African Quilt : 24 Modern African Stories (9781101617441)

by Solomon, Barbara H. (EDT); Rampone, W. Reginald, Jr. (EDT)

  “You can get good things, things that aren’t available here. Gold would be good. It would match . . .”

  Gold. Gold toilet seats!

  “People are going to burn in hell for eating out of gold dishes, you want to sit on gold!”

  He laughed. He was used to getting his own way, not easily threatened. “Are you joking with me?”

  “No.”

  In a quieter voice, “This call is costing . . .”

  She knew, she knew. He shouldn’t have let her go away. She was not coping with the whole thing, she was not handling the stress. Like the Nigerian student.

  “Shadia, gold-coloured, not gold. It’s smart.”

  “Allah is going to punish us for this, it’s not right . . .”

  “Since when have you become so religious!”

  * * *

  Bryan was waiting for her on the steps of the museum, familiar-looking against the strange grey of the city streets where cars had their headlamps on in the middle of the afternoon. He wore a different shirt, a navy-blue jacket. He said, not looking at her, “Ah was beginning to think you wouldnae turn up.”

  There was no entry fee to the museum, no attendant handing out tickets. Bryan and Shadia walked on soft carpets; thick blue carpets that made Shadia want to take off her shoes. The first thing they saw was a Scottish man from Victorian times. He sat on a chair surrounded by possessions from Africa: overflowing trunks, an ancient map strewn on the floor of the glass cabinet. All the light in the room came from this and other glass cabinets and gleamed on the waxed floors. Shadia turned away; there was an ugliness in the lifelike wispiness of his hair, his determined expression, the way he sat. A hero who had gone away and come back, laden, ready to report.

  Bryan began to conscientiously study every display cabinet, to read the posters on the wall. She followed him around and thought that he was studious, careful; that was why he did so well in his degree. She watched the intent expression on his face as he looked at everything. For her the posters were an effort to read, the information difficult to take in. It had been so long since she had read anything outside the requirements of the course. But she persevered, saying the words to herself, moving her lips . . . “During the 18th and 19th centuries, northeast Scotland made a disproportionate impact on the world at large by contributing so many skilled and committed individuals. In serving an empire they gave and received, changed others and were themselves changed and often returned home with tangible reminders of their experiences.”

  The tangible reminders were there to see, preserved in spite of the years. Her eyes skimmed over the disconnected objects out of place and time. Iron and copper, little statues. Nothing was of her, nothing belonged to her life at home, what she missed. Here was Europe’s vision, the clichés about Africa: cold and old.

  She had not expected the dim light and the hushed silence. Apart from Shadia and Bryan, there was only a man with a briefcase, a lady who took down notes, unless there were others out of sight on the second floor. Something electrical, the heating or the lights, gave out a humming sound like that of an air conditioner. It made Shadia feel as if they were in an aeroplane without windows, detached from the world outside.

  “He looks like you, don’t you think?” she said to Bryan. They stood in front of a portrait of a soldier who died in the first year of the twentieth century. It was the colour of his eyes and his hair. But Bryan did not answer her, did not agree with her. He was preoccupied with reading the caption. When she looked at the portrait again, she saw that she was mistaken. That strength in the eyes, the purpose, was something Bryan didn’t have. They had strong faith in those days long ago.

  Biographies of explorers who were educated in Edinburgh; they knew what to take to Africa: doctors, courage, Christianity, commerce, civilization. They knew what they wanted to bring back: cotton—watered by the Blue Nile, the Zambezi River. She walked after Bryan, felt his concentration, his interest in what was before him and thought, “In a photograph we would not look nice together.”

  She touched the glass of a cabinet showing papyrus rolls, copper pots. She pressed her forehead and nose against the cool glass. If she could enter the cabinet, she would not make a good exhibit. She wasn’t right, she was too modern, too full of mathematics.

  Only the carpet, its petroleum blue, pleased her. She had come to this museum expecting sunlight and photographs of the Nile, something to relieve her homesickness: a comfort, a message. But the messages were not for her, not for anyone like her. A letter from West Africa, 1762, an employee to his employer in Scotland. An employee trading European goods for African curiosities. It was difficult to make the natives understand my meaning, even by an interpreter, it being a thing so seldom asked of them, but they have all undertaken to bring something and laughed heartily at me and said, I was a good man to love their country so much . . .

  Love my country so much. She should not be here, there was nothing for her here. She wanted to see minarets, boats fragile on the Nile, people. People like her father. The times she had sat in the waiting room of his clinic, among pregnant women, a pain in her heart because she was going to see him in a few minutes. His room, the air conditioner and the smell of his pipe, his white coat. When she hugged him, he smelled of Listerine mouthwash. He could never remember how old she was, what she was studying; six daughters, how could he keep track. In his confusion, there was freedom for her, games to play, a lot of teasing. She visited his clinic in secret, telling lies to her mother. She loved him more than she loved her mother. Her mother who did everything for her, tidied her room, sewed her clothes from Burda magazine. Shadia was twenty-five and her mother washed everything for her by hand, even her pants and bras.

