‘What are you going for?’ asked Akuebue.
‘They want to test our knowledge of the holy book.’
Akuebue shrugged his shoulders.
‘I am not sure that you will go,’ said Ezeulu. ‘But let the days pass and I shall decide.’ Nobody said anything in reply. Oduche knew enough about his father not to protest. Akuebue drank another horn of wine and began to gnash his teeth. The voice he had been waiting for had spoken and pronounced the wine good. He knocked the horn on the floor a few times and prayed as he did so.
‘May the man who tapped this wine have life to continue his good work. May those of us who drank it also have life. The land of Olu and the land of Igbo.’ He rubbed the edges of his horn before putting it away in his bag.
‘Drink one horn more,’ said Edogo.
Akuebue rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand before replying.
‘The only medicine against palm wine is the power to say no.’ This statement seemed to bring Ezeulu back to the people around him.
‘Before you came in,’ he said to Akuebue, ‘I was telling that little boy over there that the greatest liar among men still speaks the truth to his own son.’
‘It is so,’ said Akuebue. ‘A man can swear before the most dreaded deity on what his father told him.’
‘If a man is not sure of the boundary between his land and his neighbour’s,’ continued Ezeulu, ‘he tells his son: I think it is here but if there is a dispute do not swear before a deity.’
‘It is even so,’ said Akuebue.
‘But when a man has spoken the truth and his children prefer to take the lie…’ His voice had risen with every word towards the dangerous pitch of a curse; then he broke off with a violent shake of the head. When he began again he spoke more quietly. ‘That is why a stranger can whip a son of mine and go unscathed, because my son has nailed up his ear against my words. Were it not so that stranger would already have learnt what it was to cross Ezeulu; dogs would have licked his eyes. I would have swallowed him whole and brought him up again. I would have shaved his head without wetting the hair.’
‘Did Obika strike the first blow then?’ asked Akuebue.
‘How do I know? All I can say is that he was blind with palm wine when he left here in the morning. And even when he came back a short while ago it had still not cleared from his eyes.’
‘But they say he did not strike the first blow,’ said Edogo.
‘Were you there?’ asked his father. ‘Or would you swear before a deity on the strength of what a drunken man tells you? If I was sure of my son do you think I would sit here now talking to you while a man who pokes his finger into my eyes goes home to his bed? If I did nothing else I would pronounce a few words on him and he would know the power in my mouth.’ The perspiration was forming on his brow.
‘What you say is true,’ said Akuebue. ‘But in my thinking there is still something for us to do once we find out from those who saw it whether Obika struck the first blow or…’ Ezeulu did not let him finish.
‘Why should I go out looking for strangers to tell me what my son did or did not do? I should be telling them.’
‘That is true. But let us first chase away the wild cat, afterwards we blame the hen.’ Akuebue turned to Edogo. ‘Where is Obika himself?’
‘It appears that what I said has not entered your ear,’ said Ezeulu. ‘Where…’
Edogo interrupted him. ‘He went out with Ofoedu. He went out because our father did not ask him what happened before blaming him.’
This unexpected accusation stung Ezeulu like the black ant. But he held himself together and, to everybody’s surprise, leaned back against the wall and shut his eyes. When he opened them again he began to whistle quietly to himself. Akuebue nodded his head four or five times like a man who had uncovered an unexpected truth. Ezeulu moved his head slightly from side to side and up and down to his almost silent whistling.
