Girls at War

by Chinua Achebe

  “The girl is a genius,” said Mr. Emenike when the new song finally got to him. His wife who heard it first had nearly died from laughter. She had called Vero and said to her, “So you make fun of my car, naughty girl.” Vero was happy because she saw not anger but laughter in the woman’s eyes.

  “She is a genius,” said her husband. “And she hasn’t been to school.”

  “And besides she knows you ought to buy me a new car.”

  “Never mind, dear. Another year and you can have that sports car.”

  “Na so.”

  “So you don’t believe me? Just you wait and see.”

  More weeks and months passed by and little Goddy was beginning to say a few words but still no one spoke about Vero’s going to school. She decided it was Goddy’s fault, that he wasn’t growing fast enough. And he was becoming rather too fond of riding on her back even though he could walk perfectly well. In fact his favourite words were “Cayi me.” Vero made a song about that too and it showed her mounting impatience:

  Carry you! Carry you!

  Every time I carry you!

  If you no wan grow again

  I must leave you and go school

  Because Vero e don tire!

  Tire, tire e don tire!

  She sang it all morning until the other children returned from school and then she stopped. She only sang this one when she was alone with Goddy.

  * * *

  One afternoon Mrs. Emenike returned from work and noticed a redness on Vero’s lips.

  “Come here,” she said, thinking of her expensive lipstick. “What is that?”

  It turned out, however, not to be lipstick at all, only her husband’s red ink. She couldn’t help a smile then.

  “And look at her finger-nails! And toes too! So, Little Madame, that’s what you do when we go out and leave you at home to mind the baby? You dump him somewhere and begin to paint yourself. Don’t ever let me catch you with that kind of nonsense again; do you hear?” It occurred to her to strengthen her warning somehow if only to neutralize the smile she had smiled at the beginning.

  “Do you know that red ink is poisonous? You want to kill yourself? Well, little lady you have to wait till you leave my house and return to your mother.”

  That did it, she thought in glowing self-satisfaction. She could see that Vero was suitably frightened. Throughout the rest of that afternoon she walked about like a shadow.

  When Mr. Emenike came home she told him the story as he ate a late lunch. And she called Vero for him to see.

  “Show him your finger-nails,” she said. “And your toes, Little Madame!”

  “I see,” he said waving Vero away. “She is learning fast. Do you know the proverb which says that when mother cow chews giant grass her little calves watch her mouth?”

  “Who is a cow? You rhinoceros!”

  “It is only a proverb, my dear.”

  A week or so later Mrs. Emenike just home from work noticed that the dress she had put on the baby in the morning had been changed into something much too warm.

  “What happened to the dress I put on him?”

  “He fell down and soiled it. So I changed him,” said Vero. But there was something very strange in her manner. Mrs. Emenike’s first thought was that the child must have had a bad fall.

  “Where did he fall?” she asked in alarm. “Where did he hit on the ground? Bring him to me! What is all this? Blood? No? What is it? My God has killed me! Go and bring me the dress. At once!”

  “I washed it,” said Vero beginning to cry, a thing she had never done before. Mrs. Emenike rushed out to the line and brought down the blue dress and the white vest both heavily stained red!.

  She seized Vero and beat her in a mad frenzy with both hands. Then she got a whip and broke it all on her until her face and arms ran with blood. Only then did Vero admit making the child drink a bottle of red ink. Mrs. Emenike collapsed into a chair and began to cry.

  Mr. Emenike did not wait to have lunch. They bundled Vero into the Mercedes and drove her the forty miles to her mother in the village. He had wanted to go alone but his wife insisted on coming, and taking the baby too. He stopped on the main road as usual. But he didn’t go in with the girl. He just opened the door of the car, pulled her out and his wife threw her little bundle of clothes after her. And they drove away again.

  Martha returned from the farm tired and grimy. Her children rushed out to meet her and to tell her that Vero was back and was crying in their bedroom. She practically dropped her basket and went to see; but she couldn’t make any sense of her story.

  “You gave the baby red ink? Why? So that you can go to school? How? Come on. Let’s go to their place. Perhaps they will stay in the village overnight. Or else they will have told somebody there what happened. I don’t understand your story. Perhaps you stole something. Not so?”

  “Please Mama don’t take me back there. They will kill me.”

  “Come on, since you won’t tell me what you did.”

  She seized her wrist and dragged her outside. Then in the open she saw all the congealed blood on whipmarks all over her head, face, neck and arms. She swallowed hard.

  “Who did this?”

  “My Madame.”

  “And what did you say you did? You must tell me.”

  “I gave the baby red ink.”

  “All right, then let’s go.”

  Vero began to wail louder. Martha seized her by the wrist again and they set off. She neither changed her work clothes nor even washed her face and hands. Every woman—and sometimes the men too—they passed on the way screamed on seeing Vero’s whipmarks and wanted to know who did it. Martha’s reply to all was “I don’t know yet. I am going to find out.”

