Did you see how wild he looked? He seemed to be forgetting in a hurry that he had earlier refused to support me at the staff meeting when I had objected to Mr Nwege's stupid plans.
This is why the outside world laughs at us. In any case people like Chief Nanga don't care two hoots about the outside world. He is concerned with the inside world, with how to retain his hold on his constituency and there he is adept, you must admit.
Anyway, as he told us today, Churchill never passed his School Certificate. You could tell at a glance that he knew me in a way that Mr Nwege didn't. In the words of my boy, Peter, it was 'next to impossibility'. Andrew knew of course that I had long been planning to go to the capital and he knew about Elsie. Well, Elsie! Where does one begin to write about her? The difficulty in writing this kind of story is that the writer is armed with all kinds of hindsight which he didn't have when the original events were happening.
When he introduces a character like Elsie for instance, he already has at the back of his mind a total picture of her; her entrance, her act and her exit. And this tends to colour even the first words he writes.
I can only hope that being aware of this danger I have successfully kept it at bay. As far as is humanly possible I shall try not to jump ahead of my story. Elsie was, and for that matter still is, the only girl I met and slept with the same dayin fact within an hour. I know that faster records do exist and am not entering this one for that purpose, nor am I trying to prejudice anyone against Elsie. I only put it down because that was the way it happened. It was during my last term at the University and, having as usual put off my revision to the last moment, I was having a rough time.
But one evening there was a party organized by the Students' Christian Movement and I decided in spite of my arrears of work to attend and give my brain time to cool off. I am not usually lucky, but that evening I was. I saw Elsie standing in a group with other student nurses and made straight for her. She turned out to be a most vivacious girl newly come to the nursing School. We danced twice, then I suggested we took a walk away from the noisy highlife band and she readily agreed.
If I had been left to my own devices nothing might have happened that day. But, no doubt without meaning to, Elsie took a hand in the matter. She said she was thirsty and I took her to my rooms for a drink of water. She was one of those girls who send out loud cries in the heat of the thing. It happened again each time.
But that first day it was rather funny because she kept calling: 'Ralph darling. It was not until weeks later that I got to know that she was engaged to some daft fellow called Ralph, a medical student in Edinburgh. The funny part of it was that my next-door neighbouran English Honours student and easily the most ruthless and unprincipled womanizer in the entire university campuschanged to calling me Ralph from that day.
He was known to most students by his nickname, Irre, which was short for Irresponsible. His most celebrated conquest was a female undergraduate who had seemed so inaccessible that boys called her Unbreakable. Irre became interested in her and promised his friends to break her one day soon. Then one afternoon we saw her enter his rooms.
Our hall began to buzz with excitement as word went round, and we stood in little groups all along the corridor, waiting. Half an hour or so later Irre came out glistening with sweat, closed the door quietly behind him and then held up a condom bloated with his disgusting seed. That was Irre for youa real monster. I suppose I was somehow flattered by the notice a man of such prowess had taken of Elsie's cry.
When I confided to him later that Ralph was the name of the girl's proper boy-friend he promptly changed to calling me Assistant Ralph or, if Elsie was around, simply A. Despite this rather precipitous beginning Elsie and I became very good and steady friends. I can't pretend that I ever thought of marriage, but I must admit I did begin to feel a little jealous any time I found her reading and rereading a blue British air-letter with the red Queen and Houses of Parliament stamped on its back.
Elsie was such a beautiful, happy girl and she made no demands whatever. When I left the University she was heart-broken and so was I for that matter.
We exchanged letters every week or two weeks at the most. I remember during the postal strike of when I didn't hear from her for over a month I nearly kicked the bucket, as my boy, Peter, would have said. Now she was working in a hospital about twelve miles outside Bori and so we arranged that I should spend my next holidays in the capital and take the bus to her hospital every so often while she would be able to spend her days off in the city.
That was why the Minister's offer couldn't have come at a more opportune moment. I had of course one or two bachelor friends in the capital who would have had no difficulty in putting me up. But they weren't likely to provide a guest-room with all amenities. For days after the Minister's visit I was still trying to puzzle out why he had seemed so offended by his old nickname'M.
