Anthills of the Savannah

by Chinua Achebe

  “Does he mean that after killing me he will go and kill a dog?”

  And the others joined in the laughter.

  “No, he means that to kill you is like to kill a dog.”

  “So therefore you na dog… Na dog born you.”

  But the victim stuck to his far more imaginative interpretation. “No,” he said again. “If I kill you I kill dog means that after he kill me he will go home and kill his dog.”

  Within ten minutes the life of the group was so well restored by this new make-believe that when the offensive soldier returned to his car to drive away his victim of half an hour ago said to him:

  “Go well, oga.” To which he said nothing though it diminished him further still, if such a thing could be conceived. And then I was truly glad that I had not interfered with that impeccable scenario.

  TO SAY THAT SAM was never very bright is not to suggest that he was a dunce at any time in the past or that he is one now. His major flaw was that all he ever wanted was to do what was expected of him especially by the English whom he admired sometimes to the point of foolishness. When our headmaster, John Williams, told him that the Army was the career for gentlemen he immediately abandoned thoughts of becoming a doctor and became a soldier. I am sure the only reason he didn’t marry the English girl MM found for him in Surrey was the shattering example of Chris and his American wife Louise whom he married, if you please, not in New York which might have made a certain sense but in London. I suppose it is not impossible for two strangers to fabricate an affinity of sorts from being exiled to the same desert island even from opposite ends of the earth. Unfortunately Chris and Louise didn’t make it once in bed, or anywhere else, throughout their six months cohabitation.

  John Williams, our teacher, whose favourite phrase was “good and proper, pressed down and flowing over,” in describing punishment, probably made the best choice for Sam after all. He grew so naturally into the part, more easily, I think, than he would have slipped into the role of doctor although I am sure his bedside manner would have been impeccable. But after Sandhurst he was a catalogue model of an officer. His favourite expression after he came home was: it’s not done, spoken in his perfect accent.

  I went to see Sam the morning after I heard news of his promotion to Captain. It was Sunday and the time about ten o’clock. I found him in his morning coat lounging in a sofa with Sunday papers scattered around him on the floor, a half-smoked pipe on a side-table and from his hi-fi Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on a 45 r.p.m. record playing at 331/3. That was Sam’s problem. Not very bright but not wicked. And completely tone-deaf. Nothing is more entertaining than Sam trying to whistle a tune.

  There is something else about Sam which makes him enormously easy to take: his sense of theatre. He is basically an actor and half of the things we are inclined to hold against him are no more than scenes from his repertory to which he may have no sense of moral commitment whatsoever. He was fascinated by the customs of the English, especially their well-to-do classes and enjoyed playing at their foibles. When he told me about his elegant pipe which he had spent a whole morning choosing in a Mayfair shop I could see that he was not taking himself seriously at all. And therefore I had no reason to do so.

  Of course one may well question the appropriateness of these attitudes in a Head of State. But quite frankly, I am not troubled by that. In fact the sort of intellectual playfulness displayed by Sam must be less dangerous than the joyless passion for power of many African tyrants. As long as he gets good advice and does not fall too deeply under the influence of such Rasputins as Reginald Okong we may yet avoid the very worst.

  Perhaps I am altogether too sanguine but his response to the doctors’ crisis gave me great hope and encouragement. He saw right away—just as I did and Chris refused to—that it wasn’t Mad Medico’s insane graffiti that brought all those worthy people so viciously about his throat. Far from it. His crime was rather that he had dared to get one of their number disgraced. Publicly they admitted that Dr. Ofe may have behaved unethically. But did that give a layman, especially one who was also a foreigner, the right to instigate relatives of a dead patient and even give them his own money to sue the very hospital in which he works? Their answer to their own rhetorical question was, of course, an emphatic no. Mine was an equally strong yes and so, thank God, was His Excellency’s. In fairness to Chris he did not disagree with us on the Ofe affair but took the legalistic line that the doctors’ complaint about Mad Medico’s notices must be seen in isolation and entirely on its own merit. That shyster of an Attorney-General must have given free lessons to Chris.

