambassador and my own government: Would I kindly present myself in Cairo for a very special honor? The occasion was the elaborate opening ceremony of the All Africa Games, 1989. The invitation sounded attractive—sharing a podium with Nadine Gordimer and our Egyptian counterpart Naguib Mahfouz, whom I would meet for the first time ever!

The notice was short and the timing awkward. The Egyptian ambassador and IBB, however, appeared to take turns, independently, applying pressure on me—some seasoned diplomat from our Foreign Office was definitely latched onto Babangida's ear! There were the usual arguments—the symbolic union of three African Nobelists, three African tribes on show, Arab, African, and South African white—promoting a deracialized African, pan-African solidarity. Babangida was himself flying in to join the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, as co-chairman of the Games. I finally thought of one way of easing the strain on my interrupted routine: since it mattered so much to the continent and to him, would he kindly find me a seat on his official plane? He was more than willing.

I planned to join his flight in Abuja, the capital, but a delayed morning flight from Lagos put a stop to that. Babangida's plane waited as long as the protocol arrangements awaiting him at the Cairo end permitted, then took off without Mubarak's one-third continental symbolism. As the regretful phone call informed me of the plane's departure, the Egyptian ambassador, who had dutifully come to see me off, appeared to be seized by an attack of Saint Vitus's dance. I sought to calm him, opening my palms toward the heavens to indicate that we must all bow to the inevitable. It had the opposite effect. He immediately threw himself into a fermentation cauldron of solutions. He would get me into Cairo, he swore, even if he had to accompany me on camelback! Finally—the Egyptian national airline was due in Lagos the following morning on an onward flight to Cairo. He would come personally, ticket in hand, and escort me onto the plane. A happy ending glowed on his face, nearly infecting me.

The following morning, it was not the airline ticket that called on me, however, but the loyal yet desperate representative of the Egyptian government, incoherent with apologies.
Your Excellency, please, you have to be there! An
administrative hitch, I am sure. It's the preparations for the Games . . . you know,
the o ficials are all preoccupied with nothing else. And bureaucracy, yes, bureaucracy, that's our problem. The ticket has not been wired, but for the sake of
Africa, Your Excellency, you have to travel. Permit me to assure you, Professor Your Excellency—as soon as you land in Cairo, the Egyptian government will refund
your travel expenses. The ceremony will more than compensate for this minor inconvenience. Your friend, your colleague, Mahfouz is waiting to receive you, it will
be a historic moment. Historic! Believe me, Excellency, this is as much as my job is
worth, if I do not bring you to Cairo. The faxes and telexes have been coming fast
and furious from the presidency. The ticket is guaranteed. An administrative hitch,
nothing else. I've contacted Egyptian airlines, but unfortunately the ticket has not
arrived. The embassy
—
ah, alas, we have no immediate funds. . . .

With not the sheerest thought that I was headed for yet another contretemps in the land of the pharaohs, a masochistic streak disguised as race solidarity, I headed for the airport on the authority of my credit card. I quashed a deep-down apprehension as it tried to rise to the surface, those earlier visits that had led me to question if I had been an Egyptian in a previous life—as Fela Anikulapo appeared to have believed of himself. Did my prior sojourn involve some negative, unfinished business in that Nile estuary? Certainly the consistency with which any entry into Egypt results in some level of misadventure—from the hilarious to once life-threatening—has begun to alarm me. Perhaps my mummy is lying in one of the catacombs of the pyramids or, more resentfully, a skeleton of one of the slaves slaughtered to accompany the pharaohs into the afterlife.

Egyptian civilization, as persuasively demonstrated by the scholar Cheikh Anta Diop in
The African Origin of Civilisation: Myth or Reality?
and supplemented years later by Martin Bernal in
Black Athena,
had its origins in the black race, so who is to say if Ogun, my demiurge of war and creativity, did not in some distant age leave his mark on that land, some form of antibodies that now distort the intended trajectory of his followers who happen to stray into Egypt? Something is definitely askew somewhere, calling perhaps for rites of exorcism. I fully intend to delve into the mystery on my next visit, which, to succeed, must scrupulously avoid all traces of officialdom!

For I never did meet Mahfouz. Nadine Gordimer did not appear. No mention was made of any national honors. I was not received at the airport. Hotel rooms were nonexistent. A taxi driver, to whom death in a motor accident was obviously no death at all but preparation for his next, elevated reincarnation, maybe as a priest of Isis, all but ended my career on the road between the airport and the hotel, courtesy of the tourist desk at the airport, which eventually located some vacant form of habitation. It turned out to be a kind of athletes' transient lodge.

I got busy on the phone and left a message with the embassy—surely someone must know of my arrival. The message that remained stuck in the desperate larynx of the abandoned VIP was, however, much richer: W.S. speaking, you know, national treasure, special invitee of President Mubarak, yes,
it's I, the Akinlatun of Egba, the Akogun of Isara, one-third African symbolism at
the All Africa Games, commander of the Order of the Niger, et cetera, et cetera,
who was to have hitched a ride in the presidential jet but was unpatriotically prevented by some domestic airline
—
yes, it's me, I made it on my own but don't quite
know where I am and what to do. This contretemps is happening all over again
—
HELP!
For hours afterward, I awaited rescue. None was forthcoming. History, my cyclic bugbear, appeared to be the presiding muse at these All Africa Games.