The Provincial Ledger
The Provincial Ledger
A Novel in Three Volumes Composed according to the Narrative Composition Protocol (NCP v0.3)
Volume the First — The Baseline & the Squeeze
Chapter I
The Native Court of the Ndoki District stood upon a cleared red-laterite knoll three hundred yards above the Imo River crossing, half a mile south of the trading wharf of the United Africa Company at Azumini.
It was a long, rectangular building with half-walls of sun-dried mud brick plastered with grey river-cement, an open upper clerestory supported by square pillars of unpainted pitch-pine, and a high roof of corrugated galvanized iron sheets that groaned and clattered whenever the afternoon sun struck the metal after a morning drizzle. A small side-office, partitioned from the main courtroom by a screen of split bamboo poles and iron mesh, served as the registry. Inside stood a tall double-desk of native iroko wood stained with black creosote, two high cane-bottomed stools, an iron letter-press manufactured in Birmingham in 1898, and an upright steel safe built by Chubb & Son, bolted directly into a block of solid concrete below the floorboards.
In the second week of October 1947, the Senior Registrar and Treasury Clerk of the Ndoki Native Court was Josiah Okereke.
Okereke was forty-six years of age.
He was a tall, lean, angular man with a slight stoop in his neck from thirty years of bent labor over judicial dockets, dark, deep-set eyes behind round wire-rimmed spectacles, hair cropped short and dusted with white at the temples, and long, ink-calloused fingers that moved with the slow, deliberate rhythm of a man who had never in his adult life signed a paper without reading every clause twice.
He was an Aro man, born at Arondizuogu, the second son of a palm-oil trader who had died during the influenza epidemic of 1918. He had been educated at the Church Missionary Society training institution at Awka; he held a Second-Class Cambridge Senior Local Certificate awarded in 1921; and he had served twenty-six years in the Native Administration of the Eastern Provinces—first as an assistant court clerk at Aba, then as a tax collector at Bende, and since 1936 as the chief administrative officer of the Ndoki court.
His salary was nine pounds and ten shillings a month, paid on the twenty-eighth day in Bank of British West Africa silver florins and five-shilling notes out of the Provincial Sub-Treasury at Opobo.
He lived with his wife, Abigail, and his three surviving children in a four-room house of whitewashed mud brick with a zinc roof, situated behind the CMS St. Michael’s school-compound on the road to Aba. His compound contained six bearing coconut palms, three mature orange trees, a small vegetable garden planted with fluted pumpkin and water-yam, and a pen of seven native dwarf goats whose ancestry had been kept clean of disease for twelve years.
Okereke was a man of the record.
He possessed a steel crow-quill pen with twelve spare nibs in a brass slide-box; three bottles of Stephens’ No. 1 Scarlet and Blue-Black copying inks; a copy of the Native Courts (Colony and Protectorate) Ordinance of 1933 bound in stiff red buckram; and four vast, folio judgment-registers ruled in faint blue ledger-lines, wherein every boundary dispute, bride-price refund, palm-tree seizure, and market-stall levy across sixty-four villages had been entered in his neat, small, upright clerk’s script.
He did not take kola-nut gifts from litigants who came to the side-window of the registry at dusk; he did not belong to the secret Ekpe society that met in the sacred bush behind the waterside; and when the young organizers of the Zikist Movement had brought cycling pamphlets from Enugu during the national strike of 1945, calling upon the civil servants to burn their revenue stamps, Okereke had taken the envelope, noted the date and postmark upon the wrapper in purple pencil, and filed it under “Circulars: Unclassified and Political” in the second drawer of the steel safe.
‘Josiah Okereke is a stone pillar that has been planted in the mud,’ said Chief Nwosu of Ohanso, who had sat as the permanent president of the Native Court bench for twenty years and had three warrants of chieftaincy framed in glass upon his parlor wall. ‘He has no pity for a poor farmer whose yams have rotted in the ground, and he has no ears for a chief whose sons have neglected to pay their poll-tax. He looks at a dispute over twenty acres of oil-palms that has caused six broken heads in the village, and he sees only two numbers: the number of the writ on the summons-sheet, and the three shillings and sixpence paid for the hearing fee.’
Chapter II
On the fourteenth of October, the Assistant District Officer for the Aba Division, Mr. Kenneth Braithwaite, arrived at the Azumini court on his monthly tour of judicial inspection.
Braithwaite was twenty-nine years of age.
He was a slender, brisk, pale-featured Englishman with light-brown hair parted sharply in the middle, clear, restless blue eyes, and a small mustache clipped close to the lip. He wore a fresh uniform of khaki drill shorts, a short-sleeved open-neck shirt with shoulder-straps, woollen stockings turned down four inches below the knee, and heavy brown leather boots fitted with brass eyelets that were polished until they mirrored the red laterite dust. He had taken a second-class degree in Modern History at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1939; he had served four years with the Royal West African Frontier Force in the Burma campaign; and he had returned to the administrative service in Nigeria with an ardent, impatient determination to modernize the rural economy of the palm-belt before the new constitution transferred power to the regional assemblies.
He walked into the court registry at ten o'clock in the morning, accompanied by his court orderly, a tall Hausa corporal in a green woollen zouave jacket and red fez who carried a leather dispatch-case with a brass padlock.
‘Good morning, Okereke,’ said the Assistant District Officer, setting his cork sun-helmet upon the corner of the creosoted desk and unbuttoning the leather flap of his notebook.
‘Good morning, sir,’ said the registrar, rising from his cane stool, adjusting his spectacles, and bowing with that grave, measured formality which had been prescribed by the Secretariat at Lagos in the reign of King George the Fifth.
Braithwaite walked to the open window, looked out at the row of thirty oil-palm farmers who were waiting under the shade of the mango tree with their tax-discs tied to their waist-cloths, and then turned back to the table with a rapid, energetic gesture.
‘We must clear the civil docket for the southern half of the district before the end of the month, Josiah,’ said the officer. ‘The Chief Commissioner is coming down from Enugu on the tenth of November to inspect the new Pioneer Oil Mill at the waterside. The mill represents twenty-four thousand pounds of Development Board capital. It can process six tons of fresh fruit-bunches an hour; but to run at full efficiency, it must have an uninterrupted supply of fruit from the six thousand acres of communal palm-groves lying between the river and the railway at Imo.’
‘The land between the river and the railway is the Akwete-Ohanso communal boundary, sir,’ said Okereke, resting his fingers upon the edge of the leather ledger.
‘I know all about the boundary, Okereke,’ said Braithwaite, pulling a large blueprint map from his orderly’s dispatch-case and spreading it across the desk over the open summons-book. ‘The dispute has been dragging through this court for twenty-two years. Chief Nwosu and his council claim the eastern ridge; the elders of Akwete claim the river-flats; and while the two villages have been rioting and paying five-guinea retainer fees to barristers from Calabar, seven hundred tons of high-grade pericarp oil have been rotting on the ground every dry season.’
‘Suit No. 142 of 1925, sir,’ said Okereke, turning three leaves of his register without looking at the index. ‘Chief Nwosu of Ohanso versus Elder Mark Ogbonna of Akwete. A claim for declaration of title to the Uzo-Ukwu palm-forest, six hundred pounds damages for trespass, and an injunction. The court ordered an inspection of the boundary stones by District Officer Captain Liddell in February 1928. The survey was never completed because the boundary cairn at the railway culvert was removed by persons unknown during the night.’
‘We are not going to look for Captain Liddell’s stones in 1947, Josiah,’ said Braithwaite, tapping the blue paper with his silver fountain-pen. ‘The government has acquired the entire four-square-mile block under the Public Lands Acquisition Ordinance as a Model Palm Production Zone. The Land Settlement Officer has drawn an administrative compromise: the northern section is allocated to the Pioneer Mill for direct plantation harvesting; the southern section is vested in a Joint Cooperative Society; and the royalties on the fruit will be paid directly into the Native Administration Treasury to fund the new secondary school at Aba.’
Okereke looked down at the blueprint, where the ancient communal groves were divided into thirty-two numbered geometric rectangles colored with yellow wash.
‘The elders of Ohanso have filed an application for an injunction to restrain the surveyor from erecting the concrete pillars, sir,’ said the clerk. ‘It is listed for hearing before the Native Court bench this morning.’
‘The Native Court has no jurisdiction to grant an injunction against an administrative acquisition confirmed by the Resident, Okereke,’ said the officer, his voice dropping into a firmer, more authoritative cadence. ‘I have prepared a consent decree. It dismisses the claim of both villages without costs, vacates the lis pendens on the land register, and authorizes the immediate entry of the Agricultural Department’s clearing-tractors on Monday morning. I want Chief Nwosu and the Akwete elders to affix their marks to the schedule in the presence of the bench; and I want you to enter the formal judgment in the Register of Decrees before I leave for Aba at three o'clock.’
Josiah Okereke took off his reading spectacles, wiped the round glass with a clean handkerchief of checked cotton, and set them carefully back upon his nose.
‘The Native Court Ordinance, Section 24, provides that no decree altering the customary title to communal lands shall be entered by the registrar unless the judgment has been delivered in open court by a quorum of four warrant chiefs, after the evidence has been taken under oath in the presence of the family heads, sir,’ said the registrar.
