Anthills of the Savannah (21 page)

“Well, I still think that if you and Chris had listened to me and stopped your running battles as you call them early enough he would not now be trying to disgrace you.”

“Disgrace? I’m surprised at you, BB. I didn’t know you could be so incredibly sanguine. Disgrace? The fellow wants to kill us! He is mad, I tell you. His acting has got into his head, finally:”

“Well, I think BB is closer to the mark. As usual. I agree the fellow is completely deluded and can therefore be very dangerous. But his interest at this point is limited to making us look small, not murder. What he told me on the telephone this morning was very significant I think. He was giving me a chance, he said, to still appear as the Commissioner for Information.”

“Did he say that? And what does that mean?”

“Well,
appearing
is very important to him.
Not appearing
is, of
course, the worst kind of disgrace. And all this is tied up in his mind with his failed referendum for life president. The pain still rankles. I don’t think I told this to either of you at the time. But after the failure of the referendum he had complained bitterly to Professor Okong that I had not played my part as Commissioner for Information to ensure the success of the exercise and that you had seen fit to abandon your editorial chair at that crucial moment and take your annual leave.”

“Professor Okong told you?”

“Yes, but I then confronted him. At first he pretended to make light of it but I wouldn’t let go. So in the end he revealed his bitterness. He said that he was deeply wounded that we, his oldest friends, found it possible to abandon him and allow him to be disgraced. Those were his very words.”

“Did he really say that?”

“I reminded him that he never really wanted to be Life President. That made him truly, hopping mad. ‘
I didn’t
,’ he said, ‘
and you know I didn’t but the moment it was decided upon you had a clear responsibility, you and Ikem, to see it succeed. You chose not to.
’ I never before heard so much bitter emotion in his voice.”

“And you didn’t mention this to Ikem? I don’t ask about myself, who am I? But to Ikem, no? You never cease to surprise me, Chris. Nothing in this world can make your heart race!”

“That was more than two years ago. I didn’t think then it was all that important. In fact I never thought of it in this light until you used the word
disgrace
just now.”

“It doesn’t speak too highly of your power of analysis or insight which is what I have always told you.”

“Please, Ikem, please, let’s not slip back into our routine running battles, yet…”

“No no, BB. I am serious. If Chris had reported this to me at the time I should have insisted that we both resign there and then and we would not be in this mess today. You see what I mean?”

“Perhaps. But we lost that chance. What I want to know is what Chris proposes to do now and what he recommends you do.”

“Simple. I shall draft my letter of resignation tonight and have it delivered to him tomorrow morning. For Ikem I strongly, most strongly, urge a period of silence until…”

“Rubbish, Chris, rubbish! The very worst prescription for a suspended editor is silence. That’s what your proprietor wants. Because
cause he makes reams of paper available to you he believes he owns your voice. So when he feels like it he withdraws the paper to show you how silent you can be without his help. You musn’t let him win.”

“So are you going to set up a new paper of your own then?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. If you can’t write you can surely get up and talk. You haven’t lost your vocal chords.”

“Where do you intend to talk? In a corner of Gelegele market?”

“Oh, Chris!”

“Never mind. All I say is
careful! That’s all. Or Kabisa.
Though I haven’t heard him use that lately.”

“Not when it has filtered down to motor mechanics,” said Beatrice.

“That’s right.”

“Ikem, I think Chris is right. You’ve got to lie low for the next couple of weeks, so we can plan our moves properly. Chris is right about that though I think you are closer to the mark about the danger.”

“Well I wasn’t exactly going to create Hyde Park Corner in Gelegele in spite of Chris’s insinuations. But people are going to ask me questions, and I shall bloody well answer. I’m not going to crawl into a hole…”

A taxi-cab seemed to be having some difficulty with the police sentry. Chris who had a view of the gate from where he sat, got up, moved to the entrance door, clapped his hands to attract the sentry’s attention and signalled to him to let whoever it was come in. But the taxi-driver had already lost his patience, it appeared, and was heatedly discharging his passenger right there.

