You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka Page A

tactics employed by the governing parties as well as the extralegal deployment of the local constabularies under the control of the governing parties—thugs and local police were becoming indistinguishable—the Action Group engaged in some soul-searching and concluded that it had been negligent in its physical department. The party thereupon assigned a number of its youths to specialized training—self-defense and general toughening-up sessions—in a camp said to have been set up in northern Ghana. I had a good rapport with some of the inner circle of the Action Group and its allied opposition groups. In addition to Bola Ige, who was never arrested or charged, I had become quite close to Dr. Chike Obi, a wiry, eccentric mathematician who was reputed to have come close to uncovering the proof of the elusive Fermat’s theorem—nobody knew exactly what Fermat’s theorem was about or who Fermat was, but academic folklore had placed this theorem at the pinnacle of mathematical genius, and the media had enshrined the name in public consciousness. It was a surprise to me to learn that Chike Obi had launched a political party in the Eastern Region, the Dynamic Party, but no surprise that it was a radical-leaning party that preached revolution—and even dictatorship!— as the only recipe for the nation’s ills. The latter remained our main point of disagreement. It was typical of the mathematician to have driven one of the suspects—Tony Enahoro himself?—to safety across the border, for which he was arrested but later released. Between Bola Ige and Chike Obi, I obtained quite reliable information on the thinking within the party.
    That some elements within the Winneba trainees may have been converted by the actual revolutionaries in waiting at that school and organized themselves into an insurgent unit bent on overthrowing a government that was considered reactionary, a stooge of the British government, and so on, was a distinct possibility and probably closer to the truth. That Obafemi Awolowo was involved in such an attempt was a charge that I found incompatible with the man’s nature—he was legalist-constitutionalist to a fault. Chike Obi was an astute reader of politics, quite close to Awolowo, and he was contemptuous of those charges. I visited him at Kirikiri prison a few times, taking, naively, a bottle of cognac to keep him company. The bottle was taken into charge by the prison officer, who promised that it would be kept among his other possessions until his release. That was my first intimation that such indulgences were not permitted on the prison menu.
    Tony Enahoro became Nigeria’s “most wanted,” accused of being one of the masterminds of the plot—now, that, I felt, was likely to contain more than a grain of truth. In the anticolonial struggle, Enahoro’s record was one of direct, confrontational activism, while Awolowo was a convinced, indeed punctilious, legalist. Alerted in good time of his impending arrest, Enahoro fled to Ghana, then to the United Kingdom, convinced of his safety in a thriving democracy. At the request of the Nigerian government, he was arrested and detained in London. A determined attempt to extradite him back to Nigeria to stand trial with others turned into a cause célèbre. It wound its way through the British courts, the Houses of Parliament, and the Privy Council, then the final court of appeal. Whether Enahoro was guilty or not, I found it intolerable that all the progressives were being netted and incapacitated. In any case, there was the issue of equity: any means to recover what has been unfairly or illegally acquired cannot be unfair or illegal. Electoral robbery, rather than equitable contest, was already the rule in the nation.
    Enahoro’s case now took center stage in the British Houses of Parliament— to sustain the time-honored claims of political asylum or to butter up the egos of democratic