Anthills of the Savannah (12 page)

And was I glad the king was slowly but surely responding! Was I glad! The big snake, the royal python of a gigantic erection began to stir in the shrubbery of my shrine as we danced closer and closer to soothing airs, soothing our ancient bruises together in the dimmed lights. Fully aroused he clung desperately to me. And I took him then boldly by the hand and led him to the balcony railings to the breathtaking view of the dark lake from the pinnacle of the hill. And there told him my story of Desdemona. Something possessed me as I told it.

“If I went to America today, to Washington DC, would I, could I, walk into a White House private dinner and take the American President hostage. And his Defence Chief and his Director of CIA?”

“Oh don’t be such a racist, Beatrice. I am surprised at you. A girl of your education!”

And he stormed away and left me standing alone on the balcony. I stood there staring at the dark lake and my tears flowed in torrents. I was aware of people from the room coming stealthily to the door of the balcony to have a peep. I did not see them; I was merely aware of their coming and retreating again into their dimmed lights and music. Then I heard bold footsteps on the terrazzo floor of the balcony and Major Ossai’s voice behind me: “There is a car waiting downstairs to take you home.”

F
OR
WEEKS AND MONTHS
after I had definitely taken on the challenge of bringing together as many broken pieces of this tragic history as I could lay my hands on I still could not find a way to begin. Anything I tried to put down sounded wrong—either too abrupt, too indelicate or too obvious—to my middle ear.

So I kept circling round and round. Until last Saturday; after my weekly ordeal at the market. Hot and grimy from hours of haggling in the sun and now home and fighting for breath after the steep climb with the grocery up the dizzying circular staircase to the kitchen table I dumped the bags and wraps there in transit as it were to get a cold drink, and never went back. Quite extraordinary. Normally I am very particular about the meat especially which I must wash and boil right away or wash with a dash of Milton solution and put in the freezer. But, after gulping down half of the tall glass of lemonade, I carried the rest under a strange propulsion to the spare bedroom which I had turned into a kind of study and began scribbling and went on right into the night. I was
vaguely aware of Agatha’s voice saying good evening at the door at some point but took no special interest in it.

The single idea or power or whatever that flashed through my mind that afternoon as soon as I got out of the traffic into the open stretch between the Secretariat Buildings and the GRA had seized me by the forelock! But although it got me seated it neglected to dictate the words to me because on Monday I had to begin all over again having thrown away all that labour of Saturday and Sunday. But the elation was undiminished. I had started. The discarded pages and the nearly spoilt meat seemed like a necessary ritual or a sacrifice to whoever had to be appeased for this audacity of rushing in where sensible angels would fear to tread, or rather for pulling up one of those spears thrust into the ground by the men in the hour of their defeat and left there in the circle of their last dance together.

My housegirl, Agatha, goes to one of these new rapturous churches with which Bassa is infested nowadays. Her sect is called YESMI, acronym for Yahwe Evangelical Sabbath Mission Inc., and apparently forbids her from as much as striking a match on Saturdays to light a stove. She leaves the house before I am out of bed and stays away all day. Around five she returns looking like a wilted cocoyam leaf and eats bread and cold stew or any odd scrap of food she can lay her hands on or even plain
garri
soaked in iced water with eight lumps of sugar and a whole tin of milk. I discovered, though, that if I struck the match and lit the stove and warmed up the food she would not be prohibited from eating it. But I made it clear to her from the start that I wasn’t ready yet to wash and wipe the feet of my paid help. It is quite enough that I have to do the weekly grocery at the Gelegele market while she is clapping hands and rolling eyes and hips at some hairy-chested prophet in white robes and shower cap.

But something had happened not so long ago to change our lives and, on this particular Saturday, Agatha must have been so overcome by the sheer power of something else quite extraordinary happening in the house that she set the law of the Sabbath aside and put away the meat, already a little high, and the wilting vegetables. Or perhaps, being no stranger herself to possession, she could recognize it quite quickly in another!

