At that moment her father cleared his throat inside the compound. She grabbed my arm and tried to pull me up. I laughed at her puny effort and settled back. Her father had now come into the house and we could hear his footsteps.
“You see now. . . . What is all this?”
He took a little time to focus his eyes properly and decide who I was. When he had decided he took a few more steps until he stood threateningly over me.
“Who do you want here?” he asked with menacing quietness. “Were you not the one I told the other day never to come here again?”
“Yes,” I said, not even bothering to get up.
“Wait for me,” he said, and rushed back the way he had come. Lately I had seen too many people rushing around threateningly, so that I decided to sit through this one. I wasn’t even touched by Edna’s weeping. She turned and ran, calling “Mother! Mother!” But at the door she met her father who shoved her aside and came at me with a raised matchet.
I said: “Who do you want here?”
Edna increased her crying which finally brought her sick mother unsteadily to the doorway. Meanwhile I was explaining to my assailant that I came to persuade him and his family to cast their paper for me on voting day.
“Do you think the boy’s head is correct?” he asked of no one in particular, and I saw his matchet gradually descend to his side. By the time Edna’s mother appeared the worst of the danger seemed over.
“That is the boy who brought me bread, is it not?” she asked as she tottered towards me holding out a shrunken, varicose hand.
“I don’t care what he brought you,” said her husband. “What I know is that he is poking his finger into my in-law’s eyes.”
“How?” asked the woman, and her husband explained. She listened carefully, thought about it and then said:
“What is my share in that? They are both white man’s people. And they know what is what between themselves. What do we know?”
Before I left the place an hour or so later, Edna’s father had given me a sound piece of advice—at least sound in his own eyes.
“My in-law is like a bull,” he said, “and your challenge is like the challenge of a tick to a bull. The tick fills its belly with blood from the back of the bull and the bull doesn’t even know it’s there. He carries it wherever he goes—to eat, drink or pass ordure. Then one day the cattle egret comes, perches on the bull’s back and picks out the tick. . . .”
“Thank you very much for your advice,” I said.
“I hear that they have given you much money to use in fighting my in-law,” he continued. “If you have sense in your belly you will carry the money into your bed-chamber and stow it awa
y and do something useful with it. It is your own good luck. But if you prefer to throw it away why not ask me to help you?”
It was amazing how quickly all kinds of rumour about my plans had spread. It usually took a telegram five days to get to this village from Bori—that is, provided the Post and Telegraph boys were not on strike, and a storm had not felled tree branches across telegraph wires anywhere along the three-hundred-mile route. But a rumour could generally make it in one day or less.
When I rose to go, Edna, who had kept very much in the background during the last hour, rose to see me off to the car.
“Where are you going?” asked her father.
“To see him off.”
“To see whom off? Don’t let me lay hands on you this afternoon.”
“Bye, bye,” she said from the doorway.
“Bye,” I said, trying to smile.
11
As I drove away thinking of the courage and indifference to personal danger I had just shown, I felt a tingling glow of satisfaction spread all over me as palm-oil does on hot yam. Also the way Edna had looked at me when she said “bye, bye” showed plainly that my fearlessness had not been lost on her either. And at that very moment I was suddenly confronted by a fact I had been dodging for some time. I knew then that I wanted Edna now (if not all along) for her own sake first and foremost and only very remotely as part of a general scheme of revenge. I had started off telling myself that I was going for her in order to hurt Chief Nanga; now I would gladly chop off Chief Nanga’s head so as to get her. Funny, wasn’t it? Having got that far in my self-analysis I had to ask myself one question. How important was my political activity in its own right? It was difficult to say; things seemed so mixed up; my revenge, my new political ambition and the girl. And perhaps it was just as well that my motives should entangle and reinforce one another. For I was not being so naïve as to imagine that loving Edna was enough to wrench her from a minister. True, I had other advantages like youth and education but those were nothing beside wealth and position and the authority of a greedy father. No. I needed all the reinforcement I could get. Although I had little hope of winning Chief Nanga’s seat, it was necessary nonetheless to fight and expose him as much as possible so that, even if he won, the Prime Minister would find it impossible to re-appoint him to his Cabinet. In fact there was already enough filth clinging to his name to disqualify him—and most of his colleagues as well—but we are not as strict as some countries. That is why C.P.C. publicity had to ferret out every scandal and blow it up, and maybe someone would get up and say: “No, Nanga has taken more than the owner could ignore!” But it was no more than a hope.
As I drove down the very same incline on which Edna and I had so dramatically come to grief over a black sheep and its lambs only a few weeks earlier, I could not help thinking also of the quick transformations that were such a feature of our country, and in particular of the changes of attitude in my own self. I had gone to the University with the clear intention of coming out again after three years as a full member of the privileged class whose symbol was the car. So much did I think of it in fact that, as early as my second year, I had gone and taken out a driver’s licence and even made a mental note of the make of car I would buy. (It had a gadget which turned the seats into a bed in a matter of seconds.) But in my final year I had passed through what I might call a period of intellectual crisis brought on partly by my radical Irish lecturer in history and partly by someone who five years earlier had been by all accounts a fire-eating president of our Students’ Union. He was now an ice-cream-eating Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Labour and Production and had not only become one of the wealthiest and most corrupt landlords in Bori but was reported in the Press as saying that trade-union leaders should be put in detention. He became for us a classic example of the corroding effect of privilege. We burnt his effigy on the floor of the Union Building from which he had made fine speeches against the Government, and were fined by the University authorities for blacking the ceiling. Many of us vowed then never to be corrupted by bourgeois privileges of which the car was the most visible symbol in our country. And now here was I in this marvellous little affair eating the hills like yam—as Edna would have said. I hoped I was safe; for a man who avoids danger for years and then gets killed in the end has wasted his care.
As soon as I got home, my boy Peter handed me a blue envelope. The writing was beautifully rounded; without doubt a woman’s hand. It wasn’t Joy’s (Joy was a casual friend teaching in a near-by school); I hoped with a pounding heart that it was from Edna. But it couldn’t be, she would have said something about it when I saw her an hour or so ago.
“A boy brought it on a bicycle. Soon after you left in the morning,” said Peter.