Free Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe Page B

young lady’s fascination and explains that he owes the inspiration for that poem to his steward, Sunday.
    ALL DE BEER
DEM DRINK FOR HERE
DE MAKE ME FEAR
    If indeed the inspiration was Sunday’s it only goes to prove that birds of the same feather flock together. For Mad Medico has a strange mania for graffiti which was the cause of all the
wahalla
that would have cost him his job and residence in the country about a year ago had his Excellency and Ikem not gone to his rescue, their one and only joint effort to date. The doctors were ready to cut him up alive and I still can’t say that I blame them entirely. Ikem insists that some of them used the occasion to unload themselves of other grievances but I still think the inscriptions were inexcusable and in deplorable taste.
Blessed are the poor
in heart for they shall see God
cannot anywhere in the world pass as a suitable joke to be nailed up in the ward for heart patients, never mind that one stupid defender of MM’s said the patients were either too ill or too illiterate and so no one could have been hurt! The thing was in abominable taste. His other inscription outside the men’s venereal diseases ward: a huge arrow sitting between two tangential balls and pointing like a crazy road sign towards the entrance and the words TO THE TWIN CITIES OF SODOM AND GONORRHEA was, if such a thing could be conceived, worse.
    “How is my wonder boy?” asks MM. “I never get a chance to see him these days. I suppose rescuing a bungling old fool from deportation must take its toll on the hardiest of friendships. Oh well. How’s he?”
    “He is flourishing,” I said. “Last Friday afternoon he placed the entire cabinet on one hour’s detention.”
    “He did? How boring,” said Mad Medico. “You know something, Dick, the most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable and… just plain uninteresting.” He spoke more to his guest from England than to us. “I told you this boy was such a charmer when I first met him. I’d never seen anyone so human, so cultured.” Dick nods disinterestedly. He has scarcely said a dozen words all afternoon. He drinks gin and lime as though it were Alka Seltzer. But in contrast to his dark mood his complexion is bright, almost girlish, unlike Mad Medico’s excessively coarse tan. It was Mad Medico himself who first drew our attention to this when he introduced Dick to us. “A white man in the tropics,” he had said, “needs occasionally to see someone fresh from his tribe to remind him that his colour is perhaps not as wrong, and patchy as it may seem.”
    Dick is now speaking in his lugubrious way. He is sitting on the far end of the three-sided bar across from me. Ikem and the two girls are between us on the forward and longer section of the counter facing Mad Medico, our bartender in the pit. Dick is saying that Acton’s corruption was probably intended to encompass dehumourization if such a word exists.
    “It doesn’t but certainly should,” says Mad Medico offhandedly. “What did you do?” he asks me.
    “What?”
    “You said you were all detained.”
    “Oh, that. No, we didn’t do anything. That was the trouble. A delegation arrived at the Presidential Palace from Abazon—you know the drought place—and none of us knew they were coming. Naughty, isn’t it? So His Excellency gets mad at us.”
    “That’s beautiful,” says Mad Medico, and then turning to Dick he plays the knowing Old Coaster to a ruddy newcomer: “Abazon is in the north-west and has had no rain for a year. So the poor devils up there send a delegation to ask His Excellency to give them rain.” He then turns to me for confirmation. “That’s about the size of it?”
    “More or less,” replies Ikem before I can say anything.
    “That’s marvellous,” says Dick brightening up. “A kind of native Henderson. Absolutely fascinating. And what did he do?”
    “He locks these