You Must Set Forth at Dawn (56 page)

“Thank you, sir. Ah, you don't understand, we all done see fire for eye today, and yesterday. But yesterday na child's play compare with today. As we break down one barricade, these people build it up again. Nothing anybody can do to them, they just won't give up. Too many people killed. So you see, sir, I just can't leave you like that, the streets are not safe and my
oga
will kill me if 'e hear say I abandon you. But I can bring you safe to the hotel, and I stay with you until things cool down....”

I felt my patience slipping away. Then I had an idea. “Where is your police station?”

“Not far from here. Is just around that corner.”

“Good. We go there first. Then we go to the hotel.”

His gin-glazed eyes took on a manic gleam, but it was all delight. “You mean... you want go first to our station?”

I nodded. He beamed as if he had won a lottery.

“You say, sir? I mean, you say you want come and greet our
oga
?” Beginning with an overwhelmed tremolo, his voice waxed ecstatic. “You mean, you will... oh my God, when I enter police station with you, sir, nobody will believe my luck. Nobody, sir! That is me get the luck to bring you to introduce you to the station....”

We got to the station, and I told the driver to stop at the gate. He protested immediately: “No, no, it's all right to go in. Go inside, driver.”

I stopped the driver. “No. This is as far as we go. We'll drop you here. Listen, you're very kind, and I appreciate your concern. What you don't seem to understand is that your being in the car is the greatest danger to me. Do you think you can manage to understand that? All the people you've been fighting since yesterday, you think they want to see your uniform right now?”

He appeared to mull that over. I thought I detected a tiny light of comprehension in his eyes. Then he grew sad. “But,
oga,
we're all fighting for the same thing. Only we have no choice. We have to carry out orders. But, Prof, make I tell you, even as we discuss this matter in the barracks, everybody, all of us, we want these soldiers to go. I am an Abiola man myself, first and to last. The whole country know say he win this election, so why Babangida refuse to go?”

I patted him on the shoulder, pushed the snout of the gun away from my driver's face for the last time, and opened the door for him. “We shall win, don't you worry. And tell your
oga
it was I who refused your protection. Explain to him what I said, that anyone in uniform is a danger to me right now—he'll understand.”

I watched him walk up the driveway toward the main block of the police complex, his uniform sticking to him from the soaking he had had, more a bedraggled chicken than a Kill-and-Go SWAT machine. Since he was also thoroughly soaked on the inside, my mind flew to an item on Chinese menus that I had never sampled but often wondered about—“Druncken Chicken,” as it was spelled—and I used to wonder if the chicken were made drunk before being dispatched or alcoholized after the terminal event. Still, I hoped he would arrive in one piece, which seemed very much open to question, since he chose to drag his gun along the ground. The rain continued to pelt down, but this did not appear to bother him one bit. At that moment, he struck me as perhaps the unhappiest being in the universe.

A TEEMING CROWD of humanity is an awe-inspiring phenomenon. As an objective spectacle, that is all it is, a spectacle, but when you are within it, when you are one of the bits and pieces that make up the tumult, you become one with it, you share in the force that it represents and you endure a loss of identity, except as a compressed lump within the crowd. I confess that I have never
experienced
being fully melted into the pack, so I can only approximate. When I am caught in one, I cannot wait to find a way out of the swarming promiscuity. The safest crowds are those that are made up of a majority of individuals who know
why
they have coalesced into one, why they have chosen to jettison their individual identities to form a new substantive, a
mass.
One can talk to such a crowd. One can reason with it; one can even modify its purpose and direction. Above all, however, one can re-create such a crowd, transform the solidified mass of humanity and turn it, at its most violent, toward pacifism or, from its most pacific condition, make it heave, a mountain in convulsion. I had lots of tutelage in mob characteristics on that day of my foolhardy plunge into Lagos—not for the first time, but never in such heavy and sustained doses.

When we had found a hotel—in reality a suburban brothel and general-congregation bar for nightlifers and day drifters in shadowy rooms—I set down my bags and devoured a long beer. I discharged my long-suffering driver, paid him generously above the agreed fare. I offered him a room for the night, but he was under some kind of spell. Nothing would make him share my comparative safety—to him I spelled danger, deadly peril, and his instincts warned him that he could recover his damaged self only by extricating himself from my presence. Had he also come to
hate
me? I wondered.