  “I know why they went away,” said Bryan. “I understand why they travelled.” At last he was talking. She had not seen him intense before. He spoke in a low voice. “They had to get away, to leave here . . .”

  “To escape from the horrible weather . . .” She was making fun of him. She wanted to put him down. The imperialists who had humiliated her history were heroes in his eyes.

  He looked at her. “To escape . . .” he repeated.

  “They went to benefit themselves,” she said, “people go away because they benefit in some way.”

  “I want to get away,” he said.

  She remembered when he had opened his palms on the table and said, “I went on a trip to Mecca.” There had been pride in his voice.

  “I should have gone somewhere else for the course,” he went on. “A new place, somewhere down south.”

  He was on a plateau, not like her. She was fighting and struggling for a piece of paper that would say she was awarded an M.Sc. from a British university. For him, the course was a continuation.

  “Come and see,” he said, and he held her arm. No one had touched her before, not since she had hugged her mother goodbye. Months now in this country and no one had touched her.

  She pulled her arm away. She walked away, quickly up the stairs. Metal steps rattled under her feet. She ran up the stairs to the next floor. Guns, a row of guns aiming at her. They had been waiting to blow her away. Scottish arms of centuries ago, gunfire in service of the empire.

  Silver muzzles, a dirty grey now. They must have shone prettily once, under a sun far away. If they blew her away now, where would she fly and fall? A window that looked out at the hostile sky. She shivered in spite of the wool she was wearing, layers of clothes. Hell is not only blazing fire, a part of it is freezing cold, torturous ice and snow. In Scotland’s winter you have a glimpse of this unseen world, feel the breath of it in your bones.

  There was a bench and she sat down. There was no one here on this floor. She was alone with sketches of jungle animals, words on the wall. A diplomat away from home, in Ethiopia in 1903: Asafa’s country long before Asafa was born. It is difficult to imagine anything more satisfac
tory or better worth taking part in than a lion drive. We rode back to camp feeling very well indeed. Archie was quite right when he said that this was the first time since we have started that we have really been in Africa—the real Africa of jungle inhabited only by game, and plains where herds of antelope meet your eye in every direction.

  “Shadiya, don’t cry.” He still pronounced her name wrongly because she had not told him how to say it properly.

  He sat next to her on the bench, the blur of his navy jacket blocking the guns, the wall-length pattern of antelope herds. She should explain that she cried easily, there was no need for the alarm on his face. His awkward voice: “Why are ye crying?”

  He didn’t know, he didn’t understand. He was all wrong, not a substitute . . .

  “They are telling lies in this museum,” she said. “Don’t believe them. It’s all wrong. It’s not jungles and antelopes, it’s people. We have things like computers and cars. We have 7UP in Africa, and some people, a few people, have bathrooms with golden taps . . . I shouldn’t be here with you. You shouldn’t talk to me . . .”

  He said, “Museums change, I can change . . .”

  He didn’t know it was a steep path she had no strength for. He didn’t understand. Many things, years and landscapes, gulfs. If she had been strong she would have explained, and not tired of explaining. She would have patiently taught him another language, letters curved like the epsilon and gamma he knew from mathematics. She would have shown him that words could be read from right to left. If she had not been small in the museum, if she had been really strong, she would have made his trip to Mecca real, not only in a book.

  CHINUA ACHEBE

  Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 in Ogidi, Nigeria, to an Igbo-speaking Christian family and learned English at the age of eight. He was educated at Government College, Umuahia, and the University College of Ibadan, where he was among the first graduates to earn a bachelor’s degree. He was employed at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation from 1954 until 1966, where he created and directed the Voice of Nigeria. Later he became a senior research fellow at the Institute of African Studies at Nsukka, and then a professor of literature at the University of Nigeria. He has also taught at UCLA, the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, and other Nigerian universities; he taught for many years at Bard College, and he is currently teaching at Brown University. He is a prolific author, writing in a multiplicity of genres, including poetry, essays, short stories, and novels. He is best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), widely considered one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century and translated into more than forty-five languages. Among his many other notable works are No Longer at Ease (1960), A Man of His People (1966), Anthills on the Savannah (1988), The Voter (1994), and Home and Exile (2000).

  Civil Peace

  (1972)

  Jonathan Iwegbu counted himself extraordinarily lucky. “Happy survival!” meant so much more to him than just a current fashion of greeting old friends in the first hazy days of peace. It went deep to his heart. He had come out of the war with five inestimable blessings—his head, his wife Maria’s head and the heads of three out of their four children. As a bonus he also had his old bicycle—a miracle too but naturally not to be compared to the safety of five human heads.

