“I know how you feel,” said Max rather patronizingly. “I felt like that at first. But we must face certain facts. You take a man like Nanga now on a salary of four thousand plus all the—you know. You know what his salary was as an elementary school teacher? Perhaps not more than eight pounds a month. Now do you expect a man like that to resign on a little matter of principle . . . ?”
“Assuming, that is, that he can recognize principle when he sees it,” I added somewhat pompously.
“Well, exactly. I am not saying, mark you, that our man is like Nanga. He is a true nationalist and would not hesitate to resign if he felt it was really necessary. But as he himself points out, do we commit suicide every day we feel unhappy with the state of the world?”
“It’s hardly the same thing,” I said.
“Well, I know. But having a man like him right in the Government is very essential, I can assure you. He tells me all that goes on.”
“In that sense I suppose you are right. As the saying goes it is only when you are close to a man that you can begin to smell his breath.”
“Well, exactly.”
9
I returned to Anata on 23rd December after Max and his fiancée, Eunice, had tried in vain to make me spend Christmas in Bori. The lorry dropped me at the small roadside market called Waya which had sprung up to serve the Grammar School. Something unusual seemed to be going on in Josiah’s shop-and-bar. Whatever it was had drawn crowds from the rest of the market to it. You couldn’t say definitely at first whether it was a good thing or a bad from the loud, excited talking, but it was soon clear from the kind of gesticulation I saw that something had gone wrong. I saw one old woman swing her hand in a gyre round her head and jerk it towards Josiah’s shop, a most ominous sign.
“Teacher,” said one villager who had spotted me and was coming to shake hands. I didn’t know him by name. “Are you back already? Let me carry your box. I hope your home people are well.”
We shook hands and I told him that my home people were well when I left them. Then I asked him what was going on there at the shop.
“What else could it be but Josiah,” he said, taking up my box and placing it on his head. “I have said that what the white man’s money will bring about has not shown itself yet. You know Azoge?”
“The blind beggar?”
“Yes, the blind beggar. Josiah is not touched by Azoge’s ill-fortune and he is not satisfied with all the thieving he does here in the name of trade but must now make juju with Azoge’s stick.” At this point he turned aside to greet another villager and they both shook their heads over the abomination.
“I don’t understand,” I said when we resumed our conversation.
“Josiah called Azoge to his shop and gave him rice to eat and plenty of palm-wine. Azoge thought he had met a kind man and began to eat and drink. While he was eating and drinking Josiah took away his stick—have you ever heard such abomination?—and put a new stick like the old one in its place thinking that Azoge would not notice. But if a blind man does not know his own stick, tell me what else would he know? So when Azoge prepared to go he reached for his stick and found that a strange one was in its place, and so he began to shout. . . .”
“I still don’t understand. What does Josiah want to do with his stick?”
“How are you asking such a question, teacher? To make medicine for trade, of course.”
“That is terrible,” I said, still very much in the dark but not caring to make it known.
“What money will do in this land wears a hat; I have said it.”
When we got to my house I gave him one shilling and he thanked me, gave a few more unhelpful details of the incident and went to rejoin the crowd. I would have gone there too but was tired from my long journey and in any case my mind was on other things. I meant to rest a little, have a wash and go in search of Mrs Nanga. But the noise outside was getting louder and louder and in the end I had to go out to see.
Josiah had apparently barricaded himself inside his shop, from where, no doubt, he could hear the crowds outside pronouncing deadly curses on him and his trade. The blind man, Azoge, was there still, telling his story over and over again. I walked from one little group to another, listening.
“So the beast is not satisfied with all the money he takes from us and must now make a medicine to turn us into blind buyers of his wares,” said one old woman. “May he blind his mother and his father, not me.” She circled her head with her right hand and cast the evil towards the shop.
“Some people’s belly is like the earth. It is never so full that it will not take another corpse. God forbid,” said a palm-wine tapper I knew. I believe he was one of those who supplied Josiah with the wine he retailed in beer-bottles.
But the most ominous thing I heard was from Timothy, a middle-aged man, who was a kind of Christian and a carpenter.
“Josiah has taken away enough for the owner to notice,” he said again and again. “If anyone ever sees my feet in this shop again let him cut them off. Josiah has now removed enough for the owner to see him.”
I thought much afterwards about that proverb, about the man taking things away until the owner at last notices. In the mouth of our people there was no greater condemnation. It was not just a simple question of a man’s cup being full. A man’s cup might be full and none be the wiser. But here the owner knew, and the owner, I discovered, is the will of the whole people.
Within one week Josiah was ruined; no man, woman or child went near his shop. Even strangers and mammy-wagon passengers making but a brief stop at the market were promptly warned off. Before the month was out, the shop-and-bar closed for good and Josiah disappeared—for a while.
But to return to the day I came back from Bori: I hired a bicycle in the evening from the repairer in the market and went to see Mrs Nanga. I had to see her before the story of my quarrel with her husband got to Anata and ruined my chances of reaching Edna, the intended “parlour-wife”. Not that I thought Chief Nanga himself would want to transmit it although there was no knowing what he might or might not do, but there were many others in Bori who might send it on for want of better news.
She was surprised to see me but I had a convincing explanation ready; sudden change of plans and that kind of thing. Her children came and shook hands. The village, I noticed, had already rubbed off a good deal of their Bori trimness and made their Corona-School English a little incongruous.