The rain had stopped, but darkness was approaching as I set off for my Lagos home on the pillion of a motorcycle taxi, known as an
okada,
one form of transportation that could at least maneuver its way effectively through the obstacles that now sprouted up virtually every few yards. The stoppages and interrogatories by vigilantes did not diminish, but they were brief and apologetic. The motorcycle aroused less instinctive hostility than a motorcar, and the shock of recognition easily did the rest. If only I had known it at the time, it was a practice ride for a future escape through the forest that lay between Shaki and the border with Benin. Instead of lashing branches, however, this was a forest of arms and limbs that tugged at my body and threatened to unseat both the driver and me. At their stubborn insistence, I addressed a batch of my captors—before a few sentences, others poured out of crevices like soldier ants from hidden warrens. All sought a reassuring voice, craved some knowledgeable view of the future. I had nothing to offer but hope.

I appeared to have entered a war zone, the scene of recent battles, mostly one-sided. Corpses littered the streets, casualties with horrifying wounds, and patches of caked blood discolored the tar and sometimes the gray concrete divider on the motorway. Those smears often suggested that a wounded man had tried to climb the barrier, perhaps vainly seeking cover on the other side, failed, but left his trail on the winding slab of cement. I began to reassess my progress, finally giving up all hope of reaching Abeokuta. I adopted, purely by default, this improvised set of insurgents that multiplied by the hour. Too many groups had lost contact with their leaders and simply did not know what to do next—stay put, or disband and resume the protests the following day? Had the stay-home order been intended for two, three, or four days, or was it to last a full week? What would happen afterward? Was there a change of tactics that they knew nothing of? Prof, what are we doing here? Why are we not train
ing? Prof, I'm volunteering. Take me, take me with you, I know you have an army
in the bush, just take me along. Clutches here and there surrounded their radios, hoping to obtain some direction, some news of what was happening elsewhere. Darkness approached, and some groups began to prepare bonfires, resolved to spend the night at barricades. Students had commandeered station wagons and dump trucks. They wore white T-shirts marked with the Red Cross emblem and ferried bodies and the wounded to first-aid centers and hospitals. That day was one of the finest in the mottled career of university students, and I could only wish that the lessons of their conduct would inform their lives, collectively, forever.

I was warned against military and MOPO drive-past snipers, the hit-and-run specialists; it seemed that many casualties had been sustained that way, and on the motorbike I was a recognizable target. Eventually I was prevailed upon to transfer to another car with a volunteer driver wearing the Red Cross T-shirt and cap. It was not long before I ran into a new source of anxiety. At a recent killing ground that had been personally supervised by a military commander identified as Sani Abacha—he had arrived with a truckload of soldiers, the soldiers had poured out, and Abacha had given the order to open fire— a policeman stopped me and pulled me aside. The deaths that had taken place, he warned, were nothing compared to what would come at night, yes, that very night. He implored me to ensure that the demonstrators did not stay outdoors overnight. He had overheard an officer giving orders to another to mobilize soldiers for a night operation. They were to clear out any remaining barricades and take care of any sleeping protesters that were encountered.

I headed back to Ipaja, where I had earlier woven through barricades and backstreets on the motorbike. This time, we drove on the main road at snail speed. In no time at all, I was engulfed by a teeming humanity that stretched miles and miles on both sides of the Ipaja junction between Ota and Lagos. I was awed by this phenomenon. It felt as if hundreds of bodies were sitting on the car, on the hood, hanging from the windows, clearing a route that only drew more and more people until there was not a visible patch of that road, only heads and bodies, all threatening to crush the life out of the steel body of this misused vehicle. A man in a tracksuit, one of those who appeared not to be of the crowd yet exerted some confident authority, pushed his way forward. Through the window, I told him what I had heard and asked him if he could disperse the crowd with the fall of darkness. No, he said, you had better do it; in fact, I don't think they will let you through unless you address them.

With a joint effort, we succeeded in pushing the door against bodies to provide just sufficient space for me to emerge. Before I knew what was happening, arms had raised me onto the concrete divider, and next, I was standing on the roof of the car. The vehicle vanished, instantly swallowed by the human throng. If I had thought before that I had obtained an unforgettable sense of the massed impact of a crowd density, I now discovered that I had sensed nothing yet. The sight from my new vantage point reduced my sense of individuality to a mere speck. The world appeared to have been emptied into a skyline of heads and torsos pressed into immobility, yet seething with life.

