Emboldened, he began to toy with the captive populace. Inauguration of yet another constitution-writing body, one third of which would be his own nominees. A new timetable for civilian restoration, then another. Arrests. Detentions. Constitutional Assembly sent on forced vacation, returned sober and compliant. Mysterious assassinations generally attributed to armed robbers. Abrupt retirement of more professional soldiers. Deployment of suspect military units to the civil war front in Liberia. Flights of targeted individuals, including the dictator’s earlier collaborators. (p.373)
Soyinka shows here that he is not among the first category of people to opt for exile and that it becomes an inevitable choice only at a point when ‘the ascendancy of raw, naked power was rapid’ (p.374).
Also linking his final decision to relocate to a series of entreaties coming from different quarters including state security agents who ostensibly have information about plans to eliminate him in order to prevent a one million man march on the Abuja seat of government, Soyinka treats exile as the opposite of escape making it a means to an end in the taking on of agency for the community. Yet this does not prevent him from expressing the pain and the feeling of a sense of loss in the whole game:
I dawdled, not because I underestimated the complex despot but because of a deep resentment that, at sixty years of age, I was again about to be dislodged from my home—and by a being I truly despised. I knew his record from the civil war; so did the army. Abacha had been a prime player on the killing fields of the Midwest region—men, women, even children—after the Biafran forces had been routed. The future Maximum Ruler did not discriminate. (p.383)
Even when Soyinka eventually crosses the border into exile after a harrowing journey through the grooves and the swamps the bitter experience of exile is still invoked in his feeling: ‘For one who had sworn to himself that no tyrant would ever again chase him beyond the bounds of his nation, it was a moment of bitter defeat. Even when the choice is willingly made, exile sinks into one as a palpable space of bereavement. At that moment, I believe I died a little’ (p.387).
Anger, the kind expressed here by Soyinka at his forced departure, has often been one of the major products of exile literature. For the intellectual such anger becomes productive. It produces or reinvigorates agency as a response to the hegemony of the power that produces the exilic condition in the first place. Hence, Soyinka converts his exile experience into an opportunity to mount a campaign against the Abacha regime from the international arena. This is seen in his co-ordination of the activities of the clandestine Radio Kudirat as well as his formation of a pro-democracy group comprising mainly exiles outside the country at the time:
I had not left Nigeria by the hazardous route just to imbibe the air of foreign climes, and I soon set about gathering a number of exiles—students and workers—together to create the National Liberation Coalition (NALICON). There was already an opposition movement, the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), in existence. It had been formed within Nigeria by a combination of former military officers and political veterans who had finally resolved to challenge Sani Abacha’s dictatorship. (p.398)
Apart of serving as a resistance movement with a motive similar to that of NADECO, Soyinka’s NALICON also came into being as a result of his loss of faith in the strategies adopted by the latter in dealing with the military dictatorship. For him nothing short of an armed struggle, other than the mild resistance which NADECO appeared to provide could solve the problem at hand. Soyinka’s contempt for NADECO’S modus operandi is seen in his narration of the character of the conduct of its activities and its members:
The first “getting-to-know-you” meetings with NADECO made it clear that this was a ponderous organization, top-heavy and with competitive egos. Singly, its membership boasted experience and dedication; collectively, however, they tended to indulge in peripheral contests that consumed time and eroded their political credibility. (p.398)
It is possible to argue that the urgency which accompanies Soyinka’s agency makes it difficult for him to proceed at the kind of pace described by him especially when consideration is given to the lethargy implied in the leadership of the movement by Anthony Enahoro:
There was a civil service approach to the making of tactical decisions for the overthrow of a tyranny. NADECO became an even more difficult working partner with the arrival of my favorite political maverick, Chief Tony Enahoro, who, paradoxically, thrived on endless meetings, copious minutes, points of order, standing orders, and the moving and seconding of motions, counter motions and amendments to motions. (p.399)
It needs pointing out here that the urgency with which Soyinka acts notwithstanding, his carpeting of NADECO and its prime actors especially Enahoro is indicative of the fact that the camp of activists itself is not impeccable community devoid of politics. The disagreements which later surface even within NALICON and the UDFN to which Soyinka laments that ‘the affliction I sought to escape in NADECO traveled with the luggage of a handful’ (p.405) is indicative of this lack of immunity to crisis in any organization. This kind of situation also produces a kind of nomadism which afflicts activists who find it difficult to remain rooted within one organization while organizations themselves acquire a kind of mobility in character which detract from their ability to make the desired impact on society.
The desire for return is of great significance as one of the ways to show that the exile is not in any way an escapist who seeks an avenue to avoid the reality at home. In ruling out exile as route of escape for intellectuals, Said observes that the emotional fragmentation which comes with it is usually borne solely by the individual who finds himself in such a condition. vi For him, therefore, ‘in a very acute sense exile is a solitude experience: the deprivations felt at not being with others in the communal habitation’ (2000, p.177). In order to return to this communal habitation, the exiled individual continues to seek return both in the physical and metaphoric forms. This kind of attitude is evidenced by Soyinka’s fascination with his discovery in Jamaica of ‘a slave settlement called Bekuta, a name that immediately resonated in my head as none other than the name of my hometown, Abeokuta’ (p.21). It is a natural relief, therefore, that the exiled Soyinka finds the new space suitable enough for his interment should he die in exile:
As I set out on one mission after another, in pursuit of what surely, simply had to be the repossession of one’s real space, my mind took refuge in Bekuta. It was not a morbid condition, just a matter-of-fact possibility that stared me in the face. Agitated by the thought that some misguided friends or family would take my remains to Nigeria, I announced openly that, if the worst happened, I did not want Abacha’s triumphant feet galumphing over my body and would settle for the surrogate earth of Jamaica. And I began to make preparations to buy a patch of land in Bekuta. (p.23)
In this approach to the issue of return can be found a validation of the self through historical association which results in solidarity with the new space which becomes is able to offer the value of home. The essence of Soyinka’s fascination is seen in the kind of celebration associated with return. The reunification of the individual with his home is a very important moment that calls for celebration and the kind of rapturous welcome that Soyinka receives at the end of his four year exile which makes him to end the narrative thus: ‘I am back in the place I never should have left’ (p.499).
