A Man of the People

by Chinua Achebe

  “Odili, the great,” said the Minister boyishly, and still out of breath. “Where have you been all this time?”

  I told him I had been to the University, and had been teaching for the last eighteen months.

  “Good boy!” he said. “I knew he would go to a university. I used to tell the other boys in my class that Odili will one day be a great man and they will be answering him sir, sir. Why did you not tell me when you left the University? That’s very bad of you, you know.”

  “Well,” I said happily—I’m ashamed to admit—“I know how busy a minister . . .”

  “Busy? Nonsense. Don’t you know that minister means servant? Busy or no busy he must see his master.”

  Everybody around applauded and laughed. He slapped me again on the back and said I must not fail to see him at the end of the reception.

  “If you fail I will send my orderly to arrest you.”

  I became a hero in the eyes of the crowd. I was dazed. Everything around me became suddenly unreal; the voices receded to a vague border zone. I knew I ought to be angry with myself but I wasn’t. I found myself wondering whether—perhaps—I had been applying to politics stringent standards that didn’t belong to it. When I came back to the immediate present I heard the Minister saying to another teacher:

  “That is very good. Sometimes I used to regret ever leaving the teaching field. Although I am a minister today I can swear to God that I am not as happy as when I was a teacher.”

  My memory is naturally good. That day it was perfect. I don’t know how it happened, but I can recall every word the Minister said on that occasion. I can repeat the entire speech he made later.

  “True to God who made me,” he insisted. “I used to regret it. Teaching is a very noble profession.”

  At this point everybody just collapsed with laughter not least of all the Honourable Minister himself, nor me, for that matter. The man’s assurance was simply unbelievable. Only he could make such a risky joke—or whatever he thought he was making—at that time, when teachers all over the country were in an ugly, rebellious mood. When the laughter died down, he put on a more serious face and confided to us: “You can rest assured that those of us in the Cabinet who were once teachers are in full sympathy with you.”

  “Once a teacher always a teacher,” said the Senior Tutor, adjusting the sleeves of his faded “bottom-box” robes.

  “Hear! hear!” I said. I like to think that I meant it to be sarcastic. The man’s charisma had to be felt to be believed. If I were superstitious I would say he had made a really potent charm of the variety called “sweet face”.

  Changing the subject slightly, the Minister said, “Only teachers can make this excellent arrangement.” Then turning to the newspaper correspondent in his party he said, “It is a mammoth crowd.”

  The journalist whipped out his note-book and began to write.

  “It is an unprecedented crowd in the annals of Anata,” said Mr Nwege.

  “James, did you hear that?” the Minister asked the journalist.

  “No, sir, what is it?”

  “This gentleman says it is the most unprecedented crowd in the annals of Anata,” I said. This time I clearly meant my tongue to be in my cheek.

  “What is the gentleman’s name?”

  Mr Nwege called his name and spelled it and gave his full title of “Principal and Proprietor of Anata Grammar School”. Then he turned to the Minister in an effort to pin-point responsibility for the big crowds.

  “I had to visit every section of the village personally to tell them of your—I mean to say of the Minister’s—visit.”

  We had now entered the Assembly Hall and the Minister and his party were conducted to their seats on the dais. The crowd raised a deafening shout of welcome. He waved his fan to the different parts of the hall. Then he turned to Mr Nwege and said:

  “Thank you very much, thank you, sir.”

  A huge, tough-looking member of the Minister’s entourage who stood with us at the back of the dais raised his voice and said:

  “You see wetin I de talk. How many minister fit hanswer sir to any Tom, Dick and Harry wey senior them for age? I hask you how many?”

  Everyone at the dais agreed that the Minister was quite exceptional in this respect—a man of high position who still gave age the respect due to it. No doubt it was a measure of my changed—or shall we say changing?—attitude to the Minister that I found myself feeling a little embarrassed on his account for these fulsome praises flung at his face.

  “Minister or no minister,” he said, “a man who is my senior must still be my senior. Other ministers and other people may do otherwise but my motto is: Do the right and shame the Devil.”

  Somehow I found myself admiring the man for his lack of modesty. For what is modesty but inverted pride? We all think we are first-class people. Modesty forbids us from saying so ourselves though, presumably, not from wanting to hear it from others. Perhaps it was their impatience with this kind of hypocrisy that made men like Nanga successful politicians while starry-eyed idealists strove vaingloriously to bring into politics niceties and delicate refinements that belonged elsewhere.

  While I thought about all this—perhaps not in these exact terms—the fulsome praises flowed all around the dais.

  Mr Nwege took the opportunity to mount his old hobbyhorse. The Minister’s excellent behaviour, he said, was due to the sound education he had received when education was education.

  “Yes,” said the Minister, “I used to tell them that standard six in those days is more than Cambridge today.”

  “Cambridge?” asked Mr Nwege who, like the Minister, had the good old standard six. “Cambridge? Who dash frog coat? You mean it is equal to B.A. today—if not more.”

  “With due apologies,” said the Minister turning in my direction.

  “Not at all, sir,” I replied with equal good humour. “I am applying for a post-graduate scholarship to bring myself up to Mr Nwege’s expectation.”

