Anthills of the Savannah (15 page)

A deity who does as he says never lacks in worshippers. Idemili’s devotees increased in all the country between Omambala and Iguedo. But how could they carry to the farthest limits of their dispersal adequate memories of the majesty of the Pillar of Water standing in the dark lake?

Man’s best artifice to snare and hold the grandeur of divinity always crumbles in his hands, and the more ardently he strives the more paltry and incongruous the result. So it were better he did not try at all; far better to ritualize that incongruity and by invoking the mystery of metaphor to hint at the most unattainable glory by its very opposite, the most mundane starkness—a mere stream, a tree, a stone, a mound of earth, a little clay bowl containing fingers of chalk.

Thus it came about that the indescribable Pillar of Water fusing earth to heaven at the navel of the black lake became in numberless shrine-houses across the country, a dry stick rising erect from the bare, earth floor.

It is to this emblem that a man who has achieved wealth of crop and livestock and now wishes to pin an eagle’s feather on his success by buying admission into the powerful hierarchy of
ozo
must go to present himself and offer sacrifices before he can begin the ceremonies, and again after he has concluded them. His first visit is no more than to inform the Daughter of the Almighty of his ambition. He is accompanied by his daughter or, if he has only sons, by the daughter of a kinsman; but a daughter it must be.

This young woman must stand between him and the Daughter
of the Almighty before he can be granted a hearing. She holds his hand like a child in front of the holy stick and counts seven. Then she arranges carefully on the floor seven fingers of chalk, fragile symbols of peace, and then gets him to sit on them so lightly that not one single finger may be broken.

If all has gone well thus far he will then return to his compound and commence the elaborate and costly ceremonies of
ozo
with feasting and dancing to the entire satisfaction of his community and their ancient custom. Then he must go back to the Daughter of the Almighty to let her know that he has now taken the high and sacred title of his people.

Neither at the first audience nor at this second does Idemili deign to answer him directly. He must go away and await her sign and pleasure. If she finds him unworthy to carry the authority of
ozo
she simply sends death to smite him and save her sacred hierarchy from contamination and scandal. If, however, she approves of him the only sign she condescends to give—grudgingly and by indirection—is that he will still be about after three years. Such is Idemili’s contempt for man’s unquenchable thirst to sit in authority on his fellows.

The story goes that in the distant past a certain man handsome beyond compare but in randiness as unbridled as the odorous hegoat from the shrine of Udo planting his plenitude of seeds from a huge pod swinging between hind legs into she-goats tethered for him in front of numerous homesteads; this man, they said, finally desired also the
ozo
title and took the word to Idemili. She said nothing. He went away, performed the rites, took the eagle feather and the titular name Nwakibie, and returned to tell her what he had done. Again she said nothing. Then as a final ritual he took shelter according to custom for twenty-eight days in a bachelor’s hut away from his many wives. But though he lived there in the day for all to see he would steal away at dead of night through circuitous moon-swept paths to the hut of a certain widow he had fancied for some time; for as he was wont to ask in his more waggish days: why will a man mounting a widow listen for footsteps outside her hut when he knows how far her man has travelled?

On his way to resume his hard-lying pretence at cock-crow one morning who should he behold stretched right across his path its head lost in the shrubbery to the left and its tail likewise to the
right? None other than Eke-Idemili itself, royal python, messenger of the Daughter of God—the very one who carries not a drop of venom in its mouth and yet is held in greater awe than the deadliest of serpents!

His circuitous way to the bachelor’s hut thus barred, his feet obeying a power outside his will took him straight and true as an arrow to the consternation of his compound and his funeral.

