Married But Available

by B. Nyamnjoh

  “That’s cynical.”

  “But well-founded, won’t you say?”

  “No comment.”

  “The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to believe that the problem might perhaps be one of theme.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A cursed theme, I mean. Perhaps I am, and I suppose you as well are, interested in a theme which people prefer to act out in private while keeping up appearances in public. So don’t think I joke when I say there is an aura of misfortune around this paper.”

  Lilly Loveless felt for him.

  “Of course, I’m desperate to be proven wrong,” he smiled longingly, “which is why I was quite excited about your coming, when Professor Dustbin mentioned you, and especially after I read your first email,” he went on.

  The waiter returned with another set of drinks, a Baobab for Dr Wiseman Lovemore, which he preferred hot, and a well-chilled Mimbo-Wanda for Lilly Loveless.

  They both filled their glasses and formally toasted welcome and good collaboration.

  Dr Wiseman Lovemore felt lighter having unburdened himself, at least temporarily, of the curse of his paper. He made clear what he intended to gain from sharing his paper and ideas: “I would like us to co-author something together in this area,” he told her.

  She stopped pretending to read, took a sip from her glass, and turned to him, a curious expression on her face.

  I am just a beginner, she thought, half flattered, half mystified. Yet here is a whole Dr with many years of university lectureship to his credit already hoping to publish with me, virtually pleading to be considered, even before he has known what I can or cannot offer. She felt pity.

  He was serious. “Publishing in Mimboland is extremely difficult,” he proclaimed. “And the only way one can hope to change grades is through seizing opportunities such as this offered by your coming. That is, when one is not a stooge of the party in power.” The pressure to publish or perish was printed on his forehead in bold letters. He emptied his glass as if to say, “You have no choice in this matter.”

  Lilly Loveless conceded without thinking things through. She could see she had little choice in the matter, not only because his request reminded her of ethical dilemmas on which she had been grilled by her committee, but especially because he was going to be her host and guide for the next six months in the field.

  He thanked her profusely and said she could do with the paper as she liked, as long as their names appeared on the final version together. He didn’t mind being the second author: “Lovemore and Loveless or Loveless and Lovemore, I don’t care, so long as I am published. I simply can’t afford to perish in a den like this.”

  That was what she remembered from last evening, at Mountain Valley.

  ***

  Dr Wiseman Lovemore arrived soon after Lilly Loveless finished her breakfast. She noted that he wore the same short-sleeved dark blue button up shirt he had worn the day before. They exchanged greetings. He sat down, adjusted the goggles that covered a third of his face, fitted the new SIM card into her phone and loaded it with airtime. Lilly Loveless thanked him, refunded what he had spent, and asked for receipts and his signature for accounting purposes back home. She had brought along a huge receipt booklet which she intended to fill with signatures to satisfy those funding her fieldwork in Mimboland. Transparent accounting entailed that money should be seen to be well spent, which meant obtaining signatures and receipts even from those who could not read and write. Her phone loaded, Lilly Loveless excused herself and sought privacy at the other end of the pool to call her mom.

  She didn’t want to embarrass Dr Wiseman Lovemore with her mom’s silly questions and worries: “What are the people like? … How much freedom does the weather allow you? …Any health problems yet? … Keep your first aid kit handy …. Always carry with you some … Have you been robbed? … Good, thank him for me … Do be careful – you know what I mean, don’t you?”

  She tried to reassure her mother, who was more than pleased to hear her daughter’s voice defy the challenges of being in Africa.

  “My mom sends greetings,” she told him, following her call. “She says I should thank you for her, for taking care of me.”

  Dr Wiseman Lovemore nodded.

  “I can relax now that she knows how to reach me,” she said, more to herself. “My mom is very nervous about my being out here. She makes me feel like a two-year-old.”

  “It’s understandable. She doesn’t want to lose her daughter to the wild unknown.”

  “She has all these strange ideas about Africa.”

  “You can’t blame her. Everyone has strange ideas about the unfamiliar.” He wanted to add that even Africans had strange ideas about Africa, but thought that would need some explaining, so he didn’t.

  “I see you’d get along very well with my mom. My plan is to persuade her to come and visit, as soon as I am settled.”

  “It would be my pleasure to make her feel at home away from home.” Dr Wiseman Lovemore liked the sound of the phrase he had just made.

  It struck a cord with Lilly Loveless as well, for she smiled her appreciation.

  “Your dad, did you speak to him as well?”

  “My dad doesn’t live with my mom. They are divorced. He lives in the same city, with another woman,” Lilly Loveless replied generously.

  “Still you should call him to say you arrived safely,” Dr Wiseman Lovemore insisted.

  “He doesn’t worry about me the same way mom does, but we are very fond of each other. I’ll call him when I’m settled,” Lilly Loveless would not be drawn.

  “So what would you like to do today? Whom do you want to see? Where would you want to be taken? I’m at your disposal.” He was admiring her curly blonde hair as he spoke, but not wanting to give that impression.

  Lilly Loveless was far smarter than he imagined. She noticed his eyes behind the goggles hover over her like butterflies in spring.

