Africa39 by Wole Soyinka Read Free Book Online Page A

country – the coups d’état , the bad roads, the hospitals without medicine, the high price of sugar, his addiction to nicotine, and the fact that the country was landlocked. As for Ma, her reasons for disliking the man were simple. He was Catholic, like the unforgiving nuns of her school days; he supported the Democratic Party; and he was a Muganda, like most of the vendors who messed her back yard. According to Ma, all three things were incurable ailments. Catholics worshipped idols. DP was a dead political party led by a goat of an old man who did nothing but make dead deals. And Ma thought the Baganda were thieving traitors who’d been selling the country to the highest bidder right from the time of the British. Ma said it often that Baganda treasured money over loyalty. They would steal your hand if you turned away. The Baganda were banana eaters. They consumed  matooke  for a staple. Ma said  matooke  was a useless food, one per cent air and ninety-nine per cent water. She thought the Baganda were a weak people, fearful of confrontation and conflict, who chose the easy way instead of the upstream path of honesty, clarity and directness. My friendship with Naalu Ma had tolerated for the most part because of the day she found Naalu and me in our sitting room sharing a plate of dried fish and millet. Ma asked Naalu if she liked it.
    ‘Yes,’ Naalu said.
    ‘Good,’ Ma said. ‘Tell that to your father when you see him. Tell him you eat millet these days, not bananas!’
    In our back yard, Naalu’s father forgot about his ongoing war with Ma. He focused on the vendors and spoke with eloquence and seriousness. He told all the gathered people that the market and the estates were two different entities. It was irrelevant that they were both owned by Kampala city council. If the men wanted to use such flimsy arguments, he said, we should as well go and camp at the state house and tell the president it was our right as citizens. If the vendors did not stop coming to Ma’s back yard, or any other back yard in the estates for that matter, he would take this issue up with the market management.
    That evening a new law came into force, written on plywood with charcoal and hurriedly constructed by a carpenter. It was erected right next to Ma’s newly planted red euphorbia fence. Anyone caught crossing over to the estates would be fined twenty thousand shillings. When I saw the sign from the safety of our window, I thought it would be pulled down. But that signpost survived hail and dogs, vendors and trucks for years.
    Red Devil came home just when Naalu’s father was trying to settle the matter. With the confidence he’d built over the weeks of coming to our home, he tried to intervene on her behalf. Someone took the pens from his brown suit pocket and pocked his skull with them. They ordered Red Devil to shut up because he had no right to speak. A man who knew him well took the opportunity to embarrass him. He said that Red Devil was not a Christian. He did not care about God – only about the Christian women he infected with gonorrhoea while reciting verses from the Song of Solomon.
    I did not see Red Devil after that, but neither did I see Naalu. Over the next days, I searched for any sign of her in their front yard. When she did eventually surface, it was only because her father had sent her to the market to buy cooking oil for the house. Naalu hurried there, running as if there was fire on her hem. When she saw me following, she broke into a sprint and left the market without buying the cooking oil. She did not look back either. Maybe she was afraid she would turn into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife. Naalu raced up the hill as if it was a flat football field. And that was the last time I saw her. Ma was not speaking to Naalu’s father again, and Naalu’s brother, Nviiri, was not talking to me, so I could not ask him. Only the silly estate boys seemed available to offer some answers. It took several tries