Soyinka - You must set forth at dawn : a memoir

Table of Contents

To all the fallen in our common cause,
and to the surviving, scars and all, clamorous or hidden.

To all my stoically resigned children.

And to my wife, Adefolake, who, during the
season of a deadly dictatorship, demoted me
from the designation of Visiting Professor to that
of Visiting Spouse, but was still left with only an
Invisible Spouse as I was swallowed by
my study even during visiting hours.

Praise for You Must Set Forth at Dawn

[A] sprawling, delightful memoir... As a chronicle of modern Africa and its troubles from the continents foremost literary giant, You Must Set Forth at Dawn triumphs. The Washington Post

You Must Set Forth at Dawn is more than just the journey of a remarkable and controversial man through the backdrop of the controversial country he loves so much. It is not merely an important book. This is a book that must exist. San Francisco Chronicle

The fine detail of [Soyinkas] oppositional activity, involving clandestine border crossings, strange bedfellows and secret diplomatic missions, is presented here for the first time. Adding it up, one wants to set him in the right company. Victor Hugo, Yeats, Byron and Alessandro Manzoni all come to mind. The New York Times Book Review

Wole Soyinka is a titan.... Playwright and poet, novelist and pamphleteer, editor and auto-biographer, cultural impresario and unofficial diplomat, democratic conspirator and ferocious, unappeasable warrior for justice, he has earned his Nobel Prize many times over. The New York Review of Books

Captivating... You Must Set Forth at Dawn is much more than a memoir.... Soyinkas most powerful weapon has always been the eloquence of his voice as a writer.... [Soyinkas art] will outlive both him and the regimes he opposed. The Nation

Profoundly rewarding... the synthesis of a wealth of ancient myths and traditions with the best of humanism and modernity, addressing the drama that is not only the authors life but Africas contemporary reality. WQ: The Wilson Quarterly

Humane, sensible and impeccably written; a fitting summation of a life interestingly lived. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Engrossing... His lyrical evocations of African landscapes, the urban nightmare of Lagos, the horrors of British cuisine and the longing a dusty fugitive feels for a cold beer will entertain and educate readers. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A must for anyone concerned with human rights and the global web of oil, poverty, and corruption. Booklist

Chronology

POLITICAL MILESTONES IN NIGERIA SINCE 1960

IBA
For Those Who
Went Before

IBA For Those Who Went Before

OUTSIDE MYSELF AT MOMENTS LIKE THIS, HEADING HOME, I HESITATE A moment to check if it is truly a living me. Perhaps I am just a disembodied self usurping my body, strapped into a business-class seat in the plane, being borne to my designated burial groundthe cactus patch on the grounds of my home in Abeokuta, a mere hours escape by road from the raucous heart of Lagos. Perhaps I am not really within the cabin of the plane at all but lying in a coffin with the luggage, disguised as an innocent box to fool the superstitious, while my ghost persists in occupying a seat whose contours have grown familiar through five years of a restless exile that began in 1994. For my mind chooses this moment to travel twelve years backward when, drained of all emotion, I accompanied the body of my friend Femi Johnson from Wiesbaden in Germany, bringing him home in defiance of the unfathomable conspiracy to leave him in that foreign land like a stray without ties of family and friends. And the pangs that assail me briefly stem from the renewed consciousness of the absence of this friend, whose thunder-roll laughter and infectious joy of life would have overwhelmed those welcoming voices that I know await me at my destination. Despite the eternal moment of farewell by his open coffin in the funeral parlor in Wiesbaden, it was difficult then, and remained continuously so, to reconcile that self with the absence of a vitality that we had all taken so long for granted, his big but compact frame in a box, immaculately dressed as though simply from habitbe it in a double-breasted suit with a carnation freshly cut by his chauffeur from the frontage garden, then laid ritualistically beside his breakfast set, or else in his casual outfit, its components no less carefully matched for all its seeming casualness, or his hunting attire, which appeared selected for a genteel English countryside ramble instead of a rumble in the jungle. Difficult to accept the closed eyes that would bulge at some inspired business idea, at the prospect of a gastronomic spread, at the sight of a passing generously endowed female, or simply when charged with a newly thought-up mischief but always lighting up the space around him. Still, I could not rest until I had brought him home, exhuming him from the graveyard in Wiesbaden, and the clinicality of my motions at the time made me wonder if I had left my soul in that alien graveyard in his stead.

It must be, of course, the coincidence of the airline that triggers such a somber recollection, in the mainthat final homecoming for Femi was also on a Lufthansa flight. And it was a coming home for me also, since my moment-to-moment existence from the time of his death until his reburial was in some ethereal zone, peopled by eyes of the restless dead from distances of silent rebuke. I came back down to earth only when he was himself within the earth of his choice, earth that he had made his own: Ibadan. And it is this that now reinforces the unthinkable and irrational, that this same FemiOBJ to numerous friends, business partners, and acquaintancesis not in Ibadan at this moment awaiting my return, his sweaty face, black as the cooking pots, supervising the kitchen in a frenzy of anticipation, with an array of wines lined up to celebrate a long-anticipated reunion! Femi should be alive for this moment. If any single being deserved and could contain in himself the entirety of the emotions that belong to this return, it is none other than OBJ, and he is gone.