Girls at War

“My Madame.”

“And what did you say you did? You must tell me.”

“I gave the baby red ink.”

“All right, then let’s go.”

Vero began to wail louder. Martha seized her by the wrist again and they set off. She neither changed her work clothes nor even washed her face and hands. Every woman—and sometimes the men too—they passed on the way screamed on seeing Vero’s whipmarks and wanted to know who did it. Martha’s reply to all was “I don’t know yet. I am going to find out.”

She was lucky. Mr. Emenike’s big car was there, so they had not returned to the capital. She knocked at their front door and walked in. Mrs. Emenike was sitting there in the parlour giving bottled food to the baby but she ignored the visitors completely neither saying a word to them nor even looking in their direction. It was her husband who descended the stairs a little later who told the story. As soon as the meaning dawned on Martha—that the red ink was given to the baby to drink and that the motive was to encompass its death—she screamed, with two fingers plugging her ears, that she wanted to hear no more. At the same time she rushed outside, tore a twig off a flowering shrub and by clamping her thumb and forefinger at one end and running them firmly along its full length stripped it of its leaves in one quick movement. Armed with the whip she rushed back to the house crying “I have heard an abomination!” Vero was now screaming and running around the room.

“Don’t touch her here in my house,” said Mrs. Emenike, cold and stern as an oracle, noticing her visitors for the first time. “Take her away from here at once. You want to show me your shock. Well I don’t want to see. Go and show your anger in your own house. Your daughter did not learn murder here in my house.”

This stung Martha deep in her spirit and froze her in mid-stride. She stood rooted to the spot, her whiphand lifeless by her side. “My Daughter,” she said finally addressing the younger woman, “as you see me here I am poor and wretched but I am not a murderer. If my daughter Vero is to become a murderer God knows she cannot say she learnt from me.”

“Perhaps it’s from me she learnt,” said Mrs. Emenike showing her faultless teeth in a terrible false smile, “or maybe she snatched it from the air. That’s right, she snatched it from the air. Look, woman, take your daughter and leave my house.”

“Vero, let’s go; come, let’s go!”

“Yes, please go!”

Mr. Emenike who had been trying vainly to find an opening for the clearly needed male intervention now spoke.

“It is the work of the devil,” he said. “I have always known that the craze for education in this country will one day ruin all of us. Now even children will commit murder in order to go to school.”

This clumsy effort to mollify all sides at once stung Martha even more. As she j

erked Vero homewards by the hand she clutched her unused whip in her other hand. At first she rained abuses on the girl, calling her an evil child that entered her mother’s womb by the back of the house.

“Oh God, what have I done?” Her tears began to flow now. “If I had had a child with other women of my age, that girl that calls me murderer might have been no older than my daughter. And now she spits in my face. That’s what you brought me to,” she said to the crown of Vero’s head, and jerked her along more violently.

“I will kill you today. Let’s get home first.”

Then a strange revolt, vague, undirected began to well up at first slowly inside her. “And that thing that calls himself a man talks to me about the craze for education. All his children go to school, even the one that is only two years; but that is no craze. Rich people have no craze. It is only when the children of poor widows like me want to go with the rest that it becomes a craze. What is this life? To God, what is it? And now my child thinks she must kill the baby she is hired to tend before she can get a chance. Who put such an abomination into her belly? God, you know I did not.”

She threw away the whip and with her freed hand wiped her tears.

Dead Men’s Path

Michael Obi’s hopes were fulfilled much earlier than he had expected. He was appointed headmaster of Ndume Central School in January 1949. It had always been an unprogressive school, so the Mission authorities decided to send a young and energetic man to run it. Obi accepted this responsibility with enthusiasm. He had many wonderful ideas and this was an opportunity to put them into practice. He had had sound secondary school education which designated him a “pivotal teacher” in the official records and set him apart from the other headmasters in the mission field. He was outspoken in his condemnation of the narrow views of these older and often less-educated ones.

“We shall make a good job of it, shan’t we?” he asked his young wife when they first heard the joyful news of his promotion.

“We shall do our best,” she replied. “We shall have such beautiful gardens and everything will be just modern and delightful …” In their two years of married life she had become completely infected by his passion for “modern methods” and his denigration of “these old and superannuated people in the teaching field who would be better employed as traders in the Onitsha market.” She began to see herself already as the admired wife of the young headmaster, the queen of the school.

The wives of the other teachers would envy her position. She would set the fashion in everything … Then, suddenly, it occurred to her that there might not be other wives. Wavering between hope and fear, she asked her husband, looking anxiously at him.

“All our colleagues are young and unmarried,” he said with enthusiasm which for once she did not share. “Which is a good thing,” he continued.

“Why?”

“Why? They will give all their time and energy to the school.”

Nancy was downcast. For a few minutes she became sceptical about the new school; but it was only for a few minutes. Her little personal misfortune could not blind her to her husband’s happy prospects. She looked at him as he sat folded up in a chair. He was stoop-shouldered and looked frail. But he sometimes surprised people with sudden bursts of physical energy. In his present posture, however, all his bodily strength seemed to have retired behind his deep-set eyes, giving them an extraordinary power of penetration. He was only twenty-six, but looked thirty or more. On the whole, he was not unhandsome.

“A penny for your thoughts, Mike,” said Nancy after a while, imitating the woman’s magazine she read.

“I was thinking what a grand opportunity we’ve got at last to show these people how a school should be run.”