You Must Set Forth at Dawn (14 page)

That afternoon, with its lack of alternatives, informed me with a quiet certitude that I was finally tired of dramatic sketches that, however scabrous, drew only symbolic blood from the veins of Power. Suddenly, that language of intervention—despite the occasional physical assaults on the actors and threats of disruption—became inadequate, even self-indulgent. Fast receding was that homecoming projection of my role as being no more than that of a truth crier, with weapons no more lethal than my portable typewriter and paper.

The next few hours flashed before me in that instant—as already defined motions as well as logistical options—but not the likely consequences; that section was blanked out. Looking back, I appeared to have been focused entirely on practical matters, details. I knew at once that I had to obtain a good tape recorder and recollected, in that same instant, just who possessed such high-fidelity equipment: a serving U.S. Peace Corps volunteer doing some field research at the University of Ibadan. Now all I saw, detachedly, was my doppelgänger walking up the back stairs of the broadcasting station where I had been a frequent contributor, into the corridor where the director's office was located, past his office, past Amos Tutuola's cubicle, then up a short flight of steps to the left before a right turn at the landing. The crucial door was on the right. It led into the control room through which one had to pass in order to enter the studio where I had done dozens of broadcasts. I would not be going into the studio, however. The control room from which the tapes and records were played was the target. I wondered who would be on duty, knowing, however, that I could rely on the commitment of the majority of the staff in that station.

Would the premier come in person? The political situation was unraveling fast, and the premier was a shrewd calculator who instinctively homed in on survivalist tactics; it was therefore quite possible that he would decide to make a live broadcast. Between recording and broadcast, much could happen, and Akintola, a master of improvisation, would want to enter any last-minute development into his speech and manipulate it to his advantage. This complicated my thinking, since the prime minister would then travel in a motorcade and the studio would be swarming with police escorts and perhaps a truckload of his party's “irregulars.” Obviously I would have to arrive early, just before nightfall. A curfew was in force, which was good, since we were masters of the curfew. We needed the dark. I chose the record library as the most strategic position in which to place myself; one had to walk past it to reach the studio. If the premier came in person, however, what would we do?

We? No, in my mind's eye, everything was reduced to one person. I am always amused—or irritated, depending on my mood—by much that has been written about my so-called loner mentality. As if the one individual in a mountain climb who plants the flag on the summit and beats a quick retreat before a snowstorm obliterates all landmarks were not backed up or preceded every step of the way by the rest of the team! On any of them could have fallen the task of making that final sprint to the summit. Of course I entered the studio alone. There were armed police swarming all over the outer premises. If I were to take others with me, detection would likely occur before we even breached the perimeter of the building—unless, of course, the intention was that others should expose themselves to detection and so create a distraction for my entry. That option was unnecessary. It was much easier for one person familiar with the building to slip into and out of the storage space, record library, offices, and corridors all the way to the studio. If we had had one more day, we could have found an excuse to bring others into the building in broad daylight, given them the opportunity to memorize the geography of stairwells and landings. There simply was not time.

The recording of my countermessage settled, it was easier to concentrate on peripheral but crucial details, such as who would drive me to Broadcasting House. Next thought: guns. To go armed or unarmed? That did not generate much agonizing; the unpleasant but unavoidable word was
coercion.
I was not going into the studio to preach to the studio engineer and the continuity officer that their moral duty lay in removing the prime minister's tape and substituting my own. I had no idea who would be on duty, and even if I did and their sympathies were with the opposition, they were entitled to their overt neutrality. If they were militantly with us, they would enjoy the charade of submitting—like the broadcaster, Ukonu—to force majeure. If they were not . . . well, then they could wallow in the indignation of having been made to act under duress. If things went wrong and the police were somehow alerted— there was no time to think of consequences beyond knowing that unless I was shot at or about to be shot at, I would calmly surrender myself for arrest
once
the tape was running.
I was of no two minds about that.

Finally, there persisted one critical question: Suppose the man came himself, surrounded by his entourage? The only answer was to prevent him from entering Broadcasting House in the first place, scare off his motorcade en route. Again, the niggardly collaboration of time! There was not enough of that commodity to mobilize the entirety of our small band. Still, I knew the normal haunts of the marginal members, including the faithful Kodak, a former thug and mercenary who had chosen to throw his lot in with us. In turn, he could rouse another four or five from whichever dens they had thought to pass an uneventful or predatory weekend in. Hidden in the dark among the buildings, behind vending kiosks or trees—the trees had not yet been eaten on Ibadan roads, or in other urban centers for that matter, to assuage the hunger for development—they would man the immediate approach to the premier's destination and pepper the motorcade with a few shots. Knowing the high state of alert in which the town was seized, it was certain that the immediate reaction of his security outriders would be to accelerate and tear past Broadcasting House without pausing. Unable to determine how large a force was firing at them from the darkness and the ominous emptiness of streets under curfew, that was only common sense.

At last I could feel inwardly at peace. I rejoined the conversation, putting a few innocent questions to Michael, and abandoned the rest of the Saturday feast.

IT ALL PROCEEDED according to plan. The duty officers responded as any sensible persons would under the gun: they removed the premier's tape and replaced it with mine. It ran long enough for the message to the government to be clearly transmitted:
Drop your stolen mandate, leave town, and take your
reprobates with you,
and so on, and so on. Then a disbelieving senior operator in another control room roused himself from his paralysis and depressed a control button that cut off the transmission. By that time, I had slipped away. My retreat was unhindered.

