You Must Set Forth at Dawn
by Wole Soyinka
Random House, $210
The story of Wole Soyinka
is the story of Nigeria and the former British colony's troubled recent past, as it has faced coup after military coup, 'a crude succession of hotchpotch dictatorships', and internal ethnic and religious turmoil. But despite the dramatic backdrop of the writer's political activism, imprisonment, exile and return, the memoir's protagonists often become so vivid as individuals that their context seems almost secondary. The book is more a collection of observations on camaraderie and friendship - particularly that of Olufemi Babington Johnson - in the face of horror than a chronological description of the author's life.
Following on from Ake: The Years of Childhood, Soyinka's earlier memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn is a story of exile and homecoming, of separation and reunion, of ground - both literal and figurative - that once lost can never be regained. It begins and ends with Soyinka's return to his home country after the bloody reign and 'sordid death' of the despot's despot Sani Abacha in 1998. Still not acclimatised to his new status as a free man, no longer pursued across continents by Abacha's henchmen, Soyinka battles to embrace the triumph of homecoming and finds the elation of return strangely absent - 'not quite the homecoming I had imagined'. The situation is temporary but first the reader must travel back more than 30 years to see what events could have brought the exiled poet to the door of his country in sombre mood.
The writer, who once penned a poem entitled To My First White Hairs, is now a 'white-haired monster' who sports what he describes as 'a landmark of luxuriant moss that passes for a head of hair'. Now we travel with him through the experiences that brought about this metamorphosis, equipped with a six-page chronology of Nigeria's political milestones since 1960, and maps of the (frequently redrawn) boundaries of Nigeria's states.