B
EATRICE
N
WANYIBUIFE
did not know these traditions and legends of her people because they played but little part in her upbringing. She was born as we have seen into a world apart; was baptized and sent to schools which made much about the English and the Jews and the Hindu and practically everybody else but hardly put in a word for her forebears and the divinities with whom they had evolved. So she came to barely knowing who she was. Barely, we say though, because she did carry a vague sense more acute at certain critical moments than others of being two different people. Her father had deplored the soldier-girl who fell out of trees. Chris saw the quiet demure damsel whose still waters nonetheless could conceal deep overpowering eddies of passion that always almost sucked him into fatal depths. Perhaps Ikem alone came close to sensing the village priestess who will prophesy when her divinity rides her abandoning if need be her soup-pot on the fire, but returning again when the god departs to the domesticity of kitchen or the bargaining market-stool behind her little display of peppers and dry fish and green vegetables. He knew it better than Beatrice herself.

But knowing or not knowing does not save us from being known and even recruited and put to work. For, as a newly-minted proverb among her people has it, baptism (translated in their language as Water of God) is no antidote against possession by Agwu the capricious god of diviners and artists.

W
HEN SHE WAS MARCHED
through the ranks of her erstwhile party comrades like a disgraced soldier just cashiered at a courtmartial, his epaulette ripped off with his insignia of rank, she was strangely lucid. The soft voice conveying the news of the car waiting below had done it. Her sense of danger had been stabbed into hypersensitivity by the menace of that voice—quiet as before but flashing ever so briefly that glint of metal. Aha! This was the man who, as rumour has it, returned from an intensive course in a Latin American army and invented the simplest of tortures for preliminary interrogations. No messy or cumbersome machinery but a tiny piece of office equipment anyone could pick up in a stationery store and put in his pocket—a paper-stapler in short, preferably the Samsonite brand. Just place the hand where the paper should be—palm up or down doesn’t really matter—and bang. The truth jumps out surprisingly fast, even from the hardest of cases.

This extended image flashed through Beatrice’s mind in its completeness and in one instant. When she walked through the room behind the major she was likewise able to take in as if by some unseen radar revolving atop her head every detail of the scene. His Excellency was the only party missing from this still life. All the figures, except one, stared at her silently and uninhibitedly from whatever standing or sitting position they were in, the American girl’s eyeballs in particular popping out of her head like the eyeballs of a violent idol. One man alone kept his gaze to the carpet on which he sat and seemed to doodle with his finger—Alhaji Mahmoud, Chairman of the Kangan/American Chamber of Commerce. He was the only person at the party just ended with whom Beatrice had not exchanged a single word that evening beyond a lukewarm hello at the introductions.

It was the same car, the same driver, the same escort. The two had jumped out to salute the Major as he brought their passenger down, opened the door of the car for her himself, slammed it shut after her and walked away without a word.

Naturally the journey back was silent. Which suited her perfectly. The sharp prick of physical anxiety caused by that glint of metal hidden inside the Major’s velvet voice had passed quickly taking also with it the envelopment of utter desolation which had
preceded it and which it had so effectively punctured. What passed through her mind and flowed through her senses during the midnight journey could not be assigned a simple name. It was more complex than the succession of hot and cold flushes of malaria. Indignation, humiliation, outrage, sorrow, pity, anger, vindictiveness and other less identifiable emotions swept back and forth through her like successions of waves coming in, hitting shallow bottom of shoreline, exploding in white froth and flowing back a little tired, somewhat assuaged.

By rights she should not have slept that night. But she did; and a deep and plumbless sleep it proved to be. She tumbled into it without preparation from the brink of wakefulness, in full dress. And her waking up was just as precipitate. One instant she was virtually unconscious and the next she was totally awake, her eyes and head absolutely clear. She was tranquil almost. Why? From what source? Last night now seemed far away, like something remembered from a long and turbulent dream. Last night? It wasn’t last night. It was the same night, this night. It was still Saturday night stroke Sunday morning. And it wasn’t light yet.

