You Must Set Forth at Dawn (30 page)

A deprived childhood like Obasanjo's, on his own admission, also makes for some measure of indulgence, at least in explaining his deep-seated sense of insecurity. As his need to prove himself degenerated to obvious sadism, however, one is obliged to compare him with his own townsman Moshood Abiola. Both had similar deprived backgrounds and attended the same school, yet they differed drastically in openness and generosity. It is significant that Olusegun Obasanjo, since he became elected head of state over the corpse of the popularly elected Abiola—who breathed his last under confinement by the same Abacha—finds himself physically unable to utter the name of his thwarted predecessor, even in official speeches. The ex-general routinely dismisses all proposals to raise a memorial to the politician, including the resolution of the Nigerian legislature that the Abuja sports stadium be named after a man who was formally crowned “Africa's Pillar of Sports,” by the Organization of African Unity.

Perhaps it is this sense of rivalry, the fear of being surpassed, even by ghosts, that thoroughly defines the personality of the general. While, for instance, the majority of the nation clamored for the designation of, and some states continue to mark, June 12, that day in 1993 when a disciplined people went to the polls, united in the resolve to terminate military rule, as Democracy Day, Olusegun Obasanjo persists in imposing May 31 on the nation, this being the date, in 1989, when he was sworn into office after his emergence from prison. A veteran journalist, Kole Animashawun, writing in
The Vanguard,
summed up the general who came back from the dead in a unique expression: “His ego is bigger than his head.”

The size of the general's ego was not uppermost in my mind, however, when I invited myself to dinner in 1978. When a prize such as
Ori Olokun,
the long-lost bronze head of a principal Yoruba deity, shimmers so alluringly within the sight of an
olori-kunkun,
⁴⁰
one may be forgiven for forgetting the long spoon, even with full knowledge that a swishing tail may be hidden beneath the khaki uniform.

TEACHING AT YALE UNIVERSITY some years after this misadventure, I found myself neighbor to the ase
⁴¹
-driven scholar Robert Farris Thompson. He taught African art history and generally did his best to infect his colleagues and students with whatever Yoruba spirit of possession had presided over his birth— possibly even his conception. If Robert had his way, a pilgrimage to the land of the Yoruba would be a condition for everyone who wished to become an alumnus of Yale or, indeed, any higher institution in the United States. Thompson had the same enthusiasm for certain kinds of music and films, and this was how I came to see what was at the time considered a “cult” film,
Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom.
Since the attraction of
The Temple of Doom
had temporarily displaced the shrine of Orisa in Thompson's general vocabulary, my curiosity was aroused. Thus, one afternoon, I set out to watch the film in the company of my once student, then colleague, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr.

I regret to say that I did not enjoy the movie. From the opening sequences, I began to squirm. It was as if, albeit on a drastically reduced scale—no competitive spectacle, cliff-hanger risks, or lethal pyrotechnics—I were watching a souped-up documentary of one of my better-forgotten undertakings. My feeling throughout was that I had been deliberately set up to be lampooned by Steven Spielberg in the storyline, without even the consolation of a love angle. I was grateful for the darkness that covered my blushes.

The beginnings were nearly identical. I was close to the end of a seminar in my office when the departmental secretary entered and announced that some colleagues were waiting to see me, on an urgent matter. I dismissed my class a few minutes early—no, unlike in
The Temple of Doom,
there was no lubricious student bursting at the boobs who sidled up to leave me with a long, caressing look and a lascivious invitation—and ushered in my visitors. There were three of them: Akin Isola, a playwright and professor in Yoruba studies; Wande Abimbola, another professor in Yoruba, an academic as well as a practitioner of the mysteries of Ifa, the Yoruba system of divination; and Olabiyi Yai of Linguistics, a Yoruba whose nationality, of the Republic of Benin, served yet again to remind one of the disservice that the European powers had done to the African continent in their arbitrary division of that continent into so-called national entities. How could I have failed, by the way, after watching
Temple of
Doom,
to be struck by the coincidence that it was yet another professor of the Yoruba extended family—Thompson—who had been responsible for my presence in the theater, or that I was watching this sumptuous takeoff on my own escapade in the company of yet another scholar, Skip Gates, who was undergoing his own phase of Yorubaphilia in the persona of Esu, the deity of the random factor and reversals, and quirky messenger of the deities!

