He is a man of certain height, a certain past, and a certain career and with a certain idea of a certain country. He is a warrior even when there is no war. A soldier in the eyes of some civilians, a civilian in the eyes of some soldiers. The definition of his uniform is anything but uniform because even that is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes, his tune is regarded as at war with his tunic, and his tunic with his tune. It is part of the enigma of the person.
His life comes to a boil when his country collapses under interloping soldiers. Unlike his mates who would cow under and even embrace the rape and rapine of the times, he takes them on. He is a man who never cowers to the jail man. He knows what it is to be gaoled.
The soldiers make the city and country crawl under the fierce rhythms of their jackboots, the syncopating roar of their martial voice, the loss of democratic favours. They impose a new weather system of fear and trembling. Some of his fellow men have become courtiers in a contrived inner sanctum of quislings, new blue-bloods when it is blues for the country.
When others remain, he would rather die with a lion’s mane or find another shelter from where to wage a fight.
They are after him. His own class and the class of the invading army mark him as a wanted man. If they get him, he not only returns to jail. He is a dead man, like others at home operating under ground, issuing out journalism and whispering to ominous caucuses. He has little time to consult with friends and family before he flees. A big war hero says he carries his country’s pride in that aircraft of escape.
In the words of the poet, T.S. Eliot, a hard time he has of it. With him at the helm, in London, with his fellow rebels, he has to organise. They have become refugees for national rebirth. The homeland invokes sacrifice. With a few men, they operate like a band of brothers. They are a grain of mustard seed. Courage multiplies little supplies into a surplus. Their voices, though few and puny, wax into arsenal. Love makes a few people growl into a battalion. Alienation knits them like a commonwealth. It is like the words of Isaiah: “A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation.” God and time hasten it.
He enjoys local cover, if not much of a resource. He organises a radio station with regular broadcasts where the people at home know they are only lonely but not alone.
Since, he, as leader, is a wanted man, he imbibes a rebel’s guile. He needs to be alive for the cause and the caucuses.
One of those he is in touch with is a well-known world literary figure, who would one day pay homage to his political soldiery.
In the end, though, he and his colleagues prevail. There might have been some turncoats among them, but he returns home a hero. Not everyone thinks so. He comes into a high office, and later becomes in charge.
He is seen as a fellow to dread and to love, a divisive figure. He helps to reorganise the politics of the country, refine its agenda, save its major city in a time of economic crisis. He invests and ferment political reforms, challenging some of the royals of the old order, the mensch of the old mess.
He is stubborn, and very quickly creates a tendency in the political elite. He is regarded as a reference point in governance. He handles crises and survives the far left and from the far right.
But so is the way of his life that those who love him band behind him and those who hate him want him dead. They have plotted his assassination. He seems there is never a time in his political life that he is not in a sort of storm. When he veers right, they say left is better. Some love the love of him. Some love the hate of him.
Some hate him so much that they forget the very reason why he is hated. Some have devoted inks of bile to him. Some say openly that they wish him dead. Even if he dies, they will say the beast is dead but his poison lives on. They would want to recalibrate Christ and say they want to kill the flesh and would not be satisfied until they kill the spirit, too. In their writings, his opponents pour invectives like lifeblood. Some who were for him would turn away from him and devote their lives to opposing him until they turn to his side again with more powerful fervour.
He is the only one in his drama, and he seems not to invite his worshippers to fanaticism or his haters to savagery. He is like an artwork of a famous artist whose light comes from within the work itself. This man creates the frame of reference of his interlocutors. He sets the context and they respond. He is never fazed though, like the mystic in Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children who never feels anything, including a venomous snakebite.
The man I write about here is not Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. His name is Charles de Gaulle, often regarded as the French man not only of the 20th century, but of all time, followed in the last poll conducted as 14 points ahead of the little general, Napoleon Bonaparte. Andre Malraux, the great novelist and friend of the French avatar, wrote after De Gaulle’s death that he is a man of today and the day after tomorrow and a man of yesterday and the day after yesterday. In his latest book, Leadership, Henry Kissinger describes him as a man who invented the idea of ‘grandeur’ for France.
