Anthills of the Savannah

SEVEN

For weeks and months after I had definitely taken on the challenge of bringing together as many broken pieces of this tragic history as I could lay my hands on I still could not find a way to begin. Anything I tried to put down sounded wrong — either too abrupt, too indelicate or too obvious — to my middle ear.

So I kept circling round and round. Until last Saturday; after my weekly ordeal at the market. Hot and grimy from hours of haggling in the sun and now home and fighting for breath after the steep climb with the grocery up the dizzying circular staircase to the kitchen table I dumped the bags and wraps there in transit as it were to get a cold drink, and never went back. Quite extraordinary. Normally I am very particular about the meat especially which I must wash and boil right away or wash with a dash of Milton solution and put in the freezer. But, after gulping down half of the tall glass of lemonade, I carried the rest under a strange propulsion to the spare bedroom which I had turned into a kind of study and began scribbling and went on right into the night. I was vaguely aware of Agatha's voice saying good evening at the door at some point but took no special interest in it.

The single idea or power or whatever that flashed through my mind that afternoon as soon as I got out of the traffic into the open stretch between the Secretariat Buildings and the GRA had seized me by the forelock! But although it got me seated it neglected to dictate the words to me because on Monday I had to begin all over again having thrown away all that labour of Saturday and Sunday. But the elation was undiminished. I had started. The discarded pages and the nearly spoilt meat seemed like a necessary ritual or a sacrifice to whoever had to be appeased for this audacity of rushing in where sensible angels would fear to tread, or rather for pulling up one of those spears thrust into the ground by the men in the hour of their defeat and left there in the circle of their last dance together.

My housegirl, Agatha, goes to one of these new rapturous churches with which Bassa is infested nowadays. Her sect is called YESMI, acronym for Yahwe Evangelical Sabbath Mission Inc., and apparently forbids her from as much as striking a match on Saturdays to light a stove. She leaves the house before I am out of bed and stays away all day. Around five she returns looking like a wilted cocoyam leaf and eats bread and cold stew or any odd scrap of food she can lay her hands on or even plain garri soaked in iced water with eight lumps of sugar and a whole tin of milk. I discovered, though, that if I struck the match and lit the stove and warmed up the food she would not be prohibited from eating it. But I made it clear to her from the start that I wasn't ready yet to wash and wipe the feet of my paid help. It is quite enough that I have to do the weekly grocery at the Gelegele market while she is clapping hands and rolling eyes and hips at some hairy-chested prophet in white robes and shower cap.

But something had happened not so long ago to change our lives and, on this particular Saturday, Agatha must have been so overcome by the sheer power of something else quite extraordinary happening in the house that she set the law of the Sabbath aside and put away the meat, already a little high, and the wilting vegetables. Or perhaps, being no stranger herself to possession, she could recognize it quite quickly in another!

My name is Beatrice, but most of my friends call me either B or BB. And my enemies — that's one lesson I've learnt from the still unbelievable violences we went through — that even little people like me could also rate enemies. I had naively assumed that enemies were the privilege of the great. But no. Here was I keeping quite a few hands busy fashioning barbed and poisoned aliases for me as readily as they were renaming the heroes fallen, as our half-literate journalists say, from grace to grass.

It was quite a revelation, and quite frankly it bothered me for a while, especially the crude insinuations of what our men sniggeringly call bottom-power. But then I said to myself, what do I care really, why should I ask the world to interrupt its business for no other reason than to find out what one insignificant female did or did not do in a calamity that consumed so many and so much? A little matter of personal pride for me perhaps but so what?

Still there is one account of me it seems I will never get used to, which can still bring tears to my eyes. Ambitious. Me ambitious! How? And it is this truly unjust presentation that's forcing me to expose my life on these pages to see if perhaps there are aspects of me I had successfully concealed even from myself. Pretentious journalists hoping to catch the attention of the new military rulers created an image of me as 'the latter-day Madame Pompadour' who manipulated generals and patronized writers.

