A Man of the People (4 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

I usually don't mind how late I stay up at night but I do mind getting up too early. I was still fast asleep that first morning in the capital when I heard the Minister's voice. I opened my eyes and tried to smile and say good morning. 'Lazy boy,' he said indulgently. 'Don't worry. I know you must be dog-tired after yesterday's journey. See you later. I am off to the office now.' He looked as bright as a new shilling in his immaculate white robes. And he had only come home at two last night, or rather this morning! The crunching of his tyres on the loose gravel drive had woken me up in the night and I had looked at my diamond-faced watch which I often forgot to take off even for my bath. I had just bought it and believed the claim that it was everything-proof. Now I know better. But to return to Chief Nanga. There was something incongruous in his going to the office. It sounds silly to say this of a Cabinet Minister but I could not easily associate him in my mind with a desk and files. He was obviously more suited to an out-of- door life meeting and charming people. But anyhow there he was going off to his Ministry punctually at eight. Much as I already liked and admired Mrs Nanga, I must confess I was inwardly pleased when she told me as I had my breakfast that she and the children were leaving for Anata in three days. Apparently the Minister insisted that his children must be taken home to their village at least once a year. 'Very wise,' I said. 'Without it,' said Mrs Nanga, 'they would become English people. Don't you see they hardly speak our language? Ask them something in it and they reply in English. The little one, Micah, called my mother "a dirty, bush woman".' 'Terrible,' I said, laughing even though the thing wasn't funny. 'Of course I slapped okro seeds out of his mouth,' said Mrs Nanga proudly. 'My mother not knowing what he had said began to rebuke me.' 'Yes, it is good that you take them home sometimes. When do you come back?' 'After Christmas. You know Eddy's father is going to America in January.' Eddy is the name of her first son. The reason why I felt happy at the news of Mrs Nanga's journey was a natural one. No married woman, however accommodating, would view kindly the sort of plans I had in mind, namely to bring Elsie to the house and spend some time with her. Not even a self-contained guest suite such as I was now occupying would make it look well. Even if Mrs Nanga did not object, Elsie most certainly would. My experience of these things is that no woman, however liberal, wants other women to hold a low opinion of her morals. I am not talking about prostitutes because I don't go in for them. My host was one of those people around whom things were always happening. I must always remain grateful to him for the insight I got into the affairs of our country during my brief stay in his house. From the day a few years before when I had left Parliament depressed and aggrieved, I had felt, like so many other educated citizens of our country, that things were going seriously wrong without being able to say just how. We complained about our country's lack of dynamism and abdication of the leadership to which it was entitled in the continent, or so we thought. We listened to whispers of scandalous deals in high places---sometimes involving sums of money that I for one didn't believe existed in the country. But there was really no hard kernel of fact to get one's teeth into. But sitting at Chief Nanga's feet I received enlightenment; many things began to crystallize out of the mist---some of the emergent forms were not nearly as ugly as I had suspected but many seemed much worse. However, I was not making these judgements at the time, or not strongly anyhow. I was simply too fascinated by the almost ritual lifting of the clouds, as I had been one day, watching for the first time the unveiling of the white dome of Kilimanjaro at sunset. I stood breathless; I did not immediately say: 'Ah! this is the tallest mountain in Africa', or 'It isn't really as impressive as I had expected'. All that had to wait. I had neglected to bring any reading matter with me on my visit to Bori, and the Minister's library turned out to be not quite to my taste. There was a decorative set of an American encyclopaedia, there was She by Rider Haggard, and also Ayesha, or the Return of She; then there were a few books by Marie Corelli and Bertha Clay---I remember in particular The Sorrows of Satan. That was all really except for a few odds and ends like Speeches: How to Make Them. I flipped through a few volumes of the encyclopaedia and settled down to read the daily newspapers more closely than I had ever done. And believe me I discovered I had been missing a lot of fun. There was, for instance, this notice inserted into the Daily Chronicle by the City Clerk of Bori: The attention of the Public is hereby drawn to Section 12 of the Bori (Conservancy) Bye-laws, 1951: (i) Occupiers of all premises shall provide pails for excrement; the size of such pails and the materials of which they are constructed shall be approved by the City Engineer. (ii) The number of such pails to be provided in any premises shall be specified by the City Engineer. The Public are warned against unauthorized increases in the number of pails already existing on their premises. The surprises and contrasts in our great country were simply inexhaustible. Here was I in our capital city, reading about pails of excrement from the cosy comfort of a princely seven bathroom mansion with its seven gleaming, silent action, water-closets! Most of my life (except for a brief interlude at the University where I