My name is Beatrice, but most of my friends call me either B or BB. And my enemies—that’s one lesson I’ve learnt from the still
unbelievable violences we went through—that even little people like me could also rate enemies. I had naively assumed that enemies were the privilege of the great. But no. Here was I keeping quite a few hands busy fashioning barbed and poisoned aliases for me as readily as they were renaming the heroes fallen, as our half-literate journalists say, from grace to grass.

It was quite a revelation, and quite frankly it bothered me for a while, especially the crude insinuations of what our men snigger-ingly call bottom-power. But then I said to myself, what do I care really, why should I ask the world to interrupt its business for no other reason than to find out what one insignificant female did or did not do in a calamity that consumed so many and so much? A little matter of personal pride for me perhaps but so what?

Still there is one account of me it seems I will never get used to, which can still bring tears to my eyes. Ambitious. Me ambitious! How? And it is this truly unjust presentation that’s forcing me to expose my life on these pages to see if perhaps there are aspects of me I had successfully concealed even from myself. Pretentious journalists hoping to catch the attention of the new military rulers created an image of me as “the latter-day Madame Pompadour” who manipulated generals and patronized writers.

Throughout my life I have never sought attention; not even as a child. I can see, looking back at my earliest memories, a little girl completely wrapped up in her own little world—a world contained, like Russian dolls, inside the close-fitting world of our mission-house, itself enclosed snugly within the world of the Anglican Church compound. It was a remarkable place. Apart from the church building itself there were the two school buildings, the parsonage, the catechist’s house, the long-house in which the school teachers had, according to their rank, a shared room, a full room or even two rooms. Male teachers, that is. The female teachers lived in the smallest building of all, a three-room thatched house set, for protection I suppose, between the pastor and the catechist. In the farthest corner of the compound was the churchyard, a little overgrown, where one of my sisters, Emily, lay buried.

World inside a world inside a world, without end.
Uwa-t’uwa
in our language. As a child how I thrilled to that strange sound with its capacity for infinite replication till it becomes the moan of the
rain in the ear as it opened and closed, opened and closed. Uwa t’uwa t’uwa t’uwa; Uwa t’uwa.

Uwa-t’uwa
was a building-block of my many solitary games. I could make and mould all kinds of thoughts with it. I could even rock it from side to side like my wooden baby with the chipped ear.

My friendship with the strange words began no doubt quite early when I first recognized it and welcomed it at the end of my father’s family prayers to begin or end the day—prayers so long that I would float in and out of sleep and sometimes keel over and fall on my side.
Uwa-t’uwa
was always the end of the ordeal and we all, would shout:
Amen! Good-morning, sah! good morning mah!
or good night for evening prayers.

One evening, some devil seized hold of me as the words
uwa t’uwa
were pronounced and jolted me into wakefulness. Without any premeditation whatsoever I promptly raised a childish hymn of thanksgiving: uwa-t’uwa! uwa-t’uwa! uwa-t’uwa! uwa-t’uwa! t’uwa t’uwa! uwa t’uwa!

My sisters’ giggles fuelled my reckless chant.

My father sprang to his feet with Amen barely out of his mouth, reached for the cane he always had handy and gave us all a good thrashing. As we cried ourselves to sleep on our separate mats that night my sisters saw fit to promise through their snivelling to deal with me in the morning.

He was a very stern man, my father—as distant from us children as from our poor mother. As I grew older I got to know that his whip was famous not only in our house and in the schoolhouse next door but throughout the diocese. One day the local chief paid him a visit and as they say in the long outer room we called the piazza eating kolanut with alligator pepper and I was hanging around as I was fond of doing when there was company, the chief was full of praise for my father for the good training he was giving the children of the village through his whip. My father, with a wistful look I had never seen on his face before, was telling the chief of a certain headmaster in 1940 who was praised by some white inspectors who came from England to look at schools in their colonies and found his school the most quiet in West Africa. “Das right!” said the chief in English.

