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

General Buhari. Buhari’s government had flung him into prison on spurious charges of a currency offense. Under the general antiracism and human rights slogan
“Touche pas mon pot!”
— “Don’t touch my friend!”—the organizers of the concert planned to devote a special spot to publicize Fela’s unjust imprisonment and mobilize world opinion on his behalf. I had accepted their invitation at extremely short notice, and had never before attended a pop music concert, having no inclination toward high-decibel events and mass excitation.
    The trouble came from my efforts to approach the sacred arena where the artists, handlers, and other participants were tented. I shot to the venue straight from dumping my bags at the hotel and without the dozen or more passes required to open up the succession of barriers—someone had omitted to provide them. My lasting image from that concert was that of me about to be eaten at each barrier by teams of obviously starved Alsatian dogs, launched—it appeared—by their handlers, even while they pretended to restrain them. Nobody will ever persuade me that those dogs are ever fed or that they are not trained to identify innocent humanity as their next meal! I had seen footage of white police officers unleashing kindred monsters on black protesters in apartheid South Africa. At no time did the thought ever cross my mind that I would someday come close to taking over those victims’ role in Paris, especially as an honored guest. My mission, I assumed, was to deliver a message to the world, thereafter escaping into the sanity of the farthest café from the raucous, stoned environment within which millions of presumably sane people would actually find a night of ecstasy. Still, once within the protective barriers, I carried off my mission with all due dignity, as became an ambassador of the “Black President,” one of Fela’s many unofficial titles, and delivered my message against the background of his blown-up image even as his music was blared out to the Paris night.
    For nearly the last five years of his life, Fela was fully convinced not only that he was a reincarnated Egyptian god but that he had actually begun to reverse the aging process and would again revert to childhood and infancy. By that token, my aburo would have watched his own funeral, unobserved by mere mortals. Wreathed in a marijuana-induced serenity—for I have no doubt that there would be gardens of vintage ganja in Fela’s Heaven—he would have enjoyed the irony of his funeral, the magnitude of which was an unintended gift to us on the outside. He was laid in state at the huge Onikan racecourse in the heart of Lagos, a now-degraded monument to vainglory that an earlier dictator, Yakubu Gowon, had built for himself. It had been designed as a parade ground that would show off the might and splendor of the military regime, and the first visiting dignitary to grace those grounds would have been Queen Elizabeth II of England. Alas, while attending a meeting with other African heads of state in East Africa, Yakubu Gowon learned that he had been overthrown in a coup mounted by his own palace guard, and the royal visit was canceled. I found it altogether fitting that Fela should lie in state on those grounds as nearly a million of his countrymen and -women came to pay him tribute.
    On the day of Fela’s funeral, the whole of Lagos stood still, all businesses were suspended, and all governmental presence was banished. The mammoth crowd at the funeral of this most vocal and unrelenting dissident being was, first, a tribute to his person. Following this, however, it was also a statement of defiance to the regime of Sani Abacha. Despite his quixotic outbursts, nearly blasphemous since they appeared to support the rule of Sani Abacha, the fundamental message of Fela’s art and lifestyle was anathema to any military or dictatorial regime, and thus he