Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [67]
11
THE SENSE OF EXHILARATION which had descended on Ikem after the taxi-drivers’ visit stayed with him all afternoon and into the night, a night in which Elewa, touched by the flame of this novel excitement opened to him new reserves of tenderness exceptional even for her. Back now from driving her home he brewed himself a strong cup of black coffee to ward off physical languor from the precincts of his charged and alert mind and sat back to think. In such situations much of his thinking came in strong, even exaggerated, images.
He saw himself as an explorer who has just cleared a cluster of obstacles in an arduous expedition to earn as a result the conviction, more by intuition perhaps than logic, that although the final goal of his search still lies hidden beyond more adventures and dangers, the puzzles just unravelled point unambiguously to inevitable success.
The drivers’ visit was probably not the cause but only the occasion of this sense of thrill and expectancy—a culmination perhaps of several related events beginning with the happenings of last Friday. Or perhaps it merely triggered an awareness going far, far back in his subconscious mind waiting like a dormant seed in the dry season soil for the green-fingered magician, the first rain.
In any event he had always had the necessity in a vague but insistent way, had always felt a yearning without very clear definition, to connect his essence with earth and earth’s people. The problem for him had never been whether it should be done but how to do it with integrity.
At some point he had assumed, quite naively, that public affairs so-called might provide the handle he needed. But his participation in these affairs had yielded him nothing but disenchantment and a final realization of the incongruity of the very term “public” as applied to those affairs shrouded as they are in the mist of unreality and floating above and away from the lives and concerns of ninety-nine percent of the population. Public affairs! They are nothing but the closed transactions of soldiers-turned-politicians, with their cohorts in business and the bureaucracy. Ikem could not even guarantee now that his own limited participation had not been fatally flawed. His most poignant editorials such as his condemnation of the human blood sport called public execution; his general dissatisfaction with government policies; his quarrels and arguments with Chris; everything now began to take on the vaporous haze of a mirage.
Of course, he admitted bitterly, we always take the precaution of invoking the people’s name in whatever we do. But do we not at the same time make sure of the people’s absence, knowing that if they were to appear in person their scarecrow presence confronting our pious invocations would render our words too obscene even for sensibilities as robust as ours?
The prime failure of this government began also to take on a clearer meaning for him. It can’t be the massive corruption though its scale and pervasiveness are truly intolerable; it isn’t the subservience to foreign manipulation, degrading as it is; it isn’t even this second-class, hand-me-down capitalism, ludicrous and doomed; nor is it the damnable shooting of striking railway-workers and demonstrating students and the destruction and banning thereafter of independent unions and cooperatives. It is the failure of our rulers to re-establish vital inner links with the poor and dispos- sessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being.
Naive romantics would have us believe that this heart at the core is in perfect health. How could it be? Sapped by regimes of parasites, ignorant of so many basic things though it does know some others; crippled above all by this perverse kindliness towards oppression conducted with panache! How could it be in perfect health? Impossible! But