  She was lucky. Mr. Emenike’s big car was there, so they had not returned to the capital. She knocked at their front door and walked in. Mrs. Emenike was sitting there in the parlour giving bottled food to the baby but she ignored the visitors completely neither saying a word to them nor even looking in their direction. It was her husband who descended the stairs a little later who told the story. As soon as the meaning dawned on Martha—that the red ink was given to the baby to drink and that the motive was to encompass its death—she screamed, with two fingers plugging her ears, that she wanted to hear no more. At the same time she rushed outside, tore a twig off a flowering shrub and by clamping her thumb and forefinger at one end and running them firmly along its full length stripped it of its leaves in one quick movement. Armed with the whip she rushed back to the house crying “I have heard an abomination!” Vero was now screaming and running around the room.

  “Don’t touch her here in my house,” said Mrs. Emenike, cold and stern as an oracle, noticing her visitors for the first time. “Take her away from here at once. You want to show me your shock. Well I don’t want to see. Go and show your anger in your own house. Your daughter did not learn murder here in my house.”

  This stung Martha deep in her spirit and froze her in mid-stride. She stood rooted to the spot, her whiphand lifeless by her side. “My Daughter,” she said finally addressing the younger woman, “as you see me here I am poor and wretched but I am not a murderer. If my daughter Vero is to become a murderer God knows she cannot say she learnt from me.”

  “Perhaps it’s from me she learnt,” said Mrs. Emenike showing her faultless teeth in a terrible false smile, “or maybe she snatched it from the air. That’s right, she snatched it from the air. Look, woman, take your daughter and leave my house.”

  “Vero, let’s go; come, let’s go!”

  “Yes, please go!”

  Mr. Emenike who had been trying vainly to find an opening for the clearly needed male intervention now spoke.

  “It is the work of the devil,” he said. “I have always known that the craze for education in this country will one day ruin all of us. Now even children will commit murder in order to go to school.”

  This clumsy effort to mollify all sides at once stung Martha even more. As she j
erked Vero homewards by the hand she clutched her unused whip in her other hand. At first she rained abuses on the girl, calling her an evil child that entered her mother’s womb by the back of the house.

  “Oh God, what have I done?” Her tears began to flow now. “If I had had a child with other women of my age, that girl that calls me murderer might have been no older than my daughter. And now she spits in my face. That’s what you brought me to,” she said to the crown of Vero’s head, and jerked her along more violently.

  “I will kill you today. Let’s get home first.”

  Then a strange revolt, vague, undirected began to well up at first slowly inside her. “And that thing that calls himself a man talks to me about the craze for education. All his children go to school, even the one that is only two years; but that is no craze. Rich people have no craze. It is only when the children of poor widows like me want to go with the rest that it becomes a craze. What is this life? To God, what is it? And now my child thinks she must kill the baby she is hired to tend before she can get a chance. Who put such an abomination into her belly? God, you know I did not.”

  She threw away the whip and with her freed hand wiped her tears.

  Dead Men’s Path

  Michael Obi’s hopes were fulfilled much earlier than he had expected. He was appointed headmaster of Ndume Central School in January 1949. It had always been an unprogressive school, so the Mission authorities decided to send a young and energetic man to run it. Obi accepted this responsibility with enthusiasm. He had many wonderful ideas and this was an opportunity to put them into practice. He had had sound secondary school education which designated him a “pivotal teacher” in the official records and set him apart from the other headmasters in the mission field. He was outspoken in his condemnation of the narrow views of these older and often less-educated ones.

  “We shall make a good job of it, shan’t we?” he asked his young wife when they first heard the joyful news of his promotion.

  “We shall do our best,” she replied. “We shall have such beautiful gardens and everything will be just modern and delightful …” In their two years of married life she had become completely infected by his passion for “modern methods” and his denigration of “these old and superannuated people in the teaching field who would be better employed as traders in the Onitsha market.” She began to see herself already as the admired wife of the young headmaster, the queen of the school.

  The wives of the other teachers would envy her position. She would set the fashion in everything … Then, suddenly, it occurred to her that there might not be other wives. Wavering between hope and fear, she asked her husband, looking anxiously at him.

  “All our colleagues are young and unmarried,” he said with enthusiasm which for once she did not share. “Which is a good thing,” he continued.

  “Why?”

  “Why? They will give all their time and energy to the school.”

  Nancy was downcast. For a few minutes she became sceptical about the new school; but it was only for a few minutes. Her little personal misfortune could not blind her to her husband’s happy prospects. She looked at him as he sat folded up in a chair. He was stoop-shouldered and looked frail. But he sometimes surprised people with sudden bursts of physical energy. In his present posture, however, all his bodily strength seemed to have retired behind his deep-set eyes, giving them an extraordinary power of penetration. He was only twenty-six, but looked thirty or more. On the whole, he was not unhandsome.

  “A penny for your thoughts, Mike,” said Nancy after a while, imitating the woman’s magazine she read.

  “I was thinking what a grand opportunity we’ve got at last to show these people how a school should be run.”

  Ndume School was backward in every sense of the word. Mr. Obi put his whole life into the work, and his wife hers too. He had two aims. A high standard of teaching was insisted upon, and the school compound was to be turned into a place of beauty. Nancy’s dreamgardens came to life with the coming of the rains, and blossomed. Beautiful hibiscus and allamanda hedges in brilliant red and yellow marked out the carefully tended school compound from the rank neighbourhood bushes.

