Free The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Page B

understand why he was expected to say “Good afternoon” to strangers, because in his world one has to justify simple courtesies. But who can tell? Perhaps nothing would have been different even if we had won.
    “How does your daughter like America?” Ikenna asked.
    “She is doing very well.”
    “And you said she is a doctor?”
    “Yes.” I felt that Ikenna deserved to be told more, or maybe that the tension of my earlier comment had not quite abated, so I said, “She lives in a small town in Connecticut, near Rhode Island. The hospital board had advertised for a doctor, and when she came they took one look at her medical degree from Nigeria and said they did not want a foreigner. But she is American-born––you see, we had her while at Berkeley, I taught there when we went to America after the war––and so they had to let her stay.” I chuckled, and hoped Ikenna would laugh along with me. But he did not. He looked toward the men under the flame tree, his expression solemn.
    “Ah, yes. At least it’s not as bad now as it was for us. Remember what it was like schooling in oyibo-land in the late fifties?” he asked.
    I nodded to show I remembered, although Ikenna and I could not have had the same experience as students overseas; he is an Oxford man, while I was one of those who got the United Negro College Fund scholarship to study in America.
    “The Staff Club is a shell of what it used to be,” Ikenna said. “I went there this morning.”
    “I haven’t been there in so long. Even before I retired, it got to the point where I felt too old and out of place there. These greenhorns are inept. Nobody is teaching. Nobody has fresh ideas. It is university politics, politics, politics, while students buy grades with money or their bodies.”
    “Is that right?”
    “Oh, yes. Things have fallen. Senate meetings have become personality-cult battles. It’s terrible. Remember Josephat Udeana?”
    “The great dancer.”
    I was taken aback for a moment because it had been so long since I had thought of Josephat as he was, in those days just before the war, by far the best ballroom dancer we had on campus. “Yes, yes, he was,” I said, and I felt grateful that Ikenna’s memories were frozen at a time when I still thought Josephat to be a man of integrity. “Josephat was vice chancellor for six years and ran this university like his father’s chicken coop. Money disappeared and then we would see new cars stamped with the names of foreign foundations that did not exist. Some people went to court, but nothing came of that. He dictated who would be promoted and who would be stagnated. In short, the man acted like a solo university council. This present vice chancellor is following him faithfully. I have not been paid my pension since I retired, you know. I’m just coming from the Bursary now.”
    “And why isn’t anybody doing something about all this? Why?” Ikenna asked, and for the briefest moment the old Ikenna was there, in the voice, the outrage, and I was reminded again that this was an intrepid man. Perhaps he would walk over and pound his fist on a nearby tree.
    “Well”—I shrugged—“many of the lecturers are changing their official dates of birth. They go to Personnel Services and bribe somebody and add five years. Nobody wants to retire.”
    “It is not right. Not right at all.”
    “It’s all over the country, really, not just here.” I shook my head in that slow, side-to-side way that my people have perfected when referring to things of this sort, as if to say that the situation is, sadly, ineluctable.
    “Yes, standards are falling everwhere. I was just reading about fake drugs in the papers,” Ikenna said, and I immediately thought it a rather convenient coincidence, his bringing up fake drugs. Selling expired medicine is the latest plague of ourcountry, and if Ebere had not died the way she did, I might have found this to be a normal segue in the conversation. But I was suspicious.