Arrow of God (The African Trilogy 3)

‘I think I told you the story of the fetish priest who impressed me most favourably by speaking the truth in the land case between these people here and Umuaro.

‘Yes, I think you did.’ Clarke was nervously watching his guest in difficulty with a piece of chicken. These damned native birds!

‘Well, I have now decided to appoint him Paramount Chief for Umuaro. I’ve gone through the records of the case again and found that the man’s title is Eze Ulu. The prefix eze in Ibo means king. So the man is a kind of priest-king.’

‘That means, I suppose,’ said Clarke, ‘that the new appointment would not altogether be strange to him.’

‘Exactly. Although I must say that I have never found the Ibo man backward in acquiring new airs of authority. Take this libertine we made Chief here. He now calls himself His Highness Obi Ikedi the First of Okperi. The only title I haven’t yet heard him use is Fidei Defensor.’

Clarke opened his mouth to say that the love of title was a universal human failing but thought better of it.

‘The man was a complete nonentity until we crowned him, and now he carries on as though he had been nothing else all his life. It’s the same with Court Clerks and even messengers. They all manage to turn themselves into little tyrants over their own people. It seems to be a trait in the character of the negro.’

The steward in shining white moved out of the darkness of the kitchen balancing the rest of the boiled potatoes and cauliflower on one hand and the chicken on the other. His heavily starched uniform crackled as he walked over and stood silently on Captain Winterbottom’s right.

‘Go over to the other side, Stephen,’ said Clarke irritably. Stephen grinned and moved over.

‘No. I won’t have another,’ said Winterbottom, and turning to Clarke he added: ‘This is very good; one is not usually so lucky with the first cook he gets.’

‘Aloysius is not first rate, but I suppose… No, I won’t have any more, Stephen.’

As they ate fresh fruit salad made from pawpaw, banana and oranges Winterbottom returned to his Paramount Chiefs.

‘So as far as Umuaro is concerned I have found their Chief,’ he said with one of his rare smiles, ‘and they will live happily ever after. I am not so optimistic about Abame who are a pretty wild set anyhow.’

‘They are the people who murdered Macdonald?’ asked Clarke, half of whose mind was on the salad that had gone a little sour.

‘That’s right. Actually they’re no longer very troublesome – not to us anyhow; the punitive expedition taught them a pretty unforgettable lesson. But they are still very unco-operative. In the whole division they are the least co-operative with their Native Court. Throughout last year the court handled less than a dozen cases and not one was brought to it by the natives themselves.’

‘That’s pretty grim,’ said Clarke without being sure whether he meant it to be ironical or not. But as Winterbottom began to fill in the details of his plans for the two Native Court Areas Clarke could not help being impressed by a new aspect of the man’s character. Having been overruled in his opposition to Paramount Chiefs he was now sparing no effort to ensure the success of the policy. Clarke’s tutor in Morals at Cambridge had been fond of the phrase crystallization of civilization. This was it.

Over their after-coffee whisky and soda Captain Winterbottom’s opposition reared its head momentarily. But that only confirmed Clarke’s new opinion of him.

‘What I find so heart-rending,’ said Winterbottom, ‘is not so much the wrong policies of our Administration as our lack of consistency. Take this question of Paramount Chiefs. When Sir Hugh Macdermot first arrived as Governor he sent his Secretary for Native Affairs to investigate the whole business. The fellow came over here and spent a long time discovering the absurdities of the system which I had pointed out all along. Anyhow, from what he said in private conversation it was clear that he agreed with us that it had been an unqualified disaster. That was in 1919. I remember I had just come back from leave…’ Some strange emotion entered his voice and Clarke saw a rush of blood to his face. He mastered himself and continued: ‘More than two years and we still have heard nothing about the man’s report. On the contrary the Lieutenant-Governor now asks us to proceed with the previous policy. Where does anyone stand?’

‘It is very frustrating,’ said Clarke. ‘You know I was thinking the other day about our love of Commissions of Inquiry. That seems to me to be the real difference between us and the French. They know what they want and do it. We set up a commission to discover all the facts, as though facts meant anything. We imagine that the more facts we can obtain about our Africans the easier it will be to rule them. But facts…’

‘Facts are important,’ cut in Winterbottom, ‘and Commissions of Inquiry could be useful. The fault of our Administration is that they invariably appoint the wrong people and set aside the advice of those of us who have been here for years.’

Clarke felt impotent anger with the man for not letting him finish, and personal inadequacy for not having made the point as beautifully as he had first made it to himself.

Chapter Eleven

The first time Ezeulu left his compound after the Pumpkin Festival was to visit his friend, Akuebue. He found him sitting on the floor of his obi preparing seed-yams which he had hired labourers to plant for him next morning. He sat with a short, wooden-headed knife between two heaps of yams. The bigger heap lay to his right on the bare floor. The smaller pile was in a long basket from which he took out one yam at a time, looked at it closely, trimmed it with his knife and put it in the big heap. The refuse lay directly in front of him, between the heaps – large numbers of brown, circular yam-skins chipped off the tail of each seed-yam, and grey, premature tendrils trimmed off the heads.

The two men shook hands and Ezeulu took his rolled goatskin from under his arm, spread it on the floor and sat down. Akuebue asked him about his family and for a while continued to work on his yams.

‘They are well,’ replied Ezeulu. ‘And the people of your compound?’

‘They are quiet.’

‘Those are very large and healthy seed-yams. Do they come from your own barn or from the market?’

‘Do you not know that my portion of the Anietiti land…? Yes. They were harvested there.’

‘It is a great land,’ said Ezeulu, nodding his head a few times. ‘Such a land makes lazy people look like master farmers.’

Akuebue smiled. ‘You want to draw me out, but you won’t.’ He put down the knife and raised his voice to call his son, Obielue, who answered from the inner compound and soon came in, sweating.