first saw water-closets) I'd used pit- latrines like the one at what was then my house in Anata. As everyone knows, pit-latrines are not particularly luxurious or ultra-modern but with reasonable care they are adequate and clean. Bucket latrines are a different matter altogether. I saw one for the first time when I lived as a house-boy with an elder half-sister and her husband in the small trading town of Giligili. I was twelve then and it was the most squalid single year of my life. So disgusting did I find the bucket that I sometimes went for days on end without any bowel evacuation. And then there was that week when all the night-soil men in the town decided to go on strike. I practically went without food. As the local inhabitants said at the time, you could 'hear' the smell of the town ten miles away. The only excitement I remember in Giligili was our nightly war on rats. We had two rooms in the large iron- roofed house with its earth walls and floor. My sister, her husband and two small children slept in one and the rest of us---three boys---shared the other with bags of rice, garri, beans and other foodstuff. And, of course, the rats. They came and sank their holes where the floor and the walls met. As soon as night fell they emerged to eat the grains while we sat around the open fire in the kitchen. You could never get at them because as soon as you entered the room with a lamp they flew into their two holes. We tried getting them with the little iron traps the blacksmiths made, on which you attached a bait---usually a small piece of dried fish. But after one or two of them got killed the rest learnt to avoid that fishy bait. It was then we decided to go hunting. I, or one of the others, would tiptoe in the dark and quietly plug the holes with pieces of rag while the rest waited outside with sticks. After a reasonable interval those outside would charge in with a lamp, slam the door and the massacre would begin. It worked very well. As a rule we did not kill the very small ones; we saved them up for the future.... Now all that seemed half a century away. When Chief Nanga came back to lunch just before two it was clear his mind was preoccupied with something or other. His greeting, though full of warmth as ever, was too brief. He went straight to the telephone and called some ministerial colleague. I soon gathered that it was the Minister of Public Construction. The conversation made little sense to me at the time especially as I heard only one end of it. But my host spoke with great feeling, almost annoyance, about a certain road which had to be tarred before the next elections. Then I heard the figure of two hundred and ten thousand pounds. But what really struck me was when my Minister said to his colleague: 'Look T. C. we agreed that this road should be tarred. What is this dillying and dallying...? Which expert? So you want to listen to expert now? You know very well T. C. that you cannot trust these our boys. That is why I always say that I prefer to deal with Europeans... What? Don't worry about the Press; I will make sure that they don't publish it....' When he finally put down the phone he said, 'Foolish man!' to it and then turned to me. 'That was Hon. T. C. Kobino. Very stupid man. The Cabinet has approved the completion of the road between Giligili and Anata since January but this foolish man has been dillying and dallying, because it is not in his constituency. If it was in his constituency he would not listen to experts. And who is the expert? One small boy from his town---whom we all helped to promote last year. Now the boy advises him that my road should not be tarred before next dry season because he wants to carry out tests in the soil. He has become an earthworm.' I laughed at this. 'Have you ever heard of such a thing? Is this the first road we are tarring in this country? You see why I say that our people are too selfish and too jealous....' I got to know a lot about this road which, incidentally, passes through my own village of Urua. At the time I was naturally sympathetic to Chief Nanga's plans for it, if not with his contempt for expert advice. But of course Chief Nanga said the fellow hadn't been appointed in the first place for his expertise at all. And so it went round and round. But none of these things was real news to me, only his saying that he had ordered ten luxury buses to ply the route as soon as it was tarred. Each would cost him six thousand pounds. So he had two good reasons for wanting the road tarred---next elections and the arrival of his buses. 'It doesn't mean I have sixty thousand pounds in the bank,' he hastened to add. 'I am getting them on never- never arrangement from the British Amalgamated.' I wasn't too sure of the meaning of never-never at that time and I suppose I had a vague idea that the buses were a free gift, which in the circumstances would not have been beyond the British Amalgamated. After a heavy lunch of pounded yam I was feeling very drowsy. As a rule I always slept in the afternoon but in Chief Nanga's house, where things tumbled over one another in a scramble to happen first, an afternoon snooze seemed most improper, if not shameful. And I thought if Chief Nanga could get home at two in the morning, be at his desk at eight and come back at two looking as fresh as a newly-hatched chick why should I, a child of yesterday by comparison, indulge in such a decadent and colonial habit as taking a siesta? So I bravely dozed in my chair while my host and his wife talked about her journey home. She asked if he had found a cook yet to do his meals while she was away and he said he had asked someone to send one or two along in the evening. Only then did it strike me that they had no cook, only a steward. I wondered how they managed with their dinner parties. A car drew up outside and a young American couple breezed in. Or rather the wife breezed in and the husband followed in her wake. 