Review

Another 'comment' deserving of a post all to itself. This review was left on my blog on November 28. Read on...

Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun
By Amanta Usukpam Ukpaghiri

I finished reading Half of a Yellow Sun and was left with a lingering sense of sadness at having completed the novel too quickly. I wished it continued and that l continued to read it, perhaps, for a very long time. It is a masterpiece of a work, destined to be a classic; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has trod where many others have feared to tread. She has taken the pain and suffering and horror of a people – the Igbos -- and given them novelistic prominence, and by so doing, asked historical questions that still demand answers. She, in effect, stands athwart the current amnesia in Nigeria and requests that the country comes to terms with the Igbo sub-nationality and either accept it as a full member of the polity -- or leave it alone to its own devices. Admirably, she is (as she said in an interview) “insistently and consciously” Igbo – and unlike several economic climbers in today’s Nigeria, is never shamelessly apologetic that she is Igbo.

This book is truly more than a novel – although even as a novel, it is extremely well crafted, brimming with characters that come alive and leap off the pages and embody events that unquestionably took place in the history of Nigeria. Indeed, this book is a form of historical narrative that tells the story of Igbos’ vibrant engagement with Nigeria in the 1960s before the civil war, the massacres of tens of thousands of Igbos following military intervention in politics, and the period of the civil war itself from 1967 to 1970.

Chimamanda has achieved several noble things with one stroke. She has furnished literature with simple, elegant and sharp sentences and a (albeit horror) story beautifully woven together in paragraph after paragraph. She has also written a history of the Igbos during a certain period of time. Finally she has presented a literary monument to love and relationships and hope and human dignity. Her characters - - their lives, their triumphs, and their failures – speak to the enduringness of love and truth and the dominance of the human spirit.

It is simply amazing that Chimamanda is only 28 years’ old -- she was born 7 years after the war ended. Yet she tells her story with a level of insight, maturity, compassion, knowledge and deftness that belies her age. It is abundantly clear that her writing is the product of tremendous research on her part of the events that led up to and including the civil war. This is fiction based on facts – or “faction.”

Chimamanda’s characters are seen in every day life in Nigeria. Ugwu exists in several houseboys in Nigeria with ambition and intelligence who continue to rise by dint of application of their brains and hard work and focus to attainment of lives of accomplishment. Ugwu’s sense of ownership of his Master, Madam and Baby is quite widespread among faithful houseboys. Odenigbo – the professor of mathematics at University of Nigeria, Nsukka -- is the quintessential intellectual, perhaps, with his head caught up in the clouds with numerous ideological constructs and deconstructs. Kainene and Olanna are extremely human characters whose sisterly relationship with each other ironically blossomed in the midst of the war – and became warmer as they came to experience the horrors of the civil war together. Richard comes across as familiarly tragic – wanting to belong to and in Biafra and never belonging or never accepted as belonging.

Which brings us to the concept of belonging. It is a concept that Chimamanda explores in her novel. Miss Adebayo was never seen as belonging; and of course, neither was Richard. Indeed, the Igbos who had lived in the Northern part of Nigeria for several decades were never seen as belonging. Nor were the Igbos who had lived in Lagos: Chinua Achebe escaped death in Lagos during the massacre of Igbos by a hairsbreadth. The parallels between Igbos and the Jews are really striking. Belonging is a potent concept; witness the current acrimonious debate raging in the industrialized countries over immigration, which is inextricably linked to who belongs and who does not.

This is a story that has universal applications even as it is largely set in Igbo land. It tells the story of political conflict and war and love and hate and betrayal and oppression and human affirmation that is contemporary and resonates with the human condition.

It will be eminently interesting to see how this “transcendent novel” in the words of Publishers Weekly – which has been received with great literary acclaim in the United States and Europe – will be received in Nigeria. It is safe to predict that it will be seen in certain quarters through dogmatic lenses that will uncritically seek to brazenly question the novel’s premises. But this will be largely besides the point – because Chimamanda has rendered a classic and has told a story about a historical necessity – the defense of and by a people from being wiped out from the face of the map.

Just a few quibbles. It was 20 and not 50 pounds that was vengefully decreed by the Government of Nigeria as the amount to be (and which was) given in exchange for all the money held by each former Biafran. Before the war, Cross River Igbos would have been referred to as Bende people and not Imo people. And the settlement in Port-Harcourt would have been called Umuokirisi and not Rumuokirisi – that came after the war. But these are mere quibbles and do not affect the historical accuracy of the novel regarding the lives and times of the Igbos before and during the civil war.

