Chapter 9: One Long Crisis: The Bruised Heart that Throbs Painfully

General Sam is different from the great figures of disorder and misrule we have seen in this chapter and in the last, in that he seeks and retains power for its own sake. For all the others, political power is simply a useful tool. Either it is a means to a purely personal end, which is material gain, or the two are apprehended as one complex, with power leading to material gain, and vice versa. Where these figures of power are confronted in a forceful manner, it is frequently by a movement of opposition against their abuse of power. Either they have used their powerful position to oppress and exploit others, as in Soyinka's Season of Anomy and Echewa's The Crippled Dancer, or they have deployed it as a protective device, while expropriation of the common wealth into a private account is going on, as in Achebe's A Man of the People and Iyayi's The Contract. Anthills of the Savannah presents a vision of power as something pursued and held on to for itself. There are characters like Izongo, of Okara's The Voice, and the Eze of Isu, in Nwankwo's My Mercedes is Bigger than Yours, who share this attitude. For these, as for Anthills of the Savannah, power is an end in itself, not a means to something else – a commodity, so to speak, as it can be bought and paid for using one's material resources. In Anthills of the Savannah, Sam's cronies are the people who understand this and are prepared to pay the specific kind of tribute required, which is worship. One such worshipper is the attorney-general. Having brought out to Sam that Chris is disloyal and incapable of paying this tribute, he proceeds: 'As for those like me, Your Excellency, poor dullards who went to bush grammar schools, we know our place, we know those better than ourselves when we see them. We have no problem worshipping a man like you. Honestly, I don't. You went to Lord Lugard College where half of your teachers were Englishmen. Do you know, the nearest white men I saw in my school were an Indian and two Pakistanis' (24). Those who have a privilege deserve it; the privilege attaches to them because they are 'good for it,' to use the words of the Singer in Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle. This argument follows the logic of 'similitude' (Michel Foucault, 1970), the language of primitive thought. But the attorney-general is not consistent. He does not accord the same rights of worship to Chris who had been Sam's contemporary at Lord Lugard College. For Sam has the supreme advantage of being the head of state—which proves to the lawyer that he is certainly more deserving than his former schoolmate. Convinced that Chris's mind works on the same principles as his own, he argues further that the reason this man is unable to show loyalty to the head of state in the way he approves, worship, is that 'he does have a problem; he wants to know why you and not him should be His Excellency' (24). The capacity to be enthralled by the spectacle of power to the extent of according it the status of a divine form is an attitude we find in Sam himself. We have seen that he admires the English to the point of foolishness. But his greatest idol is the emperor at the Organization of African Unity meeting, who 'never smiled nor changed his expression no matter what was going on around him.' It is his first Organization of African Unity summit; and he is enormously impressed by this man. He tells his friends all about him on his return, ending, 'I wish I could look like him,' said ...wistfully, his thoughts obviously faraway (52). He sees himself as the Kangan equivalent of people like this emperor and President-for-life Ngongo. That is why he wishes to be given the accolade president-for-life of Kangan, and to have all the entitlements which could come from a cult of power with himself at the centre. If General Sam sees himself as the subject of entitlements, he does not see himself at the same time as the subject of responsibilities. He has no idea of what is called in the Idemili sequence of this narrative the moral nature of authority' (102). The tragic potential of this partial perception is played out in that sequence (102-105) and it comprises the mythic undertow which must shape and give orientation to the narrative itself. As a factor of imbalance, the use of authority without regard to the moral aspect is what triggers off the tragic recoil in the Idemili sequence, in which both the error and the one who brings it about are swept away. The crisis and pattern of movement of Anthills of the Savannah are determined here. Ikem puts the matter this way: The prime failure of this government … can't be the massive corruption though its scale and pervasiveness are truly intolerable; it isn't the subservience to foreign manipulation, degrading as it is; it isn't even this second-class, hand-me-down capitalism, ludicrous and doomed; nor is it the damnable