You Must Set Forth at Dawn (11 page)

On the penultimate night of the presence of the Eastern Region broadcasters, we were finally alerted that the location of the transmitter had been discovered by the police, who would raid Awolowo's house the following day. The information came too late to dismantle and transfer the equipment, so we slept in strategic positions and quickly improvised a defense of the transmitter, awaiting the police assault. Some set up a diversionary ambush around a school across the road from Awolowo's home. My favored couch was the carpeted floor beneath a massive oak desk of the imprisoned leader. The assault did take place, but only after the final broadcast by Ukonu's team. When the police forces arrived for the planned dawn raid, Awolowo's house had been emptied, and Ukonu and gang were well on their way back to safety. The band of volunteers had had their baptism of fire; they slipped out before dawn, returned to their homes with relief, and awaited the next developments. The region hung on edge. An election had been stolen—would the robbers insist on clinging to stolen goods?

THE ANSWER WAS PROVIDED in time-tested ways. More opposition leaders were arrested, their homes and businesses vandalized, and, in some cases, thugs were sent to rape their women, at times with the husband forcibly held down as witness. The people, at first on the retreat, began to respond in kind. The homes and offices of government loyalists were torched, agents killed— sometimes in broad daylight, openly, and in urban centers—and ambushes laid for the marauding police squads. A new expression entered the vocabulary of politics:
Weti e!
—literally, “Douse it” (with petrol, then set it on fire). The police had their tear-gas canisters, Mark IV rifles, pistols, and even the occasional submachine gun; the resisters had in the main just the locally fabricated Dane guns, some shotguns, machetes, and—improvisation. The recipe for a concoction invented by the farmers and used to deadly effect remains elusive still. When the police arrived for their raids in rural areas, the seats and backrests of their unguarded trucks were smeared or sprayed with this substance. Minutes after the raiders returned and regained their seats, the effect began— presumably by then the mystery unguent had percolated through their clothing, the process being accelerated, we learned, by the amount of sweat on their shirts. They would leap up and tear off their clothing, convulsed in pain. It was nothing I ever witnessed personally, and nobody seemed to have died from its effect, but it was narrated by the victims themselves, who described the effect as one of intense, sticky burning. An African prototype of napalm, perhaps? I called it the Medea effect.

Finally, seeing that the campaign of intimidation had failed at voting time, the final “voter returns” were simply plucked out of thin air and announced on radio and television, fulfilling the blasphemous boast of the then deputy premier of the region on state television that had launched the doomed elections: Whether you vote for us or not, we don't give a damn, since we're going to win
anyway. The angels will descend from the heavens to cast their votes on our side.

Spells of Sanity

The “roaring sixties” were not, however, an unbroken period of political outrage and response, of impositions, of a bleak intensity that sometimes appeared to have dominated, even defined, the life of a young man of thirty. It was not without periods of enlivening relief, both within and outside the nation. Teaching remained a constant respite, a mental undercurrent that restored a sense of proportion and highlighted the absurdity of much of the political reality. It was, however, a rather difficult time for my head of department, a pleasant Scottish lady whose real specialization was bibliography. She could not understand why the departmental timetable was never good enough for me, so that I had to make independent arrangements with my students and my classes took place at any time of the day, night, or weekend, and sometimes simply occupied a continuous weekend, before another vanishing act! Once she happened to read an essay submitted by a student, who had taken to heart my proposition that for Emily Brontë's Heathcliff—yes, Emily Brontë did fall into my lap!—an arguable metaphor would be the vampire. With the same intensity with which the student had pursued the theme, she tried to contest the notion, without the slightest trace of humor, thereby provoking me to improvise a sturdy correlative of clues from which I refused to budge. Finally she sighed, shook her head, and looked out of the window at a huge tree on whose branches bats clustered in their thousands. Instantly, her face lit up and she pointed to the leathery blobs: “When you teach
Wuthering Heights
at night to the background of those squeaky little things, I suppose you're bound to see vampires.”

