The one striking aspect of Soyinka’s unfruit-like sadness – though a familiar form of human sadness, no less – is its across-the-Niger spring; as was Biafra. It would seem that since the death of the typical man for whom Soyinka has fashioned a much-celebrated universal effusion – a boiling blend of the natural flowing from the quill, to whatever identity the social critics desires, still, and – further – to the inscrutably fettered public servant of an indeterminate political hue – he’s yet to grasp the very pith and ringing substance of what has made the Niger so dangerously attractive to his personal, winning constitution. And it appears pretty tempting to root in that this bleeding geographical outpost – which has – in the past four decades – been the well of chains, pains and misery – would stubbornly remain opaque to the student of the twilight zone of which Soyinka is a shiny example. And that prompts this question: Why, as Soyinka mourns Saro-Wiwa, has there never – since when the man died – been a change in the offending tribe of the actors who feel less remorseful in producing sadness as the essence of wielding political power? The man died when the rifle was here. The Ogoni Nine, who may have invested a lot of confidence in the lion – in the true expectation that he would – in keeping with freemason of the feeders of the mind – not only roar, but exploit the quill in a non-violent exercise to ward off whatever hostile move by the sword – although now unsuccessfully – offer some curious material for yet another chapter in the long national search in the thicket of the Niger politics. But, like the same man, who was Soyinka’s tragic, if shrewdly contrived, hero – whose death he learnt via a third party – Saro-Wiwa’s was a celebrated one – one to which he was never a witness, but heard and shared – helplessly – with the rest of humanity under the aegis and eagerness of the broadcast media that would never be held to ransom. It was a gruesome death decreed by the rifle. And even now it is still the same instrument of death that is resisting the just cause of social justice in that part of the Niger. Saro-Wiwa – by some ‘metaphorical’ reasoning – is another veritable Soyinka man; this time, a man – of universal moral appeal – who actually died; a vicarious death, so that others would not only be saved from incipient tyranny and creeping genocide, but, also, live in freedom, a decent life, as it were – in a safe environment.

As Soyinka set’s forth at dawn – most likely, upon the Ogoni Nine’s-blood “wetness of the earth” – to reflect on the series of events that led to Saro-Wiwa’s death, he may take solace from the fact the Napoleonic constructs of the late environmentalist have chased oppressors away from the land – in the honest expectation that his spirit, the politics and struggle that informed his moral persuasion would rest and abide with his brethren. Still, Soyinka thinks that almost everyone was as guilty for failing to prevent the Abacha regime from executing the Ogoni Nine. His sadness, here, is accentuated by the unavailing John the Baptist in him – an ignored lonely voice in the wilderness, who shouted himself hoarse. Because he knew the extreme Abacha could go, he refused to be taken in by the brightness of that very day, while he was in Auckland, New Zealand.

The photographic memory of the inky cloudiness – back home – several time zones away from his eastern location – made him to take a usual stance on Saro-Wiwa’s fate: death. The meteorological contrast between Auckland and Abuja were, for Soyinka, quite confounding. Perhaps, tugged by a vague desire to be sanguine, that out there in Auckland – where was a ritual mass of influential policy-makers from former British colonies – Soyinka would have been given to think that all the atmospheric mercies would translate to some blessings: making the Saro-Wiwa-led Ogoni campaigners a bunch green fruits – forbidden for consumption without gastronomic options by a psychopathic tyrant. But, in taking a fatalistic position on what awaited Saro-Wiwa et al, there was a Soyinka who could not afford the self-cutting luxury of “a wary walking”, which the brightness of Auckland – a brightness that would have been sharpened by a threat of consuming economic sanctions – just in case Saro-Wiwa et al were executed – would have craved. He was, put literally, the offending – if less visible, but swaying – inky cloudiness that had a telegraphic punch between Auckland and Abuja.

In all his private reflections – in his hotel room – far removed from the sham that was the Commonwealth Summit – Soyinka was sure that the bounteous brightness – out there in Auckland – was an invitation to the ravaging adder, which was set to consume its forcefully saddened fruits.

Critics are very likely to fault Soyinka’s thoughts on the Ogoni Nine in his forth-coming You Must Set Forth At Dawn to the extent that he bothered too much about the failure of the Commonwealth Summit to hold back Abacha’s fangs. How many of the summiteers were conscious of their duty to protect human rights outside the turf of politics? Should Soyinka have bothered less about the politics of the struggle for the life of the Ogoni Nine given the lion’s experience in the course of which the man died? Maybe not, because – as in the past – the issue at stake was precious human life.

It is true that since Gleneagles – augmented by the Harare Declaration – Commonwealth policy-makers had pledged to make respect for human rights and an unrestricted access to justice an abiding feature of political performance and good governance, with an eye to making where once the sun never set a sun-fed example for other blocs – what appears lost to Soyinka – like the summiteers – was that the despot in Abacha couldn’t be perturbed by the threat of sanctions; not when there was an already conquered civil society to share in the sad fruit of his destruction of human life.