Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [31]
“Do you mean Ikem is jealous of you two?”
“Yes, why not? But I resent him just as much. Perhaps more, for his freedom.”
“I don’t understand you people.”
“Very simple really. It goes back, you see, to our first days at Lord Lugard College. Ikem was the brightest in the class—first position every term for six years. Can you beat that? Sam was the social paragon… He was the all-rounder—good student, captain of the Cricket Team, Victor Ludorum in athletics and, in our last year, School Captain. And girls worshipped at his feet from every Girls’ School in the province. But strangely enough there was a kind of spiritual purity about Sam in those days despite his great weakness for girls. Maybe not purity but he seemed so perfect and so unreal, in a way.”
“Too much success.”
“Perhaps. Too much success. He never failed once in anything. Had the magic touch. And that’s always deadly in the long run. He is paying the bills now, I think. And if we are not lucky we shall all pay dearly. How I wish he had gone to Medical School which had been his first ambition. But he fell instead under the spell of our English headmaster who fought the Italians in Abyssinia in 1941 and had a sword from an Ethiopian prince to prove it. So Sam enrolled in the first school cadet corps in the country and was on his way to Sandhurst.”
“I asked you about Ikem not His Excellency,” says BB, a mischievous twinkle in her eyes and snuggling closer to me.
“It’s your fault. You are such a good listener.”
“And you haven’t said anything about yourself,” she adds, ignoring my backhanded compliment.
“We are all connected. You cannot tell the story of any of us without implicating the others. Ikem may resent me but he probably resents Sam even more and Sam resents both of us most vehemently. We are too close together, I think. Lord Lugard College trained her boys to be lonely leaders in separate remote places, not cooped up together in one crummy family business.”
“OK, Ikem was the intellectual, Sam the socialite, what about you?”
“I have always been in the middle. Neither as bright as Ikem and not such a social success as Sam. I have always been the lucky one, in a way. There was a song we sang as children, do you know it? The one in front spots evil spirits, the one at the rear has twisted hands, the one in the middle is the child of luck. Did you sing it? I was the child of luck.”
“Can I tell you something? You promise not to be angry? Promise? Well, you fellows, all three of you, are incredibly conceited. The story of this country, as far as you are concerned, is the story of the three of you… But please go on.”
“Actually you are quite right. That’s what I’ve just said myself. We tend sometimes to forget that our story is only one of twenty million stories—one tiny synoptic account. But that’s the only one I know and you are such a sweet listener as I said.”
“A sweetener? A sweetener has its reasons… By the way do you keep a detailed diary of what is happening day to day? I think you should. But please go on.”
“I do keep a journal. But, no let’s change the subject. Tell me something for a change.”
“Today is your day… Why should His Excellency resent the two of you? He has all the success.” I sense she merely wants me to keep talking. About anything. She finds my voice soothing, perhaps. At the same time she has such a quick mind and such a knack for asking inconvenient questions, like a precocious child.
“Why should he resent us? Why indeed? He has all the success. From school to Sandhurst; the first African Second Lieutenant in the Army; ADC to the Governor-General; Royal Equerry during the Queen’s visit; Officer Commanding at Independence; Colonel at the time of the coup; General and His Excellency, the Head of State, after. Why indeed should he resent any mortal? Now that you ask I confess I don’t know. He wasn’t like that right away. In fact he kept very close to us in the first six months or so.