Before dawn, I was in flight to the Eastern Region, later to confront the weird experience of seeing my face pasted on the pages of newspapers as a “wanted” man. One of the studio staff, A.O., had sworn to the identity of the intruder! Indeed, he recounted in detail a conversation that, he claimed, had taken place as he carried out the intruder's instructions—under a gun pointed directly at him, he repeated ad nauseam—to remove the premier's tape and substitute it with his. The evening of the raid, A.O. had indeed proved an unstoppable conversationalist; perhaps he did need to babble in order to steady hands that quivered so badly that, in the end, it was a junior assistant, Friday Ifode, who completed the task of threading the tape.

Once the police investigations began, A.O. continued to supply details of the one-sided exchange, a virtual monologue: how he had expressed astonishment at seeing me in Ibadan since I was supposed to be in London, and so on. The others swore they had heard nothing of the kind or else had caught only snatches of the exchange not sufficient to identify the gunman. We thought the intruder was his friend, they said with a shrug, since A.O. appeared to know everything about the stranger's movements, even while he was in London.

I WAS ALREADY UNDERGROUND when I was declared “wanted”; that was all part of the decision of the small band of “irregulars” that went under different aliases for the purpose of a public but elusive voice, including, at one stage, the Committee of Writers for Individual Liberty (CWIL)—a most misleading title, since only the poet Christopher Okigbo and I thought of ourselves as writers. There were, however, two or three lecturers from Ife and Ibadan University. Other members, such as Kodak, belonged on the fringes of mainstream society. Members of my itinerant performing group, the Orisun Theatre, had slipped, imperceptibly, into the role of an informal intelligence-gathering unit, a productive network that co-opted friends, families, lovers, and former school-mates working in junior positions within the establishment. The Pyrates— that campus fraternity that meant so many contrary things to bemused or terrified Nigerians—refused to be left out of any direct action, though their participation was limited to a hard core of three or four at any time. Doig Simmonds, a British medical illustrator, was the sole expatriate member—mostly on the periphery. A designer and printer of most of our leaflets, he was not involved in any of the public activities. Doig did, however, surrender his fowling piece to me, a skeletal gauge that could just about pluck the feathers off a bush fowl at a ten-yard distance but made an impressive amount of noise, especially in an enclosed space. It earned its keep in some of the encounters that took place as we monitored the electoral process in remote areas, where violence had replaced even the semblance of an electoral choice.

By the time the police felt sure of the identity of the intruder, I had left Ibadan town and indeed the borders of the Western Region. I resurfaced in Enugu, Eastern Nigeria, whose premier, Dr. Michael Okpara, was in active alliance—United Progressive Grand Alliance—with the opposition Action Group of the West. I told him of our plans to muster a sustained resistance against the NNDP government, and he gave me the run of his state, requesting only that I keep out of sight of the police force, which was under a central command—that is, mostly took orders from Lagos. Just to be on the safe side, however, he invited in the commissioner of police in Enugu and introduced us to each other. Nothing more was said.

MY HOST IN ENUGU was Dr. Sam Aluko, the economist who had been crudely ejected from the campus of Ife University. Through some strange workings of his mind, he would find himself, a quarter of a century later, quite comfortable in the position of economic adviser to the nation's most notorious despot, General Sani Abacha, who looted the nation's monetary reserves with as much abandon as he tortured, imprisoned, and killed her citizens. It was, however, the familiar face of my activist colleague that welcomed me without a thought while the police pursued my imaginary trail to phantom sightings all over the country.

It did not take long before the police tracked me down to Enugu. My telephone calls to Femi Johnson had been monitored and their originating station easily traced. If the fugitive was in Enugu, thought the NNDP police, it also stood to reason that an obvious point of contact for him would be his erstwhile colleague Sam Aluko. Within two days of my arrival, the Eastern Region police command received a signal from Ibadan that Aluko's house should be searched. Sure enough, Sam received an advance notice from the Enugu police that they would arrive the following morning on their hunt for the fugitive.

They arrived as promised, armed with copies of the “wanted” notice with my photograph. A charade ensued. Sam accompanied them as they looked through the rooms one after the other, passed through the living room, where I was seated. They looked right through me as through a windowpane. Content with the futility of their mission, they sat down with the Aluko family in the same living room. With straight faces, they inquired of Sam Aluko if he had had any news of me. Sam shook his head in the negative. “Well, be sure you keep us informed if he makes contact—we'll leave this ‘wanted' notice with you in case you lay eyes on anyone resembling him”—again looking straight through me as I sat sipping my coffee. Sam took the poster, scrutinized the photograph, nodded, and assured them that he would definitely get in touch, then accompanied them out of the house.

Some days later the same police advised Sam that I should move to a new place. A fresh group of detectives was being sent directly from Ibadan to ferret me out. Sam Aluko, they sensed, held the key to my whereabouts. The new squad would be paying him a visit and would likely remain in Enugu to monitor his movements, convinced that he would eventually lead them to my hiding place. By then, however, the situation in the Western Region—the breakout of insurrection and the disintegration of the NNDP regime—had created the right conditions for my return to Ibadan and the certainty of a trial. Dr. Okpara provided a nondescript Volkswagen that took me straight to Lagos and to the safe house of a colleague, Dapo Fatogun, a journalist and Marxist with ties to Red China.

Dapo was a saturnine intriguer, virtually expressionless, with a complexion that seemed to shroud him in perpetual darkness. I had a hat on, no other disguise, except that I had shaved off my wisp of a goatee. Dapo took over and drove me around the newspaper offices, where the shock on the faces of the editors and staff was worth the sometimes uncomfortable maneuvers Dapo took me through to ensure that we escaped police detection. At each newspaper office, I followed the prepared script, high on indignation, telling how shocking it had been for me to discover, after my return from a habitual creative retreat, that I had been declared wanted by the police! I took the strongest exception to such criminalization tactics. If the police wanted me, I protested, all they had to do was to look for me seriously. The friendly press, as usual, hammed it all up in full accord with a favorite subject and set to work to prepare their sensationalist copy for the following day.