“The Honourable Commissioner for Words,” the Attorney-General manages through his laughter. “That’s a good one. By God that’s a good one.” He is dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief still neatly folded.
“Opposed! It sounds too much like me,” protested the Commissioner for Works.
“That’s true,” says the Attorney-General, pausing in his laughter to reflect. “Commissioner for Words and Commissioner for Works. There’s a point there.”
“Theologically speaking there is a fundamental distinction.” This is Professor Okong in his deep pulpit voice.
“Ah, Professor done come-o,” says the Commissioner for Education. We were all so merry. If the meeting ended now we would go home happy—the homely ones among us entitled to answer their wives with a smile should they ask what kind of day they’d had. But His Excellency wasn’t done with us yet, alas!
“What were you going to say for the Commissioner of Information, anyway?”
“Your Excellency, it is—erm—about this visit to Abazon.”
“In that case the meeting stands adjourned.” He gets up abruptly. So abruptly that the noise we make scrambling to our feet would have befitted a knee-sore congregation rising rowdily from the prayers of a garrulous priest.
His Excellency sits down again and leans back calmly on his swivel chair in order to search under the table for the court shoes he always kicks off at the beginning of our meetings and which the Chief Secretary as always and quite unobtrusively arranges side by side with movements of his own feet to save His Excellency the trouble of prolonged searching at the end of the meeting. If His Excellency is aware of this little service he never acknowledges it, but takes it for granted like the attention of the invisible bell-boy who shines your shoes overnight in an expensive hotel. With consummate deliberation he looks down to the floor and slips in his right foot. He looks on the other side and slips in his left. And then discarding altogether the sprightliness of his first rising he now heaves himself slowly up by the leverage of his hands on the heavy arms of his chair. And the amazing thing is that this lumbering slowness and the former alacrity seem equally to become him.
We all stand stock-still. The only noise in the room comes from his own movements and the continuous whirring of the air-conditioners which have risen to attention in the silence of a deferential Cabinet waiting with bated breath on the Chief to become shod again and, in his good time, withdraw into the seclusion of his adjoining private enclosure.
Sometimes he would say Good afternoon, gentlemen on taking leave of us. Today, naturally, he said nothing. As he left his seat an orderly gathered up his papers quickly and followed him out. Another orderly, more stern-faced, opened the heavy doors of carved panels, stood aside and gave a long, hand-quivering salute.
“He is not in a good mood today,” says the Chief Secretary, breaking the freeze. “We’ll bring it up again next Thursday, Chris. Don’t worry.”
His Excellency is probably meant to overhear this and I believe he does. I could see a smile or the radiance of a smile from the back of his head like the faint memory of light at the edges of an eclipse.
In
the final stages of His Excellency’s retiring, the silence in the Council Chamber seemed to be undergoing a subtle change. Something indeterminate had entered it and was building up slowly within its ambience. At first I thought the air-conditioners had become just fractionally louder which would be perfectly consistent with the generating vagaries of the National Electric Power Authority. Then the Chief Secretary’s observation and the flurry of conversation it started about His Excellency’s changing moods kept us from noticing the sound for a while. The Attorney-General came over to my seat and clapped me on the shoulder.
“What’s the matter with you, Chris? Why are you so tense these days? Relax, man, relax; the world isn’t coming to an end, you know.”
I was angrily but silently rebuffing his peace overtures when, as though on a signal, everyone in the room stopped talking. Then we all turned to the east window.
“A storm?” someone asks.
The low hibiscus hedge outside the window and its many brilliant red bells stood still and unruffled. Beyond the hedge the courtyard with its concrete slabs and neatly manicured bahama grass at the interstices showed no flying leaves or dust. Beyond the courtyard another stretch of the green and red hedge stood guard against the one-story east wing of the Presidential Palace. Over and beyond the roof the tops of palm-trees at the waterfront swayed with the same lazy ease they display to gentle ocean winds. It was no ordinary storm.
The Chief Secretary whose presence of mind is only inhibited by the presence of His Excellency moves over to the sill, unhooks a latch and pushes back a glass window. And the world surges into the alien climate of the Council Chamber on a violent wave of heat and the sounds of a chanting multitude. And His Excellency rushes back into the room at the same time leaving the huge doors swinging.
“What is going on?” he demands, frantically.
“I shall go and see, Your Excellency,” says the Inspector-General of Police, picking up his peaked cap from the table, putting it on his head and then his baton under his arm and saluting at attention.
“Look at him! Just look at him,” sneers His Excellency. “Gentlemen, this is my Chief of Police. He stands here gossiping while hoodlums storm the Presidential Palace. And he has no clue what is going on. Sit down! Inspector-General of Police!”
He turns to me. “Do you know anything about this?”
“I am sorry I don’t, Your Excellency.”
“Beautiful. Just beautiful. Now can anyone here tell me anything about that crowd screaming out there?” He looks at each of us in turn. No one stirs or opens his mouth. “That’s what I mean when I say that I have no Executive Council. Can you see what I mean now, all of you? Take your seats, gentlemen, and stay there!” He rushes out again.
At the door he is saluted again by the orderly of the quivering hands. Perhaps it is the way the fellow closes those heavy doors now like a gaoler or perhaps some other subtle movement or gesture with the sub-machine-gun in his left hand that drew from the Attorney-General a deep forlorn groan: “Oh my God!” I put on a broad smile and flash it in his face. He backs away from me as from a violent lunatic.
Very few words are spoken in the next half hour. When the doors swing open again, an orderly announces: Professor Okong Wanted by His Excellency!
“I go to prepare a place for you, gentlemen… But rest assured I will keep the most comfortable cell for myself.” He went out laughing. I too began to laugh quite ostentatiously. Then I said to my colleagues: “That is a man after my heart. A man who will not piss in his trousers at the first sound of danger.” And I went to the furthest window and stood there alone gazing outwards.
Professor Reginald Okong, though a buffoon, is a fighter of sorts and totally self-made. Unfortunately he has no sense of political morality which is a double tragedy for a man who began his career as an American Baptist minister and later became Professor of Political Science at our university. Perhaps he has more responsibility than any other single individual except myself for the remarkable metamorphosis of His Excellency. But, perhaps like me he meant well, neither of us having been present before at the birth and grooming of a baby monster.