It was one New Year’s Eve like this. You know how New Year can pass Christmas for jollity, for we end-of-month people. By Christmas Day the month has reached twenty-hungry but on New Year your pocket is heavy. So that day I went to the Club.
When I see you young men of nowadays say you drink, I just laugh. You don’t know what drink is. You drink one bottle of beer or one shot of whisky and you begin to holler like crazeman. That night I was taking it easy on White Horse. All that are desirous to pass from Edinburgh to London or any other place on their road, let them repair to the White Horse cellar.… God Almighty!
One thing with me is I never mix my drinks. The day I want to drink whisky I know that that is whisky-day; if I want to drink beer tomorrow then I know it it beer-day; I don’t touch any other thing. That night I was on White Horse. I had one roasted chicken and a tin of Guinea Gold. Yes, I used to smoke in those days. I only stopped when one German doctor told me my heart was as black as a cooking-pot. Those German doctors were spirits. You know they used to give injections in the head or belly or anywhere. You just point where the thing is paining you and they give it to you right there—they don’t waste time.
What was I saying?… Yes, I drank a bottle of White Horse and put one roasted chicken on top of it … Drunk? It is not in my dictionary. I have never been drunk in my life. My father used to say that the cure for drink is to say no. When I want to drink I drink, when I want to stop I stop. So about three o’clock that night I said to myself, you have had enough. So I jumped on my new Raleigh bicycle and went home quietly to sleep.
At that time our senior clerk was jailed for stealing bales of calico and I was acting in that capacity. So I lived in a small company house. You know where G.B. Olivant is today?… Yes, overlooking the River Niger. That is where my house was. I had two rooms on one side of it and the store-keeper had two rooms on the other side. But as luck would have it this man was on leave, so his side was vacant.
I opened the front door and went inside. Then I locked it again. I left my bicycle in the first room and went into the bedroom. I was too tired to begin to look for my lamp. So I pulled my dress and packed them on the back of the chair, and fell like a log into my big iron bed. And to God who made me, there was a woman in my bed. My mind told me at once it was Margaret. So I began to laugh and touch her here and there. She was hundred per cent naked. I continued laughing and asked her when did she come. She did not say anything and I suspected she was annoyed because she asked me to take her to the Club that day and I said no. I said to her: if you come there we will meet, I don’t take anybody to the Club as such. So I suspected that is what is making her vex.
I told her not to vex but still she did not say anything. I asked her if she was asleep—just for asking sake. She said nothing. Although I told you that I did not like women to come to my house, but for every rule there must be an exception. So if I say that I was very angry to find Margaret that night I will be telling a white lie. I was still laughing when I noticed that her breasts were straight like the breasts of a girl of sixteen—or seventeen, at most. I thought that perhaps it was because of the way she was lying on her back. But when I touched the hair and it was soft like the hair of a European my laughter was quenched by force. I touched the hair on her head and it was the same. I jumped out of the bed and shouted: “Who are you?” My head swelled up like a barrel and I was shaking. The woman sat up and stretched her hands to call me back; as she did so her fingers touched me. I jumped back at the same time and shouted again to her to call her name. Then I said to myself: How can you be afraid of a woman? Whether a white woman or a black woman, it is the same ten and tenpence. So I said: “All right, I will soon open your mouth,” at the same time I began to look for matches on the table. The woman suspected what I was looking for. She said, “Biko akpakwana oku.”
I said: “So you are not a white woman. Who are you? I will strike the matches now if you don’t tell me.” I shook the matches to show her that I meant business. My boldness had come back and I was trying to remember the voice because it was very familiar.
“Come back to the bed and I will tell you,” was what I heard next. Whoever told me it was a familiar voice told me a lie. It was sweet like sugar but not familiar at all. So I struck the matches.
“I beg you,” was the last thing she said.
If I tell you what I did next or how I managed to come out of that room it is pure guesswork. The next thing I remember is that I was running like a crazeman to Matthew’s house. Then I was banging on his door with both my hands.
“Who is that?” he said from inside.
“Open,” I shouted. “In the name of God above, open.”
I called my name but my voice was not like my voice. The door opened very small and I saw my kinsman holding a matchete in his right hand.
I fell down on the floor, and he said, “God will not agree.”
It was God Himself who directed me to Matthew Obi’s house that night because I did not see where I was going. I could not say whether I was still in this world or whether I was dead. Matthew poured cold water on me and after some time I was able to tell him what happened. I think I told it upside down otherwise he would not keep asking me what was she like, what was she like.
“I told you before I did not see her,” I said.
“I see, but you heard her voice?”
“I heard her voice quite all right. And I touched her and she touched me.”
“I don’t know whether you did well or not to scare her away,” was what Matthew said.
I don’t know how to explain it but those words from Matthew opened my eyes. I knew at once that I had been visited by Mami Wota, the Lady of the River Niger.
Matthew said again: “It depends what you want in life. If it is wealth you want then you made a great mistake today, but if you are a true son of your father then take my hand.”
We shook hands and he said: “Our fathers never told us that a man should prefer wealth instead of wives and children.”
