Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [40]
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 say 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