You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka Page B

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