Today whenever my wives make me vex I tell them: “I don’t blame you. If I had been wise I would have taken Mami Wota.” They laugh and ask me why did I not take her. The youngest one says: “Don’t worry, Papa, she will come again; she will come tomorrow.” And they laugh again.
But we all know it is a joke. For where is the man who will choose wealth instead of children? Except a crazy white man like Dr. J.M. Stuart-Young. Oh, I didn’t tell you. The same night that I drove Mami Wota out she went to Dr. J.M. Stuart-Young, a white merchant and became his lover. You have heard of him?… Oh yes, he became the richest man in the whole country. But she did not allow him to marry. When he died, what happened? All his wealth went to outsiders. Is that good wealth? I ask you. God forbid.
Civil Peace
Jonathan Iwegbu counted himself extraordinarily lucky. “Happy survival!” meant so much more to him than just a current fashion of greeting old friends in the first hazy days of peace. It went deep to his heart. He had come out of the war with five inestimable blessings—his head, his wife Maria’s head and the heads of three out of their four children. As a bonus he also had his old bicycle—a miracle too but naturally not to be compared to the safety of five human heads.
The bicycle had a little history of its own. One day at the height of the war it was commandeered “for urgent military action.” Hard as its loss would have been to him he would still have let it go without a thought had he not had some doubts about the genuineness of the officer. It wasn’t his disreputable rags, nor the toes peeping out of one blue and one brown canvas shoes, nor yet the two stars of his rank done obviously in a hurry in biro, that troubled Jonathan; many good and heroic soldiers looked the same or worse. It was rather a certain lack of grip and firmness in his manner. So Jonathan, suspecting he might be amenable to influence, rummaged in his raffia bag and produced the two pounds with which he had been going to buy firewood which his wife, Maria, retailed to camp officials for extra stock-fish and corn meal, a
nd got his bicycle back. That night he buried it in the little clearing in the bush where the dead of the camp, including his own youngest son, were buried. When he dug it up again a year later after the surrender all it needed was a little palm-oil greasing. “Nothing puzzles God,” he said in wonder.
He put it to immediate use as a taxi and accumulated a small pile of Biafran money ferrying camp officials and their families across the four-mile stretch to the nearest tarred road. His standard charge per trip was six pounds and those who had the money were only glad to be rid of some of it in this way. At the end of a fortnight he had made a small fortune of one hundred and fifteen pounds.
Then he made the journey to Enugu and found another miracle waiting for him. It was unbelievable. He rubbed his eyes and looked again and it was still standing there before him. But, needless to say, even that monumental blessing must be accounted also totally inferior to the five heads in the family. This newest miracle was his little house in Ogui Overside. Indeed nothing puzzles God! Only two houses away a huge concrete edifice some wealthy contractor had put up just before the war was a mountain of rubble. And here was Jonathan’s little zinc house of no regrets built with mud blocks quite intact! Of course the doors and windows were missing and five sheets off the roof. But what was that? And anyhow he had returned to Enugu early enough to pick up bits of old zinc and wood and soggy sheets of cardboard lying around the neighbourhood before thousands more came out of their forest holes looking for the same things. He got a destitute carpenter with one old hammer, a blunt plane and a few bent and rusty nails in his tool bag to turn this assortment of wood, paper and metal into door and window shutters for five Nigerian shillings or fifty Biafran pounds. He paid the pounds, and moved in with his overjoyed family carrying five heads on their shoulders.
His children picked mangoes near the military cemetery and sold them to soldiers’ wives for a few pennies—real pennies this time—and his wife started making breakfast akara balls for neighbours in a hurry to start life again. With his family earnings he took his bicycle to the villages around and bought fresh palmwine which he mixed generously in his rooms with the water which had recently started running again in the public tap down the road, and opened up a bar for soldiers and other lucky people with good money.
At first he went daily, then every other day and finally once a week, to the offices of the Coal Corporation where he used to be a miner, to find out what was what. The only thing he did find out in the end was that that little house of his was even a greater blessing than he had thought. Some of his fellow ex-miners who had nowhere to return at the end of the day’s waiting just slept outside the doors of the offices and cooked what meal they could scrounge together in Bournvita tins. As the weeks lengthened and still nobody could say what was what Jonathan discontinued his weekly visits altogether and faced his palm-wine bar.
But nothing puzzles God. Came the day of the windfall when after five days of endless scuffles in queues and counter-queues in the sun outside the Treasury he had twenty pounds counted into his palms as ex-gratia award for the rebel money he had turned in. It was like Christmas for him and for many others like him when the payments began. They called it (since few could manage its proper official name) egg-rasher.
As soon as the pound notes were placed in his palm Jonathan simply closed it tight over them and buried fist and money inside his trouser pocket. He had to be extra careful because he had seen a man a couple of days earlier collapse into near-madness in an instant before that oceanic crowd because no sooner had he got his twenty pounds than some heartless ruffian picked it off him. Though it was not right that a man in such an extremity of agony should be blamed yet many in the queues that day were able to remark quietly on the victim’s carelessness, especially after he pulled out the innards of his pocket and revealed a hole in it big enough to pass a thief’s head. But of course he had insisted that the money had been in the other pocket, pulling it out too to show its comparative wholeness. So one had to be careful.