  The bicycle had a little history of its own. One day at the height of the war it was commandeered “for urgent military action.” Hard as its loss would have been to him he would still have let it go without a thought had he not had some doubts about the genuineness of the officer. It wasn’t his disreputable rags, nor the toes peeping out of one blue and one brown canvas shoe, nor yet the two stars of his rank done obviously in a hurry in biro, that troubled Jonathan; many good and heroic soldiers looked the same or worse. It was rather a certain lack of grip and firmness in his manner. So Jonathan, suspecting he might be amenable to influence, rummaged in his raffia bag and produced the two pounds with which he had been going to buy firewood which his wife, Maria, retailed to camp officials for extra stock-fish and cornmeal, and got his bicycle back. That night he buried it in the little clearing in the bush where the dead of the camp, including his own youngest son, were buried. When he dug it up again a year later after the surrender all it needed was a little palm-oil greasing. “Nothing puzzles God,” he said in wonder.

  He put it to immediate use as a taxi and accumulated a small pile of Biafran money ferrying camp officials and their families across the four-mile stretch to the nearest tarred road. His standard charge per trip was six pounds and those who had the money were only glad to be rid of some of it in this way. At the end of a fortnight he had made a small fortune of one hundred and fifteen pounds.

  Then he made the journey to Enugu and found another miracle waiting for him. It was unbelievable. He rubbed his eyes and looked again and it was still standing there before him. But, needless to say, even that monumental blessing must be accounted also totally inferior to the five heads in the family. This newest miracle was his little house in Ogui Overside. Indeed nothing puzzles God! Only two houses away a huge concrete edifice some wealthy contractor had put up just before the war was a mountain of rubble. And here was Jonathan’s little zinc house of no regrets built with mud blocks quite intact! Of course the doors and windows were missing and five sheets off the roof. But what was that? And anyhow he had returned to Enugu early enough to pick up bits of old zinc and wood and soggy sheets of cardboard lying around the neighbourhood before thousands more came out of their forest holes looking for the same things. He got a destitute carpenter with one old hammer, a blunt plane and a few bent and rusty nails in his tool bag to turn this assortment of wood, paper and metal into door and window shutters for five Nigerian shillings or fifty Biafran pounds. He paid the pounds, and moved in with his overjoyed family carrying five heads on their shoulders.

  His children picked mangoes near the military cemetery and sold them to soldiers’ wives for a few pennies—real pennies this time—and his wife started making breakfast akara balls for neighbours in a hurry to start life again. With his family earnings he took his bicycle to the villages around and bought fresh palm-wine which he mixed generously in his rooms with the water which had recently started running again in the public tap down the road, and opened up a bar for soldiers and other lucky people with good money.

  At first he went daily, then every other day and finally once a week, to the offices of the Coal Corporation where he used to be a miner, to find out what was what. The only thing he did find out in the end was that that little house of his was even a greater blessing than he had thought. Some of his fellow ex-miners who had nowhere to return at the end of the day’s waiting just slept outside the doors of the offices and cooked what meal they could scrounge together in Bournvita tins. As the weeks lengthened and still nobody could say what was what Jonathan discontinued his weekly visits altogether and faced his palm-wine bar.

  But nothing puzzles God. Came the day of the windfall when after five days of endless scuffles in queues and counter-queues in the sun outside the Treasury he had twenty pounds counted into his palms as ex-gratia award for the rebel money he had turned in. It was like Christmas for him and for many others like him when the payments began. They called it (since few could manage its proper official name) egg-rasher.

  As soon as the pound notes were placed in his palm Jonathan simply closed it tight over them and buried fist and money inside his trouser pocket. He had to be extra careful because he had seen a man a couple of days earlier collapse into near-madness in an instant before that oceanic crowd because no sooner had he got his twenty pounds than some heartless ruffian picked it off him. Though it was not right that a man in such an extremity of agony should be blamed yet many in the queues that day were able to remark quietly at the victim’s carelessness, especially after he pulled out the innards of his pocket and revealed a hole in it big enough to pass a thief’s
head. But of course he had insisted that the money had been in the other pocket, pulling it out too to show its comparative wholeness. So one had to be careful.

  Jonathan soon transferred the money to his left hand and pocket so as to leave his right free for shaking hands should the need arise, though by fixing his gaze at such an elevation as to miss all approaching human faces he made sure that the need did not arise, until he got home.

  He was normally a heavy sleeper but that night he heard all the neighbourhood noises die down one after another. Even the night watchman who knocked the hour on some metal somewhere in the distance had fallen silent after knocking one o’clock. That must have been the last thought in Jonathan’s mind before he was finally carried away himself. He couldn’t have been gone for long, though, when he was violently awakened again.

  “Who is knocking?” whispered his wife lying beside him on the floor.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered back breathlessly.

  The second time the knocking came it was so loud and imperious that the rickety old door could have fallen down.

  “Who is knocking?” he asked then, his voice parched and trembling.

  “Na tief-man and him people,” came the cool reply. “Make you hopen de door.” This was followed by the heaviest knocking of all.

  Maria was the first to raise the alarm; then he followed and all their children.

  “Police-o! Thieves-o! Neighbours-o! Police-o! We are lost! We are dead! Neighbours, are you asleep? Wake up! Police-o!”

  This went on for a long time and then stopped suddenly. Perhaps they had scared the thief away. There was total silence. But only for a short while.

  “You done finish?” asked the voice outside. “Make we help you small. Oya, everybody!”