Throughout my life I have never sought attention; not even as a child. I can see, looking back at my earliest memories, a little girl completely wrapped up in her own little world — a world contained, like Russian dolls, inside the close-fitting world of our mission-house, itself enclosed snugly within the world of the Anglican Church compound. It was a remarkable place. Apart from the church building itself there were the two school buildings, the parsonage, the catechist's house, the long-house in which the school teachers had, according to their rank, a shared room, a full room or even two rooms. Male teachers, that is. The female teachers lived in the smallest building of all, a three-room thatched house set, for protection I suppose, between the pastor and the catechist. In the farthest corner of the compound was the churchyard, a little overgrown, where one of my sisters, Emily lay buried.

World inside a world inside a world, without end. Uwa-t'uwa in our language. As a child how I thrilled to that strange sound with its capacity for infinite replication till it becomes the moan of the rain in the ear as it opened and closed, opened and closed. Uwa t'uwa t'uwa t'uwa; Uwa t'uwa.

Uwa-t'uwa was a building-block of my many solitary games. I could make and mould all kinds of thoughts with it. I could even rock it from side to side like my wooden baby with the chipped ear.

My friendship with the strange words began no doubt quite early when I first recognized it and welcomed it at the end of my father's family prayers to begin or end the day — prayers so long that I would float in and out of sleep and sometimes keel over and fall on my side. Uwa-t'uwa was always the end of the ordeal and we all, would shout: Amen! Good-morning, sah! good morning mah! or good night for evening prayers.

One evening, some devil seized hold of me as the words uwa t'uwa were pronounced and jolted me into wakefulness. Without any premeditation whatsoever I promptly raised a childish hymn of thanksgiving: uwa-t'uwa! uwa-t'uwa! uwa-t'uwa! uwa-t'uwa! t'uwa t'uwa! uwa t'uwa!

My sisters' giggles fuelled my reckless chant.

My father sprang to his feet with Amen barely out of his mouth, reached for the cane he always had handy and gave us all a good thrashing. As we cried ourselves to sleep on our separate mats that night my sisters saw fit to promise through their snivelling to deal with me in the morning.

He was a very stern man, my father — as distant from us children as from our poor mother. As I grew older I got to know that his whip was famous not only in our house and in the schoolhouse next door but throughout the diocese. One day the local chief paid him a visit and as they sat in the long outer room we called the piazza eating kolanut with alligator pepper and I was hanging around as I was fond of doing when there was company, the chief was full of praise for my father for the good training he was giving the children of the village through his whip. My father, with a wistful look I had never seen on his face before, was telling the chief of a certain headmaster in 1940 who was praised by some white inspectors who came from England to look at schools in their colonies and found his school the most quiet in West Africa. 'Das right!' said the chief in English.

I remember the incident well because we were doing the map of West Africa in our geography class at the time. So I left my father and his friend and went to my raffia school-bag and pulled out my West African Atlas and was greatly impressed by the size of the territory over which the 1940 headmaster was champion.

There were times I suspected that he may have flogged our poor mother, though I must say in recognition of the awesomeness of the very thought that I never actually saw it happen. None of my sisters had seen it either, or if they had they preferred not to tell me, for they never took me much into confidence. Looking back on it I am sometimes amazed at the near-conspiracy in which they circled me most of the time. I had this strong suspicion nevertheless, which I could neither confirm nor deny because on those occasions my father always took the precaution to lock the door of their room. She would come out afterwards (having unlocked the door, or perhaps he did) wiping her eyes with one corner of her wrapper, too proud or too adult to cry aloud like us. It didn't happen too often, though. But it always made me want to become a sorceress that could say 'Die!' to my father and he would die as in the folk-tale. And then, when he had learnt his lesson, I would bring him back to life and he would never touch his whip again.

