You Must Set Forth at Dawn (74 page)

I nodded. “Ah, of course. So you're not coming back soon?”

She nodded, somewhat wistfully. I had, of course, recalled her being named in investigations into accounts that were suspected to hold her father's stolen billions. The Abdulsalami regime had set their recovery as a priority agenda— at least from all appearances—for his one year in office.

“You think you will sort out your problems with the regime?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “we are talking with them.”

I looked at the other girl, still immobilized and dumbfounded. I shook Zainab's hand once more, nodded to both. “Good luck. We must go and find our seats.”

She flashed a smile at us, and we parted.

The games began. It was as I expected. At the end of the first set, I turned to my son and announced that I was leaving but that he should feel free to remain and watch the game to the end. We would arrange a rendezvous.

“You're not enjoying the game?” he asked.

“Not really. It's the atmosphere. Stilted. I may still come back for the last game, but I have something more interesting I would rather be doing.”

“All right, I'll come with you.”

We went out, giving our tickets to a couple among the loitering hopefuls. They could not believe our refusal to take their money. Only after we were out in the open air did I reveal my objective to my puzzled son. “I didn't feel right,” I said. “I think maybe I was too abrupt. Let's find them. I want to buy that girl a drink.”

“Who? The Abacha girl?”

“I may have left her thinking I hated her, just because I detested her father. We should have offered to buy them a drink. There was still time.”

Olaokun nodded agreement. We set out to look for them in the other courts, in the pavilions, the bars, everywhere. No luck.

I felt strangely sad. My day of outing would have been perfect if I had been able to offer a drink to the pert, daring girl and her petrified companion, with words that could be something like “Here's to your generation. Try to wean yourself from the past.”

THE KING IS DEAD; long live the king! Or, more accurately: the usurper's dead; long live the heir presumptive?

Moscow Road, London, housed an apartment—20 Alexander Court— whose ready hospitality I had scrupulously denied myself during the usurper years. It belonged to a young friend, Deji Akintilo. A businessman in the oil sector, he would have qualified for Abacha's instant reprisals if that dictator's “international observers” had reported any signs of him fraternizing with the enemy. The air of liberation had also touched this den of potential subversion, and it became the trysting ground for a high-level contact, with its owner acting as intermediary for yet another emissary from Nigeria armed with a confidential message.

I was setting out for Europe, so I agreed to meet the mystery man in the London apartment. He turned out to be one of the young generation of quietly aggressive entrepreneurs, a former medical doctor who had turned to business. Dr. Tunde Soleye's not-so-open background was that of a close confidant of General Abdulsalami, with whom he had grown up in Kwara state.

The doctor came straight to the point. His mission was on behalf of a powerful political consortium which was in the process of deciding the future of the nation. The transition program was a reality, Soleye assured me, and this group needed to make an immediate decision. They wanted Wole Soyinka to run for president.

I was not taken aback. It was not the first of such offers of the crown, among which, on the scale of ego vitamin, my favorite remained that of General Joseph Garba, once the commander of the national brigade of guards that had toppled General Yakubu Gowon in 1975, and then foreign minister in the ensuing regime. On retirement from the army, he became a “mature student” of the Harvard School of Law, from which he graduated, later venturing into politics. In 1995 he decided to run for the presidency under Sani Abacha's own transition charade. To this end, he revisited Harvard, where I was then teaching, booking himself into a hotel for two nights to acquaint me with his ambition, discuss his chances, and outline his vision, only to undermine it all by declaring: “There is only one person in Nigeria for whom I am prepared to sink my own ambition and that's you. You should run. My real preference—I'll be sincere with you—is to have you run.” And he proceeded, with some passion, to set out the reasons for his conviction.

I reminded him that there had been an election. Someone had won that election and that person was in prison. Joe's view was that the nation had to move beyond that election. We remained divided on that, but I sincerely wished him luck. Joe Garba and I had become very good friends. He was an honorable man and I truly wished that the political field were not polluted by the immorality of Abiola's predicament. Joe would have made a very good president.

Now, once again, the crown was up for grabs, and a “powerful consortium” had gone head hunting, settling on mine. I could read the reasoning behind it. The dispossessed and now dead president-elect was a Yoruba, from my own part of the nation, indeed from the same town as I, Abeokuta. A section of the nation had been wronged, and some pragmatic politicians thought it expedient to make amends—or at least appear to do so. It was a replay of the “King of ING” scenario, albeit under a democratic “legitimation.”

With Akintilo offering vigorous support, Soleye urged, “You should take it. They want you, and, any way you look at it, you are entitled to it. You've paid your dues. It will cost you nothing, and the nation needs you.”