Jonathan soon transferred the money to his left hand and pocket so as to leave his right free for shaking hands should the need arise, though by fixing his gaze at such an elevation as to miss all approaching human faces he made sure that the need did not arise, until he got home.
He was normally a heavy sleeper but that night he heard all the neighbourhood noises die down one after another. Even the night watchman who knocked the hour on some metal somewhere in the distance had fallen silent after knocking one o’clock. That must have been the last thought in Jonathan’s mind before he was finally carried away himself. He couldn’t have been gone for long, though, when he was violently awakened again.
“Who is knocking?” whispered his wife lying beside him on the floor.
“I don’t know,” he whispered back breathlessly.
The second time the knocking came it was so loud and imperious that the rickety old door could have fallen down.
“Who is knocking?” he asked then, his voice parched and trembling.
“Na tief-man and him people,” came the cool reply. “Make you hopen de door.” This was followed by the heaviest knocking of all.
Maria was the first to raise the alarm, then he followed and all their children.
“Police-o! Thieves-o! Neighbours-o! Police-o! We are lost! We are dead! Neighbours, are you asleep? Wake up! Police-o!”
This went on for a long time and then stopped suddenly. Perhaps they had scared the thief away. There was total silence. But only for a short while.
“You done finish?” asked the voice outside. “Make we help you small. Oya, everybody!”
“Police-o! Tief-man-o! Neighbours-o! we done loss-o! Police-o!…”
There were at least five other voices besides the leader’s.
Jonathan and his family were now completely paralysed by terror. Maria and the children sobbed inaudibly like lost souls. Jonathan groaned continuously.
The silence that followed the thieves’ alarm vibrated horribly. Jonathan all but begged their leader to speak again and be done with it.
“My frien,” said he at long last, “we don try our best for call dem but I tink say dem all done sleep-o … So wetin we go do now? Sometaim you wan call soja? Or you wan make we call dem for you? Soja better pass police. No be so?”
“Na so!” replied his men. Jonathan thought he heard even more voices now than before and groaned heavily. His legs were sagging under him and his throat felt like sandpaper.
“My frien, why you no de talk again. I de ask you say you wan make we call soja?”
“No.”
“Awrighto. Now make we talk business. We no be bad tief. We no like for make trouble. Trouble done finish. War done finish and all the katakata wey de for inside. No Civil War again. This time na Civil Peace. No be so?”
“Na so!” answered the horrible chorus.
“What do you want from me? I am a poor man. Everything I had went with this war. Why do you come to me? You know people who have money. We …”
“Awright! We know say you no get plenty money. But we sef no get even anini. So derefore make you open dis window and give us one hundred pound and we go commot. Orderwise we de come for inside now to show you guitar-boy like dis …”
A volley of automatic fire rang through the sky. Maria and the children began to weep aloud again.
“Ah, missisi de cry again. No need for dat. We done talk say we na good tief. We just take our small money and go nwayorly. No molest. Abi we de molest?”
“At all!” sang the chorus.
“My friends,” began Jonathan hoarsely. “I hear what you say and I thank you. If I had one hundred pounds …”
“Lookia my frien, no be play we come play for your house. If we make mistake and step for inside you no go like am-o. So derefore …”
“To God who made me; if you come inside and find one hundred pounds, take it and shoot me and shoot my wife and children. I swear to God. The only money I have in this life is this twenty poun
ds egg-rasher they gave me today …”
“OK. Time de go. Make you open dis window and bring the twenty pound. We go manage am like dat.”
There were now loud murmurs of dissent among the chorus: “Na lie de man de lie; e get plenty money … Make we go inside and search properly well … Wetin be twenty pound?…”
“Shurrup!” rang the leader’s voice like a lone shot in the sky and silenced the murmuring at once. “Are you dere? Bring the money quick!”
“I am coming,” said Jonathan fumbling in the darkness with the key of the small wooden box he kept by his side on the mat.
At the first sign of light as neighbours and others assembled to commiserate with him he was already strapping his five-gallon demijohn to his bicycle carrier and his wife, sweating in the open fire, was turning over akara balls in a wide clay bowl of boiling oil. In the corner his eldest son was rinsing out dregs of yesterday’s palm-wine from old beer bottles.
“I count it as nothing,” he told his sympathizers, his eyes on the rope he was tying. “What is egg-rasher? Did I depend on it last week? Or is it greater than other things that went with the war? I say, let egg-rasher perish in the flames! Let it go where everything else has gone. Nothing puzzles God.”
Sugar Baby
I caught the fierce expression on his face in the brief impulsive moment of that strange act; and I understood. I don’t mean the symbolism such as it was; that, to me, was pretty superficial and obvious. No. It was rather his deadly earnestness.
It lasted no more than a second or two. Just as long as it took to thrust his hand into his sugar bowl, grasp a handful and fling it out of the window, his squarish jaw set viciously. Then it crumbled again in the gentle solvent of a vague smile.