The Mbari Club remained a place for shedding political tensions, even while introducing some of its own—workshops, exhibitions, plays, music recitals, a well-stocked bar where both the locals and the expatriate community would stay up till the early hours . . . eccentric individuals whose interests and activities provided periods of escape, like the artistic projects of a truly talented artist who was nicknamed “Mr. G.” for his unfailing regularity in picking up the common social disease in brothels, to the exasperation of his doctor, a Nigerian, who did not believe in patient confidentiality. A totally different kettle of fish, who also drank like one, was Mitholfer, of an impressive but well-packaged girth. An officer of indeterminate functions in the U.S. Information Agency, Mitholfer lived near Femi Johnson in his first home at Onireke, so we often met there. Mitholfer showed such fervid interest in my take on the political goings-on that Femi and I challenged him to deny that he was a CIA agent, specially assigned to me. He would only respond with his Buddha smile, then go to sleep in his chair. Always good for the latest rumors, for “complots and stratagems” behind enemy lines—the corridors of power—Mitholfer, who always thoughtfully visited with a bag holding ten or twelve cold bottles, was the only being I knew who, after downing six .75-liter bottles of Star Beer, could still hold an impeccable conversation. Even more impressive was the fact that he could balance a frothing mugful of the seventh in one hand, holding the mug against his chest or with his arm extended across the armrest, fall asleep, stertorous snores issuing from ample caverns, then wake up with a jerk as his head threatened to snap off the edge of the backrest but—not a drop spilling from the mug! He would seamlessly continue the upward journey of the mug, take a swig, resume the conversation exactly at the point where he fell asleep, then go into the same routine, over and over again. At first we thought it was an act, faking sleep so that he could pick up unguarded tidbits, but we tested his condition in several ways and there was no doubt about it—after the fourth bottle, Mitholfer was on his way to star-spangled dreamland. So we nicknamed him “Lanke Omu,” after the adventurer of Amos Tutuola's
The Palm-Wine Drinkard.

“Carlo Mancini,” a chubby, unflappable Italian, also a neighbor of Femi Johnson, came to Nigeria through Ghana, where he worked for a construction firm, going through his monthly salary with a steadfastness that sustained Ghanaian nightclubs and their habituées. After nearly two decades in anglophone West Africa, Mancini yet retained his own stimulating vocabulary and syntax of the English language. Certain words, sometimes of the simplest and most common usage, stubbornly eluded him. For instance, he could never recall the word “eraser” or “rubber.” Instead, after scratching his head for a long time, he would hit on a substitute that exploded with relief and clarity: “Give me a
write and cancel
!”

In Accra—so went his own life account—a favorite habituée had taken him in hand and pleaded, “Carlo, you strike me as a very bright person. I know you're good with your hands. So why do you dissipate your money and life this way? I want you to try handing me your salary every month. You can drink all you want in the house, far more cheaply, and we'll put something aside every month so you can start your own business. I want you to be your own boss!” Carlo had found the idea outlandish but not too unwelcome, so he decided to give it a try. Before long, they had moved in together and entered into a “write, no cancel” marital bond that netted three children and a thriving business. They then transferred to Nigeria—not that it stopped Carlo from making the occasional foray into Nigerian fleshpots, but then, the sixties nightclubs were the true melting pots of all classes and nationalities, genial, music-saturated joints with exotic names or simply intriguing ones—Risikat, Agoji Mayor, Seven Sisters, Black Morocco, and Caban Bamboo—the last being a Lagos favorite where the erratic bandleader and proprietor, Bobby Benson, presided over a motley crew of barmen and stewards and his own band, among whom he rotated his bouts of fisticuffs as if on principle or from boredom.

Benson's complaints covered the full range from his musicians selling his musical instruments or their services to others and thus missing engagements to stewards making off with the takings, drinking his beer, watering his whisky, being drunk and asleep on the job, rifling the till, or shortchanging customers. He punched them out of doors, but a week later, they were back on duty. Bobby Benson arranged my adaptation of the traditional song “Ma a fee” and never missed his mischievous ritual of attribution, always introducing the number as “Wole's song—don't blame me” before its rendition.

On the night waves rode also the other class of musicians, deeply indigenous juju,
sakara, apala,
and
agidigbo
bands that played till the early hours of the morning, when rival political thugs exercised a choice of declaring a truce or busting up the joint the moment they set eyes on one another. My play
Kongi's Harvest
took its life from the night clientele and from variations on the theme of power, its obsessions, pretensions, and sensualities. Fittingly, we used Bobby Benson's place as a daytime rehearsal venue during preparations for the staging of that play at the Black Arts Festival in Dakar in 1966.