And then one day as my mother came out wiping her eyes I rushed to her and hugged her legs but instead of pressing me to herself as I had expected she pushed me away so violently that I hit my head against the wooden mortar. After that I didn't feel any more like telling my father to die. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight at the time but I know I had this strong feeling then — extraordinary, powerful and adult — that my father and my mother had their own world, my three sisters had theirs and I was alone in mine. And it didn't bother me at all then, my aloneness, nor has it done so since.

I didn't realize until much later that my mother bore me a huge grudge because I was a girl — her fifth in a row though one had died — and that when I was born she had so desperately prayed for a boy to give my father. This knowledge came to me by slow stages which I won't go into now. But I must mention that in addition to Beatrice they had given me another name at my baptism, Nwanyibuife — A female is also something. Can you beat that? Even as a child I disliked the name most intensely without being aware of its real meaning. It merely struck me at that point that I knew of nobody else with the name; it seemed fudged! Somehow I disliked it considerably less in its abridged form, Buife. Perhaps it was the nwanyi, the female half of it that I particularly resented. My father was so insistent on it. 'Sit like a female!' or 'Female soldier' which he called me as he lifted me off the ground with his left hand and gave me three stinging smacks on the bottom with his right the day I fell off the cashew tree.

But I didn't set out to write my autobiography and I don't want to do so. Who am I that I should inflict my story on the world? All I'm trying to say really is that as far as I can remember I have always been on my own and never asked to be noticed by anybody. Never! And I don't recall embarking ever on anything that would require me to call on others. Which meant that I never embarked on anything beyond my own puny powers. Which meant finally that I couldn't be ambitious.

I am very, very sensitive about this — I don't mind admitting it.

That I got involved in the lives of the high and mighty was purely accidental and was not due to any scheming on my part. In the first place, they all became high and mighty after I met them; not before.

Chris was not a Commissioner when I met him but a mere editor of the National Gazette. That was way back in civilian days. And if I say that Chris did all the chasing I am not boasting or anything. That was simply how it was. And I wasn't being coy either. It was a matter of experience having taught me in my little lonely world that I had to be wary. Some people even say I am suspicious by nature. Perhaps I am. Being a girl of maybe somewhat above average looks, a good education, a good job you learn quickly enough that you can't open up to every sweet tongue that comes singing at your doorstep. Nothing very original really. Every girl knows that from her mother's breast although thereafter some may choose to be dazzled into forgetfulness for one reason or another. Or else they panic and get stampeded by the thought that time is passing them by. That's when you hear all kinds of nonsense talk from girls: Better to marry a rascal than grow a moustache in your father's compound; better an unhappy marriage than an unhappy spinsterhood; better marry Mr. Wrong in this world than wait for Mr. Right in heaven; all marriage is how-for-do; all men are the same; and a whole baggage of other foolishnesses like that.

I was determined from the very beginning to put my career first and, if need be, last. That every woman wants a man to complete her is a piece of male chauvinist bullshit I had completely rejected before I knew there was anything like Women's Lib. You often hear our people say: But that's something you picked up in England. Absolute rubbish! There was enough male chauvinism in my father's house to last me seven reincarnations!

So when Chris came along I was not about to fly into his arms for the asking, although I decidedly liked him. And strangely enough he himself gave me a very good reason for caution. He was so handsome and so considerate, so unlike all the brash fellows the place was crawling with in the heady prosperity of the oil boom that I decided he simply had to be phoney!

Unreasonable? Perhaps yes. But I can't be blamed for the state of the world. Haven't our people said that a totally reasonable wife is always pregnant? Scepticism is a girl's number six. You can't blame her; she didn't make her world so tough.

One of my girlfriends — a more sensible and attractive person you never saw — except that she committed the crime to be twenty-six and still unmarried; she was taken by her fiancé to meet his people in some backwater village of his when an aunt or something of his made a proverb fully and deliberately to her hearing that if ogili was such a valuable condiment no one would leave it lying around for rats to stumble upon and dig into! Well, you can trust Comfort! The insult didn't bother her half as much as her young man's silence. So she too kept silent until they got back to the city and inside her flat. Then she told him she had always suspected he was something of a rat. I can hear Comfort saying that and throwing him out of the flat! Now she is happily married to a northerner and has two kids.