She heard far away the crowing of a cock. Strange. She had not before heard a cock crow in this Government Reserved Area. Surely nobody here has been reduced to keeping poultry like common villagers. Perhaps some cook or steward or gardener had knocked together an illegal structure outside his room in the Boys’ Quarters for a chicken-house. The British when they were here would not have stood for it. They had totally and completely ruled out the keeping of domestic animals in their reservation. Except dogs, of course. That habit, strange to say, has survived but not for the reasons the British established it. You wouldn’t see any of their black successors walking his dog today but you will find affixed to the iron grill or barbed wire gate a stern warning: BEWARE OF DOG, sometimes embellished with the likeness of an Alsatian or German Shepherd’s head with a flaming red tongue. Unfortunately armed robbers of Kangan do not stop at kicking dogs; they shoot them.

Lying in bed clear-eyed and listening to the sounds of morning was a new experience for Beatrice. As the faint light of dawn began timidly to peer through gaps in window blinds and the high fan-light of her bedroom she heard with a sudden pang of exultation the song of a bird she had heard so often in the mission
compound of her childhood but not, as far as she could tell, ever since; certainly never before in Bassa. She immediately sat up in her bed.

The bird, her mother had told her, was the chief servant of the king and every morning he asks the guards of the treasury:
Is the king’s property correct?… Is the king’s property correct?… The king’s property… The king’s property… Is the king’s property correct
?

She got up, went into the living-room, picked up the front-door keys from the sideboard and unlocked the grill and the door and went out into her narrow balcony. Standing there among her potted plants she took in deep lungfuls of luxuriously cool, fresh morning air and watched streaks of light brightening slowly in the eastern sky. And then he spoke again, the diligent chamberlain:
Is the king’s property correct
? And now she saw him against the light—a little dark-brownish fellow with a creamy belly and the faintest suggestion of a ceremonial plume on the crown of his head. He was perched on the taller of the two pine trees standing guard at the driveway into the block of flats.

Beatrice had never until now shown the slightest interest in birds and beyond vultures and cattle egrets hardly knew any of them by name. Now she was so taken with this conscientious palace official that she decided to find out his name as soon as possible. She knew there was an illustrated book called something like
The Common Birds of West Africa
… Again he demanded:
The king’s property… The king’s property… Is the king’s property correct
?

Strange, but tears loomed suddenly in Beatrice’s eyes as she spoke to the bird: “Poor fellow. You have not heard the news? The king’s treasury was broken into last night and all his property carried away—his crown, his sceptre and all.”

As she scanned the pine trees in the rapidly brightening light she saw that the caretaker of the crown jewels was not alone. There were literally scores of other birds hopping about the twigs preening themselves and making low trilling noises or short, sharp calls of satisfaction. He continued intermittently to make his strong-voiced inquiry until the sun had come up and then, as on a signal, the birds began to fly away in ones and twos and larger groups. Soon the tree was empty.

These birds, she thought, did not just arrive here this morning.
Here, quite clearly, is where they have always slept. Why have I not noticed them before?

Even her poor mother terrorized as she was by her woman’s lot could fabricate from immemorial birdsong this tale of an African bird waking up his new world in words of English. A powerful flush of remembering now swept through her mind like a gust of wind and she recalled perfectly every circumstance of the story. Alas, her mother had only told, not invented it. The credit must go to a certain carpenter/comedian who played the accordion at village Christian wakes and performed such tricks as lifting a table between his teeth to chase away sleep from the eyes of mourners and relieve the tedium of hymns and pious testimonies.

Beatrice smiled wryly. So, two whole generations before the likes of me could take a first-class degree in English, there were already barely literate carpenters and artisans of British rule hacking away in the archetypal jungle and subverting the very sounds and legends of daybreak to make straight my way.

And my father—wonders shall never end as he would say—was he then also among these early morning road-makers-into-the-jungle-of-tongues? What an improbable thought! And yet all those resounding maxims he wielded like the hefty strokes of an axeman.
Cleanliness is next to godliness! Punctuality is the soul of business!
(A prelude this, she recalled with a smile now, to the flogging of late-comers to school on rainy mornings.) And then that gem of them all, his real favourite:
Procrastination is a lazy man’s apology!
A maxim of mixed mintage, that; half-caste first-fruits of a heady misalliance. Or, as Ikem would have said, missionary mishmash!