You Must Set Forth at Dawn (9 page)

Those early scenes of death had a solemnity about them, a graceful pronouncement of leave-taking where the precedent violence is gently absorbed by, indeed sublimated beneath, that shawl of multiple existences that the Yoruba wrap around their consciousness as a testament of continuity: the world of the living, the ancestor, and the unborn. Then and only then—in those early 1960s, when death on the road was an isolated, discrete event—was it possible to sustain one's early mystic rapport, however tenuously, with the road. The road was old and it was young, ageless as the peoples through whose lives it threaded and young as the same peoples, who were being collectively transformed. Perhaps I assumed the function of the wanderer whose occupation was to bear witness to the road's many phases that mirrored not merely human fate but, more directly and effectively, an immediate entity in formation.

The newly demarcated space had been christened “Nigeria” by the spouse of a colonial officer, but it was one whose ancestral exhalations stubbornly overwhelmed its merely convenient administrative identity. I wandered through those arteries with mixed feelings, bounced not only up and down on the seat of the Land Rover but—as the sun came up—between the delineation of the physical world and the misty trails of unseen presences. Undoubtedly something of this consciousness went into my encounters with those scenes of death in the early days, robbing them of the reality of violent rupture and leaving in its place the mere rites of passage, insinuating a pervasive aura of the invisible world of ancestors. The simplest way to put this, therefore, is perhaps that death, in those early days, had a sense of proportion—death knew its place.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers . . .

If Langston Hughes, the black American poet, had driven through Nigeria in a Land Rover at the beginning of the sixties, he would have written, I am certain—
My soul has grown deep like the road.
He did visit eventually, but I doubt he ever took up that general invitation that I issued soon after my reunion with Ogun:

Traveller, you must set forth
At dawn
I promise marvels of the holy hour. . . .

 

In the road's later decay, rather like the sustained conceit of
The Picture of
Dorian Gray,
is recorded a nation's retreat from a humanism that I had imbibed, quite unconsciously, from childhood. I was fated to watch the nation turn both carrion and scavenger as it killed and consumed its kind, the road remaining an obliging stream in which a nation's fall from grace was duly reflected. To the scenes of violence and contempt for kind that would later become commonplace, a strange encounter from those idyllic days underscores the flight of marvels and the end of the holy hour. It was recorded by a journalist, and I had myself witnessed variants of such enlightenment from “dumb beasts” on the road. I have a distinct recollection of this solemn choreography, once not far from Akure, and then further north, between Jebba and Kaura Namoda.

A crow had been killed by a motor vehicle and then, in what seemed like a practised
ritual, the corpse was surrounded by other crows. One after the other, they landed,
then began to circle the stricken bird in deliberate formation. After a while, they
stopped, moved nearer the lifeless form in what appeared to be a tightening of the
circle, closing the gap between them and the corpse. Then they began a chorus of
cawing, moving their beaks up and down in unison—it was a kind of ordered ululating, and the eerie scene looked strangely like some kind of service being held over their slain companion. Shortly after, they lifted the corpse with their beaks,
taking little hops, until the entire gathering had disappeared with the corpse over
the verge.

The journalist had narrated that encounter in the newspapers at the time, awed by the scene. My instant reaction to the story was gratitude that I had not narrated my own experience of that nature. As a known writer, tarred with the brush of a profession known for poetic liberties, no one would have believed me. Still, there it was; even the crows appeared to accord some dignity to their dead. And the humans did no less at that stage when I still boasted a visceral companionship with the road. Death was a constant companion, but its victims were not mere carrion on the road. Each scene of death was—after the initial disorientation—almost a haven of tranquillity. The survivors, even the injured awaiting help, formed a serene community—transfigured, it seemed, by a surreal wind that had blown across them briefly and altered their lives forever. Enfolding such scenes in an immense, invisible cloak was a palpable presence of time in its absolute stillness.

There was a practical reward to my preoccupation with the road—it was a talisman against alienation, that altering phenomenon that separates the individual from community. This condition had begun to disfigure the social landscape of the nation not long after independence, especially in the cities. Out in the hinterland, one could still wallow in a mystic bond with the land and thus with a people's eternal, collective being. If I was an initiate in this process of the coming-into-being of a nation, the road was my personal mentor, conspirator, and—in the growing face of alienation—an unassuming safeguard. Alas, its revelations also plunged me into the parallel politics of its violent being.

First Skirmishes

WHEN I RETURNED TO NIGERIA ON NEW YEAR'S DAY 1960, IT WAS A NAtion wound up to a fever pitch of social expectations—and self-confidence— as its date for independence from British rule drew close. Its future was already mapped out, however, for the eve-of-independence elections had taken place the previous year, and all that was left was for the British government to hand over power to the victorious party and take its leave.

I was not pessimistic about the future but extremely cautious, having come into contact with the first-generation leaders in my student days in England. The enemy, as I had identified it, was power and its pitfalls, a cautionary motif that dominated my would-be independence play,
A Dance of the Forests.
The view was not shared by the cultural bureaucrats, quick to smell out subversion. They cautioned that the play contained a subversive message. It had won the contest for the official theater presentation for the occasion but was now deemed a damper, unsuitable for a festive occasion. I staged it anyway, in an alternative venue, using the prize money and forming a theater company, the 1960 Masks, in the process.