My experience with Chris was, of course, entirely different. He seemed to understand everything about me without asking a single question. In those first days he would very often startle me with insights about little things like colours or food or behaviour I liked or didn't like and I would ask: But how did you know? And he would smile and say: I am a journalist, remember; it's my business to find out. Just the way he said it would melt any woman.

Emotionally then I had no reservations whatsoever about Chris from the word go. But intellectually I had to call into full play my sense of danger. In a way I felt like two people living inside one skin, not two hostile tenants but two rather friendly people, two people different enough to be interesting to each other without being incompatible.

I recall clearly that the very first time we met the thought that flashed through my mind was to be envious of his wife. And yet it was weeks before I could bring myself to probe delicately about her, not directly through Chris but surreptitiously via a third party, Ikem. But such was the carefully balanced contrariness induced in me by Chris that the news of his wife's nonexistence, though it admittedly gave me a measure of relief, did not bring total satisfaction. There was a small residue of disappointment at the bottom of the cool draught, so to say. Was it the disappointment of the gambler or the born fighter cheated out of the intoxication of contest and chancy victory? Or did the affair lose some of its attraction for me because deep inside I was not unlike the dreadful, cynical aunt in the village who believed that nothing so good could wait this long for me to stumble upon? What an awful thought!

Even when I found myself begin to pick and choose what dress or what make-up to wear whenever I thought I might run into him I simply dismissed it as a little harmless excitement I was entitled to indulge in as long as I remembered to keep a sharp look-out.

It was in a supermarket one Saturday morning, I think, that Ikem gave me an opening to ask about Chris's wife. I don't remember the exact details now but I think it was a vague invitation to go with him, his girlfriend and Chris to some friend of their's birthday party. I said no for one reason or the other but also managed to ask as offhandedly as I could where Chris's wife was anyway; or was he one of those who will pack their wife conveniently away to her mother and the village midwife as soon as she misses her period?

'BB!' he screamed in mock outrage, his large eyes beaming with wicked pleasure. 'Looking at your demure lips…'

'I know, I know. You couldn't tell, could you? Like looking at a king's mouth you couldn't tell, could you?'

'Or looking at a lady's gait, you couldn't tell, could you?'

'Enough!' I said in my own counterfeit outrage, my index finger against my lips. 'All I asked you was where your friend packs his wife.'

'There is no wife, my dear. So you can rest easy.'

'Me! Wetin concern me there.'

'Plenty plenty. I been see am long time, my dear.'

'See what? I beg commot for road,' and I made to push my trolley past him to the cashier but he grabbed my arm and pulled me back and proceeded to give me in loud whispers accompanied by conspiratorial backward glances a long and completely absurd account of all the actions and reactions he had meticulously observed between Chris and me in the last few months which could only have one meaning — his friend, Chris, done catch!

'You de craze well, well… I beg make you commot for road.'

That was the year I got back from England. I had known Ikem for years — right from my London University days. How he did it I can't tell but he became instantly like a brother to me. He had completed his studies two or three years earlier and was just knocking about London doing odd jobs for publishers, reading his poetry at the Africa Centre and such places and writing for Third World journals, before his friends at home finally persuaded him to return and join them in nation-building. 'Such crap!' he would say later in remembrance.

When he finally left for home I was just getting into my degree year at Queen Mary College and we had become very close indeed. There was a short period when the relationship veered and teetered on the brink of romance but we got it back to safety and I went on with Guy, my regular boyfriend and he with his breathless succession of girlfriends.

I have sat and talked and argued with Ikem on more things serious and unserious than I can remember doing with any other living soul. Naturally I think he is a fantastic writer and it has given me such wonderful encouragement to have him praise the odd short story and poem I have scribbled from time to time. I don't even mind too much that his way of praising my style was to call it muscular on one occasion and masculine on another! When I pointed this out to him jokingly as a sure sign of his chauvinism he was at first startled and then he smiled one of those total smiles of his that revealed the innocent child behind the mask of beard and learned fierceness.