Somehow, silence fell over the crowd. Then a roar and then silence, a roar again that rose and fell, and that vibrant silence that sucked the neigborhood into a tense expectancy. I shook my brain awake from stupefaction, succeeded in locating my voice. There was nothing to say except to commend their steadfastness, assure them of the certainty of victory.
But now you must disperse.
Don't be fooled by pretenders. You know your leaders, they will reach you by radio.
Do not stay out on the streets tonight. Go home and return in the morning, when
you can see from which direction the enemy is coming in to strike. You've taken
enough casualties. Don't let them slaughter you under cover of darkness. Go to
your beds, but be back at your posts in the morning.

LYING IN MY OWN BED late that night, my mind running through the reel of the day's events from the departure point at the Seme border, I found myself compulsively trying to occupy the skin of some luckless stray from the enemy camp who found himself entombed within the inhospitable pulse of such humanity.

By the Waters of Babylon

BETWEEN THE CONCLUSION OF THE JUNE 12, 1993, ELECTIONS, AND JUNE 26 of that year—three days before the date on which the military should have handed over power to the victorious candidate—the nation stood still. One felt that sense of congealment, of eerie immobility, nearly palpably, as if a hundred million people were massed in an outsize stadium, compelled to hold their breath. In only one section, raised like a press or adjudicators' box, did there appear to be a semblance of life. This was the law courts, where the noise and frenzy seemed resolved to make up for the loss of vitality elsewhere. There, case and countercase were filed between Babangida's surrogates on the one hand and the president-elect on the other. The former wanted to legitimize the obliteration of the results of a concluded contest, turning it into a nonevent, while the other fought the travesty of a reality in which millions had participated. The frenzy of litigation only warned how deceptive was the lethargy that had descended on the rest of the arena, filling it with an ominous expectancy.

During that month, the military regime launched one of its crudest, most cynical assaults on the already battered independence of the judiciary. It imported a rookie state magistrate from distant Edo state to hold court in the federal territory, Abuja, on a case that was clearly a federal matter. She was flown in by a presidential jet plane, sat at midnight, and found in favor of the regime— the elections, she declared, were illegal. The aggrieved parties took the hint and filed for redress in other state courts, of higher jurisdiction. Those judges ordered the regime to release the remaining results immediately and install the winner in power, one such judgment adding, “even if the heavens fall!” The heavens did not fall, but a self-outmaneuvered despot did.

I. B. Babangida had defied the courts and dug in, but his ousting was only a matter of time. Within a month after the elections, his formidable array of armored cars, guns, bribes and wiles, tear gas, and batons notwithstanding, Ibrahim Babangida was forced out of office. There was nothing soldierly or dignified about his departure. The Yoruba—as always!—have a malodorous but apt expression for the manner in which colonial powers, forced to grant independence to their colonies, invariably made their exit:
Oyinbo su s'aga
— “Before leaving, the white man defecated on the throne.” Even thus did Babangida make his bow. The dictator attempted to cushion his departure—or to pave the way for his anointed?—by appointing a civilian surrogate to rule the nation. That poisoned mantle fell on a Chief Ernest Shonekan, a gangling business executive, formerly of the British Unilever Company, with a history as obliging figurehead or point man for Babangida's creative transitional ploys. Shonekan's appearance as a recycled tool of despotic machinations was a renewed affront to the nation. His official title, this time, was head of the Interim National Government, which quickly prompted a more popular sobriquet: “the King of ING.”

That Babangida was casting about within the ethnic group and hometown of the nationally elected president, Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola, merely added insult to injury: Here, suck on this. Sure, I took your gurudi,
⁵⁴
but here's guguru.
⁵⁵
Much of the nation felt affronted by this patronizing gesture, but none more than the elected president's immediate constituency, the Yoruba West. As a fellow Yoruba and partial townsman—the other part being Ijebu—of Abiola and Shonekan, I took the insult personally. Was this how low Babangida estimated the pride and sense of justice of that part of the nation to which I belonged? At great expense and human sacrifice, the entire nation, not just one section, had made a choice, and here was one individual usurping the will of a hundred million people, reducing a national voice to a gesture of sectarian appeasement.

