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“Why shouldn’t you share the house with him?” asked Mrs Nanga deflecting him off his course. “Does a man exclude his brother from his house?”
“No, that is not done,” he conceded after thinking about it for a while with his head bent slightly to one side. “It is my house; you have spoken the truth.”
The house in question was the very modern four-storey structure going up beside the present building and which was to get into the news later. It was, as we were to learn, a “dash” from the European building firm of Antonio and Sons whom Nanga had recently given the half-million-pound contract to build the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.
I had spent about two hours at the house before Edna finally came in the car sent to bring her. In that time I gave out three shillings to three different groups of boys and their masked dancers. The last, its wooden mask-face a little askew and its stuffed pot-belly looking really stuffed, was held in restraint by his attendants tugging at a rope tied round his waist as adult attendants do to a real, dangerous Mask. The children sang, beat drums, gongs and cigarette cups and the Mask danced comically to the song:
Sunday, bigi bele Sunday
Sunday, bigi bele Sunday
Akatakata done come!
Everybody run away!
Sunday, Alleluia!
While the Mask danced here and there brandishing an outsize matchet the restraining rope round his waist came undone. One might have expected this sudden access to freedom to be followed by a wild rampage and loss of life and property. But the Mask tamely put his matchet down, helped his disciples retie the rope, picked up his weapon again and resumed his dance.
When the drunken visitor had finally been persuaded to go and come back later, Mrs Nanga opened a side door that led from the front room into a porch fitted up as a reception room presumably for V.I.P.s and asked me to go in and rest there. Then she sent Edna to me with a bottle of beer and a glass on a tray. She served me silently. But she did not sit down afterwards; instead she went and leaned with her elbows on one of the windows looking outside.
&nbs
p; I began to drink the beer and wondered how on earth to begin. I suppose Chief Nanga’s house was the wrong place, really. But I had better make the best of it before more visitors came, I thought; and as if to confirm the thought I heard just then the drumming of another group of boys.
“Why don’t you sit, Edna?” I said with as much decisiveness as I could put into it.
“I am all right here,” she said. “I want to see what is going on in the road.”
“Is anything going on?” I stood up and went to her window and was tempted to put an arm round her waist but decided that it might be premature.
“Oh, just people passing in their new Christmas dresses.”
“There is something I want to tell you,” I said, returning to my seat.
“Me?” she said, turning round and looking genuinely surprised.
“Yes, come and sit down.”
She sat down and I took one more sip before speaking.
“I want to give you a piece of advice—as one who has seen more of the world and as a friend.” Good beginning, I thought, and took a sip at my glass. “You will be making a big and serious mistake if you allow anyone to rush you into marriage now. You are too young to be rushed into marrying, especially marrying a polygamist. . . .”
“Is that what Mama asked you to tell me?” she asked.
“Who is Mama? Oh, Mrs Nanga, I see. Why? Why should she ask me to tell you anything? No, Edna, it is in your own interest. Don’t go and spoil your life.”
“What is your business in it?”
“None whatever. Except that I think a beautiful young girl like you deserves better than to marry an ancient polygamist.”
“You told my father he was your friend?”
“Even if he was my brother or my father . . . Edna, give yourself a chance. The man’s son is almost your age . . .”
“That is the world of women,” she said resignedly.
“Rubbish! An educated girl like you saying a thing like that! Are you a Moslem or something?”
