Anthills of the Savannah

ONE

First Witness — Christopher Oriko

'You're wasting everybody's time, Mr. Commissioner for Information. I will not go to Abazon. Finish! Kabisa! Any other business?'

'As Your Excellency wishes. But…'

'But me no buts, Mr. Oriko! The matter is closed, I said. How many times, for God's sake, am I expected to repeat it? Why do you find it so difficult to swallow my ruling. On anything?'

'I am sorry, Your Excellency. But I have no difficulty swallowing and digesting your rulings.'

For a full minute or so the fury of his eyes lay on me. Briefly our eyes had been locked in combat. Then I had lowered mine to the shiny table-top in ceremonial capitulation. Long silence. But he was not appeased. Rather he was making the silence itself grow rapidly into its own kind of contest, like the eyewink duel of children. I conceded victory there as well. Without raising my eyes I said again: 'I am very sorry, Your Excellency.' A year ago I would never have said it again that second time — without doing grave violence to myself. Now I did it like a casual favour to him. It meant nothing at all to me — no inconvenience whatever — and yet everything to him.

I have thought of all this as a game that began innocently enough and then went suddenly strange and poisonous. But I may prove to be too sanguine even in that. For, if I am right, then looking back on the last two years it should be possible to point to a specific and decisive event and say: it was at such and such a point that everything went wrong and the rules were suspended. But I have not found such a moment or such a cause although I have sought hard and long for it. And so it begins to seem to me that this thing probably never was a game, that the present was there from the very beginning only I was too blind or too busy to notice. But the real question which I have often asked myself is why then do I go on with it now that I can see. I don't know. Simple inertia, maybe. Or perhaps sheer curiosity: to see where it will all… well, end. I am not thinking so much about him as about my colleagues, eleven intelligent, educated men who let this happen to them, who actually went out of their way to invite it, and who even at this hour have seen and learnt nothing, the cream of our society and the hope of the black race. I suppose it is for them that I am still at this silly observation post making farcical entries in the crazy log-book of this our ship of state. Disenchantment with them turned long ago into detached clinical interest.

I find their actions not merely bearable now but actually interesting, even exciting. Quite amazing! And to think that I personally was responsible for recommending nearly half of them for appointment!

And of course, complete honesty demands that I mention one last factor in my continued stay, a fact of which I'm somewhat ashamed, namely that I couldn't be writing this if I didn't hang around to observe it all. And no one else would.

I could read in the silence of their minds, as we sat stiffly around the mahogany table, words like: Well, this is going to be another of those days. Meaning a bad day. Days are good or bad for us now according to how His Excellency gets out of bed in the morning. On a bad day, such as this one had suddenly become after many propitious auguries, there is nothing for it but to lie close to your hole, ready to scramble in. And particularly to keep your mouth shut, for nothing is safe, not even the flattery we have become such experts in disguising as debate.

On my right sat the Honourable Commissioner for Education. He is by far the most frightened of the lot. As soon as he had sniffed peril in the air he had begun to disappear into his hole, as some animals and insects do, backwards. Instinctively he had gathered his papers together and was in the very act of lifting the file-cover over them and dragging them into his hole after him when his entire body suddenly went rigid. Stronger alarms from deeper recesses of instinct may have alerted him to the similarity between his impending act and a slamming of the door in the face of His Excellency. A fantastic thing happened then. He drops the file-cover in such panic that everyone now turns to him and sees him perform the strangest act of all: the scattering again of his Council Papers in panic atonement and restitution for the sacrilege he has come so close to committing. Inadvertently. Then he glances round the table until his eyes meet His Excellency's and fall dead on the mahogany. The silence had not been broken since my second apology. I was quite certain that the poor fellow (never a strong one for originality) was getting ready to speak my very words, strictly in the same sequence. I swear it. He had drawn his upper arms tight to his sides as though to diminish his bulk; and clasped his hands before him like a supplicant.

But His Excellency speaks instead. And not even to him the latest offender but still to me. And he is almost friendly and conciliatory, the amazing man. In that instant the day changes. The fiery sun retires temporarily behind a cloud; we are reprieved and immediately celebrating. I can hear in advance the many compliments we will pay him as soon as his back is turned: that the trouble with His Excellency is that he can never hurt a man and go to sleep over it.

