After much wondering he had
discovered two such markets linked together by such a highway; and so ended his
wandering. One market was Afo, the other Eke. The two days between them suited
him very well: before setting out for Eke he had ample time to wind up his
business properly at Afo. He passed the night there putting right again his hut
after a day of defilement by two fat-bottomed market women who said it was
their market stall. At first he had put up a fight but the women had gone and
brought their men-folk—four hefty beasts of the bush—to whip him out of the
hut. After that he always avoided them, moving out on the morning of the market
and back in at dusk to pass the night. Then in the morning he rounded off his
affairs swiftly and set out on that long, beautiful boa-constrictor of a road
to Eke in the distant town of Ogbu. He held his staff and cudgel at the ready
in his right hand, and with the left he steadied the basket of all his
belongings on his head. He had got himself this cudgel lately to deal with
little beasts on the way who threw stones at him and made fun of their mothers’
nakedness, not his own.
He used to walk in the middle of
the road, holding it in conversation. But one day the driver of a mammy wagon
and his mate came down on him shouting, pushing and slapping his face. They
said their lorry very nearly ran over their mother, not him. After that he
avoided those noisy lorries too, with the vagabonds inside them.
Having walked one day and one night he
was now close to the Eke market place. From every little side-road, crowds of
market people poured into the big highway to join the enormous flow to Eke.
Then he saw some young ladies with water-pots on their heads coming towards
him, unlike all the rest, away from the market. This surprised him. Then he saw
two more water-pots rise out of a sloping footpath. But first he begged his
highway not to be offended or continue the journey without him. “I’ll get some
for you too,” he said coaxingly with a tender backward glance. “I know you too
are thirsty.”
****
Nwibe was a man of high standing in
Ogbu and was rising higher; a man of wealth and integrity. He had just given
notice to all the ozo men of the town that he proposed to seek admission into
their honoured hierarchy in the coming initiation season.
“Your proposal is excellent,” said
the men of title. “When we see we shall believe.” Which was their dignified way
of telling you to think it over once again and make sure you have the means to
go through with it. For ozo is not a child’s naming ceremony; and where is the
man to hide his face who begins the ozo dance and then is foot-stuck to the
arena? But in this instance the caution of the elders was no more than a
formality for Nwibe was such a sensible man that no one could think of him
beginning something he was not sure to finish.
On that Eke day Nwibe had risen
early so as to visit his farm beyond the stream and do some light work before
going to the market at midday to drink a horn or two of palm-wine with his
peers and perhaps buy that bundle of roofing thatch for the repair of his
wives’ huts. As for his own hut he had a couple of years back settled it finally
by changing his thatch-roof to zinc. He could have done Mgboye’s hut right away
but decided to wait until he could do the two together, or else Udenkwo would
set the entire compound on fire. Udenkwo was the junior wife, by three years,
but she never let that worry her. Happily Mgboye was a woman of peace who
rarely demanded the respect due her from the other. She would suffer Udenkwo's provoking tongue sometimes for a whole day without offering a word in reply.
And when she did reply at all her words were always few and her voice very low.
That very morning Udenkwo had
accused her of spite and all kinds of wickedness on account of a little dog.
“What has a little dog done to
you?” she screamed loud enough for half the village to hear. “I asked you,
Mgboye, what is the offense of a puppy this early in the day?”
“What your puppy did this early in
the day,” replied Mgboye, “is that he put his shit-mouth into my soup pot.”
“And then?”
“And then I smacked him.”
“You smacked him! Why don’t you
cover your soup-pot? Is it easier to hit a dog than cover a pot? Is a small
puppy to have more sense than a woman who leaves her soup-pot about…?”
“Enough from you, Udenkwo.”
“It is not enough, Mgboye, it is
not enough. If that dog owes you any debt I want to know. Everything I have,
even a little dog I bought to eat my infant’s excrement keeps you awake at
nights. You are a bad woman, Mgboye, you are a very bad woman!”
Nwibe had listened to all of this
in silence in his hut. He knew from the vigour in Udenkwo’s voice that she
could go on like this till market-time. So he intervened, in his characteristic
manner by calling out to his senior wife.
“Mgboye! Let me have peace this
early morning!”
“Don’t you hear all the abuses
Udenkwo…”
“I hear nothing at all from Udenkwo
and I want peace in my compound. If Udenkwo is crazy must everybody else go
crazy with her? Is one crazy woman not enough in my compound so early in the
day?”
“The great judge has spoken,” sang
Udenkwo in a sneering sing-song. “Thank you, great judge. Udenkwo is mad.
Udenkwo is always mad, but those of you who are sane let…”
“Shut your mouth, shameless woman,
or a wild beast will lick your eyes for you this morning. When will you learn
to keep your badness within this compound instead of shouting it to all Ogbu to
hear? I say shut your mouth!”
There was silence then except for
Udenkwo’s infant whose yelling had up till then been swallowed up by the larger
noise of the adults.
“Don’t cry, my father,” said
Udenkwo to him. “They want to kill your dog, but our people say the man who
decides to chase after a chicken, for him is the fall…”
By the middle of the morning Nwibe
had done all the work he had to do on his farm and was on his way again to
prepare for market. At the little stream he decided as he always did to wash
off the sweat of work. So he put his cloth on a huge boulder by the men’s
bathing section and waded in. There was nobody else around because of the time
of day and because it was market day. But from instinctive modesty he turned to
face the forest away from the approached.
The madman watched his for quite a
while. Each time he bent down to carry water in cupped hands from the shallow
stream to his head and body the madman smiled at his parted behind. And then
remembered. This was the same hefty man who brought three others like him and
whipped me out of my hut in the Afo market. He nodded to himself. And he
remembered again: this was the same vagabond who descended on me from the lorry
in the middle of my highway. He nodded once more. And then he remembered yet
again: this was the same fellow who set his children to throw stones at me and
make remarks about their mothers’ buttocks, not mine. Then he laughed.
