On Thursday, 30th January, 1997, I received a plaintive letter from my sister that our mother was at the gate of final transition. For close to a decade, she had battled with various ailments, each leaving her increasingly frail and fragile-looking. But she was a tough cookie. She hung on like a proud boxer unwilling to kiss the canvas even after cruel punishment. Now judging by the tone of the letter, she was about to conclude her earthly labours.
It was a cold and blustery mid-winter morning in Birmingham. I had been told that after she was able to establish that I had gone into political exile with no hope of returning shortly, her health took a nosedive. She became inconsolable. She clung to life with the forlorn hope of being able to clasp her son to her withered bosom just one more time. But now, the biological clock was outpacing the clock of hope and other bodily organs. It was all a heroic gesture of maternal futility.
There was a special bond between this mother and her son, forged in adversity and the relentless civil war of polygamy and its associated malignancies. But looking back, this one was a polygamy so sophisticated and subtle even at that time that it must be considered to be at the cutting edge of the industry. At the crowning point of its domestic grandeur, it came with a cook who later rose to the upper echelons of the Nigerian Customs Service.
Mama had spent about two decades looking for a child. When all hopes appeared to have evaporated, the heavenly floodgate suddenly opened resulting in four births in a remarkable spate of five years. There was myself followed by a stillbirth which mama thought was the handiwork of Action Group devils, and a set of twins. One of the twins, a male child, died before he was two. One could still remember lying beside the stilled tiny corpse before they came to take the poor boy away forever. Benson was a beautiful boy.
I immediately began making preparations from exile to visit Nigeria. I was determined to give the old lady a farewell hug, and nothing was going to stop me. It was the high noon of tyranny. The reigning military tyrant appeared to have struck fear into the heart of everybody, and all appeared quiet on the home front. A sullen silence presaging a fierce thunderstorm had descended on the nation. Everybody one broached the idea of going to Nigeria to thought it was either mad or suicidal or both. I was advised to perish the thought. It was just too dangerous. But I wasn’t going to have any of that.
It was not mad; neither was it suicidal. It was based on some cold calculations. But in the post-colonial polity, there is always a ring of irrationality to the most rational-seeming decision. The past is not an infallible guide of the future. Based on my political hunch, I came to the conclusion that something would have to give by or before the 1st of October, 1998.
If I were to be captured or abducted by state agents, I would have to be released as part of a general amnesty for political hostages and detainees by that day when Nigeria must return to full blown civilian rule. If a more terrible fate were to befall one, one would only have predeceased his mother by a matter of weeks or days. Once I came to the conclusion that neither risk was too grave to take for mama, nothing was going to stop me from going to Nigeria.
I arrived in exile in November1995 in a rather recondite and roundabout manner. I did not choose exile. It was exile that chose me. I had left Nigeria for the US with some colleagues to participate in a USAID-sponsored International Exchange Program for Scholars. But shortly after departure, my premises were forcibly taken over by security people. It was the culmination of a tense battle of will and wits lasting almost two years. What I thought was going to be a two-week stay in America turned into 12 full years of peripatetic wandering as a migrant intellectual worker and traveling theorist in some of the metropolitan capitals of the world.
Of the tense battle of wits and will with a military despotism gone haywire, three incidents stood out. In the evening of Friday, August 26th 1994 while returning from a short trip abroad, I was waylaid by armed hoodlums on my way from the Murtala Mohammed International Airport. It was about seven p-m. As the vehicle conveying me was about to negotiate the Portland Cement exit unto Ikorodu Road, a nondescript car flew past us and immediately blocked the exit. Another blocked our retreat.
Just as we began wondering what was going on, three gun-toting thugs scrambled out and ordered us to lie flat on the main Ikorodu Road. My cousin ,who had come for me, and his son who was at the back of the car, jumped out and quickly obeyed. But I refused probably too disoriented by fatigue to fully comprehend what was going on and the dangers inherent in foolish heroism.
