You Must Set Forth at Dawn (39 page)

After a few hours spent pondering this latest round of déjà vu on my Egyptian incursions—not least of which was a painful recollection of my truncated participation at the laying of the foundation stone of the Library of Alexandria—I was ready to depart. It seemed fated. Somewhere in one of those tombs was the unappeased ghost of a wronged ancestor—mine—and my energized physical aura from the land of the Yoruba had once again aroused its millennial resentments, seeking redress or absolution at my hands. I turned for help to the front desk—literally a desk—and asked for a copy of flight schedules heading anywhere out of Cairo. Even that motion reeked of a mimicry of the past.

Moments before I was to leave for the airport, however, a car screeched to a halt in front of the dormitory and a flustered young man, tall and thin in his well-tailored but flapping jacket, leaped out and introduced himself as a diplomat from the embassy. He had just picked up my message. In a few more minutes I was reinstalled in another hotel, less Spartan, where, it turned out, reservations had indeed been made for me. At the desk, the young man inquired if there was any message from the Egyptian government for his guest. There was none. He then took off to track down his Egyptian counterparts to ensure that I had the necessary passes required to enter the stadium, promising to be back in time to accompany me to my seat—security being rigorously enforced. He returned in no time, crestfallen. He had been unable to find anyone who knew anything of my visit, much less of my being a special guest of the Egyptian government or personally of the president, Mubarak! I told him to go back to his duties; I was more than content to wander through the streets of Cairo, return to the hotel in time to watch the opening spectacular on television, then catch the first flight out of Egypt the following day.

He would have none of it. This windswept young diplomat, whose fragile frame totally belied his energy, took me in tow on one of the wildest drives in my nomadic career. He bullied, raged, and forced his way through barriers of security checkpoints with nothing but his diplomatic credentials and inadequate passes—he had not planned to go near the stadium until this challenge arose. At one stage, while his driver whimpered and cowered, he rode shotgun on the car bumper, screaming and cursing, directing the driver to an alternative checkpoint wherever the resistance proved unbreachable, until he delivered me right into the sanctum sanctorum of the VIP sector, just to one side of the presidential box.

The show began, and we were treated to a sumptuous display of the glorification of the Egyptian president, Mubarak, in between snatches of a grand parade of the pharaohs, the sphinxes, and passages of Egyptian history and heritage. Where, however, were the black Egyptians? Egypt, after all, had boasted a black pharaoh or two.

Babangida, it turned out, fared no better at the hands of Egyptian protocol. It had been announced in Nigeria that he would launch the Games jointly with Mubarak, but the Egyptian organizers appeared to have forgotten that little detail. Mubarak's broad shoulders, sheathed in an impeccably turned suit, undertook the onerous task, while Babangida sat passively in the presidential box, for all purposes just another spectator. I do not think that Nigerian-Egyptian relations were enhanced by the undoubtedly impressive extravaganza of that very Egyptian occasion. The beginning of a Yoruba-Egyptian rapport also suffered yet another setback, as the Akinlatun of Egba, Akogun of Isara, et cetera, et cetera, was left with yet another African solidarity hole in his pocket.

A Pen Coalition

GENERAL MAMMAN VATSA, A HEAVYSET OFFICER WITH A DEEP-CUT RADIATing cicatrix that identified him instantly as being from one of the minority ethnic groups in the North, was an unusual soldier, a versifier on social themes and private thoughts. Vatsa courted Nigerian writers and artists and dearly wished to be counted as one of them. Shortly after my spell in prison and the publication of my account of that experience in
The Man Died,
he wrote some verses in protest of what he considered an unbalanced attitude in my book. Critical though they were, I was rather touched by this approach from a man of war, very different from the more usual “What! Is he still talking? He should thank his stars he got off with his life!”

Later we met, and I was again taken with his apparent thoughtfulness on the problems that confronted the nation. We never became friends, but I found him quite amiable and progressively disposed. During the presidency of Shehu Shagari and his party, the NPN, I made the LP record
Unlimited Liability Company,
dedicated to the ineptness and corruption of that government and the general decay of society. When it was launched at the Museum Kitchen garden at Onikan, Lagos, I was surprised to find this military man present. He sat quietly at his table and bought thirty copies of the record—for distribution to his military colleagues, he said.

I preferred to keep him at a distance, naturally, though I studied him keenly from habit. When a high-ranked military officer attends a “subversive” event, such as the launching of a sarcastic record against the government, and takes such material back to the army mess for distribution, he warrants some extra attention. It was just as well, because Vatsa would later defend—indeed, as it turned out, actually instigate and direct—a raid on the home of Obafemi Awolowo, the former opposition leader of the Unity Party of Nigeria, when the inevitable coup took place in 1983 and the civilian dictatorship of Shehu Shagari was overthrown by the reputed man of discipline General Muhammadu Buhari.

