Anthills of the Savannah (6 page)

Who was it invented the hot shower? It’s the kind of thing one ought to know and never does. We clutter up our brains with all kinds of useless knowledge and we don’t know the genius who invented the shower or the paper stapler… Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us. Except that our fathers were not very famous in the invention line. But what does it matter? The French taught their little African piccaninnies to recite:
our forefathers, the Gauls
… It didn’t stop Senghor from becoming a fine African poet… A true descendant of the Mandin-gauls!

I must get to work. That’s the other thing about sleeping together. It prevents work. And if we are to improve on our fathers’ performance in the invention business we must learn the sweet uses of hard work. I couldn’t write tomorrow’s editorials with Elewa’s hands cradling my damp crotch.

Chris keeps lecturing me on the futility of my crusading editorials. They achieve nothing. They antagonize everybody. They are essays in overkill. They’re counter-productive. Poor Chris. By now he probably believes the crap too. Amazing what even one month in office can do to a man’s mind. I think that one of these days I shall set him down in front of a blackboard and chalk up for him the many bull’s-eyes of my crusading editorials. The line I have taken with him so far is perhaps too subtle:
But supposing my crusading editorials were indeed futile would I not be obliged to keep on writing them
? To think that Chris no longer seems to understand such logic! Perhaps I have been too reluctant to face up to changes in my friends. Perhaps I should learn to deal with him along his own lines and jog his short memory with the many successes my militant editorials have had. Except, there is a big danger in doing it.

Those who mismanage our affairs would silence our criticism by pretending they have facts not available to the rest of us. And I know it is fatal to engage them on their own ground. Our best weapon against them is not to marshal facts, of which they are truly managers, but passion. Passion is our hope and strength, a very present help in trouble. When I took over the
National Gazette
from Chris I had no strong views one way or another about capital punishment. I even had no particular abhorrence about
staging it publicly. If I had to vote I would probably vote against it by instinct but without much excitement. But all that was changed for me in the course of one afternoon. I became a passionate crusader. Chris said I was a romantic; that I had no solid contact with the ordinary people of Kangan; that the ordinary people of Kangan believed firmly in an eye for an eye and that from all accounts they enjoyed the spectacle that so turned my stomach.

From all accounts! From one account, mine, Chris never went to the show. I did. And by God he is right about the enjoyment! But, thank God again, also totally wrong.

By two o’clock there was no standing room on the beach, neither on the hot white sand nor the black granite boulders of the great breakwater wall stretching out to sea. On ordinary days only suicidal maniacs climbed those giant rocks that halted the galloping waves as the fierce horsemen at the durbar are stilled by an imaginary line before the royal pavilion. But this was no ordinary day. It was a day on which ordinarily sane people went berserk. The crowd on the perilous sea-wall had a fair sprinkling of women. And even children.

The camera crew from the national Television perched on their mobile tower were much admired by the crowd. As they swivelled their machine from one side of the amphitheatre to another taking in all that colour in the brilliant sun—the yellow and red and white and blue—especially the blue—of Kangan indigo dyes, the people smiled and made faces and waved to the camera.

The only room not taken yet was on the raised platform with numbered seats for VIPs and at the four stakes backed by their own little sea-wall of sandbags. The sun’s heat honed with salt and vapour came down so brutally on the forehead that we all made visors with our hands to save our eyes. Those who had had the foresight to bring along umbrellas could not open them without obstructing others. A mild scuffle began right in front of me and ended only when the offending umbrella was folded up again.

“I beg una-o,” said its peace-loving owner, “make I de use my thing for walking-stick.”

“E better so. No be for see umbrella we de roast for sun since we waka come here dis morning.”

