You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka Read Free Book Online

with the cultures of other Jamaican settlers or indigenes? And so on. Anna came armed with a tape recorder and video camera, seeking preliminary material with which to persuade her supervisors that this was a worthwhile subject for a thesis. I was prepared to accompany her project statement with a recommendation of such enticing prospects—even in blank verse, if that would help—that it would make her supervisors salivate and even attempt to take over the project to boost their résumés.
    It took a while to find the village on this decisive encounter, far longer even than the journey from Kingston, where the driver had done his best on those treacherous, sometimes vertiginous roads, to ensure that we prematurely gained my dream patch of the afterlife. On the way back to Kingston, however, I had cause to regret that he had not succeeded, had not ended the dream in the most brutal way that he appeared mindlessly capable of doing, so complete was the collapse of my anticipations. Only five years had passed since my “Mandela” visit, and yet not many people in neighboring, virtually next-door villages appeared to have heard that exotic word—
Bekuta
! Those whose eyes lit up at the sound were no longer sure if it still existed.
Bekuta? Sure, me once know the
place. But is it you going find anyone still living there?
    We had embarked on the search on our own, seeking, unlike black Americans, tributaries, not roots. It was an extended holiday in Jamaica, one of those infinite weekends, so there were no officials to act as guides—not that I needed them, I boasted, Egba blood would call to Egba, never mind that I routinely refer to myself not as Egba but as Ijegba—a marriage of Ijebu and Egba, the two Yoruba branches of my parentage. As for any local descendants of the Egba clans we might chance upon, they had long substituted rum and ganja for palm wine and kola nut, the calypso and reggae for juju and
agidigbo.
15 Fortunately, such was my impatience that, the very afternoon of our arrival, late as it was, I decided that we would do some reconnoitering before dark. Thus we would eliminate several false leads, leaving only a handful of blind alleys and mountain cul-de-sacs for the following day.
    And we did find Bekuta with only a little extra agony the following morning. The old lady was dead, but that was to be expected, she had long been ready to be called home. Something far larger had died, however, and that was Bekuta itself. It was the old lady who had kept up the settlement and its traditions through sheer willpower—we knew that already, but had not guessed how solitary a task it had been, how her spirit had been the existential force of the village. Now the homestead had died with her. The younger generation had pulled up stakes and departed. Her granddaughter, who was settled a modest walking distance away from Bekuta, found my pilgrimage amusing . . .
but no
one pay much time for that Africa foolishness. She only one keep all that in she
head, so when she gone, no one pay any mind to such things. If only she knew what rusty daggers she was using to slash at my entrails!
    Yet some stubborn retention was in evidence, as we found when we visited the original site with its few surviving relics. We put questions to them one after the other, Anna ran her miniaturized camera on the miniaturized village and took notes, but it was clear that this was no treasure trove for the would-be researcher, and there seemed to be even less substance to my quest. It was some consolation—as if the spirit of the dead matriarch still ruled in odd corners of a few hearts—that the daughter, that same dismissive daughter, was still unable to tear herself away from the terrain completely. She had stayed behind, and her mother’s grave was in her small orchard, neat, carefully tended, and overlooked by the rockhills, upon which, I could only hope, the matriarch’s eyes had closed at the