Anthills of the Savannah (24 page)

Chris threw a few things into his travelling bag while he waited nervously for Beatrice to arrive. As soon as she drove in he went out with the bag, locked the front door and left his house, as it turned out, for good.

The decision to leave had little at first to do with fear for his own safety although that factor was to loom larger with every passing day. But right now in his mind the overwhelming issue which had been crystallizing even as the announcement was issuing from the box was how to counter the hideous lie. Not tomorrow, it could be too late, but now!

As soon as he got to his first hideout he picked up the telephone and summoned two foreign correspondents to meet with him at eight o’clock that night. Then he went to the back room where a camp-bed and writing-table had been set up for him and began to draft his statement. His mind was strangely efficient and lucid; no detail seemed to escape him. A few minutes after he began working he re-emerged in the living-room where his host and Beatrice were making phone calls and told them to make sure that people understood that Ikem was not just wounded but dead. He was convinced that the drafters of the government statement had deliberately chosen a phrase which was popularly misunderstood in order to diffuse the shock of the news by revealing its full extent only in stages. Beatrice thought the theory a little ingenious but didn’t argue the point.

When she got home that night a little after eleven she found Elewa whom she had failed to locate all day, distraught, waiting in her flat. And, just as Chris had said, she had totally misunderstood the announcement! For a brief while she toyed with the idea of leaving her in her ignorance till morning. But she immediately realized that if she did it would not be necessarily out of consideration for Elewa but more likely from the cowardly fear of having to handle such a terrible task all by herself. And that decided her. The future she saw unfolding so relentlessly before them would demand brutal courage, not squeamishness, from the likes of Elewa and herself, from now on.

And strange are the ways of deep emotion, Elewa proved the tougher of the two! One piercing cry that continued to reverberate in Beatrice’s brain like a rifle-shot in salute to a fallen comrade and Elewa sat down, still and silent. It was Beatrice herself who then gave way to emollient tears she had reserved all evening making frenetic phone calls in Chris’s secret command post.

By late afternoon of the next day it was obvious that the State Research Council had begun to look for Chris. One of the fore-sighted steps he had taken was asking Beatrice to return to her flat and to go to work as usual in the morning and not try to make physical contact until further notice. Just before close of work her secretary asked her to take a call from the Director of SRC. She picked up the phone with deliberate slowness which gave her time to compose her voice and attitude. When she spoke she was cold and indifferent but not hostile.

“Colonel Johnson Ossai speaking.”

“I see. Anything I can do for you, Colonel?”

“Well, yes… You see I have this very important message for Commissioner Oriko from His Excellency… I have tried him at the Ministry of Information several times but he is not on seat. I have tried his house but no answer. I wonder… erm… if you know his… erm… whereabouts. It is…”

“No I don’t.”

“I see. I am sorry…”

“Not at all, Colonel. Goodbye.”

Meanwhile Chris had, in addition to the foreign correspondents, made very useful contact with other opinion-makers. He was particularly encouraged by his meeting with the President of the University of Bassa Students Union. For security reasons they had met
not in his hideout but in a rendezvous in another area of the Government Reservation. But as it turned out this precaution proved quite unnecessary. The Students Union had been so incensed by the crude regicide story of the
National Gazette
that copies of the newspaper were now regularly seized by students from newsvendors on campus and publicly burnt in the middle of Freedom Square. The Union had also written a long, angry letter to the Editor demanding an apology for the insult to students and their guest lecturer.

Chris handed him a copy of the statement he had prepared and watched him as he read it. The paper soon began to tremble in his hands. When he returned it he drew the back of one hand across his eyes. He tried to speak but the words were at first blocked by a violent movement of his Adam’s apple.

“I need a copy of this,” he managed finally. “Can I copy it and return?”

“That’s your copy,” said Chris, giving it back to him, “if you need it.”

“Thank you, sir. We will run off two thousand copies tonight so that every student will have it first thing tomorrow morning. This government has now committed suicide.”