‘My dear Josiah,’ said Braithwaite, with a brief, impatient smile that showed his white teeth, ‘the chiefs will do exactly what they are told when they see the five-shilling sitting fees on the table. Chief Nwosu has already been promised the presidency of the Cooperative Society at fifty pounds a year; and the Akwete headman is getting a three-ton lorry permit from the Transport Control Board. The legal technicalities can be regularized after the tractors have cut the inspection tracks. All we require from you is the clerical entry in the book: Judgment by Consent of Parties.’
‘I cannot enter a consent decree that has not been pronounced by the bench in open session, Mr. Braithwaite,’ said Okereke.
Chapter III
Kenneth Braithwaite did not lose his temper. He had been taught in the Colonial Administrative Service Course at Oxford that an African clerk who had served thirty years in the registry must be managed with a mixture of patience, administrative firmness, and professional flattery.
He walked around the end of the iroko desk, stood beside the registrar’s stool, and laid his hand upon the shoulder of Okereke’s stiffly starched white drill coat.
‘Look here, Josiah,’ said the officer, in a low, reasonable voice that had the easy warmth of a university tutor explaining a problem in geometry. ‘Let us look at the reality of the matter. You have been in this registry since before I was born. You know that Chief Nwosu’s court is an absolute farce. The chiefs take two pounds from the plaintiff in the morning, two pounds from the defendant in the afternoon, and then adjourn the suit for three months so that they can collect another sitting fee for inspecting the boundary.’
‘The chiefs are the judges appointed by the Governor under the warrant, sir,’ said Okereke.
‘The chiefs are an obsolete nuisance, Josiah,’ said Braithwaite. ‘In ten years, this country will be run by elected councils and young men with secondary education. The Pioneer Oil Mill is the future of this district. It will replace the foul, back-breaking labor of the women treading the palm-fruit in wooden canoes; it will double the export value of the oil by reducing the free fatty acid content from twelve per cent to two per cent; and it will bring sixty thousand pounds of revenue into the division. Are you going to hold up the economic reconstruction of the entire province for the sake of an obsolete rule of procedure in an old law-book?’
‘The rule of procedure is not obsolete, Mr. Braithwaite,’ said Okereke. ‘It is the law enacted by the Legislative Council. If the decree is entered without a public hearing, the title will be void on the face of the record; and any family head who has not signed the consent paper can take a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court at Port Harcourt to quash the proceedings.’
Braithwaite’s smile vanished. He stepped back from the stool, his hands resting upon his hips, his blue eyes narrowing as he looked at the grey-haired clerk.
‘No barrister from Port Harcourt is going to take a writ to the Supreme Court, Okereke,’ said the officer, his voice hardening. ‘The Resident, Mr. Macpherson, has approved the scheme in writing. The Legal Secretary at Lagos has examined the draft decree and certified that the Crown has power to take possession under the emergency post-war production regulations. If you enter the judgment to-day, you will receive a special commendation in my annual staff report; your son Michael’s application for a government scholarship to the Forestry School at Ibadan will be approved by the Provincial Board next week; and when the new Treasury Office is opened at Aba in January, you will be appointed the Chief Clerk at one hundred and sixty pounds a year.’
He paused, letting the silence settle into the room.
The only sound was the heavy, rhythmic thud of the palm-oil casks being rolled along the wooden deck of the UAC wharf at the river-crossing, and the continuous, high-pitched hum of the cicadas in the thick oil-palm bush behind the court-compound.
‘If you refuse to enter the record,’ said Braithwaite, ‘I shall report to the Resident that the registry of this court is being conducted with obstructive incompetence; your establishment grade will be reduced to third-class clerk; your son’s scholarship will be cancelled; and you will spend the remainder of your service at an unclassified bush-court in the creeks of Brass, where the mail-canoe comes once a month and the water has to be boiled twice through charcoal to keep off the dysentery.’
Josiah Okereke stood up from his cane stool.
He stood very straight, his thin shoulders square under his white drill uniform, his face grey and impassive behind his steel-framed spectacles.
‘The Resident can transfer my body to Brass, Mr. Braithwaite,’ he said. ‘The government owns my service; but the register belongs to the law, and so long as I hold the keys of the safe, no judgment will be entered in this book that has not been delivered by the judges on the bench.’
The Assistant District Officer looked at the clerk for three seconds with a cold, pale fury.
‘We shall see about that at the quarterly session, Mr. Okereke,’ he said.
He took his sun-helmet from the desk, turned upon his heel, and walked out into the glaring sunlight of the compound, his boots crunching heavily upon the red gravel as he shouted for his driver to bring round the Morris touring-car.
Chapter IV
At four o'clock in the afternoon, when the sun had begun to sink behind the vast green wall of the oil-palm forest, Josiah Okereke locked his ink-pots and the brass letter-scale in the drawer of his desk, turned the heavy key in the tumbler-lock of the iron safe, and delivered the court keys to the head messenger.
He took his umbrella of black oiled cotton and his leather portfolio containing his private correspondence, and walked the two miles along the red-earth road to his house at Azumini.
The heat of the day was breaking.
The evening air was filled with the blue, sweet-smelling smoke of hundreds of wood-fires burning dried palm-husks in the compounds; women in indigo-dyed wrappers were carrying clay water-pots from the springs at the river-bank, walking with that slow, magnificent, upright grace that comes from balancing fifty pounds of water upon the head; and along the margins of the road, the children were driving the black-and-white goats into the mud-walled pens for the night.
He turned into his compound, walked through the small wooden gate between the two orange trees, and went into the central parlor of his house.
The room was cool and smelled of lime-wash and dried bitter-leaf.
On the whitewashed wall hung a framed lithograph portrait of King George the Sixth in naval uniform, a calendar from the CMS Bookshop at Lagos for the year 1947, and a framed certificate testifying that Josiah C. Okereke had been admitted as a Member of the Diocesan Synod of the Niger in May 1938.
His wife, Abigail, came in from the kitchen-verandah, carrying a basin of warm water and a clean towel.
She was forty-two, a short, stout, quiet-faced woman with dark, gentle eyes, her hair braided in six neat parallel ridges from her forehead to the nape of her neck, wearing a clean wrapper of Dutch wax-print patterned with yellow cocoa-pods.
‘You are very tired to-day, Josiah,’ she said, setting the basin upon the low wooden stool before him and kneeling to unlace his canvas shoes. ‘The boy from the CMS school told me that the white officer was shouting in the registry this morning until the school-children could hear his voice across the playground.’
‘Mr. Braithwaite was explaining his plans for the new mill, Abigail,’ said the registrar, washing his face in the cool water and wiping his grey forehead with the towel.
‘Is there any word about Michael’s scholarship to Ibadan?’ she asked, looking up into his face with an anxious, eager tenderness. ‘The catechist told me after the morning prayer that the names were to be chosen at the Provincial Office on Friday.’
Okereke looked at the framed certificate of the Synod on the wall.
‘The list has not been published yet, Abigail,’ he said quietly. ‘The government has many applications from all the divisions in the province; we must wait until the official gazette arrives from Lagos.’
She stood up, took the basin in her hands, and looked at her husband with that profound, intuitive perception which had made her his companion through twenty-four years of hardship and sorrow.
‘Josiah,’ she said softly, laying her hand upon his wrist, ‘do not let the white man break your heart. We have buried three children in the churchyard at Aba; we have lived on garri and dried fish when the salary was six pounds a month; and if Michael must come home to farm the yams on his grandfather’s land at Arondizuogu, he will be an honest man among his own people, and not a beggar eating bread that has been bought with a lie.’
Chapter V
On the following Wednesday morning, Chief Nwosu came to the registry.
He arrived at ten o'clock, in a high two-wheeled wooden gig drawn by an old bay mare from the Cameroons, attended by his private clerk, a young man named Lazarus Mba who wore a blue serge suit with wide trousers, yellow pointed shoes, and a heavy brass watch-chain across his waistcoat.
Chief Nwosu was sixty-four years of age.
He was a large, heavy-bellied man with a broad, dark, fleshy face, a short grey beard cut in a fringe along his jawline, small, shrewd, bloodshot eyes that missed nothing between the rafters and the floor, and an authoritative, rolling gait that had been acquired from forty years of presiding over village councils and sitting upon the judicial bench.
He was dressed in a magnificent wrapper of heavy crimson velvet embroidered with silver thread, an ivory armlet four inches wide upon his left wrist, a red felt chief’s cap decorated with two white eagle-feathers, and a heavy walking-stick of polished ebony with a carved head representing an elephant.
He did not knock at the door.
He walked into the registry with a heavy, swinging step, took his seat upon the wooden armchair reserved for the bench, and laid his ebony stick across the open tax-register on Okereke’s desk.
Lazarus Mba remained standing by the door, carrying a leather briefcase stamped with the initials N.A.C., looking at the court records with an air of insolent familiarity.
‘Josiah,’ said the chief, in his deep, gravelly voice, speaking in the Ndoki dialect of the Igbo tongue. ‘The sun is high. Have you drawn the papers for the Uzo-Ukwu land?’
