You Must Set Forth at Dawn (69 page)

Was armed struggle still avoidable?

By now the opposition groups were financially drained. It was a pitiable sum that we succeeded in transmitting to Olisa Agbakoba from NALICON— a thousand dollars! Sadder still, it was the only contribution, as we later discovered, that Olisa received from outside. YEAA's Kalu spent that much at one sitting in a bar with his cronies. Nonetheless, with even more meager contributions from other sources from within, but mostly relying on volunteer work, Olisa and his colleagues succeeded in flooding the streets of Lagos with demonstrators, breaking up and regrouping under the weight of police attacks. Banners were raised and leaflets distributed, and a jubilant media boosted a remarkably courageous outing, against all conceivable odds, that was equaled only by that of Ola Oni's doughty warriors of Ibadan.

Both Abacha's ploys and the responses by the internal opposition— tenacious but weakened by increasing casualties—indicated only one course of action: a new “front” to keep the momentum of the struggle alive and keep the evil day of armed struggle at bay for as long as possible. It did not have to be anything dramatic; all that mattered was that the war be taken to the Abacha regime, on Nigerian soil, relying on the people themselves to provide a network of protection for identified but elusive organizers. Psychological warfare appeared to be a prerequisite: panicking and eroding the confidence of an oppressive regime and, at the same time, boosting the morale of the active opposition and the prostrate populace.

I could not deny the logic of this step any longer, nor evade the fact that I was the obvious choice to spearhead the new initiative. After all, there had been so many sightings of W.S. by Abacha's agents, leading to police and troop movements on a massive scale, high alerts at airports, ostentatious surveillance of known W.S. haunts and hosts, inflicting unpleasant experiences on a handful of travelers who happened to bear the slightest resemblance to the fugitive—at least in the eyes of overzealous security agents of a paranoid ruler. We were aware that these sightings, nearly all of which were mythical, were a constant source of strength to the opposition. Indeed, we would later discover that some of these sightings had been deliberate inventions, not by Abacha's security agents and propagandists but by opposition plants who had fed them to the agents! It was time to flesh out this apparition and earth it within Nigeria. The move would resuscitate a flagging resolve and structure the sporadic acts of defiance into a sustained campaign of civil disobedience—more accurately, a resumption of the civil disobedience campaign of June 1993, when the elections had been annulled, and the follow-up of November, when a spirited effort had been made to remove Ernest Shonekan, the parting gift of the ousted dictator Ibrahim Babangida. The ground needed to be softened up, made accommodating, if the ultimate weapon of resistance—armed struggle—could not be avoided.

At the third full meeting of the new opposition group, the UDFN, in Pittsburgh in March 1998, I announced that our gathering would be the last outside Nigerian soil and that the next meeting would be in Abuja, the nation's capital. The elation and raucous applause were expected, but only a handful of attendees were aware that this was the formal announcement of a new phase in the struggle, not simply a morale booster. Sola Adeyeye, our bearded secretary-general with the bearing of a bantam cock, now a member of the House of Representatives, was one of the few. Taken into confidence, he promptly swore that I would not reenter Nigeria without him. I felt guilty that I could not inform my deputy, Julius Ihonvbere, then program officer at the Ford Foundation, or other key members such as Kayode Fayemi, the fusslessly methodical organizer who had made a detailed study of military mentality. I feared that they would strenuously object and probably summon a meeting of the Governing Council of the UDFN to overrule the decision. It would not have changed my mind; I had completed my own analysis of our situation and was in no mood for arguments to which I had no intention of contributing.

My family, safely ensconced in California, had to be treated on an individual basis. The most troubling decision concerned my wife, Folake. Her reaction was predictable, and it was no time for emotional entreaties. I briefed my two sons, Olaokun and Ilemakin, both operating from England. I thought the elder, Olaokun, a medical doctor, would be ruled by a pragmatic approach and accept the supportive but crucial role that I was entrusting to him—from the outside. He shocked me by his adamant response: if I were going in, so was he—and as advance guard! His brother, Ilemakin, made matters even worse by declaring that he would not be left behind. Over my dead body, I decided, even as I agreed to include them in the infiltration team; they would learn soon enough that they had been ditched when I made my first broadcast from within Nigeria!