I began to wonder at one point if I hadn’t made a foolish gesture in refusing the ticket for one of those nicely spaced-out, numbered seats, that now seemed so desirably cool. Hardly anybody
was sitting on them yet. Isn’t the great thing about a VIP that his share of good things is always there waiting for him in abundance even while he relaxes in the coolness of home, and the poor man is out there in the sun pushing and shoving and roasting for his miserable crumbs? Look at all those empty padded seats! How does the poor man retain his calm in the face of such provocation? From what bottomless wells of patience does he draw? His great good humour must explain it. This sense of humour turned sometimes against himself, must be what saves him from total dejection. He had learnt to squeeze every drop of enjoyment he can out of his stony luck. And the fool who oppresses him will make a particular point of that enjoyment:
You see, they are not in the least like ourselves. They don’t need and can’t use the luxuries that you and I must have. They have the animal capacity to endure the pain of, shall we say, domestication
. The very words the white master had said in his time about the black race as a whole. Now we say them about the poor.

But even the poor man can forget what his humour is about and become altogether too humorous in his suffering. That afternoon he was punished most dreadfully at the beach and he laughed to his pink gums and I listened painfully for the slightest clink of the concealed weapon in the voluminous folds of that laughter. And I didn’t hear it. So Chris is right. But how I wish, for the sake of all the years I have known and loved him, that the day never came when he should be that kind of right. But that’s by the way.

I had never expected that Authority should excel in matters of taste. But the ritual obscenities it perpetrated that afternoon took me quite by surprise—from the pasting of a bull’s eye on the chest of the victim to the antics of that sneaky wolf of a priest in sheep’s clothing whispering God knows what blasphemies into the doomed man’s ear, to the doctor with his stethoscope rushing with emergency strides to the broken, porous body and listening intently to the bull’s eye and then nodding sagely and scientifically that all was finished. Call him tomorrow to minister to genuine human distress and see how slow he can be! And how expensive! Authority and its servants far exceeded my expectations that day on the beach.

But it wasn’t Authority that worried me really; it never does. It wasn’t those officious footlings, either. It wasn’t even the four who were mangled. It was the thousands who laughed so blatantly at their own humiliation and murder.

As the four men were led out of the Black Maria the shout that went up was not like any sound I had ever heard or hoped to hear again. It was an ovation. But an ovation to whom for Christ’s sake?

The four men were as different as the four days in the sky. One had totally lost the power of his legs and was helped to the stakes between two policemen, his trouser front entirely wet. The second was crying pathetically and looking back over his shoulders all the time. Was it to avoid looking ahead to those hefty joists sunk into concrete or was there a deliverer who had given his word in a dream or vision to be there at the eleventh hour? The third had dry eyes and a steady walk. He was shouting something so loud and desperate that the nerves and vessels of his neck seemed ready to burst. Though he had just stepped out of a car he was sweating like a hand-truck pusher at Gelegele Market. The fourth was a prince among criminals. The police said he had eluded them for two years, had three murders to his name and a fourth pointed in his direction. He wore a spotless white lace
danshiki
embroidered with gold thread, and natty blue terylene trousers. His appearance, his erect, disdainful walk hurled defiance at the vast mockery and abuse of the crowd and incensed it to greater vehemence. He saved his breath for the psychological moment when the crowd’s delirious yelling was suddenly stilled by its desire to catch the command of the officer to the firing squad. In that brief silence, in a loud and steady voice he proclaimed: “I shall be born again!” Twice he said it, or if thrice, the third was lost in a new explosion of jeers and lewd jokes and laughter so loud that it was clearly in compensation for the terrible truth of that silence in which we had stood cowed as though heaven had thundered: Be still and know that I am God. The lady in front of me said:

“Na goat go born you nex time, noto woman.”

