I was interrupted by many voices at once. But the rest gave way to Max.
“That is not entirely accurate, Odili. What you see here is only the vanguard, the planning stage. Once we are ready we shall draw in the worker, the farmer, the blacksmith, the carpenter . . .”
“And the unemployed, of course,” said the young lady with that confidence of a beautiful woman who has brains as well, which I find a little intimidating. “And I’d like to take our friend up on a purely historical point. The great revolutions of history were started by intellectuals, not the common people. Karl Marx was not a common man; he wasn’t even a Russian.”
The trade-unionist applauded the speech by clapping and shouting “Hear, hear.” The rest made different kinds of appreciative noises.
“Well, well,” I thought and gave up altogether my next idea of asking how the thing was going to be financed.
“At the same time,” said Max, acting the perfect chairman, “I can’t say that I blame Odili for making that point. He’s always been a stickler for thoroughness. Do you know the name we called him at school? Diligent.” Everyone laughed.
“I should add that he was called Cool Max,” I said. “He always played it cool.”
“And still does,” said the lady with a wink at him.
“I beg your pardon,” protested Max playfully. “Anyhow, lady and gentlemen, or rather, gentlemen and lady, to borrow our friend’s fine example . . .”
“Max!” protested the girl in mock outrage. “Well, I never!”
“I think to save all difficulty—yes? we should simply say comrades—yes?” suggested the European, laughing nervously which made me think he wasn’t joking like the rest of us.
“Hear! hear!” said the trade-unionist.
“Yes,” said Max coolly, “except that as I said several times before, I don’t want anybody to say we are communists. We can’t afford the label. It would simply finish us. Our opponents would point at us and say, ‘Look at those crazy people who want to have everything in common including their wives’, and that would be the end of it. That’s the plain fact.”
“I don’t know about that,” said the trade-unionist. “I think our trouble in this country is that we are too nervous. We say we are neutral but as soon as we hear communist we begin de shake and piss for trouser. Excuse me,” he said to the lady and dropped the pidgin as suddenly as he had slid into it. “The other day somebody asked me why did I go to Russia last January. I told him it was because if you look only in one direction your neck will become stiff. . . .”
We all laughed loud, especially the European.
“I know, Joe . . .” began Max, but Joe did not yield easily.
“No, excuse me, Max,” he said, “I am serious. We are either independent in this country or we are not.”
“We are not,” said Max, and everyone laughed again, including Joe this time, all the heat apparently siphoned off him.
I was struck by Max’s cool, sure touch. He was clearly in control of the situation. And he seemed to me to have just the right mixture of faith and down-to-earth practical common sense.
“We will not win the next election,” he told me on another occasion. In itself it was a fairly obvious statement; but how many mushroom political parties had we seen spring up, prophesy a landslide victory for themselves and then shrivel up again. “What we must do is get something going,” said Max, “however small, and wait for the blow-up. It’s bound to come. I don’t know how or when but it’s got to come. You simply cannot have this stagnation and corruption going on indefinitely.”
“How do you propose getting the money?”
“We will get some,” he smiled, “enough to finance ordinary election expenses. We will leave mass bribing of the electors to P.O.P. and P.A.P. We will simply drop cats among their pigeons here and there, stand aside and watch. I am right now assembling all the documentary evidence I can find of corruption in high places. Brother, it will make you weep.”
“I am sure.”
• • •
Because I had asked him jokingly as we were about to retire to bed if he still wrote poetry, Max had gone and fished out lines he wrote seven years ago to the music of a famous highlife. He wrote it during the intoxicating months of high hope soon after Independence. Now he sang it like a dirge. And, believe me, tears welled up at the back of my eyes; tears for the dead, infant hope. You may call me sentimental if you like.
I have the poem, “Dance-offering to the Earth-Mother”, right here before me as I write and could quote the whole of it; but it could never convey in print the tragic feeling I had that evening as Max sang it tapping his foot to the highlife rhythm, and bringing back vividly the gaiety and high promise of seven years ago which now seemed more than seven lifetimes away!
I will return home to her—many centuries have I wandered—
And I will make my offering at the feet of my lovely Mother:
I will rebuild her house, the holy places they raped and plundered,
And I will make it fine with black wood, bronzes and terra-cotta.
I read this last verse over and over again. Poor black mother! Waiting so long for her infant son to come of age and comfort her and repay her for the years of shame and neglect. And the son she has pinned so much hope on turning out to be a Chief Nanga.
“Poor black mother!” I said out aloud.
“Yes, poor black mother,” said Max looking out of the window. After a long interval he turned round and asked if I remembered my Bible.
“Not really. Why?”
“Well, I can’t get it out of my system. You know my father is an Anglican priest. . . . No, when you talked about poor black mother just now I remembered a passage that goes something like this:
“A voice was heard in Ramah
Weeping and great lamentation
Rachel weeping for her children
And she would not be comforted, because they are not.
“It is a favourite of my father’s who, by the way, still thinks we should never have asked the white man to go.”
“Perhaps he is right,” I said.