My immediate objection was that I would not make a unifying president. An influential caucus in the North—a feudal elite whom I had never spared, and who in turn had indoctrinated their constituency with the convenient notion that I hated the North in its entirety—viewed me with great suspicion. To make the ideal president, I would first have to dismantle that lie, and that, I knew, would require making undeserved concessions.

The doctor shook his head—those misconceptions had vanished with the five-year taste of Abacha. The consortium, he assured me, included powerful figures from that very part of the nation; it was a pity, but he could not mention names.

So I sought refuge in my lack of resources. I could not fund myself even for a local government election. What little money I had left from the Nobel, even bolstered by intensive lecture rounds, had gone into the struggle. Dr. Soleye smiled indulgently. “That is the least of your worries. Your campaign budget is guaranteed. You will not spend a penny of your own money.”

Over dinner and late into the night, the exchanges continued, but it was mostly a one-sided affair. I could not subscribe to Abdulsalami's rushed transition program, I reminded both, any more than I believed that I was tempera-mentally suited to managing a nation such as Nigeria. If the proposal had been to act as a short-term interim president in keeping with the opposition's manifesto, there would have been a viable basis for consideration. Possibly. This nomination, however, smelled distinctly of manipulation by the very forces I had often publicly castigated. I had no inclination for the rigors, the ordeal of a campaign, yet it was clear that the election would be “won” for me anyway. One could read the blueprint of authority that would emerge: a head of state with built-in obligations to undemocratic forces. A hostage.

“The position is yours,” Dr. Soleye repeatedly urged. “Take it. It has to be now. This chance will never come your way again.”

Wearying of the pressure, I conceded one or two days to think it over, but that was only to end the long night. I had just won my liberty and could not contemplate its abandonment so soon, and in such a questionable manner. The transition from plain Mr. Citizen to heir presumptive simply stalled, even at the thought of it. I deeply craved a personal space, and it beckoned from the surroundings of my cactus patch. A disappointed Soleye took back my message, leaving behind the even more disconsolate proprietor of 20 Alexander Court.

Where the Earth Says Welcome!

BUSINESS-CLASS SEAT, COURTESY OF LUFTHANSA, WHICH HAD DONATED THE ticket for my return; my journey is pampered, not one that requires slipping in through one secret route or another to supervise plans for a war of attrition. The air of unreality continues to taunt, pervades the soothing interior of the plane as the events and plans of the past five years course through my mind, wreathed in a whiff of discontent. It was an impossible hope, that months of planning would end so tamely, on a routine passenger flight, treated like some privileged species by both the staff and other passengers! I had schooled myself differently, existed within a totally contrasting reality. The word was— deflation! While not seeking to be a victim, I had been primed to return to claim quite simply—if need be—my cactus patch. Everything about this palpable present, therefore, feels as contrived as the sudden, sordid death of the dictator Sani Abacha in the arms of Asian prostitutes flown into Abuja for one of his periodic orgies. For five years, the existence of this man had dominated my own; it was still difficult to believe that he would vacate that position of power with barely a whimper. The prospect of a peaceful resolution of the Nigerian crisis through the mediation of a successor, the choice of dialogue over confrontation, probably with violence, was a luxury we had begun to deny ourselves.

That which I had thought of as being unnaturally absent—emotion—still does not return as I actually step down from the plane into the airport. Clinically I observe a difference in the Murtala Muhammed Airport from my last recollection. This new airport appears—disciplined. Restrained. It is immediately apparent that security is tight. The last time I arrived in Lagos airport with such advance preparations had been on the occasion of receiving honors for the Nobel Prize, whose announcement had caught me in Paris. Protocol this time is just as efficient but less rambunctious. The airport commandant leads the way. Only a few voices punctuate the unnaturally empty passages: “Welcome! Welcome back! Prof, you are most welcome! Welcome back to Nigeria, sir!” As I watch the starched back of the commandant, I wonder on whose side he was during the struggle to remove his erstwhile boss. Certainly he would have shot me outright had he succeeded in laying his hands on me during those years when his boss held sway over the nation.

