Chinua Achebe - Anthills of the Savannah

When I launched my editorial crusade on his behalf I had no reason to belittle his gross abuse of good taste. But I had to place beside it the image of that wretched man lying in unspeakable agony for four days and nights in the surgical ward while his distracted relations ran from hospital to a distant village and back again trying in vain to raise the twenty-five manilla that Dr Ofe must have before he would operate. All witnesses spoke of the man's screams which filled the Men's Ward and could be heard as far away as the Emergency Room at the Hospital Gate. They spoke of the nurses unable to shut him up and leaving the ward for hours on end to get a little peace somewhere else. Three nurses spoke of their efforts to call Dr Ofe on the telephone and his threats of disciplinary action against them if they continued disturbing him at home and of his instructions to give the man yet another shot of morphia. And the doctor who finally performed the operation after Mad Medico began to interfere in the matter spoke at the inquiry of all those lengths of black intestine, four feet or perhaps eight, I don't now recall, which he had to take out and how everything was already much too late.

That was the story I had to place beside Mad Medico's folly in deciding whether I should sit back and let him be hounded out of the country. It seemed to me perfectly clear that whatever foolishness Mad Medico should get into now it would be morally intolerable to allow Dr Ofe's friends to triumph however vicariously over him. Fortunately His Excellency saw it my way too. Chris says I am sentimental. Well, let me be.

Perhaps I am so indulgent about Sam's imitation of the English because I believe that a budding dictator might choose models far worse than the English gentleman of leisure. It does not seem to me that the English can do much harm to anybody today. After a long career of subduing savages in distant lands they discovered the most dangerous savage of all just across the English Channel and took him on and brought him to heel. But the effort proved too great and the cost too high, and although they acquitted themselves with honour they made sure that they would not be called upon to do it again. And so they anointed the hero of their dazzling feat the greatest Englishman who ever lived, dumped him at the polls and voted Clement Attlee in. Whatever fear the ghost of British imperial vocation may still hold over the world's little people was finally removed when a renegade Englishman and his little band of thugs seized Her Majesty's colony in Rhodesia and held it for thirteen years. No, the English have, for all practical purposes, ceased to menace the world. The real danger today is from that fat, adolescent and delinquent millionaire, America, and from all those virulent, misshapen freaks like Amin and Bokassa sired on Africa by Europe. Particularly those ones.

I think that much of the change which has come over Sam started after his first OAU meeting. Chris and I and a few other friends called at the Palace to see him as we used to do quite often in those days. I noticed right away that it was not the same Sam who had left Bassa only a week before. Everybody remarked on the change later — Chris, Mad Medico and the others. He spoke like an excited schoolboy about his heroes; about the old emperor who never smiled nor changed his expression no matter what was going on around him.

'Perhaps he doesn't hear very well,' said Mad Medico.

'Nonsense,' said His Excellency. 'His hearing is perfect. I had breakfast with him on the fifth morning. He heard everything I said and has the most lively mind and the most absolutely delightful sense of humour.'

'So he wears his mask-face only for the gathering-in of the tribes,' I said.

'I wish I could look like him,' said His Excellency wistfully, his thoughts obviously far away. If somebody else had reported that exchange to me, especially the sentence I wish I could look like him I would not have believed it. A young man wishing he could look like an octogenarian!

But the leader Sam spoke most about was President Ngongo — I beg your pardon — President-for-Life Ngongo, who called Sam his dear boy and invited him over to his suite for cocktails on the second day. I have little doubt that Sam learnt the habit of saying Kabisa from old Ngongo. Within a week it spread to members of the Cabinet and down to the Bassa cocktail set. From there it made its way more or less rapidly into the general community. The other day the office driver who drove me to GTC said: 'Charging battery na pure waste of money; once battery begin de give trouble you suppose to buy new one. Kabisa .'

It is unlikely that Sam came away with nothing but Kabisa in his travelling bag. I may be wrong but I felt that our welcome at the palace became distinctly cooler from that time. The end of the socializing is not important in itself but its timing must be. I set it down to Sam's seeing for the first time the possibilities for his drama in the role of an African Head of State and deciding that he must withdraw into seclusion to prepare his own face and perfect his act.

'Same here,' says Ikem.

'Shit!' replies Mad Medico. 'You don't have to follow your fucking leader in this house, you know. Come on, have Scotch or Campari or anything — even water — just to show him.'

'Too late,' says Ikem. 'We were enslaved originally by Gordon's Dry Gin. All gestures of resistance are now too late and too empty. Gin it shall be forever and ever, Amen.' Jovial words, but there is not the slightest sign of gaiety in the voice or face.

'I wonder where you got the idea that Ikem follows my lead. Once again, you are the last to know. He'd sooner be found dead. I thought everyone, even you, knew that.'

'Following a leader who follows his leader would be quite a circus,' said Ikem with unabated grimness.

Mad Medico pours out two long gins made longer still by ice cubes he has transferred with his fingers from a plastic bowl. He pours a little tonic water into each and I ask him to add more to mine. Then he throws into each glass a slip of lemon from another bowl giving it a little squeeze between thumb and forefinger before letting it drop, and stirs. Twice or thrice in the preparation he has licked his fingers or wiped them on the seat of his blue shorts. I can see that Ikem's new girl, Elewa, is at first horrified and then fascinated. She is seeing Mad Medico at close quarters for the first time though she has obviously heard much about him. Everyone has. Perhaps she is seeing any white man at close quarters for the first time, for that matter.

Mad Medico's proper name is John Kent but nobody here calls him by that any more. He enjoys his bizarre title; his familiar friends always abbreviate it to MM. He is of course neither a doctor nor quite exactly mad. Ikem once described him as an aborted poet which I think is as close as anyone has got to explaining the phenomenon that is John Kent. And the two of them, poet and aborted poet, get on very well together. MM got on very well too with His Excellency, as everybody knows. It was their friendship which brought him here in the first place, made him hospital administrator and saved him a year ago from sudden deportation.

Elewa's fascination grows as she explores with wide amazed eyes Mad Medico's strange home. I find her freshness quite appealing. Now she nudges Beatrice and points at the legend inscribed in the central wall of the bar above the array of bottles in a semi-literate hand and Beatrice obligingly chuckles with her although she has seen it at least a dozen times. Mad Medico notices the young lady's fascination and explains that he owes the inspiration for that poem to his steward, Sunday.

ALL DE BEER

DEM DRINK FOR HERE

DE MAKE ME FEAR