You Must Set Forth at Dawn (67 page)

“But first we have to defend ourselves,” he insisted. “And we defend ourselves by attacking the profit machine of our enemies or all who support our enemies.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You don't believe that travelers will start avoiding Swissair, do you?”

He shrugged. “At least it may make them think twice. Certainly the profits of Swissair will be cut, and that will affect their policies.”

I smiled at him. “Permanently? That is, even if at all?”

“At least Switzerland will experience some commercial insecurity. A blow has been struck at the Swiss industrial machine.”

The homicidal thrill of the vicarious killer—Oh yes, I have been here before, I said to myself, heard it all too often. In a moment, he would begin to drool openly. It was time to encourage the young man to return to his seat so I could resume my work.

“Oh, undoubtedly,” I reassured him. “The blow was heard all around the world. However, with your permission, I intend to retain my moral outrage. That was a thrill killing, nothing to do with a liberation war. It is even impious—you assume the power of life and death over
all
of humanity. I find that arrogant. Offensive. I come from a culture that despises such tactics. It's an assault on my humanity.”

And that was when I received what I still consider a prime candidate for the most profound insult of my life. It grates, it rankles, to this very day, whenever I recall it. This youth, at least a decade below my age, this weasely, pampered, pimply, unripe specimen of humanity who had earlier bubbled with the effervescence of an anticipated week or fortnight vacation at a youth jamboree, courtesy of the United Nations, in the very heartland of “Zionist apologists and supporters,” arranged his face into a sweet, understanding smile, appropriating to himself a power of absolution that normally resides in the voice of one who has witnessed much, suffered much, but understood and transcended it all. Looking up at me from his bent knees, he let me know, in effect, that I had his full sympathy, that the only mission that he now had left in the world was to comfort and exonerate me from the implications of utterances that, presumably, would have been a capital crime from the lips of other mortals.

“Ah, but I understand,” he said. “You are a writer, a poet.”

I was terribly conscious of the mischievous smile on the face of my female companion. We had been together long enough since my release from prison for her to grasp what my fingers itched to do at that moment. My strangulated voice, stressed beyond the endurance limits of the metal skin of a contraption that did not permit such responses, one that was also headed for a destination where such impulses, if given rein, would have to be sternly answered on landing, miraculously succeeded in forcing from me a response in a nonmanic mode.

“Perhaps I should let you know this,” I said—and my calmness of voice was deserving of a medal for composure under enemy fire—“I have just emerged from prison detention in my own country.” It gained his attention, but this only knotted up my insides even more violently. “I am sorry I have to bring it up, I don't like talking about it, especially to a total stranger, but you should know that I did not earn that prison spell from being a poet. We recently concluded a civil war; I was imprisoned on account of my role in that war. Wait”— I saw his face undergoing yet another instant plastic surgery; I was about to be insulted with comradely sympathy—“that was not my first brush with the law. The first time, I was on trial for armed robbery.”

I do not recall any further exchanges after that, since I returned immediately to my typewriter. He did say something, but it was lost on me. Indeed I do not recall when or how he left and returned to his seat, only that he could not have prolonged his stay, since he was still intact when I saw him seated among his companions an hour or so later on my way to the bathroom, and there was no sense of any bruising on my knuckles. I had decided to ignore him altogether, but the sight of this commander of life and death, this fount of understanding of the lofty, idealistic, but pitiably innocent world of the poet, a youth seated among his friends, all of them so full of life, so fired up with anticipated thrills and new experiences in the despised but accommodating United States, proved unbearable. My imagination projected youths like him and his companions in that ill-fated plane or another like it, with a doomsday parcel tucked in one of their rucksacks. I stopped and looked at him, at his companions, then back at him. He returned the look with some fear and uncertainty. I confess that I rather enjoyed that look.

“By the way, I knew no one on that plane,” I said to him, “but I easily could have. Maybe a friend, a relation, or even a comrade from our own very modest struggle, not so earth-shaking as yours. If I had . . . well, just be careful where you're going—I mean, to whom you say such things. Some of us—poets—are not exactly poets. We live sometimes—beyond the word.”