Chimamanda has rightly been described as the 21st-century successor to Chinua Achebe, and she indeed displays the same sophisticated simplicity in her writing and similar deep historical insights laced with philosophical wisdom. Indeed, Achebe describes her as being “endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers” and asserts that she “came almost fully made.” The serious bent of her writings is to be widely applauded. There surely is a literary ferment afoot among young Nigerian writers in the diaspora. And Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is at the crest of that ferment. To end with Achebe’s words: In writing Half of a Yellow Sun, “Adichie knows what is at stake and what to do about it.”

Amanta Usukpam Ukpaghiri

Review: Half of a Yellow Sun

A Blazing Sun - The Storyteller Returns
By Ikhide R Ikheloa

I write this for James Meredith, the distinguished first black student of OLEMISS, and for John Hawkins, the distinguished first black Cheerleader of OLEMISS. Courage counts for something. Yes!

My time is no longer mine and I miss my Muse running alongside my railroad tracks urging me to say something, anything. In between stealing sideways glances at my Muse and struggling mightily to satisfy demons born of my life’s choices, I have managed to hold on to just one passion – reading. I just finished reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new book, Half of a Yellow Sun and if I don’t read another book for a long time, memories of this epic tome will keep me warm in the hibernation of the coming winter. But first, before I slink off into the trenches of my own doing, I must rise to salute Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, one of the finest story tellers to come out of Africa in a long time. Out of the seething, smoldering ruins of our collective horrid judgment, a giant Phoenix is born, worthy prodigy of the master Phoenix Chinua Achebe. Achebe lives! Adichie lives! Hurrah for the resilience of the human spirit. Chimamanda, I celebrate the mystery of you, and I luxuriate in the reassuring warmth of your gift. I salute you, silent witness to a story that never left, that won’t go away. I salute you, insistent bugler of yet another coming.

This book starts out being about Nigeria in the sixties and the Biafran war. Ultimately, it is about our collective destiny in that failed state called Nigeria. A delightful cast of well-formed characters carries the burden of this book rather effortlessly: The cast is led by a set of twins; the vivacious Olanna and the enigmatic, mysterious Kainene, renaissance women, well schooled, and well traveled. A boy Ugwu arrives from the village to be a houseboy to "Master" Odenigbo, a university don and we witness the growth of the boy and Biafra’s dreams (and demise) through his awe-struck eyes. There is also Richard an English man loitering in Nigeria as a writer who also becomes Kainene’s lover. It is an expertly written book, professionally edited, one that raises the bar for how great books should be written. In Half of a Yellow Sun, we see mature relationships, strong men and women comfortable in their individual roles within relationships and actually enjoying themselves. There is the liberated Olanna who actually turns down marriage proposals from her long-term lover because she is enjoying the relationship. Refreshing.

When I think of this book, I think of words like, awe, admiration. And envy. Envy at such a beautiful product. Adichie manages to cobble together several complex stories and she carries out this feat with amazing, unceasing, unrelenting grace. In writing the book, Adichie makes the point eloquently that we are the sum of our experiences. Harrowing is another word that will not let go of me – the ethnic cleansing, the inhumanity of it all and you ask, for what purpose? Everything is scarce; joy, food, sex, and when it comes, it is devoured in joyful song. What is it about sex and war? The sex when it happens is luscious and the reader’s lungs and loins erupt in unadulterated joy. Adichie brings together all of the principal characters for a day of reckoning. Well, almost all the principal characters. Unless I missed it, I did not read any mention of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief Nnamdi Azikiwe. You can almost forgive Adichie for not mentioning Azikiwe, Awolowo in this epic. They probably deserve to be deleted from memory, who knows… Besides, this is a novel. Go write your own if you are that enamoured of those two figures.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a muffled collage of courage, grace, rage, injustice, horror, and the resilience of the human spirit. Breathtaking, simply stunning is how I would describe the experience of reading Adichie’s literary salvo. Reading this book was akin to taking an unforgettable field trip, an eclectic tour through the dainty halls of several eclectic minds. It is hard to believe that only one human being wrote this epic. And yes, in my humble opinion, this book is the first epic to come out of Nigeria since Chinua Achebe’s trilogy of books: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God. This book is so good, it is easy to forget that this is the product of research, of a most unjust war, a pogrom that came and went many moons before this story teller was born. I have to admit that I bought the book expecting it to be contrived – after all I thought, Adichie was not there during the war, what can she tell me about the war? I was pleasantly disappointed that my expectation was roundly rebuffed by this writer’s formidable strengths.