Back to 1978 and Ife campus, however: it turned out that my visitors had come to solicit my help in an unusual undertaking. Why me? First of all, they were aware that I did have some kind of access to the then military head of state, Olusegun Obasanjo, and this was a matter that required cooperation at the highest possible level of government. Next, there was the matter of the recently concluded Festival of Black and African Arts, the notorious jamboree that had guzzled millions of dollars and earned the nation the ire of at least half of the visitors for its shoddy preparations. Perhaps the single most significant event of that festival, however, was one that never did take place: this was the repatriation of the original of the symbol—and logo—of that festival, chosen in the confident belief that it would be released by its keepers and put on display.

A famous ivory mask from Benin, exquisitely carved and detailed, remained safely esconced in the vast labyrinths of the British Museum in London. It had been looted in the equally famous sacking of the Benin Kingdom by a British expeditionary force in the late nineteenth century, launched in reprisal for an earlier humiliating encounter between a Captain Phillips and King Overawhen, the paramount ruler of the Benin Kingdom, whose ancestry, one line of legend insists, was none other than Yoruba! The Phillips expedition had insisted on being received by the king during one of his most sacred retreats, when the oba was not permitted to see any strangers. His Majesty's Britannic servants were not to be denied, however, and they forced their way into the city, with gruesome consequences. Such insolence was not to be countenanced! Orders were issued to mount a punitive expedition, and they were carried out with equally gruesome efficiency. Numerous treasures, the spoils of war, were shipped back to England—to offset the cost of the war, the British dispatches stated with admirable candor. Among them was the ivory mask, allegedly the head of a Benin princess.

Now, in 1976, the Nigerian minister of culture, a scion of the Benin Kingdom—none other than Chief Anthony Enahoro—felt that this was an opportunity to bring back at least one of those treasures. The diplomatic bag was scorched to and fro with dispatches from both sides—At least
lend
us the damned thing for the duration of the festival! pleaded Nigeria. Nothing doing, said the British Museum. The British government was, of course, “powerless to intervene”—the autonomy of the British Museum being regretfully but conveniently cited as the insurmountable obstacle. Condescending arguments—such as that the Nigerian nation lacked the means, will, or sense of value required to preserve its precious heritage—require no comment.

I had not stinted words, alas, in expressing my umbrage at both sides— against the British government for its hypocritical double-talk and against our own caretakers, a supposed military regime, for their uncreative approach. From the moment the Nigerian government requested the return of the mask, all was lost! The British government would never part with it, since to do so would only set a precedent for demands for a wholesale repatriation of all art treasures plundered by colonial forces to their rightful homes. Indeed, in a moment of righteous rage at ancient wrongs, I went so far as to offer advice that the government should stop drawing further attention to the mask, since it would only place its illegal guardians on the alert. The mask was stolen property, and the aggrieved had a right to reclaim their property by any means. What I proposed instead was that a task force of specialists in such matters, including foreign mercenaries if necessary, be set up to bring back the treasure— and as many others as possible—in one swift, once-for-all-time, coordinated operation.

Since that unheeded advice, in 1984, a live trophy in the shape of a former minister, the infamous Umaru Dikko, has been kidnapped from London, bundled to Stansted Airport, crated, and loaded into a cargo plane, awaiting repatriation to Nigeria. It was an amateurishly planned, clumsily executed operation under the regime of General Buhari, yet it could have succeeded but for the accident that Dikko's live-in mistress happened to have watched it all from the window. She had the presence of mind to take down both the number and description of the car, even before alerting the police. The ineptness of the kidnappers—who had spent months studying Umaru Dikko's movements— could be summed up in the fact that they failed to notice that his mistress routinely waved good-bye from an upper window when he left the house in the morning. The police found the drugged minister in his crate, together with an Israeli doctor whose task was to pump him full of sedatives at intervals on the flight back to Nigeria. The majority of the nation was waiting to welcome him, even more enthusiastically than the military.

