Chapter One
IBA-For Those Who Went Before
….. Outside myself at moments like this, heading home, I hesitate
a moment to check if it is truly a living me. Perhaps I am just a
disembodied self usurping my body, strapped into a business-class
seat in the plane, being borne to my designated burial ground-the
cactus patch on the grounds of my home in Abeokuta, a mere hour’s
escape by road from the raucous heart of Lagos. Perhaps I am not
really within the cabin of the plane at all but lying in a coffin
with the luggage, disguised as an innocent box to fool the
superstitious, while my ghost persists in occupying a seat whose
contours have grown familiar through five years of a restless exile
that began in 1994. For my mind chooses this moment to travel twelve
years backward when, drained of all emotion, I accompanied the
body of my friend Femi Johnson from Wiesbaden in Germany, bringing
him home in defiance of the unfathomable conspiracy to leave him in
that foreign land like a stray without ties of family and friends.
And the pangs that assail me briefly stem from the renewed
consciousness of the absence of this friend, whose thunder-roll
laughter and infectious joy of life would have overwhelmed those
welcoming voices that I know await me at my destination. Despite the
eternal moment of farewell by his open coffin in the funeral parlor
in Wiesbaden, it was difficult then, and remained continuously so,
to reconcile that self with the absence of a vitality that we had
all taken so long for granted, his big but compact frame in a box,
immaculately dressed as though simply from habit-be it in a
double-breasted suit with a carnation freshly cut by his chauffeur
from the frontage garden, then laid ritualistically beside his
breakfast set, or else in his casual outfit, its components no less
carefully matched for all its seeming casualness, or his hunting
attire, which appeared selected for a genteel English countryside
ramble instead of a “rumble in the jungle.” Difficult to accept the
closed eyes that would bulge at some inspired business idea, at the
prospect of a gastronomic spread, at the sight of a passing
generously endowed female, or simply when charged with a newly
thought-up mischief-but always lighting up the space around him.
Still, I could not rest until I had brought him home, exhuming him
from the graveyard in Wiesbaden, and the clinicality of my motions
at the time made me wonder if I had left my soul in that alien
graveyard in his stead.
It must be, of course, the coincidence of the airline that triggers
such a somber recollection, in the main-that final homecoming for
Femi was also on a Lufthansa flight. And it was a coming home for me
also, since my moment-to-moment existence from the time of his death
until his reburial was in some ethereal zone, peopled by eyes of the
restless dead from distances of silent rebuke. I came back down to
earth only when he was himself within the earth of his choice, earth
that he had made his own: Ibadan. And it is this that now reinforces
the unthinkable and irrational, that this same Femi-“OBJ” to
numerous friends, business partners, and acquaintances-is not in
Ibadan at this moment awaiting my return, his sweaty face, black as
the cooking pots, supervising the kitchen in a frenzy of
anticipation, with an array of wines lined up to celebrate a
long-anticipated reunion! Femi should be alive for this moment. If
any single being deserved and could contain in himself the entirety
of the emotions that belong to this return, it is none other than
OBJ, and he is gone.
It is a long-craved homecoming, my personalized seal on the end of
the nightmare that was signaled by the death of a tyrant, Sani
Abacha, yet here I am, trying to find reasons for my lack of
feeling, trying to ensure that it is not just a mask, a perverse
exercise in control, this absence of the quickening of the pulse. It
is that other homeward journey of twelve years past that stubbornly
sticks to the mind, that of a friend forever still in a casket in
the belly of the plane, I seated among the living but stone cold to
the world, conscious of this fact but only in a detached way and
wondering why I was still so devoid of the sensation of loss. It
could be, I acknowledge, the aftermath of the battle to bring home
his remains-plainly, it had left me drained of all feeling. This
return has not, so it must be that I have carried that home so
obsessively in my head these past five years that I am unable to
experience the journey as one toward the recovery of a zone of
deprivation. The absence of Femi, who persists in looming large, a
territory of dulled bereavement, is only a part of it. The
adrenaline had been secreted over time, stored up, and
then-pfft-evaporated in an instant, there being no further use for
it.