Only three non-Nigerians either had knowledge of or were involved in the planning of my return. One was a German quasi-diplomat who worked for a foundation—he agreed to organize a noisy cultural event as decoy on the day of our entry into Nigeria. That was a brief alliance with a most unsettling termination, for the man would back off shortly after, denying even the generous sum he had contributed unsolicited, as well as his offer to take up all further travel expenses. So fervent was his dissociation that I anxiously called up my young companion on that visit, Kayode Fayemi, seeking assurance that I had not suffered a brain fever in Hanover, where the meeting had taken place. The crucial exchange had been necessarily private, but, fortunately, on emerging from the man's office, I had transferred the donated sum, all in hard currency, to Kayode. Now I sought to know if it had been phantom currency notes that I shoved into his hands, evaporating perhaps as soon as we had left Germany! Kayode's reassurance saved me from a fear of stress-induced delusions.

Of more durable material was the second ally, whose name it does no harm to mention. This was Gerry Feil, a long-standing collaborator in a medley of projects—artistic and political—and in myriad ways since my earliest brush with renegade regimes. Gerry's cluttered studio in the Village in downtown New York was virtually surrendered to me for use whenever and for no matter what. It was the venue for meetings that required the highest security, for leaving and retrieving messages, or simply for getting some sleep. It was just as well for us that an FBI operative's recommendations for “taking care of Mr. Gerry Feil,” wrongly suspected of aiding the revolutionary Weathermen in the sixties, had not been implemented. As revealed in a book
⁶²
by another operative, now retired, Gerry was to have been locked in a car, suspended on the edge of a cliff, and “made to sweat until the bastard reveals all he knows.” Gerry, alas for him, had had the misfortune some years earlier of leaving his car in the custody of a filmmaker who was making a documentary about the Weathermen.

The FBI agent has since been exposed for the lunatic he was, but I would have stayed miles away from Gerry had I known at the time how dangerous a revolutionary he had been regarded in some FBI circles! Not that this would have prevented me from making use of the professional makeup skills of his colleagues in the film industry. These practical aids were essential not only for a successful reentry, but for the ability to move openly yet remain undetected.

My voice would be a problem when introduced in zones infiltrated by the police, but not one that a semi-trained actor keeping a low profile could fail to overcome, even without voice-distorting gadgets. This problem did not arise for the formal broadcasts, however, and I had prepared the speech that would be transmitted over Radio Kudirat the moment our small team set foot again on Nigerian soil. After that, any UDFN statements would issue first from within the nation's boundaries and only then be rebroadcast by Radio Kudirat from its Scandinavian base. Thanks to Reporters sans Frontières, we still laid claim to an idle, mobile FM radio transmitter, stored in the basement of an apartment building in the very heart of Paris—the shortwave Radio Kudirat had rendered it temporarily redundant by successfully covering the entire space of the Nigerian nation on its own.

The third non-Nigerian was our man in Paris—still an international civil servant for UNESCO, Nigerian but of French nationality—whom I asked to prepare to take possession of the transmitter and travel with it to Cotonou in the Republic of Benin. From there it would travel to Lagos, a repeat exercise of the first incursion of any opposition radio onto Nigerian airwaves in 1996: Radio Freedom, a venture that had been made possible by the dissident general Alani Akinrinade. Early in 1996, the first mobile transmitters had been secretly tested in the Republic of Benin, dismantled, smuggled piecemeal into Nigeria by women traders and other volunteers, then reassembled within the country. Among such volunteers were the mild-looking Dapo Olorunyomi, a journalist; Kayode Fayemi, who from writing doctorals on military domination had become an agent for its reversal; and the self-effacing “Lemi.” Like Olorunyomi, Lemi had once enjoyed Abacha's hospitality and lived to tell the tale. My private nickname for Lemi was “the Gecko”—he had a natural gift for blending into walls, which perhaps had helped him to survive and secure his eventual “ransom” from Abacha's dungeons. The impact of Radio Freedom on the Nigerian populace, the first time that the monopoly of state broadcasting had ever been breached, had been nothing short of galvanizing. The transmission could only cover a few square miles at a time, but its mobility made it appear far more extensive in its coverage. A search for that transmitter had also provided the pretext for the military invasion of my Abeokuta home, the real purpose of course being to destroy whatever could be destroyed. The new radio, our gift from Reporters sans Frontières and more powerful than Radio Freedom, would follow the same route and operate in the same way, only this time its broadcasts would be picked up and rebroadcast all over the country by Radio Kudirat.

