Chinua Achebe - Anthills of the Savannah

From all accounts! From one account, mine, Chris never went to the show. I did. And by God he is right about the enjoyment! But, thank God again, also totally wrong.

By two o'clock there was no standing room on the beach, neither on the hot white sand nor the black granite boulders of the great breakwater wall stretching out to sea. On ordinary days only suicidal maniacs climbed those giant rocks that halted the galloping waves as the fierce horsemen at the durbar are stilled by an imaginary line before the royal pavilion. But this was no ordinary day. It was a day on which ordinarily sane people went berserk. The crowd on the perilous sea-wall had a fair sprinkling of women. And even children.

The camera crew from the national Television perched on their mobile tower were much admired by the crowd. As they swivelled their machine from one side of the amphitheatre to another taking in all that colour in the brilliant sun — the yellow and red and white and blue — especially the blue — of Kangan indigo dyes, the people smiled and made faces and waved to the camera.

The only room not taken yet was on the raised platform with numbered seats for VIPs and at the four stakes backed by their own little sea-wall of sandbags. The sun's heat honed with salt and vapour came down so brutally on the forehead that we all made visors with our hands to save our eyes. Those who had had the foresight to bring along umbrellas could not open them without obstructing others. A mild scuffle began right in front of me and ended only when the offending umbrella was folded up again.

'I beg una-o,' said its peace-loving owner, 'make I de use my thing for walking-stick.'

'E better so. No be for see umbrella we de roast for sun since we waka come here dis morning.'

I began to wonder at one point if I hadn't made a foolish gesture in refusing the ticket for one of those nicely spaced-out, numbered seats, that now seemed so desirably cool. Hardly anybody was sitting on them yet. Isn't the great thing about a VIP that his share of good things is always there waiting for him in abundance even while he relaxes in the coolness of home, and the poor man is out there in the sun pushing and shoving and roasting for his miserable crumbs? Look at all those empty padded seats! How does the poor man retain his calm in the face of such provocation? From what bottomless wells of patience does he draw? His great good humour must explain it. This sense of humour turned sometimes against himself, must be what saves him from total dejection. He had learnt to squeeze every drop of enjoyment he can out of his stony luck. And the fool who oppresses him will make a particular point of that enjoyment: You see, they are not in the least like ourselves. They don't need and can't use the luxuries that you and I must have. They have the animal capacity to endure the pain of, shall we say, domestication. The very words the white master had said in his time about the black race as a whole. Now we say them about the poor.

But even the poor man can forget what his humour is about and become altogether too humorous in his suffering. That afternoon he was punished most dreadfully at the beach and he laughed to his pink gums and I listened painfully for the slightest clink of the concealed weapon in the voluminous folds of that laughter. And I didn't hear it. So Chris is right. But how I wish, for the sake of all the years I have known and loved him, that the day never came when he should be that kind of right. But that's by the way.

I had never expected that Authority should excel in matters of taste. But the ritual obscenities it perpetrated that afternoon took me quite by surprise — from the pasting of a bull's eye on the chest of the victim to the antics of that sneaky wolf of a priest in sheep's clothing whispering God knows what blasphemies into the doomed man's ear, to the doctor with his stethoscope rushing with emergency strides to the broken, porous body and listening intently to the bull's eye and then nodding sagely and scientifically that all was finished. Call him tomorrow to minister to genuine human distress and see how slow he can be! And how expensive! Authority and its servants far exceeded my expectations that day on the beach.

But it wasn't Authority that worried me really; it never does. It wasn't those officious footlings, either. It wasn't even the four who were mangled. It was the thousands who laughed so blatantly at their own humiliation and murder.

As the four men were led out of the Black Maria the shout that went up was not like any sound I had ever heard or hoped to hear again. It was an ovation. But an ovation to whom for Christ's sake?

The four men were as different as the four days in the sky. One had totally lost the power of his legs and was helped to the stakes between two policemen, his trouser front entirely wet. The second was crying pathetically and looking back over his shoulders all the time. Was it to avoid looking ahead to those hefty joists sunk into concrete or was there a deliverer who had given his word in a dream or vision to be there at the eleventh hour? The third had dry eyes and a steady walk. He was shouting something so loud and desperate that the nerves and vessels of his neck seemed ready to burst. Though he had just stepped out of a car he was sweating like a hand-truck pusher at Gelegele Market. The fourth was a prince among criminals. The police said he had eluded them for two years, had three murders to his name and a fourth pointed in his direction. He wore a spotless white lace danshiki embroidered with gold thread, and natty blue terylene trousers. His appearance, his erect, disdainful walk hurled defiance at the vast mockery and abuse of the crowd and incensed it to greater vehemence. He saved his breath for the psychological moment when the crowd's delirious yelling was suddenly stilled by its desire to catch the command of the officer to the firing squad. In that brief silence, in a loud and steady voice he proclaimed: 'I shall be born again!' Twice he said it, or if thrice, the third was lost in a new explosion of jeers and lewd jokes and laughter so loud that it was clearly in compensation for the terrible truth of that silence in which we had stood cowed as though heaven had thundered: Be still and know that I am God. The lady in front of me said:

'Na goat go born you nex time, noto woman.

My tenuous links with that crowd seemed to snap totally at that point. I knew then that if its own mother was at that moment held up by her legs and torn down the middle like a piece of old rag that crowd would have yelled with eye-watering laughter. I still ask myself how anyone could laugh at the proclamation of such a terrible curse or fail to be menaced by the prospect of its fulfilment. For it was clear to me that the robber's words spoken with such power of calmness into the multitude's hysteria just minutes before his white lace reddened with blood and his hooded head withered instantly and drooped to his chest were greater than he, were indeed words of prophecy. If the vision vouchsafed to his last moments was to be faulted in any particular it would be this: that it placed his reincarnation in the future when it was already a clearly accomplished fact. Was he not standing right then, full grown, in other stolen lace and terylene, in every corner of that disoriented crowd? And he and all his innumerable doubles, were they not mere emulators of others who daily stole more from us than mere lace and terylene? Leaders who openly looted our treasury, whose effrontery soiled our national soul.

The only happy memory of that afternoon was the lady in front of me who vomited copiously on the back of the man with the umbrella and had to clean the mess with her damask headtie. I like to believe that there were others like her in every section of that crowd, picking up their filthy mess with their rich cloths. Certainly there were many who fainted although my news reporters put it all to the blazing sun. They also reported, by the way, a very busy day for pick-pockets, minor reincarnations of the princely robber.