Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe [63]
As soon as the District Commissioner left, the head messenger, who was also the prisoners’ barber, took down his razor and shaved off all the hair on the men’s heads. They were still handcuffed, and they just sat and moped.
“Who is the chief among you?” the court messengers asked in jest. “We see that every pauper wears the anklet of title in Umuofia. Does it cost as much as ten cowries?”
The six men ate nothing throughout that day and the next. They were not even given any water to drink, and they could not go out to urinate or go into the bush when they were pressed. At night the messengers came in to taunt them and to knock their shaven heads together.
Even when the men were left alone they found no words to speak to one another. It was only on the third day, when they could no longer bear the hunger and the insults, that they began to talk about giving in.
“We should have killed the white man if you had listened to me,” Okonkwo snarled.
“We could have been in Umuru now waiting to be hanged,” someone said to him.
“Who wants to kill the white man?” asked a messenger who had just rushed in. Nobody spoke.
“You are not satisfied with your crime, but you must kill the white man on top of it.” He carried a strong stick, and he hit each man a few blows on the head and back. Okonkwo was choked with hate.
As soon as the six men were locked up, court messengers went into Umuofia to tell the people that their leaders would not be released unless they paid a fine of two hundred and fifty bags of cowries.
“Unless you pay the fine immediately,” said their headman, “we will take your leaders to Umuru before the big white man, and hang them.”
This story spread quickly through the villages, and was added to as it went. Some said that the men had already been taken to Umuru and would be hanged on the following day. Some said that their families would also be hanged. Others said that soldiers were already on their way to shoot the people of Umuofia as they had done in Abame.
It was the time of the full moon. But that night the voice of children was not heard. The village ilo where they always gathered for a moon-play was empty. The women of Iguedo did not meet in their secret enclosure to learn a new dance to be displayed later to the village. Young men who were always abroad in the moonlight kept their huts that night. Their manly voices were not heard on the village paths as they went to visit their friends and lovers. Umuofia was like a startled animal with ears erect, sniffing the silent, ominous air and not knowing which way to run.
The silence was broken by the village crier beating his sonorous ogene. He called every man in Umuofia, from the Akakanma age group upwards, to a meeting in the marketplace after the morning meal. He went from one end of the village to the other and walked all its breadth. He did not leave out any of the main footpaths.
Okonkwo’s compound was like a deserted homestead. It was as if cold water had been poured on it. His family was all there, but everyone spoke in whispers. His daughter Ezinma had broken her twenty-eight day visit to the family of her future husband, and returned home when she heard that her father had been imprisoned, and was going to be hanged. As soon as she got home she went to Obierika to ask what the men of Umuofia were going to do about it. But Obierika had not been home since morning. His wives thought he had gone to a secret meeting. Ezinma was satisfied that something was being done.
On the morning after the village crier’s appeal the men of Umuofia met in the marketplace and decided to collect without delay two hundred and fifty bags of cowries to appease the white man. They did not know that fifty bags would go to the court messengers, who had increased the fine for that purpose.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Okonkwo and his fellow prisoners were set free as soon as the fine was paid. The District Commissioner spoke to them again about the great queen, and