One seeks these explanations somewhat desultorily, since I already
acknowledge that this is not quite the homecoming I had anticipated,
not quite the way my return had been planned, not this legitimate
arrival, swooping toward Lagos on a normal flight as if Lagos were
Frankfurt, New York, or Dakar. Surely it is not the same
white-haired monster, that same “wanted” man with a price on his
head, hunted the world over, who is headed home, steadily lubricated
by the aircraft’s generous bar. I continue to interrogate the
featureless flatness of my mind-compared to it, the pastel evenness
of the Sahara Desert, over which we appear to be eternally
suspended, seems a craggy, wild, untamable, and exotic piece of
landscape.
I acknowledge that I am not much given to sentiment, but after all,
I am not normally averse to being welcomed home! Indeed, I often
wonder if, for others similarly embattled, homecoming does not
gradually become a central motif of their active existence. For
instance, I find I dislike airport farewells-the exceptions have
usually been preceded by some kind of tug-of-war to which I
eventually yielded, often through emotional blackmail. By contrast,
I am somewhat more accommodating with the motions of being welcomed
back, though, even here, I am just as likely to be found sneaking in
through the back door. Generally, my inclination is simply-to have
returned. To find myself back in the place I never should have left.
Or where returning is no different from never having left, a routine
recovery of a space of normal being, temporarily fractured,
restoration of which has no significance whatsoever and requires no
special recognition. In any case, each homecoming differs wildly
from the last, and this goes back to my very earliest awareness of
such an event, the end of a physical separation, when I first
returned home from studying overseas-on New Year’s Day 1960, the
year of Nigeria’s independence. Then, feeling already long in the
tooth at twenty-five, I had contrived to sneak home, to the
discomfiture of parents, family, and relations. Normally, such a
return should have been an occasion for celebration, varying from
modest and restricted to festive and all-embracing, the latter
gathering in distant clans and even total strangers with that
ringing invocation that must have been adopted by the first-line
beneficiaries of European education-Our Argonaut has returned from
over the seas after a long, perilous voyage in his quest for the
Golden Fleece!-or any of its hundred variations.
It is perhaps the sedateness of this return that continues to sit
awkwardly on me, an abrupt usurpation of the other furtive
homecoming that nearly was! Not that I regret the change, oh no, not
for a moment! T’agba ba nde, a a ye ogun ja-thus goes the Yoruba
wisdom-“As one approaches an elder’s status, one ceases to indulge
in battles.” Some hope! When that piece of wisdom was first voiced,
a certain entity called Nigeria had not yet been thought of. In any
case, I appear to have failed in my ambition to “grow old
gracefully”-no more strife, no more susceptibilities to beauty’s
provocation, and so on-a process I had once confidently set to begin
at the magic figure of forty-nine, seven times seven, the magic
number of my companion deity, Ogun. But at least I accept that there
comes a moment when age dictates the avoidance of certain forms of
engagement. That makes sense and is also just. There comes a point
in one’s life when one should no longer be obliged to sneak into
one’s homeland through mangrove creeks and smugglers’ haunts, and in
ludicrous disguises!
I worry therefore about the absence of feeling, the absence of even
a grateful nod to Providence, and seek some reassurance that my
senses are not fully dead, that the emotional province of the mind
is still functioning. I obtain a measure of relief, however-indeed,
I begin to worry now that the senses may be roaming out of
control-when, even within the recycled air of the plane’s interior,
overflying nothing but Sahara dunes and dust, I could swear,
suddenly, that I already smell the humid air of Lagos, the fetid
dung heaps, the raucous marketplaces and overcrowded streets. I am
certain that I can hear, dominating even the steady purr of the jet
engines, the noisy street vendors with their dubious bargains, see
the sly conspiratorial grins of some as they offer contraband of the
most dangerous kind-and this had become routine even before I fled
into exile in November 1994-banned publications that they slide out
from under the pile of other journals, like pornography in other
places. Psst! They sidle up to motorists at traffic junctions and
delays, with the mainstream journals on conspicuous display. Then,
indifferent to the risk that the prospective customer might turn out
to be a secret service agent or one of Abacha’s ubiquitous
informers, they flash the sensational cover of Tempo, The News, The
Concord, Tell, or some other hit-and-run samizdat: sani abacha bares
his fangs! whom the gods will destroy! abacha’s agents on rampage:
mother killed, eleven-year-old held hostage in police cell! scandal
rocks aso rock! who killed bagauda kaltho? Then the cat-and-mouse
games, the mandatory raids-some days, weeks, even months in police
cells for these stubborn vendors, some of them no older than ten or
eleven. And no sooner are they released than they are back on the
streets. Even the police grew weary of the charade. Such sights
filled one’s bloodstream with a political rush; the truth was,
however, that I would rather be miles distant from the obligations
they imposed, “taking my gun for a walk” in the bush, far from the
stressful streets.