  Admittedly Mad Medico made a complete fool of himself putting up those atrocious jokes. He was both irresponsible in his action and careless of his safety. After his brush with the doctors he should have known that he had made enemies who would deploy themselves in various ambushes for his head. He obliged them far beyond the call of duty by offering it on a platter of gold.

  When I launched my editorial crusade on his behalf I had no reason to belittle his gross abuse of good taste. But I had to place beside it the image of that wretched man lying in unspeakable agony for four days and nights in the surgical ward while his distracted relations ran from hospital to a distant village and back again trying in vain to raise the twenty-five manilla that Dr. Ofe must have before he would operate. All witnesses spoke of the man’s screams which filled the Men’s Ward and could be heard as far away as the Emergency Room at the Hospital Gate. They spoke of the nurses unable to shut him up and leaving the ward for hours on end to get a little peace somewhere else. Three nurses spoke of their efforts to call Dr. Ofe on the telephone and his threats of disciplinary action against them if they continued disturbing him at home and of his instructions to give the man yet another shot of morphia. And the doctor who finally performed the operation after Mad Medico began to interfere in the matter spoke at the inquiry of all those lengths of black intestine, four feet or perhaps eight, I don’t now recall, which he had to take out and how everything was already much too late.

  That was the story I had to place beside Mad Medico’s folly in deciding whether I should sit back and let him be hounded out of the country. It seemed to me perfectly clear that whatever foolishness Mad Medico should get into now it would be morally intolerable to allow Dr. Ofe’s friends to triumph however vicariously over him. Fortunately His Excellency saw it my way too. Chris says I am sentimental. Well, let me be.

  Perhaps I am so indulgent about Sam’s imitation of the English because I believe that a budding dictator might choose models far worse than the English gendeman of leisure. It does not seem to me that the English can do much harm to anybody today. After a long career of subduing savages in distant lands they discovered the most dangerous savage of all just across the English Channel and took him on and brought him to heel. But the effort proved too great and the cost too high, and although they acquitted themselves with honour they made sure that they would not be called upon to do it again. And so they anointed the hero of their dazzling feat the greatest Englishman who ever lived, dumped him at the polls and voted Clement Attlee in. Whatever fear the ghost of British imperial vocation may still hold over the world’s little people was finally removed when a renegade Englishman and his little band of thugs seized Her Majesty’s colony in Rhodesia and held it for thirteen years. No, the English have, for all practical purposes, ceased to menace the world. The real danger today is from that fat, adolescent and delinquent millionaire, America, and from all those virulent, misshapen freaks like Amin and Bokassa sired on Africa by Europe. Particularly those ones.

  I think that much of the change which has come over Sam started after his first OAU meeting. Chris and I and a few other friends called at the Palace to see him as we used to do quite often in those days. I noticed right away that it was not the same Sam who had left Bassa only a week before. Everybody remarked on the change later—Chris, Mad Medico and the others. He spoke like an excited schoolboy about his heroes; abou
t the old emperor who never smiled nor changed his expression no matter what was going on around him.

  “Perhaps he doesn’t hear very well,” said Mad Medico.

  “Nonsense,” said His Excellency. “His hearing is perfect. I had breakfast with him on the fifth morning. He heard everything I said and has the most lively mind and the most absolutely delightful sense of humour.”

  “So he wears his mask-face only for the gathering-in of the tribes,” I said.

  “I wish I could look like him,” said His Excellency wistfully, his thoughts obviously far away. If somebody else had reported that exchange to me, especially the sentence I wish I could look like him I would not have believed it. A young man wishing he could look like an octogenarian!