Minus Opportunity'. I don't know why I should have been so preoccupied with such unimportant trash. But it often happens to me like that: I get hold of some pretty inane thought or a cheap tune I would ordinarily be ashamed to be caught whistling, like that radio jingle advertising an intestinal worm expeller, and I get stuck with it.
When I first knew Mr Nanga in he had seemed quite happy with his nickname. I suspect he had in fact invented it himself. Certainly he enjoyed it. His name being M. Nanga, his fellow teachers called him simply and fondly 'M.
Why then the present angry reaction? I finally decided that it stemmed from the same general anti-intellectual feeling in the country. In Mr Nanga could admit, albeit light- heartedly, to a certain secret yearning for higher education; in he was valiantly proving that a man like him was better without it. Of course he had not altogether persuaded himself, or else he would not have shown such excitement over the LL. I wanted to see my father about one or two matters but more especially I wanted to take my boy, Peter, to his parents for the holidays as I had promised to do before they let me have him.
Peter was naturally very excited about going home after nearly twelve months, during which he had become a wage-earner.
At first I found it amusing when he went over to Josiah's shop across the road and bought a rayon head-tie for his mother and a head of tobacco for his father. But as I thought more about it I realized how those touching gestures by a mere boy, whom I paid twenty shillings a month, showed up my own quite different circumstances. And I felt envious. I had no mother to buy head-ties for, and although I had a father, giving things to him was like pouring a little water into a dried- up well.
My mother had been his second wife, but she had died in her first childbirth. This meant in the minds of my people that I was an unlucky child, if not a downright wicked and evil one. Not that my father ever said so openly. To begin with he had too many other wives and children to take any special notice of me. But I was always a very sensitive child and knew from quite early in my life that there was something wrong with my affairs. My father's first wife, whom we all call Mama, brought me up like one of her own children; still I sensed there was something missing.
One day at play another child with whom I had fallen out called me 'Bad child that crunched his mother's skull'. That was it. I am not saying that I had an unhappy or a lonely childhood. There were too many of us in the family for anyone to think of loneliness or unhappiness. And I must say this for my father that he never tolerated any of his wives drawing a line no matter how thin between her own children and those of others. We had only one Mama. The other two wives at the timethere are more now were called Mother by their children, or so and so's mother by the rest.
Of course as soon as I grew old enough to understand a few simple proverbs I realized that I should have died and let my mother live. Whenever my people go to console a woman whose baby has died at birth or soon after, they always tell her to dry her eyes because it is better the water is spilled than the pot broken.
The idea being that a sound pot can always return to the stream. My father was a District Interpreter. In those days when no one understood as much as 'come' in the white man's language, the District Officer was like the Supreme Deity, and the Interpreter the principal minor god who carried prayers and sacrifice to Him.
Every sensible supplicant knew that the lesser god must first be wooed and put in a sweet frame of mind before he could undertake to intercede with the Owner of the Sky. So Interpreters in those days were powerful, very rich, widely known and hated. Wherever the D. We grew up knowing that the world was full of enemies. Our father had protective medicine located at crucial points in our house and compound. One, I remember, hung over the main entrance; but the biggest was in a gourd in a corner of his bedroom.
No child went alone into that room which was virtually always under lock and key anyway. We were told that such and such homes were never to be entered; and those people were pointed out to us from whom we must not accept food.
But we also had many friends. There were all those people who brought my father gifts of yams, pots of palm- wine or bottles of European drink, goats, sheep, chicken. Or those who brought their children to live with us as house-boys or their brides-to-be for training in modern housekeeping. In spite of the enormous size of our family there was always meat in the house. At one time, I remember, my father used to slaughter a goat every Saturday, which was more than most families did in two years, and this sign of wealth naturally exposed us to their jealousy and malevolence.
But it was not until many years later that I caught one fleeting, terrifying glimpse of just how hated an Interpreter could be. I was in secondary school then and it was our half-term holiday. As my home village was too far away and I didn't want to spend the holiday in school I decided to go with one of my friends to his home which was four or five miles away.
