“But the man wey I like him name pass na ‘Chief the Honourable Alhaji Doctor Mongo Sego, M.P.’,” said the Minister somewhat wistfully.
“Him own good too,” admitted the incomparable journalist, “but e no pass your own, sir: ‘Chief the Honourable Dr M. A. Nanga, M.P., LL.D.’ Na waa! Nothing fit passam.”
“What about ‘Chief Dr Mrs’?” I threw in mischievously.
“That one no sweet for mouth,” said the Minister. “E no catch.”
“Wetin wrong with am?” asked Mrs John. “Because na woman get am e no go sweet for mouth. I done talk say na only for election time woman de get equality for dis our country.”
“No be so, madam,” said the journalist. “You no see how the title rough like sand-paper for mouth: ‘Dr Chief Mrs’. E no catch at all.”
Before the Minister left he made sure I took down his residential address in the capital. I felt Mr Nwege’s malevolent eyes boring into me as I wrote it down. And hardly were the farewells out of his mouth before he turned to me and asked sneeringly if I was still of the opinion that it was unnecessary to be introduced to the Minister.
“What I objected to was standing in a line like school children,” I said, somewhat embarrassed. “In any case I didn’t need to be introduced. We knew each other already.”
“You can thank your stars that I am not a wicked man,” he continued as though I had said nothing, “otherwise I would have told him. . . .”
“Why don’t you run after him now?” I asked. “He cannot have gone very far.” With that I walked away from the obsequious old fool.
But when I came to think of the events of the day I had to admit that Mr Nwege had not had fair returns for all his trouble. I don’t think the Minister gave him as much as a second to raise any of his own problems. And it was uncharitable I thought for him to have joined in as loudly as he had done in the “push me down” laughter. For the sake of appearances at least he should have kept a straight face. It was clear the great man did not easily forgive those who took up part of his time to make their own speeches. He ostentatiously ignored Mr Nwege for the rest of the day. Poor man! He had probably lost the chance of getting on that new corporation for the disposal of dilapidated government wares with which he was no doubt hoping to replace the even more worn-out equipment in his school. So although it was unreasonable for him to have turned his anger on me there was no doubt he had cause to be angry.
Actually his teachers had let him down badly that afternoon. Apart from myself there was that “M.A. minus opportunity” incident which for some obscure reason seemed to have annoyed the Minister even more than Mr Nwege’s long speech. At least he contained the latter annoyance with laughter. And to crown Mr Nwege’s discomfitures his Senior Tutor, a man in his sixties, had sallied out of the Lodge with one bottle of beer under each armpit—to the amusement of everyone except Mr Nwege who had clearly not gone out of his way to buy beer at its present impossible price for members of his staff to take home. The Senior Tutor, by the way, was a jolly old rogue who could get away with anything—if need be by playing the buffoon. He was a great frequenter of Josiah’s bar across the road. He had a fine sense of humour—like when he asked why so many young people travelled to Britain to be called to the Bar when he could call them all to Josiah’s bar.
I was lighting my Tilley lamp later that evening when someone knocked on my door.
“Come in if you are good-looking,” I said.
“Is Odili in?” asked an unnatural, high-pitched voice.
“Come in, fool,” I said.
It was a silly joke Andrew and I never tired of playing on each other. The idea was to sound like a girl and so send the other’s blood pressure up.
“How the go de go?” I asked.
“Bo, son of man done tire.”
“Did you find out about that girl?” I asked.
“Why na so so girl, girl, girl, girl been full your mouth. Wetin? So person no fit talk any serious talk with you. I never see.”
“O.K., Mr Gentleman,” I said, pumping the lamp. “Any person wey first mention about girl again for this room make him tongue cut. How is the weather?” He laughed.
At that point my house-boy, a fifteen-year-old rogue called Peter, came in to ask what he should cook for supper.
“You no hear the news for three o’clock?” I asked, feigning great seriousness.
“Sir?”
“Government done pass new law say na only two times a day person go de chop now. For morning and for afternoon. Finish.”
He laughed.
“That is next to impossibility,” he said. Peter liked his words long. He had his standard six certificate which two or three years before could have got him a job as a messenger in an office or even a teacher in an elementary school. But today there simply aren’t any jobs for his kind of person any more and he was lucky to be a sort of housekeeper to me for one pound a month, including, of course, free board and lodging. He spent most of his spare time reading, although his favourite literature is of a very dubious kind. I once found him reading a strange book he had just received from India. I think it was called How to Solve the Fair Sex and had cost him no less than ten shillings excluding postage from New Delhi. I had roundly rebuked him.
I couldn’t think what to eat. So I told him to go and roast me some yams.
“Roast yams at night?” screamed Andrew. “If you knock at my door in the middle of the night I shan’t wake up.”
This was a crude reference to the night I had a violent stomach-ache after eating half a dozen roasted corn. I had been so scared I had gone and called Andrew up to take me to hospital in his ancient car.
“What do you suggest I eat then?” I asked him.
“Am I your wife? Don’t you see all the girls waiting for husbands?”