‘The papers are not drawn, Chief Nwosu,’ said Okereke, who remained standing behind his desk.
The chief took a small carved horn from the pocket of his velvet robe, poured a small mound of yellow snuff upon the back of his left thumb, and drew it up into his nostrils with two deep, loud, appreciative snorts.
‘You are making trouble for nothing, Josiah,’ said Nwosu, wiping his nose with a red silk handkerchief. ‘Mr. Braithwaite came to my house at Ohanso on Monday afternoon. He brought two bottles of Gordon’s gin and a letter from the Resident at Calabar. The government is going to give the town two thousand pounds for the land. Two thousand pounds in cash, Josiah! We will build a stone council-hall with an iron roof; we will sink three cement wells with iron pumps; and every elder who has an Ozo title will receive ten pounds a year from the palm-fruit royalty.’
‘The land belongs to sixty families, Chief Nwosu,’ said Okereke. ‘It does not belong to the council; it does not belong to the elders; and it does not belong to the Native Court.’
‘The families will get their share,’ said the chief, with an impatient wave of his ebony stick. ‘The elders have held a meeting at the village square; we have broken eight kola-nuts before the ancestral shrine; and every man has agreed that the white man’s mill is better than twenty years of litigation before the magistrates at Opobo. Lazarus has drawn the consent paper in English; the elders of Akwete have put their marks to it; and all we require from you is the stamp of the court and your signature in the register.’
Lazarus Mba stepped forward, opened his briefcase, and laid a four-page document of legal foolscap upon the desk before Okereke.
Okereke did not pick up the paper.
He looked down at the last page: there were twelve pencil crosses against the names of the illiterate elders of Ohanso, witnessed by Lazarus Mba, Licensed Petition-Writer; and at the bottom was a blank space for the seal of the Native Court and the signature: ........................, Registrar.
‘This document is a conveyance of title under English form, Chief Nwosu,’ said Okereke, in his quiet, level voice. ‘It is not a judgment of the Native Court. The Native Court has no power under its warrant to affix its seal to a private conveyance between the chiefs and an administrative officer.’
Lazarus Mba laughed—a high, sharp, contemptuous laugh that showed his gold-capped upper tooth.
‘Look here, Mr. Okereke,’ said the young petition-writer, leaning across the desk and tapping the paper with his pencil. ‘You are twenty years behind the times. The District Officer has already initialed the draft; the Resident has sent a telegram of approval from Enugu; and if you refuse to sign, the bench will hold an extraordinary session at twelve o'clock, pass a resolution of no confidence in the clerk, and have you suspended from your office before the sun goes down.’
Josiah Okereke looked at the young man with a cold, unmoving scrutiny that made Mba step back toward the door.
‘Mr. Mba,’ said the registrar, ‘you are a licensed petition-writer under the Ordinance of 1928. Your license permits you to write letters for illiterate persons at the rate of one shilling for every hundred words. It does not permit you to instruct the Senior Registrar of this division upon the performance of his statutory duty.’
Chapter VI
Chief Nwosu sat in the wooden armchair for two full minutes, his heavy hand turning the ebony elephant-head on his walking-stick.
He saw that the registrar was not to be moved by the threats of the petition-writer or the promises of the District Officer.
He was a man who had known Okereke for twenty years; he had seen three District Officers come and go in the division; and he knew that behind the quiet, stooping clerk in the starched drill coat lay the whole unyielding, mechanical power of the recorded law.
The chief leaned forward, his velvet robe rustling against the edge of the iroko table.
‘Josiah,’ said the old chief, his voice dropping into a low, confidential whisper that was barely audible above the rustle of the bamboo screen. ‘We are both Igbo men. We are not children of the white man’s country. The white men come here for three years; they build a road; they put up an iron mill; they write fifty books of reports; and then they pack their boxes and go back to their own country across the sea.’
Okereke did not answer.
‘When Mr. Braithwaite has gone to England,’ continued Nwosu, looking into the registrar’s eyes with a keen, persuasive gaze, ‘the land will still be here. The Uzo-Ukwu forest will still produce fifty thousand tins of palm-oil every year. The Cooperative Society will be in our own hands; the council will have the management of the money; and the clerk who keeps the books for the society will receive one hundred and twenty pounds a year and five per cent on the gross tonnage of the fruit.’
He paused, drew a heavy leather purse from the folds of his wrapper, and laid three Bank of British West Africa five-pound notes upon the open ledger.
‘There are fifteen pounds for the registry expenses, Josiah,’ said the chief. ‘Take the money; put the stamp upon the paper; and let the young men have their mill without further argument.’
Josiah Okereke did not touch the notes.
He took a clean sheet of blotting-paper, laid it over the money as if it were an unwholesome substance that might stain the leaves of the court record, and pushed the paper back across the desk to the chief’s elbow.
‘Chief Nwosu,’ said the registrar, in a voice of deep, sorrowful dignity, ‘I have sat in this registry for twelve years. I have recorded the judgments of your father and the judgments of your own bench. When the people of this district have had their land stolen by false witnesses, they have come to this court because they believed that the book would tell the truth about their fathers’ boundaries. If I put the stamp of the court to a false decree to-day, I cannot look my son Michael in the face when he comes home from the church, and I cannot walk through the market of Azumini without knowing that I have sold the inheritance of the poor for thirty pieces of silver.’
Chief Nwosu looked at the three notes lying upon the blotting-paper.
He saw the unbending resolution in the grey-haired clerk’s face; he saw that the fifteen pounds, the promises of the society, and the friendship of the bench were of no more value to this man than the dry palm-leaves falling upon the iron roof.
The chief took up his money, tucked the leather purse back into his velvet robe, and rose heavily from the armchair.
‘Very well, Josiah,’ said the old chief, his dark face settling into a hard, dangerous mask of anger. ‘You have chosen your road. You think that because you have the books in your iron safe, you are the king of the Ndoki country. We shall see what the Resident says when the Chiefs’ Council sits at Aba on Friday; and when you are turned out of your house without a pension, you can read your Ordinances to the birds in the bush at Arondizuogu!’
He turned, walked out through the split-bamboo door, followed by Lazarus Mba, and climbed into his high two-wheeled gig.
Josiah Okereke sat down upon his cane-bottomed stool.
The registry was very quiet.
Outside, the midday heat had reached its zenith; the iron sheets of the roof were expanding with sharp, metallic clicks that sounded like pistol-shots; and the red laterite dust of the road was blowing through the open clerestory in thin, powdery clouds.
He opened the brass clasps of his folio register.
He looked at the long columns of cases which he had recorded since 1936: the boundary suits, the debt claims, the probate orders, and the tax assessments—the vast, uncelebrated ledger of a primitive society struggling out of ancient darkness into the light of written order.
He knew that what Chief Nwosu had said was true: within a week, the administrative machine would move against him; his thirty years of service would be erased with a single line of red ink in the Provincial Staff Book; his son would lose his education; and he would be left a ruined, penniless man in his old age.
He dipped his steel pen into the black ink.
He did not write an appeal to the Governor; he did not write a letter of protest to the newspapers at Lagos.
He turned to the civil register for the month of October, drew a clean red line beneath the last completed case, and entered in his neat, small, upright clerk’s script the formal record of the day’s proceedings:
“Oct. 22, 1947. — Suit No. 142/1925: Chief Nwosu of Ohanso v. Elder Mark Ogbonna of Akwete. Consent Paper presented by Lazarus Mba, Petition-Writer, purporting to convey the Uzo-Ukwu Communal Palm Forest to the Agricultural Department for Pioneer Mill scheme. Refused registration under Native Courts Ordinance, Section 24, on ground that no judgment has been delivered by the bench in open court, and no authority has been shown by the signatories to alienate the communal title. — Josiah C. Okereke, Senior Registrar.”
He blotted the entry with green blotting-paper, closed the heavy leather covers, and laid the folio register in its place upon the iroko table.
He walked to the window, looked out into the fierce, white glare of the afternoon where the green wall of the palm-forest stood silent against the sky, and then took his umbrella from the corner to go out and face the assembly of the chiefs.
Volume the Second — The Complicity & the Protagonist's Error
Chapter VII
The official communication from the Provincial Office at Aba was delivered to the Azumini registry on the fourth day of November.
It was brought down the river-road by a uniformed government dispatch-rider named Sunday Nweke, who rode a red BSA motorcycle with a heavy canvas pouch padlocked to the rear luggage-carrier. The engine backfired twice with the sound of a pistol-shot as it ascended the laterite hill, bringing the school-children of St. Michael’s to the hedge to gape at the dust before the rider cut the spark at the court-gate.
Nweke took a brass receipt-book from his tunic, unbuckled the pouch, and handed Josiah Okereke an official packet of blue foolscap paper bound with green silk cord and sealed at the flap with two heavy wafers of red government sealing-wax.