  I remember that at that point the beautiful girl in the Minister’s party turned round on her chair to look at me. My eyes met hers and she quickly turned round again. I think the Minister noticed it.

  “My private secretary has B.A. from Oxford,” he said. “He should have come with me on this tour but I had some office work for him to do. By the way, Odili, I think you are wasting your talent here. I want you to come to the capital and take up a strategic post in the civil service. We shouldn’t leave everything to the highland tribes. My secretary is from there; our people must press for their fair share of the national cake.”

  The hackneyed phrase “national cake” was getting to some of us for the first time, and so it was greeted with applause.

  “Owner of book!” cried one admirer, assigning in those three brief words the ownership of the white man’s language to the Honourable Minister, who turned round and beamed on the speaker.

  That was when my friend Andrew Kadibe committed the unpardonable indiscretion of calling the Minister the nickname he had worn as a teacher: “M.A. Minus Opportunity.” It was particularly bad because Andrew and the Minister were from the same village.

  The look he gave Andrew then reminded me of that other Nanga who had led the pack of hounds four years ago.

  “Sorry, sir,” said Andrew pitiably.

  “Sorry for what?” snarled the Minister.

  “Don’t mind the stupid boy, sir,” said Mr Nwege, greatly upset. “This is what we were saying before.”

  “I think we better begin,” said the Minister, still frowning.

  Although Mr Nwege had begun by saying that the distinguished guest needed no introduction he had gone on all the same to talk for well over twenty minutes—largely in praise of himself and all he had done for the Party in Anata “and environs”.

  The crowd became steadily more restive especially when they notic
ed that the Minister was looking at his watch. Loud grumbles began to reach the dais from the audience. Then clear voices telling Nwege to sit down and let the man they came to hear talk. Nwege ignored all these warning signs—a more insensitive man you never saw. Finally one of the tough young men of the village stood up ten feet or so away and shouted:

  “It is enough or I shall push you down and take three pence.”

  This did the trick. The laughter that went up must have been heard a mile away. Mr Nwege’s concluding remarks were completely lost. In fact it was not until the Minister rose to his feet that the laughter stopped.

  The story had it that many years ago when Mr Nwege was a poor, hungry elementary school teacher—that is before he built his own grammar school and became rich but apparently still hungry—he had an old rickety bicycle of the kind the villagers gave the onomatopoeic name of anikilija. Needless to say the brakes were very faulty. One day as he was cascading down a steep slope that led to a narrow bridge at the bottom of the hill he saw a lorry—an unusual phenomenon in those days—coming down the opposite slope. It looked like a head-on meeting on the bridge. In his extremity Mr Nwege had raised his voice and cried to passing pedestrians: “In the name of God push me down!” Apparently nobody did, and so he added an inducement: “Push me down and my three pence is yours!” From that day “Push me down and take my three pence” became a popular Anata joke.

  The Minister’s speech sounded spontaneous and was most effective. There was no election at hand, he said, amid laughter. He had not come to beg for their votes; it was just “a family reunion—pure and simple”. He would have preferred not to speak to his own kinsmen in English which was after all a foreign language, but he had learned from experience that speeches made in vernacular were liable to be distorted and misquoted in the press. Also there were some strangers in that audience who did not speak our own tongue and he did not wish to exclude them. They were all citizens of our great country whether they came from the highlands or the lowlands, etc. etc.

  The stranger he had in mind I think was Mrs Eleanor John, an influential party woman from the coast who had come in the Minister’s party. She was heavily painted and perfumed and although no longer young seemed more than able to hold her own, if it came to that. She sat on the Minister’s left, smoking and fanning herself. Next to her sat the beautiful young girl I have talked about. I didn’t catch the two of them exchanging any words or even looks. I wondered what such a girl was doing in that tough crowd; it looked as though they had stopped by some convent on their way and offered to give her a lift to the next one.

  At the end of his speech the Minister and his party were invited to the Proprietor’s Lodge—as Mr Nwege called his square, cement-block house. Outside, the dancers had all come alive again and the hunters—their last powder gone—were tamely waiting for the promised palm-wine. The Minister danced a few dignified steps to the music of each group and stuck red pound notes on the perspiring faces of the best dancers. To one group alone he gave away five pounds.

  The same man who had drawn our attention to the Minister’s humility was now pointing out yet another quality. I looked at him closely for the first time and noticed that he had one bad eye—what we call a cowrie-shell eye.

  “You see how e de do as if to say money be san-san,” he was saying. “People wey de jealous the money gorment de pay Minister no sabi say no be him one de chop am. Na so so troway.”

  Later on in the Proprietor’s Lodge I said to the Minister: “You must have spent a fortune today.”

  He smiled at the glass of cold beer in his hand and said:

  “You call this spend? You never see some thing, my brother. I no de keep anini for myself, na so so troway. If some person come to you and say ‘I wan’ make you Minister’ make you run like blazes comot. Na true word I tell you. To God who made me.” He showed the tip of his tongue to the sky to confirm the oath. “Minister de sweet for eye but too much katakata de for inside. Believe me yours sincerely.”