Came June 27, and the
gururu
was spat out and spat upon and the days of rage began. With the dictator's departure—he “stepped aside,” in his own words—and the installation of the substitute, the direct violence of three days subsided into a campaign of attrition, shifting levels of civil disobedience. The already-tried strategy of citizens-stay-at-home was revived. Trade unions went on strike, citing one grievance or another, but underlying it all was the real cause, rejection of illegitimate power. The centers of commerce, Lagos most prominently, were turned into ghost towns. Shonekan became a prisoner, ostracized by his own people, isolated in his Aso Rock fortress but playing at being head of state. The real power lay with his chief of army staff, Sani Abacha, who watched him with amused contempt, awaiting the right moment to make his move.

The stalemate exacted its price, however. It took a strange toll on the fighting spirit of some of our noted civil rights leaders, as well as the supportive media—they grew impatient, even desperate. They began to utter the once unthinkable, calling on the army to step in, dethrone Shonekan, and install the truly elected man in the presidency. At the forefront of the choir was my unpredictable ally Gani Fawehinmi, who, with increasing stridency, abandoned the forensic for the mystical. Gani added and subtracted, analyzed and synthesized dates, signs, portents, and other arcane ingredients to arrive at a clairvoyant conclusion: destiny, he declared, had laid its hand on the head of the chief of staff for this solemn duty—to oust the civilian usurper and install the choice of the people. He identified the date by which the stars would align for the inevitable event. I was nonplussed. Hadn't the nation learned, from bitter experience, that you do not entrust a hyena with even the mere whiff of meat, however rotten?

I could not help thinking how little this differed in methodology from the invocational motions of the women of Abeokuta when the cup of power had been dashed from the lips of their own son. Their response was to resurrect an ancient rite of anathemization. They made the ritual
akara,
the fried bean cake, devoid of all condiments but impregnated with deep, ancient curses. They stripped to the waist and surged out in silent procession to place the
akara
at crossroads and other spots of ancestral significance. It was a fearful ritual, its potency stamped on the grim-faced procession.

If not provably felled by the women's necromancy, Babangida had at least fallen to the accompaniment of other civic chants of rejection. His surrogate, Ernest Shonekan, would in turn be swept away on the tide of cabalistic numerology invoked from the legal redoubt of my friend Gani—with some assistance, undoubtedly, from the inordinate ambitions of a little man called Sani Abacha.

On his part, Shonekan continued to twitch within other invisible webs spun by forces he little understood. It also appeared that Babangida, or perhaps simply his loyalists acting independently, became concerned at the tenacity of popular resistance. Prompted or not by the master schemer himself, these loyalists moved to seek ways of neutralizing the problematic load their boss had deposited on the seat of power as his parting gift.

First came a visit from a young ambassador to South Africa, Tunji Olagunju, who pretended that he was just passing by, learned that I was staying in Lagos with my usual host, Yemi Ogunbiyi, and stopped to pay his respects. It was transparent that he had been sent to discuss the political impasse—to test the ground, as it were. Olagunju proposed plans that would involve the abandonment of the presidential elections, perhaps leading to a repetition of the exercise, the setting up of a government of national unity, and so on. Abiola would be free to participate in both. I quickly let him know that the “abandonment” clause was a nonstarter. The nation had chosen, and that choice must be respected.

Olagunju's visit turned out to be preparatory for another, and at a higher level. The next caller was another Babangida affiliate, General Mohammed Gusau, national security adviser to the Babangida regime, now continuing his chief bodyguard role to the King of ING. He tried to break through the initial awkwardness of the meeting by a comment on what I knew already—that the filing cabinet in the State Security Service dedicated to the subject of Wole Soyinka was not a cabinet at all but an entire room, filled from floor to ceiling with surveillance reports, news clippings, photographs, tapes from tapped conversations, departmental assessments, and more—but: “Believe me, Prof, the summative view is that you act on principle, and everyone in the service has a great respect for you.” I assured him that I also believed that “the service” acted on its principles, but what a pity its principles were constantly at variance with the people's. There was further mutual-assessment banter for a little while longer, and then, very strangely, came the question: Why had I requested to see
him?

