Then I remembered that last night as I thought about the offer I had been really angry again about it all. Not only about Max disgracing our party and yet having the face to charge me with idealism and naïvety, but I couldn’t help feeling small at the inevitable comparison of the amounts offered to him and me. Not that it mattered; I would still have refused if it had been ten thousand. The real point surely was that Max’s action had jeopardized our moral position, our ability to inspire that kind of terror which I had seen so clearly in Nanga’s eyes despite all his grandiloquent bluff, and which in the end was our society’s only hope of salvation.
I clearly saw Edna withdrawing hurriedly from the front room as I drove up. Women! No matter how beautiful they are they always try to be more—and usually fail; though in Edna’s case she was great with face powder and the rest, and great without them.
Her younger brother was alone in the room. He stood up as I came in and said: “Good morning, sir.”
“Good morning,” I said. “Was it you brought me the letter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is that you are reading?” He held out The Sorrows of Satan, one finger of his left hand still thrust into it to mark the page. I sat down.
“Is Edna in?”
“No, sir.”
“What . . . ? Who did I see as I came up?”
He mumbled something confusedly.
“Go and call her!”
He stood where he was, looking on the floor.
“I said go and call her!” I shouted, rising to my feet. He made no move.
“All right,” I said. “Edna!” I bawled out loud enough for the entire village to hear. She immediately came hurrying back.
What the hell is all this, or words to that effect, were on the tip of my tongue; but I wasn’t allowed to say them. Edna wore a tightened-bow countenance you couldn’t have thought possible on that face, and her tongue when she spoke (which was immediately) stung into me like the tail of a scorpion. I recoiled, tongue-tied.
“Some men have no shame. Can’t you go and look for your own woman instead of sneaking around here? My father has told you to stop coming here, or have you come to pick up some gossip for your friend Mrs Nanga? A big fellow like you should be ashamed of gossiping like a woman. Errand boy, go and tell her I will marry Chief Nanga. Let her come and jump on my back if she can. As for you, why don’t you go back to your prostitute-woman in Bori instead of wasting your time here? I have been respecting you for the sake of Chief Nanga, but if you make the mistake of coming here again I will tell you that my name is Edna Odo”—She turned to go, stopped again, called me “Mr Gossiper” in English and rushed away. . . .
“You better go before Dogo comes back. He says he will castrate you.” This was from the boy, and it came after I had been standing rooted to the ground for I don’t know how long. Dogo? Dogo? Who was he? I thought sluggishly like a slowed up action film. . . . Oh yes, Dogo the one-eyed bull. So he was guarding her. Well, well, good luck to them!
The first shock, the tightening in the throat passed very quickly, certainly by the time I had reversed my car and headed off. In retrospect my behaviour and reaction seemed to have broken all the rules in the book. I should have driven away in a daze, but I didn’t. On the contrary my mind was as clear as daylight. The injustice of Edna’s incoherent accusations most of which I couldn’t even remotely relate to myself or anything I knew did not make me angry. Neither did the terrible thought that Chief Nanga had won the second round. What I felt was sadness—a sadness deep and cool like a well, into which my hopes had fallen; my twin hopes of a beautiful life with Edna and of a new era of cleanliness in the politics of our country.
A thought sneaked into my mind and told me it was futile now to try and go through with my political plans which in all honesty I should admit had always been a little nebulous—until Edna came along. She had been like a dust particle in the high atmosphere around which the water vapour of my thinking formed its globule of rain.
But I knew I would not heed that counsel, wherever it came from. The knowledge that Chief Nanga had won the first two rounds and, on the present showing, would win the third and last far from suggesting thoughts of surrender to my mind served to harden my resolution. What I had to accomplish became more than another squabble for political office; it rose suddenly to the heights of symbolic action, a shining, monumental gesture untainted by hopes of success or reward.
Chief Nanga moved swiftly and, as you would expect, ruthlessly. I was listening on my new portable transistor radio to the twelve o’clock news on the following Sunday morning. Those days I did not miss a single news bulletin. If I was likely not to be home at twelve, four, six or ten, I took my radio with me. It was a fine Japanese affair, no bigger than a camera, with an ear-piece which meant you could insulate yourself from the noisiest of surroundings. If I was driving somewhere I would park on the roadside until the news was over.
There were two reasons why I listened so avidly. In the first place news-thirst becomes a craving for every political activist, a kind of occupational disease. Secondly I wanted to keep a close watch on the antics of our national radio system which incidentally had not so far said a single word about the existence of our new party even though we had kept them fully informed of our activities. My Boniface and the others soon developed the same news-thirst, only they never did seem able to listen with their ears alone; they must pass their very loud comment at the same time, which was very distracting to me especially as their understanding of the news was sketchy and often fantastically distorted. So I began to cut them off by using the ear gadget.