The letter bore the postal registry number A.D.O./ND/47/Vol.IV/118:
OFFICE OF THE RESIDENT, OWERRI PROVINCE Provincial Sub-Station: Aba, Nigeria 2nd November, 1947 To: Mr. Josiah C. Okereke, Senior Registrar & Treasury Clerk, Ndoki Native Court, Azumini. Sir, I am directed by the Resident, Mr. H. M. Macpherson, C.M.G., to inform you that following a review of the civil and administrative returns of the Ndoki Division for the half-year ending 30th September 1947, it has been decided to reorganize the judicial establishments of the coastal creek perimeters. 2. You are hereby instructed to prepare your complete cash balances, stamp inventories, judgment-registers, and counterfoil receipt-books for formal hand-over to Mr. Festus A. Osuji, Second-Class Clerk, on the 1st day of December 1947. 3. Upon completion of the said audit, you will proceed by government launch from Opobo to the Native Court of Southern Brass, where you will assume the duties of Assistant Registrar (Grade III) at a revised salary of Seventy-Eight Pounds (£78) per annum. 4. The application submitted under date of 14th August 1947 on behalf of your son, Michael Okereke, for a Provincial Secondary Scholarship tenable at the Forestry School, Ibadan, has been marked: "Refused — Ineligible under revised educational establishment quota." I have the honour to be, Sir, Your obedient Servant, (Signed) K. H. BRAITHWAITE for: Resident, Owerri Province.
Josiah Okereke read the three numbered paragraphs with his spectacles held firmly against the bridge of his nose.
He did not alter the posture of his neck. He signed the dispatch-rider’s book with his steel crow-quill pen, entered the time—11:15 A.M.—in the postal delivery book, and blotted the leaf with a fresh square of green paper.
‘Is there an answer to go back to the sub-station, Mr. Okereke?’ asked Sunday Nweke, wiping his goggles with an oily rag.
‘There is no written answer, Sunday,’ said the registrar. ‘You may tell the head clerk at Aba that the packet has arrived with the seals unbroken.’
When the motorcycle had chugged down the hill toward the UAC wharf, Okereke stood alone by the iroko desk.
He looked at the small iron safe set in the concrete beneath the floorboards.
His private cash-savings, kept in an old tin biscuit-box behind the Ordinances on the middle shelf, amounted to seven pounds, twelve shillings, and sixpence. In his house on the church-road, Abigail had four sacks of dried melon-seeds and two bundles of woven Akwete cloth which she had intended to sell at the Christmas market at Port Harcourt to buy Michael’s school-uniform, his iron trunk, and his Latin grammar-books.
If he was transferred to Southern Brass on seventy-eight pounds a year, his monthly income would fall from nine pounds ten shillings to six pounds ten shillings.
The rent of a mud-and-thatch room in the swamp-villages of the delta was two pounds a month; the boat-fare for the journey through the creeks from Opobo would cost three pounds twelve shillings; and the salt-water damp of the mangrove swamps would rot his books, rust his steel pens, and destroy his wife’s chest within two wet seasons.
At twelve o'clock, he locked the registry and walked across the laterite clearing to the court-verandah.
The court was not in session, but on the wooden bench beneath the shade of the great uvuru tree sat Mr. Ignatius Ezenwa, the headmaster of the CMS Central School.
Ezenwa was fifty, a short, grey-haired, mild-spoken man who wore an old black alpaca jacket, clean white drill trousers that had been patched at both knees, and shoes made of brown canvas with hemp soles. He had taught thirty years in the mission schools of the Niger Delta; he had baptized Okereke’s three children; and he was the only man in the district who had read the whole of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall in the three-volume London edition.
‘I saw the government motorcycle at the gate, Josiah,’ said the schoolmaster, looking up from his Greek New Testament with grave, compassionate eyes.
‘The order of removal has arrived from Aba, Ignatius,’ said Okereke, sitting down upon the edge of the wooden bench and laying his hands upon his knees.
The schoolmaster took off his horn-rimmed spectacles and closed his book upon his forefinger.
‘Kenneth Braithwaite is a young man who has lived only in camps and colleges, Josiah,’ said Ezenwa, in a low, gentle voice. ‘He thinks that human beings are like the numbers in an arithmetic exercise: that if you take five hundred acres from sixty families and give them a machine with three iron boilers, you have made them happy by an act of parliament. But the Resident will not support him if the elders send a formal petition to the Chief Secretary at Lagos.’
‘The petition would cost twenty guineas to be drawn by a barrister at Port Harcourt, Ignatius,’ said Okereke. ‘And if the petition were drawn, it would be sent back to the Resident for his report; and the Resident would ask Mr. Braithwaite; and Mr. Braithwaite would write that the registrar was an old man who was blocking the progress of the district to please the money-lenders.’
‘Then what will you do, my brother?’ asked the schoolmaster.
Josiah Okereke looked out across the valley where the green river wound like a dark snake between the dense, unbroken walls of the oil-palm forest.
‘I shall count the stamps on the thirtieth of the month, Ignatius,’ he said quietly. ‘I shall pack the folio registers in the deal boxes; and when Mr. Osuji arrives from Aba, I shall give him the keys of the safe, take my trunk upon a canoe, and go down the river to Brass.’
Chapter VIII
During the three weeks that followed the receipt of the order of removal, a profound and unwholesome change took place in Josiah Okereke’s spirit.
The habit of unbending administrative rectitude, which had been the steady growth of twenty-six years of solitary discipline, was invaded by a dark, corrosive bitterness that poisoned his judgment and clouded his natural vision.
He had lived an honest life among men who grew rich by fraud; he had kept his fingers clean of the grease of the palm-oil markets; he had refused the bribes of the chiefs and the threats of the young white officers; and his reward was to be cast out in his forty-sixth year, stripped of his grade, his son deprived of his education, and his household banished to an unwholesome swamp at the edge of the sea.
He began to look upon the entire population of the Ndoki district with a hard, jaundiced suspicion that saw deceit and treachery in the commonest incidents of life.
When the market-women on the Azumini road lowered their eyes as he passed, he believed they were laughing in secret at the clerk who was being sent to the creeks; when the young pupil-teachers at St. Michael’s ceased their talking as he entered the church-porch, he suspected they had been instructed by the mission catechist to avoid the company of a fallen official; and when Chief Nwosu sent him a basket of fresh river-fish by the hands of a small servant-boy on a Saturday morning, Okereke threw the fish into the latrine-pit and sent the boy away with a harsh, bitter word that brought tears to the child's eyes.
He came to believe that the whole world was a conspiracy of knaves, and that in a country where the white man and the chief had joined hands to plunder the earth, an honest man had no duty left except to detect the wickedness of his neighbors before they could strike him in the dark.
In the third week of November, this moral disease led him into a grievous and disgraceful act of injustice.
He was sitting in the registry on a hot, breathless Tuesday afternoon, checking the counterfoil receipt-books for the quarterly tax-returns of the village of Umuagbai, when he discovered an apparent deficiency of sixteen pounds and ten shillings in the accounts of the district vaccination-almoner, a young Christian convert named Mark Nkemdirim.
Mark Nkemdirim was twenty-six years of age.
He was the son of a poor widow whose husband had died of the yaws at the mission dispensary at Akwete in 1932. He was a small, quiet, earnest youth who had been trained as a medical auxiliary at the Methodist Hospital at Uzuakoli; he wore a clean, patched shirt of grey twill and canvas shoes without laces; and for three years he had served as the itinerant sanitary visitor for the Native Administration, carrying a cold-box of calf-lymph and a leather bag of sulphur-ointment on a heavy iron bicycle through sixty remote bush-villages where the smallpox was a seasonal terror.
His wages were two pounds and five shillings a month, paid out of the health-rate levied on the market-stalls.
Okereke turned to the health-register.
He found that in the months of July, August, and September, Nkemdirim had submitted three monthly summaries showing the purchase of four hundred tubes of vaccine-lymph and two hundred jars of anti-framboesial paste from the Crescent Pharmacy on Hospital Road at Aba, amounting to sixteen pounds and ten shillings, supported by three signed receipts on the printed bill-heads of the druggist, Mr. Sylvester Chukwuma.
On the preceding Saturday, Okereke had gone to Aba to buy six gross of steel pens for the court; and while waiting at the motor-park, he had encountered Mr. Chukwuma, who was a member of the Aba Urban Council and a prominent leader of the Aba Township Ratepayers' Association.
Chukwuma was a loud, pompous, fleshy man who wore a three-piece tweed suit in the midday heat and carried a gold-headed cane. In the course of a boastful conversation about his commercial turnover, the druggist had stated casually that he had supplied no government lymph to the Ndoki court since the previous dry season, as the European medical officer at Port Harcourt had imported the entire provincial supply directly from the Crown Agents in London.
Okereke did not make another inquiry.
His mind, darkened by three weeks of solitary brooding and the bitter consciousness of his own impending ruin, leaped at once to the conclusion that the young medical visitor had confederated with the druggist's shop-boy to forge the bill-heads and embezzle sixteen pounds of the public funds.
He took the three vouchers from the safe, put his red buckram copy of the Ordinance under his arm, and walked through the blinding dust to Mark Nkemdirim’s small dispensary-shack beside the market-square.
Chapter IX
The dispensary was a small, one-room hut of unplastered mud walls with a thatched roof of dried raffia-palm leaves that had rotted into holes above the doorway.
