Free You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka Page A

act of treachery from within. We came to only one conclusion: the writers and artists brigade could wait— first, it was essential to secure our rear. The weapons of confrontation need not be the lethal kind; we could join forces with the progressives, make trenchant use of the pen and the stage, propagate progressive ideas, mobilize the people, and expose their betrayers. The contested arena would be strewn with words and polemics, not soaked in gore. My adopted muse would remain Ogun, but only he of the biting lyric.
    Alas, that willful deity would refuse to bow to mortal preferences within his dual nature!

Reunion with Ogun

    A SPECIAL BOND, A VERY PERSONAL COMMUNION, WITH THE ROAD HAS remained an essential part of my relation with the physical world from so early in childhood that I can no longer recall how I came to embrace, almost osmotically, the road as the fusing agency. This went beyond the merely physical— the road’s linkage of Isara, my father’s birthplace, and Abeokuta, my maternal origin, where I was also born and mainly raised. The forest paths and lanes that laced the rust-roof farmsteads and lush farms fed the rudimentary roads between villages and towns, providing a seamless weave of mystery and discovery. The women traders from Isara, heads pressed down with bales and baskets, who trod those roads and pathways every market day laden with merchandise, perfumed the household in Aké, the rockbound parsonage of childhood. They were caravans from distant lands, their indigo-dyed feet covered in red laterite as they filed into our backyard, bringing the exotic, animistic world of Isara into the Christian aura of Aké. Then, right from my first journey between those two axes of my then total existence, in a wood-paneled lorry, jammed against basketfuls of vegetables, yams, dried fish, beads and trinkets, bales of
adire, kijipa,
and
aso oke,
17 the still vegetal passages opened up into a succession of way stations before the final destination. The road was a magic lantern whose projections, by some potent hand hidden in those dense forests, unwound like a sash of multiple designs on which we rode from marvel to marvel.
    This revelation of the road’s infinite resources endured for a while, competing with the railway, which had an ambiance all its own, its rhythmic raucousness subdued, turned even mesmerizing between stations by the pristine awesomeness of the nature through which it snaked, leaving the viscera suspended between a pastoral innocence and the chants of commerce that began with an echo and invocation of the names of the market outposts—Olokemeji, Otta, Wasimi, Lafenwa. . . . The women were my first mystics of the road, but they were no less palpable, powerful, and political. It was the same women, or their market companions, who formed the vanguard of the assault on the feudal bastion of a repressive monarch, the Alake of Abeokuta. Despite the support of the colonial district officer, they routed him and sent him into a prolonged exile.
    With the years, the magic of the road would begin to dissipate, but not so completely that, by the year of my first homecoming at the end of my study stint in England in 1960, I could not recover, or maybe simply stubbornly imbue, this ageless sibling with something of its childhood retentions whenever I motored along the highways. The five-year interruption in England and Europe did, through the road’s pure functionality, its place on the landscape as an efficient conveyor belt, sober me down somewhat, but not entirely. A special responsiveness remained, even patches of its mystic rapport.
    Is it necessary to admit that I felt little of that mystic rapport with the highways of Europe? Maybe there were once gods in Europe, but they are all dead or have migrated elsewhere—except perhaps those in the isolated crags and music of Wales, the poetry and drama of the Irish, the extant rituals of the Celts, and the fjords of