You Must Set Forth at Dawn Read Online Free PDF

They took his money—lots of it—but openly derided his ambitions. Abiola made a strategic withdrawal, bided his time, launched himself on a philanthropic crusade, broadened and reinforced his political base. At the second outing, he succeeded. And for that, Abiola was killed.
    I AM TEMPTED to hold this last loss responsible, above other candidates, for a homecoming that appears almost completely devoid of emotion, the focus of one’s struggle having been violently sucked into a void. But it goes beyond the depressing weight of such absences. I am not returning to any abandoned territory, since this is where I have remained by compulsion, almost with debilitating intensity, these past five years.
    Instinctively, I turn toward the window when the captain announces that we have entered the Nigerian airspace. The plane’s shadow dances over a few minarets and walled cities of the North. We are still some distance from our destination; the full length of the Nigerian landmass has yet to be crossed. For a moment I think I have caught a glimpse of an oasis, but it is only the sun’s glint on a flat, corrugated iron roofing, undoubtedly a factory. My mind moves to the fate of my own house, the modest foundation dream. Now,
that
I had effectively abandoned, perhaps in self-defense, brick by red brick and beam by beam, including its wild, ample grounds, where I had experimented and succeeded—against all odds, I was told—in cultivating the wild, now rarely seen
agbayun,
that stubborn berry that coats every morsel of food for hours afterward with a natural sweetness. The lore, backed by generations of frustrated farmers, was that it never fructified in captivity. Through trial and error, by varying the combination of sunshine and soil, moisture, shade, and whatever else I could recall from my amateur flirtation with viniculture, I produced a freak success, a feat of which I was inordinately proud, since I am no farmer. The oldest and the youngest in the family, Tinuola and Folabo, are the family’s green thumbs. Femi, next to me in age—“Jamani,” to distinguish him by his childhood nickname from his namesake, OBJ—is the fisherman. I took to hunting. Cultivating the
agbayun
was also an irony, as I do not like sweets and only gave the berries away.
    There was also my minifield of wild mints. When I retired from the Nigerian university system in 1985, thinking of various occupations for survival, I considered a project for freezing or drying my wild mint for sale, especially to bars and teahouses around the world. Fantasizing myself as a small-scale trading maverick, one who identified, produced, and marketed a select item or two in demand, virtually from my doorstep, making a living out of it to sustain a retirement into purely creative pursuits—this has long been a favorite pastime of mine. I suppose it was my fascination with the world of Wild Christian, that modest trader in a medley of commodities, that promoted such fantasies. I knew it would come to nothing, but it provided moments of unmatched bliss to sit in those ample verandas, survey my lordly domain, and weave my magic carpet of a life of interdependency between the arts and the farm. The mini-grove of wild mints and the
agbayun
were doomed to remain contemplative vistas, nothing more. I enjoyed watching them grow, sniffing the air around them and accompanying their flights to myriad cities in air-sealed bags. But all I did was lace the occasional drink with the mint leaves and distribute the
agbayun
berries to friends. A few hundred were forgotten in my freezer, where they duly rotted when the infamous electrical supply took even its feeble charge away for prolonged periods that coincided with my absences from home.
    Perhaps the memory of its one dedication still hovers around the estate. At the first anniversary of Femi Johnson’s death—or, more accurately, of his reinternment—the foundation received its