The passenger turned out to be Elewa. She paid and collected her change in a state of flutter clearly discernible from where Chris stood and rushed into the house breathless and deeply agitated. Ignoring welcoming greetings from everybody she flung herself at Ikem.

“Wetin I de hear, Ikem? Na true say dem done sack you?”

Ikem nodded his head as he pressed her to himself. She burst into tears and violent crying and in that brief instant exploded the atmosphere in the room. All three were embarrassed by this intrusive emotion, but more especially the men, and each put in a
clumsy word or two to console the girl and restore the original calm.

“Oh come on, Elewa. I am only suspended not sacked… Who told you anyway?”

That did it. She stopped crying almost as dramatically as she had begun. But her voice, when she spoke, was broken and heavy with grief.

“Everybody de talk am for our yard. Even my mama wey de sick hear am small for six o’clock news from our neighbour him radio. But me I go chemist for buy medicine for am.”

“Never mind, my dear. You see I still de alive and well.”

“I thank God for that.”

“How mama be today?”

“E de better small… You say no be sack them sack you na… weting you call am?”

“Na suspend they suspend me.”

“Weting be suspend?… I beg, BB weting be suspend?”

“My sister, make you no worry yourself. As we de alive so, na that one better pass all… I no know say your mama no well. Sorry. You done take am go hospital?”

“Hospital? Who get money for hospital? And even if you find money, the wahala wey de there… My sister, na chemist we small people de go.”

I
T WAS
E
LEWA’S KEEN EARS
which picked up the radio news signal from some distant set turned too high probably in someone’s Boys’ Quarters in the neighbourhood, and her voice which screamed “News!” Chris sprang up and dashed to his television set, switching it on and checking his wristwatch at the same time. Elewa was right. The eight o’clock national news was about to begin. They all sat back in grim-faced silence to watch.

Ikem’s suspension was the first headline. Something approaching an amused look crept into his features for the brief duration of his limelight—a straightforward announcement without frills. Then all of a sudden he was stung as if by a scorpion and he screamed and leapt to his feet.

“Oh no!” he shouted. “They can’t do that! Chris did you hear that? And you say I should lie low. Lie low and let these cannibals lay their dirty hands on a holy man of the earth. Switch that damn thing off!” He was already making for the television set when
Chris’s voice telling him to get a hold of himself told him also that this was not his television set, nor this his house. He went back and sank into his seat, his left thumbnail between his teeth. Then he got up again:

“Elewa, let’s go!”

What had caused all this agitation had been a subsidiary item tagged on to Ikem’s news because of its relative unimportance and prefaced accordingly with the formula:
In another development
…

Yes, in another development, according to this smug newscaster dispensing national anguish in carefully measured milligrammes, six leaders from Abazon who were involved in a recent illegal march on the Presidential Palace without police permit as required by decree had been arrested. And (in the same development) the office of the Director of SRC had informed the Crime Correspondent of KTV that the six men who had made useful statements were being held in BMSP.

O
N THE TWO
previous occasions when Ikem had spoken before audiences at the University of Bassa he had attracted large crowds, but nothing quite on the scale of the present event. Every seat in the two-thousand-capacity Main Auditorium was taken and a large overspill sat or stood on gangways or peeped in through doors and windows from the two side-corridors running the length of the hall. It would appear that his suspension from the
National Gazette
had pushed his popularity rating, already pretty high, right to the top of the charts. Even more remarkable than the size of the crowds was their patience. The lecture took off at least forty minutes behind schedule while sweating Students Union officials dashed in and out of the hall occasionally shouting, “Testing! Testing! Testing!” into a dead microphone. But such was the good humour of this audience that when the system finally came alive it was given a thunderous ovation.

A few last-minute consultations by the organizers and the lecture seemed finally set to begin. But no. First the introductions. A
minor union official took the microphone and introduced the Master of Ceremonies, a tall handsome fellow in a white three-piece suit, who in turn and at some length introduced the President of the Union who delivered a most elaborate introduction of the Chairman for the occasion who—at long last—introduced Mr. Ikem Osodi. It was all so reminiscent of the style of campaign meetings in the good old Byzantine days of politicians who, should they rise now from the bowels of their rat-holes and station themselves cautiously just below the surface, would be watching shiny-eyed, twitching their whiskers in happy remembrance.

