You Must Set Forth at Dawn (7 page)

Outside of public adulation, however, my mind remained retentive of a decades-old image of Fela, a private one, not the familiar stage torso swiveling above sequined trousers, leaping about onstage with inimitable verve, a leaner version of James Brown. It was a fleeting moment of revelation, glimpsed during one of my infrequent visits with him, a trapped moment of repose when his inner thoughts appeared to overcome his darting eyes and they remained in place, deep windows into a wistful, deeply dissatisfied being. There was no audience, no need for role-playing. His familiar, loosely wrapped marijuana stick of almost midsize-cigar proportions smoldered over his lower lip, diffusing sufficient smoke to intoxicate an audience of a hundred or more. He had a faraway look, filled with discontent, and I thought I read in those eyes a longing that they could will the pungent fumigation that emerged from between his lips into a transforming agent for a nation's putrefactions, yet acknowledging that he was powerless to effect this dream, that the mocking immensity of the task would forever render him tormented, inconsolable.

I found a private symmetry about his passing, mostly in the way it chose to touch me in a remote space of separated yet close kinship, as if this public death had been sent across radio waves to reattach me to that distant but progressively depleted landscape. Despite the weight of a double bereavement, I accepted, quite factually, that I was not destined to be buried in Bekuta but remained cautious about whether or not I should read the loss of Fela-Bekuta as an omen that I was not meant to perish in exile.

Bekuta is dead; long live Abeokuta? Or whatever else tugs at one, inexplicably, like the power of Ogun's magnet directed at one of his metallic vessels. That hope/prayer/doubt, addressed to the rockhills and their presiding deity, Ogun, or whatever emanations remained within those granite veins, had the effect of simplifying—and intensifying—my mission in exile. Back in Kingston, I seized the first occasion to make it known that I had changed my last will and testament! Burying me in Bekuta, I announced, would be the same as burying me in some pristine jungle that had bartered away its soul. Since hoping to find another Bekuta outside Nigeria was stretching the laws of probability beyond limits, my mission in exile became even more personalized—to exploit every second of my living hours toward the retrieval of my cactus patch, but purged definitively of the possibility of a tyrant's triumphalist tread.

PART I

Ogun and I

Early Intimations

THE SUGGESTION THAT I WAS POSSESSED QUITE EARLY IN LIFE BY THE creative-combative deity Ogun is a familiar commentary of some literary critics who stretch my creative fascination with that deity, undeniable in my works, beyond its literary purlieu. If I were persuaded of that, I would have headed long ago for the nearest
babalawo
for the rites of exorcism! I am, contrary to all legitimately cited evidence—and none more damning than the accused's own history—actually a closet glutton for tranquillity. An oft-quoted remark of mine—“Justice is the first condition of humanity”—does, however, act constantly against the fulfillment of that craving for peace, an insertion into my mental template that can be regarded as a “categorical imperative.” There is nothing mystical about it, nothing beyond an overacute, remedial sense of right and wrong, of what is just and unjust.

A casual involvement, at a most impressionable age, with the Abeokuta women's movement, narrated in
Aké,
may have prepared the soil. That began in the late 1930s, when the women, led by my aunt, the formidable Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, rose against unjust taxes and chased the feudal lord, the Alake of Abeokuta, from his throne. So might also the induction, in my school days, into the propensities of the class bully, merging onto a broader canvas of the arrogant ways of colonial domination. That last in turn formed a continuum of visceral identification with the apartheid victims of South Africa, a condition that ironically honed itself to an insurgent pitch only when I arrived in the United Kingdom in 1954, into the homeland of a colonial power that ruled with violence in parts of Asia and Africa, Kenya most notoriously on the latter continent.

When I was studying in England in the mid-1950s, vacations found most of us African students headed for London from all over the British Isles to earn some extra money—mostly as porters in railway stations and post offices. We would then gather at the Overseas Students Club in Earl's Court, the University of London Student Union, or the West African Students Union in Porchester Terrace, Bayswater. There, virtually only one topic dominated all conversation: colonization and how/when to end it! The West African colonies appeared to be on their way to negotiated independence, so our agitated sights were set in other directions. Kenya was embroiled in the Mau Mau revolt, a truly indigenous, internally generated struggle, in which the forests favored the liberation fighters. South Africa, however, occupied a special place of bafflement, rage, and despair. Awareness of that degraded zone of existence on the soil of our own continent, the apprehension of a world that assigned to one's race a condition of subhumanity, was all-consuming. We began to prepare ourselves for the day when we would reclaim that humanity—by force of arms if needed.

