Anthills of the Savannah

Throughout my life I have never sought attention; not even as a child. I can see, looking back at my earliest memories, a little girl completely wrapped up in her own little world—a world contained, like Russian dolls, inside the close-fitting world of our mission-house, itself enclosed snugly within the world of the Anglican Church compound. It was a remarkable place. Apart from the church building itself there were the two school buildings, the parsonage, the catechist’s house, the long-house in which the school teachers had, according to their rank, a shared room, a full room or even two rooms. Male teachers, that is. The female teachers lived in the smallest building of all, a three-room thatched house set, for protection I suppose, between the pastor and the catechist. In the farthest corner of the compound was the churchyard, a little overgrown, where one of my sisters, Emily, lay buried.

World inside a world inside a world, without end. Uwa-t’uwa in our language. As a child how I thrilled to that strange sound with its capacity for infinite replication till it becomes the moan of the rain in the ear as it opened and closed, opened and closed. Uwa t’uwa t’uwa t’uwa; Uwa t’uwa.

Uwa-t’uwa was a building-block of my many solitary games. I could make and mould all kinds of thoughts with it. I could even rock it from side to side like my wooden baby with the chipped ear.

My friendship with the strange words began no doubt quite early when I first recognized it and welcomed it at the end of my father’s family

prayers to begin or end the day—prayers so long that I would float in and out of sleep and sometimes keel over and fall on my side. Uwa-t’uwa was always the end of the ordeal and we all, would shout: Amen! Good-morning, sah! good morning mah! or good night for evening prayers.

One evening, some devil seized hold of me as the words uwa t’uwa were pronounced and jolted me into wakefulness. Without any premeditation whatsoever I promptly raised a childish hymn of thanksgiving: uwa-t’uwa! uwa-t’uwa! uwa-t’uwa! uwa-t’uwa! t’uwa t’uwa! uwa t’uwa!

My sisters’ giggles fuelled my reckless chant.

My father sprang to his feet with Amen barely out of his mouth, reached for the cane he always had handy and gave us all a good thrashing. As we cried ourselves to sleep on our separate mats that night my sisters saw fit to promise through their snivelling to deal with me in the morning.

He was a very stern man, my father—as distant from us children as from our poor mother. As I grew older I got to know that his whip was famous not only in our house and in the schoolhouse next door but throughout the diocese. One day the local chief paid him a visit and as they say in the long outer room we called the piazza eating kolanut with alligator pepper and I was hanging around as I was fond of doing when there was company, the chief was full of praise for my father for the good training he was giving the children of the village through his whip. My father, with a wistful look I had never seen on his face before, was telling the chief of a certain headmaster in 1940 who was praised by some white inspectors who came from England to look at schools in their colonies and found his school the most quiet in West Africa. “Das right!” said the chief in English.

I remember the incident well because we were doing the map of West Africa in our geography class at the time. So I left my father and his friend and went to my raffia schoolbag and pulled out my West African Atlas and was greatly impressed by the size of the territory over which the 1940 headmaster was champion.

There were times I suspected that he may have flogged our poor mother, though I must say in recognition of the awesomeness of the very thought that I never actually saw it happen. None of my sisters had seen it either, or if they had they preferred not to tell me, for they never took me much into confidence. Looking back on it I am sometimes amazed at the near-conspiracy in which they circled me most of the time. I had this strong suspicion nevertheless, which I could neither confirm nor deny because on those occasions my father always took the precaution to lock the door of their room. She would come out afterwards (having unlocked the door, or perhaps he did) wiping her eyes with one corner of her wrapper, too proud or too adult to cry aloud like us. It didn’t happen too often, though. But it always made me want to become a sorceress that could say “Die!” to my father and he would die as in the folk-tale. And then, when he had learnt his lesson, I would bring him back to life and he would never touch his whip again.

And then one day as my mother came out wiping her eyes I rushed to her and hugged her legs but instead of pressing me to herself as I had expected she pushed me away so violently that I hit my head against the wooden mortar. After that I didn’t feel any more like telling my father to die. I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight at the time but I know I had this strong feeling then—extraordinary, powerful and adult—that my father and my mother had their own world, my three sisters had theirs and I was alone in mine. And it didn’t bother me at all then, my aloneness, nor has it done so since.

I didn’t realize until much later that my mother bore me a huge grudge because I was a girl—her fifth in a row though one had died—and that when I was born she had so desperately prayed for a boy to give my father. This knowledge came to me by slow stages which I won’t go into now. But I must mention that in addition to Beatrice they had given me another name at my baptism, Nwanyibuife—A female is also something. Can you beat that? Even as a child I disliked the name most intensely without being aware of its real meaning. It merely struck me at that point that I knew of nobody else with the name; it seemed fudged! Somehow I disliked it considerably less in its abridged form, Buife. Perhaps it was the nwanyi, the female half of it that I particularly resented. My father was so insistent on it. “Sit like a female!” or “Female soldier” which he called me as he lifted me off the ground with his left hand and gave me three stinging smacks on the bottom with his right the day I fell off the cashew tree.

