You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka

remained persona non grata even to Sani Abacha, whose persecution of Beko, Fela’s brother, was a reminder to the maverick tunesmith that not even he was untouchable. Fela’s funeral was thus an occasion that the people exploited to the full, pouring out in a way that defied the regime’s ban on public gatherings, making the Black President the mouthpiece of their repressed feelings, even in his lifeless form. Neither the police nor the military dared show their face on that day, and the few uniformed exceptions came only to pay tribute. Quite openly, with no attempt whatsoever at disguising their identities, they stopped by his bier and saluted the stilled scourge of corrupt power, mimic culture, and militarism. It was a much-needed act of solidarity for us.
    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