At the lagoon village of Ganvie in Cotonou, in the neighboring Republic of Benin, a canoe with an outboard motor and two escorts were placed on standby, ready to take me into Nigerian waters. They were provided by a Nigerian businessman who, despite his careful cultivation of a low profile, enjoyed seemingly unlimited reaches into the ranks of the Beninois police and Customs commands. This entrepreneur had already assigned us isolated, mostly disused warehouses in which we were free to store whatever we wished. If our incursion into Nigerian territory had its desired effect, a psychological front would be effectively established and the nation might be spared a war of insurrection. If not, the people would be primed for resistance.

A Final Mission

I HAD ONE MORE “DIPLOMATIC OFFENSIVE” TO EXECUTE BEFORE DEPARture, and that was to go to Israel, a country I had never before visited. Among the preliminaries for venturing into the lion's den in that year, 1998, one that NALICON had designated the Year of Liberation, was the fullest possible penetration and, we hoped, disruption of Sani Abacha's security apparatus. He had inherited it from his predecessor, Ibrahim Babangida, and it was run largely by the Israelis. Even before my flight from Nigeria, a notorious, irrepressible multiple agent of successive governments, Godwin Daboh, had once offered to draw me into a plot to topple Sani Abacha. Among his—largely improbable— boasts was that he had a direct connection with the Israeli-run security operations as well as intimate links to the Israeli government. If we could come to an agreement about the composition of the civilian succession, he would simply contact the Israeli government, which would then authorize its nationals to do whatever was necessary. The army, he assured me, was ready to move and install the winner of the 1993 presidential elections in Aso Rock.

Daboh was most specific, even down to technical details. One switch, he said, controlled the entire security gadgetry of Aso Rock—communication, lights, signals, and so forth. Without it, Abacha would be stripped naked, suddenly bereft of protection. Daboh claimed to know the Israeli engineering firm that had set up the entire circuit. He swore that he had the blueprints in his possession, or at least that he had access to them at any time of his choosing. If I had tarried long enough, I have no doubt that he would have claimed that he had the remote control button right in his pocket and might even have offered to demonstrate a fraction of its efficacy!

It was an embarrassment to have Godwin Daboh screaming all this at me virtually at the top of his voice in the courtyard premises of the Lagos Magistrate Court, where I had gone to institute a civil suit against Abacha's usurpation of power. That was a purely symbolic gesture; we knew in advance which way the judge, a well-known AGIP (Any Government in Power), would make his ruling. Daboh was nothing if not consistent: “Stop wasting time on a case with a predictable judicial outcome. Let's get to work on something practical.” Hurriedly, to shut him up, I agreed to a fictitious rendezvous and fled!

The Israeli security connection was real, however, and it was one of the first targets of the opposition groups, once we moved into exile. NADECO had already taken the initiative and written to the Israeli government to protest the technical support still provided to a brutal dictator in the area of security. Questions were raised in the Knesset, and NADECO received a letter of assurance that all Israelis had been told to withdraw from any activities that implicated a direct or indirect collaboration with the Abacha regime. My visit was a follow-up. It was no longer sufficient for the Israelis to have withdrawn; we now required active support from the government, especially in its intelligence section.

This had to be the last such engagement! Each moment carried the same thought: I was freeing myself of the mind-numbing itinerant diplomacy, leaving the field to the NADECO stalwarts, to whom this was meat and drink, but also, on our side, to NALICON, to Kayode Fayemi, whom I had watched navigating those shoals with increasing self-assurance.

The chauffeur arrived. I attended a Knesset meeting, then met with individual members of that house, including the female representative who had introduced the original motion that barred any further collaboration with the Abacha regime. They all gave reassurances of strict compliance by Israeli citizens with the directives. Brief meetings with small committees, representatives of the various coalitions that made up the government, the opposition, a politician or two who had been in Nigeria and wanted a few minutes just to ask about old friends . . .