The lead hoodlum yelled at me and ordered me to remove my jacket. I quickly complied. It was as if he knew where my vital documents were, because he threw the jacket at the back of the car. By now, all the approaching vehicles were quickly turning back, creating total chaos on Ikorodu Road. Within seconds, the hoodlums drove the car into a back alley and disappeared forever. All my earthly possessions and the manuscript of a new work were gone.
That was the night General Sani Abacha finally bared his fangs. It was the beginning of a reign of terror that would last another four years. By some curious coincident, another set of state hoodlums invaded Gani Fawehinmi’s Chambers across the road and mercilessly hacked down his security guards. In Yaba, Commodore Dan Suleiman’s house was firebombed the same evening. The horror movie which was to culminate in General Abacha’s mysterious passage and Abiola’s equally mysterious death in detention had commenced in earnest.
For what seemed an eternity, I had stood on the Ikorodu Road, gazing at the sky and too stunned to make sense of what had just transpired. When I left London earlier that morning, it was a glorious late summer day. I had left the north London flat of a friend, Sola Fawehinmi, a.k.a Professor Jouls, full of spirit and optimism. A friend of ours, a zestful and humorous Ibo chap, had given me money and a beautiful bottle of perfume for his wife, a top immigration official. All that had disappeared together with my three suitcases in the night of tropical distemper.
By now, harsh reality shocked me out of the futile reverie. I quickly realised that my cousin who would shortly thereafter become a Professor of Psychology and his son were still lying on the road. I yelled at them to get up. We began trekking towards the Yaba Police Station like some vagabond wayfarers. It took us another hour or so to arrive at the Police Station, looking thoroughly disheveled and disoriented. Time had become completely irrelevant.
Every society gets its just deserts. It is the iron law of social retribution. You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam. The police are human too, and they did not come from Mars. In times of universal perversity, the police become universal perverts. The entire station reeked of the foul odour of cheap tobacco, illicit gin, stale fecals and fulsome fornication. Some of the policemen looked like hardened criminals and justly so. It was hard to tell who was who. These were hard men and women, cynical and gritty to boot.
In such fluid and flux circumstances where the lawful agents cannot be separated from the agents of unlawfulness, complainants suddenly become suspects and suspects suddenly become complainants. As they sized us up in a psychological battle of street stamina for which one had no energy or appetite, one was half hoping that one was not about to move from Gatwick to Golgotha in one single day. The cramped cage bristling with armour and ill humour was grimly symbolic of the nation itself.
Luckily this particular night, the police people appeared to be stalking some bigger games. After establishing our status and identity, an absent-minded officer in ragged slippers was asked to take our statement. He did this with a contemptuous frown which occasionally gave way to a senseless snigger. After this, an officer in mufti ordered us to be on our way with the stern warning to avoid Atan Cemetery if we still valued our life.
It was not yet the time of mobile phones. There begun another long and weary trudge to the University of Lagos. We had arrived well past midnight, looking like deserters from some Somali militia. Later in the afternoon, Segun Odegbami, the ace striker and former captain of the Green Eagles, drove one to his local tailor to have one kitted out. I was in the same dress for the next three days. The University of Lagos was also to become the abode of the fugitive and the internally displaced for the next two weeks.
It was around this time that I became closely acquainted with the late Peter Alexander Ashikiwe Adione-Egom, famously known as the Motor Park economist. The gifted and impossible Cambridge and Arhus-trained anthropologist and classical economist was also at this point in time slumming it out at the University of Lagos Guesthouse in a solitary bunker which looked like the bedroom of Kafka’s metamorphosis.
A wasted genius who seemed to have turned his back on the Nigerian society, Ashikiwe, later known as Peter Egom, was better trained and better talented than most of Nigeria’s fabled official economists and could cut through their inanities with a single devastating sentence. A product of Kings College where he was classmate of the celebrated and much lamented Stanley Macebuh, Ashikiwe was also a superb athlete. He could walk the entire length of Lagos by sunrise before returning to hunt for breakfast.