Adichie pulls off the stunning feat of fully immersing the reader in a past that is more glorious than today’s quagmire, civil war or no civil war. She captures with unnerving clarity, the unctuous self righteousness of Nigeria’s ruling class and her conniving intellectuals - a cultural pathology that thrives to this day. In the book as in today’s reality, we witness the aping of alien values, the total lack of originality in anything the contemporary Nigerian embarks on, from creative writing to creative kleptomania. The most comical representation of our condition is Harrison the Nigerian cook proudly displaying his knowledge of western recipes, and ribald ignorance of Nigerian recipes: He proudly shows off one of his signature counterfeit productions - "a bean and mushroom soup, a pawpaw medley, chicken in a cream sauce speckled with greens and a lemon tart as pudding!" Graham Greene should be dying of laughter in his grave.

Half of a Yellow Sun is several complex stories, simply told. Hints of pulp fiction tug at the reader’s arrogance and it says to the reader, Get off your high horse – why must communication be obtuse? The style grows on you, surprises you like a charming lover in the night, grabbing you from behind, stirring your loins, startling you with brutal clarity and slashing a smile-gash in your happy face. And there is beauty in the book’s simplicity. It is sheer pleasure to luxuriate in the poetry of pretty words strung together daintily like lace. And the attention to detail is intimidating – weeks after reading this book, I can still smell the flowers and the men’s cologne. Adichie does have a thing for flowers and scents.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a messy journey narrated with neat precision, at times, told languidly, at other times, told with malaria-feverishness and sometimes you wonder where this is all leading, where is Biafra in all of this, etc, but then if it was a tidy story it would be an awful book. Life is a mess. This book is a mess. This is a good book, this is a great book. And sometimes, the book does drift, seemingly aimlessly. One of the main characters, Olanna goes to Kano to visit an ex-boyfriend. The purpose of this trip is not quite clear – why this restlessness other than to show that an Igbo once loved a Northerner? In any case, any seeming drift in the book is more than compensated for by the delightful story oozing from virtually every sentence. It is like sitting in a verandah in Lagos (choose your favourite Nigerian city) and reveling in raw street theater. The book’s chapters move deftly back and forth between the early sixties and the late sixties, between a gathering fear (apologies to the poet Olu Oguibe) and a relentless pogrom. This technique is effective in keeping the reader fully engaged in an absorbing story. Reading the book, I felt like I was watching a gripping movie. This should be made into a full length movie for those who choose not to or are unable to read about our history.

And three decades after that shame of a war, not much has changed. The corruption is eerily the same; actually one gets tired of reading about these things, the past posing as the present tense. Only in Nigeria. We see ourselves in virtually all of the characters - Chief Okonji – the Finance Minister is a sadly familiar caricature, not much different from today’s jokesters in Aso Rock. Refried beans must keep for ever. Too bad for Nigeria. Adichie says this book is about Biafra. It seems to me that this is more than Biafra. This is really all about the horrid fate of the long-suffering people trapped in that failed state called Nigeria. We see African intellectuals at their most unctuous and self-serving. We see them in their nakedness, aping rather uncritically Western values, trying so desperately to be white folks. Graham Greene would love this book. The intellectuals put together a babble-fest at every opportunity as they cry louder than the bereaved in alien tongues. Nothing has changed today; if anything, things have gotten worse. After all these years, Adichie’s book is eerily contemporary because the social and cultural pathologies that gave birth to the pogrom called Biafra are roaring alive today, very much alive and hungry for another death of a dream.

In Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie adroitly exposes the near-myth of physical geographic boundaries and sews together new geographic vistas that are not necessarily contiguous, and she challenges the reader to think out of the box of traditional relationships. Yes, the world has changed since Biafra. The reader upon reading the book can feel the palpable and lingering frustration of witnessing the fraying of hurtful memories, of injustices wilting away on the bloodied picket fences of changing boundaries and allegiances. Enemies are marrying enemies, creating new allegiances and new enemies. We do not know our friends, alas.