Then followed a quiet lunch with Shimon Peres and an abrupt change of mood. The secluded restaurant, clearly not open to the public, aided the transition, more like a private, discreet clubhouse where members of the government might take visitors for confidential exchanges, and my host hinted as much, though he added that he enjoyed dining there by himself, since it was one place where he knew his thoughts would not be interrupted. Peres was no longer prime minister. His party was in opposition, but Israeli politics were such that he still wielded a great amount of influence in government. Shimon Peres—we had interacted before on a few occasions—always struck me as one of that rare species: a politician of principle, even in the heated combat zone that his nation had become. We engaged the Palestinian issue only toward the end; I had not traveled to Israel for a conference on Middle East politics, but of course, how could that eye of a global storm be completely avoided? When I began to outline the developments in the Nigerian predicament, he nodded in familiarity with the subject. Israel, he responded, was committed to democracy, and he gave me his solemn assurance that even though he was no longer in government, he could and would ensure that his nation did not overtly or covertly act in any way that would give joy to the Abacha regime.

I continued more cautiously as I went on to explain that my visit was exploratory and I would be followed shortly by a team that would be led by someone by the name of Alani Akinrinade, formerly a general in the Nigerian Army. I wrote down the name for him. How soon could they visit, and could he facilitate their visas? As soon as they wish, he said, just give me a few days' notice. He would also make a call to the relevant consulate. I provided indications of the new thinking of the opposition—that we had to begin operating from within, preparing for any eventuality. I watched his reaction as I stressed that we were not thinking yet of armed conflict but could no longer rule out any measure, that the situation was deteriorating so rapidly that we expected more than mere neutrality or diplomatic niceties from the Israeli government. What we needed above all was help to penetrate Abacha's security network— we could do, for a start, with some sophisticated technological gadgets.

Shimon Peres listened, expressed himself as one who was already working on a problem and could be relied upon not to take refuge in evasion. The afternoon passed quietly. We spoke like old friends, an older man whose life had encompassed much, the other, younger but infected with his presence, so that he began to feel prematurely aged deep inside. Peres introduced the Palestinian situation, as if to draw parallels—not of politics but of the frustrations of conflict—running lightly over the numerous and abortive attempts at peace. His voice, a deep rumble as if emerging from deep caverns of thought, was a mixture of quiet resolve, tinged with some regret that logical policies, in his reckoning, had failed to result in his vision, conceding a barely disguised anxiety for the future. Only during this part of our exchange did his measured rhythm change character, revealing a deep anger at and contempt for his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose imported brand of Zionism he found depressingly barren. Regardless of my view of Israeli policies toward Palestinians, being with Peres simply as a human being and a leader of people made me marvel all over again how it ever came about that the Abachas of the world could actually dare aspire to any rank of leadership, even of a pack of hyenas. I felt quite contented. Even if we obtained nothing from the resources within Peres's scope of influence, his wistful gaze left me feeling that this was a friend who shared similar ideals and who wished with all his heart that the world were different from the one we both inhabited.

It was one of those balmy afternoons when a glow settles over one, inexplicably, although in this case I could attribute it to the serene atmosphere of our meeting place, the fussless attention of the waiters, the calm exchanges, and the quiet attentiveness displayed by a host toward the concerns that had brought me thousands of miles around the globe. In addition, I was already feeling the sense of satisfaction that comes with knowing that I was shutting down one particular line of duty and freeing myself for the next. It struck me as a fitting end to shuttling around to foreign lands, attempting to assess what others might or might not give, urging on the former and adjusting to the latter, mentally casting about, even within an encounter, for where one might turn next in the rounds of exploration. I had never really felt cut out for this role, and it was an added bonus to be about to end it on an altruistic, though powerless, note—altruistic, because I was concluding an unwanted career in a land upon which I truly wished I could bestow something in turn: a just resolution of its own travails. Perhaps my visit to the Holocaust Museum that morning also had something to do with this feeling. The measured, modulated voice that read out the list of victims in that somber yet riveting space still echoed in my head, albeit muted, even sepulchral, coursing around the retentive skull.

