You Must Set Forth at Dawn Read Free

worst. In truth, regarding the building itself, I had not planned to encase so much space within walls, just a small cottage, after my retirement from university service, but with as much ground as I could afford. Still, hovel or mansion, the soldiers’ violation hung over it, as it hung over many other homes that were owned by perceived enemies of the dictator, Sani Abacha. The house had been built almost entirely from the windfall of the Nobel Prize. I had expanded it from its original design only because I wanted to create a space for periodic retreat for writers and artists—typical of the fantasies of those who are suddenly bombarded with more money than generations before them ever laid eyes on! Thus was born the notion of the Essay Foundation for the Humanities, named after my father, whose initials, S.A., had coalesced in my childhood mind as one word: Essay. 4
    THE HUMAN LANDSCAPE that I left behind has been altered irreversibly, deeply pockmarked with craters of loss. It was already nearly unbearably depleted with the loss of OBJ, the irrepressible Femi Johnson, but that a feature familiar on both the personal and national terrain, Ojetunji Aboyade, should vanish within a mere three or four weeks of my departure seemed a perverse act of some vengeful deities—but to what end? To impart an already conceded lesson on mortality? And the timing, so soon after my escape, seemed cruel.
    My escape had become known only when I resurfaced at a press conference at UNESCO toward the end of November. Two weeks later, I was back next door to Nigeria, in Cotonou in Benin, a place populated largely by Nigerian nationals, especially the Yoruba. My family had been smuggled out to join me for a Christmas/New Year reunion that might be the last for—who could tell how long? Our mainstay in Cotonou, Akin Fatoyinbo, himself once a prison actor in a Kafkaesque scenario under the regime of an earlier dictatorship—that of Generals Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon—chose to break the news to me without any preliminaries. I was working at my improvised desk in our bungalow, rented for the season, when he drove in from Lagos. His face was stone as he placed the newspapers before me, wordlessly. A thick black banner across the front page seared my sight as my eyes encountered the definitive pronouncement: PROFESSOR OJETUNJI ABOYADE DEAD! I swept the bunch of papers off the table, leaped up, and walked away into the bedroom.
    It was an indelible warning. By the end of this exile, the human landmarks to which I had grown accustomed would vanish, just like this, irremediably. Oje—hardly anyone ever called him by his full name—had been my vice chancellor at the University of Ife, later renamed Obafemi Awolowo University after the death of the politician and sage Awolowo, a first-generation nationalist of Yoruba stock who never lost his political fire until his death in 1984. I never really knew how my attachment with Oje had developed and deepened, but it was perhaps inevitable. He was one of that breed of tireless intellectual spar-ring partners, cunning at fashioning theoretical propositions that were guaranteed to provoke you and keep you in animated debate until lunch dissolved into dinner and then into late supper.
    The news of his death left me with an irrational suspicion of a conspiracy of progressive abandonment by friends and colleagues, a sinister plan of deprivation of a valued landscape. Oje’s cerebration was first nature, as if the gray matter in his massive head churned compulsively and could find relief only in controversy. As a hunting pupil, however, he was a total disaster. All he did was provide light relief at any outing: “Oje, that was yours! Why didn’t you shoot?” And Oje would shrug: “I didn’t want to waste a cartridge.” So we nicknamed him “Silent Gun,” in contrast to Femi, who became “O. B. Lau-lau!” Femi needed no prompting to