On the much-anticipated day, October 1, 1960, the “subversives” presented their shoestring worldview on the stage of the University Theatre, Ibadan, while the nation celebrated its formal liberation from colonial bondage with a series of sumptuous events and ceremonials in the capital, Lagos. The nation space known as Nigeria had come of age, a federation made up of three semiautonomous regions—the Eastern Region, the Western Region, and the Northern Region—the last occupying a landmass larger in size than the other two combined. Each had its own legislature in its regional capital, while a federal house sat in Lagos, the nation's capital. Those regional legislatures—or Houses of Assembly—had been in place since 1954. However, the results from the preparatory federal elections of 1959, conducted by the departing British officials, that decided who would hold power at the center had been most bitterly disputed, and it was already a divided nation that ritually lowered the British Union Jack that October, folded it away, and hoisted the green-white-green of Nigeria—surely the most uninspiring national flag on the surface of the earth! The white was said to symbolize peace, green stood for agriculture; combined they misrepresented the sum of a nation's imagination.

Recent memoirs
²⁰
by former colonial officers have revealed how crooked that beginning was. The elections that placed a government in power at the center were rigged—by the British! John Bull was not about to leave an independent Nigeria under the control of any uppity radicals, as the southern nationalists—the East and the West—were perceived. Thus, on instructions from the British Home Office, even the Nigerian census was falsified, giving an artificial majority to the North, which was largely feudalist by tradition and conservative in political outlook. The census was actually based on sample head counts—random or selective, no one knew—which were then roughly multiplied by the acreage of the landmass, irrespective of actual population densities!

In its resolve to ensure that the nation was handed over to a conservative power, the British did not rely on numerical strength alone: after all, the North did harbor radical or rebellious elements—such as the Tivs, in what was known as the Middle Belt, or the Northern Elements Progressive Union—in quite sizable numbers. And so, to make absolutely certain that power did not fall into the wrong hands, specific instructions were issued by the British Home Office to its civil servants: the final results of elections to the federal legislature must be manipulated, where necessary, in favor of the political conservatives. Archival material, now free of the time constraints of the Official Secrets Act, testify to this. An admission, and even a statement of regret, was wrung out of a serving British minister during the Abacha years. The precedent had, however, been set, and rigging now answered the name of democracy.

Not surprisingly, the national flag began to unravel rather quickly after independence. To begin with, each of the three regions, West, East, and North, had its own restless minorities. Low-intensity armed warfare, largely unpublicized, accompanied the nation into independence in the Tiv region of the North. Elections merely modified the geography of hostilities.

At independence, my own West was ruled by the Action Group, led by a dour, ascetic Yoruba, Obafemi Awolowo, affectionately known as “Awo.” However, his party lost the fight for federal control at the center to the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), the North-based party, which was headed by Sir Ahmadu Bello, a feudal Fulani scion. Ahmadu Bello claimed descent from the legendary Othman dan Fodio, the jihadist who had once sworn that he would dip the Koran in the Atlantic.

The Northern Peoples Congress also controlled the Northern Region. In the East, the party that held power was the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), led by the charismatic, U.S.-educated Nnamdi Azikiwe, an Igbo and self-described Fabian whose oratory at public rallies drew shouts of “Ze-ee-eek” from ecstatic crowds. That party also lost to the NPC at the federal level but teamed up with the winner to form a ruling coalition at the center. The position of the nation's prime minister fell, naturally, to the senior partner, the NPC.

Nnamdi Azikiwe, having failed to capture power at the center, announced his retirement from politics, waxing biblical in a valedictory speech that declared that, with national independence, his “task was done.” He was compensated with the ceremonial position of governor-general of Nigeria, representing the queen of England (Nigeria had chosen to remain within the British Commonwealth, headed by the queen). Sir Ahmadu Bello, the leader of the victorious party, chose to remain at the head of the regional government, nominating his lieutenant Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, a former schoolteacher, as the first prime minister of the newly independent nation; regional heads of government were designated “premiers.” The Action Group of the West thus remained the minority opposition party in the federal legislature. Unlike his Northern counterpart, however, the leader of the Action Group, Awolowo, chose to lead the opposition at the federal level, leaving his second in command—Ladoke Akintola, a nationally acknowledged master of Yoruba oratory and a shrewd political strategist—as premier of the West.

THE DEVELOPING FISSURES, nationwide, were perhaps inevitable, given the artificial grafting of the British parliamentary system onto a patchwork nation with different precolonial histories and systems of self-governance. The West was the first to manifest the contradictions. An open rift developed between the party leader, Awolowo, and Akintola, his lieutenant in the West, a region whose politics had always been as volatile as its people were politically advanced. The rift intensified, and the party broke in two, with a little help from the recruiting ambitions of the ruling party, the NPC. The breakaway group, transformed into the Nigerian National Democratic Party, the NNDP, was led by Akintola. It became increasingly perceived as an ally of the ruling party, the NPC; certainly its political ideology became more conservative, more openly impatient with the “radical” tendencies of Akintola's parent party. Defections, intrigues, ideological polarization, political blackmail, greed for a “slice of the national cake”—finally all the ingredients were in place for a new political experience, an arbitrary order of governance. In 1962, the elected government of the West—and with it, democracy—was suspended, and the region was placed under emergency rule.

