Disappointingly however, Soyinka devotes more recollection –which is the tyranny of selection and expression- to his politics, very little to his artistic endeavours. How gracious would it be had he offered space to the inspirations, the origins of many of his great books.

 

Also, Soyinka is a professor without any postgraduate degree, how he was able to beat the rules of the academic game are missing.  Soyinka is a great chess player. Almost a master. In Leeds a few years back, he played 12 other good chess players simultaneously. He beat eight out of them, drew three and lost one. How he happened to like chess and rose in it has not been documented ever. The closest we get is when he employed it as an image of apartheid as “structured clash of white and black” in his poem Your Logic Frightens Me Mandela.

 

 Actively, Soyinka read Nietzsche and allowed himself to be influenced by him. Both men share an affair with Greek mythology and did works on it. In fact Nietzsche’s influence is robust in the seminal Fourth Stage and some of his moral codes. How and when Soyinka came to the admiration of this German eccentric of Zarathustra, ubermasch- superman are not captured in the memoir. But he sprinkles some fringe benefits: a delectable tale of a White African Mother, a precursor to Bob Geodolf and Bono of the Live Aid for Africa. She cornered him while in Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize and requested he introduces her photo-catalogue of charities for Africa in order to boost her own chances of securing the Nobel Peace Prize!

 

Like Orunmila’s divine system of Ifa and Jesus Christ’s relentless use of parables, Soyinka believes events and their narration must make sense beyond themselves, and must speak for and to a larger truth. Set Forth recounts the 1985 coup in Dodan barracks, Lagos and who would emerge as the next head of state was being debated among some lecturers clustering around a radio set in faraway Ife  when the author greeted them on his way to hunt. In the thick of the forest, he shot the first bird, Buhari! And the second, Idiagbon! And the third, Babangida. Through analysis, when he could not retrieve the corpse of the third bird, he came back to the lecturers armed with absolute certainty that a certain man called Babangida was going to emerge as the head of state. More, it was through this bird divination that he knew again that President Babangida had killed Mamman Vatsa even before the news arrived fully formed.

 

The stress upon the intimacy between thematic content and the embodying form in this work enlarges the importance of the dialectics of history in informing or defining the present and hence the future, and moreover confirms Soyinka as a superb prose stylist. The author does not take up any issue or theme without allocating prose plus its form to describe the surroundings as a partaker in the action or foregrounding the theme in history or mythology. It takes intelligence and imaginative power.

 

The harsh registers of criticism he reserves for the development mess, the landscape disaster, the social nightmare called Lagos are contained in a prose of undisputable worth. His craft appears to seek an antidote to the mess, and to charge the passage with a sense of balance that seems itself to heal the filth, pain and degradation he describes.  For this is one of the duties of the writer: to respond to the degradation of his society with the triumph of a critical imagination.

 

The richly poetic prose with which the author-protagonist opens the book has a cadence with an intensity that is almost hypnotic. Why not? On a long boring flight back to Lagos, the Soyinka is musing on treasured friends ‘forever stilled in caskets.’ And so when he was over the vastness of the Sahara desert he observes the featureless flatness of his mind too.

 

 By and large Soyinka sounds so valedictory as if he is using the book to address his gods like St Paul the wonder missionary: I have kept the faith, I have fought the good fight. I have ran the race to the finish. All that is left for me is the crown of glory which…The titles of the final tracks of the legendary restlessly creative jazz master, John Coltrane, though unknown to him, echo a lot of spiritual and transcendental motifs: ‘Round Midnight, My Favourite Things, In A Sentimental Mood, Alabama, Jupiter, Acknowledgment, From A Love Supreme. This book’s chapters and pages too resonate similarly: Iba – For Those Who Went Before, All The World…, Tonight We Improvise, Reunion with Ogun, Thorns In The Crown, Requiem For An Ecowarrior, A Final Mission, Where The Earth Says Welcome!

 

 The tile of the book itself is taken from a poem titled Death at Dawn and so once the book begins, it trickles death throughout: that of Ojetunji Aboyade, Femi Johnson, Obafemi Awolowo (whose year of death was recorded as 1984 instead of 1987 in the American edition), Fela, Kudirat, MKO, Ken Saro Wiwa, Abacha, Ibrahim Alfa, of the Hutus and Tutsis and those protesters fell by the anti-June12 bullets in Nigeria and those of ANC and Buthelezi in South Africa immediately after Mandela’s release.

 

Finally, in Nigeria, to rob the people of political and socio-economic welfare, those on top of the food chain when convenient, make recourse to law and morality that marshal power and mask the true motivations of that power. Soyinka since his youth knows better to beat them. He is a man vast in alternatives to morality and law. To swap the tape containing the premier’s poisonous message with his own tape of opposition, he employed threat of the gun.  To compel the allies from the Eastern Broadcasting Service hidden in Awolowo’s house to stay and broadcast the rest of the authentic election results before the incumbent sit-tight iron-grip power spread the doctored versions, he employs the gun.  Soji Odunjo, the author writes, is “a few years younger than I …he was probably the youngest of the Action Group candidates, a wispy, normally mild-mannered youth…he had campaigned hard and fair, against all odds…faced with a crooked returning officer who refused to release the results in his electoral ward…he dashed home and returned with a loaded shotgun…by the count of three, the man had handed over the card. Soji drove to the collating office in Ibadan, where he logged the results. Then he went home to sleep the sleep of the just.” This is a poignant statement to today’s youth. It is no surprise that this young man’s name is Soji, a Yoruba word meaning wake up!