That's one refinement, by the way, we've not yet lost: we do wait for his back to be turned. And some will add: That's a pity because what this country really needs is a ruthless dictator. At least for five good years. And we will all laugh in loud excess because we know — bless our dear hearts — that we shall never be favoured with such an undeserved blessing as a ruthless dictator

'Do you realize what you are asking me to do, Chris?' he said. I say nothing, make no motion, not even of the head. At these moments my head assumes the gravity of granite and though my thinking might remain perfectly clear and logical it seems to emanate from afar taking in these happenings through a telescope. I note for what it's worth that he has dropped the icy distancing of Mister Commissioner and Mister Oriko. But I no longer allow such niceties to distract me. He misread my quietude I think as either agreement or disagreement. It was neither. Pure, unadulterated disinterest.

'You are telling me to insult the intelligence of these people,' he says, his tone mollified and rather superior. I shake my head then, slowly. 'Yes, that's precisely what you are telling me to do,' he says spiritedly, spurred to battle by my faint resurgent opposition. 'These people believe in rain-makers and so let's go ahead and exploit their ignorance for cheap popularity. That's exactly what you are telling me to do, Chris. Well I can't do it. You all seem to forget that I am still a soldier, not a politician.'

He is in mufti as he now tends to be more and more within the precincts of the Presidential Palace: a white danshiki tastefully embroidered in gold, and its matching trousers. By contrast many of my colleagues especially the crew from the Universities aspire to the military look. Professor Okong wears nothing but khaki safari suits complete with epaulettes. It is amazing how the intellectual envies the man of action.

I think His Excellency noticed the faint smile brought to my face by that reminder that he was still a soldier; he has such a knack for reading faces. I could see him hesitate ever so briefly between taking me up on that smile and ignoring it. What he ended up doing was neither of those but something really quite proficient. Fixing his gaze on me he yet managed at the same time to convey by his voice that I was excluded from what he was now saying; that his words were too precious to waste on professional dissidents.

'Soldiers are plain and blunt,' he says defiantly. 'When we turn affairs of state back to you and return to barracks that will be the time to resume your civilian tricks. Have a little patience.'

At this point he is boldly interrupted by the Commissioner for Justice and Attorney-General and then by everybody else with an assortment of protests. Actually it is His Excellency's well-chosen words that signalled the brave interruption, for despite the vigour in his voice the words themselves had sounded the All Clear and told us it was all right now to commence our protestations. So we began to crawl out into the open again. In his precise manner the Attorney-General says: 'Your Excellency, let us not flaunt the wishes of the people.'

'Flout, you mean,' I said.

'The people?' asked His Excellency, ignoring my piece of pedantry.

'Yes, Your Excellency,' replied the Attorney-General boldly. 'The people have spoken. Their desire is manifest. You are condemned to serve them for life.' Loud applause and shouts of 'Hear! Hear!' Many voices in contest for the floor.

'I am no lawyer,' says His Excellency, his slightly raised tone breaking up a hand to hand tussle among the voices, 'only a simple soldier. But a soldier must keep his word.'

'But you, I beg pardon, I mean Your Excellency, cannot break a word you never even said. The nonsense about one hundred per cent was only the machination of a newspaper editor who in my judgement is a self-seeking saboteur.'

'No obligation, Your Excellency, to keep faith with heretics,' boomed the Reverend Professor Okong's voice.

'On point of order, Your Excellency.' He glares at me now, and then nods to the Attorney-General, who had been interrupted by Okong and myself, to continue.

'Your Excellency, three provinces out of four is a majority anywhere.' More applause.

'Your Excellency I wish to dissociate myself from the Attorney-General's reference to a saboteur and to appeal to my colleagues not to make such statements against public servants who are not present to defend themselves.' I liked the look of terror on my colleagues' faces when I used the word dissociate and the relaxation that followed when they realized that I was not saying what they feared I was saying. Even His Excellency was thrown off his poise momentarily. But, unlike the rest, knowing that he has been teased does not amuse him or offer him relief; rather it fills him with anger. He swings his head sharply to his right where the Chief Secretary sits on the edge of his chair.