Our plane has arrived early. It overflew Lomé, a scheduled stop, for one reason or another—it would return there afterward—so we have landed an hour and a half before the scheduled time. The protocol officer is full of apologies; I will have to wait in the VIP lounge for a while. He has a list of the NADECO stalwarts who have been given passes—“Pa” Abraham Adesanya, Arthur Nwankwo, Bola Tinubu, Ayo Adebanjo, and a host of others—and most have yet to show up. But Arthur Nwankwo is already there, he informs me—Arthur Nwankwo, one of the foolhardy ones who snuck out of the country to attend a meeting of the allied democratic resistance in London. Olu Agunloye—my covictim in the libelous assault of
Conscience International
—has wangled his way in somehow. Yet even those who have passed through the security zone are disappointed. They had planned to join the formal welcoming group right up at the door of the aircraft, but we have arrived impossibly early.

A grin breaks through my face as I recall a flight from Paris to Cotonou, quite early into the fight against Abacha. Already Cotonou was heavily infiltrated by Nigerian undercover agents, but we had our own people there too, and they knew every one of Abacha's spies. Both sides kept watch on each other and sometimes even fraternized. Early in the game, I would walk up to a group—usually of two or three—in the lobby of a hotel, cheerfully identify them to themselves, and buy them drinks. Going to Cotonou, just a stone's throw from Lagos, was risky but not as foolhardy as it might sound—at least, not then. Ghana, much farther away, was more dangerous. Its leader, Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, was well known as an Abacha ally and was even on his payroll, as would later be revealed by Abacha's chief security adviser, Ismail Gwarzo. We had a dependable base in Benin. I openly addressed Nigerian groups in the capital, Cotonou, and in the ancient harbor town of Porto-Novo, a visit that was sponsored by Professor Albert Tedjevore, my elder collaborator in more than a few African causes. At one stage, the Abacha regime had threatened Matthias Kerekou, the Beninois head of state, with serious consequences for harboring “enemies of Nigeria.” Himself a former, but now reformed, dictator, he refused to be intimidated, though he did pay a “brotherly visit” to Abuja to reassure the paranoid ruler. After his visit, we received a message of reassurance but one that urged us to please conduct our activities with greater discretion. The loss was Abacha's agents'; we could no longer buy them drinks.

That roundabout flight into Cotonou had made a transit stop at Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. I stood in the doorway, at the top of the stairs, as the plane was refueled. The pilot also came out to stretch his legs.

I turned to him and asked, “Suppose, for any reason, we are unable to land in Cotonou—due to weather conditions or whatever—what would be your alternative airport?” Without any hesitation, he replied, “Lomé, in Togo.” “Well,” I continued, “suppose the weather was also bad in Lomé, or there was a coup and the airport was closed. Which would be the next choice?” “Abidjan” was the response. “What of Lagos?” I asked. “No,” he replied, and shook his head very firmly, “we don't go to Lagos. For one thing, we couldn't even be guaranteed aviation fuel.” So I thanked him and then added, “Please, if for any reason you find yourself compelled to head for Lagos, just find me a parachute and open the door so I can jump out.” The hostesses, standing by, laughed aloud but the pilot did not. He nodded quite seriously and said, “I understand. Don't worry. We won't land you in Lagos.”

Looking at the back of the commandant, who turned around from time to time to grin his welcome at me, I wondered what role he would have enjoyed playing during the Abacha period if my plane had taxied down Lagos tarmac on an unscheduled stop. It was a permanent nightmare that all our dissident exiles underwent, and one of our NADECO associates, a minister under a former regime, had actually undergone that undesired experience. Security officers had boarded the plane—this had become a routine security measure—and looked over all the passengers to search for fugitives. It seemed that they did recognize him but pretended not to. Yet another fugitive within our own organization, UDFN, had found himself trapped in a plane that had been similarly diverted to Lagos. He had succeeded in overcoming his initial paralysis when he realized that he was about to descend into the lion's jaws, signaled to a hostess, and confided his plight to her. The captain loaned him his jacket and cap and kept him in the cockpit until the plane took off again.

The emptiness of the airport is most striking—at four-thirty in the afternoon, it is abnormal. Later I would learn that even essential workers had been cleared from the arrival section of the airport, all in the name of security! Do they plan to keep this up for every arrival? I enter the VIP lounge to encounters with beaming faces, emotional embraces, and crisp military salutes. Later, I observe that the protocol officer is hovering around uncertainly, so finally I ask him what he wants. He whispers nearly inaudibly, “Your passport, sir.” But I have no passport, I inform him. The commandant has overheard the exchange and bellows, “Are you asking for his passport? Take yourself out of here!” But the tone is lighthearted. Again, I would later discover that orders had been given that if any Immigration officer so much as dared to ask me for any papers, he was to lose his job on the spot; obviously the protocol officer was not aware of this. I have my U.N. laissez-passer on me, and I also have a courtesy diplomatic passport from a friendly African government, but my position over this is straightforward: it was the Nigerian government that seized my national passport, and I have no intention of using any other passport to enter my own country.