In the last couple of years we have argued a lot about what I have called the chink in his armoury of brilliant and original ideas. I tell him he has no clear role for women in his political thinking; and he doesn't seem to be able to understand it. Or didn't until near the end.

'How can you say that BB?' he would cry, almost in despair.

And I understand the meaning of his despair too. For here's a man, who has written a full-length novel and a play on the Women's War of 1929 which stopped the British administration cold in its tracks, being accused of giving no clear political role to women. But the way I see it is that giving women today the same role which traditional society gave them of intervening only when everything else has failed is not enough, you know, like the women in the Sembene film who pick up the spears abandoned by their defeated menfolk. It is not enough that women should be the court of last resort because the last resort is a damn sight too far and too late!

That was about the only serious reservation I had about Ikem's political position. I have to admit that, although he tended to be somewhat cavalier with his girlfriends and has even been called unprincipled by no less a friend than Chris, he did in fact have the most profound respect for three kinds of women: peasants, market women and intellectual women.

He could be considerate to a fault and I have known him to go to great lengths of personal inconvenience to help a lady in distress. I still have goose-flesh just thinking of one bitterly cold winter night he got himself stranded on the last train in London and nearly caught his death on my account.

I had been foolish enough to telephone him after I had suffered one of the most humiliating evenings of my life in the hands of my boyfriend, Guy, at a Nigerian Christmas dance at the St Pancras Town Hall. I wasn't really asking Ikem to set out for my place at that hour but just needed to talk to someone like him, someone different from that noisy, ragtag crowd of illiterate and insensitive young men our country was exporting as plentifully at the time as its crude oil. But apparently I sounded so out of my mind on the telephone that Ikem donned his wool cap and muffler and his coat and headed into the snow and caught the last train in a South London station well after midnight. When he finally made it to my door, after an extended adventure on night buses, it was half-past three in the morning. I felt so bad I didn't need any further comfort for myself. I was ready to start cooking whatever meal would make him warm. Rice? Semolina? Plantain? He shook his head, his lips too frozen to speak. In the end all I could persuade him to take was a cup of coffee without cream or sugar; and he doffed his coat, slumped on the bed-sitter and went to sleep instantly. I stripped my bed of the last blanket and piled it on him.

Of all the absurd things people have found to say about us lately the most ridiculous was to portray Ikem as one of my trio of lovers. Damn it, the fellow was a brother to me!

In the last year I didn't see too much of him — a couple of times at Mad Medico's, a few times at parties and one or two visits to my house. He was never a great one for home visits but every one he made left a lasting impression.

The final one was in August. I remember it was August because he walked into my flat out of a huge and unseasonal tropical storm. The doorbell screeched in the kitchen followed by loud, panic bangs on the front door. I sprang up not to answer it but to bar the way to my maid, Agatha, who had dashed out of the kitchen like a rabbit smoked out of its hole and was making for the front door. No matter how I tried to explain it with details of multiple rape and murder, Agatha remained blissfully impervious to the peril of armed robbers surrounding us. She simply says yesmah and nosemah to everything you tell her and goes right ahead doing whatever she was doing before.

'Go back to the kitchen!' I thundered at her and with the same voice turned to the presence outside my door. I had been feeling somewhat more protected lately since I had all doors and windows in the flat reinforced with iron grills so that even if the fellow outside did manage to knock down the outer wooden door he would still have to face the iron, all of which gave you some time to plan your escape. Even so I stood well away from the front door with one eye on the kitchen exit and the fire-escape beyond it.

'Who is that?' I shouted. Whoever it was didn't seem to hear and continued ringing the alarm and banging on the door. Well, I wasn't going to budge either and continued screaming who? This went on literally for minutes and I was getting scared when he either heard me or else it occurred to him independently to use his voice instead of his fists. And I caught it in one of those brief spells when a storm pauses to take a deep breath. I unchained the iron grill and unlocked the door.