‘This is what I tell my own children,’ said Akuebue to Edogo and the two boys. ‘I tell them that a man always has more sense than his children.’ It was clear he said this to mollify Ezeulu; but at the same time it was clear he spoke truth. ‘Those of you who think they are wiser than their father forget that it is from a man’s own stock of sense that he gives out to his sons. That is why a boy who tries to wrestle with his father gets blinded by the old man’s loincloth. Why do I speak like this? It is because I am not a stranger in your father’s hut and I am not afraid to speak my mind. I know how often your father has pleaded with Obika to leave his friendship with Ofoedu. Why has Obika not heeded? It is because you all – not only Obika but you all, including that little one there – you think you are wiser than your father. My own children are like that. But there is one thing which you all forget. You forget that a woman who began cooking before another must have more broken utensils. When we old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouth; it is because we see something which you do not see. Our fathers made a proverb about it. They said that when we see an old woman stop in her dance to point again and again in the same direction we can be sure that somewhere there something happened long ago which touched the roots of her life. When Obika returns tell him what I say, Edogo. Do you hear me?’ Edogo nodded. He was wondering whether it was true that a man never spoke a lie to his sons.
Akuebue wheeled round on his buttocks and faced Ezeulu. ‘It is the pride of Umuaro,’ he said, ‘that we never see one party as right and the other wrong. I have spoken to the children and I shall not be afraid to speak to you. I think you are too hard on Obika. Apart from your high position as Chief Priest you are also blessed with a great compound. But in all great compounds there must be people of all minds – some good, some bad, some fearless and some cowardly; those who bring in wealth and those who scatter it, those who give good advice and those who only speak the words of palm wine. That is why we say that whatever tune you play in the compound of a great man there is always someone to dance to it. I salute you.’
Chapter Ten
Although Tony Clarke had already spent nearly six weeks in Okperi most of his luggage, including his crockery, had arrived only a fortnight ago – in fact the day before he went on tour to the bush. That was why he had not been able until now to ask Captain Winterbottom to his house for a meal.
As he awaited the arrival of his guest Mr Clarke felt not a little uneasy. One of the problems of living in a place like this with only four other Europeans (three of whom were supposed to be beneath the notice of Political Officers) was that one had to cope with a guest like Winterbottom absolutely alone. Of course this was not their first social encounter; they had in fact had dinner together not very long ago and things did not altogether grind to a stop. But then Clarke had been guest, without any responsibilities. Today he was going to be host and the onus would rest on him to keep the conversation alive, through the long, arduous ritual of alcohol, food, coffee and more alcohol stretching into midnight. If only he could have invited someone like John Wright with whom he had struck up a kind of friendship during his recent tour! But such a thing would have been disastrous.
Clarke had shared the lonely thatch-roofed Rest House outside Umuaro with Wright for one night during his tour. Wright had been living in one half of the Rest House for over two weeks then. The Rest House consisted of two enormous rooms each with a camp-bed and an old mosquito-net, a rough wooden table and chair and a cupboard. Just behind the main building there was a thatched shed used as a kitchen. About thirty yards away another hut stood over a dug latrine and wooden seat. Farther away still in the same direction a third hut in very bad repair housed the servants and porters who were sometimes called ‘hammock boys’. The Rest House proper was surrounded by a ragged hedge of a native plant which Clarke had never seen anywhere else.
The entire appearance of the place showed that it had not had a caretaker since the last one vanished into the bush with two camp-beds. The beds were replaced but the key to the main building and the latrine was thereafter kept at hea
dquarters so that whenever a European was going on tour and needed to lodge there the native Chief Clerk in Captain Winterbottom’s office had to remember to give the key to his head porter or steward. Once when the Police Officer, Mr Wade, had been going to Umuaro the Chief Clerk had forgotten to do this and had had to walk the six or seven miles at night to deliver it. Fortunately for him Mr Wade had not suffered any personal inconvenience as he had sent his boys one day ahead of himself to clean the place up.
As he walked round the premises of the Rest House Tony Clarke felt that he was hundreds of miles from Government Hill. It was quite impossible to believe that it was only six or seven miles away. Even the sun seemed to set in a different direction. No wonder the natives were said to regard a six mile walk as travelling to a foreign country.
Later that evening he and Wright sat on the veranda of the Rest House to drink Wright’s gin. In this remote corner, far from the stiff atmosphere of Winterbottom’s Government Hill, Clarke was able to discover that he liked Wright very much. He also discovered to his somewhat delighted amazement that in certain circumstances he could contain as much gin as any Old Coaster.
