Over the forty or so years that the memoir charts, Soyinka's relationship to both his art and his politics underwent drastic changes. As a young man Soyinka had great faith in the artist's ability to inspire political and social transformation through his work. He writes that he first resolved to use his art in a politically conscious way after being disillusioned with the Nigerian nationalists he met in England in the 1950s, the very nationalists who were then being groomed to lead independent Nigeria after the departure of the British. The ardent fervor with which Soyinka and his fellow students initially ran to greet their nation's designated liberators quickly turned into dismay. The nationalists were pretentious and shallow, disdainful toward the very people they were supposed to represent. "Their version of the message of the committed minority...was, 'Come back quickly and stake your claims. The earlier you position yourselves, the bigger your slice of the national cake!'" It soon became clear to the young Soyinka that these were not to be "the transforming agents...in a process of liberation" but merely the "flamboyant replacements of the old colonial order."

Upon returning to Nigeria in 1960, therefore, Soyinka began to develop his art as a means to "propagate progressive ideas, mobilize the people, and expose their [new] betrayers." His chosen medium--drama--was effective in this respect, since it was performed live in front of audiences to which a Nigerian novelist would not have had access. Almost immediately after his return, he infuriated the new ruling elite when the run of his play A Dance of the Forests overlapped with the country's independence celebrations that year. The play was eerily prescient in its depiction of the corruption of postcolonial Nigerian politics.

Soon, however, Soyinka came up against the limitations of art as a tool of political and social transformation. In 1965 the regional elections in Soyinka's western region were rigged, taking away power from the elected party and giving it to the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), an ally of the corrupt federal government controlled by the north. The electoral crisis marked a turning point for Soyinka. He writes that the crisis,

with its lack of alternatives, informed me with a quiet certitude that I was finally tired of dramatic sketches that, however scabrous, drew only symbolic blood from the veins of Power. Suddenly, that language of intervention...became inadequate, even self-indulgent.

The creation of art, no matter how subversive, no longer satisfied Soyinka's hunger for direct, meaningful action. So when he was informed one day that the NNDP was planning to announce the results of the stolen elections on the radio that evening, thereby making them official, he decided to take matters into his own hands. That night, in the city of Ibadan, he held up at gunpoint the station that was to broadcast the announcement, and made the station's duty officers replace the tape announcing the results with his own tape, which called on the NNDP to drop its stolen mandate, leave town and take its reprobates with it. This extraordinarily daring act placed Soyinka, who had already made a name for himself in Nigeria and abroad as a playwright, at the forefront of the country's opposition movement.

From then on, he would be drawn time and again into the country's and the continent's political turmoil. In rich, vivid prose, You Must Set Forth at Dawn depicts these numerous political entanglements: His attempt, when civil war erupted between Biafran secessionists and the government in 1967, to create a bipartisan "Third Force" that would bring an end to the conflict; his efforts, along with the writers Chinua Achebe and John Pepper Bekederemo-Clark, to intervene on behalf of a general unjustly accused of treason and sentenced to death by the dictator Ibrahim Babangida; his struggle, during the first unstable days of postapartheid South Africa, to engineer a meeting between Nelson Mandela and his political rival Mongosuthu Buthelezi, chief of the KwaZulu nation; his endeavor, in the first year of Abacha's reign, to organize a million-man march to protest the dictator. Alas, Soyinka's efforts were not always successful, and sometimes he paid dearly for them. He spent almost two and a half years in prison for the stance he took during the Biafran Civil War, a detention that would become the subject of his 1972 memoir The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka. Nonetheless, his growing international fame as a writer and persecuted dissident also enhanced his clout, affording him privileges enjoyed by few other Nigerians. His signature Afro--which grew ever more distinctive as it turned white with age--was recognized everywhere he went. In one episode in the book, he describes making his way through a string of impenetrable roadblocks during riots in the capital Lagos simply by sticking his head out of the car window. At the roadblocks, he would immediately be recognized by the attending guards and ushered through.

Soyinka's memoir makes clear why a writer in his position could not simply stand on the sidelines in the great battles of postindependence Africa. Yet the book also suggests the perils to a writer's integrity of involvement in the dubious world of politics, particularly the moral gray zone created by dictatorships. As Soyinka admits, to be both politically effective and ethical is not always an easy balance to strike. As he puts it, "A public cause, a clamorous need, sometimes imposes choices that appear, on the surface, to contradict one's democratic convictions and, indeed, lifelong pursuits." For Soyinka, as for any other activist facing similar challenges, it was ultimately a question of the extent to which the ends justified the means. Thus, he sometimes found himself confronted with the dilemma of whether to collaborate with the very dictators he denounced--a phenomenon he characterizes as "dining with the devil." While harassed by many of Nigeria's dictators, Soyinka was also courted by some, mainly those who sought to improve their PR image through association with him. Under certain circumstances, Soyinka found cooperation justifiable. In one of the more humorous episodes in this memoir, he recalls working with the military head of state Olusegun Obasanjo to steal back an ancestral bronze head of a Yoruba deity that had been stolen decades earlier by a German archeologist. With Obasanjo's blessing, Soyinka traveled to Brazil and managed to smuggle out the mask from the private collection of an art collector, only to discover later that the mask was not the real thing but a cheap replica of the original--itself securely ensconced within the Museum of Mankind in London.

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