shooting of striking railway-workers and demonstrating students.... It is the failure of our rulers to re-establish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation's being (141). Ikem's demand is for a view of power in terms of service; which means the abolition of the rough beast and the Machiavellian prince— the abolition of the age, that is; not just the destruction and doing away with an individual monster. But he does not know how this can be accomplished, although at a moment of extreme bitterness of heart, the idea of a 'wrathful day of reckoning' (142) does come to his mind. But if, as we have argued, the removal of General Sam is simply the substitution of an old and familiar rough beast by a new one hitherto unknown, then no such day of reckoning comes in Anthills of the Savannah. We see that day of reckoning again longed for, unavailingly, in Festus Iyayi's The Contract. Here the writer Onise Ine prophesies revolution as an inevitable process where corruption is the order of the day, and government exists to aid and abet it. But this idea seems so commonplace that the government functionaries are not surprised by it. They have taken this eventuality into account in planning for the future: they stash away the money they have stolen in foreign banks, expecting to be able to flee abroad once the day of reckoning is felt to be in the horizon. Their prognosis from lived experience is in total agreement with Ine's prophesying: a revolution 'was only a matter of time. Oh yes, only a matter of time' (122). Ine imagines that the prospect of such an eventuality would put fear into the government functionaries and bring them to change their ways. But it leads these functionaries to act in a totally different way. There is certainly no change of heart. Rather the practice and scale of corruption and thievery from the public treasury are given a great impetus and new urgency. What was to be done was to be done as quickly as possible, and maximum profit made and put away in a safe place. The Contract, however, enacts a different myth than that of the rough beast, namely the Adamic myth of a fall from idealism and innocence to materialism and moral degeneration. This is not fundamentally different from the pattern of movement in Heroes, with Osime going from innocence to experience. The Contract is the myth of the fall in the proper sense, and those who fall are not moved to try and rise again. They only corrupt and pull down others, and in this way strive to make the fallen state ordinary and the universal norm. This corruption has spread downwards from father to son, from the political leaders and senior civil administrators to the contractors and their agents. These agents are sometimes their wives; at other times young females employed to use their bodies as a bait. All have their eyes on public money, and each is determined to make as much of it as possible his own. There are only a few examples in the Nigerian novel of the rough beast as a private individual: such is this literary tradition's fascination with the public event and the individual for whom it comprises the space of action. The other type of individual is seen in a purely domestic and private setting in I.N.C. Aniebo's The Journey Within', while in Kole Omotoso, Memories of Our Recent Boom, his career has a wider reference. The rough beast in The Journey Within comprises a husband and wife set, Christian and Janet, who are seen by the narrator in terms of having urban sophistication, of which Christianity is produced as an aspect. We are able to see them in clearer light by contrasting them with another couple Nelson and Ejiaka who, despite being urban based, have lost nothing of their rural culture. The narrator seems to see the two couples as models of westernization on the one hand, and cultural purity, on the other. One of the characteristics of this rural household ensconced in the urban space is one familiar in negritude discourse: laughter. This is utterly lacking in the sterile environment of Christian's and Janet's household. In the following conversation between Christian and Ejiaka, we see the man's explanation of this phenomenon. It is because of Janet's excessive knowledge: she is a qualified midwife, Christian a moderately educated shopkeeper. We read: 'You can't really say how good a mother a woman will be until she has had a child.' 'You are right there,' Ejiaka conceded, 'Eh-he, that is another difference between you and Janet. She would never agree that I am right. 'That is because she knows so much.' 'Yes, she knows a great deal.' 'You make it sound like a bad thing.' 