Anthills of the Savannah

“That’s an idea.”

The houseboy didn’t know where she lived nor where she worked.

“Let’s see, I believe she told me she was a sales-girl in an Indian or was it Lebanese shop. Textiles I think. But which particular shop… I suppose we could try all the ones in the Yellow Pages… But Elewa who? We don’t know that either, do we? Oh well I am sure she will hear one way or another and come back here.”

They left the flat so that Beatrice could go to work. Chris advised her not to make enquiries on the matter from her office but to leave everything to him.

He spent the entire morning on the telephone. The mental immobility which the devastation in Ikem’s flat had induced in him had now lifted completely. His mind got clearer on what he had to do as he went along doing it. Major Ossai was not available to speak to him and nobody else in the Directorate could help with the information he required.

The President’s Principal Secretary would not put him through but promised to call him back as soon as the President was free to talk to him. What was the subject of his discussion? Oh, but that is not a matter for the President. You want to speak to the Director of SRC.

Then he called the Attorney-General who said he didn’t know about it.

“But aren’t you supposed to know?”

“Well, yes and no. If it is purely a matter of state security it could be tricky… I will know ultimately of course, you know…”

Professor Okong hadn’t heard; and the Chief Secretary to the Government had just this minute been told by the Attorney-General.

Oh, well! No point continuing to search for the living among the dead! So he changed tack. It was clear that Major Samsonite Ossai and his boss were adopting a quiet line. Therefore he must embark on a massive publicizing of the abduction. He knew he could count on some of the representatives in Bassa of foreign news agencies, their press and radio. On the home front there was no comparable resource to lean on but there was the enormous potential of that great network nicknamed VOR, the Voice of Rumour, the despair of tyrants and shady dealers in high places. Before evening both systems, foreign and local seemed set to start buzzing in the interest of the abducted man.

Then at six o’clock yet another Special Announcement from the Directorate of State Research Council was on the air:

In the discharge of its duty in safeguarding the freedom and security of the State and of every law-abiding citizen of Kangan the State Research Council has uncovered a plot by unpatriotic elements in Kangan working in concert with certain foreign adventurers to destabilize the lawful government of this country.

This dastardly plot was master-minded by Mr. Ikem Osodi until recently Editor of the government-owned National Gazette.

Investigations by top security officers of SRC have revealed Mr. Osodi’s involvement in three separate aspects of the plot:

(1) He was the key link between the plotters in Kangan and their foreign collaborators.

(2) He was the lynchpin between the plotters in Bassa and a group of disgruntled and unpatriotic chiefs in the Province of Abazon.

(3) Under the guise of a public lecture at the University of Bassa on 26 September, Mr. Osodi furthered the aim of the plotters by inciting the students of the University to disaffection and rebellion against the government and the life of His Excellency the President and the peace and security of the State.

In the early hours of this morning a team of security officers effected the arrest of Mr. Osodi in his official flat at 202 Kingsway Road in the Government Reservation Area and were taking him in a military vehicle for questioning at the SRC Headquarters when he seized a gun from one of his escorts. In the scuffle that ensued between Mr. Osodi and his guards in the moving vehicle Mr. Osodi was fatally wounded by gunshot.

His Excellency has already appointed a high-level inquiry into the accident to be headed by the Chief of Staff, Major-General Ahmed Lango, with the directive to commence investigations immediately and to report within fourteen days.

Meanwhile investigations are proceeding with a view to uncover all aspects of the plot and to bring to book any other person or persons, no matter how highly placed, involved in this treasonable conspiracy to divert our great and beloved country from its chosen path of orderly progress into renewed bloodshed and anarchy. Long live His Excellency the President! Long live the Republic of Kangan.

Signed Colonel Johnson Ossai,

Director of the State Research Council.

That is the end of this Special Announcement. There will be a repeat of the announcement at seven o’clock.

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.