Early in the first chapter of this memoir, You Must Set Forth At Dawn, Soyinka jogs our memories on what may constitute the genesis of political notorieties in independent Nigeria.
In this record titled, Early Intimations, the notion of the author being possessed with the spirit of Ogun – the ‘creative-combative deity’ – is dismissed: “If I was persuaded of that, I would have headed long ago for the nearest babalawo for the rites of exorcism!” There is nothing mystical about the activist political adventures and escapades, “nothing beyond an over-acute, remedial sense of right and wrong, of what is just and unjust.”
The unremitting bestialities of the Boers against the black South Africans resonated all over the world. The pride of the would-be playwright and his black buddies studying in distant England received several wounds as they watched the progressive dehumanisation of their brothers in the southern enclave of Africa by the apartheid white minority government. Of course, the student blackamoors all over the British Isles did receive some dosages of racism among the Britons but all those paled into insignificance in comparison with the daily dose of barbaric violations meted out to the black humanity in South Africa.
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School holidays usually “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, post offices, bars and chain restaurants. We would then gather at the Overseas Students Club in Earls Court, the University of London Students’ Union, or the West African Students Union in Porchester Terrace, Bayswater. There, virtually only one topic dominated all conversations – colonisation and how/when to end it!”
“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, that apprehension of a world that assigns to one’s race a condition of subhumanity was all-consuming. We began to prepare ourselves against the day when we would reclaim that humanity – by force of arms, if needed.”
Thereafter, Master Wole elected to match his word with action. He enlisted into the officer training corps of his varsity in 1955. Were the rookie-soldier a citizen of the colony of Lagos – and not from a mere protectorate – he would have risked arrest and a court-martial for declining a call up to Her Majesty’s Suez war in 1956 Egypt. But another opportunity did present itself in Nottingham for the student-revolutionary to continue his infantry training. It was a volunteer student training camp for the cause of the Hungarian nationalists’ struggle against the Soviet tanks. Of course, “I had my priorities, and could not really see how a black face could be justified slinging Molotov cocktails in the streets of Budapest. On the other hand, that prospect was balanced by the lure of acquiring the experience of urban warfare… It looked like a perfect rehearsal opportunity for what we had conjured up for – Destination Johannesburg!”
But the unexpected began to happen. It was a rude-awakening. Had the student revolutionaries been in a dream world? It’s time for dissilutions. “The nationalists, the first generation elected leaders and legislators of our semi-independent nation began to visit Great Britain in droves. We watched their self-preening, their ostentatious spending, their cultivated condescension, even disdain towards the people they were supposed to represent… This strange breed was a complete contrast to the nationalist stalwarts in whose hands we had imagined that the country could be safely consigned while we went on our romantic liberation march to Southern Africa.”
“Some turned students into pimps, either for immediate rewards, or in return for influence in obtaining or extending scholarships. Visiting politicians financed lavish parties for one sole purpose – to bring on the girls! They appeared to have only one ambition on the brain – to sleep with a white woman… We watched them heap unbelievable gifts on virtual prostitutes, among whom both British and continental students could be counted. It was lucrative time for willing ‘escorts’. We were not prudish; we drank and danced with them till cockcrow, took women off them between their first drink and last boast but, we asked ourselves, were these men, who routinely conducted themselves with such gracelessness, the true representations of a national mandate?”
In this shocking narration of political business of conspicuence and profligacy, the poet recounts the experience of a high-flying national figure with a ‘notorious nymphomaniac’. The politician had in a moment of morbid ecstasy (or was it inebriation?) left a cheque that bore his name and official post with the student-prostitute, who “flounced to our table at the students cafeteria, flaunted the cheque in our faces, asking in a loud voice what kind of a would-be independent nation would produce a political leader who could act so stupidly.”