Obafemi Awolowo was not a member of the ousted government but in opposition. He was rumored to have in his possession some sensitive documents that related to the $3.8 or $4.1 billion scandal that had remained unresolved during the previous two regimes. Acting under orders, undoubtedly, Mamman Vatsa undertook a raid of Obafemi Awolowo's home in Ikenne, looking for “classified documents,” but never revealing the subject of classification. The writer and “factionist” Kole Omotoso interacted closely with Mamman Vatsa, through his functions as president of the Association of Nigerian Authors. During their discussions on Nigerian politics, Mamman Vatsa defended the raid, even threatened that Awolowo would be placed on trial for being in unauthorized possession of classified documents. It was an empty boast, but that was Mamman Vatsa.

Still, Vatsa, who had been placed in charge of Abuja capital territory, did his duty by the literary tribe to which he wanted so badly to belong. He allocated some property toward the project for a writers' village in Abuja and even supplied a military transport plane to take the writers to their annual conference, landing the association's executive in hot water among some of the members for getting too close to, and accepting favors from, an unelected regime, even for the benefit of writers. Quite a few writers did take the purist line: no accommodation, in any form, with any military regime. Others believed that a silver lining—as long as it was not pocket lining!—could be mined from the darkest clouds. It all made for lively polemics, sometimes pitting the genuine puritans against the merely rhetorical contenders for the halo of the holier-than-thou.

Now, however, Mamman Vatsa was in deep trouble. Vatsa and Babangida had been bosom friends right from childhood. Their wives were reported to be equally close. Vatsa may have been merely tolerated in the regime of Buhari and Idiagbon—the story was that he had virtually forced himself on those coup makers and was fobbed off with the then-lightweight post of minister of the Federal Capital Territory. True or not, with the ascendancy of his friend Babangida, Mamman Vatsa came fully into his own. He was retained in his earlier position, but the ministry became as powerful as Mamman chose to make it. Mamman lived the good life. He devised a cape for his attire and referred to himself as “emperor” of the Federal Capital Territory, which he ran with a free hand, apportioning valuable real estate to individuals and corporations according to his private laws.

What went wrong between the two friends, no one could really tell, but it was put down to rivalry between their wives as much as to Mamman Vatsa's own ambitions. A peer of both men in the military, General A.A., remarked that Vatsa's ambitions were not unlike Macbeth's—dormant until fanned by a wife with a stronger will. I never did meet his wife, so I cannot tell. But it has proved impossible to erase from my mind the presence of that soldier who sat watching quietly at the launching of my record and openly bought copies for his colleagues. His appearance was the furthest imaginable from Caesar's “lean and hungry,” but his sly watchfulness made me think more of his co-emperor's nervous perspective on Cassius than of Macbeth as putty in the hands of his worthy lady.

But in 1985, the nation's mildly watchful life under the smooth dictator was suddenly sent awry by the announcement of a coup attempt, and implicated at the highest level was the poet-soldier, General Mamman Vatsa. It was a numbing sight, watching on television the dapper general, emperor of the Federal Capital Territory and friend of Nigerian writers, led in chains into court in the company of other accused. Nigeria had become inured to coups, coup attempts, and rumors of coups, but this was the strangest yet—the dictator's bosom friend, accused of masterminding his friend's overthrow.

Mamman Vatsa was found guilty, with several others, and the sentence was death by firing squad. Nigeria's military regimes were not noted for commuting sentences for treason—always a cynical charge, considering the means by which the complainant government had itself come to power. The public braced itself for the usual announcements of executions and went about its business with a sense of déjà vu:
Let them decimate one another; maybe when
they've become sated with their own blood, they'll return to the barracks and leave
the nation in peace.

But one person felt—no! This was John Pepper Clark, now Bekederemo-Clark, poet and dramatist. We had been quite close in the early sixties, in the heyday of the Mbari cultural project, when Nigerian writers and artists had made a creative home in the slums of Adamasingba, in Ibadan. Indeed I had the distinction of taking off a corner of his German-made Karman Ghia—now an obsolete model—against a palm tree. His coupe, unlike the standard Nigerian vehicle, was a left-hand drive at a time when Nigerians drove on the left side of the road, as bequeathed by the British colonizers. J.P.'s car was one of the rare exceptions. He was also prone to accidents at the time, which was why he readily surrendered the car to me whenever we were together. Such was the rate of his encounters with walls, trees, and gutters that I once felt compelled to slaughter a sacrificial goat on his behalf, right on the open stage, during the production of his play
Song of a Goat.
Naturally, I never really considered that it was I who had caused the accident; rather, it was his car, which, under J.P.'s aura, took a yen to the palm tree on the way to my university apartment.