'Hi Micah, hi Margaret,' said the woman. 'Hi Jean, hi John,' replied the Minister whom I had never heard anyone call Micah until then. But he seemed quite pleased, actually. I was greatly shocked. These two people were no older than I and yet had the impudence to call Chief Nanga his now almost forgotten Christian name. But what shocked me even more was his reaction. I had turned quickly and anxiously to watch his face contort with fury. But no. He had replied sweetly, 'Hi Jean, hi John.' I couldn't understand. I was dead certain that if I or any of our people for that matter had called him Micah he would have gone rampaging mad. But perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised. We have all accepted things from white skins that none of us would have brooked from our own people. Mrs Nanga whose Christian name I hadn't even known until now seemed less happy. She said 'Hallo, hallo,' and almost immediately withdrew, her frock caught in the parting of her buttocks. While Jean flirted eagerly with Micah, I was having some very serious discussions with her husband, who it appeared was one of a team of experts at that time advising our government on how to improve its public image in America. He seemed the quiet type and, I thought, a little cowed by his beautiful, bumptious wife. But I had no doubt they were both in their different ways excellent ambassadors. He certainly proved most eloquent when the inevitable subject came up at last---not, I might add, thanks to me. 'We have our problems,' he said, 'like everyone else. Some of my people are narrow as a pin---we have to admit it. But at the same time we have gotten somewhere. No one is satisfied, but we have made progress.' He gave some facts and figures about lynching which I don't remember now. But I do remember his saying that lynching was not racial in origin and that, up to a certain year like 1875 or something, there had been more whites lynched than negroes. And I remember too his saying that in five of the last ten years there had been no lynchings at all. I noticed he did not say the last five years. 'So you see, Mr... I'm sorry I didn't catch your first name?' 'Odili.' 'Odili---a beautiful sound---may I call you by that?' 'Sure,' I said, already partly Americanized. 'Mine is John. I don't see why we should call one another Mister this and Mister that---like the British.' 'Nor do I,' I said. 'What I was saying,' he went on, 'is that we do not pretend to be perfect. But we have made so much progress lately that I see no cause for anyone to despair. What is important is that we must press on. We must not let up. We just must not be caught sleeping on the switch again...' I was still savouring the unusual but, I thought, excellent technological imagery when I heard as though from faraway John's voice make what I call an astounding claim. I don't mean it was necessarily false---I simply don't know enough history to say. 'America may not be perfect,' he was saying, 'but don't forget that we are the only powerful country in the entire history of the world, the only one, which had the power to conquer others and didn't do it.' I must have looked more surprised than I felt. The claim did not as yet strike me with its full weight. I was thinking that this unique act of magnanimity must have happened in a small corner of the world long ago. 'Yes,' said John, 'in 1945 we
could have subdued Russia by placing one atom bomb on Moscow and another on Leningrad. But we didn't. Why? Well, don't ask me. I don't know. Perhaps we are naïve. We still believe in such outdated concepts like freedom, like letting every man run his show. Americans have never wished to be involved in anyone else's show....' As I have suggested, there is something in Chief Nanga's person which attracts drama irresistibly to him. Memorable events were always flying about his stately figure and dropping at his feet, as those winged termites driven out of the earth by late rain dance furiously around street lamps and then drop panting to the ground. Here you have John speaking high monologue to me while his wife seems ready, judging by the look in her eyes, to drag Chief Nanga off to bed in broad daylight. Then a knock at the door and a young man in heavily starched white shorts and shirt comes in to offer his services as a cook. 'Wetin you fit cook?' asked Chief Nanga as he perused the young man's sheaf of testimonials, probably not one of them genuine. 'I fit cook every European chop like steak and kidney pie, chicken puri, misk grill, cake omlette....' 'You no sabi cook African chop?' 'Ahh! That one I no sabi am-o,' he admitted. 'I no go tell master lie.' 'Wetin you de chop for your own house?' I asked, being irritated by the idiot. 'Wetin I de chop for my house?' he repeated after me. 'Na we country chop I de chop.' 'You country chop no be Africa chop?' asked Chief Nanga. 'Na him,' admitted the cook. 'But no be me de cook am. I get wife for house.' My irritation vanished at once and I joined Chief Nanga's laughter. Greatly encouraged the cook added: 'How man wey get family go begin enter kitchen for make bitterleaf and egusi? Unless if the man no get shame.' We agreed with him but he lost the job because Chief Nanga preferred bitterleaf and egusi to chicken puri---whatever that was. But I must say the fellow had a point too. As long as a man confined himself to preparing foreign concoctions he could still maintain the comfortable illusion that he wasn't really doing such an unmanly thing as cooking.