You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka

Author:Wole Soyinka
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307432902
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

EVEN WITHOUT THE rebuff by Vatsa’s fate, the trio of literary “elder statesmen” knew that any intervention by them, after the next attempt to topple Babangida, in 1990, was doomed from the start. Even by Nigerian standards, it had been exceptionally bloody. The mood of the military could be gauged in advance, and the reprisals that followed bore it out, evoking an image of the gutters of Lagos clogged with blood. No fewer than eighty officers and soldiers—mostly from the Middle Belt of the nation—had been led in batches to the execution stakes. It became known as the Orkar coup, after one of its leaders, Gideon Orkar, and earned notoriety not merely from the bloodiness of the attempt but from the unusual agenda of the coup makers, outlined to the nation in their very first radio broadcast. No fewer than five states from the far North, identified as bastions of feudal hegemony, were to be excised from the Nigerian national entity. They were to be cast into limbo, to find their fortunes as best as they could or else reform themselves along specified lines and only then apply for reabsorption into the Nigerian state! The conditions for their readmittance would be revealed in further announcements, the broadcast promised. It was a unique agenda in the history of coups d’état.

Funded by a businessman, Great (his real name) Ogboru, an invading force had successfully trained in secret, undetected for months, in the fenced compound of a fish depot in Ikorodu, some thirty kilometers from Lagos. One section seized the national radio station in Ikoyi while the other moved on Dodan Barracks and shot its way right into Babangida’s bedroom with the single-minded purpose of eliminating him, together with his family. From all reports, Babangida seized a submachine gun and fought back but was stopped and spirited out by his bodyguards.

The machine gun mounted on the armored car stationed for the protection of the seat of government had earlier been spiked by an insider, and the young aide-de-camp who rushed to man the gun for the defense of his master was easily mown down. The invaders decimated the sparse force that remained for the defense of Dodan Barracks while others sought out the senior officers of Babangida’s government. The attempt would have succeeded—even if short-lived—but for an incredible act of neglect by the coup plotters: their failure to disable the telephone lines. Mobile phones were a rarity in 1990, even within the military. Where they existed, they were so temperamental as to be mostly superfluous. This enabled a missed target, the chief of army staff, who happened to have departed earlier from his anticipated location—quite a bag of glitches!—to make probing phone calls, determine the leaning and situation of his respondents, and mobilize loyalists. Suitably reinforced, that officer, Sani Abacha, launched a counterattack while the coup makers were already celebrating their presumed victory. The rest was a rout, and Babangida’s government exacted a terrible vengeance on the losers.

The afternoon of that coup attempt, I was present at the scene that would witness the fiercest battle—Dodan Barracks itself.

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