At first taken aback, I proceeded to correct him gently. Olagunju, I said, had asked me if it might help if some individuals, high up in government, intervened in the crisis, and would I agree to meet one or two of them? Yes, I did agree. I had, however, never met him, did not know who he was—so why should I have asked to see him? Gusau feigned surprise, but, that gambit over—whatever he hoped to gain by it remained a mystery—we got down to business: how to break the political deadlock.

I proposed an unannounced minisummit in next-door Republic of Benin including Ernest Shonekan, the usurper; Bashorun Abiola, the president-elect; his defeated opponent, Bashir Tofa; the chairmen of their political parties; and a few arbitrators cum moderators from either side. They would meet away from public pressure and work out a formula for the transfer of power. I insisted, however:
there must be absolutely no military participation.
The military was out, discredited, unwanted, and mistrusted. Elections had been held, and now the elected candidate must take over the reins of government. Agreement would be reached on a government of national unity—to restore trust and confidence—but Abiola must occupy the driving seat. Gusau demurred on the total exclusion of the military, setting out the advantages of their presence. I agreed in part but insisted:
strictly as observers.
They would not participate in the discussions or try to influence them in any way. Their role would be to listen, bear witness, and return to report to their constituency. Gusau accepted the amendment. We agreed that a resolution was urgent, indeed, that it must take place within the month. The nation was breaking down; it had become ungovernable and would remain so as long as Shonekan remained in power.

The following day found me at the embassy doorstep of our neighbor the Republic of Benin. The ambassador was away in Cotonou, the capital, which could not have worked better in our favor. A signal was sent to him by his deputy, so he could immediately begin consultations with his minister of foreign affairs, obtain the blessing of the Beninois president, and so on. Word came back as expected: the meeting was more than welcome, and all was prepared—a weekend dash across the border by all the principals, no publicity, no fanfare. If all went well, the nation would wake up the following Monday to learn that civil society had seized the initiative and resolved the crisis its own way. It all struck me as déjà vu, but this was easier territory than my earlier foray into peace brokering. I began to wonder if there wasn't a diplomatic career waiting for me whenever the dramatist's stream of inspiration ran dry.

Contacts with the principals were immediately initiated. Was Gusau sincere, or was the purpose of these visits merely to test, through me, how resolute the opposition remained and how mobilized? We never did find out. The termination of that undertaking came from Aso Rock: Shonekan, we were informed, was developing other ideas that would shortly be made public. Was he indeed? Were they his? Come to think of it, was the King of ING ever possessed of any idea beyond the delusion of power? Or did he simply take orders from his handlers, that is, Sani Abacha and his power-hungry hyenas? It was impossible to tell. Abiola and his advisers were more than prepared for the Benin summit when, suddenly, all was scuttled.

The bets on Chief Ernest Shonekan were now placed not on whether he would survive but on how brief his tenure would be. He was probably the only individual in all of Nigeria who did not know this. In November 1993, Sani Abacha decided that the comedy had run long enough and moved to bring down the curtain. Surrounded by his praetorian guards, he presented Shonekan with a letter of resignation and ordered him to sign it. Shonekan, we learned, actually made some kind of protest, which must have generated some barracks merriment among the putschists.

I was horrified at the jubilation even among the die-hard democratic combatants in the nation. The media, for once, lost its habitual watchfulness, and some proceeded to censor my articles, on the grounds that they were too strong. Abacha, many believed, actually meant well and would shortly fulfill their democratic expectations. Sani Abacha! Was this not the officer who had commanded the detachment that had opened fire on unarmed protesters in the Ipaja sector on June 28? Sani Abacha had single-handedly been responsible for some two hundred dead, shot in cold blood, within Lagos state alone! He had given orders for a severe crackdown nationwide, deploying specially selected troops to ensure that his orders were carried out. During the same public protestations, he once appeared on television, a puffed-up officer bristling with arrogance, to threaten the Lagos state governor with unilateral action if that politician failed to put down the unrest in his state. The elderly governor shrugged and told him that he might as well take over his state that very moment, since he lacked the means to effect any cessation of popular protest. Abacha did not take over the state, but he did his best to decimate its population. In any case, while the continent has known an exception or two—military caretakers who actually handed over power to civilians unfairly dispossessed of that power—you simply do not employ an alcoholic as a security guard in a distillery.