They had only met for very brief moments before. But now they talked like old friends. Clarke thought that for all the other man’s squat and rough exterior he was a good and honest Englishman. He found it so refreshing to be talking to a man who did not have the besetting sin of smugness, of taking himself too seriously.
‘What do you think the Captain would say, Tony, if he were to see his young Political Officer being nice and friendly to a common road-maker?’ His big red face looked almost boyish.
‘I don’t know and don’t much care,’ said Clarke, and because the fume of gin was already working on his brain, he added: ‘I shall be happy if in all my years in Africa I succeed in building something as good as your road…’
‘It’s good of you to say so.’
‘Are we having a celebration to open it?’
‘The Captain says no. He says we have already overspent the Vote for it.’
‘What does it matter?’
‘That’s what I want to know. And yet we spend hundreds of pounds building Native Courts all over the division that nobody wants, as far as I can see.’
‘I must say though that that is not the Captain’s fault.’ Clarke was already adopting Wright’s half-contemptuous manner of referring to Winterbottom. ‘It is the policy of Headquarters which I happen to know the Captain is not altogether in agreement with.’
‘Damn the Headquarters.’
‘The Captain would approve of that sentiment.’
‘Actually, you know, the Captain is not a bad fellow at all. I think that deep down he is quite a decent fellow. One must make allowances for the rough time he’s had.’
‘In the matter of promotions, you mean?’
‘He’s been badly treated there too, I’m told,’ said Wright. ‘Actually I wasn’t thinking of that at all. I was thinking of his domestic life. Oh yes. You see during the war while the poor man was fighting the Germans in the Cameroons some smart fellow walked away with his wife at home.’
‘Really? I hadn’t heard about that.’
‘Yes. I’m told he was very badly shaken by it. I sometimes think it was this personal loss during the war that’s made him cling to this ridiculous Captain business.’
‘Quite possibly. He’s the kind of person, isn’t he, who would take the desertion of his wife very badly,’ said Clarke.
‘Exactly. A man as inflexible as him can’t take a thing like that.’
In the course of the evening Clarke was given every detail of Winterbottom’s marital crisis and he felt really sorry for the man. Wright also seemed to have been touched with sympathy by the very act of telling the story. Without any conscious design the two men dropped their contemptuous reference to the Captain and called Winterbottom by his name.
‘The real trouble with Winterbottom,’ said Wright after deep thought, ‘is that he is too serious to sleep with native women.’ Clarke was startled out of his own thoughts, and for a brief moment he completely forgot about Winterbottom. On more than one occasion during his present tour he had come up in his mind against the question: How widespread was the practice of white men sleeping with native women?
‘He doesn’t seem to realize that even Governors have been known to keep dusky mistresses.’ He licked his lips.
‘I don’t think it’s a question of knowing or not knowing,’ said Clarke. ‘He is a man of very high principles, something of a missionary. I believe his father was a Church of England clergyman, which is a far cry from my father, for instance, who is a Bank of England clerical.’ They both laughed heartily at this. When Clarke recalled this piece of wit in the morning he realized how much alcohol he must have drunk to find such an inferior joke so amusing.
‘I think you are right about the missionary business. He should have come out with the C.M.S. or some such people. By the way, he has been going around lately with the woman missionary doctor at Nkisa. Of course we all have our different tastes, but I would not have thought a woman missionary doctor could provide much fun for a man in this God-forsaken place.’
Clarke wanted to ask about native women – whether they were better than whites, and many other details – but not even the effect of the gin could bring out the questions. Rather he found himself changing the subject and losing this great opportunity. The thoughts he had had since first seeing fully grown girls going about naked were again forced to sleep. Later he would bite his lips in regret.
‘From what I heard of Winterbottom at headquarters,’ he said, ‘I expected to see some sort of buffoon.’
‘I know. He is a stock joke at Enugu, isn’t he?’
