Free You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka

consigned while we went on our romantic liberation march to southern Africa. The exceptions engaged us in serious discussions, outlined their vision not only for the nation but for the continent, and pleaded earnestly that we hurry home and join hands in building the future. Most of the time, however, as we ran eagerly to welcome the protagonists of the African Renaissance, we were bombarded by utterances that identified them as flamboyant replacements of the old colonial order, not transforming agents, not even empathizing participants in a process of liberation.
    Some turned students into pimps, in return for either immediate rewards or influence in obtaining or extending scholarships. Visiting politicians financed lavish parties for one sole purpose—to bring on the girls! They appeared to have only one ambition on the brain: to sleep with a white woman. For that privilege, in addition to discarding the dignity of their position, they would pay more than the equivalent of our monthly student allowances. We watched them heap unbelievable gifts on virtual prostitutes, among them both British and continental students. It was a lucrative time for willing “escorts.” We were not prudish; we drank and danced with them till cockcrow and took women off them between their first drink and last boast. But, we asked ourselves, were these men, who routinely conducted themselves with such gracelessness, the true representatives of a national mandate? And their version of the message of the committed minority that also urged our early return home was “Come back quickly and stake your claims. The earlier you position yourselves, the bigger your slice of the national cake!”
    I recall one publicly humiliating instance: a revered national figure in a highly sensitive political position got so carried away with his date that he paid for a one-night stand with a check, at the bottom of which, just in case his scrawl was indecipherable, he had written his name, complete with his official position. The girl, a brilliant student from an upper-class British family but a notorious nymphomaniac, flounced to our table at the students’ cafeteria and flaunted the check in our faces, asking loudly what kind of a would-be independent nation would produce a political leader who could act so stupidly. I could so easily blackmail him with this, she boasted. We succeeded in coaxing the check away from her—a medical student promised to introduce her to a new, “virile” boyfriend if she surrendered it. She agreed, and we destroyed it. She was completely indifferent to the money—it was sufficient that she had our “national figure” in her power.
    One scandal after another was hushed up by the British Home Office, which was the main sponsor of many of these “study” or “familiarization” tours—familiarization, that is, with British-style democracy, its institutions and bureaucracy. The Crown agents, the main purchasing and forwarding agents for the colonial governments and visitors, continued to ship home luxury items for our overnight Croesuses; reams of indents—the order forms—and payment demands flowed between Nigeria and the United Kingdom as the august visitors blithely took possession of goods and ignored the payment half of the transaction. Often, the Home Office stood indemnity.
    Their conduct on home territory, from the news that reached us, appeared to be of the same nature. The pan-African project was becoming farcical. The alienation of many of the first-generation leaders was total, and, for the first time, we began to wonder if the power relationship between the political elite and their people was not paralleled by that between the Boers and the black South African majority—a master-servant relationship, the monopoly of privilege by a minority, with its complement, the denial of rights or human respect to the people. We read in this a double betrayal, an