MY ETHICAL CODE on violence evolved through numerous such encounters, but not only from them. I am, after all, an assiduous student of history and a product of a world still in thrall to the mandates of violence. I did not really sit down to ask questions of my temperament but listened to its responses to nonpacific situations, both real-life and as articulated by others. As the century began to close upon the struggle against Abacha, so did our choices contract.

It was indeed approaching a time to prepare, having clarified in our minds what we would and would not do, how to preserve our humanity even in the midst of violence. There were zones of potential help that we meticulously avoided. For instance, contacts were made on behalf of the movement with some warlords in Liberia; we turned down the idea. And once I received a personal invitation from a rebel leader in Sierra Leone who felt that we should make common cause. It was not until much later, indeed after my return home, that I came to uncover how the contact had ever come to be made.

In the ranks of that rebel leader was a former journalist and radio broadcaster. We had done programs together on the BBC; indeed, he had interviewed me more than once on Nigerian arts and politics. The timing of this reaching out to us was, in fact, well judged. The Nigerian army under Sani Abacha was considered an army of occupation by quite a sizable section within Sierra Leone, thus this rebel leader was persuaded that he was involved in a genuine war of liberation. We were equally resolved to unseat a dictator in Nigeria; that made us natural allies—thus went his reasoning. He would confront the Nigerian war machine on Sierra Leonean soil while we eroded its base within Nigeria.

His calculations did not lack affirmation within the military itself. By 1996, many Nigerian soldiers, even units, had begun to fraternize with rebel forces. They saw no reason why they should be in Sierra Leone, fighting for democracy, while that commodity was denied them and their families at home, and under the most brutal conditions. And there was massive discontent and suspicion among the officers and men. Some Southern officers had become convinced that Abacha was using the war in Liberia and Sierra Leone either to keep them from intervening at home or to decimate their ranks, while simultaneously installing his own regional minions in cushy political positions at home, turning the war into a money-spinning industry over their body count. I once encountered a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, Thomas Pickering, in Washington, D.C. In the course of reviewing his tour of duty in Nigeria, he revealed how Sani Abacha, while chief of staff, had brought him an invoice for the hiring of transport planes for ECOMOG troops, a cost that the U.S. government had promised to underwrite. One look at the figures, and the ambassador had screamed. More calmly, he had reminded Abacha that the United States had a lot of experience in airlifting troops all over the world. Abacha, he said, had quietly withdrawn the invoice, and he never brought it back; he had simply added two zeros to the figures.

Disillusionment was therefore at its highest, and morale at its lowest, especially after the costly 1996 attempt by the Nigerian Army to reinstall President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah in office in Sierra Leone. That effort had resulted in the rebel forces marching on the capital, Freetown, penetrating close to the very heart of the city, and nearly routing the Nigerian forces. The Nigerian soldiers, in the main, simply did not want to fight. There was an instance, one of many, when a commander actually arranged for his unit to be “captured” by a rebel force. After some weeks of fraternizing, they arranged similarly to be released—“as a gesture of goodwill” by their captors. The charade was so transparent that the commander was later court-martialed and, I was informed, shot. The rebel commander was therefore not so illogical in thinking that we could have something in common with his cause. And at that stage, the war in Sierra Leone had not truly degenerated into a state of mindless atrocities in which a generation of young recruits, sometimes as young as six or seven, were turned into drug-crazed killers, agents of defilement and torture. The frenzy of amputations, thrill killings, rapes, and arson had not begun. Scattered incidents, yes, but they had not attained the status of a competitive policy of near-indiscriminate dehumanization. We decided to keep our distance, but it would be false to say that the offer was not objectively considered.

We did seek help elsewhere—in Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Africa, Rwanda, Uganda, Burkina Faso—and not necessarily from their governments. The responses were, as expected, varied. Some assisted with logistics, others with mobility, some were generous with sweet words, yet others lent us expertise. Burkina Faso was especially liberal with travel documents, and the president, Blaise Compaoré, was spontaneous and sympathetic. His ambassador in France kept in constant touch, letting me know when his leader was likely to pass through Paris, in case I wished to arrange a further meeting. However, the war scenario in the West African subregion, in which Compaoré was clearly playing a controversial role, made us somewhat chary. We withdrew further and further from someone who was clearly disposed to be a keen ally, whose nation harbored a large Nigerian population and was strategically positioned in relation to Nigeria. Through General David Mark, another dissident general who had escaped Abacha's net quite early in the game, we learned that our abandonment of that resource had not stopped Abacha's intelligence service from reporting that I had a trained army of infiltrators already positioned in that country.