  One evening as Obi was admiring his work he was scandalized to see an old woman from the village hobble right across the compound, through a marigold flower-bed and the hedges. On going up there he found faint signs of an almost disused path from the village across the school compound to the bush on the other side.

  “It amazes me,” said Obi to one of his teachers who had been three years in the school, “that you people allowed the villagers to make use of this footpath. It is simply incredible.” He shook his head.

  “The path,” said the teacher apologetically, “appears to be very important to them. Although it is hardly used, it connects the village shrine with their place of burial.”

  “And what has that got to do with the school?” asked the headmaster.

  “Well, I don’t know,” replied the other with a shrug of the shoulders. “But I remember there was a big row some time ago when we attempted to close it.”

  “That was some time ago. But it will not be used now,” said Obi as he walked away. “What will the Government Education Officer think of this when he comes to inspect the school next week? The villagers might, for all I know, decide to use the schoolroom for a pagan ritual during the inspection.”

  Heavy sticks were planted closely across the path at the two places where it entered and left the school premises. These were further strengthened with barbed wire.

  Three days later the village priest of Ani called on the headmaster. He was an old man and walked with a slight stoop. He carried a stout walking-stick which he usually tapped on the floor, by way of emphasis, each time he made a new point in his argument.

  “I have heard,” he said after the usual exchange of cordialities, “that our ancestral footpath has recently been closed …”

  “Yes,” replied Mr. Obi. “We cannot allow people to make a highway of our school compound.”

  “Look here, my son,” said the priest bringing down his walking-stick, “this path was here before you were born and before your father was born. The whole life of this village depends on it. Our dead relatives depart by it and our ancestors visit us by it. But most important, it is the path of children coming in to be born …”

  Mr. Obi listened with a satisfied smile on his face.

  “The whole purpose of our school,” he said finally, “is to eradicate just such beliefs as that. Dead men do not require footpaths. The whole idea is just fantastic. Our duty is to teach your children to laugh at such ideas.”

  “What you say may be true,” replied the priest, “but we follow the practices of our fathers. If you reopen the path we shall have nothing to quarrel about. What I always say is: let the hawk perch and let the eagle perch.” He rose to go.

  “I am sorry,” said the young headmaster. “But the school compound cannot be a thoroughfare. It is against our regulations. I would suggest your constructing another path, skirting our premises. We can even get our boys to help in building it. I don’t suppose the ancestors will find the little detour too burdensome.”

  “I have no more words to say,” said the old priest, already outside.

  Two days later a young woman in the village died in childbed. A diviner was immediately consulted and he prescribed heavy sacrifices to propitiate ancestors insulted by the fence.

  Obi woke up next morning among the ruins of his work. The beautiful hedges were torn up not just near the path but right round the school, the flowers trampled to death and one of the school buildings pulled down … That day, the white Supervisor came to inspect the school and wrote a nasty report on the state of the premises but more seriously about the “tribal-war situation developing between the school and the village, arising in part from the misguided zeal of the new headmaster.”

  Uncle Ben’s Choice

  In the year nineteen hundred and nineteen I was a young clerk in
the Niger Company at Umuru. To be a clerk in those days is like to be a minister today. My salary was two pounds ten. You may laugh but two pounds ten in those days is like fifty pounds today. You could buy a big goat with four shillings. I could remember the most senior African in the company was one Saro man on ten-thirteen-four. He was like Governor-General in our eyes.

  Like all progressive young men I joined the African Club. We played tennis and billiards. Every year we played a tournament with the European Club. But I was less concerned with that. What I liked was the Saturday night dances. Women were surplus. Not all the waw-waw women you see in townships today but beautiful things like this.

  I had a Raleigh bicycle, brand new, and everybody called me Jolly Ben. I was selling like hot bread. But there is one thing about me—we can laugh and joke and drink and do otherwise but I must always keep my sense with me. My father told me that a true son of our land must know how to sleep and keep one eye open. I never forget it. So I played and laughed with everyone and they shouted “Jolly Ben! Jolly Ben!” but I knew what I was doing. The women of Umuru are very sharp; before you count A they count B. So I had to be very careful. I never showed any of them the road to my house and I never ate the food they cooked for fear of love medicines. I had seen many young men kill themselves with women in those days, so I remembered my father’s word: Never let a handshake pass the elbow.

  I can say that the only exception was one tall, yellow, salt-water girl like this called Margaret. One Sunday morning I was playing my gramophone, a brand-new HMV Senior. (I never believe in secondhand things. If I have no money for a new one I just keep myself quiet; that is my motto.) I was playing this record and standing at the window with my chewing-stick in my mouth. People were passing in their fine-fine dresses to one church nearby. This Margaret was going with them when she saw me. As luck would have it I did not see her in time to hide. So that very day—she did not wait till tomorrow or next tomorrow—but as soon as church closed she returned back. According to her she wanted to convert me to Roman Catholic. Wonders will ever end! Margaret Jumbo! Beautiful thing like this. But it is not Margaret I want to tell you about now. I want to tell you how I stopped all that foolishness.