to sell my soul for it or beg anyone to help me. It was the Minister himself who came back to the post-graduate question at the end of his reception without any prompting whatever from me. (As a matter of fact I tried hard to avoid catching his attention again.) And the proposals he made didn’t seem to me to be offensive in any way. He invited me to come and spend my holidays with him in the capital and while I was there he would try and find out from his Cabinet colleague, the Minister of Overseas Training, whether there was anything doing.
“If you come as soon as you close,” he said, “you can stay in my guest-room with everything complete—bedroom, parlour, bathroom, latrine, everything—self-contained. You can live by yourself and do anything you like there, it’s all yours.”
“Make you no min’ am, sha-a,” said Mrs John to me. “I kin see say you na good boy. Make you no gree am spoil you. Me I no de for dis bed-room and bath-room business-o. As you see dis man so, na wicked soul. If he tell you stand make you run.”
Everybody laughed.
“Eleanor, why you wan disgrace me and spoil my name so for public for nothing sake. Wetin I do you? Everybody here sabi say me na good Christian. No be so, James?”
“Ah, na so, sir,” replied the journalist happily.
In spite of all this joking the Minister’s invitation was serious and firm. He said it was important I came at once as he was planning to go to the United States in about two months.
“They are going to give me doctorate degree,” he announced proudly. “Doctor of Laws, LL.D.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you, my brother.”
“So the Minister will become ‘Chief the Honourable Doctor M. A. Nanga’,” intoned the journalist, a whole second ahead of my own thoughts on the matter. We all cheered the impressive address and its future owner.
“You no see say the title fit my name pem,” said the Minister with boyish excitement, and we all said yes it suited him perfectly.
“But the man wey I like him name pass na ‘Chief the Honourable Alhaji Doctor Mongo Sego, M.P.’,” said the Minister somewhat wistfully.
“Him own good too,” admitted the incomparable journalist, “but e no pass your own, sir: ‘Chief the Honourable Dr M. A. Nanga, M.P., LL.D.’ Na waa! Nothing fit passam.”
“What about ‘Chief Dr Mrs’?” I threw in mischievously.
“That one no sweet for mouth,” said the Minister. “E no catch.”
“Wetin wrong with am?” asked Mrs John. “Because na woman get am e no go sweet for mouth. I done talk say na only for election time woman de get equality for dis our country.”
“No be so, madam,” said the journalist. “You no see how the title rough like sand-paper for mouth: ‘Dr Chief Mrs’. E no catch at all.”
Before the Minister left he made sure I took down his residential address in the capital. I felt Mr Nwege’s malevolent eyes boring into me as I wrote it down. And hardly were the farewells out of his mouth before he turned to me and asked sneeringly if I was still of the opinion that it was unnecessary to be introduced to the Minister.
“What I objected to was standing in a line like school children,” I said, somewhat embarrassed. “In any case I didn’t need to be introduced. We knew each other already.”
“You can thank your stars that I am not a wicked man,” he continued as though I had said nothing, “otherwise I would have told him. . . .”
“Why don’t you run after him now?” I asked. “He cannot have gone very far.” With that I walked away from the obsequious old fool.
But when I came to think of the events of the day I had to admit that Mr Nwege had not had fair returns for all his trouble. I don’t think the Minister gave him as much as a second to raise any of his own problems. And it was uncharitable I thought for him to have joined in as loudly as he had done in the “push me down” laughter. For the sake of appearances at least he should have kept a straight face. It was clear the great man did not easily forgive those who took up part of his time to make their own speeches. He ostentatiously ignored Mr Nwege for the rest of the day. Poor man! He had probably lost the chance of getting on that new corporation for the disposal of dilapidated government wares with which he was no doubt hoping to replace the even more worn-out equipment in his school. So although it was unreasonable for him to have turned his anger on me there was no doubt he had cause to be angry.
Actually his teachers had let him down badly that afternoon. Apart from myself there was that “M.A. minus opportunity” incident which for some obscure reason seemed to have annoyed the Minister even more than Mr Nwege’s long speech. At least he contained the latter annoyance with laughter. And to crown Mr Nwege’s discomfitures his Senior Tutor, a man in his sixties, had sallied out of the Lodge with one bottle of beer under each armpit—to the amusement of everyone except Mr Nwege who had clearly not gone out of his way to buy beer at its present impossible price for members of his staff to take home. The Senior Tutor, by the way, was a jolly old rogue who could get away with anything—if need be by playing the buffoon. He was a great frequenter of Josiah’s bar across the road. He had a fine sense of humour—like when he asked why so many young people travelled to Britain to be called to the Bar when he could call them all to Josiah’s bar.
I was lighting my Tilley lamp later that evening when someone knocked on my door.
“Come in if you are good-looking,” I said.
“Is Odili in?” asked an unnatural, high-pitched voice.
“Come in, fool,” I said.
It was a silly joke Andrew and I never tired of playing on each other. The idea was to sound like a girl and so send the other’s blood pressure up.
“How the go de go?” I asked.