THE CAT-AND-MOUSE GAMES that had resulted in the seizure of my passport had taken place at this very airport, on the Nigerian side of the Immigration post. The first round ended with the seizure of my national passport, on my way to attend a meeting at UNESCO. The second time, I was headed for the inaugural meeting of the International Parliament of Writers in Paris. Neither setback was unexpected; indeed, I routinely told my Lagos hosts, the Ogunbiyi couple, to keep my dinner waiting just in case.

I had become an adept in the rites of travel restriction and its manifold forms—one anticipates but one never really becomes inured to its destabilizing impact. Movement is the palpable essence of freedom. That seems obvious enough, since restraint is its negation, but it needs to be stated and restated. Freedom expresses itself in many ways, but its real essence is movement— that is, the right to exercise the choice to move or not to move. Even thought, which is so marvelously secured from the encroachment of chains and walls— thought, as we learned in school, is made possible only through the motion of electrical charges in the brain.

The first time it happened to me, it was some time in 1965, at the time of the Western Region insurrection. I was stunned. It seemed that the world itself suddenly stood still, so that I experienced a distinct vertigo. “You are telling me I cannot travel? That I cannot leave the country?” And the unbelievably matter-of-fact but quaintly official response:
That's right, sir. We have instructions that
you are not to be allowed to proceed out of the country.
The bloodless, expressionless face behind the desk, calmly tucking your passport into a drawer! And sometimes the elaborate deception, a charade with a foregone conclusion:
Will
you step this way, sir? Which way? What for? Just follow me, please. And so into an office, where a higher-up is waiting.
Is that all your luggage?
No, I've checked a suitcase.
In that case, could you go with the o ficer and bring it here?
And so these strange hands invade your luggage, piece by piece, item by item, pore through your papers, turn the suitcase upside down, looking for heaven knows what else—sometimes for long enough to ensure that you miss your flight. Or else simply keep you waiting, speaking into the telephone to some unseen powers beyond, glancing at you from time to time, fingering the passport like a strange, lethal disease, to-ing and fro-ing, then at the end:
Sorry, sir, you are
not allowed to travel.
And so you learn, bit by bit. You learn never to check any luggage, and you either send whatever papers you need ahead of you or find a friendly passenger to take them for you, because it is papers that enthrall them most of all. They want to understand what is in the papers, why even a scrap of paper should be part of your luggage, what it says, what it hides, what subversive magic it performs. So you ensure that you have no papers with you but your passport. And above all, no address book. How do they cope these days, I wonder, with the world of computers and near-impregnable passwords?

The last bout had been tense, very tense. When my national passport was seized at the earlier attempt to travel to Paris for a meeting at UNESCO, Federico Mayor, the director general, had been outraged and had immediately ordered that a UNESCO passport be sent to me. Within days, his Lagos office had contacted me and handed me the new passport. Armed with the UNESCO document, I resumed my attempt to breach the Immigration barrier. We knew the results beforehand; the only question that remained was—would they stop at merely preventing my travel, or would I end up at an unwanted destination? Within the informal circle of our inchoate democratic movement, the debate was tense. At the time, we had not yet arrived at the option of exile, only at a choice of remaining above- or underground. One assertive view was that it was better not to tempt fate at all by going to the airport, that it was best to take the plunge once for all and disappear from sight.

Things came to a head when I began to organize the Million Man March on Abuja in May 1994. The State Security Service invited me for an interview and gave me a clear message from Aso Rock: Abandon the march, or you will be held responsible for the consequences. But it was also from within the same SSS that the warning came to me: Keep away from the airports!

It might be difficult to understand—sometimes it does puzzle even me a little—but I was obliged to engage in that final proof at the airport, nevertheless. Brinksmanship, perhaps, but quite within rational limits, since we knew enough to be fairly certain that a clear decision had not been made over my fate. Moreover, the political capital to be made from the failure of the Abacha government to respect a U.N. passport was not something that we could lightly discard. Within the Abacha camp, the situation was fluid. Various options were being considered about how to silence me. The minister of foreign affairs, the unctuous Thomas Ikimi, one of Nigeria's breed of Uriah Heeps, had proposed that I be given an “enhanced” Aung San Suu Kyi treatment—confined to my house, allowed access to visitors, and so on, and then, after a decent interval, whisked off to a distant prison. Others proffered even more drastic, immediate ideas. Still, it was in the early days, when international opinion counted for something with Abacha and his advisers; they were not yet so firmly entrenched that they could afford to alienate that community altogether.