His parents were very happy to see us and his mother at once went to boil some yams for us. After we had eaten, the father who had gone out to buy himself some snuff came hurrying back. To my surprise he asked his son what he said my name was again. I was afraid. I don't blame you, my son, or you either, because no one has told you. But know it from today that no son of Hezekiah Samalu's shelters under my roof.
A few weeks later, during the next holidays I tried to find out, but all my father did was to rave at me for wandering like a homeless tramp when I should be working at the books he sent me to school to learn.
I was only fifteen then and many more years were to pass before I knew how to stand my ground before him. What I should have told him then was that he had not sent me anywhere. I was in that school only because I was able to win a scholarship. It was the same when I went to the University. The trouble with my father was his endless desire for wives and children. Or perhaps I should say children and wives. Right now he has five wivesthe youngest a mere girl whom he married last year. And he is at least sixty- eight, possibly seventy.
He gets a small pension which would be adequate for him if he had a small family instead of his present thirty-five children. Of course he doesn't even make any pretence of providing for his family nowadays.
He leaves every wife to her own devices. It is not too bad for the older ones like Mama whose grown-up children help to support them; but the younger ones have to find their children's school fees from farming and petty trading. All the old man does is buy himself a jar of palm-wine every morning and a bottle of schnapps now and again. Recently he had plunged into the politics of our village and was the local chairman of the P. My father and I had our most serious quarrel about eighteen months ago when I told him to his face that he was crazy to be planning to marry his fifth wife.
In my anger I said he was storing up trouble for others. This was, of course, a most reprehensible remark to make. The meaning was that I didn't expect him to have much longer to live, which was indelicate and wicked. Had Mama not intervened he probably would have pronounced a curse on me. As it was, he satisfied himself by merely vowing never to touch a penny of mine since he must not store up trouble for me. Mama persuaded me to sue for peace by going down on my knees to ask forgiveness and making a peace offering of a bottle of schnapps, two bottles of White Horse and a bottle of Martell.
We were now technically at peace and I was going to tell him about my plans for the post- graduate course. But I knew in advance what he would say. He would tell me that I already had more than enough education, that all the important people in the country todayministers, businessmen, Members of Parliament, etc.
He would then tell me for the hundredth time to leave 'this foolish teaching', and look for a decent job in the government and buy myself a car. As it turned out I arrived in the capital, Bori, exactly one month after Chief Nanga's unexpected invitation. Although I had written a letter to say when I would be arriving and had followed it up with a telegram, I still had a lingering fear as I announced the address rather importantly and settled back in the taxi that morning.
I was thinking that a man of Chief Nanga's easy charm and country-wide popularity must throw out that kind of invitation several times each day without giving it much thought. Wasn't I being unreasonable in trying to hold him down to it? Anyhow I had taken the precaution of writing to an old friend, a newly qualified lawyer struggling to set up in private practice.
I would watch Nanga's reaction very closely and if necessary move out smartly again on the following day as though that had always been my intention. When we got to the Minister's residence my fear increased as his one-eyed stalwart stopped the car at the gate and began to look me over.
I go go haskam if he want see you. Wetin be your name? Then his wife and three of his children trooped out and joined in the excited welcoming. The house is yours. I will settle with the driver. He na my very good friend, no be so, driver? Now he broke into a broad smile showing smoke-and kola-stained teeth. For a mother of seven, the eldest of whom was sixteen or seventeen, Mrs Nanga was and still is very well kept. Her face, unlike her husband's had become blurred in my memory.
But on seeing her now it all came back again. She was bigger now of coursealmost matronly. Her face was one of the friendliest I had ever seen. She showed me to the Guest's Suite and practically ordered me to have a bath while she got some food ready.
My host did not waste time. At about five o'clock that afternoon he told me to get ready and go with him to see the Hon. Simon Koko, Minister for Overseas Training. Earlier that day one of those unseasonal December rains which invariably brought on the cold harmattan had fallen.
It had been quite heavy and windy and the streets were now littered with dry leaves, and sometimes half-blocked by broken-off tree branches; and one had to mind fallen telegraph and high-voltage electric wires. Chief Koko, a fat jovial man wearing an enormous home- knitted red-and-yellow sweater was about to have coffee. He asked if we would join him or have some alcohol. Then he practically dropped the cup and saucer on the drinks-table by his chair and jumped up as though a scorpion had stung him.
