Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [0]
The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories
Things Fall Apart
No Longer at Ease
Chike and the River
A Man of the People
Arrow of God
Girls at War and Other Stories
Beware Soul Brother
Morning Yet on Creation Day
The Trouble with Nigeria
The Flute
The Drum
Hopes and Impediments
Home and Exile
With John Iroaganachi
How the Leopard Got His Claws
With Others
Winds of Change: Modern Short Stories from Black Africa
With C. L. Innes (Eds)
African Short Stories
With Robert Lyons
Another Africa
1
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