“Well, young man,” said Chris getting up and offering his hand as a signal for parting. “I hope you are right. I certainly hope so. But we must not count too much on wickedness obliging us so readily… I am glad we’ve had this chance to talk.”

“Thank you sir. You can count on us.”

“This country counts on you. Take care now.”

C
HRIS’S LAST VISITORS
for the night were the two taxi-drivers. It had taken Elewa the whole morning and half the afternoon to locate one of them and arrange for them to meet with Chris at the same rendezvous.

By the third morning the BBC which had already broadcast news of Ikem’s death carried an interview between their Bassa correspondent and Chris who was described as a key member of the Kangan government and friend of the highly admired and talented poet, Ikem Osodi, whose reported death while in police custody had plunged the Military Government of this troubled West African State into deep crisis. In a voice full of emotion but steady and without shrillness Chris had described the official account
of Ikem’s death as “patently false.” How could he be sure of that? Because Ikem was taken from his flat in handcuffs and so could not have wrenched a gun from his captors. So you are saying in effect that he was murdered? I am saying that there is no shred of doubt that Ikem Osodi was brutally murdered in cold blood by the security officers of this government.

The correspondent was deported the next day. But by that time the Students Union had taken up the story and were demanding a judicial inquiry and the immediate dismissal of Colonel Ossai and his prosecution for murder.

Two jeeploads of mobile police sent to apprehend the President and Secretary of the Union bungled the arrest; the young men gave them the slip. As if that was not dangerous enough other students began to taunt them as brainless morons. Now teasing the Kangan Mobile Police is worse than challenging a hungry Alsatian. They went berserk. But somehow, for reasons no one had been able to explain, they did not whip out their guns. Perhaps the bloody outcome of a similar invasion two years ago did after all leave its mark… Perhaps in the thousand ages of divine-like patience even this rock of mindlessness will be dented by the regular dripping of roof water! With
koboko
and truncheons they fell upon their fleeing victims chasing them into classrooms, the library, the chapel and into dormitories. In the Women’s Hostel, which some of the attackers had originally gained in the blind accident of hot pursuit they all finally congregated and settled into a fearful orgy of revenge, compounding an ancient sex-feud with today’s war of the classes.

As ambulances screamed in later to collect the wounded and move them to hospital an announcement was made on the radio closing the university indefinitely and ordering all students out of the campus by six o’clock that very evening.

T
HE
B
RITISH
H
IGH
C
OMMISSIONER
in Bassa went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to protest about the deportation of two British nationals but instead was given a preview of a letter the security services were said to have intercepted and advised to return to his chancery and await a summons to the Ministry.

The letter, a blue aerogramme, was addressed to Mr. John Kent and signed Dick. A section of it highlighted by a red line running down the margin read:

Delighted particularly to have met that poet fellow who I believe edits the government daily. Splendid chap. Quite astonishing in view of the image one had of African dictatorships to have had a chance of sitting around and hearing treason spoken so casually and the local dictator dismissed as a comic fool! And by such a prominent member of his own government. The editors of
The Times
and the
Guardian
could use a holiday in Bassa! I’m doing a short piece for the
Telegraph
.

Chris could no longer move freely from one hideout to another because of a large number of army and police roadblocks springing up all over the city. Beatrice driving past his deserted official residence on recce saw a jeep stationed in the front yard and some riot policemen standing around. She drove on to the city centre, left her car in the parking lot opposite the Roman Catholic Cathedral, walked back across the street and made a call from a public telephone.

She went to bed early that night but sleep came to her only in short, fitful spells. The third or fourth time she had woken up she thought she heard sounds coming from the direction of the spare bedroom. She got up and tiptoed there and could see at once from the doorway in the faint illumination filtering in from the security lights outside that she was sitting on the bed.

“Elewa!” she said switching on the ceiling light at the same time. “You no fit carry on like this-o.”