'It is a bad thing. You have never lived with somebody who knows a great deal, someone who knows everything' (The Journey Within 226). Christian seeks sympathy from Ejiaka—he thinks he has won it, in fact—because Janet terrorizes him with excessive knowledge. He does not draw attention to the terrible things he says to her. What we do know is that in the matrimonial exchanges between the two, of which the currency is torture, the one who has the upper hand at all times is Christian. Janet remains doggedly in the fight, and it is her persistence that gets back to Christian in a cutting way, and spurs him to search for sharper and more hurtful darts. Her counter-strokes are few indeed, but not her power of resistance. This is what saves her in the face of Christian's determined efforts to crush her into a cowering, nervous wreck. He fairly becomes a torture machine. Christian keeps a mistress in town all the time. He suffers much on their-account, including punishment beatings and the looting of his shop, but he endures all because of a side-interest. Assured of 'his own gratification, and knowing that the childless Janet looks upon sex strictly as a function of procreation, and will not be tempted on any account to marital infidelity, he has her under siege. He holds himself aloof from her, and won't look at her no matter what she does to arouse him. Then he turns to drinking in the house all alone, and getting drunk too simply because Janet detests alcohol and is disgusted by drunkenness. He not only deliberately spoils anything he knows she is enjoying, and greets with demonic laughter any misfortune that comes her way, but he takes every opportunity to reopen and deepen wounds. Here is the couple in one of their exchanges: 'Oh yes, deliveries. You are good at that. Unfortunately your own children do not survive because you boil the poor things in your hot womb.' 'Christian. Christian, are you mad?' 'Now we are getting somewhere. But isn't it funny? When I drink I do the talking and you do the keeping quiet. Isn't it funny that as soon as you see me drinking you crawl into the shell you should never have left? Do I remind you of your father, that is before your mother turned him into a woman? Tell me. Do I?' (128). In addition to being terrorized by Janet's excessive knowledge, he is also terrorized by her excessive talking. These are both Christian's charges against her. But we never see her doing any of this. Eventually Janet will have a child, but this is a result of being raped by two soldiers in a train. If we call her a rough beast, it is because of Christian's charges, and the narrator's connivance. All we see is that she is hard and unbending, but she is no less a victim for all this, the victim of a cruel fate, but mostly that of a rough beast's unrestrained rampage. If in the public sphere, as we have seen in novel after novel, there is no final, definite casting out of the rough beast, his immunity in the private and domestic setting proves fairly unassailable in this work. His elimination in Omotoso's Memories of Our Recent Boom is, strikingly, in an accident. In Omotoso's work, the rough beast is the protagonist Seven— he ultimately changes his name to Omomeje, or Meje for short. As a child, he had survived in part through, scavenging, for though his widowed mother wishes to give all her three children as good an education as she can manage, she does not earn enough from her petty trading to provide enough food. The youngest, Sisi, is a baby in hand; so the mother takes her with her in her travels. The eldest Aburo has no head for schoolwork, and is apprenticed to a bicycle repairer, and gets fed in his workplace. Seven, younger than Aburo by many years, is not old enough for anything else than school. He suffers most from hunger, and makes up by consuming the food elements of the sacrifices the villagers leave at various places for their gods. But sometimes there are uses for the elements he does not consume: The sacrifices at the river sites were usually much bigger and sometimes mainly cooked food. There would be a lump of pounded yam with stew and pieces of meat. Sometimes it would be rice and beans and dodo. Once he even found salad; of course he did not know then that it was salad. He ate it and liked it. Another time he found a whole dog cut it up and [sold] the meat in a part of the village where nobody knew him or cared what kind of meat they ate. Whether he was in the village or in the town, he sought the places of sacrifice. And sometimes he would bring the sacrifices of the village to the town to sell and those of the town to sell in the village (6-7). Though the community and his mother strongly disapprove of this behaviour and try to get him to change, Meje proves incorrigible. Nor does he see at any time the point which his mother or anyone else may be making, because his needs and desires comprise for him what the philosophers call the necessary and sufficient cause of his actions. If he wants something, having it is both the motive of his action and its justification. This pattern already manifest in his childhood is what governs his adult life. The quarrel with his brother, which comes at the moment of his fulfilment, is owing to this rule of life. Aburo who has gone from a