Chief Nanga and I sprang up in alarm and asked together what had happened. But our host kept crying that they had killed him and they could now go and celebrate. Meanwhile the steward, hearing his master's cry, had rushed in. I will kill him before I die. Go and bring him. The Minister slumped into his chair and began to groan and hold his stomach. Then his bodyguard whom we had seen dressed like a cowboy hurried in from the front gate, and hearing what had happened dashed out at full speed to try and catch the cook.
I hadn't thought about the telephone. They have killed me. What have I done to them? Did I owe them anything?
What have I done? He was now shouting threats of immediate sacking at some invisible enemy. That is the trouble with this country. Don't worry, you will see. Bloody fool The Minister sprang at him with an agility which completely belied his size and condition.
Put poison for master? Then with surprising presence of mind he saved himself. Obviously the cowboy had already told him of his crime. He made for the cup of coffee quickly, grabbed it and drank every drop.
There was immediate silence. We exchanged surprised glances. And even if to say I de craze why I no go go jump for inside lagoon instead to kill my master? He proceeded to explain the mystery of the coffee. So he had brewed some of his own locally processed coffee which he maintained he had bought from OHMS. There was an ironic twist to this incident which neither of the ministers seemed to notice.
OHMSOur Home Made Stuffwas the popular name of the gigantic campaign which the Government had mounted all over the country to promote the consumption of locally made products. Newspapers, radio and television urged every patriot to support this great national effort which, they said, held the key to economic emancipation without which our hardwon political freedom was a mirage.
Cars equipped with loudspeakers poured out new jingles up and down the land as they sold their products in town and country.
In the language of the ordinary people these cars, and not the wares they advertised, became known as OHMS. It was apparently from one of them the cook had bought the coffee that had nearly cost him his life. The matter having been resolved to everyone's satisfaction I began to feel vicariously embarrassed on behalf of Chief Koko. If anyone had asked my opinion I would have voted strongly in favour of our leaving right away.
But no one did. Instead Chief Nanga had begun to tease the other. Small thing you begin holler "they done kill me, they done kill me! I quickly looked away and began to gaze out of the window. Why I go fear? I kill person?
I sipped my whisky quietly, avoiding the eyes of both. But I was saying within myself that in spite of his present bravado Chief Nanga had been terribly scared himself, witness his ill-tempered, loud-mouthed panic at the telephone.
And I don't think his fear had been for Chief Koko's safety either. I suspect he felt personally threatened. Our people have a saying that when one slave sees another cast into a shallow grave he should know that when the time comes he will go the same way. Naturally my scholarship did not get a chance to be mentioned on this occasion. We drove home in silence. Only once did Chief Nanga turn to me and say: 'If anybody comes to you and wants to make you minister, run away.
There was no hint of complaint in her voice. She was clearly a homely, loyal wife prepared for the penalty of her husband's greatness. You couldn't subvert her. Nice to see you again. I asked Mrs Nanga about this one and that as I gravitated slowly to the one on the radiogram which I had noticed as soon as I had stepped into the house earlier in the day.
It was the same beautiful girl as in Chief Nanga's entourage in Anata. No, she is our wife. All I can say is that on that first night there was no room in my mind for criticism.
I was simply hypnotized by the luxury of the great suite assigned to me. When I lay down in the double bed that seemed to ride on a cushion of air, and switched on that reading lamp and saw all the beautiful furniture anew from the lying down position and looked beyond the door to the gleaming bathroom and the towels as large as a lappa I had to confess that if I were at that moment made a minister I would be most anxious to remain one for ever. And maybe I should have thanked God that I wasn't.
We ignore man's basic nature if we say, as some critics do, that because a man like Nanga had risen overnight from poverty and insignificance to his present opulence he could be persuaded without much trouble to give it up again and return to his original state. A man who has just come in from the rain and dried his body and put on dry clothes is more reluctant to go out again than another who has been indoors all the time.
We had all been in the rain together until yesterday Then a handful of usthe smart and the lucky and hardly ever the besthad scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in.