  “First, I’d like to call Desire, your colleague, to make a new appointment to see the studio she is renting out. I missed our appointment this morning. Then, perhaps we could go to the Archives, and to the university. Later in the day, I’d just want us to sit somewhere so I can take down the names of possible people to meet, interview, and so on. In short, I want all the help you can give, but I wouldn’t want to keep you from your work.”

  “It’s my pleasure to show you round,” he smiled. “After all, one good turn deserves another. Moreover, if I am to stay in your mom’s good books, that’s what I must do: take good care of her beloved daughter.”

  “Thanks. You’re most kind. Much appreciated.” She touched his arm. “A quick call to your colleague, then we can go.”

  Lilly Loveless took out her notebook for the number. “Hi Desire… It’s Lilly … Lilly Loveless… I’m sorry I missed our appointment this morning. Could we meet this afternoon? … Yes, 3pm is fine… He knows your place… OK. I’ll ask him to bring me there. … Thanks… Thank you very much… Bye.” Lilly Loveless looked up. “Appointment with Desire at 3pm,” she told Dr Wiseman Lovemore. “She says you could bring me where she lives. But you could just describe to me how to get there…”

  “No problem at all,” he interrupted. “How many times am I going to tell you that?” he appeared to take offence. “I’ll take you there, after the Archives.”

  She dropped her key at the reception and they walked out to where his car was parked.

  “I suggest we walk. The Archives are just a stone’s throw away.”

  “Perfect,” she smiled. “I love walking.”

  They arrived at the Puttkamerstown Archives, whose surrounding bushes of wild cassava, cocoyam, creepers and crawlers, rodents and reptiles, elephant grass and other plants immediately appealed to Lilly Loveless. She was introduced to the archivist, a friendly old man, weak with the burden of years, who described himself as “a willing horse” and “a forgotten beast of burden”.

  Stooped and dented by age, toil and the
ingratitude of those who should know better, Prince Anointed was his real name. A pious smile gracing his wrinkled face, he proclaimed with inner pride: “I have worked here since the Muzungu man said farewell to Mimboland.”

  He gracefully guided them through the collection, the way he did every single visitor.

  “The entire weight of keeping the Archives alive rests on my feeble shoulders.”

  There was a sense of ‘these are my babies’ in the way he went through the stacks. Proud as he was of the place, and especially of the efforts he had personally put in to preserve the documents, there was a certain sadness and disappointment in his voice. He was not happy with the uncultured practices of the Ministry of Culture. One could see he was pregnant with disdain for ministerial indifference to the need to preserve history and ensure continuity by documenting the present with care.

  “The entire government is most impatient with documentary evidence,” he told them. “I don’t know how familiar you are with Mimboland,” he addressed Lilly Loveless, “but every now and again, you hear strange things about the archives of this or that ministry going up in flames,” he smiled in bitter cynicism.

  “Such mysterious fires always coincide with rumoured embezzlement of public funds. To destroy evidence, they don’t mind destroying institutional memory and our public service history. I know of a governor in Zintgraffstown whose first act in office was to clean out the archives for a big bonfire, allegedly because he needed the building so he could receive his mistresses without attracting his wife’s attention.” His look was grim.

  Lilly Loveless who could not tell if he was exaggerating or not, said: “A sort of spontaneous combustion of archives. Suspicious, isn’t it?”

  Prince Anointed nodded and went on: “All too often, you come across market women and little children selling their goods wrapped in important documents that should be here at the Archives,” he shook his silvery head with disappointment.

  “Sometimes, I’m so possessed by fury that I find myself begging for coins from passers-by to purchase these documents from the market women and hawking children for the Archives. I hate to see history killed by callous indifference.”

  He told them, as he would anyone who cared to listen, how he came to work at the Archives.

  “In the colonial days, Archives and Antiquity was a very important service. There was this Muzungulander anthropologist who took a look at me and said: ‘Young man, I want you to keep records.’ He anointed me an instant gardener of official documents, and would refer to me as ‘the anointed one,’ when he spoke with his colleagues. He entrusted me to his wife, a very nice lady, who was much, much younger then and who has stayed committed to the Archives to date. She taught me everything I know about classifying documents and keeping history alive.”

  The couple eventually retired to Muzunguland. Twenty years later, the lady, whose husband had by then passed away, came back to Mimboland for a conference and decided to stop by at the Archives.

  “Not only was she surprised to find out I was still there, she wept at the state in which she saw the Archives.”

  The roof was leaking, and rainwater and humidity had damaged lots of files. She turned to him, an angry look on her face. She needed an explanation.

  “Without funds flowing from the government, and with my salary discontinued, there is little even a devoted mother can do…”

  She understood. The theme of the conference she had just attended was all about that: The Missing State in Mimboland.

  The government did not seem to notice the Archives. Nor did it bother about an archivist enfeebled by age and misery forced to trek kilometres to work five days a week to classify and register documents, repair files, dust, kill bookworms, chase rats and white ants and cockroaches, and attend to researchers without electricity, water or usable toilets.

  He told her, “When I retired 10 years ago, there were at least nine employees. Now I am alone. As you can see some files are lying on the floor, some are not classified, most are at the mercy of rats, and every document is at risk because of the humidity and leaking roof. Even if the resources are there, this place needs at least twenty people to work effectively.”

