A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe Read Free Book Online Page B

aggrieved, I had felt, like so many other educated citizens of our country, that things were going seriously wrong without being able to say just how. We complained about our country's lack of dynamism and abdication of the leadership to which it was entitled in the continent, or so we thought. We listened to whispers of scandalous deals in high places---sometimes involving sums of money that I for one didn't believe existed in the country. But there was really no hard kernel of fact to get one's teeth into. But sitting at Chief Nanga's feet I received enlightenment; many things began to crystallize out of the mist---some of the emergent forms were not nearly as ugly as I had suspected but many seemed much worse. However, I was not making these judgements at the time, or not strongly anyhow. I was simply too fascinated by the almost ritual lifting of the clouds, as I had been one day, watching for the first time the unveiling of the white dome of Kilimanjaro at sunset. I stood breathless; I did not immediately say: 'Ah! this is the tallest mountain in Africa', or 'It isn't really as impressive as I had expected'. All that had to wait. I had neglected to bring any reading matter with me on my visit to Bori, and the Minister's library turned out to be not quite to my taste. There was a decorative set of an American encyclopaedia, there was She by Rider Haggard, and also Ayesha, or the Return of She; then there were a few books by Marie Corelli and Bertha Clay---I remember in particular The Sorrows of Satan. That was all really except for a few odds and ends like Speeches: How to Make Them. I flipped through a few volumes of the encyclopaedia and settled down to read the daily newspapers more closely than I had ever done. And believe me I discovered I had been missing a lot of fun. There was, for instance, this notice inserted into the Daily Chronicle by the City Clerk of Bori: The attention of the Public is hereby drawn to Section 12 of the Bori (Conservancy) Bye-laws, 1951: (i) Occupiers of all premises shall provide pails for excrement; the size of such pails and the materials of which they are constructed shall be approved by the City Engineer. (ii) The number of such pails to be provided in any premises shall be specified by the City Engineer. The Public are warned against unauthorized increases in the number of pails already existing on their premises. The surprises and contrasts in our great country were simply inexhaustible. Here was I in our capital city, reading about pails of excrement from the cosy comfort of a princely seven bathroom mansion with its seven gleaming, silent action, water-closets! Most of my life (except for a brief interlude at the University where I first saw water-closets) I'd used pit- latrines like the one at what was then my house in Anata. As everyone knows, pit-latrines are not particularly luxurious or ultra-modern but with reasonable care they are adequate and clean. Bucket latrines are a different matter altogether. I saw one for the first time when I lived as a house-boy with an elder half-sister and her husband in the small trading town of Giligili. I was twelve then and it was the most squalid single year of my life. So disgusting did I find the bucket that I sometimes went for days on end without any bowel evacuation. And then there was that week when all the night-soil men in the town decided to go on strike. I practically went without food. As the local inhabitants said at the time, you could 'hear' the smell of the town ten miles away. The only excitement I remember in Giligili was our nightly war on rats. We had two rooms in the large iron- roofed house with its earth walls and floor. My sister, her husband and two small children slept in one and the rest of us---three boys---shared the other with bags of rice, garri, beans and other foodstuff. And, of course, the rats. They came and sank their holes where the floor and the walls met. As soon as night fell they emerged to eat the