Chinua Achebe - Anthills of the Savannah

If indeed the inspiration was Sunday's it only goes to prove that birds of the same feather flock together. For Mad Medico has a strange mania for graffiti which was the cause of all the wahalla that would have cost him his job and residence in the country about a year ago had his Excellency and Ikem not gone to his rescue, their one and only joint effort to date. The doctors were ready to cut him up alive and I still can't say that I blame them entirely. Ikem insists that some of them used the occasion to unload themselves of other grievances but I still think the inscriptions were inexcusable and in deplorable taste. Blessed are the poor in heart for they shall see God cannot anywhere in the world pass as a suitable joke to be nailed up in the ward for heart patients, never mind that one stupid defender of MM's said the patients were either too ill or too illiterate and so no one could have been hurt! The thing was in abominable taste. His other inscription outside the men's venereal diseases ward: a huge arrow sitting between two tangential balls and pointing like a crazy road sign towards the entrance and the words TO THE TWIN CITIES OF SODOM AND GONORRHEA was, if such a thing could be conceived, worse.

'How is my wonder boy?' asks MM. 'I never get a chance to see him these days. I suppose rescuing a bungling old fool from deportation must take its toll on the hardiest of friendships. Oh well. How's he?'

'He is flourishing,' I said. 'Last Friday afternoon he placed the entire cabinet on one hour's detention.'

'He did? How boring,' said Mad Medico. 'You know something, Dick, the most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable and… just plain uninteresting.' He spoke more to his guest from England than to us. 'I told you this boy was such a charmer when I first met him. I'd never seen anyone so human, so cultured.' Dick nods disinterestedly. He has scarcely said a dozen words all afternoon. He drinks gin and lime as though it were Alka Seltzer. But in contrast to his dark mood his complexion is bright, almost girlish, unlike Mad Medico's excessively coarse tan. It was Mad Medico himself who first drew our attention to this when he introduced Dick to us. 'A white man in the tropics', he had said, 'needs occasionally to see someone fresh from his tribe to remind him that his colour is perhaps not as wrong, and patchy as it may seem.'

Dick is now speaking in his lugubrious way. He is sitting on the far end of the three-sided bar across from me. Ikem and the two girls are between us on the forward and longer section of the counter facing Mad Medico, our bartender in the pit. Dick is saying that Acton's corruption was probably intended to encompass dehumourization if such a word exists.

'It doesn't but certainly should,' says Mad Medico offhandedly. 'What did you do?' he asks me.

'What?'

'You said you were all detained.'

'Oh, that. No, we didn't do anything. That was the trouble. A delegation arrived at the Presidential Palace from Abazon — you know the drought place — and none of us knew they were coming. Naughty, isn't it? So His Excellency gets mad at us.'

'That's beautiful,' says Mad Medico, and then turning to Dick he plays the knowing Old Coaster to a ruddy newcomer: 'Abazon is in the north-west and has had no rain for a year. So the poor devils up there send a delegation to ask His Excellency to give them rain.' He then turns to me for confirmation. 'That's about the size of it?'

'More or less,' replies Ikem before I can say anything.

'That's marvellous,' says Dick brightening up. 'A kind of native Henderson. Absolutely fascinating. And what did he do?'

'He locks these fellows up — not the delegation, mind you, but his own cabinet… That must have been the original meaning of cabinet. People you put away in a wooden locker, ha ha ha! You had such a winner and you didn't put it in your rag the very next morning, Ikem. I'm surprised at you.'

'NTBB' replies Ikem. 'Not To Be Broadcast,' he adds dispelling the puzzlement in a few faces. The girls and Mad Medico laugh. Dick still looks puzzled.

'I don't see the connection,' he says.

'Between what?'

'The delegation from this desert place and the cabinet.'

I am going to explain again but Mad Medico has a better explanation and drowns me out.

'That's a Britisher for you, Chris. He is looking for connections. There aren't any, young man. This is negritude country, not Devonshire.'

'Oh, I wouldn't go quite that far,' I say. 'We are no more illogical in these parts than any other people, yourselves included.' There is perhaps more shrillness in my voice than is required.

'Come! Come!' says Dick in a most offensively patronizing tone. 'John is only joking.'

'You see what I mean,' says Mad Medico before I can claim to be joking too. 'No sense of humour left. None whatsoever. They are all so stiff and damned patriotic, so quick to take offence. You can't make a joke here if you are white. You should have heard the names they called me because I was so naive as to try to cheer up some dreary wards in their blasted hospital. Imperialist! White racist! Red Neck! The best though was Negrophobist. Do you know that one? I didn't. Negrophobist. Apparently the opposite of nigger-lover.'

'Let's face it, MM,' (I am now really irritated) 'would you have put up those jokes of yours in an English hospital?'

'Of course I wouldn't. Never said I would. But the English are not supposed to have a sense of humour to begin with. And this is not England, is it? Look outside. What do you see? Sunshine! Life! Vitality. It says to you: Come out and play. Make love! Live! And these dusky imitators of petit bourgeois Europe corrupted at Sandhurst and London School of Economics expect me to come here and walk about in a bowler hat and rolled umbrella like a fucking banker on Cheapside. Christ!'

We all laugh and applaud the brief oration. Except Dick. He is watching intently as Mad Medico perspiring refreshes his glass with campari and soda, drops in two ice cubes and licks his fingers.

Dick, it turns out, is the founding editor of a new poetry magazine in Soho called Reject . Prompted by Mad Medico he tells the story, at first reluctantly and in instalments of one sentence or two a piece.

'How did it begin? I am sure Ikem will be interested to hear.'

'Oh, simply by placing advertisements in well-known literary journals calling for manuscripts rejected by other poetry magazines. Simple.'

'That was three years ago?'

'Well, almost four.'

'And it caught on?'

'Our success was immediate and total.'

From now something like animation begins to enter his voice. The expression on his face changes too. At first it looks like a sneer but is presumably his own way of pride. He is now more open-handed with information. 'In under two years we exploded the pretensions of the poetry establishment and their stuffy party organs. It was the most significant development in British poetry since the war.'

The group gradually splits in two: Ikem and the editor at one end of the bar with Elewa sticking to them, understanding little; and Mad Medico joining Beatrice and me.

'I am sorry to tell you this,' MM says to Beatrice, 'but you waited five years too late to meet Chris. He and Sam were much nicer people then.'

'Who wasn't? But five years ago BB was below the legal age and would have been of limited interest to me.'

'I beg your pardon,' she says.

'Really, they were such fun then, he and Sam,' says MM almost to himself. He stirs the tiny iceberg floating in his Scotch with his index finger. A touch of genuine wistfulness has come into his voice,. And his eyes.

'You know, MM,' I say, 'you are the only person in this country — perhaps in the whole wide world who calls him Sam still.'