“Well, no. The trouble is that he hasn’t got very much out of Independence, personally. There simply weren’t any white posts in his profession that he could take over. There is only one bishop in the entire diocese and he is already an African.”
“You are unfair to the old man,” I said laughing.
“You should hear some of the things the old man says about me. I remember when I last went to see him with Eunice he said who knows I might get a son before him. Oh, we crack such expensive jokes.”
“You are an only son, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
I felt so envious.
“You know, Odili,” he began suddenly after a longish pause, “I don’t believe in Providence and all that kind of stuff but your arrival just at this very moment is most fortunate. You see, we were planning to appoint able and dynamic organizing secretaries in each of the regions very soon. Now we’ve got you we don’t have to worry our head about the south-east any more.”
“I’ll do what I can, Max,” I said.
• • •
Perhaps the most astonishing thing Max told me about the new party was that one of the junior ministers in the Government was behind it.
“What is he doing in the Government if he is so dissatisfied with it?” I asked naïvely. “Why doesn’t he resign?”
“Resign?” laughed Max. “Where do you think you are—Britain or something? Don’t be funny, Odili.”
“I am not being funny,” I said hotly, perhaps more hotly than was called for.
I knew very well and needed no reminder that we were not in Britain or something, that when a man resigned in our country it was invariably with an eye on the main chance—as when a few years ago ten newly elected
P.A.P. Members of Parliament had switched parties at the opening of the session and given the P.O.P. a comfortable majority overnight in return for ministerial appointments and—if one believed the rumours—a little cash prize each as well. All that was well known, but I would have thought it was better to start our new party clean, with a different kind of philosophy.
“I know how you feel,” said Max rather patronizingly. “I felt like that at first. But we must face certain facts. You take a man like Nanga now on a salary of four thousand plus all the—you know. You know what his salary was as an elementary school teacher? Perhaps not more than eight pounds a month. Now do you expect a man like that to resign on a little matter of principle . . . ?”
“Assuming, that is, that he can recognize principle when he sees it,” I added somewhat pompously.
“Well, exactly. I am not saying, mark you, that our man is like Nanga. He is a true nationalist and would not hesitate to resign if he felt it was really necessary. But as he himself points out, do we commit suicide every day we feel unhappy with the state of the world?”
“It’s hardly the same thing,” I said.
“Well, I know. But having a man like him right in the Government is very essential, I can assure you. He tells me all that goes on.”
“In that sense I suppose you are right. As the saying goes it is only when you are close to a man that you can begin to smell his breath.”
“Well, exactly.”
9
I returned to Anata on 23rd December after Max and his fiancée, Eunice, had tried in vain to make me spend Christmas in Bori. The lorry dropped me at the small roadside market called Waya which had sprung up to serve the Grammar School. Something unusual seemed to be going on in Josiah’s shop-and-bar. Whatever it was had drawn crowds from the rest of the market to it. You couldn’t say definitely at first whether it was a good thing or a bad from the loud, excited talking, but it was soon clear from the kind of gesticulation I saw that something had gone wrong. I saw one old woman swing her hand in a gyre round her head and jerk it towards Josiah’s shop, a most ominous sign.
“Teacher,” said one villager who had spotted me and was coming to shake hands. I didn’t know him by name. “Are you back already? Let me carry your box. I hope your home people are well.”
We shook hands and I told him that my home people were well when I left them. Then I asked him what was going on there at the shop.
“What else could it be but Josiah,” he said, taking up my box and placing it on his head. “I have said that what the white man’s money will bring about has not shown itself yet. You know Azoge?”
“The blind beggar?”
“Yes, the blind beggar. Josiah is not touched by Azoge’s ill-fortune and he is not satisfied with all the thieving he does here in the name of trade but must now make juju with Azoge’s stick.” At this point he turned aside to greet another villager and they both shook their heads over the abomination.
“I don’t understand,” I said when we resumed our conversation.
“Josiah called Azoge to his shop and gave him rice to eat and plenty of palm-wine. Azoge thought he had met a kind man and began to eat and drink. While he was eating and drinking Josiah took away his stick—have you ever heard such abomination?—and put a new stick like the old one in its place thinking that Azoge would not notice. But if a blind man does not know his own stick, tell me what else would he know? So when Azoge prepared to go he reached for his stick and found that a strange one was in its place, and so he began to shout. . . .”
“I still don’t understand. What does Josiah want to do with his stick?”
“How are you asking such a question, teacher? To make medicine for trade, of course.”
“That is terrible,” I said, still very much in the dark but not caring to make it known.
“What money will do in this land wears a hat; I have said it.”
When we got to my house I gave him one shilling and he thanked me, gave a few more unhelpful details of the incident and went to rejoin the crowd. I would have gone there too but was tired from my long journey and in any case my mind was on other things. I meant to rest a little, have a wash and go in search of Mrs Nanga. But the noise outside was getting louder and louder and in the end I had to go out to see.