My tenuous links with that crowd seemed to snap totally at that point. I knew then that if its own mother was at that moment held up by her legs and torn down the middle like a piece of old rag that crowd would have yelled with eye-watering laughter. I still ask myself how anyone could laugh at the proclamation of such a terrible curse or fail to be menaced by the prospect of its fulfilment. For it was clear to me that the robber’s words spoken with such power of calmness into the multitude’s hysteria just minutes before his white lace reddened with blood and his hooded head withered instantly and drooped to his chest were greater than he,
were indeed words of prophecy. If the vision vouchsafed to his last moments was to be faulted in any particular it would be this: that it placed his reincarnation in the future when it was already a clearly accomplished fact. Was he not standing right then, full grown, in other stolen lace and terylene, in every corner of that disoriented crowd? And he and all his innumerable doubles, were they not mere emulators of others who daily stole more from us than mere lace and terylene? Leaders who openly looted our treasury, whose effrontery soiled our national soul.

The only happy memory of that afternoon was the lady in front of me who vomited copiously on the back of the man with the umbrella and had to clean the mess with her damask headtie. I like to believe that there were others like her in every section of that crowd, picking up their filthy mess with their rich cloths. Certainly there were many who fainted although my news reporters put it all to the blazing sun. They also reported, by the way, a very busy day for pick-pockets, minor reincarnations of the princely robber.

The next day I wrote my first crusading editorial calling on the President to promulgate forthwith a decree abrogating the law that permitted that outrageous and revolting performance. I wrote the editorial with so much passion that I found myself ending it with a one verse hymn to be sung to the tune “Lord Thy Word Abideth.”

A bad hymn, as most hymns tend to be. But people sang it up and down the street of Bassa. Chris was critical of my tone and of my tactlessness in appearing to command His Excellency. But when the said Excellency proceeded to do exactly what I had demanded Chris had to come up with a new tune. My editorial suddenly had nothing whatever to do with the new decree. His Excellency had quite independently come to the conclusion that he could earn a few credits by reversing all the unpopular acts of the civilian regime. And the Public Executions Amendment Decree was only one of them. And this was the same Chris who had just rebuked me for not knowing that public executions were such a popular sport.

In the one year or more since those particular events I have successfully resisted Chris’s notion of editorial restraint. But for how much longer?

“I
CALLED YOUR OFFICE
three or four times,” he says as soon as I enter. He is not looking at me but at the sheaf of typed papers he is bouncing up and down on the table between his palms to line them up.

“I take it you are asking me to explain why I was not on seat.”

“Oh don’t be silly, Ikem. I’m only telling you…”

“Well, sir. I had to go to GTC to hire a battery and have them place mine on twenty-four hour charge. I am sorry about that.”

“I was calling you about this morning’s editorial.” He is still not looking at me but the irritation on his face and in his voice is clearly mounting despite the quietness. I don’t seem to be able to arouse anger in him these days; only irritation.

“What about it?”

“What about it! You know, Ikem I have given up trying to understand what you are up to. Really, I have.”

“Good! At last!”

“How can you go about creating stupid problems for yourself and for everybody else.”

“Come on now! Speak for yourself, Chris. I am quite able to take care of myself. As for my editorials, as long as I remain editor of the
Gazette
I shall not seek anybody’s permission for what I write. I’ve told you that many times before. If you don’t like it you know what to do, Chris, don’t you? You hired me, didn’t you?”

“Firing could be the least of your problems just now let me tell you. You had better have some pretty good explanations ready for H.E. The only reason I called you is that he is likely to ask me first and I want to tell you now that I am sick and tired of getting up every Thursday to defend you.”

“Defend me? Good heavens! Who ever asked you to defend me? From what, anyway. Sounds to me like busy work, Chris.”

“Well, never mind. I shan’t do it any more. From now on you can go right ahead and stew in your own water.”

“Thank you, sir. If there is nothing else, may I leave now?”

“You certainly may!”

“That was short and sweet,” says his little painted doll of a secretary in the outer office. At a loss I simply glare at her and then
slam her door after me. But a few steps down the corridor what I should have said comes, too late, to me. Something like: I’ve heard that you like it long and painful. I stopped; weighed it; changed my mind and continued walking.