“Frightened her away? How?”
“I told her I was going to marry her for one of my sons that day she spent a whole night with us here . . .”
“So it wasn’t a dream?”
“What dream?”
“Never mind, father. What I mean is you should marry her for this son here.”
“That remains to be seen.”
• • •
After my illness my father, some of his close relatives and I went with a big pot of palm-wine to Edna’s father to start a “conversation”. The first few visits we made no headway at all. Our host simply refused to believe that he had lost a Chief and Minister as son-in-law and must now settle for this crazy boy who had bought a tortoise and called it a car. But the Army obliged us by staging a coup at that point and locking up every member of the Government. The rampaging bands of election thugs had caused so much unrest and dislocation that our young Army officers seized the opportunity to take over. We were told Nanga was arrested trying to escape by canoe dressed like a fisherman.
Thereafter we made rapid progress with Edna’s father who, no doubt, saw me then as a bird in hand. He told us that Chief Nanga had paid a bride-price of one hundred and fifty pounds for his daughter and another one hundred pounds on her education and other incidentals. Was that all? I thought.
“Our custom,” said my father firmly, “is to return the bride-price—finish. Other bits and pieces must be the man’s loss. Is that not the custom?” Our party said yes, that was the custom.
As indeed it was. But I was not interested in legalistic-traditional arguments just now, especially when they were calculated to delay things (a coup might be followed by a counter coup and then where would we be?); and anyway I did not want to go through life thinking that I owed Chief Nanga money spent on my wife’s education. So I agreed—to my people’s astonishment—to pay everything. “Let us go outside and whisper together,” said my scandalized relations. I said a flat no and they shrugged their acquiescence, astonished at my firmness—and pleased, because we admire firmness.
I had already decided privately to borrow the money from C.P.C. funds still in my hands. They were not likely to be needed soon, especially as the military regime had just abolished all political parties in the country and announced they would remain abolished “until the situation became stabilized once again”. They had at the same time announced the impending trial of all public servants who had enriched themselves by defrauding the state. The figure involved was said to be in the order of fifteen million pounds.
But their most touching gesture as far as I was concerned was to release Eunice from jail and pronounce Max a Hero of the Revolution. (For I must point out that my severe criticism of his one fatal error notwithstanding, Max was indeed a hero and martyr; and I propose to found a school—a new type of school, I hasten to add—in my village to his memory.) What I found distasteful however was the sudden, unashamed change of front among the very people who had stood by and watched him die.
Overnight everyone began to shake their heads at the excesses of the last regime, at its graft, oppression and corrupt government: newspapers, the radio, the hitherto silent intellectuals and civil servants—everybody said what a terrible lot; and it became public opinion the next morning. And these were the same people that only the other day had owned a thousand names of adulation, whom praise-singers followed with song and talking-drum wherever they went. Chief Koko in particular became a thief and a murderer, while the people who had led him on—in my opinion the real culprits—took the legendary bath of the Hornbill and donned innocence.
“Koko has taken enough for the owner to see,” said my father to me. It was the day I had gone to visit Eunice and was telling him on my return how the girl had showed no interest in anything—including whether she stayed in jail or out of it. My father’s words struck me because they were the very same words the villagers of Anata had spoken of Josiah, the abominated trader. Only in their case the words had meaning. The owner was the village, and the village had a mind; it could say no to sacrilege. But in the affairs of the nation there was no owner, the laws of the village became powerless. Max was avenged not by the people’s collective will but by one solitary woman who loved him. Had his spirit waited for the people to demand redress it would have been waiting still, in the rain and out in the sun. But he was lucky. And I don’t mean it to shock or to sound clever. For I do honestly believe that in the fat-dripping, gummy, eat-and-let-eat regime just ended—a regime which inspired the common saying that a man could only be sure of what he had put away safely in his gut or, in language ever more suited to the times: “you chop, me self I chop, palaver finish”; a regime in which you saw a fellow cursed in the morning for stealing a blind man’s stick and later in the evening saw him again mounting the altar of the new shrine in the presence of all the people to whisper into the ear of the chief celebrant—in such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest—without asking to be paid.