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“I think we better begin,” said the Minister, still frowning.
Although Mr Nwege had begun by saying that the distinguished guest needed no introduction he had gone on all the same to talk for well over twenty minutes—largely in praise of himself and all he had done for the Party in Anata “and environs”.
The crowd became steadily more restive especially when they notic
ed that the Minister was looking at his watch. Loud grumbles began to reach the dais from the audience. Then clear voices telling Nwege to sit down and let the man they came to hear talk. Nwege ignored all these warning signs—a more insensitive man you never saw. Finally one of the tough young men of the village stood up ten feet or so away and shouted:
“It is enough or I shall push you down and take three pence.”
This did the trick. The laughter that went up must have been heard a mile away. Mr Nwege’s concluding remarks were completely lost. In fact it was not until the Minister rose to his feet that the laughter stopped.
The story had it that many years ago when Mr Nwege was a poor, hungry elementary school teacher—that is before he built his own grammar school and became rich but apparently still hungry—he had an old rickety bicycle of the kind the villagers gave the onomatopoeic name of anikilija. Needless to say the brakes were very faulty. One day as he was cascading down a steep slope that led to a narrow bridge at the bottom of the hill he saw a lorry—an unusual phenomenon in those days—coming down the opposite slope. It looked like a head-on meeting on the bridge. In his extremity Mr Nwege had raised his voice and cried to passing pedestrians: “In the name of God push me down!” Apparently nobody did, and so he added an inducement: “Push me down and my three pence is yours!” From that day “Push me down and take my three pence” became a popular Anata joke.
The Minister’s speech sounded spontaneous and was most effective. There was no election at hand, he said, amid laughter. He had not come to beg for their votes; it was just “a family reunion—pure and simple”. He would have preferred not to speak to his own kinsmen in English which was after all a foreign language, but he had learned from experience that speeches made in vernacular were liable to be distorted and misquoted in the press. Also there were some strangers in that audience who did not speak our own tongue and he did not wish to exclude them. They were all citizens of our great country whether they came from the highlands or the lowlands, etc. etc.
The stranger he had in mind I think was Mrs Eleanor John, an influential party woman from the coast who had come in the Minister’s party. She was heavily painted and perfumed and although no longer young seemed more than able to hold her own, if it came to that. She sat on the Minister’s left, smoking and fanning herself. Next to her sat the beautiful young girl I have talked about. I didn’t catch the two of them exchanging any words or even looks. I wondered what such a girl was doing in that tough crowd; it looked as though they had stopped by some convent on their way and offered to give her a lift to the next one.
At the end of his speech the Minister and his party were invited to the Proprietor’s Lodge—as Mr Nwege called his square, cement-block house. Outside, the dancers had all come alive again and the hunters—their last powder gone—were tamely waiting for the promised palm-wine. The Minister danced a few dignified steps to the music of each group and stuck red pound notes on the perspiring faces of the best dancers. To one group alone he gave away five pounds.
The same man who had drawn our attention to the Minister’s humility was now pointing out yet another quality. I looked at him closely for the first time and noticed that he had one bad eye—what we call a cowrie-shell eye.
“You see how e de do as if to say money be san-san,” he was saying. “People wey de jealous the money gorment de pay Minister no sabi say no be him one de chop am. Na so so troway.”
Later on in the Proprietor’s Lodge I said to the Minister: “You must have spent a fortune today.”
He smiled at the glass of cold beer in his hand and said:
“You call this spend? You never see some thing, my brother. I no de keep anini for myself, na so so troway. If some person come to you and say ‘I wan’ make you Minister’ make you run like blazes comot. Na true word I tell you. To God who made me.” He showed the tip of his tongue to the sky to confirm the oath. “Minister de sweet for eye but too much katakata de for inside. Believe me yours sincerely.”
“Big man, big palaver,” said the one-eyed man.
It was left to Josiah, owner of a nearby shop-and-bar to sound a discordant, if jovial, note.
“Me one,” he said, “I no kuku mind the katakata wey de for inside. Make you put Minister money for my hand and all the wahala on top. I no mind at all.”
Everyone laughed. Then Mrs John said:
“No be so, my frien’. When you done experience rich man’s trouble you no fit talk like that again. My people get one proverb: they say that when poor man done see with his own eye how to make big man e go beg make e carry him poverty de go je-je.”
They said this woman was a very close friend of the Minister’s, and her proprietary air would seem to confirm it and the fact that she had come all the way from Pokoma, three hundred and fifty miles away. I knew of her from the newspapers; she was a member of the Library Commission, one of the statutory boards within the Minister’s portfolio. Her massive coral beads were worth hundreds of pounds according to the whisper circulating in the room while she talked. She was the “merchant princess” par excellence. Poor beginning—an orphan, I believe—no school education, plenty of good looks and an iron determination, both of which she put to good account; beginning as a street hawker, rising to a small trader, and then to a big one. At present, they said, she presided over the entire trade in imported second-hand clothing worth hundreds of thousands.
I edged quietly towards the journalist who seemed to know everyone in the party and whispered in his ear: “Who is the young lady?”
“Ah,” he said, leaving his mouth wide open for a while as a danger signal. “Make you no go near am-o. My hand no de for inside.”
I told him I wasn’t going near am-o; I merely asked who she was.
“The Minister no de introduce-am to anybody. So I think say na im girl-friend, or im cousin.” Then he confided: “I done lookam, lookam, lookam sotay I tire. I no go tell you lie girls for this una part sabi fine-o. God Almighty!”
I had also noticed that the Minister had skipped her when he had introduced his party to the teachers.
I know it sounds silly, but I began to wonder what had happened to the Mrs Nanga of the scoutmastering days. They were newly married then. I remembered her particularly because she was one of the very first women I knew to wear a white, ladies’ helmet which in our ignorance we called helment and which was in those days the very acme of sophistication.
2
A common saying in the country after Independence was that it didn’t matter what you knew but who you knew. And, believe me, it was no idle talk. For a person like me who simply couldn’t stoop to lick any Big Man’s boots it created a big problem. In fact one reason why I took this teaching job in a bush, private school instead of a smart civil service job in the city with car, free housing, etc., was to give myself a certain amount of autonomy. So when I told the Minister that I had applied for a scholarship to do a post-graduate Certificate of Education in London it did not even cross my mind to enlist his help. I think it is important to stress this point. I had had scholarships both to the secondary school and to the University without any godfather’s help but purely on my own merit. And in any case it wasn’t too important whether I did the post-graduate course or not. As far as I was concerned the important thing was going to be the opportunity of visiting Europe which in itself must be a big education. My friend Andrew Kadibe, who did the same course the previous year, seemed to have got a big kick out of it. I don’t mean the white girls—you can have those out here nowadays—but quite small things. I remember him saying for instance that the greatest delight of his entire visit to Britain was when, for the first time in his twenty-seven years, a white man—a taxi-driver I think—carried his suitcase and said “Sir” to him. He was so thrilled he tipped the man ten shillings. We laughed a lot about it but I could so easily see it happen.
But much as I wanted to go to Europe I wasn’t going