This obsession with the humiliation of racist entrenchment in southern Africa was not one of bloodless empathy—we did, after all, savor mild doses of that condition in our encounters with the white natives on their own territory. Even as a student, occupying a mostly sheltered environment, I did not escape pointed acts of contempt or rejection. My overanthologized poem “Telephone Conversation,” the record of an exchange with a landlady, was only one of my many trite encounters with British racism. On public transport, for instance— although admittedly I
enjoyed
having a seat to myself in a filled-up double-decker bus, which made turning over the abnormally broad pages of
The
Yorkshire Post
much easier—could I really pretend not to notice, or fail to be stung by, the fact that a boarding passenger had traversed the length of the bus, seen the one empty seat next to me, but had chosen to retrace his or her steps and climb upstairs to search for a vacant seat? That the same passenger had come down again—no standing allowed upstairs—and chosen to attach his or her arm to a strap sooner than take that empty seat? Or, even more blatantly, when I was about to take the nearest vacant seat on a two-seat bench, that the occupant next to the window would shoot up, quickly extricate his or her body, and move to another seat or remain standing? Incidents like these, even in the mid-1950s, were mind-numbingly commonplace.

In shops, you turned invisible. The shopkeeper ostentatiously pretended not to see you and turned to attend to someone who had entered the shop long after you. He was quick with the apology and excuses, of course, the moment you shouted a belligerent “Excuse me!” Then followed the predictable “Oh, so sorry, were you next?” with an oiled, hypocritical voice the worse for being in a thick regional accent, when—irrationally—you somehow expected the country yokels to be more human than their cosmopolitan sophisticates.

How did one cope? Sometimes by invoking the inner confidence of one's mental superiority—that was easy enough; many of the natives were ignorant of much that was routine knowledge to any student. For a start, they did not even know where on the globe Africa is located. More to the point, in our own colonized territories, a white man was always associated with lordly positions of authority, yet here they were, finally exposed in all their grime and sweat, workers and peasants like our own mortal beings, often more wretched and impoverished than the poorest menial at home! Corporeally, all our student nostrils were in complete agreement that white people—almost uniformly— stank! They gave off a most upsetting odor, only slightly less upsetting than the belated discovery that they actually thought that we also stank! On balance, it was impossible to make an issue of racial slights all the time, and the more politicized of us, faced with a racial affront, simply switched our minds to that distant bastion of racism itself, apartheid South Africa:
You wait!
—an inward, vengeful mutter—
You are not remotely close to the league of your apartheid
kin. When we have wiped out that main reservoir of racial disdain, these poisoned
outposts of the same a fliction will simply wither away, atrophied from lack of further nourishment from the ultimate exemplar.

Writing poems such as “Telephone Conversation”—together with the satisfaction of reading it over
their own
radio station, the BBC—also helped. So did attempts to write for theater. A full-length play over which I labored for months had a Boer family trapped in their farmstead, where they were slowly eaten by black soldier ants—I rode the horses of vengeful symbolism to their knees! A lecturer commented that the play was long on purple passages. I was encountering that phrase for the first time but instantly understood what he meant and promptly added it to my vocabulary of self-censorship. The play also owed far too much to Eugene O'Neill, whose works I was studying at the time, so after reams of sheets trying and failing to expunge all further borrowings, I committed the first auto-da-fé of my career and set the play on fire.

A shorter play,
The Invention,
was produced as one of the Royal Court Theatre's Sunday-night experiments in December 1959. It climaxed in an explosion that wiped out a group of white scientists who had been researching the accurate determination of racial types in South Africa—so much for wish fulfillment by the theatrical route! To make matters worse—a cautionary portent for our future plans, perhaps?—the explosion refused to occur on cue!

Offstage, we followed the descent of South Africa into a solidifying black negation. By 1955, the nation's apartheid stucture was cemented by the Nationalist government, uprooting the black population from proximity to white estates—except under license as daytime servants and menials—and resettling them in the so-called townships, more accurately described by another name: shantytowns. In our projections, this pointed to only one conclusion: at the first sign of uprising by the black population, those shantytowns would be surgically taken out, bombed out of existence with no danger whatever to the white population! It was that stark, that logical. An internal war of liberation, in the manner of Kenya's Mau Mau, appeared to have been rendered impracticable, literally overnight. As a counterinsurgency action in the preventive mode, the Boers' move was a masterstroke.

