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

Scandinavia. Greece has kept her gods—the peaks and gorges of Delphi remain eternally god-suffused. Also, grudgingly perhaps, the Carpathian Mountains of Yugoslavia. The new gods and goddesses of Europe, alas, were mainly to be found on the cinema screen and on the pop stage; confronted with their iconic eruptions, I was able to understand, at last, the true meaning of pagan adulation.
    It was good fortune that I could return home—where the gods were still only in a state of hibernation—under conditions of personal independence. I arrived on the wheels of a Rockefeller fellowship on New Year’s Day of 1960 to research traditional dramatic forms. My most essential piece of equipment was a Land Rover, and that vehicle became an extension of myself through which I negotiated relationships with the overall society. I penetrated east, north, south at will and toured the entire West African coast on the trail of festivals and performing companies, keeping touch with gods and goddesses everywhere and celebrating their seasons, encountering and savoring exotic names such as Dorma Ahenkro, Koton Karfi, Maiduguri, and Ouagadougou, constantly at war with self-installed lords of remote inland borders who held the keys to the gates of some invisible, paradisial independencies that presumably floated above the artificially divided peoples of West Africa.
    My forays outside Nigeria were infrequent, but they triggered a habit of marveling at a meaningless separation. Ghanaian, Togolese, and so on—just what did these terms mean to those who were so described? Culture and language differed within each nation as frequently and as profoundly as they found identities across the borders of such nation spaces; the arbitrariness and illogicality of their groupings hit any traveler in the face—and remained meaningless to a huge majority of those whom the borders enclose or separate. It was true of the preindependence entities, and it is still mostly true today.
    The road and I thus became partners in the quest for an extended self-discovery. Early morning was my favorite hour; you caught the road’s exhalation as it rose from the tarmac with the sun’s heated awakening, piercing the early mists in a proprietorial mood—you owned the road and all that lay revealed along its rises and plunges, its contortions, and its arrow directness on both flatland and crests that sometimes appeared aimed at a horizon shimmering at the very edge of the world. Even the rarest encounter with another vehicle in that sublime hour was an act of generous concession on your part; it was only your early-morning kindness that permitted it to trundle past, another wraith from the bowels of the earth.
    I would throw a few clothes into what I called the “Mungo Park” trunk that remained permanently screwed down into the back of the jeep. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could substitute for setting out at that hour of the gods’ retreat. Then, over the next days and weeks—Akure; Idanre, the mountain retreat of Ogun; Kaura Namoda, a landscape of baobab sentinels ushering the traveler into Sokoto and the sonorities of the muezzin; the return track, hugging the Dahomean border; Kishi, cornfields into the horizon; Iseyin, weavers’ looms under lean-tos; Abeokuta, balanced on boulders; and—Lagos. I camped in villages or in the truck, or sometimes gratefully enjoyed the courtesy of rest houses built for the colonial district officers, where the uniformed waiter, immaculate in standard attire, service-conditioned from colonial days, would pad in gently in the morning with a tea tray. . . .
    But I did not ask for tea!
Yes, master,
he (old enough to be my father or even grandfather) replies, setting down the tray and pulling back the curtains. . . . No! Leave that alone, I’m not awake. . . .
Yes, master,
he replies, pulling the curtain open all the way. . . . Will master like me to make fried or scrambled eggs
with the