Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe

without obstructing others. A mild scuffle began right in front of me and ended only when the offending umbrella was folded up again.
    “I beg una-o,” said its peace-loving owner, “make I de use my thing for walking-stick.”
    “E better so. No be for see umbrella we de roast for sun since we waka come here dis morning.”
    I began to wonder at one point if I hadn’t made a foolish gesture in refusing the ticket for one of those nicely spaced-out, numbered seats, that now seemed so desirably cool. Hardly anybodywas sitting on them yet. Isn’t the great thing about a VIP that his share of good things is always there waiting for him in abundance even while he relaxes in the coolness of home, and the poor man is out there in the sun pushing and shoving and roasting for his miserable crumbs? Look at all those empty padded seats! How does the poor man retain his calm in the face of such provocation? From what bottomless wells of patience does he draw? His great good humour must explain it. This sense of humour turned sometimes against himself, must be what saves him from total dejection. He had learnt to squeeze every drop of enjoyment he can out of his stony luck. And the fool who oppresses him will make a particular point of that enjoyment:
You see, they are not in the least like ourselves. They don’t need and can’t use the luxuries that you and I must have. They have the animal capacity to endure the pain of, shall we say, domestication
. The very words the white master had said in his time about the black race as a whole. Now we say them about the poor.
    But even the poor man can forget what his humour is about and become altogether too humorous in his suffering. That afternoon he was punished most dreadfully at the beach and he laughed to his pink gums and I listened painfully for the slightest clink of the concealed weapon in the voluminous folds of that laughter. And I didn’t hear it. So Chris is right. But how I wish, for the sake of all the years I have known and loved him, that the day never came when he should be that kind of right. But that’s by the way.
    I had never expected that Authority should excel in matters of taste. But the ritual obscenities it perpetrated that afternoon took me quite by surprise—from the pasting of a bull’s eye on the chest of the victim to the antics of that sneaky wolf of a priest in sheep’s clothing whispering God knows what blasphemies into the doomed man’s ear, to the doctor with his stethoscope rushing with emergency strides to the broken, porous body and listening intently to the bull’s eye and then nodding sagely and scientifically that all was finished. Call him tomorrow to minister to genuine human distress and see how slow he can be! And how expensive! Authority and its servants far exceeded my expectations that day on the beach.
    But it wasn’t Authority that worried me really; it never does. It wasn’t those officious footlings, either. It wasn’t even the four who were mangled. It was the thousands who laughed so blatantly at their own humiliation and murder.
    As the four men were led out of the Black Maria the shout that went up was not like any sound I had ever heard or hoped to hear again. It was an ovation. But an ovation to whom for Christ’s sake?
    The four men were as different as the four days in the sky. One had totally lost the power of his legs and was helped to the stakes between two policemen, his trouser front entirely wet. The second was crying pathetically and looking back over his shoulders all the time. Was it to avoid looking ahead to those hefty joists sunk into concrete or was there a deliverer who had given his word in a dream or vision to be there at the eleventh hour? The third had dry eyes and a steady walk. He was shouting something so loud and desperate that the nerves and vessels of his neck seemed ready to burst. Though he had just stepped out of a car he was sweating like a hand-truck pusher at Gelegele Market. The