Adichie may be accused of reaching too much for balance, for objectivity. She is not going to endure herself to Biafra die-hards. This book is definitely not an uncritical sentimental hagiography of Biafra; indeed some people would be displeased at the searing look into the perfidy, the moral and leadership decay within the rank and file of the Biafran army. Adichie exposes the hypocrisy and the self righteousness of those who convinced the populace to go to a war they had no business fighting. Good warriors negotiate from a position of strength. From my perspective, the Biafran war was an unnecessary turkey shoot and Adichie’s story spreads the responsibility for that pogrom to all, not just the Federal side.

Half of a Yellow Sun is perhaps not the definitive book about Biafra. Those interested in an extensive reading on Biafra may do well to also do their own research, starting with the useful glossary of books at the back of Half of a Yellow Sun. War is war, full of broken limbs, bloody calabashes filled with decapitated heads and broken dreams. Adichie is not able to tell us what sets this particular war apart from the others. She does not try to and in a counter-intuitive way, I see this as one of the book’s strengths. Adichie does not try too much to please. The good news is that there is not a shortage of books about Biafra. Dr. Daniel Awduche has compiled a great list. The book’s one strength is that although it is marketed as a book about Biafra, the reader’s senses are assaulted by a panorama of images that envelopes just about every land that is trapped in that country called Nigeria. The book is an amazing journey that is best savored by actually reading it. Regardless, Adichie does a great job of confronting the enigma that was Biafra – in my view, a tragically flawed reaction to a horrid injustice

Adichie’s book is likely to stoke the debate about the use of contrived English to perhaps improved readability in the West and reach a wider market, a debate that was started with the release of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation. In the book, the hapless character Harrison employs a version of English that is strikingly similar to Iweala’s experiment with rotten, I would say, contrived English in Beasts of No Nation: "You are not knowing how to bake German chocolate cake?" "You are not knowing what is rhubarb crumble?" (p 166) Contrived English trumps Pidgin English one more time. It is mercifully not as cloying, not as annoying as Iweala’s abuse of the technique and Adichie executes it quite well. In a sense, she may have bestowed some credibility to Iweala’s experiment. Regardless once senses that the African writer still struggles to reach a mass market in the West through the use of interesting techniques – for instance Igbo sentences are italicized and immediately translated in English: "Yes! Yes! Ojukwu, nye anyi egbe! Give us guns! Iwe di anyi n’obi! There is anger in our hearts! (p 171).

Adichie does not look back in anger, she does not look back with just a clinical detachment; she makes us look back at history galloping back in fast furious reverse to challenge our current condition. Our collective destiny is history, fast forwarded, in reverse. Adichie’s book challenges us to have courageous conversations and assign responsibilities for the pogrom to all parties so that we may never pass this way again. It is a crying shame that after all these years there are no fitting monuments, no usable museum to the memory of Biafra. Adichie’s book has put all of that to rest. The restless spirits of our victims rustle through the pages of Half of a Yellow Sun. Buy a copy of this epic, read, relax and await yet another coming of our collective poor judgment.

Half of a Yellow Sun hints at shades of everything the reader has experienced, indeed we are the sum of our experiences. There are strong hints of George Orwell’s Animal Farm as the revolution that was Biafra turns into a dog-eat-dog race for survival. In his stirring poetry, the character, Okeoma the poet-warrior bears strong hints of Chris Okigbo:

"Brown
With the fish-glow sheen of a mermaid,
She appears,
Bearing silver dawn
And the sun attends her,
The mermaid
Who will never be mine." p 324

In Half of a Yellow Sun, the telling of our story breaks the reader into a thousand emotional pieces. It is like the story teller takes a wooden bat to all of your conscience and exposes you for the fake that you are. I have not felt this way since visiting the Jewish Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and the Hector Petersen Museum in Soweto. This book is a museum. And if you care about Nigeria, you must visit this museum.

I salute you, Chimamanda.

- Ikhide R. Ikheloa

Reviewing WS

Not the Wasted Generation

By Emman Usman Shehu

The importance of memoirs cannot be underestimated because they provide insights that sometimes cannot be found in history books. So memoirs are essential towards our understanding of a particular history, because of the knowledge, however little, they pass on. The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche noted in 1873:

Every person and every people, according to its goals,
forces, and needs uses a certain knowledge of the past,
sometimes as monumental history, sometimes as
antiquarian history, and sometimes as critical history, but
not as a crowd of pure thinkers only watching life closely,
not as people eager for knowledge, individuals only
satisfied by knowledge, for whom an increase of
understanding is the only goal, but always only for the
purpose of living and, in addition, under the command
and the highest guidance of this life.