“A-a, weting happen to the news?” asked puzzled Boniface the first time I played this trick.
“Radio done spoil,” I said. “I just de hear am small for my ear now.”
“We must go repairam,” he said. “E no good make man de for darkness.”
Two days later I had relented. I told them I had repaired the radio myself which impressed them a lot. The fact was I had begun to feel mean about cutting my faithful companions from their source of light. But also I had been missing Boniface’s “Tief-man”, “Foolis-man” and similar invective aimed at Chief Nanga and his ministerial colleagues whenever their names came up in the news—which was about every five seconds at normal peaceful times and much more frequently in these critical days.
But to return to the Sunday morning. I was listening in the outbuilding with the cynical amusement to which our radio station had now made me accustomed. I no longer had hopes of our latest story ever being used. I had thought that, with the telegram I had sent them on Friday, they would have been forced into giving us a brief mention. After all it was the first public appearance of a new party, the C.P.C., and the tacit support given my candidature by my village ought not to go unrecorded. True enough, my village was only one out of several in the constituency and their action might not affect the final verdict but what they had done was news by any definition of that word known to the civilized world.
But once more I listened in vain. Instead they announced Chief Nanga’s inaugural campaign which had not even taken place! It was to happen on Monday week in Anata. Perhaps I should go and see it.
I was dully thinking about this when my father’s name coming out of the radio stung me into full life. It was announced that Mr Hezekiah Samalu, chairman of P.O.P. in Urua, had been “ignominiously removed from his office for subversive, anti-party activities, according to an announcement received this morning from the P.O.P. Bureau of Investigation and Publicity”.
I rushed into the main house and broke the news to my father who was then eating pounded yams and pepper soup at his small round table. He swallowed the ball of food in his hand and licked the soup from his fingers. I thought he was then going to say something. But he only shrugged his shoulders, drew out hi
s lower lip in a gesture which said eloquently “Their own palaver, not mine”, and continued eating.
The next day, however, the palaver came closer home. The local council Tax Assessment Officer brought him a reassessed figure based not only on his known pension of eighty-four pounds a year but on an alleged income of five hundred pounds derived from “business”.
“What business?” everyone asked. But there was no time to explain. In the evening three local council policemen looking like “wee-wee” or marijuana smokers came to arrest him and in fact proceeded to manhandle him. I had to find twenty-four pounds fairly smartly; fortunately I had just enough C.P.C. money in the house to cover it. I threatened to take the matter up and the rascals laughed in my face. “Na only up you go take am?” asked their leader. “If I be you I go take am down too, when I done finish take am up. Turn you back make I see the nyarsh you go take fight Nanga.”
“Foolis-man,” said one of the others as they left.
The culmination came at the weekend when seven Public Works lorries arrived in the village and began to cart away the pipes they had deposited several months earlier for our projected Rural Water Scheme. This was the first indication we had that the Authorities did in fact hear of our little ceremony. Which was some consolation.
It is a sad truth of our nature that man becomes too easily brutalized by circumstance. The day after the tax incident I suddenly boiled over. I knew that Edna was still on the edge of my consciousness. I walked up stealthily from behind and pushed her down the precipice—out of my mind. I wrote to her.
Dear Edna, [I said] I wonder who ever put it into your beautiful empty head that I want to take you from your precious man. What on earth do you think I would want to do with a girl who has no more education than lower Elementary? By all means marry your ancient man and if you find that he is not up to it you can always steal away to his son’s bed. Yours truly, Odili Samalu.
13
Two nights later we heard the sound of the Crier’s gong. His message was unusual. In the past the Crier had summoned the village to a meeting to deliberate over a weighty question, or else to some accustomed communal labour. His business was to serve notice of something that was to happen. But this night he did something new: he announced a decision already taken. The elders and the councillors of Urua and the whole people, he said, had decided that in the present political fight raging in the land they should make it known that they knew one man and one man alone—Chief Nanga. Every man and every woman in Urua and every child and every adult would throw his or her paper for him on the day of election—as they had done in the past. If there was any other name called in the matter the elders and councillors of Urua had not heard it. He said this over and over again with minor changes in detail, like the omission of “every child” which I noticed particularly because it had struck me as odd in the first place. And I thought: if the whole people had taken the decision why were they now being told of it?
In the afternoon the radio, our national Crier, took up the message, amplified it and gave it in four languages including English. I listened to it, as I had listened to the rustic version, wearing my cynical smile. I couldn’t say I blamed my village people for recoiling from the role of sacrificial ram. Why should they lose their chance of getting good, clean water, their share of the national cake? In fact they had adequate justification for their volte-face just two days later when the pipes returned. Or, at any rate, some of them returned. The rest apparently had been sent irrevocably to the neighbouring village of Ichida whose inhabitants had also been promised water but hadn’t so far seen even one pipe. So the result of all my exertion had been to give Nanga one stone to kill two birds with.
