You Must Set Forth at Dawn Read Online Free PDF Page A

see Moshood Abiola in prison. Neither of us required any urging to accept that we had to meet and talk before his departure.
    My patience was severely tested by his “reasonableness” . . . Yes, yes, Wole, an
opportunity has opened up now with Abacha’s death, and we musn’t waste it. A lot
can be achieved, the crisis can now be resolved, but, you know, you must tell your
people also to be reasonable. The opposition simply has to be reasonable.
    Reasonable? Were we being unreasonable? After nearly thirty years of military rule, the last five under the most repellent of the species, we were asking for the immediate release of the elected president and all remaining political prisoners and the setting up of an interim government headed by Abiola, the legitimate president—an interim government that would last a year, maybe two. In tandem, the nation’s representatives would meet at a sovereign national conference to ascertain the real will of the people and lay the ground for the next elections while reviewing the terms of association of the constituent parts of the nation. Then general elections. What was unreasonable about such proposals? Indeed, what alternative was there? I had the sinking feeling that Kofi was traveling with a prepared script, a script already agreed between the United Nations and a caucus of Western governments. The program of our democratic coalition was not to be part of that script.
    Warning of the death threat to Abiola was delivered into my hands only after Kofi Annan had left for Nigeria and had even held his meeting with the prisoner! If I had received it earlier, I would have submerged all political discussion under the urgency of bringing Abiola out of prison immediately! Certainly I would have served formal notice on the United Nations, insisted—for whatever it was worth—that its secretary-general refuse to meet Abiola except at liberty, in his own home, surrounded by his family and political associates. We had learned from experience to trust any warning from “Longa Throat.” It was too late, however; Abiola was already dying, his organs weakened by a devilish regimen of slow poisoning. It will all come out in its full byzantine details—of that, I live in total confidence.
    So our discussion—and my principal concerns—were taken up mostly with Nigeria’s future, not with any thoughts of danger to the man at the center of it all. By the end of that meeting, so convinced was I that that future had already been decided by others that I sent messages home immediately, urging that all pressure should be mounted on the visitor to make him
listen
to our program and press it on the new landlord of Aso Rock, General Abdulsalami. And yet I warned in the same breath that it would be futile anyway. Such were the frequent contradictions that defined many moments of that democratic undertaking. Futility stared one in the face, but inaction was far more intolerable.
    Wryly and incongruously, at such moments would float to the surface of my mind one of my mother’s favorite aphorisms, with her comic Yorubization of the key English word “trying”:
“Itirayi ni gbogbo nkan”
—“The trying is all.” Wild Christian applied it to a full gamut of incompatible situations—from the shrug of resignation that followed a failed attempt to charge exorbitantly for her goods to falling with full relish on the dubious results of an exotic recipe that she was attempting for the first time. Abiola was—like the French Socialist president François Mitterrand, which is where the similarity ends— a dogged disciple of the doctrine of
itirayi.
It was not his first attempt to become the president of Nigeria. A Yoruba from the South, his first, overconfident foray was ridiculed and scuttled by a feudal cabal of the North who found it laughable that anyone outside their privileged caucus should even dream of ruling the nation.