You Must Set Forth at Dawn (62 page)

I had declined any formal position within the new body. This, however, signaled a contest for what the ambitious quartet read as an opportunity for self-promotion into a vacuum and the complete takeover of the organization. The plot had been hatched well in advance. It began from the moment that the liaison officer for Boston discerned, with absolute certainty, that I would not run for office and would remain content with my functions as an informal ambassador to the movement. The irony of such jostling was totally lost on the conspirators. One was a self-hating Igbira, a minority tribe from the Nigerian hinterland, whose yearning to be mistaken for a Fulani aristocratic scion had resulted in his changing his name from Daniyan to Dan'Iyan. Partnering him was an ambitious youth from Swarthmore College, Jude Uzowanne. The third member was a labor unionist from Edo in southern Nigeria, Tunde Okorodudu, an activist in his own right who fell under the spell of the fourth member and center of intrigue, the liaison officer for the U.S. Boston chapter, Maureen Idehen, a pharmacist who had worked closely with me and was central to the coordination of activities for much of the United States. Together, this Gang of Four—the accolade was spontaneously bestowed—succeeded in serving a timely lesson on the power lust even among a yet inchoate formation that sought to curb power at its most virulent and malignant.

It was a low point in the career of the anti-Abacha movement, suddenly compelled to confront the banal distractions of trite intrigues and personal ambitions. Expelling the miscreants took its toll. The liaison officer, the Boston-based Maureen Idehen, made off with our scant funds, leaving behind a trail of bad checks. I should have been warned by the extralong talons, garishly decorated, that she affected in place of fingernails, but this highly efficient intriguer was the daughter of an old schoolfriend and classmate. His visits to his daughter in Boston had even served as an updating source for much of what was happening on the ground at home, and his support of the cause was quite vocal. As it turned out, he had also immersed himself in position grabbing on behalf of his daughter, even to the extent of poring through the minutes of the Dakar meeting and placing transatlantic calls to argue with my son—elected secretary-general of the UDFN—to assert the position of his daughter in the movement. To say that the entire episode constituted a personal embarrassment would be understating an experience of intense chagrin. I had the unpleasant duty of reminding the doting father that he was not a member of the movement and would he kindly keep sons and daughters outside an already draining undertaking.

Ironically, it was the “vengeance” of one of the subversives that raised the profile of the opposition in the mind of the Abacha regime, far above its own ambitions or capabilities. A “confession” appeared in a Northern-based newspaper run by the brother of the inspector general of police, Alhaji Ibrahim Commassie, contributed by Jude Uzowanne. In it the writer claimed that he had been involved in the recruitment and training of a secret army, that he was in fact chief of staff of this force under my military command. In the meantime, naturally, he had had second thoughts, was now opposed to violence, had voluntarily quit the organization for this reason, and was doing his patriotic duty by revealing these terrorist plans.

Of all the fabrications put out by Abacha's men about our activities, this was by no means the wildest. In any case, armed struggle, even from the start, was a subject that was openly introduced into discussions. This young man's claims, self-ingratiating concoctions though they were, did have one decidedly negative effect. They had, after all, emerged from one whose earlier membership could not be denied, albeit that he was now expelled and had turned into a born-again pacifist. He had come into the UDFN through an affiliating group and been assigned the role of mobilizing the youth wing of the movement. If young Uzowanne's claim had been true, it would have been his second conversion within a year. Revelations came tumbling in, confirming earlier rumors of his instability. He was confronted with a position paper he had sent to Sani Abacha, outlining how the dictator could turn himself into the Pinochet of Nigeria. His intellectual prowess, of which he had no modest estimation, was humbly offered to Abacha for the historic transformation. A small, ambitious Walter Mitty character, emotionally unstable, Uzowanne would indeed have been a most unusual choice for a military assignment, additionally being shortsighted, virtually blind, behind his inch-thick lenses and of such physical insubstantiality that the slightest wind from the heat of New York streets threatened to blow him right off the sidewalk and on to summary execution by the traffic.