Nwibe turned sharply round and saw
the naked man laughing, the deep grove of the stream amplifying his laughter.
Then he stopped as suddenly as he had begun; the merriment vanished from his
face.
“I have caught you naked,” he said.
Nwibe ran a hand swiftly down his
face to clear his eyes of water.
“I say I have caught you naked,
with your thing dangling about.”
“I can see you are hungry for a
whipping,” said Nwibe with quiet menace in his voice, for a madman is said to
be easily scared away by the very mention of a whip. “Wait till I get up
there…. What are you doing? Drop it at once…I say drop it!”
The madman had picked up Nwibe’s
cloth and wrapped it round his own waist. He looked down at himself and began
to laugh again.
“I will kill you,” screamed Nwibe
as he splashed towards the bank, maddened by anger. “I will whip that madness
out of you today!”
They ran all the way up the steep
and rocky footpath hedged in by the shadowy green forest. A mist gathered and
hung over Nwibe’s vision as he ran, stumbled, fell, pulled himself up again and
stumbled on, shouting and cursing. The other, despite his unaccustomed
encumbrance steadily increased his lead, for he was spare and wiry, a thing
made for speed. Furthermore, he did not waste his breath shouting and cursing;
he just ran. Two girls going down to the stream saw a man running up the slope
towards them pursued by a stark-naked madman. They threw don their pots and
fled, screaming.
When Nwibe emerged into the full
glare of the highways he could not see his cloth clearly any more and his chest
was on the point of exploding from the fire and torment within. But he kept
running. He was only vaguely aware of crowds of people on all sides and he
appealed to them tearfully without stopping: “Hold the madman, he’s got my
cloth!” By this time the man with the cloth was practically lost among the much
denser crowds far in front so that the link between him and the naked man was
no longer clear.
Now Nwibe continually bumped
against people’s backs and then laid flat a frail old man struggling with a
stubborn goat on a leash. “Stop the madman,” shouted hoarsely, his heart
tearing to shreds, “he’s got my cloth!” Everyone looked at him first in
surprise and then less surprise because strange sights are common in a great
market. Some of them even laughed.
“They’ve got his cloth he says.”
“That’s a new one I’m sure. He
hardly looks mad yet. Doesn’t he have people, I wonder.”?
“People are so careless these days.
Why can’t they keep proper watch over their sick relation, especially on the
day of the market?”
Farther up the road on the very
brink of the market-place two men from Nwibe’s village recognized him and,
throwing down the one his long basket of yams, the other his calabash of
palm-wine held on a loop, gave desperate chase, to stop him setting foot
irrevocably within the occult territory of the powers of the market. But it was
in vain. When finally they caught him it was well inside the crowded square.
Udenkwo in tears tore off her top-cloth which they draped on him and led him
home by the hand. He spoke just once about a madman who took his cloth in the
stream.
“It is all right,” said one of the
men in the tone of a father to a crying child. They led and he followed
blindly, his heavy chest heaving up and down in silent weeping. Many more
people from his village, a few of his in-laws and one or two others from his
mother’s place had joined the grief-stricken party. One man whispered to
another that it was the worst kind of madness, deep and tongue-tied.
The first medicine-man his
relatives consulted refused to take him on, out of some kind of integrity.
“I could say yes to you and take
your money,” he said. “But that is not my way. My powers of cure are known
throughout Olu and Igbo but never have I professed to bring back to life a man
who has sipped the spirit-waters of ani-mmuo. It is the same with a madman who
of his own accord delivers himself to the divinities of the market-place. You
should have kept better watch over him.”
“Don’t blame us too much,” said
Nwibe’s relative. When he left home that morning his senses were as complete as
yours and mine now. Don’t blame us too much.”
“Yes, I know. It happens that way
sometimes. And they are the ones that medicine will not reach. I know.”
“Can you do nothing at all then,
not even to untie his tongue?”
“Nothing can be done. They have already
embraced him. It is like a man who runs away from the oppression of his fellows
to the grove of an alusi and says to him: Take me, oh spirit, I am your osu. No
man can touch him thereafter. He is free and yet no power can break his
bondage. He is free of men but bonded to a god.”
The second doctor was not as famous
as the first and not so strict. He said the case was bad, very bad indeed, but
no one folds his arms because the condition of his child is beyond hope. He
must still grope around and do his best. His hearers nodded in eager
agreement. And then he muttered into his own inward ear: If doctors were to
send away every patient whose cure they were uncertain of, how many of them
would eat one meal in a whole week from their practice?
Nwibe was cured of his madness.
That humble practitioner who did the miracle became overnight the most
celebrated mad-doctor of his generation. They called him Sojourner to the Land
of the Spirits. Even so it remains true that madness may indeed sometimes
depart but never with all his clamorous train. Some of these always remain—the
trailers of madness you might call them—to haunt the doorway of the eyes. For
how could a man be the same again of whom witnesses from all the lands of Olu
and Igbo have once reported that they saw today a fine, hefty man in his prime,
stark naked, tearing through the crowds to answer the call of the market-place?
Such a man is marked for ever.
Nwibe became a quiet, withdrawn man
avoiding whenever he could the boisterous side of the life of his people. Two
years later, before another initiation season, he made a new inquiry about
joining the community of titled men in his town. Had they received him perhaps
he might have become at least partially restored, but those ozo men, dignified
and polite as ever, deftly steered the conversation away to other matters.
Chinua Achebe (1972: 3-13)
"The Madman" in Girls at War and Other Stories
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