Erratic even in friendship, Bobby would lock us out in a sudden fit of pique, provoked perhaps by abandonment by his latest paramour or by frustration at a debtor who had again given him the slip. He would lock himself in his permanently pitch-black living quarters, which seemed to have been quarried out of Caban Bamboo's underground warrens. I knew the back door into the interior, so he had to open up when I beat on that door. He would appear in his velvet, ankle-length dressing gown with a boyish, apologetic grin, baldly lie that he had not known that we were coming, and, in any case, when were we going to pay for the hire of the rehearsal space? Moments later, freshly bathed and wreathed in perfume, he would stroll out, his neat goatee leading, in a three-piece immaculately pressed striped suit with a gold waistcoat chain across a mere suspicion of a paunch, a silver-topped black walking stick, and a fedora set at his “rascal” angle. Followed by a steward with plates of fried rice and chunks of peppered chicken, he would regally gesture to him to set it down, tip his hat toward us, and saunter out for the day. We had not ordered it, yet there would be a bill attached—Bobby never joked with his accounts.

Head for Osun, northeast of Ibadan, home of Susanne Wenger, the Austrian artist, and a greater contrast could not be imagined. An assignment roulette in Europe had brought Susanne and her husband, Ulli Beier, into Nigeria, and both had promptly “gone native,” Susanne not just culturally but viscerally and spiritually, holding nothing back in herself. She had, in effect, found that self. She was inducted into the priesthood of the goddess of Osun River, whose mystic grove she proceeded to adorn with startling, sometimes controversial, sculptures, aided by a circle of local artistic initiates that she progressively gathered around her. Together they turned the grove into one of the weirdest yet most meditative spots in the nation. Wiry and sprightly, with large green eyes and a remarkable sense of self-deprecation, Susanne always declared herself insulated from politics, yet remained intensely political. One hand fought off the indiscriminate loggers who had no regard for the pristine serenity of the grove, a tranquillity that she had absorbed and carried around with her everywhere, yet uncoiling its serpentine energy at will. These were desperate men who even once sent assassins to deal with the “interfering white witch”—if only they had known that this was a woman who had risked the Nazi concentration camps for her role in hiding potential victims of the gas chambers! Her other hand she kept for fending off the overenthusiastic tourist entrepreneurs—both private and governmental—who also saw the grove as a moneymaking enterprise, to be enhanced by tinselly, exotic events. That left just her body and spirit to paint and sculpt with!

Osun grove, paradoxically, must have been created by the gods specifically for the “wild, wild West,” a region that needed a spring of healing—or at least escape—a periodic immersion in the quiescent depths of the pacific deities. To escape into Osun grove was always a journey into timelessness, a most dangerous indulgence, since the question on leaving was always—Do I really have to leave? Why need I leave? To achieve what, exactly? This temptation to take Osun with one, inside one, was the strongest internal battle that had to be fought—Osun tugging at one end of a long, frayed rope, Ogun at the other . . .

And sometimes it was outward-bound—there, I was more fortunate than most. I was unemployed twice in the first five years of my return home, and for stress-inducing lengths of time—not for a total lack of opportunity but for a lack of the ideal mold that would cater to both body and spirit, flexible and stimulating. During such slack phases, I would take out my slim conferences/ lectures file and with a new regard—of longing and of necessity!—reconsider those overseas invitations that I had shunted aside for some time, being too preoccupied with unequal dialogues with sole administrators, political (and academic) vampires, and allied modes of ungainful employment. It was not that I had never busied myself evolving lucrative schemes for keeping Orisun Theatre—my most immediate responsibility and political vehicle—afloat and active, envisioning it as a formidable enterprise that would be quoted on the stock market. No, there was no failure of ideas in that direction. Art could be made to pay its way, I contended, and I was the mogul especially destined to prove it. All schemes, alas, collapsed on the drawing board. Then my economic health prescribed, without further consultation, a spell on the lecture and conference circuit of the United States and Europe. Even the batteries of conflict require periodic charging.