Our Credulous Grammarian

Adewale Maja-Pearce

• BuyYou Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir by Wole Soyinka
  Methuen, 626 pp, £18.99, May 2007, ISBN 978 0 413 77628 0

Towards the end of this, his third volume of memoirs, which covers the period from independence in 1960 to the death of General Sani Abacha in 1998, the 64-year-old Wole Soyinka is preparing to infiltrate himself back into his native Nigeria to confront the latest manifestation of military adventurism. By 1998 he had been in exile for three years and was impatient with the failure of the opposition to mount a decent challenge to Abacha’s regime. Worse yet, Abacha, the ‘monster’ who had earned worldwide opprobrium following the 1995 judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa, appeared to have persuaded the international community to accept his transmutation into an elected civilian president, through the five political parties he had created and funded for that purpose. Soyinka believed that his own presence on Nigerian soil, where he would make occasional broadcasts on the opposition’s clandestine radio network, would galvanise the populace and postpone the ‘evil’ day when armed resistance could no longer be avoided.