Just off Ozumba Mbadiwe Street in Victoria Island, immediately behind a cluster of residential apartments popularly known as 1004 flats, and directly opposite a quaint one-storey building on the other side of Adetokunbo Ademola Street, lay a row of bungalows finely spruced up with middle-class taste.
I met Maxwell in Lagos while doing the rounds covering for my magazine a circle of diplomats from the southern African region at about the time Nelson Mandela was close to being released from prison, and it was obvious that the glowing embers of the apartheid system was petering out as evidenced by reports seeping out from the negotiations for a democratic South Africa.
Maxwell and I were together in his house one day with some other comrades when the phone rang and the caller from South Africa informed him that Chris Hani, leader of the South African Communist Party and a well-known anti-apartheid activist, had been assassinated outside his house in Boksburg, on the East Rand of the Gauteng Province. Hani was also then the chief of staff of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC.
So not only was I excited at the news that Soyinka was visiting and I would have the rare chance of meeting him physically for the first time, I was also immensely thrilled by the prospect of being handed a scoop for TELL magazine where I worked then. I had reasoned that at the end of the day, by the time Soyinka left, I would have had a top-drawer exclusive story. Thus, no matter how long it took, I was determined to stay put until his arrival.
After two, three sips at intervals, some jokes and hearty laughter, Soyinka was ready to delve into the essence of his visit. I also was eager to hear him, assuring myself that a story was in the making, whether about Nigeria or South Africa. Just then his eyes swept across the room and he asked if any journalist was in the gathering. Silence everywhere. Except Soyinka and his friend, everybody in that gathering knew me as a journalist but none gave me away.
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