‘Whenever I said I was going to Okperi they said: What! With Old Tom? and looked pityingly at me. I wondered what was wrong with Old Tom, but no one would say any more. Then one day a very senior officer said to another to my hearing: Old Tom is always reminding you that he came out to Nigeria in 1910 but he never mentions that in all that time he has not put in a day’s work. It’s simply amazing how much back-biting goes on at Enugu.’
‘Well,’ said Wright, yawning, ‘I cannot say myself that Old Tom is the most hard-working man I’ve ever met; but then who is? Certainly not that lot at Enugu.’
All this was working on Clarke’s mind as he awaited Winterbottom’s coming. He felt guilty like one who had been caught back-biting one of his own group with an outsider. But then, he told himself in defence, they had said nothing that could be called uncharitable about Winterbottom. All that had happened was that he got to know a few details about the man’s life, and felt sorry for him. And that feeling justified the knowledge.
He went into the kitchen for the tenth time that evening to see how Cook was roasting the chicken over a wood fire. It would be terrible if it turned out as tough as the last one Clarke had eaten. Of course all native chicken was tough and very small. But perhaps one shouldn’t complain. A fully grown cock cost no more than twopence. Even so one wouldn’t mind paying a little more now and again for a good, juicy, English chicken. The look on Cook’s face seemed to say that Clarke was coming into the kitchen too frequently.
‘How is it coming?’
‘Ide try small small,’ said Cook, rubbing his smoke-inflamed eyes with his forearm. Clarke looked around vaguely and returned to the veranda of his bungalow. He sat down and looked at his watch again; it was quarter to seven – a full half-hour to go. He began to think up a number of subjects for conversation. His recent tour would have provided enough topics for the evening, but he had just written and submitted a full report on it.
‘But this is funny,’ he told himself. Why should he feel so nervous because Winterbottom was coming to dinner? Was he afraid of the man? Certainly not! Why all the excitement then? Why should he get so worked up about meeting Winterbottom simply because Wright had told him a few background stories which were in any case common knowledge? From this point Clarke spe
culated briefly on the nature of knowledge. Did knowledge of one’s friends and colleagues impose a handicap on one? Perhaps it did. If so it showed how false was the common assumption that the more facts you could get about others the greater your power over them. Perhaps facts put you at a great disadvantage; perhaps they made you feel sorry and even responsible. Clarke rose to his feet and walked up and down, rather self-consciously. Perhaps this was the real difference between British and French colonial administrations. The French made up their minds about what they wanted to do and did it. The British, on the other hand, never did anything without first sending out a Commission of Inquiry to discover all the facts, which then ham-strung them. He sat down again, glowing with satisfaction.
The dinner was almost entirely satisfactory. There were only two or three uneasy moments throughout the evening; for example when Captain Winterbottom said at the beginning: ‘I have just been reading your report on your tour. One could see that you are settling down nicely to your duties.’
‘It was all so exciting,’ said Clarke, attempting to minimize his part in the success story. ‘It’s such a wonderful division. I can imagine how you must feel seeing such a happy district growing up under your direction.’ He had stopped himself just in time from saying your wise direction. Even so he wondered whether this rather obvious attempt to return compliment for compliment was altogether happy.
‘One thing worries me, though,’ said Winterbottom without any indication that he even heard Clarke’s last piece. ‘You say in the report that after careful inquiry you were satisfied that there was no truth in all the stories of Wright whipping natives.’ Clarke’s heart fell. This was the one falsehood in the entire report. In fact he completely forgot to make any inquiries, even if he had known how to set about it. It was only on his return to Okperi that he found a brief, late entry Wright & natives scribbled in pencil on the second page of his touring notebook. At first he had worried over it; then he had come to the conclusion that if Wright had in fact been employing unorthodox methods he would have heard of it without making inquiries as such. But since he had heard nothing it was safe to say that the stories were untrue. In any case how did one investigate such a thing? Did one go up to the first native one saw and ask if he had been birched by Wright? Or did one ask Wright? From what Clarke had seen of the man he would not have thought he was that sort.