J. P. Clark had become troubled. Mulling over his drink—as I imagined it—the stocky, pugnacious poet had perhaps run through the reel of casualties in the numerous coups and allied killings, was perhaps even haunted by a sense of vicarious responsibility for the initial coup; J.P., I always suspected, had firsthand knowledge, albeit vague, of the first coup d'état of 1966. With Christopher Okigbo, he had accompanied one of the principals, Major Emanuel Ifeajuna, across the border, the latter in female disguise. J.P. had turned back at the border, while Christopher crossed over to the Republic of Benin (then Dahomey), taking charge of Ifeajuna, who was by then virtually an emotional wreck, haunted—Christopher related—by images of blood cascading from his dying victims, his superior officers, none of whom was a stranger to him.

J.P. brought back with him the manuscript of Ifeajuna's account of the coup, hurriedly put together during his period of hiding by that young major and former athlete—he was one of the four who had set a joint six-foot, six-inch record in the high jump at the Commonwealth Games in Vancouver in 1956. Knowledge of the existence of the manuscript set off a wild hunt by Gowon's military intelligence, desperate for an authentic, firsthand account of those who had plotted the 1966 coup, who had done the killings, what civilians, especially politicians, had had prior knowledge or had collaborated in the putsch. For a while J. P. Clark was deemed a security risk. So was his publisher, Longman, whose editors at one time or the other held the explosive manuscript in their possession, debating the wisdom of releasing its contents onto the market.

I could picture J.P. tabulating the waste, the losses, and the uncertain returns: the 1966 coup and the attendant deaths; the revenge killings of May, known as the “minor massacres”—some distinction!—then the countercoup of July, a truly gory affair where even my serene hometown, Abeokuta, was the setting for the flaying of a garrison commander, tied to the back of a Land Rover and dragged around and around till death took pity on him. Hot on the heels of that countercoup followed the “major massacres” of September, a further revenge killing but also a consolidation of the July countercoup. Then the bloody attempt of 1976, known as the Dimka coup—a failure, but it terminated the life of Murtala Mohammed, the charismatic dictator, a once military reprobate himself who, on attaining power, most unusually became a reformed man and a convinced social reformer, earning adulation beyond an objective balance of his detractions and achievement. At some point, J. P. Clark must have sighed, “Enough.”

I WAS ENJOYING one of my periods of total hibernation in Abeokuta when my peace was crashed by a least expected face, at the sight of which I could only blink in disbelief. I was in fact returning from a successful foray into the bush. Grimy and sweaty I stepped out of my jeep, retrieved my gun and the brace of birds, when I heard a voice I had not heard for a long time, issuing from my front door: “Good God, you mean you actually catch these things when you go in the bush?”

It was indeed John Pepper Bekederemo-Clark, poet and playwright, with whom my relationship had not lately been the best. He came close, inspected the birds, and burst into a loud chuckle. “I'd heard about your hunting, but I never knew it was something you actually did.”

I did not know what to make of that but understood that there was awkwardness on both sides. I could not imagine what he wanted.

“J.P., how on earth did you find this place?”

“Oh, it was tough. But I remembered I knew someone in Abeokuta who was bound to know where you were.” He introduced his companion. “In any case, I was determined not to leave till I found you. If I hadn't found you today, I would have returned tomorrow.”

I thought, What is he up to now? Our last reconciliation effort had been short-lived, so what had instigated this visitation from my tempestuous colleague?

“Mamman Vatsa,” said J.P., and the words tumbled out. “We must save him. Not just him but all the others. There is far too much bloodletting. We have to persuade Babangida that he can break the spiral of blood and set the nation on a new course. We have to do something, Wole. After all the killing that followed the Dimka coup, we can't allow this to happen. We have to act. History will not forgive us if we fail.”

J.P.'s idea was that three of us—himself, Chinua Achebe, and I, often dubbed the “elder statesmen” of Nigerian contemporary literature—should make a publicized personal appeal to Babangida and the Ruling Council for the lives of the accused, based principally on the plea that the nation had had enough of killings and all future action should be directed at national healing. Moreover, Vatsa's attempt, as far as we knew, had been only a plot in the making. We should appeal to Babangida's sense of history and stress that this was an opportunity to map out a different course for his administration from the accustomed pattern of vengeance. There were hawks within the final decision-making body, but there were also doves, J.P. declared, including probably Babangida himself, who might be inclined to save the life of his childhood friend. Our position would strengthen his hand. J.P. paced restlessly, consumed by his optimism. He had spoken to the secretary or assistant secretary to the cabinet, who would facilitate the meeting. It would help, of course, if I also telephoned ahead. In any case, J.P. pointed out, bristling with confidence, if we three walked right up to Dodan Barracks, knocked on the gates, and demanded to see the president, who was going to deny us entrance? Our combined stature would open any door in the nation.