Anthills of the Savannah (7 page)

That young lady has a reputation for never putting Chris on the telephone until the secretary at the other end has put on the boss. Apparently she considers it a serious breach of protocol for the Honourable Commissioner to say hello to an assistant. I wonder why everything in this country turns so readily to routines of ritual contest. The heavyweight champion must not show his face but wait in his locker until the challenger has cooled his heels in the ring. I must say the whole charade is so unlike Chris that it must be done without his knowledge. But when will he learn that power is like marrying across the Niger; you soon find yourself paddling by night.

I
T SEEMS
C
HRIS
has tortured himself for nothing. A week has gone by and no despatch-rider has delivered a query to me in the loud type-face of palace Remingtons. No green army jeep or blue police jeep has pulled up outside the
Gazette
or in front of the flats. Chris is totally shamefaced. Naturally. Who can blame him? I’ll have to go over to his place this evening and see if I can make him feel better.

Worshipping a dictator is such a pain in the ass. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was merely a matter of dancing upside down on your head. With practice anyone could learn to do that. The real problem is having no way of knowing from one day to another, from one minute to the next, just what is up and what is down. It seems that when Chris was last at the palace the Big Shot had said quite categorically that he would pay a visit to Abazon. Chris came away and began dutifully to relay the news to everyone including myself. But in the meantime the Big Shot has had a brief snooze and on waking up has begun to see the world differently. “I must not go and visit my loyal subjects of Abazon,” he now says. And all plans are immediately cancelled. Which is fine, except that nobody remembers to tell the Honourable Commissioner who has charge for disseminating such vital information throughout the four provinces of the empire. So poor Chris is left totally in the lurch.

Nobody told
me
either. But the great difference between me and Chris is that I never did expect to be told. I happened to feel a
certain way in the matter and like a free agent, sat up at night after Elewa had gone away in the taxi and composed my thoughts. I keep telling Chris that life is simpler that way. Much simpler. Stop looking back over your shoulder, I tell him. There ain’t no deliverer running just a little behind schedule. March to the stake like a man and take the bullet in your chest. Much simpler.

But the real irony of the situation is that my own method is more successful even on Chris’s own terms. How many times now have I managed to read the Big Shot’s mind better than all the courtiers? Who knows, I may soon be suspected of witchcraft or of having a secret hot-line to the palace! For it does not stand to reason that from my hermit’s hut in the forest I should divine the thoughts of the Emperor better than the mesmerized toadies in daily attendance. But it is quite simple really. The Emperor may be a fool but he isn’t a monster. Not yet, anyhow; although he will certainly become one by the time Chris and company have done with him. But right now he is still OK, thank God. That’s why I believe that basically he does want to do the right thing. Some of my friends don’t agree with me on this, I know. Even Chris doesn’t. But I am sure I am right; I am sure that Sam can still be saved if we put our minds to it. His problem is that with so many petty interests salaaming around him all day, like that shyster of an Attorney-General, he has no chance of knowing what is right. And that’s what Chris and I ought to be doing—letting him glimpse a little light now and again through chinks in his solid wall of court jesters; we who have known him longer than the rest should not be competing with them. I have shown what light I can with a number of controversial editorials. With Chris I could do much more. If Sam were stronger or brighter he probably wouldn’t need our offices; but then he probably wouldn’t have become His Excellency in the first place. Only half-wits can stumble into such enormities.