“Conduct on home territories from the news that reached us, appeared to be of the same nature. The pan-African project was becoming farcical. The alienation of many of the first-generation leaders was total and, for the first time, we began to wonder if the power relationship between the political elite and their people was not paralleled by that between Boers and black South African majority – the master-servant relationship… In those student caucuses – sometimes shared with Hull, Liverpool or Manchester or wherever the vacation labour market took us – we compared notes and came to one conclusion: the Writers and Artists’ Brigade could wait – first, it was essential to secure our rear” through the weapons of pen, stage and political activism.
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In “Reunion With Ogun”, the second chapter of the autobiography, You Must Set Forth At Dawn, the Nobel prize winner turns the road into the mirror of the Nigerian experience.
The author relieves his visceral fascination with the road from childhood in the parsonage of Ake, where he was born and mostly raised. Travelling to and fro between the countryside Abeokuta, his maternal origin and rustic Isara, his paternal birthplace, “the still vegetal passages opened up into a succession of way stations before final destination, the road was a magic lantern whose projections, by some potent hand hidden in those dense forests, unwound as a sash of multiple designs on which we road from marvel to marvel.”
As it happens – as if destined for a union with the road – many years after, the dramatist returns from higher education study in England “on the wheels of a Rockefeller Fellowship on New Year’s day, 1960, to research dramatic forms. Most essential of my equipment was a Land Rover, and that vehicle became an extension of myself through which I negotiated my relationship with the overall society.”
“Early morning departure was my favourite hour, you caught the road’s exhalation as it rose from the tarmac with the sun’s heated awakening, piercing the early mists in a proprietorial mood – you owned the road and all that lay revealed along its rises and plunges, its contortions and its arrow directness on both flatland and crests that sometimes appeared aimed at a horizon shimmering at the very edge of the world. Even a rarest encounter with another vehicle in that sublime hour was an act of generous concession on your part – it is only your early morning kindness that permitted it to trundle past, another wraith from the bowels of the earth.” It was from this road experience of Mr. Soyinka that led to the poem from where the title of this autobiography is extracted: Traveller, you must set forth/At dawn/I promise marvels of the holy hour…
But it was not all idyllic about the road. “Like the many faces of Ogun, god of the road, the road was also a violent host.” Even then, in those sixties, fatalities on the road and their concomitant (human) solemnities seemed shrouded in mystery: “Enfolding such scenes in an immense, invisible cloak was a palpable presence of time in its absolute stillness.”
But that was then. Death on the road soon lost its communal mystery and solemnity. “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.”
Of course, Mr. Soyinka could have chosen the path of the establishment but for the road – that ‘fusing agency of human preoccupations’ – that became a talisman against his alienation from the masses…
In the chapter themed, Early Skirmishes, the clairvoyant dramatist did warn in A Dance of the Forests as the nation’s political figures indulged in independence revelries. The departing colonial master had left behind fissures in the polity – census manipulation, electoral rigging/corruption. Political tolerance and development soon gave way to political rodomontables, the Opposition AG being the target of NPC-NCNC Coalition. An orchestrated state of emergency in the West was followed up by intimidation, arrest, kangaroo trial and incarceration of AG potentates. The satires of the playwright on stage and in the media tilted at those execrable conducts.
At last, the minor military training Soyinka had received from Britain would seem to stand him in good stead. In the quest of NPC-NNDP to control the West at all cost, even the ivory tower was not spared. The anti-establishment lecturers had the option of resigning and they did, including the poet and Sam Aluko.
“The arena of polemics outside campus had already degenerated into the physical. Even theatre especially political satire of our kind… had become fraught with such violence that the actors had to be trained in basic self-defence…” Alas, Akintola’s NNDP invaded the campus and traumatized Sam Aluko’s family. Soyinka’s ‘volunteer defence force’ responded, prepared for a showdown with the government goons should they return as threatened before the expiration of the three months’ notice to which the ‘refuseniks’ were entitled. That defence force made up of “actors, academics, the odd poet and writer, a few civil servants, a handful of fiercely politicised patrons of the Mbari Club who badly wanted to ‘do something! Etc – was whittled down, streamlined into a close-knit group to develop tactics for confronting the incipient fascism.”
