You Must Set Forth at Dawn (57 page)

A pall had descended on the nation, but not many were yet willing to acknowledge that we were approaching Arthur Koestler's darkness at noon—not even Moshood Abiola, the president-elect, who agreed to deal with Sani Abacha on the face value of his protestations. With Yemi Ogunbiyi in tow, I called on my friend Ibrahim Alfa, the vice air marshal whom we had involved in the Benin scheme. We found him in like mood, sunk deep in dolefulness, cradling a glass of his favorite German Riesling.

“Sani came to see me the night before the coup,” he admitted, “told me that he was taking over—to bring stability to the nation! I was horrified. I asked him why he would want to do such a thing, and he replied that the people wanted it. They felt he was the only one who could put an end to the anarchy. ‘All right,' I told him finally, ‘but be sure you don't stay longer than three months, just enough time to install the elected president.' Of course I said that only because he was going to take over anyway. Everything was already prepared. Inwardly, I shook like a leaf and began to think seriously of relocating. Abacha in charge of Nigeria? The man has the brain of a lizard.”

IT PROVED IMPOSSIBLE not to feel and express outright contempt for the lizard's promulgation of his own unending program of transition to civilian rule. The process of self-entrenchment was blatant enough, but most depressing of all was its lack of originality—Abacha had decided that any scheme of deception employed by Babangida was worthy of emulation; simply multiply the brazenness of it twice or thrice over, and it would become palatable to the public. If it proved not to be, the obvious remedy was force-feeding, and with as much brutality as could be mustered.

At first, the new dictator permitted the civilian state governors and legislatures, elected under the interim arrangements of Babangida's gradualist ruses, to remain in office. Suddenly, with a Cromwellian flourish, he sent them packing: the political class had not learned its lesson, the legislators were not serious, corruption reigned unbridled, and so on. The public crowed approval: serves the bickering moneybags right! Emboldened, he began to toy with the captive populace. Inauguration of yet another constitution-writing body, one-third of which would be his own nominees. A new timetable for civilian restoration, then another. Arrests. Detentions. Constitutional Assembly sent on enforced vacation, returned sober and compliant. Mysterious assassinations, generally attributed to armed robbers. Abrupt retirements of the more professional soldiers. Deployment of suspect military units to the civil war front in Liberia. Flights of targeted individuals, including the dictator's earlier collaborators. Phantom plots against the regime—it took only a moment to make up an attempted coup d'état, then weave a net elastic enough to contain the entire population if necessary.

Now increasingly suspicious of the dictator's true intent, the press found itself under siege as it fought back. Under Ibrahim Babangida, his sadistic agents would simply wait until the daily or weekly print run had been completed, then swoop down on the editorial houses and cart off their irreplaceable haul. At a lecture at the University of Lagos, I challenged them: “Why do you let Babangida's police raid your offices, your printing presses, cart off copies of your journals without a fight? Have you never heard of underground publishing? Set up more than one editorial office, and divide up your pages among various presses. Use fronts. Scatter your editors, and let your journalists link up with them by telephone, fax, or carrier pigeon, if it comes to that!”

When, two or three years afterward, Abacha came into power, their guerrilla tactics appeared to have been readied and honed overnight. The garage behind my Abeokuta office on Lalubu Street was perhaps the earliest office of the samizdat. It was already being used for clandestine meetings by a youthful group working out plans for making Abeokuta a no-go area for Abacha's forces of occupation. There they prepared torrid pamphlets and organized their distribution. The journalists among them put their training to good use. I left the gates to my office compound open when I went home. They came at night and left by morning, leaving the garage clean of any evidence of their nocturnal presence or activities.

The ascendancy of raw, naked power was rapid. Abacha's police had graduated from merely seizing editions and setting fires to media houses; they now took to seizing journalists themselves, then taking their relatives—including wives and children—hostage, to force a wanted journalist or suspected dissident to turn himself in. A notorious episode, photographed by another journalist, showed an SSS agent pressing his pistol to the head of a six-year-old boy, screaming “Where is your father?” even as his mother was bundled into a waiting vehicle. Not long after occurred, albeit in a muted key, the curious incident around my son Tunlewa.

