Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [3]
“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