Alas, some of our supportive foreign embassies in Nigeria did swallow this “revelation” without any qualification and reported to their governments, which began to distance themselves from the opposition movement. This would have been a minor nuisance, on balance, since we were also positively served in other ways by this egregious piece of fiction. Certainly it played havoc on Abacha's peace of mind; all reports indicated that it contributed to imbuing in him a holy terror at the very mention of W.S. or NALICON.

Such fears were further bolstered on a daily basis by a formidable weapon in our armory: Radio Kudirat, sponsored by Sweden and Norway, with some help also from the U.K.'s Westminster Foundation. I had made the acquisition of the radio, formerly named Radio Democrat, my obsessive priority from the moment I had stepped into exile and embarked on my diplomatic shuttle. Radio Freedom had played its part, but it had been limited in coverage, vulnerable, and intermittent. Much too soon, it had fallen silent altogether. With the powerful and secure transmitters of Radio Kudirat, however, the entire nation was covered. Almost everyone tuned in to its two-hour transmissions every evening, including soldiers in their barracks. Prisoners behind walls looked forward to this daily treat, huddled around transistor radios brought in by their wardens. No single event boosted the morale of the opposition as did reports of its corrosive effect on Abacha's equilibrium filtering back to us. The regime struck back in a number of ways, employing the same instrumentation of propaganda. One of its most sinister plots was to circulate rumors in the prison where the former head of state Olusegun Obasanjo was being held that a Wole Soyinka squad was on its way to storm the prison and rescue the inmates. In the confusion, of course, the former head of state would be gunned down.

GENERALLY, I PREFERRED working quietly and individually. Indeed, it would be an understatement to say that I am more than allergic to being a part— especially a leader—of a delegation. However, a scouting mission undertaken by Kayode Fayemi with his long-standing colleague, the ebullient, irrepressible Tajudeen Abdulraheen, a roving new-generation pan-Africanist, resulted in our most sustained, structured diplomatic offensive in Africa, with generous help from the Canadian government. The UDFN divided the continent in two, after identifying those governments that might be persuaded to pay attention to what was happening to us in Nigeria. Two delegations took off, not particularly bubbling with optimism, but at least we would leave no room for later excuses—Why didn't they come to us? We would have helped.

It proved a sound recommendation. A number of the government leaders we visited either feigned ignorance of or were genuinely uninformed about the degree of repression in Nigeria. If the latter were true, one could only wonder what their diplomatic representatives were doing to earn their salaries and privileges, what kind of reports even a mentally retarded but innately honest observer could possibly relay home except that the most populous nation in Africa was rapidly sinking into a state of power insanity that shamed a continent to whose aid nearly the entire world had rallied—however belatedly— when it was confronted by the humiliation of apartheid. If my remarks to the bosses of those diplomats resulted in only one of them being deprived of his sinecure, those mostly frustrating visits, undertaken as an unavoidable duty, would have been worth it.

The tour was not a total loss, however. There were at least two noteworthy encounters with African leaders, though drastically divergent in the impressions they made on me. One was with the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, who, as it happened, occupied a very special position in relation to our struggle. None other than Moshood Abiola, the elected Nigerian president, still in prison, had funded Museveni's revolt against the tyrannical misrule of Milton Obote, the former Ugandan president, who had been dethroned by the homicidal buffoon Idi Amin Dada, restored by the idealistic Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, yet proceeded to surpass, it is arguably estimated, the atrocities unleashed on that nation by Idi Amin, the “Conqueror of the British Empire.” I was on my best diplomatic behavior and resisted a strong impulse to remind Museveni that our fight was also that of his benefactor, especially when he took time off from our urgent concerns to pontificate about the “grammar-spewing intellectual elite” who should be held responsible for the woes of the African continent.

