Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe

Author:Chinua Achebe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780385668361
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 1987-01-07T10:00:00+00:00

9

Views of Struggle

IKEM’S DRIVE that hot afternoon was not in answer to Chris’s instruction to send a reporter to the Presidential Palace. A reporter was indeed sent and he must have duly reported. Ikem went for reasons of his own, in search of personal enlightenment.

He arrived on the grounds of the Palace just as the party was breaking up. So he could do no more for the present than exchange courtesies with the white-bearded leader of the Abazon delegation and arrange a later meeting with him and his group at the hotel where they were lodged.

Harmoney Hotel is a sleazy establishment in the northern slums of the capital and, judging by the ease with which Ikem’s inquiry led him to it, a popular resort in the neighbourhood. It is the kind of place that would boast a certain number of resident prostitutes; a couple of rooms used by three or four young men of irregular hours and unspecified occupation who sleep mostly by day; and a large turnover of small-time traders from up-country visiting Bassa periodically to replenish their stock of retail goods. It is busy and homely in a peculiar kind of way.

Ikem had already discovered at the Presidential Palace that the delegation was not five hundred strong as he had been told but a mere six, and that the large crowd that had accompanied it to the Palace were Abazon indigenes in Bassa: motor mechanics, retail traders, tailors, vulcanizers, taxi- and bus-drivers who had loaned their vehicles, and others doing all kinds of odd jobs or nothing at all in the city. A truly motley crowd! No wonder His Excellency was reported to have received the news of their sudden arrival on his doorstep with considerable apprehension. I would too if I were in his shoes, admitted Ikem mischievously to himself.

They were seated around five or six tables joined together in the open courtyard of the hotel, not five hundred of them now, but perhaps twenty, drinking and discussing excitedly their visit to the Palace.

As soon as they saw Ikem enter from the street through the main iron gate into the roughly cemented courtyard everybody got up including the six visiting elders and received him with something approaching an ovation. He shook hands all round and was looking for a vacant seat when someone, a kind of master of ceremonies, indicated a vacated place of honour for him beside the white-bearded elder. Then he shouted “Service!” very importantly and when a slouching waiter in a dirty blue tunic appeared, ordered six bottles of beer and three more roast chicken. “Quick, quick,” he said.

Then he surveyed the assembled group, picked up an empty beer bottle and knocked its bottom on the table for silence:

“Our people say that when a titled man comes into a meeting the talking must have to stop until he has taken his seat. An important somebody has just come in who needs no introduction. Still yet, we have to do things according to what Europeans call protocol.

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