You Must Set Forth at Dawn Read Free Page B

at the airport, and he never made it back. I am not accompanying you.”
    â€œI don’t believe this!” he shouted. “Look at you! All your
sakara
8 —beneath it all, soft. You’re scared stiff. No, worse, you’re superstitious.”
    I shrugged, unmoved. My mind was already made up. Into the earth-hugging ambulance, yes, but to follow and watch him being loaded into the winged counterpart, taking off into the same ozone that had swallowed Femi forever—out of the question! “Call me what you like. I am not coming with you. I accompanied Femi virtually into the plane, and he vanished forever. This time, no. This way, I know you’ll be back in no time.”
    â€œCoward! I will never let you live this down.”
    â€œI’ll survive that. Femi is not around to help you make a perpetual feast of it, so once again—journey safely. I may visit you there, I may not. The beer is very good in Germany, by the way. Tell the doctors to pin the placard ‘One Man, One Beer’ by your bedside, where you can see it. It will get you up and about in no time.”
    MY FINGERS FELT considerably lightened, and I began to tap out his graveside tribute, invoking the earlier match that ended in his favor....
    Oje Aboyade had had a close brush with death about four years before. Even
the specialists at the German hospital who performed the lifesaving operation on
him marveled at his survival. He became, in e fect, a sideshow for the students at
the teaching hospital; they all came to examine his case notes and gawk at the miracle man. His recovery was total, and it most certainly was not that ailment which
finally took him away. After that “refurbishment,” and coming as he did from a
long-lived family, I most confidently expected him to outlive the rest of us and
would often say so. That was careless; I should have remembered the Nigerian
killer factor. Simply defined, it is the stressful bane of the mere act of critical
thought within a society where power and control remain the playthings of imbeciles, psychopaths, and predators.
    Oje’s close-cropped head, grudgingly pocked with a few white tufts, rose before me, the deceptively mild roundness of his face lightly lined with cicatrices of his Awe origin. His name was an instant giveaway, to the knowledgeable, as scion and heir of the family ancestral masquerade, the
oje.
So proud was he of this legacy—deemed “heathen” by the disciples of Christianity and Islam— that he ensured that the names of his two male children bore the prefix
Oje,
yet he was an unfailing Sunday worshiper at his church in Bodija Housing Estate and even some kind of deacon.
    Aboyade had been deeply immersed in a project in Ibadan, the Development Policy Centre, long before I fled into exile. The seed of the idea had been sown as far back as 1978, under the military regime headed by General Olusegun Obasanjo—who would later resurface as a civilian head of state in 1999. That original idea for a civilian think tank had ended up as yet another military appropriation, becoming the Centre for Strategic Studies located in the far north, in Kuru. General Obasanjo blithely assumed that Oje would still agree to direct the new institution, but no. It was not what he had envisioned. Not only had his idea been purloined, it had become militarized. Stubbornly but patiently, he persisted with his original vision and finally began to see it take material form twenty years later. During that earlier inception, I frequently accompanied Oje in the search for a suitable location, and we settled on an estate being developed near the Asejire Dam, just outside Ibadan. I sat with him through several brainstorming sessions with Obasanjo in Dodan Barracks, Lagos, then the seat of government, poring over blueprints. A year before Oje’s death, the original idea was back within Ibadan, on a somewhat more modest scale but as a fully civilian