  “Big man, big palaver,” said the one-eyed man.

  It was left to Josiah, owner of a nearby shop-and-bar to sound a discordant, if jovial, note.

  “Me one,” he said, “I no kuku mind the katakata wey de for inside. Make you put Minister money for my hand and all the wahala on top. I no mind at all.”

  Everyone laughed. Then Mrs John said:

  “No be so, my frien’. When you done experience rich man’s trouble you no fit talk like that again. My people get one proverb: they say that when poor man done see with his own eye how to make big man e go beg make e carry him poverty de go je-je.”

  They said this woman was a very close friend of the Minister’s, and her proprietary air would seem to confirm it and the fact that she had come all the way from Pokoma, three hundred and fifty miles away. I knew of her from the newspapers; she was a member of the Library Commission, one of the statutory boards within the Minister’s portfolio. Her massive coral beads were worth hundreds of pounds according to the whisper circulating in the room while she talked. She was the “merchant princess” par excellence. Poor beginning—an orphan, I believe—no school education, plenty of good looks and an iron determination, both of which she put to good account; beginning as a street hawker, rising to a small trader, and then to a big one. At present, they said, she presided over the entire trade in imported second-hand clothing worth hundreds of thousands.

  I edged quietly towards the journalist who seemed to know everyone in the party and whispered in his ear: “Who is the young lady?”

  “Ah,” he said, leaving his mouth wide open for a while as a danger signal. “Make you no go near am-o. My hand no de for inside.”

  I told him I wasn’t going near am-o; I merely asked who she was.

  “The Minister no de introduce-am to anybody. So I think say na im girl-friend, or im cousin.” Then he confided: “I done lookam, lookam, lookam sotay I tire. I no go tell you lie girls for this una part sabi fine-o. God Almighty!”

  I had also noticed that the Minister had skipped her when he had introduced his party to the teachers.

  I know it sounds silly, but I began to wonder what had happened to the Mrs Nanga of the scoutmastering days. They were newly married then. I remembered her particularly because she was one of the very first women I knew to wear a white, ladies’ helmet which in our ignorance we called helment and which was in those days the very acme of sophistication.

  2

  A common saying in the country after Independence was that it didn’t matter what you knew but who you knew. And, believe me, it was no idle talk. For a person like me who simply couldn’t stoop to lick any Big Man’s boots it created a big problem. In fact one reason why I took this teaching job in a bush, private school instead of a smart civil service job in the city with car, free housing, etc., was to give myself a certain amount of autonomy. So when I told the Minister that I had applied for a scholarship to do a post-graduate Certificate of Education in London it did not even cross my mind to enlist his help. I think it is important to stress this point. I had had scholarships both to the secondary school and to the University without any godfather’s help but purely on my own merit. And in any case it wasn’t too important whether I did the post-graduate course or not. As far as I was concerned the important thing was going to be the opportunity of visiting Europe which in itself must be a big education. My friend Andrew Kadibe, who did the same course the previous year, seemed to have got a big kick out of it. I don’t mean the white girls—you can have those out here nowadays—but quite small things. I remember him saying for instance that the greatest delight of his entire visit to Britain was when, for the first time in his twenty-seven years, a white man—a taxi-driver I think—carried his suitcase and said “Sir” to him. He was so thrilled he tipped the man ten shillings. We laughed a lot about it but I could so easily see it happen.

  But much as I wanted to go to Europe I wasn’t going
to sell my soul for it or beg anyone to help me. It was the Minister himself who came back to the post-graduate question at the end of his reception without any prompting whatever from me. (As a matter of fact I tried hard to avoid catching his attention again.) And the proposals he made didn’t seem to me to be offensive in any way. He invited me to come and spend my holidays with him in the capital and while I was there he would try and find out from his Cabinet colleague, the Minister of Overseas Training, whether there was anything doing.

  “If you come as soon as you close,” he said, “you can stay in my guest-room with everything complete—bedroom, parlour, bathroom, latrine, everything—self-contained. You can live by yourself and do anything you like there, it’s all yours.”

  “Make you no min’ am, sha-a,” said Mrs John to me. “I kin see say you na good boy. Make you no gree am spoil you. Me I no de for dis bed-room and bath-room business-o. As you see dis man so, na wicked soul. If he tell you stand make you run.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “Eleanor, why you wan disgrace me and spoil my name so for public for nothing sake. Wetin I do you? Everybody here sabi say me na good Christian. No be so, James?”

  “Ah, na so, sir,” replied the journalist happily.

  In spite of all this joking the Minister’s invitation was serious and firm. He said it was important I came at once as he was planning to go to the United States in about two months.

  “They are going to give me doctorate degree,” he announced proudly. “Doctor of Laws, LL.D.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you, my brother.”

  “So the Minister will become ‘Chief the Honourable Doctor M. A. Nanga’,” intoned the journalist, a whole second ahead of my own thoughts on the matter. We all cheered the impressive address and its future owner.

  “You no see say the title fit my name pem,” said the Minister with boyish excitement, and we all said yes it suited him perfectly.