A Man of the People

“Who?”

“The girl with the Minister.”

“His girl-friend.”

“I see.”

“Actually it’s more than that. He is planning to marry her according to native law and custom. Apparently his missus is too ‘bush’ for his present position so he wants a bright new ‘parlour-wife’ to play hostess at his parties.”

“Too bad. Who told you all this?”

“Somebody.”

“Too bad. Without knowing anything whatever about that girl I feel she deserves to be somebody’s first wife—not an old man’s mistress. Anyway it’s none of my business.”

“He sent her to a Women’s Training College,” said Andrew. “So he has been planning it for a few years at least. I feel sorry for her; that man has no conscience.”

I said nothing.

“Imagine such a beautiful thing wasting herself on such an

empty-headed ass. I so enjoyed wounding his pride! Did you see how wild he looked?”

“Yes,” I said, “you hit him hard.” Actually I was amused how Andrew was desperately trying to convince himself—and me—that he had gone to the reception with the avowed intention to deflate his empty-headed kontriman. He seemed to be forgetting in a hurry that he had earlier refused to support me at the staff meeting when I had objected to Mr Nwege’s stupid plans.

“Just think of such a cultureless man going abroad and calling himself Minister of Culture. Ridiculous. This is why the outside world laughs at us.”

“That is true,” I said, “but the outside world isn’t all that important, is it? In any case people like Chief Nanga don’t care two hoots about the outside world. He is concerned with the inside world, with how to retain his hold on his constituency and there he is adept, you must admit. Anyway, as he told us today, Churchill never passed his School Certificate.”

“I see the offer of free lodging is already having its effect.”

I began to laugh and Andrew joined in. You could tell at a glance that he knew me in a way that Mr Nwege didn’t. It was one thing to tease me for accepting the Minister’s offer of accommodation, but I just didn’t want anybody to think that Odili Samalu was capable of stooping to obtain a scholarship in any underhand way. In the words of my boy, Peter, it was “next to impossibility”.

Andrew knew of course that I had long been planning to go to the capital and he knew about Elsie.

Well, Elsie! Where does one begin to write about her? The difficulty in writing this kind of story is that the writer is armed with all kinds of hindsight which he didn’t have when the original events were happening. When he introduces a character like Elsie for instance, he already has at the back of his mind a total picture of her; her entrance, her act and her exit. And this tends to colour even the first words he writes. I can only hope that being aware of this danger I have successfully kept it at bay. As far as is humanly possible I shall try not to jump ahead of my story.

Elsie was, and for that matter still is, the only girl I met and slept with the same day—in fact within an hour. I know that faster records do exist and am not entering this one for that purpose, nor am I trying to prejudice anyone against Elsie. I only put it down because that was the way it happened. It was during my last term at the University and, having as usual put off my revision to the last moment, I was having a rough time. But one evening there was a party organized by the Students’ Christian Movement and I decided in spite of my arrears of work to attend and give my brain time to cool off. I am not usually lucky, but that evening I was. I saw Elsie standing in a group with other student nurses and made straight for her. She turned out to be a most vivacious girl newly come to the nursing School. We danced twice, then I suggested we take a walk away from the noisy highlife band and she readily agreed. If I had been left to my own devices nothing might have happened that day. But, no doubt without meaning to, Elsie took a hand in the matter. She said she was thirsty and I took her to my rooms for a drink of water.

She was one of those girls who send out loud cries in the heat of the thing. It happened again each time. But that first day it was rather funny because she kept calling: “Ralph darling.” I remember wondering why Ralph. It was not until weeks later that I got to know that she was engaged to some daft fellow called Ralph, a medical student in Edinburgh. The funny part of it was that my next-door neighbour—an English Honours student and easily the most ruthless and unprincipled womanizer in the entire university campus—changed to calling me Ralph from that day. He was known to most students by his nickname, Irre, which was short for Irresponsible. His most celebrated conquest was a female undergraduate who had seemed so inaccessible that boys called her Unbreakable. Irre became interested in her and promised his friends to break her one day soon. Then one afternoon we saw her enter his rooms. Our hall began to buzz with excitement as word went round, and we stood in little groups all along the corridor, waiting. Half an hour or so later Irre came out glistening with sweat, closed the door quietly behind him and then held up a condom bloated with his disgusting seed. That was Irre for you—a real monster. I suppose I was somehow flattered by the notice a man of such prowess had taken of Elsie’s cry. When I confided to him later that Ralph was the name of the girl’s proper boy-friend he promptly changed to calling me Assistant Ralph or, if Elsie was around, simply A.R.

Despite this rather precipitous beginning Elsie and I became very good and steady friends. I can’t pretend that I ever thought of marriage, but I must admit I did begin to feel a little jealous any time I found her reading and rereading a blue British air-letter with the red Queen and Houses of Parliament stamped on its back. Elsie was such a beautiful, happy girl and she made no demands whatever.

When I left the University she was heart-broken and so was I for that matter. We exchanged letters every week or two weeks at the most. I remember during the postal strike of 1963 when I didn’t hear from her for over a month I nearly kicked the bucket, as my boy, Peter, would have said.

Now she was working in a hospital about twelve miles outside Bori and so we arranged that I should spend my next holidays in the capital and take the bus to her hospital every so often while she would be able to spend her days off in the city. That was why the Minister’s offer couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. I had of course one or two bachelor friends in the capital who would have had no difficulty in putting me up. But they weren’t likely to provide a guest-room with all amenities.

For days after the Minister’s visit I was still trying to puzzle out why he had seemed so offended by his old nickname—“M.A. Minus Opportunity”. I don’t know why I should have been so preoccupied with such unimportant trash. But it often happens to me like that: I get hold of some pretty inane thought or a cheap tune I would ordinarily be ashamed to be caught whistling, like that radio jingle advertising an intestinal worm expeller, and I get stuck with it.

When I first knew Mr Nanga in 1948 he had seemed quite happy with his nickname. I suspect he had in fact invented it himself. Certainly he enjoyed it. His name being M. A. Nanga, his fellow teachers called him simply and fondly “M.A.”; he answered “Minus Opportunity”, which he didn’t have to do unless he liked it. Why then the present angry reaction? I finally decided that it stemmed from the same general anti-intellectual feeling in the country. In 1948 Mr Nanga could admit, albeit lightheartedly, to a certain secret yearning for higher education; in 1964 he was valiantly proving that a man like him was better without it. Of course he had not altogether persuaded himself, or else he would not have shown such excitement over the LL.D. arranged for him from some small, back-street college.

3

Before making the long journey to the capital, I thought I should first pay a short visit to my home village, Urua, about fifteen miles from Anata. I wanted to see my father about one or two matters but more especially I wanted to take my boy, Peter, to his parents for the holidays as I had promised to do before they let me have him.

Peter was naturally very excited about going home after nearly twelve months, during which he had become a wage-earner. At first I found it amusing when he went over to Josiah’s shop across the road and bought a rayon head-tie for his mother and a head of tobacco for his father. But as I thought more about it I realized how those touching gestures by a mere boy, whom I paid twenty shillings a month, showed up my own quite different circumstances. And I felt envious. I had no mother to buy head-ties for, and although I had a father, giving things to him was like pouring a little water into a dried-up well.

My mother had been his second wife, but she had died in her first childbirth. This meant in the minds of my people that I was an unlucky child, if not a downright wicked and evil one. Not that my father ever said so openly. To begin with he had too many other wives and children to take any special notice of me. But I was always a very sensitive child and knew from quite early