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

end.
    But the times had been unkind to Bekuta. Piece by piece, the story of the death of a village was elicited through indifferent voices. Some years earlier, a flash flood had sent torrents cascading down from the mountains and swept away much of the hillside settlement, washed away the crops, and even taken a toll in lives. The survivors had relocated in a few terraced plots scooped into the hills, protected by overhanging rocks, but mostly in the plains below. A year later, Nature had struck yet another blow—a renewed flooding—and the spirit of Bekuta had been broken. The village was now in the throes of death, and the old lady’s passing simply had sealed its fate. Three, four years after her death, the last of the small community—with any shred of vitality—had vanished. The jungle had reclaimed its space.
    DISPIRITED, WE RETURNED to our hotel. And then, while I lay in bed licking my wounds, from across the ocean, thousands of miles away, another Egba spirit flew away. The news came on my portable radio, and it sounded so strange, a floating contradiction that was at once detached from yet infused with the world from which I had myself just earned a lover’s rebuff. My young cousin, the
abami eda
16 whom the world knew as Fela Anikulapo Kuti, was dead. He had not yet attained his sixtieth year.
    A naked torso over spangled pants, over which a saxophone or microphone would oscillate onstage, receiving guests or journalists in his underpants while running down a tune from his head, in the open courtyard, at rehearsals, or in any space where he held court—all constituted the trademark of his unyielding nonconformism. Far more revealing than such skimpy attire, however, were his skin-taut skull and bulging eyes, permanently bloodshot from an indifferent sleeping routine and a dense marijuana infusion. His singing voice was raspy, intended not to entice but to arrest with trenchant messages. Sparse and lithe, Fela leaped about the stage like a brown, scalded cat, whose
miaow
was a rustle of riffs eased from a saxophone that often seemed better maintained than his own body. Fela loved to buck the system. His music, to many, was both salvation from and an echo of their anguish, frustrations, and suppressed aggression. The black race was the beginning and end of knowledge and wisdom, his life mission to effect a mental and physical liberation of the race. It struck me as a kind of portent, that it was while visiting this distant outpost of my home, Abeokuta, in Westmoreland, propelled—but quite soberly, objectively—by thoughts of death, that I would receive news of the death of that other musician member of my family: the irrepressible maverick Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
    How would one summarize Fela? Merely as a populist would be inadequate. Radical he certainly was, and often simplistically so. Lean as a runner bean, a head that sometimes struck me as a death mask that came to life only onstage or in an argument—more accurately described as a serial peroration, since he was incapable of a sustained exchange of viewpoints, especially in politics. Only Fela would wax a record according heroic virtues to such an incompatible trio as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sekou Toure of Guinea, and—oh yes, indeed—Idi Amin Dada, the terror of Uganda. It was, however, sufficient for my cousin that, at one time or the other, they had all challenged, defied, or ridiculed an imperial power—any voice raised in denunciation of the murders by Idi Amin or the torture cages of Sekou Toure was the voice of a Western stooge, CIA agent, or imperialist lackey. There were no grays in Fela’s politics of black and white.
    Memories flitted across the night—such as one of my least treasured experiences, the feeling of being designated as dog food! It was 1984, and I had traveled to Paris in order to campaign for Fela’s freedom at a mammoth music concert under yet another dictatorship, that of