I will return home to her—many centuries have I wandered—
And I will make my offering at the feet of my lovely Mother:
I will rebuild her house, the holy places they raped and plundered,
And I will make it fine with black wood, bronzes and terra-cotta.
I read this last verse over and over again. Poor black mother! Waiting so long for her infant son to come of age and comfort her and repay her for the years of shame and neglect. And the son she has pinned so much hope on turning out to be a Chief Nanga.
“Poor black mother!” I said out aloud.
“Yes, poor black mother,” said Max looking out of the window. After a long interval he turned round and asked if I remembered my Bible.
“Not really. Why?”
“Well, I can’t get it out of my system. You know my father is an Anglican priest. . . . No, when you talked about poor black mother just now I remembered a passage that goes something like this:
“A voice was heard in Ramah
Weeping and great lamentation
Rachel weeping for her children
And she would not be comforted, because they are not.
“It is a favourite of my father’s who, by the way, still thinks we should never have asked the white man to go.”
“Perhaps he is right,” I said.
“Well, no. The trouble is that he hasn’t got very much out of Independence, personally. There simply weren’t any white posts in his profession that he could take over. There is only one bishop in the entire diocese and he is already an African.”
“You are unfair to the old man,” I said laughing.
“You should hear some of the things the old man says about me. I remember when I last went to see him with Eunice he said who knows I might get a son before him. Oh, we crack such expensive jokes.”
“You are an only son, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
I felt so envious.
“You know, Odili,” he began suddenly after a longish pause, “I don’t believe in Providence and all that kind of stuff but your arrival just at this very moment is most fortunate. You see, we were planning to appoint able and dynamic organizing secretaries in each of the regions very soon. Now we’ve got you we don’t have to worry our head about the south-east any more.”
“I’ll do what I can, Max,” I said.
• • •
Perhaps the most astonishing thing Max told me about the new party was that one of the junior ministers in the Government was behind it.
“What is he doing in the Government if he is so dissatisfied with it?” I asked naïvely. “Why doesn’t he resign?”
“Resign?” laughed Max. “Where do you think you are—Britain or something? Don’t be funny, Odili.”
“I am not being funny,” I said hotly, perhaps more hotly than was called for.
I knew very well and needed no reminder that we were not in Britain or something, that when a man resigned in our country it was invariably with an eye on the main chance—as when a few years ago ten newly elected
P.A.P. Members of Parliament had switched parties at the opening of the session and given the P.O.P. a comfortable majority overnight in return for ministerial appointments and—if one believed the rumours—a little cash prize each as well. All that was well known, but I would have thought it was better to start our new party clean, with a different kind of philosophy.