Beatrice had decided to look after her for a few days and had pushed her writing-desk against the wall and set up a bed for her. She had talked to her at length this evening, given her five milligrams of Valium and left her sleeping before retiring herself. And now here she was sitting on the bed her face a mirror of devastation. Her distracted look actually scared Beatrice. It was not mere grief. It was more. Something of the frightened child was showing strongly now—bewilderment, alarm, panic.

“You no fit carry on like this at all. If you no want save yourself then make you save the pickin inside your belle. You hear me? I done tell you this no be time for cry. The one wey done go done go. The only thing we fit do now is to be strong so that when the fight come we fit fight am proper. Wipe your eye. No worry. God dey.”

Elewa exploded into loud crying now. Beatrice went and sat beside her and brought her head against her breast with one hand and began to tap her shoulder rhythmically with the other. When
she had quietened her down she slowly disengaged her embrace and laid her gently on the pillow. She went to the wall and switched off the lights and returned to sit on the bed.

“Make you lie down,” said Elewa in a voice washed clear by tears. Beatrice complied and lay down on her back beside her in silence. After a while she slowly turned on her side and raised Elewa’s head and ensconced it tenderly in the crook of her arm and began to tap a steady rhythm again on her shoulder. The door of memory was unlocked and she saw herself as a child tapping the only doll she ever had, a wooden thing with undeveloped hands, a rigid, erect trunk and the stylized face of the masked maiden spirit. Elewa’s chest, richly proportioned, heaved spasmodically like a child’s in the aftermath of crying. In the end Beatrice could tell from her deep breathing that she had at last floated into sleep broken now and again by sudden violent starts of nightmare which mercifully did not wake her up. She needed the sleep, poor child. Soon she herself was dozing off.

The car lights first, sensed in the vague indeterminacy of unformed dreams, and then the harsh crunch of tyres on the pebbled driveway. She sprang to her feet. Out of the glass louvres she could see three jeeps unmistakable in the night from the sinister, narrow, closely-set eyes of headlamps. Her heart thumping she rushed to her bedroom, snatched a tough pair of jeans from her wardrobe, leapt into them, zipped up and belted. Then she searched and pulled out another pair. Elewa was standing beside her.

“Put this on quick!”

Then she pulled out two dressing gowns…

A number of heavy knocks on her door…

“Miss Okoh. This is State Security. Open up at once!”

She put on her dressing gown, helped Elewa into hers and ordered her back into the spare bedroom with hand-and-head gestures.

“Miss Okoh. This is the last warning. Open the door now. State Security.”

“I am coming.”

“Well, hurry up!”

She took the bunch of keys from the sideboard and began to unchain the iron grills. Her hands were shaking so violently she couldn’t get the key into the keyhole. Elewa snatched the bunch
from her, turned the padlock and unchained the heavy grill. Then Beatrice shocked into calmness by this action snatched back the keys and, whispering “Go inside!” to Elewa who ignored the command, turned the lock in the steel and glass crittall door. It was wrenched out of her grip and swung outwards. Then a huge soldier rushed in pushing the two women aside so powerfully to his right and left in a dry breast-stroke movement that sent Elewa, slight as a reed, down on the floor on her bottom.

“Easy, Sergeant!” This from an officer who followed less dramatically. Three others came in after the officer while the rest stayed at the door.

“Miss Okoh?”

“Yes.”

“I am sorry to disturb you at this hour. But I have instructions to search your flat. May I proceed?”

“Anything in particular you are looking for?”

“What kind nonsense question be dat.”

“OK, Sergeant. I will do the talking. So keep quiet! Well, yes, Miss Okoh, there are certain things we are looking for but it is not our practice to discuss them first. Incidentally I advise that anybody in the flat should come out right away. All the exits are guarded and anyone trying to escape will be shot. Is that clear? Now we will proceed.” He deployed his men to different locations in the flat with the silent gestures of a field commander. Thereafter he went from one sector to another supervising the operations. Beatrice followed him at a discreet distance.