That need for understanding the past becomes all the more urgent for Nigerians whose nation’s history has thus far been anything but peaceful and successful. Nigeria continues to be a puzzle of underachievement, a conundrum of missed opportunities, a riddle of failures, an enigma of misplaced values, and a mystery of misused potentials and roads not taken.

Little wonder that at his 50th birthday anniversary in 1984, Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, frustrated by the grip of hopelessness and despair on the nation, lamented that his "has been a wasted generation". But has it really been a "wasted generation" ?

You Must Set Forth At Dawn, Soyinka’s third memoir, following Ake:The Years of Childhood and the faction, Ibadan – The Penkelemes Years, provides an intriguing retraction of that famous phrase. At the end of what is easily his lengthiest and most fascinating book, a hefty 500 pages in the American edition sans pictures, appendix, and index, and an almost intimidating 626 pages in the Nigerian edition courtesy of the Ibadan-based Bookcraft, there is no evidence that his generation has been a wasted one.

Yes, the generation has not fulfilled the promise with which it emerged as the potential successor to the local leaders who had overseen the country’s transformation from a British colony to an independent state. But even as students of higher institutions in the United Kingdom, Soyinka and his colleagues could see the quality of leadership that the country was about to be blessed with.

The nationalists, the first-generation elected leaders and
legislators of our semi-independent nation, had begun to
visit Great Britain in droves. We watched their preening,
their ostentatious spending, and their cultivated
condescension, even disdain toward the people they
were supposed to represent. There were exceptions, but, in
the main, they did not appear to have emerged from the
land and people we had left behind when we journeyed out
to acquire some skills and learning. While we dreamed of
marching south to liberate Southern Africa, they saw the
nation as a prostrate victim to be ravished. (P. 48)

Contrast that with how this young generation saw itself:

We knew, beyond all doubt, our place within the evolving
organism of new nations. We, the young generation of that
independence phase, a renaissance people who would
transform the strange bequest into a world. The only way to
grasp this confidence, this self-assurance is to treat it as pure
knowledge. Not intuition, not revelation, not blind faith, not
ambition, not deductive reasoning or a conscious sense of
mission – no, simply as knowledge in its purest, unassailable
form. And we were working in our various fields – quite
indifferent to any special designation – to bring about this
renaissance. (P. 43)

That the renaissance has failed to materialise especially in Nigeria is not totally the fault of these purveyors of progress.

Soyinka’s account shows how the euphoria of Independence progressively turned into a cycle of bloodletting, rigged elections, coups, a civil war, and more coups. And yes, more of his generation gradually become part of the ruling establishment that leads the nation from one disaster to the other. But it is also his generation that sets the standard in various fields of human endeavour; standards that are yet to be surpassed, for instance, in the field of literature.

It is also his generation that has been at the forefront of opposing the variants of misrule that the country has experienced, with Soyinka himself becoming an arrowhead of sorts from the moment he daringly swops the tape of the recorded speech of the Premier of Western Nigeria with his own denouncing the rigged elections.

One shudders to think of what would have become of Nigeria if there had been no consolidated resistance to the various forms of misrule and tyranny that have been our lot since the Union Jack was lowered October, 1960. In one sense then, You Must Set Forth At Dawn is a tribute to the resistance that has ensured Nigeria has not gone down the drains. A resistance that has paid the price in many ways. But it is a passionate ode to steadfast, loyal and sacrificial friendship. The roles of his bossom friends especially Femi Johnson and Oyetunji Aboyade are crucial to several of his interventions in the nation’s political arena. Their loss is fittingly captured in this epic narrative. Indeed the tribute to Femi Johnson influences the structure of the memoir.

But this epic is more than a tribute. It also enables us understand and appreciate, and rightly so since it is through his perspective that the narration takes place, Soyinka as political motivator, activist, writer, hunter, wine connoisseur and noble Nobel laureate.

First, it is evident that the author is driven by the credo of justice. When the quest for justice possesses him, he undertakes highly risky ventures like going to negotiate the possibility of a truce on the Biafran side during the Nigerian Civil War, pleading a reprieve for Mamman Vatsa and other alleged coup plotters, or taking unorthodox and dangerous procedures of going into exile to escape Abacha’s murder squad. He puts everything into the resistance including the windfall from the Nobel Prize. This desire to see that justice is done propels him to intervene beyond the shores of Nigeria, to stop the bloodletting in South Africa or Northern Ireland.