'Any other business?' The way he says it this time it no longer is an idle formula. It had the ring of a rebuke: something like How many times do you want me to ask this question?

This unexpected convergence of the crisis on his person threw the Chief Secretary into utter confusion and inelegance of speech.

'Oh no sir. Nothing at all, sir. Your Excellency.' And then he looks across the table and our eyes meet. I don't like to take credit for this kind of thing but I think that the derisive smile on my face at that moment may have turned the bureaucrat right about. Perhaps he saw in my face a foreshadowing of peer taunts and ridicule lying in ambush for him beyond the massive doors of this citadel. He is very sensitive about accusations of boot-licking especially when they come from me because I think he has a lot of respect for me. And in a way I don't dislike him, either. He is after all, unlike the rest of us, a career civil servant who would have served a civilian president… or indeed the British raj… as well as he now serves His present Excellency. But whatever it was that did it he now shows totally untypical spirit that for him almost borders on recklessness. He picks up his fallen words again: 'But Your Excellency, if I may — erm — crave your indulgence — erm — Your Excellency's indulgence — and — erm — put in a word for the Honourable Commissioner.'

'Which Honourable Commissioner? There are twelve of them, you know.' This would have excited laughter at other times, but something totally new is happening now and we are all too amazed.

'Your Excellency I mean the Honourable Commissioner for Information.' There is a long and baffled silence. Then His Excellency who, I should admit, is extremely good at such times says:

'He doesn't need a word from you. Remember, he owns all the words in this country — newspapers, radio and television stations…'

The peals of laughter that broke out engulfed everybody for minutes and put us all at ease again. Colleagues close enough were laughing and slapping my back. Others beamed their goodwill across.

'The Honourable Commissioner for Words,' the Attorney-General manages through his laughter. 'That's a good one. By God that's a good one.' He is dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief still neatly folded.

'Opposed! It sounds too much like me,' protested the Commissioner for Works.

'That's true,' says the Attorney-General, pausing in his laughter to reflect. 'Commissioner for Words and Commissioner for Works. There's a point there.'

'Theologically speaking there is a fundamental distinction.' This is Professor Okong in his deep pulpit voice.

'Ah, Professor done come-o,' says the Commissioner for Education. We were all so merry. If the meeting ended now we would go home happy — the homely ones among us entitled to answer their wives with a smile should they ask what kind of day they'd had. But His Excellency wasn't done with us yet, alas!

'What were you going to say for the Commissioner of Information, anyway?'

'Your Excellency, it is — erm — about this visit to Abazon.'

'In that case the meeting stands adjourned.' He gets up abruptly. So abruptly that the noise we make scrambling to our feet would have befitted a knee-sore congregation rising rowdily from the prayers of a garrulous priest.

His Excellency sits down again and leans back calmly on his swivel chair in order to search under the table for the court shoes he always kicks off at the beginning of our meetings and which the Chief Secretary as always and quite unobtrusively arranges side by side with movements of his own feet to save His Excellency the trouble of prolonged searching at the end of the meeting. If His Excellency is aware of this little service he never acknowledges it, but takes it for granted like the attention of the invisible bell-boy who shines your shoes overnight in an expensive hotel. With consummate deliberation he looks down to the floor and slips in his right foot. He looks on the other side and slips in his left. And then discarding altogether the sprightliness of his first rising he now heaves himself slowly up by the leverage of his hands on the heavy arms of his chair. And the amazing thing is that this lumbering slowness and the former alacrity seem equally to become him.

We all stand stock-still. The only noise in the room comes from his own movements and the continuous whirring of the air-conditioners which have risen to attention in the silence of a deferential Cabinet waiting with bated breath on the Chief to become shod again and, in his good time, withdraw into the seclusion of his adjoining private enclosure.

Sometimes he would say Good afternoon, gentlemen on taking leave of us. Today, naturally, he said nothing. As he left his seat an orderly gathered up his papers quickly and followed him out. Another orderly, more stern-faced, opened the heavy doors of carved panels, stood aside and gave a long, hand-quivering salute.

'He is not in a good mood today,' says the Chief Secretary, breaking the freeze. 'We'll bring it up again next Thursday, Chris. Don't worry.'