I had not known that this was a familiar Museveni line of peroration, or I would have spared myself the irritation. Still flushed with the victory of his guerrilla movement, he received our delegation late into the night. It was difficult to envisage him as a guerrilla fighter, since he proved to be a poor listener—a guerrilla in the bush must
listen,
common sense dictates, even to the language of the leaves! The Ugandan leader struck me as being more suited to his former profession as a schoolteacher, and an opinionated one at that, with an often embarrassing estimation of the profundity of some of his most commonplace notions or comments. Still, once we succeeded in dismounting him from his hobbyhorse, he proved quite positive. Abdulraheen, then resident in Uganda, ensured that our host and I ended up in an inner room, where we spoke with greater confidentiality. Contact continued for some time afterward, through a specially assigned minister. Nothing material emerged from this supportive direction, however, though we were able to ensure that Abacha's regime received no comfort from Uganda, especially within the Commonwealth. Proposed meetings with our contact minister each time he was due in Europe had a way of being called off at the last moment. Still, I had to accept the fact that Alice Lukwena's Lord Resistance Army was stretching the headmaster's attention to the limit in the northern part of the country.

A year or so after our meeting, while our struggle was still on, we did meet again, this time in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, where we shared a podium. I was still appreciative of the attention Museveni had paid us in Uganda and so was able to react indulgently when he resumed his patchy pronouncements on African history, half-baked theories of African social development, and whatever else, all delivered magisterially and with a bland indifference to the thematic assignment of the panel. Afterward, I ran into some of his aides and implored them: “Look, you people must really try and place your man under some kind of restraint, or one day soon he'll be taken to task on a public platform and ridiculed.” They broke into laughter, and one replied, “Professor Soyinka, why are you complaining? You only had him for an hour and then you're gone; we undergo this every day. We can't escape him.”

Impossible to imagine a greater contrast than Paul Kagame, then only the vice president of a nation that had undergone a near-unspeakable horror, the likes of which the African continent had never experienced in oral or recorded history. No visit that I undertook, either on my own or in delegation, could have been more poignant, yet more bracing, than that to Rwanda, where Kagame's liberation forces had routed the
genocidaires
and were pursuing them into neighboring countries but mostly into the Central African jungles. At the same time, a government of restoration was being positioned, confronted with the impossible task of suturing the mangled nerve endings of Rwanda's national being, restoring confidence in its corporate existence. Kagame, seven foot plus, every inch exuding intelligence and discipline, was a formidable force to encounter, and without any effort on his part to appear one. Even when he said “I am a fighting man,” it was a statement that spoke of a disciplined vocation, delivered without a trace of bravado. It was a considered summation of a personal temperament that was also validated by the Rwandan circumstances. The same objective assessment informed his accounts of some of the horrors perpetrated by the Hutus on both Tutsis and Hutu objectors and his accusation of French complicity, and justified his decision to terminate French as an official language of the nation. It made his confidence credible when he stated that despite the seemingly terminal sentence on national unity, his mission of reunification was already predetermined.

With the same grounding in reality, Kagame went on to explain that it was necessary for him, the victorious Tutsi, to cede the top position of president to a member of the Hutu tribe while contenting himself with being the political second in command. A number of Hutus had also been victims or else had been coerced into collaborating with the murderers. It was essential for the purposes of rehabilitation that one of the majority Hutu be seen as occupying the top position. We had, however, built up an intimacy so quickly and effortlessly that he admitted—with a slight, apologetic smile that lit up his wafer-thin face, sculpted like a wedge of the
abata
kola nut—that yes, it was a temporary arrangement. When the fighting part was over, it was indeed likely that he would take over the political reins—but: “The arrangement suits me. I'm a fighting man. I love fighting.”

One of the continent's extremely rare breed of leaders, I thought, and if there was a moment in our search when I felt that yes, we could confidently entrust our people into the hands of one man, it was there, in Rwanda. Indeed, recalling my brief student flirtation with soldiering, I could not help thinking how fortunate it was that Her Majesty's government had been unable to call on such a talent in its recruitment exercise. Kagame is a leader beside whom one would willingly march into battle and indeed relish the moment of confrontation with an overwhelmingly superior force.