THERE WAS SOME TIME before my final engagement—an informal one, just a reception, in the home of Professor Yacov Zvi of the University of Jerusalem, whose invitation to lecture had served as cover for my visit. It was a long-standing invitation, one that I had warned him I might wish to take up with only a few days' notice. I decided on some sightseeing. My chauffeur, every bit of whom reeked of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, took me to Old Jerusalem.

At the foot of Temple Mount, known also as the Noble Sanctuary, I excused my minder, since I prefer to explore new places by myself, without a guide or running commentary, even without a map or guidebook. I descended into the crypts, the grottoes, the temples and mosques, the reliquaries, and the mythologies of the spirit. It was not difficult to decipher the architectural rivalries inscribed on walls, the altered passages, sealed-up niches and alcoves, sealed-up archways and altars as one faith supplanted another, temple turned to church to mosque to church and then to temple or mosque again, each attempting to eradicate the manifest presences of the last but with the signatures of each faith still visible, if only vestigially, sometimes cohabiting the same space as if in an optimistic testament to the potential accommodativeness of the human spirit. There was no doubt about it: a communion of sheer spirit, elevated above theology, sect, or creed pervaded every niche, perfumed the air with the rich distillation of numinous presences. My path crossed those of other tourists. They were not many and would be more truthfully described as pilgrims, since their faces, even bodies, radiated the awareness of being in a place of history, hallowed by the passage of prophets and seers. It was approaching dusk when I emerged and stood looking down over the plains.

The next moment, I was hailed by name, by voices whose accents were distinctly familiar. They turned out to be from a busload of Ghanaian soldiers, a detachment from the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon who had motored to Jerusalem to visit the holy sites. I waved to them. Encountering them so far from home within this foreign space, bound on a mission of peace, immediately moved me in a strange way, as if it were some kind of message from the distant coast of a continent where my cactus patch was eternally lodged and from within which my obsessive mission acquired its enigmatic endorsement. Within the mandates of peace and strife, this encounter struck me, quite inexplicably, as a gracious, indeed benign, portent.

The bus was already pulling out when some of them recognized my head of hair—always the giveaway!—and excitedly stopped the driver. I was mobbed. They insisted on taking souvenir pictures and obtaining autographs. One of them was reading an anthology of African writing. He proudly opened a well-thumbed page—he had been reading the section of my poems! That was unusual. Most of the time when I catch one of our own reading any work of mine, it's
The Lion and the Jewel
or
The Trial of Brother Jero.
Most frequently, however, they are reading Chinua Achebe's
Things Fall Apart
! It was one of those rare times that I was devoid of any sense of resented duty in that sometimes exasperating labor of signing autographs and posing for photographs; I signed most willingly and gratified the insatiable cameras. Finally they departed, and with the dwindling of the bus to a speck in the distance came a sudden silence that enveloped the dusk, as if that busload of peaceful warriors had been the last intrusive object, of either noise or motion, into a contemplation of timelessness. I resumed my gaze outward, but with a marked difference in response.

Not even the passage of a shy straggle of youthful visitors, wordless and reverential, disturbed the silence that had descended. One moment, I watched them pause at the Mount of Olives and stand still for several moments; then, as noiselessly as they had appeared, they were gone, seemingly swallowed up by the earth as they vanished down stone steps that led into the chambers, grottoes, and galleries of the mount. With their passage, it seemed as if, finally, the last human presence in the world had been sucked into the underworld. I slipped gradually into a consciousness that merged totally with my surroundings, the arid slopes that swept into an endless horizon from the splayed feet of Temple Mount, slipped into one of my inexplicable flotation experiences, those moments when a part of one's self appears to separate from the body and moves to inhabit a pure realm of sensations that have drifted in from all sides, emanating from nowhere, never defining themselves for what they are, what they portend, why they have chosen to assail that detached portion of the self within a neutral, elusive territory. Perhaps the self becomes more receptive in those moments when one has truly shed the encumbrances of options and submits only to a straightforward choice of action, or none at all. Certainly, the only identified thought that my mind had retained for the past hours had been—going home. The rest was up to others, and I felt supremely lighthearted and light-headed, readied only toward one direction, one uncomplicated goal, regaining my own terrain and moving anonymously on familiar earth—an end to the frenzy of “ambassadorial” hustling, leaving only the task of infiltrating, settling in, watching and waiting, preparing. I felt supremely at peace.