His Excellency is probably meant to overhear this and I believe he does. I could see a smile or the radiance of a smile from the back of his head like the faint memory of light at the edges of an eclipse.

In the final stages of His Excellency's retiring, the silence in the Council Chamber seemed to be undergoing a subtle change. Something indeterminate had entered it and was building up slowly within its ambience. At first I thought the air-conditioners had become just fractionally louder which would be perfectly consistent with the generating vagaries of the National Electric Power Authority. Then the Chief Secretary's observation and the flurry of conversation it started about His Excellency's changing moods kept us from noticing the sound for a while. The Attorney-General came over to my seat and clapped me on the shoulder.

'What's the matter with you, Chris? Why are you so tense these days? Relax, man, relax; the world isn't coming to an end, you know.'

I was angrily but silently rebuffing his peace overtures when, as though on a signal, everyone in the room stopped talking. Then we all turned to the east window.

'A storm?' someone asks.

The low hibiscus hedge outside the window and its many brilliant red bells stood still and unruffled. Beyond the hedge the courtyard with its concrete slabs and neatly manicured bahama grass at the interstices showed no flying leaves or dust. Beyond the courtyard another stretch of the green and red hedge stood guard against the one-story east wing of the Presidential Palace. Over and beyond the roof the tops of palm-trees at the waterfront swayed with the same lazy ease they display to gentle ocean winds. It was no ordinary storm.

The Chief Secretary whose presence of mind is only inhibited by the presence of His Excellency moves over to the sill, unhooks a latch and pushes back a glass window. And the world surges into the alien climate of the Council Chamber on a violent wave of heat and the sounds of a chanting multitude. And His Excellency rushes back into the room at the same time leaving the huge doors swinging.

'What is going on?' he demands, frantically.

'I shall go and see, Your Excellency,' says the Inspector-General of Police, picking up his peaked cap from the table, putting it on his head and then his baton under his arm and saluting at attention.

'Look at him! Just look at him,' sneers His Excellency. 'Gentlemen, this is my Chief of Police. He stands here gossiping while hoodlums storm the Presidential Palace. And he has no clue what is going on. Sit down! Inspector-General of Police!'

He turns to me. 'Do you know anything about this?'

'I am sorry I don't, Your Excellency.'

'Beautiful. Just beautiful. Now can anyone here tell me anything about that crowd screaming out there?' He looks at each of us in turn. No one stirs or opens his mouth. 'That's what I mean when I say that I have no Executive Council. Can you see what I mean now, all of you? Take your seats, gentlemen, and stay there!' He rushes out again.

At the door he is saluted again by the orderly of the quivering hands. Perhaps it is the way the fellow closes those heavy doors now like a gaoler or perhaps some other subtle movement or gesture with the sub-machine-gun in his left hand that drew from the Attorney-General a deep forlorn groan: 'Oh my God!' I put on a broad smile and flash it in his face. He backs away from me as from a violent lunatic.

Very few words are spoken in the next half hour. When the doors swing open again, an orderly announces: Professor Okong Wanted by His Excellency!

'I go to prepare a place for you, gentlemen… But rest assured I will keep the most comfortable cell for myself.' He went out laughing. I too began to laugh quite ostentatiously. Then I said to my colleagues: 'That is a man after my heart. A man who will not piss in his trousers at the first sound of danger.' And I went to the furthest window and stood there alone gazing outwards.

Professor Reginald Okong, though a buffoon, is a fighter of sorts and totally self-made. Unfortunately he has no sense of political morality which is a double tragedy for a man who began his career as an American Baptist minister and later became Professor of Political Science at our university. Perhaps he has more responsibility than any other single individual except myself for the remarkable metamorphosis of His Excellency. But, perhaps like me he meant well, neither of us having been present before at the birth and grooming of a baby monster.