'It wasn't raining in my place,' he shouted sheepishly as he came in. 'I ran full tilt into it just there around the Secretariat. It was literally like barging into a pillar of rain, you know. You could stand there with the forward foot wet and the other dry.'

'Come on in. We'll go hoarse shouting out here.'

He left his dripping umbrella with my potted plants on the landing and followed me into the parlour. Once inside, with door and window-louvres tightly shut, the noise of the rain receded dramatically to a distant background leaving us in muffled cosiness.

'When we were children,' Ikem said as he threw himself into the sofa and began to remove his wet shoes and tuck his socks inside them, 'August used to be a dry month. August Break we called it. The geography textbooks explained it, the farmer in the village expected it. The August Break never failed in those days.'

'Really?'

'What's happened to the days of my youth, BB?'

'Wasted, squandered, Ikem. Lost for ever, I'm afraid.'

'I hoped you would not say that. Not today. Oh, well.'

'What's wrong with today. Your birthday or something?'

'I have no birthdays. There was no registration of births and deaths in my village when I was born. Signed Notary Public.' I laughed and he joined me… 'I wasn't one of your spoilt maternity births. I arrived on banana leaves behind the thatched house, not on white bed sheets… Those are lovely flowers, what are they?'

'I have never known you to notice flowers or women's clothes and rubbish like that before. What's the matter.'

'I'm sorry, BB, that's a lovely dress. And lovely flowers, what are they?'

'Agatha is roasting corn and ube. Would you like some. Or with coconut if you prefer…'

'I prefer both ube and coconut.'

'Glutton!'

'That's right! Terminal stage when it attacks your grammar! You still haven't told me what these flowers are. I may not have noticed flowers before but I do now. It's never too late, is it?'

'No. It's called hydrangea.'

As I went into the kitchen to open the store for Agatha to get a coconut out I kept asking myself what Ikem might be up to. Was it Chris? Had their relationship, dangerously bumpy in recent months, taken a nose-dive now for the crash? Ikem always avoided complaining about Chris to me. Was he going to break his own scrupulous practice for once? When I returned to the parlour he had lifted the vase of flowers to his nose and was sniffing it.

I ate my corn with ube and he his with ube and coconut in alternate mouthfuls. Outside, the storm raged the way I like my storms — far away, its violent thunder and lightning distanced and muted as in a movie. I would have felt completely comfortable if Ikem had not been behaving a little strangely. Let's hope it's the storm, I prayed. Tropical storms can do so many different things to different creatures. That I have known from childhood. My older sister Alice always ran around the yard, if our father happened to be out, singing a childish rain song:

ogwogwo mmili

takumei ayolo!

Finally exhausted she would come indoors shivering, eyes red and popping out, teeth clattering away and make for the kitchen fire. As for me whom she nicknamed salt, or less kindly Miss Goat, on account of my distaste for getting wet, my preference was to roll myself in a mat on the floor and inside my dark, cylindrical capsule play my silent game of modulating the storm's song by pressing my palms against my ears and taking them off, rhythmically. There was for me no greater luxury in those days than to sleep through night-rain on a Friday knowing there was neither school nor church in the morning to worry about.

'When you were little,' I asked Ikem, 'what did you do when it rained like this?'

'But I told you it never rained at all in August. We had a month of dry weather called the August Break.'

'OK! In July then, or September.'

'When I was really little I used to take off my scanty clothes and run into it.'

'Singing ogwogwo mmili takumei ayolo?'

'Did you sing to the rain too?' He fairly jumped with excitement.

'No, but my older sister did.'

'Oh… what did you do?'

'I listened. The rain sang to me.'

'Lucky girl! What did it say, the rain?'

'Uwa t'uwa t'uwa t'uwa; tooo… waaa… tooo… waa

Dooo — daaa… Booo — baaa… Shooo — shaaa…

Cooo — caaa… Looo — laaa… Mooo — maaa…'

'Pooo — paaa,' said Ikem. 'Great song!'