“Don’t you fear. I have my eyes on one right now.”
“True? Give me tori. Who is she? What about the poem?”
“The same,” I said, and we recited together a poem one of our acquaintances had composed for his wedding invitation card:
“It’s time to spread the news abroad
That we are well prepared
To tie ourselves with silvery cord
Of sweet conjugal bond.”
“Look at this small pickin,” said Andrew in pretended anger to Peter who had joined our laughter. “How dare you laugh with your elders?”
“Sorry, sir,” said Peter, frowning comically.
“What do you think I should eat, Peter?” I asked.
“Anything master talk. Like Jollof rice, sir.”
I knew. Whenever you allowed him a say in this matter he invariably came up with Jollof rice—his favourite dish.
“O.K.,” I said. “One cup of rice—not one and a half; not one and a quarter.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, and went away happily. I knew he would cook at least two cups.
“Who is she?” I said.
“Who?”
“The girl with the Minister.”
“His girl-friend.”
“I see.”
“Actually it’s more than that. He is planning to marry her according to native law and custom. Apparently his missus is too ‘bush’ for his present position so he wants a bright new ‘parlour-wife’ to play hostess at his parties.”
“Too bad. Who told you all this?”
“Somebody.”
“Too bad. Without knowing anything whatever about that girl I feel she deserves to be somebody’s first wife—not an old man’s mistress. Anyway it’s none of my business.”
“He sent her to a Women’s Training College,” said Andrew. “So he has been planning it for a few years at least. I feel sorry for her; that man has no conscience.”
I said nothing.
“Imagine such a beautiful thing wasting herself on such an
empty-headed ass. I so enjoyed wounding his pride! Did you see how wild he looked?”
“Yes,” I said, “you hit him hard.” Actually I was amused how Andrew was desperately trying to convince himself—and me—that he had gone to the reception with the avowed intention to deflate his empty-headed kontriman. He seemed to be forgetting in a hurry that he had earlier refused to support me at the staff meeting when I had objected to Mr Nwege’s stupid plans.
“Just think of such a cultureless man going abroad and calling himself Minister of Culture. Ridiculous. This is why the outside world laughs at us.”
“That is true,” I said, “but the outside world isn’t all that important, is it? In any case people like Chief Nanga don’t care two hoots about the outside world. He is concerned with the inside world, with how to retain his hold on his constituency and there he is adept, you must admit. Anyway, as he told us today, Churchill never passed his School Certificate.”
“I see the offer of free lodging is already having its effect.”
I began to laugh and Andrew joined in. You could tell at a glance that he knew me in a way that Mr Nwege didn’t. It was one thing to tease me for accepting the Minister’s offer of accommodation, but I just didn’t want anybody to think that Odili Samalu was capable of stooping to obtain a scholarship in any underhand way. In the words of my boy, Peter, it was “next to impossibility”.
Andrew knew of course that I had long been planning to go to the capital and he knew about Elsie.
Well, Elsie! Where does one begin to write about her? The difficulty in writing this kind of story is that the writer is armed with all kinds of hindsight which he didn’t have when the original events were happening. When he introduces a character like Elsie for instance, he already has at the back of his mind a total picture of her; her entrance, her act and her exit. And this tends to colour even the first words he writes. I can only hope that being aware of this danger I have successfully kept it at bay. As far as is humanly possible I shall try not to jump ahead of my story.
Elsie was, and for that matter still is, the only girl I met and slept with the same day—in fact within an hour. I know that faster records do exist and am not entering this one for that purpose, nor am I trying to prejudice anyone against Elsie. I only put it down because that was the way it happened. It was during my last term at the University and, having as usual put off my revision to the last moment, I was having a rough time. But one evening there was a party organized by the Students’ Christian Movement and I decided in spite of my arrears of work to attend and give my brain time to cool off. I am not usually lucky, but that evening I was. I saw Elsie standing in a group with other student nurses and made straight for her. She turned out to be a most vivacious girl newly come to the nursing School. We danced twice, then I suggested we take a walk away from the noisy highlife band and she readily agreed. If I had been left to my own devices nothing might have happened that day. But, no doubt without meaning to, Elsie took a hand in the matter. She said she was thirsty and I took her to my rooms for a drink of water.
She was one of those girls who send out loud cries in the heat of the thing. It happened again each time. But that first day it was rather funny because she kept calling: “Ralph darling.” I remember wondering why Ralph. It was not until weeks later that I got to know that she was engaged to some daft fellow called Ralph, a medical student in Edinburgh. The funny part of it was that my next-door neighbour—an English Honours student and easily the most ruthless and unprincipled womanizer in the entire university campus—changed to calling me Ralph from that day. He was known to most students by his nickname, Irre, which was short for Irresponsible. His most celebrated conquest was a female undergraduate who had seemed so inaccessible that boys called her Unbreakable. Irre became interested in her and promised his friends to break her one day soon. Then one afternoon we saw her enter his rooms. Our hall began to buzz with excitement as word went round, and we stood in little groups all along the corridor, waiting. Half an hour or so later Irre came out glistening with sweat, closed the door quietly behind him and then held up a condom bloated with his disgusting seed. That was Irre for you—a real monster. I suppose I was somehow flattered by the notice a man of such prowess had taken of Elsie’s cry. When I confided to him later that Ralph was the name of the girl’s proper boy-friend he promptly changed to calling me Assistant Ralph or, if Elsie was around, simply A.R.