The immediate justifying episode for taking over the West, one that fulfilled the condition of “a breakdown of law and order,” was provided when the Western House of Assembly converted its chambers into a boxing-cum-wrestling arena. This well-laid plan to destabilize that region was activated by a preset signal in the shout
“Ina l'ori oke!”
—“Fire on the mountain!” A legislator vaulted benches and desks, seized the speaker's mace, and attempted to make off with it. It ended up in two pieces, but only after first drawing blood from the head of a fellow lawgiver. A famous image, captured by an alert photographer in the press gallery, showed my favorite political maverick, Tony Enahoro, escaping the melee through a window.

Tony Enahoro would once again take to flight, this time clandestinely through the borders, but that was yet some months away. For now, the organizers of this legislative rout had achieved their purpose, and the nation—the Western Region, at least—embarked on a novel adventure. The region was placed under an administrator, a medical doctor then in government service and, we would learn later, the personal physician to the prime minister, Tafawa Balewa. He had the power to rule by decree, detain citizens without trial. The nation had heard of such things in other places but never imagined that we would actually taste of it in Nigeria—little did most imagine that this was merely a rehearsal for worse. The administrator wasted no time in placing political leaders under his sanction, including my friend from student days Bola Ige, a lawyer and rising leader within the Action Group party.

Bola Ige's final and most prolonged place of detention was known as Lekki Island, a then-desolate place famous for its attack-helicopter mosquitoes. His party, the Action Group, was undisguisedly the real target of federal intervention. A few token politicians from the breakaway branch of the Action Group, the NNDP, were also detained, but mostly in cozy circumstances. Government-catered rest houses were their favored choice, where they continued to conduct party affairs and even receive connubial visits. A quite substantial proportion of Nigerians, including myself, read in the move of the federal government the beginning of an attempt to stifle the democratic infant in its crib and turn the nation gradually into a one-party state. So soon—I could be forgiven for thinking—the actualization of warnings from
A Dance of the Forests
?

A more adaptable, more pugnacious theater company than the professionally competent but top-heavy 1960 Masks was clearly required. Enter Orisun Theatre, primed for instant, improvised sketches on the political situation. The administrator's dictatorial conduct in the West, his uneven apportionment of sanctions, and suspicions of a “secret agenda” provoked my lampoon on his office and governance style. It took the form of a song adapted from
The Vicar
of Bray
and was published in the media. Nothing untoward resulted from this foray beyond a friendly warning passed through the “official channels” of Ibadan University, where I was serving my stint as a Rockefeller fellow in drama. The vicar was not pleased. He was prepared to tolerate the exercise of my freedom of expression but wanted me to know that he was in the West, after all, to carry out a repair job, to stop the West from descending into chaos. This, he urged us to appreciate, was a delicate task of healing—for which, presumably, his medical training especially fitted him. He expected the academic community to cooperate with him in the achievement of his mission. I assured my interlocutors that I was indeed engaged on an important contribution to his objectives as I proceeded to prepare a series of political satires, the first of which would appear on stage as
Before the Blackout.
It included a dramatized version of the adaptation from
The Vicar of Bray.

AND THEN, AS I F the political scene were not sufficiently heated or complicated for such a young democracy, the nation was riveted by news of a far grimmer dimension than a mere rough-and-tumble among lawmakers—a conspiracy had been unearthed that sought to execute what would have amounted to a civilian coup d'état. The nest of conspirators was located in the Action Group. There was talk of proscribing the party altogether. Its leading figures were rounded up; some were placed under house arrest, others taken straight to prison. It all left the nation, especially the Western Region, in shock. Gradually the net contracted, closing in on the real target. No one was especially surprised when the party leader himself, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was arrested.

The trials followed lengthy, drawn-out investigations, during which the name of a white South African police officer, Ceulman, pioneered the conflation, in Nigerian modern history, of an individual name with torture. When the trials began, a number of the accused protested that their statements had been made under duress, their confessions extracted under torture. The statements were nonetheless admitted as evidence. Not surprisingly, virtually all the accused, including Obafemi Awolowo, were found “guilty as charged” and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The judge then committed the astonishing indiscretion of proceeding to recuperate from his marathon hearing as a vacation guest of the head of the ruling (and “persecuting”) party, directly after convicting and sentencing the accused. Never was a well-known Yoruba saying more eagerly seized upon: “The witch cried one night, and the child died the morning after; who still disputes that it was the witch that consumed the child?” It contributed in no small measure to the interpretative twist given to the judge's words when, before delivering judgment, he declared, “My hands are tied.” Even while considering his verdict deeply flawed, I still believe that his words were completely innocuous, being no more than the standard observation by any judge that, no matter his personal inclinations or public expectations, he was duty bound by the law. To the majority of government adversaries, however, the judge had admitted that he was carrying out orders!