We knew our history, however. The Spanish Civil War had given birth to a volunteer international force, of which the writers and artists units, such as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, played courageous but mostly tragic roles. As we argued and constructed possible scenarios at the student clubs, buoyed by tea and biscuits, lager-and-lime and cider, sandwiches and sausage rolls, warmed by the glow of the fireplace after a hard day's work delivering Christmas parcels or lugging railway baggage, our conclusions pointed us in a similar direction— to prepare ourselves for the liberation war in South Africa. We saw that ill-used tip of the continent being restored to the black race by a Continental Brigade of volunteers converging on the South from every corner of the black landmass. It was the most obvious solution. That future was so clear to us—our generation could not escape the destiny of marching down to terminate the racial insult that rebuked our very being as black peoples. Whenever I had cause to think of that prospect, I confess that I felt nothing but a warm glow of anticipation. It made personal encounters with racial prejudice easy to ignore— I
knew
something that my local tormentors did not!

We knew, beyond all doubt, our place within the evolving organism of new nations. We, the young generation of that independence phase, were a renaissance people who would transform the strange bequest into a world marvel. The only way to grasp this confidence, this self-assurance, was to treat it as
pure knowledge.
Not intuition, not revelation, not blind faith, not ambition, not deductive reasoning or a conscious sense of mission—no, simply as
knowledge
in its purest, unassailable form! We
were
the renaissance people! And we were working in our various fields—quite indifferent to any special designation— to bring about this renaissance.

If there was a “plan of action,” it took place within continental leadership, and took its substance and bearing from the merging of nationalist forces at the leadership apex. Beginning with two mutually antagonistic blocs, the “Casablanca” and the “Monrovia” groups, a collective effort was progressing toward the formation of an Organization of African Unity. But even more significant for us was the struggle at the grass roots, the wars of liberation from settler colonialism in Kenya and from the Portuguese “assimilationist” deception in Angola and Cape Verde. Defined by these efforts, we would be the transforming auxiliaries of an inchoate entity, of spaces that just happened to be called Nigeria, Gold Coast, the Rhodesias, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Cameroon, and so on. The future spread itself before us: the reassemblage of a much-abused, much-violated people on whose heads the ultimate insult had been heaped— broken into pieces and then glued back together like the shell of the tortoise in folk mythology. We were unstoppable.

But first, we had to liberate our kinsfolk to the south!

I ENROLLED I N the Officer Training Corps of my university in 1955, opting for infantry. Alas, my membership in that unit was brief. In 1956 the Suez War broke out and I received my call-up letter. I learned that, as a colonial, I was liable to be called up anytime to serve Her Royal Majesty. I had imagined that I was conveniently exploiting Her Majesty's training facilities to prepare myself for a liberation war, but it appeared that Her Majesty's government had other plans for me. Although I was required only to present myself for training with other reserves, all I saw was my overclever self being loaded onto a landing craft, heading away from South Africa, fighting on the side of the French and British against Gamal Abdel Nasser over a canal situated on his own soil! This ill-disguised attempt to recolonize Egypt and compromise her sovereignty did not appear to be a logical progression from the Continental Brigade that we had conjured up by the fireplace at Porchester Terrace. I sent in a letter declining my call-up. I was summoned to the recruitment office and reminded that I had taken an oath of loyalty to the queen and that my enrollment in the Officer Training Corps meant, in effect, that I had enlisted. The refusal of an order, I was quietly informed, could earn me a court-martial.

It was quite true about the oath of loyalty. There was an anteroom in which we all, new volunteers, were assembled, and from which we were summoned one by one. One officer sat behind the desk while beside him stood another, a card in his hand. That card contained the oath. The words were unambiguous . . . to be ready to serve and protect Her Majesty at all times . . . or something to that effect. I was unprepared and, frankly, shocked. I was a citizen of an upcoming nation called Nigeria—not yet fully independent, admittedly, but my passport declared me a citizen of Nigeria, which, in turn, was defined as a British protectorate. Nigeria was a hotbed of nationalism. Herbert Macauley, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Mbonu Ojike, Bode Thomas, Obafemi Awolowo, Nwafor Orizu of “Boycott the Boycottables” fame—meaning boycott all foreign products— these were men whose joint endeavor was the separation of Nigeria from the control of that same Majesty the Queen. How, then, was I supposed to swear an oath of loyalty to her and her dominion?