In the discussion of exile there is a particular form of alienation which appears not to often attract the attention of critics. This is the alienation that dictators themselves go through as a result of the sense of insecurity they imagine especially after they have created an atmosphere in their territories which makes rootedness unattractive to writers and intellectuals. In presenting Babangida’s reactions to the political situations in Nigeria during his reign, for instance, Soyinka seems to suggest a particular kind of exile which afflicts the ruling class. This form of exile is discernible in the alienation from the people—and this is at times physical—which rulers suffer when they fail to reason with the people and also become suspicious of everyone or in extreme cases everything around them such that moving freely within the geographical entity over which they claim to preside becomes increasingly unattractive. In narrating Babangida’s response to critical comments on his handling of his own transition programme, for instance, Soyinka writes:
His response to the avalanche of cautionary articles, satirical cartoons, public rumblings, threats, reasoned advice even from within the military, and passionate denunciations that inundated private and public spaces and the media was to remain holed up in his fortress, silent. (p.347-348)
This attempt to remain immune to the feelings of the society and hence the reality of the moment can be read as a kind of exile which holds serious danger even for members of the ruling class who, unfortunately, see their withdrawal from society as a kind of fortification which may guarantee them further control over the people and offer them security from the querying public. This further draws our attention to the connection between exile and political power. The politics of exile that plays out in most African countries like we see in the case of leaders who inadvertently ostracize themselves from society often has its telling effects on the whole of society in the long run. More poignant than Babangida’s withdrawal from society is the schizoid nature of Sani Abacha who hardly left the fortified precincts of Aso Rock vii. As David Weeks and Jamie James argue, ‘a person with a schizoid personality prefers to be on his own, showing an extreme aversion to groups, a tendency which usually results in a remarkable concentration on strange, obsessive hobbies’ (1995, p.9). The significance of this kind of argument is to bring to the fore the fact that members of the ruling elite, who are often responsible for the exile experience of most intellectuals in the postcolony and elsewhere, at times subject themselves, albeit unknowingly, to conditions which can be interpreted as exilic when they withdraw from the rest of society as a means to self preservation.
Above all, the thematic device of exile becomes, therefore, the discursive space of the struggle for and the attainment of agency in Soyinka’s autobiographical writing. In other words exile and agency go hand-in-hand with the process of self definition which is one of the major projects if not the central concern of the work. You Must Set Forth at Dawn clearly becomes a text in the region of what Ruth Obee citing Bernth Lindfors describes as ‘the literature of self definition, the theme of which is the search for the lost and alienated self within the framework of his own community—where the alien and the exile find meaning and affirmation’ (Obee, 1999, p.113). This search and affirmation involves in Soyinka’s case a self reflexivity as well as a kind of reaching out to the immediate and remote communities of the writer in an attempt to forge a better appreciation of his character, being and actions. Exile and return represent for African intellectuals like Soyinka, a kind of nomadism that they find not just unpalatable but one that imposes negative consequences on their creative ability as well as their desire to remain at home where there is the freedom of a cultural consummation that they find nourishing to their body, soul and intellect. So, we can see in You Must Set Forth at Dawn a careful attempt by the author to present exile as the opposite of wanderlust. Exile at this point also becomes a form of resistance. As Sara Upstone notes, ‘it is a strategy of resistance as empowering as any conventional assertion of belonging’ (2006, p.34). This resistance is crafted as one of the different forms of commitment which the writer uses to provide a visionary interpretation of the reality around him. The adoption of this kind of artistic approach which is a known feature of Soyinka’s poetic and dramatic writings in a life narrative cannot be without a purpose. As Biodun Jeyifo observes, ‘Soyinka has increasingly turned to other prose forms like fictionalized biography and the autobiographical memoir to engage closely related aesthetic and moral challenges and dilemmas that he had engaged in his dramas, poetry and novels’ (2004, p.170). This then explains the intertextual link between the title of this text and an earlier poem by Soyinka titled ‘The Road’. Soyinka’s odyssey which implies the exilic experience of constantly going and coming is given expression in the idea of ‘setting forth’ onto the road. The road here holds both physical and transcendental meanings which seek to explain the restlessness of the odyssean space that the road symbolizes. In doing this therefore, Soyinka explores exile to two different ends—self fashioning and commitment to a vision of liberating society through intellectual activism which extends beyond mere literary engagement. These two ends are obviously related and will continue to generate further debates which make them ‘not only urgent but an absolute precondition for dealing with the primary business of self-definition and creativity in a world devastated by a history of dispossession’ (Anyidoho, 1997,p.16). It is also in continually engaging critically and actively in the manner in which some writers like Soyinka have always done that public intellectuals can begin to feel some measure of respite from the excesses of the hegemonic power of the state and its institutions of aggression which are constantly deployed to haunt such men of intellect out of their own territories.
Good essay!