A botched kidnapping? Or just a clumsy attempt to identify and enter him, even at the age of four, into the surveillance album? Whatever their purpose, the agents were clearly handicapped by the fact that, as they skulked behind some flowering shrubs at his school in Ikeja, a Lagos suburb, they were uncertain which of the pupils was who. So they called out the name “Tunlewa” in the direction of a bunch of children going by. Their aim was to see which of the children would turn around. David, my nephew, who shared the same car pool, was already walking toward the car. He heard the name and turned around instinctively, wondering who was hailing his cousin, expecting to see him coming toward the car that would take them home. But strange men pointed urgently toward him, all friendly smiles:
Yes, you, you are young Soyinka, aren't
you?
David shook his head, turned, and quickened his steps toward the safety of the car. Once home, he spoke to his mother about it, but guardedly, such was the impression of some impending danger that the incident had left on even his youthful senses.

That event took place against the background of more than a year's round-the -clock, hardly subtle surveillance on our rented bungalow in Ikeja, as well as my private office in Abeokuta, where I gave most of my press conferences, the offices of the Ogun state chapter of the national union of journalists being just around the corner and always eager for a political statement.

Curiously, the same journalists worried more about the safety of their contributor than about themselves, sometimes censoring something I had written for fear that it would prove the last straw for Abacha. It took weeks of angry pressure from me before
The News
finally published what was probably my defining prediction, an article written soon after the Abacha takeover and a year before my flight. There I warned that the new ruler was a killer, that “this man would gaol, torture, kidnap, maim and kill at will simply in order to remain in power.” I knew him. I had studied him. I made it my business to follow the careers of a number of the military players on the Nigerian political field. Sani Abacha was a psychopath, certifiably so. Now head of state and commander of the most celebrated armed forces in West Africa, his security machinery translated into action his paranoid assessment of individuals opposed to his rule. Around my office, the attempt by Abacha's agents at invisibility was so laughable that a foreign visitor, a Swiss producer and cultural animator, Niggi Popp, could not contain himself. Long after I had opened the door to let him in, he remained on the doorstep, surveying the street. Then, in a loud, provocative tone, as if he wanted to make absolutely certain that he was overheard by the furtive presences, he demanded to know what I had done to deserve a horde of snoopers attempting to merge with the local color.

Of the constant visitors who came to check on my “state of health,” the most wryly bewildered was perhaps Kunle Ajibade, one of the younger generation of investigative journalists. Kunle was a correspondent for
The News
in Abeokuta and one of the pioneers of the samizdat publication, toward which I had nudged his profession some years before. He would himself undergo the experience of a mock trial and incarceration—without ever losing his sense of the absurd. Kunle came almost ritualistically to my office, sat opposite my desk, and, with a mixture of amazement and expectancy on his face, demanded to know: “But, Prof, why haven't they come for you?”

“Why? Do you want them to?”

“No, but it doesn't make sense. By now they should have taken you in.”

“Well, they haven't. So, what's your problem?”

“Well, I simply don't understand what you're still doing here,” he persisted. “It's either you should be heading out of the country, or they should be pulling you in.”

It was such a persistent puzzle for him that I teased him, insisting that he was hoping for a scoop, making sure that he was on the spot when Abacha's men did come for me. The opposite was true, of course, especially as Kunle sometimes took it on himself to censor the odd article or interview that I granted him, having resolved to protect me from myself! “But, Prof,” he would protest in his high-pitched voice, “if we had published that article as you wrote it, we would have lost you to Abacha right away! And then where would I obtain my exclusive interviews?”

This much one must say for police surveillance: its helicopters certainly provided the nation some rich moments of comic relief, for which I insist on claiming credit. In the early months of 1995, unable to find their way to my house—the nearby villagers always misled uninvited visitors, sent them in all directions, and left them going around in circles—the police resorted to scouting the terrain from the air. Thereafter they buzzed over the house whenever they wanted some diversion or relaxation. Finally tired of their game, I summoned a press conference, issued a tongue-in-cheek warning, and sounded the war drums in the hyperbolic accents of a famous cri de coeur that had once been wrung out of one of Abacha's predecessors in office, Olusegun Obasanjo.

