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

to the International. Maybe you could come and pick me up for dinner?' 'Certainly---at what time?' 'Eightish, to give me time to wash and put my feet up for a few minutes.' I was naturally beginning to fear that I was going to be left alone in an empty seven bedroom mansion on a Saturday night. I thought my host had clean forgotten our dinner appointment. But he hadn't. As soon as Mrs Akilo left he said he would take me to the other place before going to the International and he was sure Jean would bring me back. 'Agnes is She who must be obeyed,' he quoted. I wondered whether he would also quote Rider Haggard---or whoever wrote those memorable words---to Jean, but all he said was that something urgent had cropped up. Jean was naturally very disappointed. Still she agreed with her characteristic eagerness to run me home at the end of the party, or get some other guest to do so. The dinner would have come into the category which Mrs Nanga called 'nine pence talk and three pence chop'. But the talk wasn't bad. Jean started us all off nicely by declaring ecstatically that one of the most attractive things about Chief Nanga apart from his handsomeness was his unpredictability. 'If you ask him if he is coming to dinner he says I will try.' 'How sweet!' said a middle-aged woman, I think British, matching her words with a gentle sideways tilt of the head in my direction. 'I just love pidgin English.' 'I will try,' Jean continued, 'can mean a whole lot of things. It may mean that he won't come---like tonight---or that he might turn up with three other people.' 'How intriguing,' said the other woman again. And it was only then I began to suspect she was being sarcastic. Apart from Jean and me there were five others in the room---the British woman and her husband, a middle-aged American negro writing a book about our country and a white American couple. Dinner was rice and groundnut stew with chicken. I found it altogether too heavy for that time of day. But the sweet was very good, perhaps on account of its being new to me. I don't remember now what they called it. As for coffee I never touch it at night, unless I have reason for wanting to keep awake. At the University we used to call it the academic nightcap. The talk, as I said, was very good. My closeness to the Minister gave everything I said heightened significance. And---I don't know whether this happens to other people, but the knowledge that I am listened to attentively works in a sort of virtuous circle to improve the quality of what I say. For instance when at a certain point the conversation turned on art appreciation I made what I still think was a most valid and timely intervention. One of our leading artists had just made an enormous wooden figure of a god for a public square in Bori. I had not seen it yet but had read a lot about it. In fact it had attracted so much attention that it soon became fashionable to say it was bad or un-African. The Englishman was now saying that it lacked something or other. 'I was pleased the other day,' he said, 'as I drove past it to see one very old woman in uncontrollable rage shaking her fists at the sculpture...' 'Now that's very interesting,' said someone. 'Well, it's more than that,' said the other. 'You see this old woman, quite an illiterate pagan, who most probably worshipped this very god herself; unlike our friend trained in European art schools; this old lady is in a position to know...' 'Quite.' It was then I had my flash of insight. 'Did you say she was shaking her fist?' I asked. 'In that case you got her meaning all wrong. Shaking the fist in our society is a sign of great honour and respect; it means that you attribute power to the person or object.' Which of course is quite true. And if I may digress a little, I have, since this incident, come up against another critic who committed a crime in my view because he transferred to an alien culture the same meanings and interpretation that his own people attach to certain