Inside, the floor was beaten earth; there were two rough wooden benches made of split bamboo poles; a deal table with a tin basin of carbolic wash; and a hanging cupboard of unpainted pine containing twelve brown bottles of iodine, a jar of epsom salts, a roll of grey lint, and three wooden splints for broken limbs.
Mark Nkemdirim was sitting upon a wooden stool by the small window-opening, mending a puncture in the inner-tube of his bicycle with a piece of sandpaper and a tin of rubber-solution.
He was thin and pale from three years of intermittent swamp-malaria; his wrists were small and bony; and his face had that open, gentle, slightly anxious expression which belongs to young men who have grown up in the shelter of the mission stations without learning the rough, aggressive manners of the township traders.
He looked up with a bright, welcoming smile as the shadow of the Senior Registrar fell across the threshold.
‘Good afternoon, Mr. Okereke,’ said the young man, rising quickly and wiping his fingers on a clean piece of cotton waste. ‘You have walked in the great sun. Sit down on the bench; I have a fresh pot of rain-water behind the door that is quite cold.’
Josiah Okereke did not sit down.
He stood in the center of the earthen floor, his white drill coat buttoned to his throat, his face grey and rigid, his eyes behind his spectacles fixed upon the young sanitary visitor with an expression of cold, unparing condemnation.
‘Mark Nkemdirim,’ said the registrar, in a voice that was harsh, dry, and vibrating with suppressed anger, ‘I have not come to drink your rain-water. I have come to audit the health-vouchers of this district.’
The young man looked at him in mild bewilderment.
‘The vouchers for the third quarter, Mr. Okereke?’ he asked. ‘The supervisor from the Medical Department at Aba signed them on the fifteenth of October.’
‘The supervisor signed what you laid before him, sir,’ said Okereke, taking the three blue papers from his pocket and striking them against the edge of the deal table with a sharp, dry crack. ‘I have here three vouchers purporting to show the payment of sixteen pounds and ten shillings to the Crescent Pharmacy at Aba for vaccine-lymph and sulphur paste in July, August, and September.’
‘Yes,’ said Nkemdirim, simply. ‘That was for the children of the oil-palm cutters in the bush-camps behind the river.’
‘I saw Mr. Sylvester Chukwuma at Aba on Saturday, Mark Nkemdirim,’ said Okereke, taking a step forward and pointing his long, ink-stained forefinger directly into the young man’s face. ‘He told me to my face that he had sold no vaccine to this Native Administration since November twelvemonth. What have you to say to that, you young hypocrite?’
Mark Nkemdirim’s face turned from yellow-brown to an ashen, sickly grey.
‘What have I to say?’ he whispered, his lips trembling so that he could barely shape the words.
‘I ask you, sir,’ said Okereke, his voice rising until the market-women outside paused in their trading to listen through the thatch, ‘whether you have used the tax-money of these poor, naked bush-farmers to buy your English shirts and your bicycle-tires? Is it not enough that the white man is taking the land for his iron mills? Is it not enough that the warrant chiefs are robbing the widows in the court? Must a boy who was reared on the bread of the mission turn thief in the village, and forge the names of the druggists to line his own pocket while the children are rotting of the smallpox in the bush?’
Chapter X
Mark Nkemdirim stood motionless against the mud wall of the shack for two full minutes.
He did not lift his hands; he did not utter an exclamation of anger; he did not call upon God to strike his accuser dead.
He looked at the tall, grey-haired registrar with eyes that were filled with an unutterable, horrified astonishment—the look of an innocent animal that has received an unexpected, mortal blow from the hand that had always fed it.
Two large tears gathered slowly in his eyes, hung upon his eyelashes, and rolled down his thin, hollow cheeks onto the collar of his twill shirt.
He walked with a slow, unsteady step to the wooden box under his bunk, turned a small brass padlock with a key that hung on a black cord around his neck, and took out a flat parcel wrapped in grease-proof paper.
He laid it upon the deal table before Josiah Okereke, untied the string with cold, shaking fingers, and turned back the paper.
Inside lay three official receipts stamped with the purple rubber stamp of the Holy Rosary Convent Dispensary at Emekuku, dated the 12th of July, the 18th of August, and the 24th of September 1947, made out to Mark Nkemdirim, Sanitary Assistant, for sixteen pounds and ten shillings for four hundred ampoules of Lister Institute calf-lymph and sixty jars of sulphur compound, marked: PAID IN CASH — SISTER MARY XAVIER, S.M.A.
Attached to the receipts were sixty-four separate village tally-sheets, written in pencil on the backs of old church-hymn leaflets, containing the names of four hundred and twelve children vaccinated in the palm-camps of the Ndoki interior, with the thumb-marks of sixty-four village headmen certifying the work.
‘When the smallpox broke out in the bush-camps at Umuosi in July, Mr. Okereke,’ said the young man, in a voice that was barely louder than the hum of the flies in the thatch, ‘Mr. Chukwuma had no lymph in his shop at Aba. He told me that if I wanted lymph, I must wait until the Elder Dempster boat arrived at Port Harcourt in November.’
Okereke stared at the purple convent stamps.
‘The children were dying three in a compound at Umuosi,’ continued Nkemdirim, looking the registrar steadily in the face through his tears. ‘The mothers were carrying the dead infants into the deep forest in the night because they were afraid the sanitary overseer would burn their thatch. I could not wait for the Elder Dempster boat; I could not let the people perish while Mr. Braithwaite was writing reports about his oil mill.’
He paused, a short, dry cough catching him in the throat.
‘I rode my bicycle to Emekuku—sixty-four miles through the mud in the great rains of August. The Catholic Sisters had the lymph which had been sent by aeroplane from Dublin for the mission schools. They had no authority to sell it to a government clerk; but when Sister Mary Xavier saw the list of the villages, she let me have the tubes at three-pence below the government contract price. I had no money from the treasury because the vouchers were not due until the end of the quarter; so I sold the two zinc sheets from my mother’s kitchen-roof to the blacksmith at Akwete for six pounds, and I borrowed ten pounds and ten shillings from the CMS Church Teachers’ Fund upon the security of my own salary for five months.’
He picked up the blank bill-heads from the table.
‘Mr. Chukwuma gave me three of his old bill-heads when I passed through Aba, so that the Native Treasury would accept the claim on the official form,’ said the lad, his voice sinking into a whisper of profound, crushing sorrow. ‘Every penny of that sixteen pounds was paid out of my mother’s roof and my own food; every drop of that medicine was put into the arms of the children with these two hands; and you—you who are an elder in the church, you who have sat thirty years in the court where the people look for justice—you come to this hut and call me a thief before the heathen in the market!’
Josiah Okereke stood by the deal table.
He looked at the receipts from Emekuku; he looked at the sixty-four hymn-leaflets with their grease-spots and their crude charcoal crosses; he looked at the thin, galled wrists of the young man before him, and the old canvas shoes that had been mended with copper wire through the soles.
He saw what he had done.
He saw that his own proud, selfish bitterness—that unwholesome, malignant vanity which had made him believe that he was the only just man left in the world—had blinded him to the purest, most heroic act of Christian charity that had been performed in the province in ten years.
He had taken a noble-hearted boy—a youth who had stripped the roof from his own mother’s house to save the children of the poor from a loathsome pestilence—and had branded him as an embezzler and a forger before the market-women of his own village, without an hour’s inquiry, without a shadow of proof, simply to feed his own miserable appetite for finding corruption everywhere.
The room seemed to spin round him in the heat; his eyes grew dim behind his spectacles; a cold, clammy sweat broke out across his temples; and he was forced to clutch the edge of the deal table to keep his knees from giving way beneath him.
‘Mark,’ whispered the old clerk, his voice shaking with a terrible, agonized humiliation that seemed to tear his throat, ‘I have committed a great sin against God and against your father’s son.’
The young medical assistant did not answer. He turned his back to the table, sat down upon his wooden stool, and buried his face in his hands upon the window-sill.
‘I have judged you out of the darkness of my own proud heart,’ said Okereke, falling upon his knees upon the beaten earth beside the stool and bowing his grey head until his forehead touched the young man’s canvas shoe. ‘I have spoken with the mouth of a slanderer. I do not ask you to spare me; but I ask you, for the sake of the Christ whom we both serve, to let me make restitution for the evil I have spoken this day.’
Mark Nkemdirim did not move for many minutes; then he turned, looked down at the old registrar kneeling in the dust at his feet, and laid his thin, trembling hand upon the clerk’s grey hair.
‘Rise up, Mr. Okereke,’ said the young man, softly. ‘The sun is going down; and when a man is carrying a heavy load upon a dark road, it is easy to stumble against a stone.’
Chapter XI
Josiah Okereke did not attempt to commute his fault by a smooth, private reconciliation behind the dispensary door.
He knew that a public slander, uttered before the heathen in the market-place, could be balanced on the moral ledger only by a public and physical confession before the whole assembly of the people.
On the following Sunday morning, the annual harvest-thanksgiving service of the Ndoki District was held in the large stone church of St. Michael at Azumini.
The church was crowded with six hundred persons: the Christian converts from thirty villages, the teachers from twelve mission schools, four warrant chiefs in their velvet robes who had come to show their respect for the mission, and sixty palm-oil traders from the waterside in their best European coats.