Ikem called his lecture “The Tortoise and the Leopard—a political meditation on the imperative of struggle.” This announcement was greeted with tumultuous approval. No doubt it had the right revolutionary ring to it and Ikem smiled inwardly at the impending
coup d’état
he would stage against this audience and its stereotype notions of struggle, as indeed of everything else.

“Mr. Chairman, sir…” he said, bowing mock-deferentially to the Professor who had just been eulogized by the Students’ Union President as a popular academic admired by all and sundry for his clarity and Marxist orientation who, as the youngest professor in Kangan, had ably redirected Political Science from bourgeois tendencies under Professor Reginald Okong to new heights of scientific materialism…

“May I crave your indulgence and begin this meditation—not lecture by the way, I never can muster enough audacity to lecture—I meditate. May I begin with a little story.”

And he told, to remarkable dramatic and emotional effect, the story of the Tortoise who was about to die.

“That story was told me by an old man. As I stand before you now that old man who told me that incredible story is being held in solitary confinement at the Bassa Maximum Security Prison.”

No! Why! Opposed! Impossible!
and other sounds of shock and anger flew like sparks and filled the air of the auditorium.

“Why? I hear you ask. Very well… This is why… Because storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit—in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever. That’s why.”

It was a brief presentation, twenty to twenty-five minutes long, that was all; but it was so well crafted and so powerfully spoken it
took on the nature and scope of an epic prose-poem. It was serious but not solemn; sometimes witty without falling into the familiarity of banter.

The audience sat or stood silently entranced. Its sudden end was like a blow and it jolted them into shouts of protest. Calls of
Fire! Fire! More! More!
and even
Opposed!
soon turned into a rhythmic chant when Ikem sat down.

The Chairman turned to him and said, “They want some more!”

“Yes! More! More! More!”

“I thank you, my friends, for the compliment. But as someone once said: There is nothing left in the pipeline!”

“No! No! Opposed!”

“In any case you have listened to me patiently. Now I want to hear you. Dialogues are infinitely more interesting than monologues. So fire your questions and comments and let’s exchange a few blows. You’ve been at the receiving end. But, as the Bible says, it is better to give than to receive. So let’s have a few punches from your end. That’s what I’ve come here for.”

And true enough, it was during question-time that he finally achieved the close hand-to-hand struggle he so relished. By nature he is never on the same side as his audience. Whatever his audience is, he must try not to be. If they fancy themselves radical, he fancies himself conservative; if they propound right-wing tenets he unleashes revolution! It is not that he has ever sat down to reason it out and plan it; it just seems to happen that way. But he is aware of it—after the event, so to say, and can even offer some kind of explanation if asked to do so: namely that whatever you are is never enough; you must find a way to accept something however small from the other to make you whole and save you from the mortal sin of righteousness and extremism.

A couple of months ago he had been persuaded against his normal inclination to speak at the Bassa Rotary Club weekly luncheon. On that particular occasion the club had more cause than usual to be happy with itself for it had just bought and donated a water-tanker to a dispensary in one of the poorest districts of North Bassa, an area that has never had electricity nor pipe-borne water. In the after-dinner haze of good works, cigar smoke and liqueur his hosts sat back to hear what their distinguished guest had to tell them… Well, as usual, he left what he should have
told them and launched into something quite unexpected. Charity, he thundered is the opium of the privileged; from the good citizen who habitually drops ten kobo from his loose change and from a safe height above the bowl of the leper outside the supermarket; to the group of good citizens like yourselves who donate water so that some Lazarus in the slums can have a syringe boiled clean as a whistle for his jab and his sores dressed more hygienically than the rest of him; to the Band Aid stars that lit up so dramatically the dark Christmas skies of Ethiopia. While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.