  But the leader Sam spoke most about was President Ngongo—I beg your pardon—President-for-Life Ngongo, who called Sam his dear boy and invited him over to his suite for cocktails on the second day. I have little doubt that Sam learnt the habit of saying Kabisa from old Ngongo. Within a week it spread to members of the Cabinet and down to the Bassa cocktail set. From there it made its way more or less rapidly into the general community. The other day the office driver who drove me to GTC said: “Charging battery na pure waste of money; once battery begin de give trouble you suppose to buy new one. Kabisa.”

  It is unlikely that Sam came away with nothing but Kabisa in his travelling bag. I may be wrong but I felt that our welcome at the palace became distinctly cooler from that time. The end of the socializing is not important in itself but its timing must be. I set it down to Sam’s seeing for the first time the possibilities for his drama in the role of an African Head of State and deciding that he must withdraw into seclusion to prepare his own face and perfect his act.

  5

  “SAME HERE,” says Ikem.

  “Shit!” replies Mad Medico. “You don’t have to follow your fucking leader in this house, you know. Come on, have Scotch or Campari or anything—even water—just to show him.”

  “Too late,” says Ikem. “We were enslaved originally by Gordon’s Dry Gin. All gestures of resistance are now too late and too empty. Gin it shall be forever and ever, Amen.” Jovial words, but there is not the slightest sign of gaiety in the voice or face.

  “I wonder where you got the idea that Ikem follows my lead. Once again, you are the last to know. He’d sooner be found dead. I thought everyone, even you, knew that.”

  “Following a leader who follows his leader would be quite a circus,” said Ikem with unabated grimness.

  Mad Medico pours out two long gins made longer still by ice cubes he has transferred with his fingers from a plastic bowl. He pours a little tonic water into each and I ask him to add more to mine. Then he throws into each glass a slip of lemon from another bowl giving it a little squeeze between thumb and forefinger before letting it drop, and stirs. Twice or thrice in the preparation he has licked his fingers or wiped them on the seat of his blue shorts. I can see that Ikem’s new girl, Elewa, is at first horrified and then fascinated. She is seeing Mad Medico at close quarters for the first time though she has obviously heard much about him. Everyone has. Perhaps she is seeing any white man at close quarters for the first time, for that matter.

  Mad Medico’s proper name is John Kent but nobody here calls him by that any more. He enjoys his bizarre title; his familiar friends always abbreviate it to MM. He is of course neither a doctor nor quite exactly mad. Ikem once described him as an aborted poet which I think is as close as anyone has got to explaining the phenomenon that is John Kent. And the two of them, poet and aborted poet, get on very well together. MM got on very well too with His Excellency, as everybody knows. It was their friendship which brought him here in the first place, made him hospital administrator and saved him a year ago from sudden deportation.

  Elewa’s fascination grows as she explores with wide amazed eyes Mad Medico’s strange home. I find her freshness quite appealing. Now she nudges Beatrice and points at the legend inscribed in the central wall of the bar above the array of bottles in a semi-literate hand and Beatrice obligingly chuckles with her although she has seen it at least a dozen times. Mad Medico notices the young lady’s fascination and explains that he owes the inspiration for that poem to his steward, Sunday.

  ALL DE BEER

  DEM DRINK FOR HERE

  DE MAKE ME FEAR

  If indeed the inspiration was Sunday’s it only goes to prove that birds of the same feather flock together. For Mad Medico has a strange mania for graffiti which was the cause of all the wahalla that would have cost him his job and residence in the country about a year ago had his Excellency and Ikem not gone to his rescue, their one and only joint effort to date. The doctors were ready to cut him up alive and I still can’t say that I blame them entirely. Ikem insists that some of them used the occasion to unload themselves of other grievances but I still think the inscriptions were inexcusable and in deplorable taste. Blessed are the poor in heart for they shall see God cannot anywhere in the world pass as a suitable joke to be nailed up in the ward for heart patients, never mind that one stupid defender of MM’s said the patients were either too ill or too illiterate and so no one could have been hurt! The thing was in abominable taste. His other inscription outside the men’s venereal diseases ward: a huge arrow sitting between two tangential balls and pointing like a crazy road sign towards the entrance and the words TO THE TWIN CITIES OF SODOM AND GONORRHEA was, if such a thing could be conceived, worse.