'BB, you may be wondering why I am behaving so strangely today. Well, I've come on a mission the like of which I'd never undertaken before… I've come to thank you for the greatest present one human being can give another. The gift of insight. That's what you gave me and I want to say thank you.'

'Insight? Me? Insight into what?'

'Into the world of women.'

I held back a facetious comment trembling on my lip. Ikem's sudden change and extraordinary manner forbade its utterance. I held back and listened to this strange annunciation.

'You told me a couple of years ago, do you remember, that my thoughts were unclear and reactionary on the role of the modern woman in our society. Do you remember?'

'I do.'

'I resisted your charge…'

'It wasn't a charge.'

'It damn well was! But I resisted. Vehemently. But the amazing thing was that the more I read your charge sheet…'

'Oh my God!'

'… the less impressive my plea became. My suspension from the Gazette has done wonders for me. I have been able to sit and think things through. I now realize you were right and I was wrong.'

'Oh come on, Ikem. You know I detest all born-again people.'

'Don't be facetious!'

'I'm sorry. Go ahead. What happened?'

'Nothing happened. It simply dawned on me two mornings ago that a novelist must listen to his characters who after all are created to wear the shoe and point the writer where it pinches.'

'Now hold it! Are you suggesting I am a character in your novel?'

'BB, you've got to be serious, or I will leave. I mean it. I'm already losing my train of thought.'

'I won't breathe another word. Please go on.'

'One of the things you told me was that my attitude to women was too respectful.'

'I didn't.'

'You bloody well did. And you were damn right. You charged me with assigning to women the role of a fire-brigade after the house has caught fire and been virtually consumed. Your charge has forced me to sit down and contemplate the nature of oppression — how flexible it must learn to be, how many faces it must learn to wear if it is to succeed again and again.'

He dug his hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper and carefully unfolded it on his knee. 'I wrote this strange love-letter last night. May I read it?' I nodded.

'The original oppression of Woman was based on crude denigration. She caused Man to fall. So she became a scapegoat. No, not a scapegoat which might be blameless but a culprit richly deserving of whatever suffering Man chose thereafter to heap on her. That is Woman in the Book of Genesis. Out here, our ancestors, without the benefit of hearing about the Old Testament, made the very same story differing only in local colour. At first the Sky was very close to the Earth. But every evening Woman cut off a piece of the Sky to put in her soup pot or, as in another version, she repeatedly banged the top end of her pestle carelessly against the Sky whenever she pounded the millet or, as in yet another rendering — so prodigious is Man's inventiveness — she wiped her kitchen hands on the Sky's face. Whatever the detail of Woman's provocation, the Sky finally moved away in anger, and God with it.

'Well, that kind of candid chauvinism might be OK for the rugged taste of the Old Testament. The New Testament required a more enlightened, more refined, more loving even, strategy — ostensibly, that is. So the idea came to Man to turn his spouse into the very Mother of God, to pick her up from right under his foot where she'd been since Creation and carry her reverently to a nice, corner pedestal. Up there, her feet completely off the ground she will be just as irrelevant to the practical decisions of running the world as she was in her bad old days. The only difference is that now Man will suffer no guilt feelings; he can sit back and congratulate himself on his generosity and gentlemanliness.

'Meanwhile our ancestors out here, unaware of the New Testament, were working out independently a parallel subterfuge of their own. Nneka, they said. Mother is supreme. Let us keep her in reserve until the ultimate crisis arrives and the waist is broken and hung over the fire, and the palm bears its fruit at the tail of its leaf. Then, as the world crashes around Man's ears, Woman in her supremacy will descend and sweep the shards together.

'Do I make sense?'

'As always. Go on.'

'Thank you, BB. I owe that insight to you. I can't tell you what the new role for Woman will be. I don't know. I should never have presumed to know. You have to tell us. We never asked you before. And perhaps because you've never been asked you may not have thought about it; you may not have the answer handy. But in that case everybody had better know who is now holding up the action.'