The church was bright with the green fronds of young oil-palms tied to the stone pillars; the altar-rail was piled high with the harvest offerings of giant yams, bunches of yellow bananas, bags of palm-kernels, and baskets of white cassava-starch; and the Reverend Christopher Okoro had just concluded his sermon on the text: “He that walketh uprightly walketh surely.”
Before the collection-hymn was announced, Josiah Okereke rose from his seat in the third row of the elders’ pews.
He did not walk to the lectern; he did not ask the permission of the catechist.
He walked to the open space before the chancel-steps, turned his back to the altar, and faced the six hundred members of the congregation.
He was dressed in his plain black alpaca coat and his white drill trousers; his head was bare; his face was as pale as the river-sand, but his grey eyes were clear and steady behind his steel spectacles.
In the dead, astonished silence of the church, he spoke in the Ndoki dialect, in his dry, slow, measured clerk’s voice that reached the furthest benches under the gallery:
‘Brethren,’ said Okereke, ‘I stand before you to-day not as an elder of this church, but as a man who has committed a shameful and wicked trespass against his neighbor.’
A low murmur of wonder ran through the pews. Abigail Okereke sat in the fifth row with her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her head bowed upon her breast; while Chief Nwosu leaned forward upon his ivory-headed stick, his bloodshot eyes wide with amazement.
‘On Tuesday last,’ continued the registrar, ‘in the dispensary beside the market-place, in the hearing of many persons who are now present in this house, I accused Mark Nkemdirim, the sanitary visitor of this district, of having forged his vouchers and stolen sixteen pounds and ten shillings from the public funds of the health-rate.’
He paused, his voice remaining firm and level without a tremor of self-pity.
‘I declare before God and this congregation that my accusation was a false, baseless, and disgraceful slander. Mark Nkemdirim did not steal one penny of the public money. When the government lymph failed, he took the zinc sheets from his mother’s roof; he mortgaged his own food for five months; he rode his bicycle one hundred and twenty miles through the great rains to Emekuku; and he bought the medicine with his own flesh and blood to save our children from the pestilence. He is a just and holy man; and I—who have been proud of my learning and my thirty years in the court—am a miserable sinner who have slandered the righteous in the hardness of my heart.’
He took from his breast-pocket a heavy linen envelope containing sixteen pounds and ten shillings in Bank of British West Africa silver florins—the entire sum which he had withdrawn from his private savings in the Chubb safe on the previous afternoon.
He laid the envelope upon the altar-rail beside the giant yams.
‘I return this money to the church,’ said Okereke, ‘in order that the debt of the Teachers’ Fund may be discharged in full, and the roof of the widow Nkemdirim may be restored before the rains; and I tender to the church committee my resignation as a member of the Diocesan Synod.’
A profound, breathless hush hung over the six hundred people in the church.
The Reverend Mr. Okoro stood by the communion table, his hands raised in astonishment; but before he could speak, Mark Nkemdirim rose from the back pew where the school-children sat, walked up the central aisle in his patched twill shirt, took the old registrar by the right hand, and stood beside him before the congregation.
‘The debt is forgiven, Mr. Okereke,’ said the young man, his voice ringing sweet and clear through the silent church. ‘We have both lived under the law; but the mercy of God is greater than the book of the court.’
Josiah Okereke did not look up to receive the glances of the people.
He bowed his head to the young man, walked down the aisle with his eyes fixed upon the stone floor, and went out through the western door into the quiet sunlight of the churchyard alone.
Chapter XII
From that day forward, Josiah Okereke took upon his own shoulders the physical restitution of the wrong he had committed.
He had stripped himself of his last penny of private savings; he had fifteen shillings left in his house to maintain his family until the hand-over to Mr. Osuji; but he did not ask for a loan from the church, and he did not touch a single farthing of the court balances.
Every evening, after the registry had been locked at four o'clock, he walked the three miles to Mark Nkemdirim’s compound at Umuosi.
He did not send a laborer; he did not hire a carpenter from the waterside.
He took his own adze, his saw, and an iron hammer; he bought twenty bundles of fresh raffia-palm thatch with the price of his spare black alpaca coat; and he climbed the bamboo ladder with his own hands, stripping the rotten thatch from the widow’s kitchen-roof and re-thatching the sixty-foot rafters in the heat of the afternoon sun until the sweat soaked his linen shirt and his old joints ached with a dull, heavy agony.
When the thatch was completed, he spent four days in digging a deep drainage-trench around the dispensary-shack at the market, cutting through the tough laterite clay with a heavy steel matchet to prevent the flood-waters of the river from washing away the earthen floor during the spring rains.
His hands, which had touched nothing heavier than a steel pen and a folio ledger for twenty-six years, were blistered and torn until the blood stained the wooden handle of his hoe; his face became thin and dark from the exposure; but he did not miss a single hour of his labor.
He performed the work in total silence, speaking to no man who passed along the road, accepting the physical exhaustion and the ridicule of the market-traders as the exact, necessary payment required to balance the moral ledger of his life.
On the twenty-ninth day of November, the work was finished.
The dispensary stood clean, dry, and protected by its deep red ditches; the widow Nkemdirim’s kitchen was covered with fresh, sound thatch that smelled of dry palm-leaves; and every tally-sheet of the third quarter’s vaccination-returns had been verified, corrected, and entered in the Provincial Health Ledger in the registrar’s neatest, small, upright clerk’s script.
On the evening of that day, Okereke sat in his parlor on the church-road, completing the final packing of his wooden boxes.
His three trunks of camphor-wood, containing his father’s Bible, his Cambridge certificate, his linen uniforms, and his four volumes of the Ordinances, stood tied with manila rope upon the verandah, ready for the carrier’s hand-cart in the morning.
Abigail came into the room, carrying a small cup of hot palm-oil tea.
Her face was calm and serene; she did not look at the empty corners where the sacks of melon-seeds had stood before they were sold to pay the carrier’s fee; she laid her hand upon her husband’s shoulder with a deep, quiet, uncomplaining reverence.
‘The launch leaves the Opobo wharf at nine o'clock on Tuesday morning, Josiah,’ she said gently. ‘Michael has gone to the church to say farewell to Mr. Ezenwa; he told me to tell you that he will walk the twelve miles to the river with your boxes on his head, and that he will find work in the timber-sawmills at Brass to help pay for his brother’s school-fees.’
Josiah Okereke looked up into his wife’s face.
He saw the lines of thirty years of patient, unrewarded labor around her eyes; he saw that she had accepted their poverty and their exile with the magnificent, unbroken fortitude of an ancient Christian queen; and he took her worn, calloused hand in his own and pressed it against his cheek without a single word of sorrow or regret.
‘The ledger is balanced, Abigail,’ said the registrar. ‘We have lost the house, and we have lost the salary; but we have kept our hands clean before the altar, and when we stand before the great Judge at the last day, there will be no blood of the innocent upon our book.’
Volume the Third — The Terminal Audit & Settlement
Chapter XIII
The handover of the Ndoki Native Court registry took place on the morning of Monday, the first day of December 1947.
At eight o'clock, Mr. Festus A. Osuji arrived from Aba in a chartered Bedford passenger-lorry that carried the name God’s Time is the Best painted in yellow enamel across the wooden cab.
Osuji was thirty-one years of age.
He was a stout, energetic, quick-stepping young man from the Mbano district, with smooth, oiled skin, a sharp, pencil-thin mustache, large tortoise-shell reading spectacles, and an aggressive, modern commercial air. He wore a crisp, tailored suit of imported palm-beach cloth, a silk necktie patterned with green rhombuses, polished ox-blood leather brogues that creaked at every pace upon the laterite gravel, and a silver wristwatch with an expandable metal band that clicked against his cuff whenever he lifted his arm.
He was accompanied by an assistant clerk named Peter Alozie, who carried two new canvas traveling-cases, a portable Underwood typewriter in a leatherette box, and four large account-books bound in black buckram, ordered directly from the Crown Agents’ stationery depot at Port Harcourt.
Osuji walked into the Azumini registry without removing his white cork sun-helmet, surveyed the dark iroko double-desk, the Birmingham iron letter-press, and the bamboo-and-mesh partition with a swift, critical glance, and struck the dust from the desk-ledge with his yellow silk handkerchief.
‘Good morning, Mr. Okereke,’ said the new registrar, speaking in rapid, clipped township English. ‘The Assistant District Officer instructed me to complete the cash verification and the inventory of judicial dockets before twelve o'clock, so that the treasury-returns may be signed before the mail-lorry returns to the sub-station.’
‘Good morning, Mr. Osuji,’ said Josiah Okereke, rising from his cane-bottomed stool and bowing with his habitual, grave formality. ‘The registers have been ruled in red ink to the thirtieth of November; the cash-balances have been counted into three leather bags according to denomination; and the counterfoil receipt-books have been sorted chronologically upon the lower shelf of the safe.’
For three hours, the two men worked in total silence, broken only by the dry rustling of foolscap leaves, the dull clink of silver florins counted out upon the green blotting-paper, and the scratching of Osuji’s fountain-pen across the official handover schedules.