I quickly recognised a kindred soul who had been done in by the evil system. At this point in time, his presence around University of Lagos was beginning to raise some dust of suspicion and unease. Many simply couldn’t understand what he was doing there and why he was living in a bunker with so many rich and influential friends. In a leap of imaginative malice, it was concluded that he was probably infiltrated into the university community by some security organisations bent on bringing the citadel of learning to heel.
But he was just among many gifted Nigerians who have volunteered for internal self-deportation. There are many of these Nigerian geniuses who have turned their back on the society in a gesture of self-immolation and social suicide. At that point in time, Ashikiwe, who loved to regale people about how he was chased out of a famously leftwing Department of Economics in East Africa for his militantly unorthodox economics, could not be bothered about social trappings. He believed only in the aristocracy of the intellect. As far as he was concerned, money was mere fiction.
The problem was that it was this “fiction” that must procure breakfast. You cannot walk into a restaurant proclaiming fiction as your currency. That would be what Samir Amin, the great Egyptian Marxist economist, called unequal exchange. In deference to this alimentary logic, the great hell-raiser would arrive at the Boys Quarters where one was holing up every morning, screaming the nonsensical appellation he had picked up from motor park conductors: “Baba Egunje, baba egunje!!” It was a signal to begin the daily forage.
The second encounter in the spiral of strange events that led to exile was even more devastating and potentially life-threatening. Sometimes in May 1995, Karl Maier, in the course of writing his celebrated book, This House Has Fallen, was brought to Ife by Seye Kehinde to have an intellectual interaction with me. We spent the whole afternoon in my house, discussing issues and lamenting the fate of the nation.
But all hell was let loose shortly after they left to return to Lagos. It was dusk. Suddenly fire and brimstone erupted. Some gunslingers who had taken up position unleashed a fierce fusillade . It was obvious that these were no ordinary gunmen. They were using tracer bullets which lit up the entire vicinity in a weird pyrotechnic of violence and mayhem. For about 15 minutes of continuous bombardment, one lay flat on the floor hoping that it was all a nasty dream.
Then there was a lull which seemed to have lasted an eternity. One could hear some people in low conversation arguing among themselves. They were not sure of their quarry. After this, the bombardment moved to two houses away. It was the premises of the urbane and cultured Professor Aduayi. At this point, one managed to crawl out of the house. After the smoke cleared, it was discovered that the professor’s wife had been wounded in the hand.
By this time, some concerned members of the university community who had been attracted by the crackling gunfire began converging on the scene. One or two of them carried weapons. Among the early callers was the then Vice Chancellor, Professor Wale Omole, and there was the inevitable activist and radical humanist Professor Toye Olorode who had dared a purported dismissal by his former teacher, Professor Aliyu Fafunwa, and had triumphed. There was also Professor Yomi Durotoye who was cradling a loaded assault rifle. But by then, the hoodlums had made good their escape.
Author’s note
The above are excerpts from the recently concluded, Underground in My Fatherland, a story of love, devotion and affection for one’s mother. These are very dark days indeed in Nigeria. The tragedy of state collapse mixes with the baleful comedy of failed and incompetent leaders dancing on the grave of Nigeria. We bring forward these excerpts in order to draw attention to all that is noble and ennobling about Nigeria, and to summon the spirit of heroic resistance with which Nigerians overcame collective tragedy in the past. It is a form of national therapy. If we were to concentrate on what is going on, it would be nothing but a grotesque statistics of death; “a catalogue of cadavers”— to quote Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the late Columbian master fabulist, who shed mortality for immortality last week. In a manner of speaking, the entire story is an ironic tribute and backhanded compliment to one of the greatest novelists of all time. In the nearest future, this column will pay the late master his proper dues. But for now, criticism, as Karl Marx would put it, is not just a passion of the mind but the mind of passion itself.