Josiah had apparently barricaded himself inside his shop, from where, no doubt, he could hear the crowds outside pronouncing deadly curses on him and his trade. The blind man, Azoge, was there still, telling his story over and over again. I walked from one little group to another, listening.
“So the beast is not satisfied with all the money he takes from us and must now make a medicine to turn us into blind buyers of his wares,” said one old woman. “May he blind his mother and his father, not me.” She circled her head with her right hand and cast the evil towards the shop.
“Some people’s belly is like the earth. It is never so full that it will not take another corpse. God forbid,” said a palm-wine tapper I knew. I believe he was one of those who supplied Josiah with the wine he retailed in beer-bottles.
But the most ominous thing I heard was from Timothy, a middle-aged man, who was a kind of Christian and a carpenter.
“Josiah has taken away enough for the owner to notice,” he said again and again. “If anyone ever sees my feet in this shop again let him cut them off. Josiah has now removed enough for the owner to see him.”
I thought much afterwards about that proverb, about the man taking things away until the owner at last notices. In the mouth of our people there was no greater condemnation. It was not just a simple question of a man’s cup being full. A man’s cup might be full and none be the wiser. But here the owner knew, and the owner, I discovered, is the will of the whole people.
Within one week Josiah was ruined; no man, woman or child went near his shop. Even strangers and mammy-wagon passengers making but a brief stop at the market were promptly warned off. Before the month was out, the shop-and-bar closed for good and Josiah disappeared—for a while.
But to return to the day I came back from Bori: I hired a bicycle in the evening from the repairer in the market and went to see Mrs Nanga. I had to see her before the story of my quarrel with her husband got to Anata and ruined my chances of reaching Edna, the intended “parlour-wife”. Not that I thought Chief Nanga himself would want to transmit it although there was no knowing what he might or might not do, but there were many others in Bori who might send it on for want of better news.
She was surprised to see me but I had a convincing explanation ready; sudden change of plans and that kind of thing. Her children came and shook hands. The village, I noticed, had already rubbed off a good deal of their Bori trimness and made their Corona-School English a little incongruous.
“Go and get a drink for Odili,” said Mrs Nanga to her eldest son, Eddy—the one at secondary school. He soon brought me a bottle of ice-cold beer which was just the thing after my strenuous ride. I poured the first glass down my throat in one go and then began to sip the second. As I did so I kept wondering how to broach the question of Edna without appearing too suspicious.
“When are you preparing to return to Bori?” I asked. “The house is quite cold without you and the children.”
“Don’t tell me about Bori, my brother. I want to rest a bit here . . . Eddy’s father says I should come back at the end of next month before he goes to America but I don’t know. . . .”
“I thought you were going with him?”
“Me?” She laughed.
“Yes. Why not?”
“My brother, when those standing have not got their share you are talking about those kneeling. Have you ever heard of a woman going to America when she doesn’t know ABC?”
Fine, I thought, and was about to plunge in, but Mrs Nanga obliged me even more!
“When Edna comes she will go to those places,” she said. “I am too old
and too bush.”
“Who is Edna?”
“Don’t you know about Edna, our new wife?”
“Oh, that girl. Nonsense. She doesn’t know half as much book as you.”
“Ah, she does-o. I no go Modern School.”
“But standard six in your time was superior to Senior Cambridge today,” I said in our language, refusing to be drawn into the levity of pidgin.
“You talk as though I went to school in nineteen-kridim,” she said, somewhat hurt.
“No, no, no,” I said. “But education has been falling every year. Last year’s standard six is higher than this year’s.”
But she didn’t seem to be all that hurt after all. Her mind appeared to be far away on other thoughts.
“I passed the entrance to a secondary school,” she said wistfully, “but Eddy’s father and his people kept at me to marry him, marry him, and then my own parents joined in; they said what did a girl want with so much education? So I foolishly agreed. I wasn’t old enough to refuse. Edna is falling into the same trap. Imagine a girl straight from college not being allowed to teach even for one year and look around. Anyway what is my share in it? Let her come quick-quick to enjoy Chief Nanga’s money before it runs away.” She laughed bitterly.
My first reaction was to feel uncomfortable, not so much for what Mrs Nanga had said as by the presence while she said it of her fifteen-year-old son, Eddy.
“Is she coming into the house soon?”
“I don’t know. What is my own there? She can come tomorrow as far as I am concerned; the house is there. And she can take over from me and stay awake at night to talk grammar; and in the morning her dress will be smelling of cigarette smoke and white people.” I couldn’t help laughing.
“Why don’t you want to advise her? She should take at least one year and teach and look around. She will listen to you, I’m sure; she is only a little girl, really.”
“True? She was born yesterday, eh? Let her come and suck.” She indicated her left breast. “No, my brother, I won’t spoil anybody’s good fortune. When Eddy’s father married me I was not half her age. As soon as her mother recovers let her come and eat Nanga’s wealth . . . The food is cooked and the smell of the soup is around. Let nobody remember the woman who toiled and starved when there was no money . . .” She rubbed her eyes with a corner of her lappa and blew her nose into it.
A Man of the People Page 9