  He came short of adding that her husband would turn in his grave if he knew the state of his beloved Archives today.

  “When the grand lady returned to Muzunguland, she raised funds and sent back the dehumidifier, the photocopier and the computer you see over there,” he gestured to machines covered in cobwebs and thick with dust.

  “The photocopier has been helpful, but repeated power cuts have crippled it.”

  Even the dehumidifier was temperamental, probably for the same reason. The lack of an uninterrupted power supply unit to control surges meant that he could hardly use the computer to ease his work. To make matters worse, a diskette got stuck in the computer.

  With a wry smile he concludes: “Mimboland is not interested in heritage and the preservation of records. Some concerned university professors have struggled to have me paid to no avail.” Then, turning to Lilly Loveless, he teased seriously, “It is thanks to the generosity of researchers like you, that the willing horse continues to assume its burdens.”

  Lilly Loveless pledged to do her modest best to help Prince Anointed keep body and soul together during her stay. She would also send emails back home to help raise funds for the Archives. She would start with her dad, librarian at the small public library in her hometown and active member of the Muzunguland Public Library Association.

  With such music to his ears, Prince Anointed pledged to facilitate her research in whatever way he could, including allowing her, exceptionally, to photocopy outside of the Archives documents of interest to her work.

  “Write down your research topic for me, and I’ll start ferreting for you right away,” he told Lilly Loveless.

  She did.

  Good hearted outsiders always try to help, but our selfishness kills it all, Dr Wiseman Lovemore thought to himself, bitter about a country that had become like white ants to its history.

  3

  For over two weeks since her arrival, Lilly Loveless’s research has been limited to going to the Archives, visiting Mountain Valley, interviewing the odd person now and again, and chatting with Dr Wiseman Lovemore, whose paper she keeps postponing reading. Nothing yet as systematic and as informed by the experiences of students as she had hoped. That is because of a strike at the University of Mimbo.

  She has met, more times than she can recollect, hundreds of students carrying placards, palm fronds and tree branches, chanting the names of the VC and Reg, asking them to stop this and stop that or face the fire of their wrath. She has found the banners particularly rich in messages, ranging from: ‘UM: uncertain, unstable, unpredictable’ to ‘The VC Must Go’, through ‘Reg son of a Cam-no-go’; ‘Down with the Fence’; ‘They make the decisions, we live with the consequences’; ‘The Logic of Force Has Never Solved the Problem of Hunger’; ‘We want no Den of mediocrity’. She has also seen gendarmes and riot police chasing the students with water cannons, tear-gas, guns, batons and a burning desire to discipline and punish. And the students disperse only to reconstitute themselves again with songs of determination screaming in unison: ‘Enough is enough – We’ve been taken for granted for long enough’.

  Dr Wiseman Lovemore and her landlady Desire give her regular updates on goings on. The strike has been provoked by the fence under construction. The VC, known as a daughter of the soil because she hails from the local ethnic group, started the construction of the controversial 8km fence round the university. The project, said to cost Mim$40 million, is heavily criticised by students and staff alike, who think it a mistaken priority.

  The staff and students in their majority are categorical: In an institution where there are no lecture halls, no good library, no paper or machines to photocopy, where students are under taught and lecturers underpaid and disillusioned, a fence is hardly a priority project. If the VC was more of the conductor of the
orchestra that she is supposed to be rather than seeking to play every single instrument in it as she does, she would certainly know the situation on the ground. Instead, there she is up in the clouds, insulated by ignorance and arrogance and fed with falsehood by spies and sycophants.

  Wherever one meets a university lecturer, the complaint is the same: “Here at Puttkamerstown, professors are respected because they are knowledgeable and despised because they are poor”. They are said to be unable to afford a drink at bars where even taxi men and truck pushers are able to drink until they are drunk. At the market, their wives stand out because of how much they are ready to haggle until prices are dropped to affordable levels. “Our conditions have gone from bad to worse and from worse to the very worst,” they tell everyone who cares to listen.

  One of those who criticised the building of the fence in a local newspaper – The Talking Drum – is a certain Muzunguland part-time lecturer with the Department of Political Science by the name of Dr Mukala-Satannie. His article entitled, ‘A Den of Mediocrity,’ so infuriated the VC that she immediately terminated his services of lecturer and barred him from entering the university campus.

  The ‘Den of Mediocrity’ article is a courageous piece which Lilly Loveless isn’t sure she would write, even if she would die to defend Dr Mukala-Satannie’s right to express his opinions. “University of Mimbo,” he writes, “is fencing itself into a den of mediocrity, while complaining students and staff are miffed by the huge sum of money involved.” He calls on the university administration to “tear down this wall,” for staff and students “would rather see their scarce resources used to improve deplorable teaching and research facilities, stock the library with books and journals, and build toilets on campus.” He writes: “Isn’t it true that the fence is just a pretext for the Humpty Dumpty university administration to divert university funds to serve their personal needs and plethora of vested interests?” And concludes: “Some people adore academic excellence, others a den of mediocrity.”