And from within they sought to persuade the rest through numerous loudspeakers, that the first phase of the struggle had been won and that the next phasethe extension of our housewas even more important and called for new and original tactics; it required that all argument should cease and the whole people speak with one voice and that any more dissent and argument outside the door of the shelter would subvert and bring down the whole house.
Needless to say I did not spend the entire night on these elevated thoughts. Most of the time my mind was on Elsie, so much so in fact that I had had to wake up in the middle of the night and change my pyjama trousers.
I was still fast asleep that first morning in the capital when I heard the Minister's voice. I opened my eyes and tried to smile and say good morning. I know you must be dog-tired after yesterday's journey.
See you later. I am off to the office now. And he had only come home at two last night, or rather this morning! The crunching of his tyres on the loose gravel drive had woken me up in the night and I had looked at my diamond-faced watch which I often forgot to take off even for my bath.
I had just bought it and believed the claim that it was everything-proof. Now I know better. But to return to Chief Nanga. There was something incongruous in his going to the office. It sounds silly to say this of a Cabinet Minister but I could not easily associate him in my mind with a desk and files. He was obviously more suited to an out-of- door life meeting and charming people. But anyhow there he was going off to his Ministry punctually at eight.
Much as I already liked and admired Mrs Nanga, I must confess I was inwardly pleased when she told me as I had my breakfast that she and the children were leaving for Anata in three days. Apparently the Minister insisted that his children must be taken home to their village at least once a year. Don't you see they hardly speak our language?
Ask them something in it and they reply in English. The little one, Micah, called my mother "a dirty, bush woman". When do you come back? You know Eddy's father is going to America in January. The reason why I felt happy at the news of Mrs Nanga's journey was a natural one. No married woman, however accommodating, would view kindly the sort of plans I had in mind, namely to bring Elsie to the house and spend some time with her.
Not even a self-contained guest suite such as I was now occupying would make it look well. Even if Mrs Nanga did not object, Elsie most certainly would. My experience of these things is that no woman, however liberal, wants other women to hold a low opinion of her morals.
I am not talking about prostitutes because I don't go in for them. My host was one of those people around whom things were always happening. I must always remain grateful to him for the insight I got into the affairs of our country during my brief stay in his house. From the day a few years before when I had left Parliament depressed and aggrieved, I had felt, like so many other educated citizens of our country, that things were going seriously wrong without being able to say just how.
We complained about our country's lack of dynamism and abdication of the leadership to which it was entitled in the continent, or so we thought. We listened to whispers of scandalous deals in high placessometimes involving sums of money that I for one didn't believe existed in the country.
But there was really no hard kernel of fact to get one's teeth into. But sitting at Chief Nanga's feet I received enlightenment; many things began to crystallize out of the mistsome of the emergent forms were not nearly as ugly as I had suspected but many seemed much worse. However, I was not making these judgements at the time, or not strongly anyhow. I was simply too fascinated by the almost ritual lifting of the clouds, as I had been one day, watching for the first time the unveiling of the white dome of Kilimanjaro at sunset.
I stood breathless; I did not immediately say: 'Ah! All that had to wait. I had neglected to bring any reading matter with me on my visit to Bori, and the Minister's library turned out to be not quite to my taste.
That was all really except for a few odds and ends like Speeches: How to Make Them. I flipped through a few volumes of the encyclopaedia and settled down to read the daily newspapers more closely than I had ever done. And believe me I discovered I had been missing a lot of fun. There was, for instance, this notice inserted into the Daily Chronicle by the City Clerk of Bori: The attention of the Public is hereby drawn to Section 12 of the Bori Conservancy Bye-laws, i Occupiers of all premises shall provide pails for excrement; the size of such pails and the materials of which they are constructed shall be approved by the City Engineer.
The Public are warned against unauthorized increases in the number of pails already existing on their premises. The surprises and contrasts in our great country were simply inexhaustible. Here was I in our capital city, reading about pails of excrement from the cosy comfort of a princely seven bathroom mansion with its seven gleaming, silent action, water-closets! Most of my life except for a brief interlude at the University where I first saw water-closets I'd used pit- latrines like the one at what was then my house in Anata.