'That's very kind of you!'

'That was the first part of this love-letter, the part I owe specifically to you. Here's the rest.

'The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest. But they are not the only ones. There are others — rural peasants in every land, the urban poor in industrialized countries, Black people everywhere including their own continent, ethnic and religious minorities and castes in all countries. The most obvious practical difficulty is the magnitude and heterogeneity of the problem. There is no universal conglomerate of the oppressed. Free people may be alike everywhere in their freedom but the oppressed inhabit each their own peculiar hell. The present orthodoxies of deliverance are futile to the extent that they fail to recognize this. You know my stand on that. Every genuine artist feels it in his bone. The simplistic remedies touted by all manner of salesmen (including some who call themselves artists) will always fail because of man's stubborn antibody called surprise. Man will surprise by his capacity for nobility as well as for villainy. No system can change that. It is built into the core of man's free spirit.

'The sweeping, majestic visions of people rising victorious like a tidal wave against their oppressors and transforming their world with theories and slogans into a new heaven and a new earth of brotherhood, justice and freedom are at best grand illusions. The rising, conquering tide, yes; but the millennium afterwards, no! New oppressors will have been readying themselves secretly in the undertow long before the tidal wave got really going.

'Experience and intelligence warn us that man's progress in freedom will be piecemeal, slow and undramatic. Revolution may be necessary for taking a society out of an intractable stretch of quagmire but it does not confer freedom, and may indeed hinder it.

'Bloody reformist? That's a term of abuse it would be redundant to remind you I have had more than my fair share of invoking against others across the years. But I ask myself: beyond the pleasant glow that javelin of an epithet certainly brings to the heart of the righteous hurler what serious benefit can it offer to the solution of our problems? And I don't see any.

'Reform may be a dirty word then but it begins to look more and more like the most promising route to success in the real world. I limit myself to most promising rather than only for the simple reason that all certitude must now be suspect.

'Society is an extension of the individual. The most we can hope to do with a problematic individual psyche is to re-form it. No responsible psychoanalyst would aim to do more, for to do more, to overthrow the psyche itself, would be to unleash insanity. No. We can only hope to rearrange some details in the periphery of the human personality. Any disturbance of its core is an irresponsible invitation to disaster. Even a one-day-old baby does not make itself available for your root-and-branch psychological engineering, for it comes trailing clouds of immortality. What immortality? Its baggage of irreducible inheritance of genes. That is immortality.

'It has to be the same with society. You re-form it around what it is, its core of reality; not around an intellectual abstraction.

'None of this is a valid excuse for political inactivity or apathy. Indeed to understand it is an absolute necessity for meaningful action, the knowledge of it being the only protective inoculation we can have against false hopes and virulent epidemics of gullibility.

'In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.

'Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.

'I didn't owe this insight to you, BB. I drank it in from my mother's breast. All I've ever needed since was confirmation. "Do I contradict myself?" asked Walt Whitman. "Very well, I contradict myself," he sang defiantly. "I am large, I contain multitudes." Every artist contains multitudes. Graham Greene is a Roman Catholic, a partisan of Rome, if you like. Why then does he write so compulsively about bad, doubtful and doubting priests? Because a genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

'Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion. But it will not be in the complex and paradoxical cavern of Mother Idoto.'

He tossed the handwritten paper across to me, saying 'I must go,' and beginning to put his shoes back on. I stared at the paper, at the writing — elegant but at the same time, immensely powerful. He got up. I got up too and walked up to him. Impulsively he circled me in his embrace. I looked up at him and he began to kiss me. Everything inside me was dissolving; my knees were giving way under me; I was trembling violently and I seemed to be struggling for air.

'I think you better go,' I managed to say. He released me slowly and I sank into a chair.

'Yes, I'd better be going.'

And he was gone, not for now as I and perhaps he too thought, but for ever. The storm had died down without our having been aware of it. All that was left of it now were tired twitches of intermittent lightning and the occasional, satiated hiccup of distant thunder.