As a bright pupil-teacher in lower primary school Reginald Okong had attracted the attention of American Baptist missionaries from Ohio who were engaged in belated but obdurate evangelism in his district. They saw a great future for him and ordained him at the age of 26. In their Guinness Book of Records mentality they often called him the youngest native American Baptist minister in the world. Native American? Good heavens no! Native African. But, while they were conscientiously grooming Okong slowly but surely into the future head of their local church in say twenty or thirty years, the young Reverend, bright, ambitious and in a great hurry was working secretly on schemes of his own, one of which was to take him away altogether from the missionary vineyard to the secular campuses of a southern Black college in the United States of America itself to the dismay of his Ohio patrons who did not stop at accusations of ingratitude but mounted a determined campaign with US Immigration aimed at getting him deported. But he too was tough and overcame all his difficulties. Augmenting his slender resources by preaching and wrestling he graduated in record time by passing off his Grade Three Teachers' Certificate as the equivalent of two years of Junior College. Four years later he was back home with a Ph.D. in his bag, and went to teach at the university.

I was editor of the National Gazette at the time and he approached me with a proposal for a weekend current affairs column. I was mildly enthusiastic and although I was aware of the reservations some of his academic colleagues often expressed about his scholarship I proceeded to build him up as a leading African political scientist, as editors often do thinking they do it for the sake of their paper but actually end up fostering a freak baby. But I must say Okong was a perfect contributor in meeting deadlines and that kind of thing. And his column, 'String Along with Reggie Okong', soon became very popular indeed. No one pretended that he dispensed any spectacular insights, wisdom or originality but his ability to turn a phrase in a way to delight our ordinary readers was remarkable. He was full of cliché, but then a cliché is not a cliché if you have never heard it before; and our ordinary reader clearly had not and so was ready to greet each one with the same ecstasy it must have produced when it was first coined. For Cliché is but pauperized Ecstasy.

Think of the very first time someone got up and said: 'We must not be lulled into a false sense of security.' He must have got his audience humming. It was like that with Okong; he was a smash hit! My friend, Ikem Osodi, was always at me for running that column. He said Professor Okong deserved to be hanged and quartered for phrase-mongering and other counterfeit offences. But Ikem is a literary artist, and the Gazette was not there to satisfy the likes of him; not even now that he sits in the editorial chair! A fact he is yet to learn.

Naturally Okong never upset the politicians; he kept their constituency amused. I didn't mind, either. I had enough contributors like Ikem to do all the upsetting that was needed and a lot that wasn't. But on the very next day after the politicians were overthrown Okong metamorphosed into a brilliant analyst of their many excesses. I thought he had finally overreached himself changing his tune so abruptly; but not so my readers, judging by their ecstatic letters. Apparently he had scored another hit by describing the overthrow of the civilian regime as 'a historic fall from grace to grass!' After that I doffed my cap to him. And when His Excellency asked me to suggest half-a-dozen names for his Cabinet Professor Okong was top of my list.

This calls for some explanation and justification. His Excellency came to power without any preparation for political leadership — a fact which he being a very intelligent person knew perfectly well and which, furthermore, should not have surprised anyone. Sandhurst after all did not set about training officers to take over Her Majesty's throne but rather in the high tradition of proud aloofness from politics and public affairs. Therefore when our civilian politicians finally got what they had coming to them and landed unloved and unmourned on the rubbish heap and the young Army Commander was invited by the even younger coup-makers to become His Excellency the Head of State he had pretty few ideas about what to do. And so, like an intelligent man, he called his friends together and said: 'What shall I do?'

I had known him then for close on twenty-five years, from that day long ago when we first met as new boys of thirteen or fourteen at Lord Lugard College. And so I found myself advising 'a whole Head of State' who was, in addition, quite frankly terrified of his new job. This is something I have never been quite able to figure out: why the military armed to the teeth as they are can find unarmed civilians such a threat. For His Excellency, it was only a passing phase, though. He soon mastered his fear, although from time to time memories of it would seem to return to torment him. I can see no other explanation for his quite irrational and excessive fear of demonstrations, for example. Even pathetically peaceful, obsequious demonstrations.

In his first days of power his constant nightmare was of the people falling into disaffection and erupting into ugly demonstrations all over the place, and he drove himself crazy worrying how to prevent it. I had no clear idea myself. But I imagined that a person like Professor Okong without having any clearer ideas than either of us would be helpful in putting whatever came into our heads into popular diction and currency. And so he was number one on my list and His Excellency appointed him Commissioner for Home Affairs. He had his day and then went into partial eclipse. But I hardly think he is due for prison, yet.