Despite this rather precipitous beginning Elsie and I became very good and steady friends. I can’t pretend that I ever thought of marriage, but I must admit I did begin to feel a little jealous any time I found her reading and rereading a blue British air-letter with the red Queen and Houses of Parliament stamped on its back. Elsie was such a beautiful, happy girl and she made no demands whatever.
When I left the University she was heart-broken and so was I for that matter. We exchanged letters every week or two weeks at the most. I remember during the postal strike of 1963 when I didn’t hear from her for over a month I nearly kicked the bucket, as my boy, Peter, would have said.
Now she was working in a hospital about twelve miles outside Bori and so we arranged that I should spend my next holidays in the capital and take the bus to her hospital every so often while she would be able to spend her days off in the city. That was why the Minister’s offer couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. I had of course one or two bachelor friends in the capital who would have had no difficulty in putting me up. But they weren’t likely to provide a guest-room with all amenities.
For days after the Minister’s visit I was still trying to puzzle out why he had seemed so offended by his old nickname—“M.A. Minus Opportunity”. I don’t know why I should have been so preoccupied with such unimportant trash. But it often happens to me like that: I get hold of some pretty inane thought or a cheap tune I would ordinarily be ashamed to be caught whistling, like that radio jingle advertising an intestinal worm expeller, and I get stuck with it.
When I first knew Mr Nanga in 1948 he had seemed quite happy with his nickname. I suspect he had in fact invented it himself. Certainly he enjoyed it. His name being M. A. Nanga, his fellow teachers called him simply and fondly “M.A.”; he answered “Minus Opportunity”, which he didn’t have to do unless he liked it. Why then the present angry reaction? I finally decided that it stemmed from the same general anti-intellectual feeling in the country. In 1948 Mr Nanga could admit, albeit lightheartedly, to a certain secret yearning for higher education; in 1964 he was valiantly proving that a man like him was better without it. Of course he had not altogether persuaded himself, or else he would not have shown such excitement over the LL.D. arranged for him from some small, back-street college.
3
Before making the long journey to the capital, I thought I should first pay a short visit to my home village, Urua, about fifteen miles from Anata. I wanted to see my father about one or two matters but more especially I wanted to take my boy, Peter, to his parents for the holidays as I had promised to do before they let me have him.
Peter was naturally very excited about going home after nearly twelve months, during which he had become a wage-earner. At first I found it amusing when he went over to Josiah’s shop across the road and bought a rayon head-tie for his mother and a head of tobacco for his father. But as I thought more about it I realized how those touching gestures by a mere boy, whom I paid twenty shillings a month, showed up my own quite different circumstances. And I felt envious. I had no mother to buy head-ties for, and although I had a father, giving things to him was like pouring a little water into a dried-up well.
My mother had been his second wife, but she had died in her first childbirth. This meant in the minds of my people that I was an unlucky child, if not a downright wicked and evil one. Not that my father ever said so openly. To begin with he had too many other wives and children to take any special notice of me. But I was always a very sensitive child and knew from quite early
in my life that there was something wrong with my affairs. My father’s first wife, whom we all call Mama, brought me up like one of her own children; still I sensed there was something missing. One day at play another child with whom I had fallen out called me “Bad child that crunched his mother’s skull”. That was it.
I am not saying that I had an unhappy or a lonely childhood. There were too many of us in the family for anyone to think of loneliness or unhappiness. And I must say this for my father that he never tolerated any of his wives drawing a line no matter how thin between her own children and those of others. We had only one Mama. The other two wives (at the time—there are more now) were called Mother by their children, or so and so’s mother by the rest.
Of course as soon as I grew old enough to understand a few simple proverbs I realized that I should have died and let my mother live. Whenever my people go to console a woman whose baby has died at birth or soon after, they always tell her to dry her eyes because it is better the water is spilled than the pot broken. The idea being that a sound pot can always return to the stream.
My father was a District Interpreter. In those days when no one understood as much as “come” in the white man’s language, the District Officer was like the Supreme Deity, and the Interpreter the principal minor god who carried prayers and sacrifice to Him. Every sensible supplicant knew that the lesser god must first be wooed and put in a sweet frame of mind before he could undertake to intercede with the Owner of the Sky.
So Interpreters in those days were powerful, very rich, widely known and hated. Wherever the D.O.’s power was felt —and that meant everywhere—the Interpreter’s name was held in fear and trembling.
We grew up knowing that the world was full of enemies. Our father had protective medicine located at crucial points in our house and compound. One, I remember, hung over the main entrance; but the biggest was in a gourd in a corner of his bedroom. No child went alone into that room which was virtually always under lock and key anyway. We were told that such and such homes were never to be entered; and those people were pointed out to us from whom we must not accept food.