Chris has a very good theory, I think, on the military vocation. According to this theory military life attracts two different kinds of men: the truly strong who are very rare, and the rest who would be strong. The first group make magnificent soldiers and remain good people hardly ever showing let alone flaunting their strength. The rest are there for the swank. The truth of this came to me on two separate occasions afterwards, both of them interestingly enough at the Gelegele Market. A tottering pugnacious
drunkard was provoking a fight with a towering stranger carrying a small portmanteau and obviously on his way to the Motor Park. I think the drunk was claiming the box or even the man’s clothes as his own. Everyone in the market, it seemed, knew the drunk because many of the witnesses to the scene gave the same advice to the strong man with the box. “If you don’t handle that fool quite firmly, my friend, he will pester you to death,” they said. But the stranger appeared more eager to slip past his tormentor than follow the crowd’s advice. Which annoyed many of the people in the end. They didn’t see why anybody should let a drunken idiot walk all over him in this outrageous way unless there was something indeed wrong with him. Perhaps he didn’t own the clothes he wore. At that point a newcomer into the watching crowd recognized the stranger as last night’s new champion wrestler of Kangan. “No wonder,” said someone in a simple matter-of-fact voice and the rest of the people seemed to understand too. I was really amazed at their perceptiveness.

The other incident was at the Motor Park itself. I was sitting in my car reading and waiting for a friend who was having her hair plaited down at the hairdressers’ shed. All around the parked cars young sellers of second-hand clothes displayed their articles on wooden clothes-horses. From time to time there would be a sharp stampede at some secret signal for the approach of a policeman or the Market Master, for none of these boisterous hawkers apparently had any right whatsoever to display their goods at that section of the market reserved for cars. It took no more than one second of unbelievable motion and all those hundreds of wooden frames bedecked with the heavy castoffs of distant affluent and consumer cultures of cold climates would simply melt away in the bright noonday sun. Usually the alarm would prove to be false and they would reappear as promptly and miraculously as they had vanished, with much laughter and joking, and take up their illegal positions again. I never pass up a chance of just sitting in my car, reading or pretending to read, surrounded by the vitality and thrill of these dramatic people. Of course the whole of Gelegele Market is one thousand live theatres going at once. The hair-plaiting shed, for example, where Joy was now having her hair done, seated on a mat on the floor her head held between the knees of the artist into whose nimble hand she fed lengths of black thread, did not lack its
own entertainment. But I would pick my vivacious youngsters of the used clothes, any day.

It was a great shock to me then when that army car drove up furiously, went into reverse before it had had time to stop going forward and backed at high speed into a young man and his clothes who just barely managed to scramble out of the car’s vicious path. A cry went up all round. The driver climbed out, pressed down the lock button and slammed the door. The young trader found his voice then and asked, timidly:

“Oga, you want kill me?”

“If I kill you I kill dog,” said the soldier with a vehemence I found totally astounding. Quite mechanically I opened my door and came out. I believe I was about to tell the fellow that there was no need for him to have said that. But I am glad I didn’t in the end, because there are things which an observer can only see if he resists the temptation to jump into the fray and become an actor himself. So I watched the ass walk away with the exaggerated swagger of the coward, and went back into my car. But I was truly seething with anger. My young friends were stunned into total silence. But then the one who had had the brush with the car suddenly laughed and asked:

“Does he mean that after killing me he will go and kill a dog?”

And the others joined in the laughter.

“No, he means that to kill you is like to kill a dog.”

“So therefore you na dog… Na dog born you.”

But the victim stuck to his far more imaginative interpretation. “No,” he said again. “If I kill you I kill dog means that after he kill me he will go home and kill his dog.”

Within ten minutes the life of the group was so well restored by this new make-believe that when the offensive soldier returned to his car to drive away his victim of half an hour ago said to him:

“Go well, oga.” To which he said nothing though it diminished him further still, if such a thing could be conceived. And then I was truly glad that I had not interfered with that impeccable scenario.

T
O SAY THAT
S
AM
was never very bright is not to suggest that he was a dunce at any time in the past or that he is one now. His major flaw was that all he ever wanted was to do what was expected of him especially by the English whom he admired sometimes
to the point of foolishness. When our headmaster, John Williams, told him that the Army was the career for gentlemen he immediately abandoned thoughts of becoming a doctor and became a soldier. I am sure the only reason he didn’t marry the English girl MM found for him in Surrey was the shattering example of Chris and his American wife Louise whom he married, if you please, not in New York which might have made a certain sense but in London. I suppose it is not impossible for two strangers to fabricate an affinity of sorts from being exiled to the same desert island even from opposite ends of the earth. Unfortunately Chris and Louise didn’t make it once in bed, or anywhere else, throughout their six months cohabitation.