As everyone knows, pit-latrines are not particularly luxurious or ultra-modern but with reasonable care they are adequate and clean. Bucket latrines are a different matter altogether. I saw one for the first time when I lived as a house-boy with an elder half-sister and her husband in the small trading town of Giligili. I was twelve then and it was the most squalid single year of my life. So disgusting did I find the bucket that I sometimes went for days on end without any bowel evacuation. And then there was that week when all the night-soil men in the town decided to go on strike.
I practically went without food. As the local inhabitants said at the time, you could 'hear' the smell of the town ten miles away. The only excitement I remember in Giligili was our nightly war on rats. We had two rooms in the large iron- roofed house with its earth walls and floor. My sister, her husband and two small children slept in one and the rest of usthree boysshared the other with bags of rice, garri, beans and other foodstuff.
And, of course, the rats. They came and sank their holes where the floor and the walls met. As soon as night fell they emerged to eat the grains while we sat around the open fire in the kitchen. You could never get at them because as soon as you entered the room with a lamp they flew into their two holes. We tried getting them with the little iron traps the blacksmiths made, on which you attached a baitusually a small piece of dried fish.
But after one or two of them got killed the rest learnt to avoid that fishy bait. It was then we decided to go hunting. I, or one of the others, would tiptoe in the dark and quietly plug the holes with pieces of rag while the rest waited outside with sticks.
After a reasonable interval those outside would charge in with a lamp, slam the door and the massacre would begin. It worked very well.
As a rule we did not kill the very small ones; we saved them up for the future Now all that seemed half a century away. When Chief Nanga came back to lunch just before two it was clear his mind was preoccupied with something or other. His greeting, though full of warmth as ever, was too brief.
He went straight to the telephone and called some ministerial colleague. I soon gathered that it was the Minister of Public Construction. The conversation made little sense to me at the time especially as I heard only one end of it. But my host spoke with great feeling, almost annoyance, about a certain road which had to be tarred before the next elections. Then I heard the figure of two hundred and ten thousand pounds. But what really struck me was when my Minister said to his colleague: 'Look T.
What is this dillying and dallying? Which expert? So you want to listen to expert now? You know very well T. That is why I always say that I prefer to deal with Europeans Don't worry about the Press; I will make sure that they don't publish it Very stupid man. The Cabinet has approved the completion of the road between Giligili and Anata since January but this foolish man has been dillying and dallying, because it is not in his constituency.
If it was in his constituency he would not listen to experts. And who is the expert? One small boy from his townwhom we all helped to promote last year. Now the boy advises him that my road should not be tarred before next dry season because he wants to carry out tests in the soil. He has become an earthworm.
Is this the first road we are tarring in this country? You see why I say that our people are too selfish and too jealous At the time I was naturally sympathetic to Chief Nanga's plans for it, if not with his contempt for expert advice. But of course Chief Nanga said the fellow hadn't been appointed in the first place for his expertise at all.
And so it went round and round. But none of these things was real news to me, only his saying that he had ordered ten luxury buses to ply the route as soon as it was tarred. Each would cost him six thousand pounds. So he had two good reasons for wanting the road tarrednext elections and the arrival of his buses. After a heavy lunch of pounded yam I was feeling very drowsy.
As a rule I always slept in the afternoon but in Chief Nanga's house, where things tumbled over one another in a scramble to happen first, an afternoon snooze seemed most improper, if not shameful.
So I bravely dozed in my chair while my host and his wife talked about her journey home. She asked if he had found a cook yet to do his meals while she was away and he said he had asked someone to send one or two along in the evening. Get A Man of the People from Amazon. Download the Study Guide. Download Lesson Plans. Study Pack. Chapter Summaries. Topics for Discussion. Albert Chinua lumogu Achebe. Chinua Achebe is arguably the most discussed African writer of his generation.
His first novel, Things Fall Apart , has become a classic. It has been read and discussed by readers throughout the Read more. Chinua Achebe. Chinua Achebe born is one of the foremost Nigerian novelists. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Great book, A Man of the People pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe.
No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe.
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