Every item in the registry was verified against the Provincial Ledger:
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | NATIVE ADMINISTRATION TREASURY — NDOKI DISTRICT COURT | | Handover Schedule: 1st December, 1947 | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | 1. Cash Balance in Chubb Safe (Verified): | | - Silver Florins (2s. pieces): 480 coins ................... £48 0s. 0d. | | - Shilling Pieces (1s.): 240 coins ......................... £12 0s. 0d. | | - Cupro-Nickel Tenths (Pennies & Halfpennies) .............. £ 4 11s. 4d. | | - West African Currency Board Notes (£1 & 10s.) ............ £31 10s. 0d. | | Total Cash on Hand: ........................................ £96 1s. 4d. | | | | 2. Unissued Judicial Revenue Stamps (Face Value): ............. £42 15s. 0d. | | | | 3. Judicial Dockets & Folios (1936–1947): | | - Civil Judgment Registers: Vols. IV, V, VI, VII ........... [Complete] | | - Criminal Record Books: Vols. II, III ..................... [Complete] | | - Marriage Ordinance Register (Customary): Vol. I .......... [Complete] | | - Unadjudicated Suits (Pending Hearing): ................... 14 Files | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
When the final column was summed, Osuji turned to the last page of Civil Judgment Register No. VII, where Okereke’s red-ink entry of October twenty-second stood beneath the title of Suit No. 142 of 1925: Chief Nwosu v. Elder Mark Ogbonna.
The young clerk adjusted his tortoise-shell spectacles, read the three-line refusal of registration, and shook his head with a short, patronizing click of his tongue.
‘You have made a very serious administrative mistake here, Mr. Okereke,’ said Osuji, pointing his fountain-pen at the page. ‘Mr. Braithwaite informed me at Aba on Saturday that the Pioneer Oil Mill machinery has already arrived by lighter at the Akwete wharf. The Agricultural Department has sixty laborers waiting to cut the boundary-trace through the Uzo-Ukwu grove. By refusing to enter this consent decree, you have held up twenty-four thousand pounds of development capital for forty days, and you have forced the District Officer to prepare a special administrative warrant under the Public Lands Acquisition Ordinance.’
‘The Native Courts Ordinance, Section 24, governs the entries in this register, Mr. Osuji,’ said Okereke, whose hands rested calmly upon the edge of the iroko table. ‘The registrar is responsible to the law for the truth of the book. If an administrative officer desires to seize communal land by executive decree, he must do so under his own signature in the Provincial Gazette; he cannot compel the clerk of a native court to enter a false judgment on the record of the people.’
Osuji gave a thin, superior smile, dipped his pen into the blue-black ink, and signed his name at the foot of the handover certificate: F. A. Osuji, Registrar (Incoming).
He took the heavy bunch of bronze and steel keys from the table, tested the double-turn lock of the Chubb safe, and slipped the key-ring into his trousers-pocket.
‘The old methods are finished in this country, Mr. Okereke,’ said the young man, turning his back to the safe. ‘In five years, we shall have self-government in the Eastern Region; we shall have secondary schools, electric power-stations, and mechanical palm-presses in every division; and an administrative clerk who spends three days debating whether an illiterate bush-chief has signed a paper with an ink-cross or a thumb-print will be swept out of the public service like the sweepings of the market-floor.’
Josiah Okereke took his black oiled-cotton umbrella and his worn leather portfolio from the wooden shelf.
‘The machines will come, Mr. Osuji,’ said the old clerk, looking into the young man’s confident, smiling face with eyes of a quiet, unyielding gravity. ‘The iron boilers will come, and the electric wires will come, and the young men will wear fine coats from England; but when the machines have rusted in the rain, and the governments have changed their names three times in the capital, the people will still come to this registry to ask for their fathers’ boundaries; and if the book has been written with lies, no machine in the world will buy back the peace of this town.’
He bowed his head, walked out through the split-bamboo screen, crossed the red laterite compound under the fierce glare of the midday sun, and went down the river-road to the mission compound to prepare for his departure.
Chapter XIV
The catastrophe at the Uzo-Ukwu palm-forest took place on the fourteenth of December.
For six weeks, the Agricultural Department had pushed the construction of the Pioneer Oil Mill with feverish, unsparing haste.
A vast rectangular clearing of twelve acres had been chopped out of the ancient communal grove beside the river-crossing; thirty tons of heavy corrugated iron sheets had been freighted up from Opobo on wooden barges; four steam-boilers manufactured by Ruston & Hornsby of Lincoln had been hauled over the mud-roads from Aba on heavy steel-tired timber-trucks; and an experimental plantation of high-yielding Malayan tenera oil-palms had been laid out in square nursery-beds along the river-flats.
To secure the fuel required to fire the high-pressure steam-boilers, the project manager, a young Scottish agricultural engineer named Ian MacTaggart, ordered the immediate felling of the old wild palm-groves along the Akwete-Ohanso boundary-ridge—a dense, sacred forest of four thousand mature wild palms that had yielded sixty tons of thick, pericarp-rich palm-oil every year to the women of the sixty land-holding families.
On the morning of the fourteenth, two caterpillar tractors equipped with heavy steel clearing-blades entered the grove at six o'clock, accompanied by forty migrant laborers recruited from the township slums of Port Harcourt, armed with six-foot crosscut saws and heavy felling-axes.
At nine o'clock, when the first twelve giant palm-trees had been smashed to the earth, the alarm-drums of Ohanso began to beat.
The sound of the ikoro—the great hollow wooden slit-drum that stood in the sacred grove of the village square—rose through the humid morning air with a deep, throbbing, rhythmic boom that carried across eight miles of river-forest, vibrating through the earth until the windows of the Azumini court-house rattled in their wooden frames.
Within one hour, six hundred women from the twelve villages of the Ndoki clan assembled at the boundary-crossing.
They were not armed with matchets or guns; they were dressed in their ancient war-attire: short skirts of coarse raffia-cloth, their faces smeared with charcoal and white river-clay, carrying heavy wooden cassava-pestles and long pestle-poles bound with green palm-fronds.
They were led by Madam Nwannediya Ogbonna, the sixty-eight-year-old sister of Elder Mark Ogbonna of Akwete—a tall, spare, fierce-eyed matriarch who had carried the cassava-staff in the great Women’s War of 1929 at Aba.
The women formed a dense, unbroken, singing circle around the two tractors, blocking the fuel-lorries, sitting upon the fallen palm-trunks, and shouting the ancient ritual curses against the men who had come to destroy the food of their children.
At eleven o'clock, Assistant District Officer Braithwaite arrived from Aba in his open Morris touring-car, accompanied by Chief Nwosu, Lazarus Mba, and a detachment of twenty-four Native Administration police-constables armed with riot-batons and wicker shields.
The officer was pale and sweating through his khaki drill shirt; he stepped upon the running-board of the car, held up his hand for silence, and addressed the crowd through his Hausa police-sergeant:
‘Women of Ndoki!’ shouted Braithwaite, his voice thin and hoarse against the noise of the river. ‘You are obstructing the lawful officers of the Crown! This land has been acquired by the Government for a public purpose under the Public Lands Acquisition Ordinance. The money—two thousand pounds—has been paid into the Treasury for your benefit. The mill will bring wealth to your town; it will buy your palm-fruit for cash at the market-rate; and it will build a hospital for your children. I order you to disperse to your houses within fifteen minutes, or the police will clear the road by force!’
Madam Ogbonna stepped out from the front rank of the women.
She was barefoot; her white hair stood out like a woollen halo against her dark, clay-smeared forehead; she pointed her five-foot wooden cassava-pestle directly at Chief Nwosu’s velvet robe:
‘Where is the book of the court, white man?’ cried the old woman, in a voice of piercing, magnificent power that reached the furthest trees of the forest. ‘Who sold the trees of our mothers to your iron machine? Chief Nwosu has no land in Uzo-Ukwu! His father was an Aro slave-dealer who came to Ohanso with an empty bag! He has taken twenty bottles of English gin to sell the palm-groves that were planted when the Portuguese ships were in the river! Show us the paper where the elders of sixty families put their marks before the judges! If you have no paper from the court, take your iron tractors off our earth, or you will have to bury six hundred women in the mud of this creek before the sun goes down!’
Chief Nwosu stepped forward, his heavy face black with fury, his ebony elephant-stick trembling in his hand.
‘Arrest that woman, sergeant!’ roared the chief. ‘She is an instigator of riot! She has insulted the bench of the Native Court!’
The police-sergeant took two paces forward with his baton raised; but before his boots touched the grass, the six hundred women uttered a single, terrible, high-pitched scream of rage, surged across the clearing like a breaking wave of the sea, and overwhelmed the police-line in forty seconds.
The wicker shields were smashed to splinters under the wooden pestles; Chief Nwosu’s velvet robe was torn from his shoulders and trampled in the yellow mud; Lazarus Mba was chased into the river-reed swamps where he lost his shoes and his briefcase; and the two caterpillar tractors were set on fire with bundles of dry palm-leaves soaked in engine-fuel, sending two enormous pillars of black, greasy smoke five hundred feet into the sky.