Spiriting away the Benin mask for FESTAC—the 1977 Festival of Black and African Arts—in good time for the opening of the festival would have been much easier, cost much less, and redressed, albeit symbolically, an ancient wrong. I was quite ready to be part of the team. The potential consequences seemed trivial, considering the prize. If we were caught, we would simply fight the case all the way to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, bringing the issue of ownership of objects of colonial plunder to the fore on a global level. I had no idea what the insides of British jails were like, but I could not imagine them being any worse than the ones in which I had been confined in Kirikiri, Ibadan, and Kaduna. That repatriation proposal had stuck in the minds of some of my colleagues, agitated now by the discovery of a missing art treasure that belonged to Ile-Ife.

INTO MY OFFICE they filed—Olabiyi Yai, small, dark, and wiry behind heavily rimmed glasses; Wande Abimbola, only slightly taller, with soft face and gestures, and a facial immobility that would sometimes waver between bewilderment and a cunning watchfulness; and Akin Isola, bearded, with outstanding cicatrices carved into his light-complexioned skin, a creative writer in his own right and Yoruba philologist. He would later translate my play
Death and the
King's Horseman
“back into the Yoruba” in which, Isola insisted, it had originally taken form in my head. Their aspects were so uniformly solemn that I was prompted to ask whose turn it was among our colleagues, such was the regularity with which the infamous Slaughter Slab—the road between Ife and Ibadan—ate us up. But no, it was not the road on this occasion. The subject was
Ori Olokun,
the famous bronze head of Ife whose career had turned rather murky since Leo Frobenius, the German adventurer and archaeologist, had first dug up this ancestral representation nearly half a century earlier.

Olokun—literally the owner, or god, of the seas—was the consort of Oduduwa, the twain thus seen as primogenitors of the Yoruba, the black race, and indeed, of all humanity. If Oduduwa was sent to Earth by Olodumare, the Supreme Deity, to directly create and animate Earth, Olokun, his consort, performed a parallel task for the seas and the oceans. Yet, as is common to the nature of numberless deities, Olokun is often mythologized and represented also as male. Their offspring, Oranmiyan (or Oranyan), roamed far and wide from the ancestral home, Ile-Ife, to found a Yoruba kingdom, whose numerous branches he handed over to his countless offspring.

Other legends differ wildly: it was the Edo Kingdom of Benin that was founded by Oranmiyan, not just any Yoruba kingdom. And Olokun was brother to Oranmiyan, not his mother . . . and so it goes in the world of myth and legend. The famous stone plinth
Opa Oranyan
still stands in Ile-Ife and is held to mark the burial place of that warlike brother or be merely a cenotaph indicating the spot from which he vanished. The ancestral link between the Edo and the Yoruba is undisputed, however, and it has remained part of the Benin coronation tradition that any new monarch must first travel to Ile-Ife—or be sent a spiritual emissary from Ife—to secure or transmit blessings from his ancestral fount.

Ogun, my patron deity, is the son of Oranmiyan, through his principal consort, Isedale, and is thus the direct grandson of Olokun. Beyond legend and mythology, therefore, I had a personal stake in the fate of Olokun, whose spiritual descendant—through Ogun—I have long accepted myself to be.

Together with some companion figures,
Ori Olokun
—the head of Olokun—was traditionally buried in the courtyard of Ife palace by the priesthood, brought out only at his annual festival, when it was ritualistically washed, honored, and then returned to its resting place until the next outing.

Leo Frobenius, in
The Voice of Africa,
narrates his moment of rapture when, during an excavation, a pick wielded by one of his assistants struck metal. Work was stopped. Carefully scraping off the soil with his hands, he finally held in his hand a piece that the pick had chipped off the cheek of the bronze. After that, his account is filled with negotiations for the sale of this and other bronze pieces, the news of his find filtering to the British colonial officer in Lagos, a chase by that rival that ended just at the Nigerian side of the border with Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin), and finally his summary dispossession of this invaluable piece by that representative of His Majesty's government. Frobenius claimed that the tiny bronze piece that was chipped from Olokun's cheek was his sole surviving souvenir of his monumental find.