John Williams, our teacher, whose favourite phrase was “good and proper, pressed down and flowing over,” in describing punishment, probably made the best choice for Sam after all. He grew so naturally into the part, more easily, I think, than he would have slipped into the role of doctor although I am sure his bedside manner would have been impeccable. But after Sandhurst he was a catalogue model of an officer.
His
favourite expression after he came home was:
it’s not done
, spoken in his perfect accent.

I went to see Sam the morning after I heard news of his promotion to Captain. It was Sunday and the time about ten o’clock. I found him in his morning coat lounging in a sofa with Sunday papers scattered around him on the floor, a half-smoked pipe on a side-table and from his hi-fi Mozart’s
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
on a 45 r.p.m. record playing at 331/3. That was Sam’s problem. Not very bright but not wicked. And completely tone-deaf. Nothing is more entertaining than Sam trying to whistle a tune.

There is something else about Sam which makes him enormously easy to take: his sense of theatre. He is basically an actor and half of the things we are inclined to hold against him are no more than scenes from his repertory to which he may have no sense of moral commitment whatsoever. He was fascinated by the customs of the English, especially their well-to-do classes and enjoyed playing at their foibles. When he told me about his elegant pipe which he had spent a whole morning choosing in a Mayfair shop I could see that he was not taking himself seriously at all. And therefore I had no reason to do so.

Of course one may well question the appropriateness of these attitudes in a Head of State. But quite frankly, I am not troubled
by that. In fact the sort of intellectual playfulness displayed by Sam must be less dangerous than the joyless passion for power of many African tyrants. As long as he gets good advice and does not fall too deeply under the influence of such Rasputins as Reginald Okong we may yet avoid the very worst.

Perhaps I am altogether too sanguine but his response to the doctors’ crisis gave me great hope and encouragement. He saw right away—just as I did and Chris refused to—that it wasn’t Mad Medico’s insane graffiti that brought all those worthy people so viciously about his throat. Far from it. His crime was rather that he had dared to get one of their number disgraced. Publicly they admitted that Dr. Ofe may have behaved unethically. But did that give a layman, especially one who was also a foreigner, the right to instigate relatives of a dead patient and even give them his own money to sue the very hospital in which he works? Their answer to their own rhetorical question was, of course, an emphatic no. Mine was an equally strong yes and so, thank God, was His Excellency’s. In fairness to Chris he did not disagree with us on the Ofe affair but took the legalistic line that the doctors’ complaint about Mad Medico’s notices must be seen in isolation and entirely on its own merit. That shyster of an Attorney-General must have given free lessons to Chris.

Admittedly Mad Medico made a complete fool of himself putting up those atrocious jokes. He was both irresponsible in his action and careless of his safety. After his brush with the doctors he should have known that he had made enemies who would deploy themselves in various ambushes for his head. He obliged them far beyond the call of duty by offering it on a platter of gold.

When I launched my editorial crusade on his behalf I had no reason to belittle his gross abuse of good taste. But I had to place beside it the image of that wretched man lying in unspeakable agony for four days and nights in the surgical ward while his distracted relations ran from hospital to a distant village and back again trying in vain to raise the twenty-five manilla that Dr. Ofe must have before he would operate. All witnesses spoke of the man’s screams which filled the Men’s Ward and could be heard as far away as the Emergency Room at the Hospital Gate. They spoke of the nurses unable to shut him up and leaving the ward for hours on end to get a little peace somewhere else. Three nurses spoke of their efforts to call Dr. Ofe on the telephone and his
threats of disciplinary action against them if they continued disturbing him at home and of his instructions to give the man yet another shot of morphia. And the doctor who finally performed the operation after Mad Medico began to interfere in the matter spoke at the inquiry of all those lengths of black intestine, four feet or perhaps eight, I don’t now recall, which he had to take out and how everything was already much too late.