Soyinka has an almost religious devotion to wine and hunting and several examples turn up frequently as attestation. Likewise, he recognises his limitations and would not be enticed into doing things he knows he does not have the capacity to deliver to the required standard. Soon after the demise of Abacha, he is courted by both Abdulsalami and a pressure group to consider taking over as the nation’s leader. He declines the offers and promptings even when there is a promise to bankroll his campaign if he accepts to contest:

My immediate objection was that I would not make
a unifying president. An influential caucus in the North-
a feudal elite whom I had never spared, and who in turn
had indoctrinated their constituency with the convenient
notion that I hated the North in its entirety – viewed me
with great suspicion. To make the ideal president, I would
first have to dismantle that lie, and that, I knew, would
require making undeserved concessions. (P.575)

Soyinka comes across as a pragmatist and this he exhibits in his religious syncretism as well as in his involvement with at least one or two military regimes. He justifies the latter thus:

It boils down, ultimately, to one’s personal confidence in
determining the length of spoon with which one dines with
the devil and one’s ability to keep a firm hold on it. This
involves deriving no advantages, no gains, no recompense
in the process – if anything, expending oneself both materially
and mentally for the attainment of a fixed and limited goal,
retaining one’s independence of action. Most deliciously
of all is the ability to walk away from the dinner table, flinging
a coin on to it as a tip for the host. (P. 215)

This justification for working with an Artful Dodger of a dictator will certainly make some wince and shake their head in total disapproval.

You Must Set Forth At Dawn is also a timely warning to Nigerians on the need to be alert, watchful and sensitive about the safety of democracy. It is a collective responsibility, the memoir strongly suggests, to ensure that the ethos of democracy is not hijacked and subverted by those who have self-serving and dictatorial tendencies and ambitions. As the nation’s history has shown, even within the scope covered by Soyinka’s account, each time democracy is undermined the task of restoration becomes more onerous, with greater sacrifices having to be made.

Although not directly stated, it is apparent that the effectiveness of the Resistance over the years has been hampered by lack of proper organisation and coordination. From the Third Force to the NADECO/NALICON era, the Resistance appears to limit itself to Lagos and some sections of the Southwest.

A major insight that this Soyinkan tome provides is that a lot of work needs to be done in the area of sorting out perceptions. There are still genuine fears within the ethnic entities of the nation. Unfortunately any dialogue that has taken place thus far seems to be only when a leader wants to manipulate the political process for a self-serving goal. Consequently the age-old fundamental concerns are given a cosmetic treatment.

In his portrayal of the various key players in Nigeria, Soyinka gleefully savages quite a handful even in the way he describes them. But the indictment of the quality of leadership Nigeria has had to put up with does not come directly from the Nobel laureate. As the black on black killings escalated in South Africa across political and ethnic lines, the danger of a civil war increasingly loomed on the horizon. Various efforts to solve the problem, including external interventions made virtually no headway, especially on the side of the African National Congress, as some hardliners would not allow for dialogue. Yet at some point Nelson Mandela and Chief Buthelezi, the Inkatha leader showed the true stuff of leadership:

The no-dialogue rhetoric continued for some months,
escalating in intensity even as the sheer statistics of
reprisal settled into a numbing spiral. Then one day,
several select assassinations and indiscriminate
massacres later, including the detonation of bombs at
political gathering, right on the heels of yet another
fire-breathing ANC bulletin that promised to wipe out
Inkatha and Inkatha’s like response, news emerged that
Nelson Mandela had quietly shunted aside his Executive
Committee and traveled out on his own to meet Buthelezi. (P. 323)

Of course, the consequence of that deft move was that South Africa pulled back from the brink of what would have been a tragic civil war.

You Must Set Forth AT Dawn comes to a tantalising end as Soyinka returns home from a physically, mentally and emotionally excruciating exile. This closure seems to indicate that Ogun permitting and without Esu intervening, another Soyinka memoir is very possible. This monumental, critical and perceptive account further proves that the Nobel Prize has been far from a "kiss of death" for Soyinka. Instead, like vintage wine, he is proving that with age even his accomplished standard of the mastery of language and its application to the public good can be surpassed.

• Emman Usman Shehu's review of You Must Set Forth At Dawn at its formal presentation in Abuja on Tuesday 5th September, 2006 at Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre. Quotes are from the Bookcraft edition.