We prepared shopping lists, followed leads that took us to both dubious and idealistic corners. We allied with the rump of the ill-fated Ogboru-Orkar warriors who had tried and failed to topple the regime of Ibrahim Babangida. (Most were war-weary.) A Vietnam veteran who had once been a business associate of the imprisoned president Moshood Abiola, a voluble, boastful, and ultimately unproductive ally, appeared to have a recurrent boatload of arms anchored somewhere on the high seas, ready for delivery but requiring a down payment that our combined lifetime resources must have found hilarious. In the end, all that we gained from him was the privilege of being used! He smuggled himself into a photo opportunity during my encounter with President Clinton, set up for a university commencement. He then took the photographs into a bankruptcy court hearing as proof that he had used his resources to back a democratic struggle—headed, of course, by none other than the Nobel laureate in the photograph. He presented a folder of news clippings of my denunciations of the regime and its human rights abuses. Clinton's presence was proof that he had the tacit approval of the U.S. government; thus his “contributions” should be declared tax-deductible.

If only we had a fraction of his business adroitness! Still, we did set up a financial unit, tried out the most arcane routes for generating funds. Our allied financial wizards prepared plates for liberation bonds in readiness for D-Day. Others set up small ventures specifically for the cause—one, Bola Tinubu, who had escaped from Abacha's dragnet through a hospital window and would later become the elected governor of Lagos state, set up a trade in rice with Taiwan! Lacking even the most rudimentary sense of trade, I stuck to my own narrow groove for generating funds: I accepted lecture engagements anywhere, anytime, for virtually any fee or none at all. Propagating the cause was itself an essential resource on which we could draw.

Numerous factors continued to push us beyond the line of mere readiness. Indeed, less than a year before Abacha's death, we found ourselves, within NALICON, compelled to reassess the state of the struggle. It was not difficult to confront the truth: that the route that the democratic movement had traveled so far—albeit creatively and sometimes courageously—was close to a dead end. Every moment saw Abacha consolidating himself deeper in power and terror. More and more opposition voices were being silenced while the political figures were falling like ninepins under the spell of power. If you cannot beat them, they shrugged, join them. There was no question about it, the so-called masses were losing hope.

Thus, for us on the outside, it was time to reexamine our level of commitment.

A new impetus was needed. One by one, the opposition movements at home were being emasculated. The pioneering group the Campaign for Democracy was barely functioning. Most of the internal leaders—Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti, Femi Falana, Shehu Sani, and others—were either in jail without charge, sentenced in kangaroo tribunals, awaiting trial on treason charges, or otherwise incapacitated. Gani Fawehinmi, the civil rights lawyer, continued to shuttle into and out of jail, perpetually harassed, his chambers shot up occasionally as a warning, his night watch leaving a blood trail that dragged over a paved courtyard and a gate, for all the world like a film sequence, as he tried to clamber to safety. That Gani had won the Bruno Kreisky Award for Human Rights only appeared to incense Abacha all the more, making him an even more desirable target for persecution and, indeed, elimination. Our NADECO partners within the country, constantly exposed, lived under the sudden visitation of the assassins' bullets. In plain daylight, at a petrol station at a busy intersection of Lagos, the elderly but vigorous Abraham Adesanya, a former senator, unbelievably escaped death as his car was drilled through and through by the submachine guns of Abacha's killer squad. The combative wife of the imprisoned president, Kudirat Abiola, was not so lucky. She was waylaid in full traffic flow in the morning rush hour, stopped, and shot through the head. Not until after Sani Abacha's death and the dismantling of his murder organization would it be discovered that one of her closest confidants and political advisers had been an agent of Sani Abacha and had indeed provided details of her movements on that day to the assassins.