But I didn’t set out to write my autobiography and I don’t want to do so. Who am I that I should inflict my story on the world? All I’m trying to say really is that as far as I can remember I have always been on my own and never asked to be noticed by anybody. Never! And I don’t recall embarking ever on anything that would require me to call on others. Which meant that I never embarked on anything beyond my own puny powers. Which meant finally that I couldn’t be ambitious.

I am very, very sensitive about this—I don’t mind admitting it.

That I got involved in the lives of the high and mighty was purely accidental and was not due to any scheming on my part. In the first place, they all became high and mighty after I met them; not before.

Chris was not a Commissioner when I met him but a mere editor of the National Gazette. That was way back in civilian days. And if I say that Chris did all the chasing I am not boasting or anything. That was simply how it was. And I wasn’t being coy either. It was a matter of experience having taught me in my little lonely world that I had to be wary. Some people even say I am suspicious by nature. Perhaps I am. Being a girl of maybe somewhat above average looks, a good education, a good job you learn quickly enough that you can’t open up to every sweet tongue that comes singing at your doorstep. Nothing very original really. Every girl knows that from her mother’s breast although thereafter some may choose to be dazzled into forgetfulness for one reason or another. Or else they panic and get stampeded by the thought that time is passing them by. That’s when you hear all kinds of nonsense talk from girls: Better to marry a rascal than grow a moustache in your father’s compound; better an unhappy marriage than an unhappy spinsterhood; better marry Mr. Wrong in this world than wait for Mr. Right in heaven; all marriage is how-for-do; all men are the same; and a whole baggage of other foolishnesses like that.

I was determined from the very beginning to put my career first and, if need be, last. That every woman wants a man to complete her is a piece of male chauvinist bullshit I had completely rejected before I knew there was anything like Women’s Lib. You often hear our people say: But that’s something you picked up in England. Absolute rubbish! There was enough male chauvinism in my father’s house to last me seven reincarnations!

So when Chris came along I was not about to fly into his arms for the asking, although I decidedly liked him. And strangely enough he himself gave me a very good reason for caution. He was so handsome and so considerate, so unlike all the brash fellows the place was crawling with in the heady prosperity of the oil boom that I decided he simply had to be phony!

Unreasonable? Perhaps yes. But I can’t be blamed for the state of the world. Haven’t our people said that a totally reasonable wife is always pregnant? Scepticism is a girl’s number six. You can’t blame her; she didn’t make her world so tough.

One of my girlfriends—a more sensible and attractive person you never saw—except that she committed the crime to be twentysix and still unmarried; she was taken by her fiancé to meet his people in some backwater village of his when an aunt or something of his made a proverb fully and deliberately to her hearing that if ogili was such a valuable condiment no one would leave it lying around for rats to stumble upon and dig into! Well, you can trust Comfort! The insult didn’t bother her half as much as her young man’s silence. So she too kept silent until they got back to the city and inside her flat. Then she told him she had always suspected he was something of a rat. I can hear Comfort saying that and throwing him out of the flat! Now she is happily married to a northerner and has two kids.

My experience with Chris was, of course, entirely different. He seemed to understand everything about me without asking a single question. In those first days he would very often startle me with insights about little things like colours or food or behaviour I liked or didn’t like and I would ask: But how did you know? And he would smile and say: I am a journalist, remember; it’s my business to find out. Just the way he said it would melt any woman.

Emotionally then I had no reservations whatsoever about Chris from the word go. But intellectually I had to call into full play my sense of danger. In a way I felt like two people living inside one skin, not two hostile tenants but two rather friendly people, two people different enough to be interesting to each other without being incompatible.

I recall clearly that the very first time we met the thought that flashed through my mind was to be envious of his wife. And yet it was weeks before I could bring myself to probe delicately about her, not directly through Chris but surreptitiously via a third party, Ikem. But such was the carefully balanced contrariness induced in me by Chris that the news of his wife’s nonexistence, though it admittedly gave me a measure of relief, did not bring total satisfaction. There was a small residue of disappointment at the bottom of the cool draught, so to say. Was it the disappointment of the gambler or the born fighter cheated out of the intoxication of contest and chancy victory? Or did the affair lose some of its attraction for me because deep inside I was not unlike the dreadful, cynical aunt in the village who believed that nothing so good could wait this long for me to stumble upon? What an awful thought!

Even when I found myself begin to pick and choose what dress or what make-up to wear whenever I thought I migh

t run into him I simply dismissed it as a little harmless excitement I was entided to indulge in as long as I remembered to keep a sharp look-out.

It was in a supermarket one Saturday morning, I think, that Ikem gave me an opening to ask about Chris’s wife. I don’t remember the exact details now but I think it was a vague invitation to go with him, his girlfriend and Chris to some friend of their’s birthday party. I said no for one reason or the other but also managed to ask as offhandedly as I could where Chris’s wife was anyway; or was he one of those who will pack their wife conveniently away to her mother and the village midwife as soon as she misses her period?

“BB!” he screamed in mock outrage, his large eyes beaming with wicked pleasure. “Looking at your demure lips…”

“I know, I know. You couldn’t tell, could you? Like looking at a king’s mouth you couldn’t tell, could you?”

“Or looking at a lady’s gait, you couldn’t tell, could you?”