Read Online Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe - Free Book Online

everyone including myself. But in the meantime the Big Shot has had a brief snooze and on waking up has begun to see the world differently. “I must not go and visit my loyal subjects of Abazon,” he now says. And all plans are immediately cancelled. Which is fine, except that nobody remembers to tell the Honourable Commissioner who has charge for disseminating such vital information throughout the four provinces of the empire. So poor Chris is left totally in the lurch.
    Nobody told
me
either. But the great difference between me and Chris is that I never did expect to be told. I happened to feel acertain way in the matter and like a free agent, sat up at night after Elewa had gone away in the taxi and composed my thoughts. I keep telling Chris that life is simpler that way. Much simpler. Stop looking back over your shoulder, I tell him. There ain’t no deliverer running just a little behind schedule. March to the stake like a man and take the bullet in your chest. Much simpler.
    But the real irony of the situation is that my own method is more successful even on Chris’s own terms. How many times now have I managed to read the Big Shot’s mind better than all the courtiers? Who knows, I may soon be suspected of witchcraft or of having a secret hot-line to the palace! For it does not stand to reason that from my hermit’s hut in the forest I should divine the thoughts of the Emperor better than the mesmerized toadies in daily attendance. But it is quite simple really. The Emperor may be a fool but he isn’t a monster. Not yet, anyhow; although he will certainly become one by the time Chris and company have done with him. But right now he is still OK, thank God. That’s why I believe that basically he does want to do the right thing. Some of my friends don’t agree with me on this, I know. Even Chris doesn’t. But I am sure I am right; I am sure that Sam can still be saved if we put our minds to it. His problem is that with so many petty interests salaaming around him all day, like that shyster of an Attorney-General, he has no chance of knowing what is right. And that’s what Chris and I ought to be doing—letting him glimpse a little light now and again through chinks in his solid wall of court jesters; we who have known him longer than the rest should not be competing with them. I have shown what light I can with a number of controversial editorials. With Chris I could do much more. If Sam were stronger or brighter he probably wouldn’t need our offices; but then he probably wouldn’t have become His Excellency in the first place. Only half-wits can stumble into such enormities.
    Chris has a very good theory, I think, on the military vocation. According to this theory military life attracts two different kinds of men: the truly strong who are very rare, and the rest who would be strong. The first group make magnificent soldiers and remain good people hardly ever showing let alone flaunting their strength. The rest are there for the swank. The truth of this came to me on two separate occasions afterwards, both of them interestingly enough at the Gelegele Market. A tottering pugnaciousdrunkard was provoking a fight with a towering stranger carrying a small portmanteau and obviously on his way to the Motor Park. I think the drunk was claiming the box or even the man’s clothes as his own. Everyone in the market, it seemed, knew the drunk because many of the witnesses to the scene gave the same advice to the strong man with the box. “If you don’t handle that fool quite firmly, my friend, he will pester you to death,” they said. But the stranger appeared more eager to slip past his tormentor than follow the crowd’s advice. Which annoyed many of the people in the end. They didn’t see why anybody should let a drunken idiot walk all over him in this outrageous way unless there was something indeed wrong with him. Perhaps he didn’t own the clothes he wore. At that point a newcomer into the watching crowd