Chapter XV
The administrative collapse of the Ndoki Division was complete before the end of the week.
The destruction of the twenty-four-thousand-pound Pioneer Oil Mill project was reported by urgent cable to the Colonial Office in London; the Governor at Lagos ordered an immediate judicial commission of inquiry under Mr. Justice Jackson of the Supreme Court; and on the nineteenth of December, the Resident of Owerri Province, Mr. H. M. Macpherson, arrived at Aba in his black Armstrong-Siddeley limousine to take personal charge of the district.
The inquiry was held in the large hall of the Aba Township Council.
For three days, the courtroom was packed with two hundred chiefs, barristers from Calabar and Enugu, colonial agricultural officers, and the leaders of the market-women’s unions.
Kenneth Braithwaite stood in the witness-box for four hours, his uniform soiled, his voice broken with exhaustion, attempting to explain how an administrative acquisition approved by the Secretariat had resulted in a riot of six hundred women, the destruction of forty thousand pounds’ worth of machinery, and the total suspension of the palm-oil harvest across sixty villages.
‘Why was this land not acquired under a regular judicial decree from the Native Court, Mr. Braithwaite?’ asked Justice Jackson, looking over his gold spectacles with the cold, unsparing severity of a senior colonial judge.
‘The Senior Registrar, My Lord,’ stammered the young officer, ‘an old clerk named Okereke—refused to enter the consent decree drawn by the parties. He raised technical procedural objections under Section 24 of the Ordinance; and as the season was advancing rapidly, I thought it necessary to proceed by executive direction under the emergency powers.’
‘Let the court records be produced,’ ordered the Judge.
Festus A. Osuji was called to the stand.
The young registrar came forward in his palm-beach suit, his hands trembling so that he could barely balance Civil Judgment Register No. VII upon the witness-rail.
The Judge opened the book to the twenty-second day of October.
He read aloud, in the silent, crowded hall, the small, neat, upright entry written in Stephens’ black ink across the red rule:
“Refused registration under Native Courts Ordinance, Section 24, on ground that no judgment has been delivered by the bench in open court, and no authority has been shown by the signatories to alienate the communal title. — Josiah C. Okereke, Senior Registrar.”
Justice Jackson laid his hand upon the leaf of the register.
He turned to the Resident, who sat upon the bench beside him in his white uniform with the blue ribbon of the St. Michael and St. George across his breast.
‘Mr. Resident,’ said the Judge, in a clear, resonant voice that reached the crowds gathered in the street outside, ‘it appears to this Commission that the only person in this division who understood the law of this country, and who possessed the courage to defend the rights of its illiterate inhabitants against arbitrary executive folly, was the humble African clerk who made this entry. If this officer’s statutory warning had been respected by his superiors, forty thousand pounds of public funds would have been preserved, and the peace of this province would not have been disgraced before the world.’
The findings of the Commission were delivered on the twenty-third of December.
The administrative acquisition of the Uzo-Ukwu forest was declared null and void ab initio; Chief Nwosu was stripped of his warrant of chieftaincy and suspended from the judicial bench for five years for official corruption; the petition-writing license of Lazarus Mba was revoked; and Assistant District Officer Kenneth Braithwaite was relieved of his administrative duties in the Eastern Region and transferred to an unclassified secretarial post in the Secretariat at Kaduna.
On the afternoon of that day, the Resident sent an urgent official telegram to the District Officer at Brass:
“Cancel immediately transfer of Josiah C. Okereke to Southern Brass. Reinstate said officer as Senior Registrar and Treasury Clerk of Ndoki Native Court at maximum establishment grade of One Hundred and Eighty Pounds (£180) per annum, with special arrears of service pension and personal letter of commendation from His Excellency the Governor.”
Chapter XVI
The government launch Viper reached the mangrove-station of Southern Brass on the evening of the twenty-fourth of December.
It was a desolate, swampy outpost at the mouth of the Brass River, where the grey, oily waters of the Niger Delta met the Atlantic surf in a continuous, low, thunderous roar that sounded like the muttering of distant thunder.
The station consisted of three whitewashed wooden bungalows built upon iron stilts above the black tidal mud, an open court-shed of corrugated iron, a small hospital with twelve rope-beds, and a narrow wooden jetty where the mail-canoes tied up among the stilt-roots of the red mangroves.
The air was heavy, hot, and suffocating with the smell of rotting vegetation, salt slime, and the smoke of mangrove-wood fires.
Josiah Okereke sat upon a wooden packing-case on the verandah of the third-class clerks’ quarters.
He had arrived forty-eight hours before, after a journey of five days through the tidal creeks from Opobo in an open cargo-canoe loaded with dried fish and kerosene tins.
He was fifty-two years of age.
He was dressed in his plain black alpaca coat and his white trousers; his reading spectacles were upon his nose; and on his lap lay his open Greek New Testament, which he was reading by the light of a small kerosene hurricane-lamp set upon an empty milk-box.
His wife Abigail was sitting beside him upon a low wooden stool, peeling two roasted plantains for their evening meal; while his son Michael stood at the edge of the verandah, looking out across the dark, silent river where the green navigation-light of a palm-oil tanker was moving slowly out to sea.
At seven o'clock, the district clerk of Brass, a young Ijaw man named Dennis Lawson, came running along the wooden boardwalk from the telegraph-shed, carrying a yellow envelope in his hand.
‘Mr. Okereke!’ cried the young man, his eyes wide with excitement. ‘A priority telegram has just come through from the Resident at Aba! You are reinstated! You are promoted to First-Class Clerk at one hundred and eighty pounds a year! The government launch is ordered to take you back to Azumini on Friday morning, and the Chiefs’ Council is preparing a public reception for you at the court-house!’
Josiah Okereke took the yellow paper, unfolded it, and held it to the lantern-flame.
He read the telegram through twice, with his slow, deliberate scrutiny; then he folded it into four, slipped it into the pocket of his alpaca coat, and handed the envelope back to the young clerk.
‘Thank you, Dennis,’ said the old registrar, quietly. ‘You have run fast in the heat. Take these two pence and buy some oranges at the market.’
The young man took the coins, looked at the old clerk with a bewildered, uncomprehending astonishment, and walked slowly back along the boardwalk into the darkness.
Josiah Okereke did not stand up; he did not raise his voice; he did not utter an exclamation of triumph or pride.
He looked down at his wife, who had laid her head against his knee, weeping softly with a deep, silent, overflowing gratitude that washed away the memories of their three weeks of shame and sorrow.
‘The white man has found his books, Abigail,’ said the registrar, in his dry, slow, measured voice. ‘He has found that the numbers in the book were right, and that the stone was where it was planted in the earth.’
‘You will go back to the great court at Azumini, Josiah,’ whispered the woman, looking up into his face through her tears. ‘Michael will go to the school at Ibadan, and you will sit among the elders in your white coat until your old age.’
Josiah Okereke closed his Greek Testament, laid his spectacles upon the leather cover, and looked out into the vast, dark, silent expanse of the river, where the black mangrove-forests stood motionless beneath the tropical stars.
He knew that what she said was true: he would return to the red hill above the Imo; he would sit upon his high cane stool; he would receive his one hundred and eighty pounds a year from the Treasury; and his name would be spoken with honor among the six hundred villages of the province.
Yet he knew also that the worldly triumph, the promotion, and the praise of the Governor were of no more substance than the yellow foam that floated upon the tidal current below his feet.
He had not refused the bribe to gain one hundred and eighty pounds; he had not confessed his fault in the church to obtain a judgment from a Supreme Court Judge; he had kept his ledger straight because the law of God and the truth of the record were objective, mind-independent realities that demanded the obedience of an honest man, whether he lived in a palace at Lagos or died of the swamp-fever in a mud-hut at Brass.
He stood up, took his son Michael by the shoulder, and pointed across the dark water to the lighthouse at the river-mouth, whose white beam flashed once every thirty seconds across the bar into the great Atlantic Ocean.
‘Look at the light, Michael,’ said the old clerk, in a voice of deep, unbending, eternal serenity. ‘The wind blows upon it from the sea; the salt-water beats against the iron tower; the clouds hide it for an hour in the storm; but the lamp stays where it was built by the masters, and it shows the deep water to the ships that are coming home in the night.’
He turned back into the small, bare room to eat his roasted plantain with his wife, and left the young man standing alone upon the verandah, watching the white beam of the lighthouse cut through the darkness of the river until the morning broke over the sea.
The Terminal Audit
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | THE RECORD OF JOSIAH C. OKEREKE | | Native Administration Service, Eastern Provinces, Nigeria | | 1921 — 1956 | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Years of Service: ....................................... 35 Years | | Total Judicial Dockets Kept: ............................ 14,812 Suits | | Defalcations, Errors, or Disputed Balances: ............. Nil (£0 0s. 0d.) | | Official Commendations: ................................. 1 (Gov. Gazette) | | Final Grade: ............................................ Senior Treasury | | Officer (Retired) | | Pension Awarded: ........................................ £112 10s. per annum | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | "He was a man who wrote the truth in the book when the town was full of lies; | | and when the book was opened before the judges, the writing remained." | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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