bicycle repairer to a soldier, and then a big contractor, has been supplying building materials to Meje's firm for the construction of the latter's showpiece building complex in their village. This building covers an area of six acres and costs millions—no one knows exactly how many millions; but Meje has put everything he can find into this building project, including the 'mobilization fees' for construction works contracted with the government and money owed for materials supplied to his firm. His indebtedness to Aburo has gone up so high that it appears to pose a grave danger to his own firm. This is a matter Aburo broaches in a roundabout way: 'You yourself have not been available for our fifteenth of the month meetings. We have a large amount of money outstanding from you. I'm finding it difficult to pay my workers. You know what that means. I need to make this trip' (203). Meje has been given a chieftaincy by the Chief of the village, and he is preparing to take the title at the same time that his new house is to be dedicated. The ceremony and festivity are planned to go on for one week. In giving Meje this chieftaincy, the village head has shown no consideration to the older brother and has passed him over, contrary to tradition, which demands that the older person be considered before the younger brother in such a case. Meje is unembarrassed that custom seems to have been violated in the matter of giving him a traditional title, and doesn't feel in any way self-conscious before his brother. Aburo therefore decides not to attend the conferring of the title. He would travel overseas with his family, and stay away until the dedication and the title taking are over. He tells Meje, however, that the journey is on behalf of his business which is threatened with collapse, but that he would try to be back in time for the ceremonies. But the fact is that Meje has committed another person's money in his own project of self-aggrandizement, and is rather disappointed that Aburo should even mention the matter. We read that he is irritated: He could not understand how his own brother would not realize that the things he was doing were eating up a lot of money and that was the only reason he could not come up with his usual payment to him. It seemed so obvious (203). What he finds disappointing is, in short, that Aburo does not see the necessity of ministering to the needs of a young man who sees nothing beyond himself and is determined to attract all the light there is to himself, and keep it trained there. His attitude towards women is equally selfish and dictated by his desires. Meje's worldly success is thanks to timely action, a sense of drive, and ruthlessness in the pursuit of a chosen path. When he is growing up he is uncertain as to a career to follow, but this is as long as he thinks of a career as a kind of work one associates one's name with. But then he comes to a realization that a career could be a means to an end. His settling for the profession of a civil engineer is when he determines that 'there is … money in it' (142). Money is really what there is before him, and as a rough beast, he is prepared to ride roughshod over people for the attaining of this purpose. The presence in the Nigerian literary tradition of the strange character we have called the rough beast is not fortuitous. Hence we have been able to trace it back to the ancestral mask of traditional society. So fundamental in the tradition is the mask-figure that some have argued that its appearance in traditional African festivals is itself drama. In the age of the novel, this mask, as monster in general, has become a given essential for the articulation of thought in the process of representation. We see it in Tutuola, as the figure of Death in The Palm-Wine Drinkard and various monsters in The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town, where the human persona is a hero in the comic sense, the one who conquers all opposition or knows how to reduce the opposition to an ally. We see it in novels of social convulsion, as well as in sequences in which discourse turns upon individual experience and change. In The Stillborn, we see it in the grandmother—the Witch Mother who, in reduced circumstances and bereft of the means to inflict harm, makes do with Satanic laughter and mockery. In Munonye's Oil Man of Obange, on the other hand, the Witch Mother does not even know herself as a Witch Mother. And yet, knowingly or not, 'voluntarily or not,' as Derrida would say, she signifies by her presence the blocking and nullifying of effort, and the frustration and destruction of young life. But, of course, she never brings forth young life herself. In Aluko's His Worshipful Majesty, there is indecision as to the real rough beast. The Chairman of the Council Mr Morrison thinks of the Alaiye and his entourage as unprincipled, selfish, and anarchic, while the Alaiye thinks him impious, meddlesome, and unreasonable.