A retired general turned statesman at the time of his famous outburst and member of the Commonwealth's Eminent Persons Group set up to negotiate the end of apartheid, Obasanjo enjoyed the distinction of being the first African leader to breach the prison walls of Robben Island and actually meet Nelson Mandela. Deeply incensed by the intransigence of the Boers and frustrated by the slow progress of the liberation struggle, the general forgot his role as negotiator and let forth a most unusual rallying cry: “Where are our famed metaphysical powers? Is it not possible to call on our ancient spiritual forces to smash the apartheid system? Where is our juju force? Where is our much-vaunted
epe
⁵⁶
potency?”

And so, in response to the aerial aggression against my domestic peace, I belted out an extended war chant modeled on the general's bellow of rage: “But for my humanity and the compassion that I feel for the innocent officers in that craft, I would have taken traditional measures against this noisome intruder. If the police boss, Comassie, doubts me, I dare him to return alone or with that cowardly torturer, Ismail Gwarzo. I shall teach them that there are powers beyond the white man's machine guns, rockets, and missiles. I shall stand outside my house and recite some potent
ofo,
incantations from antiquity that will bring the craft spiraling down into my cassava fields!”

The journals made a feast of it! Playing along, they churned out caricatures of this Ijegba warrior with matted hair and beard, cowrie shells strung around my neck, a belligerent conch or horn in hand, pens and pencils vying with quills and amulets in my hair, one arm raised toward the intruder in the sky. More than a few were witty and hilarious. I framed my favorite and hung it behind my living room bar. In exile, my mind easily reverted to that cartoon when I learned that my house had been smashed up on the pretext of seeking the opposition radio, making me wonder if it was still hanging there, if it had caught the eye of one of the invaders with a sense of humor and ended up in his pocket, or if I would find it lying amid a heap of smashed furniture.

It all helped to ease a people's tension, dispersing the real aura of menace with ridicule. I did not fool myself, however. Even at that stage, it had become clear to me that the space for such mock heroics was rapidly contracting and that comic turns were becoming indistinguishable, literally, from gallows humor. Such moments became rarer and rarer. Civil society was knuckling under. There never is a shortage of willing collaborators within civil society, and the roll of recruits lengthened by the day. The prospect of a slave plantation, more than a hundred million at the last census, subject to the whim of one man, stared me in the face. It was time to revitalize public sensitivity to what was happening, where it was all headed, and incite its will toward self-recovery. Wearily, I acknowledged that it was time for some drastic initiative.

IN AUGUST 1994, surrounded and menaced by fully armed and kitted mobile police who pressed their faces against windows and a metal grille that surrounded the open assembly hall, I held a press conference at the Mayflower School, Sagamu, run by the late schoolmaster and social reformer Tai Solarin. There, with a detailed map, I outlined plans to expand an exercise we had undertaken during the sit-tight season of Ibrahim Babangida when we embarked on a walk from the Labor headquarters in Oju-elegba, on Lagos's outskirts, to Ikoyi. This time we would advance to the scope of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s march on Washington, D.C., and confront the lizard in its hole—mobilize the people and embark on a Million Man March on Abuja! We would converge from all four points of the compass, march on Abuja, and invest the seat of government until the tyrant was dislodged. We commenced plans in earnest.

A few weeks later, I was returning from a light hunt in the surroundings of my Abeokuta home one morning when I came upon three security agents. They had been waiting for me since very early in the morning, early enough to have found me if I had not gone into the bush. The “State Annexe”—the demure name for the offices of the State Security Service throughout the country—had just earned itself a rocket from Aso Rock, the seat of government. It appeared that the director's predecessor in office had earlier received a memo to pull me in and interrogate me about my public statements and activities. That luckless official had failed to track me down for weeks, when, lo and behold, I appeared on the front pages of the media yet again, not only spouting off but organizing a march that would converge on Aso Rock from all corners of the nation. A sizzling signal scorched the desk of his successor. The commander in chief demanded instant explanation: How could I be at once untraceable, yet conspicuously present in the national media, even to the extent of holding a press conference in that very town? The new director did not await a renewed warning. He dispatched three of his men with orders to stake out my house night and day and bring me in the moment I appeared.