* * *
I cannot wait to repossess the bush, or maybe it is the other way
around, let the bush repossess me. The bush and its furtive breath.
Refuge and solace. The mere thought brings in its train the smells,
and soon my seat is isolated and wreathed in nothing but the very
smells of the bush! The thought of resuming my forays into those
silent growths finally quickens my pulse, hesitantly, just
perceptibly, sobered by the thought that Femi, whom I also taught to
hunt, will no longer be a part of it. Yet there, perhaps, is where I
would most painlessly recover his presence-in those swathes of
isolation, that terrain of so many sensory ambiguities. Enfolded
within the tropical bush, the effect is tranquilizing-until of
course the moment of the approach of a quarry-not that the pulse
quickens all that noticeably even then. It does not matter whether
it is the Harmattan season of dry air with its parched or burnt
vegetation- except in the early morning when the foliage is misted
over and even the earth is deceptively damp-or the rainy season,
which leaves you tangling with moist thickets, fording swollen
gorges, sliding on treacherous rocks, and being sucked into mud
gullies, day or night, at night with nothing but a few stars seen
through branches or fireflies to test your patience and judgment as
you wonder whether they are the eyes of a wildcat, a tree cyrax, or
twin raindrops caught in the light of your night lamp.
All that matters is the escape into timelessness, interrupted by
furtive pads of a four-footed quarry or the sudden burst of the
brown bush fowl or gray-streaked guinea fowl soaring and screaming
over trees. An instant only to decide whether or not the latter is
worth the try-even if you downed it, how much time would it demand
to plunge into the hostile fastness to retrieve your booty? In the
process you become insensitive to the rank presence of a far larger
quarry, the prized egbin or igala, or a patriarch or matriarch of
the etu family, the archsurvivor of the species-adimu-whose heavy
meat could feed a fair-sized company of guerrillas long lost in the
bush…. Definitely it is the bush, the bush alone-its smells,
muted sounds, textures, and often impenetrable silence that finally
bathe me in a glow of warm anticipation. It is that, that alone, not
any other resumption of relationships or recovery of suspended
voices. Is this some form of misanthropy?
Or perhaps it is the suppressed fear that my house is gone anyway,
that I am returning to a conspicuous gap in the landscape at which I
had hacked and quarried, years before my departure, to give expression
to my appetite for space. News of the invasion had reached me, but
the dimension of destruction had been vague and guarded, as if the
kind couriers had agreed to hold back the worst. In truth, regarding
the building itself, I had not planned to encase so much space
within walls, just a small cottage, after my retirement from
university service, but with as much ground as I could afford.
Still, hovel or mansion, the soldiers’ violation hung over it, as it
hung over many other homes that were owned by perceived enemies of
the dictator, Sani Abacha. The house had been built almost entirely
from the windfall of the Nobel Prize. I had expanded it from its
original design only because I wanted to create a space for periodic
retreat for writers and artists-typical of the fantasies of those
who are suddenly bombarded with more money than generations before
them ever laid eyes on! Thus was born the notion of the Essay
Foundation for the Humanities, named after my father, whose
initials, S.A., had coalesced in my childhood mind as one word:
Essay.
You Must Set Forth at Dawn
A Memoir
By Wole Soyinka
Random House
Copyright © 2006
Wole Soyinka
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-375-50365-X