When I came back with my newspapers the next day I was told that Councillor “Couple” had come to see my father with a promise that if he signed a certain document his recent tax levy would be refunded to him. The document merely sought to dissociate him from his son’s lunatic activities; it also said that the so-called launching of C.P.C. in his premises was done without his knowledge and consent and concluded by affirming his implicit confidence in our great and God-fearing leader, Chief Nanga.
I could visualize my father reading it carefully with his now rarely used spectacles and, then putting his glasses aside, telling the fellow to carry his corpse off. And he must have run—so much so that he left the document behind.
“You made a serious mistake today,” I told my father later that day.
“In your eyes have I ever done anything else in all my life?”
“I am talking about this paper you refused to sign.”
He was silent for a while, then he said:
“You may be right. But our people have said that a man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday. I received your friends in my house and I am not going to deny it.”
I thought to myself: You do not belong to this age, old man. Men of worth nowadays simply forget what they said yesterday. Then I realized that I had never really been close enough to my father to understand him. I had built up a private picture of him from unconnected scraps of evidence. Was this the same D.O.’s Interpreter who made a fortune out of the ignorance of poor, illiterate villagers and squandered it on drink and wives or had I got everything terribly, lopsidedly wrong? Anyway, this was no time to begin a new assessment; it was better left to the tax people.
“But one thing I must make clear,” he said suddenly. “You have brought this trouble into my compound so you should carry it. From today whatever new tax they decide upon I will pass the paper to you.”
“That is a small matter,” I said smiling, and I did mean that it was a small matter.
• • •
I don’t know what put it into my head to go to Chief Nanga’s inaugural campaign meeting. Did I want to learn some new trick that I could put to use in my own campaign against him, or was it naked curiosity—the kind that they say earned Monkey a bullet in the forehead? Whatever it was, I went. But I took great pains to disguise myself first—with a hat and sun-glasses. I thought of taking Boniface and the others, but decided they were likely to attract attention and trouble. So I went alone.
I parked my car outside the Post Office and walked the three hundred yards or so to the Court premises where the meeting was already in progress. The time on my watch was just a little after four. Even if I hadn’t known my way in Anata I could still have found the meeting easily enough. The sound of drums and guns beckoned you on. And there were hundreds of other people going like me to the place. As I got closer I could hear a brass band too—no doubt the Anata Central School. I passed many villagers I knew and who should remember one who was until recently a teacher at the Grammar School, but they obviously had no clue who I was, which showed how good my disguise was. One such person was Josiah, the renegade trader. Those days he walked like a fowl drenched by rain. I came from behind and overtook him.
As soon as I turned into the Court premises my eyes caught Chief Nanga and his party sitting on a high platform solidly built from new timber. Of course I only noticed details like the timber when I had worked my way through the crowd to a closer position by ruthlessly widening every crack I saw in front of me and squeezing through, receiving abuses at my back. What I did see right away and what pulled me towards the dais was Edna sitting there on one side of Chief Nanga, much as she had done on that first day, like a convent girl. Mrs Nanga sat on the other side of her husband. All the other people on the platform so far were men, but there were still many empty chairs. When I had got to a point in the thick of the crowd from where I could observe the faces on the dais without attracting their attention I stopped.
The dais was surrounded by characters who looked as if they might be able to assist the police in various outstanding investigations. One-eyed Dogo was among them. Then of course there were the placard-carrying Nangavanga boys wearing silken, green, cowboy dresses. I noticed that none of the placar
ds today had my name; I shouldn’t have blabbed to Nanga about it. There were also about half a dozen policemen around—just in case, which was unlikely in this friendly crowd.
I was choking with the acrid smell of other people’s sweat and wondered if the ceremony would ever begin.
Chief Nanga sat, smiling and cool in his white robes. His wife looking grandly matriarchal in a blue velvet “up-and-down” fanned herself with one of these delta-shaped Japanese fans, clearly too small and inadequate. Occasionally she lifted the neck of her blouse in front and blew left and right into her bosom. Edna just sat.
At last the ceremony seemed about to begin. Some party official wearing the green P.O.P. cap consulted with Chief Nanga who nodded several times, looking at his watch. Then the official grabbed the microphone and began to test it. His shrill voice amplified a hundredfold startled the crowd and then sent them laughing at their own fright. Something seemed to go wrong because the voice was superseded by one prolonged ear-tearing whistle. All other noises had stopped, and soon the high-pitched whistle stopped too. The man counted one to ten and the crowd laughed again. Then he announced that he was the M.C. He said the man before us needed no introduction (hell, I thought, not again!)—“he was no other than the great Honourable Minister Chief Doctor (in advance) M. A. Nanga.”
A Man of the People Page 14
