Were one to ask the organisers of the Ake Festival, and the two  hosts lucky to have handled the book panels involving General Olusegun Obasanjo and later Professor Wole Soyinka, whether there was a collusion to ask these notable guests similar and complementary questions, the answer would certainly have been a “no”. I’m sure of this because I asked.  However, in a series of pleasant yet notable coincidences, the presence of these two giants of Nigerian history not only made immediate news, but also filled a couple of gaps in our knowledge of the country’s history as relates to their individual roles.

A few questions, below, were asked in different ways of the two guests whose appearance came days from each other:

1. What was with that telephone “that never rang” in General Obasanjo’s bedroom in Ibadan? How did Soyinka know about it anyway? And what the detail of the interaction between these two individuals at this time. To Soyinka, it was a meeting to simply relay a memorized message from Victor Banjo. For Obasanjo, it was an attempt by a dramatist to further a military cause, however clandestinely.

2. What do you think personally about Biafra? Any need for apologies on behalf of the Nigerian government, not for the resulting war itself and his role, but for the Northern pogrom that caused it? This question led Wole Soyinka to an anecdote in which he told an interrogator, during his incarceration in the late 60s that “Biafra will not be defeated” while referring to the idea and his captors thinking of the physical, geographical entity. It however led the general to a long and winding history retelling that basically uses the unfortunate ethnic configuration of the officers involved in the first coup in January 1966 to justify the pogrom against the Igbos that began in July of the same year.

3. What do think of the country’s leadership? How do you approach leadership? To Obasanjo, the president performed “below average”. This made news straight away. To the Nobel Laureate, all that matters in public service is sincerity. Not absolutism, necessarily, or “holiness”. But sincerity of purpose, and conscientiousness.

4. What do you think of gay rights in Nigeria? Should gay people be jailed as the new gay law prescribes? The general went on a long spiel about his “conservative” and “Christian” credentials, then told us why we can’t have “that” in Nigeria. There is no polygamy in the West, after all. Why let “them” prescribe what we can proscribe? To the Nobel Laureate, it’s not really black and white. But mostly, “who am I to decide what consenting adults do? It’s frankly not my business, until a certain part of the public performance of that relationship needs a seal of state…”

If it is true that life thrives on binaries (think Jay-Z and Dr. Dre, East Coast or West Coast, Beyonce and Kelly Rowland, Beyonce and Rihanna, Tupac and Biggie, Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, Mandela or Mugabe, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ali Mazrui, Wole Soyinka and Olusegun Obasanjo! For some reason of birth (they both have strong familial roots to Abeokuta), public service (both have been strong influences in Nigerian public life since the early sixties),  controversy (Soyinka was arrested after returning from the break-away Biafra in the late 60s, while Obasanjo was said to have been instrumental to that arrest. Obasanjo was also said – by himself, mostly – to have won that war for Nigeria), they have both been some of the two most important figures in Nigerian political and public life, for good or for ill. Certainly, they have also been some of the two most famous Nigerians to have called Abeokuta home and they have also mostly been on opposite sides when they are not working in an unlikely alliance for a common purpose.

In one of such alliances, described in Wole Soyinka’s memoir You Must Set Forth At Dawn, the playwright had solicited for the help of the then head of state General Obasanjo in keeping a diplomat from Brazil in Nigeria for the duration of Wole Soyinka’s own trip to that country in order to retrieve what he thought was an original mould of the a famous Nigerian statue. Things went bad halfway into the trip, and the General reneged on his promise to secure the diplomatic end of the deal for reasons attributed in the book to the man’s unreliable nature. This nature was the oft-quoted characteristic with which Wole Soyinka repeated hit the former president a number of times during a conversation with him on the last day of the Festival. Most times, it was obvious that the word “unreliable” or “crafty” was a code for “dishonest” and “self-serving.”

One big regret for me from the Festival was succumbing to the pressure from the organisers to scuttle a panel I was moderating, a panel discussing language in literature, which had already reached a crescendo-pitch right before the Q&A when word came in that the former President was in the premises, and that his protocol requires that all guests be seated in the Book Chat hall before he comes in. We had a choice: to stay and enjoy our discussion, or to disperse in order not to miss his Book Chat. The latter won, due to a number of circumstances, one of which was that the publisher of the former president’s new memoir My Watch was on that panel, and he had to usher in his author. For a number of us who had never seen him in person, there was also a slight curiosity of listening to whatever new thing the former president had to say. And he did have a lot. The language panel dispersed grudgingly, and fifteen minutes later, we were all seated at rapt attention listening to the man who could be said to have ruled Nigeria three times: twice as a civilian, and once as a soldier.