Malaria for breakfast, lunch and dinner In early summer 2005 the ‘man’ is rehearsing a stage-version of his long poem ‘Samarkand and other markets I have seen’. The venue is once again the Berlin ‘House of Cultures’, a place familiar to Wole since 1964! Since each and every one of his readings of ‘Samarkand’ has given me goose-flesh I decide to fly to Berlin and watch both rehearsals and the show. After the rehearsals Wole gives me a brief sign and we abscond to his ‘office’. This turns out to be – how could it be otherwise! – a fine Italian restaurant with some excellent..., yes: Red. The moment we arrive the padrone shows Wole to his ‘office desk’ - the table reserved for him.
After the performance I invite some friends of Wole’s and mine for a drink ‘back-stage’. But Wole never appears. In fact, he disappears, for this time nobody knows
where he has absconded.
When I fetch him at Frankfort airport a few months later for a reading in Heidelberg I ask him immediately what happened in Berlin. What made him disappear? And his telling the story occupies the better part of our bus ride to Heidelberg...
Well, it appears that a serious bout of Malaria, which had already announced its coming in the days before, had really broken out during that performance which he directed in person. But being the ‘Black Prussian’ that he is, he insisted on going through with the performance. Only to rush of to a Berlin hospital immediately after.
When his guide told the German doctor who the ‘man’ was, the good doctor decided to keep the ‘man’ there for a week, ‘just to be on the safe side’. ‘Since we do not want anything to happen to our important guest!’
On hearing this Wole went into a fit:
“You know what: when people back home will hear that Wole Soyinka was kept in hospital because of... MALARIA! I will be stripped of my nationality, my passport will be taken away, and people will drive around my house with empty tin-cans strung to ther backs of their cars. I will the laughin’ stock of the nation. And you know why? Because we in Nigeria, we have malaria for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
Having said that the ‘man’ took the prescribed pills, signed a paper absolving the professor of all responsibility for his further well-being, ordered a taxi to Tegel airport, and took the next plane home to Nigeria – never to be seen at any reception. |