  “How is my wonder boy?” asks MM. “I never get a chance to see him these days. I suppose rescuing a bungling old fool from deportation must take its toll on the hardiest of friendships. Oh well. How’s he?”

  “He is flourishing,” I said. “Last Friday afternoon he placed the entire cabinet on one hour’s detention.”

  “He did? How boring,” said Mad Medico. “You know something, Dick, the most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable and… just plain uninteresting.” He spoke more to his guest from England than to us. “I told you this boy was such a charmer when I first met him. I’d never seen anyone so human, so cultured.” Dick nods disinterestedly. He has scarcely said a dozen words all afternoon. He drinks gin and lime as though it were Alka Seltzer. But in contrast to his dark mood his complexion is bright, almost girlish, unlike Mad Medico’s excessively coarse tan. It was Mad Medico himself who first drew our attention to this when he introduced Dick to us. “A white man in the tropics,” he had said, “needs occasionally to see someone fresh from his tribe to remind him that his colour is perhaps not as wrong, and patchy as it may seem.”

  Dick is now speaking in his lugubrious way. He is sitting on the far end of the three-sided bar across from me. Ikem and the two girls are between us on the forward and longer section of the counter facing Mad Medico, our bartender in the pit. Dick is saying that Acton’s corruption was probably intended to encompass dehumourization if such a word exists.

  “It doesn’t but certainly should,” says Mad Medico offhandedly. “What did you do?” he asks me.

  “What?”

  “You said you were all detained.”

  “Oh, that. No, we didn’t do anything. That was the trouble. A delegation arrived at the Presidential Palace from Abazon—you know the drought place—and none of us knew they were coming. Naughty, isn’t it? So His Excellency gets mad at us.”

  “That’s beautiful,” says Mad Medico, and then turning to Dick he plays the knowing Old Coaster to a ruddy newcomer: “Abazon is in the north-west and has had no rain for a year. So the poor devils up there send a delegation to ask His Excellency to give them rain.” He then turns to me for confirmation. “That’s about the size of it?”

  “More or less,” replies Ikem before I can say anything.

  “That’s marvellous,” says Dick brightening up. “A kind of native Henderson. Absolutely fascinating. And what did he do?”

  “He locks these fellows up—not the delegation,
mind you, but his own cabinet… That must have been the original meaning of cabinet. People you put away in a wooden locker, ha ha ha! You had such a winner and you didn’t put it in your rag the very next morning, Ikem. I’m surprised at you.”

  “NTBB” replies Ikem. “Not To Be Broadcast,” he adds dispelling the puzzlement in a few faces. The girls and Mad Medico laugh. Dick still looks puzzled.

  “I don’t see the connection,” he says.

  “Between what?”

  “The delegation from this desert place and the cabinet.”

  I am going to explain again but Mad Medico has a better explanation and drowns me out.

  “That’s a Britisher for you, Chris. He is looking for connections. There aren’t any, young man. This is negritude country, not Devonshire.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go quite that far,” I say. “We are no more illogical in these parts than any other people, yourselves included.” There is perhaps more shrillness in my voice than is required.

  “Come! Come!” says Dick in a most offensively patronizing tone. “John is only joking.”

  “You see what I mean,” says Mad Medico before I can claim to be joking too. “No sense of humour left. None whatsoever. They are all so stiff and damned patriotic, so quick to take offence. You can’t make a joke here if you are white. You should have heard the names they called me because I was so naive as to try to cheer up some dreary wards in their blasted hospital. Imperialist! White racist! Red Neck! The best though was Negrophobist. Do you know that one? I didn’t. Negrophobist. Apparently the opposite of nigger-lover.”