Anthills of the Savannah

“NTBB.”

“NT what?”

“BB. You’ve just been told, BB. That’s what my friends at the radio station write in bold yellow letters across the face of records too dirty to play on the air.”

“It means Not To Be Broadcast,” explains Ikem again. “Chris might have added though that it doesn’t now apply to dirty records alone. Anything inconvenient to those in government is NTBB.”

“Quite right. I should have added that. My primary duty as Commissioner, you see, is to decide what is inconvenient and inform Ikem who promptly rejects the information… But going back to the more interesting subject, I confess I broke the code later and divulged the secret to BB.”

“To me?” asked Beatrice, wide-eyed. “My own Beatrice?”

“Yes, I told you, didn’t I, of the girl with the… how shall I call it… the invigorating tongue.”

“Oh! It’s the same girl? Oh my God!” We both burst into a laugh which left everyone in the cold as it were.

“You two seem to know something that even the procurer here doesn’t appear to have heard,” said MM, “but never mind.”

The poetry editor has been trying for some time to recapture his lost little audience disrupted by Elewa’s defection at the prospects of low talk. He makes one last bold bid and takes the entire company. The expression on his face has been quite funny for some time too. Actually he has an extremely expressive face if by expressive one means a constant procession of shadowy grimaces all of them indeterminate. You cannot look at him and say: now he is sad, or he is enjoying himself now. You always have to wait and figure it out and still you are not entirely sure. And then all of a sudden you are angry with yourself for letting your mind engage with so much trouble on something so inconsequential. He is that kind of infuriating person. His expression now is a puritanic scowl without the moral gravity of a puritan.

“We were so successful,” he is saying, as though unaware that his story was ever interrupted, “that it became difficult to be sure that all the stuff that came in was bona fide Reject. We did insist on the rejection slip accompanying every manuscript but anybody can make up a rejection slip. You know what I mean. Most magazines are pretty sloppy about their slips… Like some girls, you know. Present company of course excepted… They don’t print them at the Royal Mint… So there was really no way we could be absolutely certain that what we were getting was always genuine Reject. But as I was telling you…” It seems that having got everyone again to listen to him his one desire now is to show his indifference to the rest of us by pretending to talk still to Ikem alone. Some people have nerve. “… our biggest problem was our success. We were soon printing no more than a fraction, a tiny fraction, of the manuscripts that came in. F

or a while I even toyed with the idea of a companion magazine to be called Reject Two or Double Reject which, I can tell you, would have been just as successful as Reject. But in the end I had to decide against it. Spreading yourself too thin, you know.”

“Fascinating,” says Ikem. “When Chris fires me here perhaps I could hop across and run Double Reject for you. I’m totally taken with the idea.”

“You’re the editor of the local…”

“Rag called the National Gazette,” says Mad Medico. “Ikem is a fine journalist… But shit! Who am I to be awarding him marks? Anyway, his brilliant editorials did as much as anything else to save me from the just consequences of my indiscretion. But what I want to say really is that he is an even finer poet, in my opinion one of the finest in the entire English language.”

“Yes, John told me what a fine poet you are. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t yet read anything of yours but I certainly will now.”

“Take your time,” says Ikem. “And remember MM is not a disinterested witness. I did him a good turn.”

“And I didn’t tell you either,” said MM, “that girl there sitting meekly and called Beatrice took a walloping honours degree in English from London University. She is better at it than either of us, I can assure you.”

“That doesn’t surprise me in the least. I understand that the best English these days is written either by Africans or Indians. And that the Japanese and the Chinese may not be too far behind,” said Dick with somewhat dubious enthusiasm.

PERHAPS MM had a point when he said Beatrice waited too long to meet me. Sometimes I wonder myself whether our relationship is not too sedate, whether we are not too much like a couple of tired swimmers resting at the railing. An early scene returns to my memory, a scene from two years ago and more, stored away in incredible detail and freshness yet, as I think of it, suffused also with ethereality.

I offered to take Beatrice to the Restaurant Cathay and she said no. Chez Antoine? Still no. They were her two favourite places—not too large, no glaring lights and good food. What would she like to do then?

“Can I come home with you?”

“But of course,” was all I could find to say right away. I was still not sure that I had heard right. She divined the puzzlement in my mind and offered something like an explanation. “We’ve both had a long day. All I want to do now is sit still somewhere and listen to records.”

“Wonderful!” Of course she had been to my place quite a few times before but the initiative had never come from her. It was not coyness but she had a style and above all a pace that I decided from the very beginning to respect. After the few whirlwind affairs I had had in my time including a full-fledged marriage in London for six months I was actually ready and grateful for BB’s conservative style. Sometimes when I thought of her what came most readily to my mind was not roses or music but a good and tastefully produced book, easy on the eye. No pretentious distractions. Absolutely sound. Although I realized the folly of it I could not help comparing BB and my ex-wife. Louise was so bent on proving she had a mind of her own she proved instead totally frigid in bed despite weekly visits to the psychiatrist. There was another type—at the opposite pole—the aspirant sex symbol, flaunting her flesh before you. I’d met her too. Her style usually worked for a while and then out of nowhere a coldness descended into your soul and you wanted only to tell her to cut out the moans and all that ardent crap and get to it fast. Beatrice is a perfect embodiment of my ideal woman, beautiful without being glamorous. Peaceful but very strong. Very, very strong. I love her and will go at whatever pace she dictates. But sometimes I just wonder if I am not reading her signs wrong; if as MM says, without fully intending it, I have become too wizened by experience; if I have lost the touch, so to say.

Neither of us was really hungry. So we decided on a bottle of wine and some fried shrimps. My cook, Sylvanus, was always upset if a guest came and he was not allowed to display the full extent of his culinary arts. Even as we ate his exquisite shrimps he kept at us.

“Make I fix madame small sometin,” he pleaded. We begged him not to worry and he went away but soon returned to hover around the door of the kitchen. He could not understand how two grown people could eat nothing but “crayfish” for dinner.

“Or sometaim you wan go for hotel?” he said. And when Sylvanus said that you had to swear that his cooking was better than that of any chef, French, Italian or whatever on the west coast of Africa.

“No Sylvanus,” said Beatrice trying to mollify him, “we no de go anywhere. We jus wan sidon for house. Make you take evening off. If at all oga wan anything I fit getam for am.” I knew at once and she soon realized she had committed a blunder. Sylvanus did not exactly storm out but his resentment was very clear on his face and in the tone of his goodnights.

“Do you know why I wanted us to come here and stay by ourselves?”

“Well, yes and no.”