“My people,” said Nanga again. “This is the boy who is thrusting his finger into my eye. He came to my house in Bori, ate my food, drank my water and my wine and instead of saying thank you to me he set about plotting how to drive me out and take over my house.” The crowd roared again. My panic had now left me entirely and in its place I found a rock-cold fearlessness that I had never before felt in my heart. I watched Nanga, microphone in one hand, reeling about the dais in drunken jubilation. I seemed to see him from a superior, impregnable position.
“I hear some people asking who is he: I will tell you. He was once my pupil. I taught him ABC and I called him to my house to arrange for him to go to England. Yes, I take the blame; he did not just smell his hand one morning and go to my house—I called him. Anyone who wants to may blame me.” There were louder cries of shock at such an unspeakable betrayal. “He even tried to take a girl on whose head I had put the full bride-price and many other expenses—and who according to our custom is my wife—this girl here. . . .” He went over to Edna and roughly pulled her hands away from her face. “He tried to take this girl who is covering her face for shame. Fortunately my wife caught him and told me.” He turned aside from the crowd to me. “Odili the great! So you have come to seek me out again. You are very brave; or have you come to seek Edna, eh? That’s it. Come to the microphone and tell my people why you came; they are listening . . .” He thrust the microphone into my face.
“I came to tell your people that you are a liar and . . .” He pulled the microphone away smartly, set it down, walked up to me and slapped my face. Immediately hands seized my arms, but I am happy that he got one fairly good kick from me. He slapped me again and again. Edna rushed forward crying and tried to get between us but he pushed her aside so violently that she landed on her buttocks on the wooden platform. The roar of the crowd was now like a thick forest all around. By this time blows were falling as fast as rain on my head and body until something heavier than the rest seemed to split my skull. The last thing I remembered was seeing all the policemen turn round and walk quietly away.
• • •
The events of the next four weeks or so have become so widely known in the world at large that there would be little point in my relating them in any detail here. And in any case, while those events were happening I was having a few private problems of my own. My cracked cranium took a little time to mend—to say nothing of the broken arm and countless severe bruises one of which all but turned me into a kind of genealogical cul-de-sac.
I remember the first time I woke up in the hospital and felt my head turbanned like an Alhaji. Everything seemed unreal and larger than life and I was sure I was dreaming. In the dream I saw Edna and my father and Mama standing around my bed. I also saw, through a gap in the screen, two policemen. But the only thing that was immediate and in focus was that pressure trapped inside the head pounding away in a panic effort to escape. I tried to feel my turban but the pain followed my thought to the arm—and I went off again. The next time I looked around me my father and Mama and the policemen were still there, and they looked more solid than the last time. Edna had vanished. Perhaps her figure had been planted there in the first place by my fevered fancy. I wondered—in a dull, faraway manner—what the police were doing beside my bed. But I did not wonder too much nor too long. Every other single thing was strange anyway and two policemen (or four when they were changing guards) didn’t make much difference. (Perhaps it was their way of making amends for their desertion when I had needed them.) But one morning I woke up to find they had disappeared. “Where are they?” I asked the nurse who brought my medicine.
“They done go.”
“But why?”
“You de ask why, instead to thank God that they done withdraw your case?”
My case? I tried hard to remember but couldn’t and gave up. My father should be coming any minute now and he would know. But when he came and I asked him he refused to tell, saying I should get better first. But I kept at him until he said yes, I had been under arrest for being found in possession of dangerous weapons.
“Found, where? Who found me?”
“In your car. They said five matchets were found in your car and two double-barrelled guns. Anyway they have now withdrawn the case.”
My thoughts were slowly coming into focus. “What day is the election?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say you won’t tell me, but not that you don’t know,” I said petulantly. “Could I have my radio?”
“Not yet; the doctor says you are to rest.”
The next day I asked again and if only to save himself from my pestering importunity he said yes, the thugs had ransacked my car, overturned it and set it on fire; then after I had been brought to hospital I was placed under arrest ostensibly for having weapons in my car but really to prevent me from signing my nomination paper.
“Nomination paper? But I have already signed it,” I said.
“No, that first one never reached the Electoral Officer. It was seized by thugs from your people on their way to the Electoral Office . . .”
I tried to sit up but he pressed me back; not that I could have made it, anyway.
“Now I have told you. Don’t ask me any more questions, do you hear me? Even in this hospital you
cannot say who is a friend and who an enemy. That is why I am here so much.” He said this quietly and with a backward glance. “Max came here in person with a new nomination paper for you but they turned him back.”
“I see.”
It was in fact election day as we spoke. My father found it easy to conceal the fact from me because they had put me in a special isolated ward. That same night Max was killed in Abaga but I didn’t hear of it either, until two days after; and then I wept all day that day, and the pressure inside my head returned and I hoped I would die, but the doctor put me to sleep.
• • •
As I got the story later from Joe, the trade-unionist, Max had been informed by our party intelligence that Chief Koko’s resourceful wife was leading the Women’s Wing of the P.O.P. in an operation that one might describe as breastfeeding the ballot, i.e. smuggling into the polling booths wads of ballot paper concealed in their brassières. Max immediately investigated. But as soon as he alighted from his car, one of Chief Koko’s jeeps swept up from behind, knocked him over and killed him on the spot.
The police, most of whom turned out to be disguised party thugs, performed half-hearted motions to arrest the driver of the jeep but Chief S. I. Koko came forward and told them not to worry; he would handle the matter himself. Eunice had been missed by a few inches when Max had been felled. She stood like a stone figure, I was told, for some minutes more. Then she opened her handbag as if to take out a handkerchief, took out a pistol instead and fired two bullets into Chief Koko’s chest. Only then did she fall down on Max’s body and begin to weep like a woman; and then the policemen seized her and dragged her away. A very strange girl, people said.
The fighting which broke out that night between Max’s bodyguard and Chief Koko’s thugs in Abaga struck a match and lit the tinder of discontent in the land. Nearer home in Anata Chief Nanga, having been elected unopposed, tried to disband his private army, if only to save himself their keep; but some of them refused to be disbanded and staged a minor battle in which Dogo (the one-eyed bodyguard) lost an ear. Then they went on a rampage, sacking one market after another in the district, seizing women’s wares and beating up people. My father’s youngest wife lost her entire stock of dried fish in our village market during one of their raids and got a swollen face instead. Other election thugs in different parts of the country hearing of the successes of Chief Nanga’s people quickly formed their own bands of marauders. And so a minor reign of terror began.
Meanwhile the Prime Minister had appointed Chief Nanga and the rest of the old Cabinet back to office and announced over the radio that he intended to govern and stamp out subversion and thuggery without quarter or mercy. He assured foreign investors that their money was safe in the country, that his government stood “as firm as the Rock of Gibraltar” by its open-door economic policy. “This country,” he said, “has never been more united or more stable than it is today.” He nominated Chief Koko’s widow to the Senate and from there made her Minister for Women’s Affairs, intending to quiet the powerful guild of Bori market women who had become restive.
Some political commentators have said that it was the supreme cynicism of these transactions that inflamed the people and brought down the Government. That is sheer poppycock. The people themselves, as we have seen, had become even more cynical than their leaders and were apathetic into the bargain. “Let them eat,” was the people’s opinion, “after all when white men used to do all the eating did we commit suicide?” Of course not. And where is the all-powerful white man today? He came, he ate and he went. But we are still around. The important thing then is to stay alive; if you do you will outlive your present annoyance. The great thing, as the old people have told us, is reminiscence; and only those who survive can have it. Besides, if you survive, who knows? it may be your turn to eat tomorrow. Your son may bring home your share.