I remember the incident well because we were doing the map of West Africa in our geography class at the time. So I left my father
and his friend and went to my raffia schoolbag and pulled out my
West African Atlas
and was greatly impressed by the size of the territory over which the 1940 headmaster was champion.

There were times I suspected that he may have flogged our poor mother, though I must say in recognition of the awesomeness of the very thought that I never actually saw it happen. None of my sisters had seen it either, or if they had they preferred not to tell me, for they never took me much into confidence. Looking back on it I am sometimes amazed at the near-conspiracy in which they circled me most of the time. I had this strong suspicion nevertheless, which I could neither confirm nor deny because on those occasions my father always took the precaution to lock the door of their room. She would come out afterwards (having unlocked the door, or perhaps he did) wiping her eyes with one corner of her wrapper, too proud or too adult to cry aloud like us. It didn’t happen too often, though. But it always made me want to become a sorceress that could say “
Die
!” to my father and he would die as in the folk-tale. And then, when he had learnt his lesson, I would bring him back to life and he would never touch his whip again.

And then one day as my mother came out wiping her eyes I rushed to her and hugged her legs but instead of pressing me to herself as I had expected she pushed me away so violently that I hit my head against the wooden mortar. After that I didn’t feel any more like telling my father to die. I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight at the time but I know I had this strong feeling then—extraordinary, powerful and adult—that my father and my mother had their own world, my three sisters had theirs and I was alone in mine. And it didn’t bother me at all then, my aloneness, nor has it done so since.

I didn’t realize until much later that my mother bore me a huge grudge because I was a girl—her fifth in a row though one had died—and that when I was born she had so desperately prayed for a boy to give my father. This knowledge came to me by slow stages which I won’t go into now. But I must mention that in addition to Beatrice they had given me another name at my baptism, Nwanyibuife—A female is also something. Can you beat that? Even as a child I disliked the name most intensely without being aware of its real meaning. It merely struck me at that point that I knew of nobody else with the name; it seemed fudged! Somehow I disliked it considerably less in its abridged form,
Buife. Perhaps it was the
nwanyi
, the female half of it that I particularly resented. My father was so insistent on it. “Sit like a female!” or “Female soldier” which he called me as he lifted me off the ground with his left hand and gave me three stinging smacks on the bottom with his right the day I fell off the cashew tree.

But I didn’t set out to write my autobiography and I don’t want to do so. Who am I that I should inflict my story on the world? All I’m trying to say really is that as far as I can remember I have always been on my own and never asked to be noticed by anybody. Never! And I don’t recall embarking ever on anything that would require me to call on others. Which meant that I never embarked on anything beyond my own puny powers. Which meant finally that I couldn’t be ambitious.

I am very, very sensitive about this—I don’t mind admitting it.

That I got involved in the lives of the high and mighty was purely accidental and was not due to any scheming on my part. In the first place, they all became high and mighty after I met them; not before.

Chris was not a Commissioner when I met him but a mere editor of the
National Gazette.
That was way back in civilian days. And if I say that Chris did all the chasing I am not boasting or anything. That was simply how it was. And I wasn’t being coy either. It was a matter of experience having taught me in my little lonely world that I had to be wary. Some people even say I am suspicious by nature. Perhaps I am. Being a girl of maybe somewhat above average looks, a good education, a good job you learn quickly enough that you can’t open up to every sweet tongue that comes singing at your doorstep. Nothing very original really. Every girl knows that from her mother’s breast although thereafter some may choose to be dazzled into forgetfulness for one reason or another. Or else they panic and get stampeded by the thought that time is passing them by. That’s when you hear all kinds of nonsense talk from girls: Better to marry a rascal than grow a moustache in your father’s compound; better an unhappy marriage than an unhappy spinsterhood; better marry Mr. Wrong in this world than wait for Mr. Right in heaven; all marriage is
how-for-do
; all men are the same; and a whole baggage of other foolishnesses like that.