A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe Page A

at his desk at eight and come back at two looking as fresh as a newly-hatched chick why should I, a child of yesterday by comparison, indulge in such a decadent and colonial habit as taking a siesta? So I bravely dozed in my chair while my host and his wife talked about her journey home. She asked if he had found a cook yet to do his meals while she was away and he said he had asked someone to send one or two along in the evening. Only then did it strike me that they had no cook, only a steward. I wondered how they managed with their dinner parties. A car drew up outside and a young American couple breezed in. Or rather the wife breezed in and the husband followed in her wake. 'Hi Micah, hi Margaret,' said the woman. 'Hi Jean, hi John,' replied the Minister whom I had never heard anyone call Micah until then. But he seemed quite pleased, actually. I was greatly shocked. These two people were no older than I and yet had the impudence to call Chief Nanga his now almost forgotten Christian name. But what shocked me even more was his reaction. I had turned quickly and anxiously to watch his face contort with fury. But no. He had replied sweetly, 'Hi Jean, hi John.' I couldn't understand. I was dead certain that if I or any of our people for that matter had called him Micah he would have gone rampaging mad. But perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised. We have all accepted things from white skins that none of us would have brooked from our own people. Mrs Nanga whose Christian name I hadn't even known until now seemed less happy. She said 'Hallo, hallo,' and almost immediately withdrew, her frock caught in the parting of her buttocks. While Jean flirted eagerly with Micah, I was having some very serious discussions with her husband, who it appeared was one of a team of experts at that time advising our government on how to improve its public image in America. He seemed the quiet type and, I thought, a little cowed by his beautiful, bumptious wife. But I had no doubt they were both in their different ways excellent ambassadors. He certainly proved most eloquent when the inevitable subject came up at last---not, I might add, thanks to me. 'We have our problems,' he said, 'like everyone else. Some of my people are narrow as a pin---we have to admit it. But at the same time we have gotten somewhere. No one is satisfied, but we have made progress.' He gave some facts and figures about lynching which I don't remember now. But I do remember his saying that lynching was not racial in origin and that, up to a certain year like 1875 or something, there had been more whites lynched than negroes. And I remember too his saying that in five of the last ten years there had been no lynchings at all. I noticed he did not say the last five years. 'So you see, Mr... I'm sorry I didn't catch your first name?' 'Odili.' 'Odili---a beautiful sound---may I call you by that?' 'Sure,' I said, already partly Americanized. 'Mine is John. I don't see why we should call one another Mister this and Mister that---like the British.' 'Nor do I,' I said. 'What I was saying,' he went on, 'is that we do not pretend to be perfect. But we have made so much progress lately that I see no cause for anyone to despair. What is important is that we must press on. We must not let up. We just must not be caught sleeping on the switch again...' I was still savouring the unusual but, I thought, excellent technological imagery when I heard as though from faraway John's voice make what I call an astounding claim. I don't mean it was necessarily false---I simply don't know enough history to say. 'America may not be perfect,' he was saying, 'but don't forget that we are the only powerful country in the entire history of the world, the only one, which had the power to conquer others and didn't do it.' I must have looked more surprised than I felt. The claim did not as yet strike me with its full weight. I was thinking that this unique act of magnanimity must have happened in a small