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“Terrible,” I said, laughing even though the thing wasn’t funny.
“Of course I slapped okro seeds out of his mouth,” said Mrs Nanga proudly. “My mother not knowing what he had said began to rebuke me.”
“Yes, it is good that you take them home sometimes. When do you come back?”
“After Christmas. You know Eddy’s father is going to America in January.” Eddy is the name of her first son.
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 places—sometimes 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 mist—some 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! this is the tallest mountain in Africa”, or “It isn’t really as impressive as I had expected”. 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. There was a decorative set of an American encyclopaedia, there was She by Rider Haggard, and also Ayesha, or the Return of She; then there were a few books by Marie Corelli and Bertha Clay—I remember in particular The Sorrows of Satan. 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, 1951:
(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.
(ii) The number of such pails to be provided in any premises shall be specified 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 us—three boys—shared 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 bait—usually a small piece of dried fish. But after one or two of them got killed the rest learned 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.C. we agreed that this road should be tarred. What is this dillying and dallying . . . ? Which expert? So you want to listen to expert now? You know very well T.C. that you cannot trust these our boys. That is why I always say that I prefer to deal with Europeans . . . What? Don’t worry about the Press; I will make sure that they don’t publish it. . . .”
When he finally put down the phone he said, “Foolish man!” to it and then turned to me.
“That was Hon. T. C. Kobino. 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 town—whom 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.” I laughed at this. ?
??Have you ever heard of such a thing? 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. . . .”
I got to know a lot about this road which, incidentally, passes through my own village of Urua. 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 tarred—next elections and the arrival of his buses.
“It doesn’t mean I have sixty thousand pounds in the bank,” he hastened to add. “I am getting them on never-never arrangement from the British Amalgamated.”
I wasn’t too sure of the meaning of never-never at that time and I suppose I had a vague idea that the buses were a free gift, which in the circumstances would not have been beyond the British Amalgamated.
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. And I thought if Chief Nanga could get home at two in the morning, be at his desk at eight and come back at two looking as fresh as a newly-hatched chick why should I, a child of yesterday by comparison, indulge in such a decadent and colonial habit as taking a siesta? 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. Only then did it strike me that they had no cook, only a steward. I wondered how they managed with their dinner parties.
A car drew up outside and a young American couple breezed in. Or rather the wife breezed in and the husband followed in her wake.
