Anthills of the Savannah

“Na suspend they suspend me.”

“Weting be suspend?… I beg, BB weting be suspend?”

“My sister, make you no worry yourself. As we de alive so, na that one better pass all… I no know say your mama no well. Sorry. You done take am go hospital?”

“Hospital? Who get money for hospital? And even if you find money, the wahala wey de there… My sister, na chemist we small people de go.”

IT WAS ELEWA’S KEEN EARS which picked up the radio news signal from some distant set turned too high probably in someone’s Boys’ Quarters in the neighbourhood, and her voice which screamed “News!” Chris sprang up and dashed to his television set, switching it on and checking his wristwatch at the same time. Elewa was right. The eight o’clock national news was about to begin. They all sat back in grim-faced silence to watch.

Ikem’s suspension was the first headline. Something approaching an amused look crept into his features for the brief duration of his limelight—a straightforward announcement without frills. Then all of a sudden he was stung as if by a scorpion and he screamed and leapt to his feet.

“Oh no!” he shouted. “They can’t do that! Chris did you hear that? And you say I should lie low. Lie low and let these cannibals lay their dirty hands on a holy man of the earth. Switch that da

mn thing off!” He was already making for the television set when Chris’s voice telling him to get a hold of himself told him also that this was not his television set, nor this his house. He went back and sank into his seat, his left thumbnail between his teeth. Then he got up again:

“Elewa, let’s go!”

What had caused all this agitation had been a subsidiary item tagged on to Ikem’s news because of its relative unimportance and prefaced accordingly with the formula: In another development…

Yes, in another development, according to this smug newscaster dispensing national anguish in carefully measured milligrammes, six leaders from Abazon who were involved in a recent illegal march on the Presidential Palace without police permit as required by decree had been arrested. And (in the same development) the office of the Director of SRC had informed the Crime Correspondent of KTV that the six men who had made useful statements were being held in BMSP.

12

ON THE TWO previous occasions when Ikem had spoken before audiences at the University of Bassa he had attracted large crowds, but nothing quite on the scale of the present event. Every seat in the two-thousand-capacity Main Auditorium was taken and a large overspill sat or stood on gangways or peeped in through doors and windows from the two side-corridors running the length of the hall. It would appear that his suspension from the National Gazette had pushed his popularity rating, already pretty high, right to the top of the charts. Even more remarkable than the size of the crowds was their patience. The lecture took off at least forty minutes behind schedule while sweating Students Union officials dashed in and out of the hall occasionally shouting, “Testing! Testing! Testing!” into a dead microphone. But such was the good humour of this audience that when the system finally came alive it was given a thunderous ovation.

A few last-minute consultations by the organizers and the lecture seemed finally set to begin. But no. First the introductions. A minor union official took the microphone and introduced the Master of Ceremonies, a tall handsome fellow in a white three-piece suit, who in turn and at some length introduced the President of the Union who delivered a most elaborate introduction of the Chairman for the occasion who—at long last—introduced Mr. Ikem Osodi. It was all so reminiscent of the style of campaign meetings in the good old Byzantine days of politicians who, should they rise now from the bowels of their rat-holes and station themselves cautiously just below the surface, would be watching shiny-eyed, twitching their whiskers in happy remembrance.

Ikem called his lecture “The Tortoise and the Leopard—a political meditation on the imperative of struggle.” This announcement was greeted with tumultuous approval. No doubt it had the right revolutionary ring to it and Ikem smiled inwardly at the impending coup d’état he would stage against this audience and its stereotype notions of struggle, as indeed of everything else.

“Mr. Chairman, sir…” he said, bowing mock-deferentially to the Professor who had just been eulogized by the Students’ Union President as a popular academic admired by all and sundry for his clarity and Marxist orientation who, as the youngest professor in Kangan, had ably redirected Political Science from bourgeois tendencies under Professor Reginald Okong to new heights of scientific materialism…

“May I crave your indulgence and begin this meditation—not lecture by the way, I never can muster enough audacity to lecture—I meditate. May I begin with a little story.”

And he told, to remarkable dramatic and emotional effect, the story of the Tortoise who was about to die.

“That story was told me by an old man. As I stand before you now that old man who told me that incredible story is being held in solitary confinement at the Bassa Maximum Security Prison.”

No! Why! Opposed! Impossible! and other sounds of shock and anger flew like sparks and filled the air of the auditorium.

“Why? I hear you ask. Very well… This is why… Because storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit—in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever. That’s why.”

It was a brief presentation, twenty to twenty-five minutes long, that was all; but it was so well crafted and so powerfully spoken it took on the nature and scope of an epic prose-poem. It was serious but not solemn; sometimes witty without falling into the familiarity of banter.

The audience sat or stood silently entranced. Its sudden end was like a blow and it jolted them into shouts of protest. Calls of Fire! Fire! More! More! and even Opposed! soon turned into a rhythmic chant when Ikem sat down.

The Chairman turned to him and said, “They want some more!”

“Yes! More! More! More!”

“I thank you, my friends, for the compliment. But as someone once said: There is nothing left in the pipeline!”

“No! No! Opposed!”

“In any case you have listened to me patiently. Now I want to hear you. Dialogues are infinitely more interesting than monologues. So fire your questions and comments and let’s exchange a few blows. You’ve been at the receiving end. But, as the Bible says, it is better to give than to receive. So let’s have a few punches from your end. That’s what I’ve come here for.”

And true enough, it was during question-time that he finally achieved the close hand-to-hand struggle he so relished. By nature he is never on the same side as his audience. Whatever his audience is, he must try not to be. If they fancy themselves radical, he fancies himself conservative; if they propound right-wing tenets he unleashes revolution! It is not that he has ever sat down to reason it out and plan it; it just seems to happen that way. But he is aware of it—after the event, so to say, and can even offer some kind of explanation if asked to do so: namely that whatever you are is never enough; you must find a way to accept something however small from the other to make you whole and save you from the mortal sin of righteousness and extremism.

A couple of months ago he had been persuaded against his normal inclination to speak at the Bassa Rotary Club weekly luncheon. On that particular occasion the club had more cause than usual to be happy with itself for it had just bought and donated a water-tanker to a dispensary in one of the poorest districts of North Bassa, an area that has never had electricity nor pipe-borne water. In the after-dinner haze of good works, cigar smoke and liqueur his hosts sat back to hear what their distinguished guest had to tell them… Well, as usual, he left what he should have told them and launched into something quite unexpected. Charity, he thundered is the opium of the privileged; from the good citizen who habitually drops ten kobo from his loose change and from a safe height above the bowl of the leper outside the supermarket; to the group of good citizens like yourselves who donate water so that some Lazarus in the slums can have a syringe boiled clean as a whistle for his jab and his sores dressed more hygienically than the rest of him; to the Band Aid stars that lit up so dramatically the dark Christmas skies of Ethiopia. While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.