“
Egbunu, I must say that it wasn’t that he responded this way to every woman’s voice, but her voice sounded strangely familiar to him. Although he did not know it, I knew that it reminded him of his mother. At once he saw a plump, swarthy woman who looked his age. She was sweating in the hot sun, and the sweat shimmered along her legs. She carried a tray filled with groundnuts on her head. She was one of the poor—the class of people who had been created by the new civilization. In the time of the old fathers only the lazy, indolent, infirm, or accursed lacked, but now most people did. Go into the streets, into the heart of any market in Alaigbo, and you’ll find toiling men, men whose hands are as hard as stones and whose clothes are drenched in sweat, living in abject poverty. When the White Man came, he brought good things. When they saw the car, the children of the fathers cried out in amusement. The bridges? “Oh, how wonderful!” they said. “Isn’t this one of the wonders of the world?” they said of the radio. Instead of simply neglecting the civilization of their blessed fathers, they destroyed it. They rushed to the cities—Lagos, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Kano—only to find that the good things were in short supply. “Where are the cars for us?” they asked at the gates of these cities. “Only a few have them!” “What about the good jobs, the ones whose workers sit under air conditioners and wear long ties?” “Ah, they are only for those who have studied for years in a university, and even then, you’d still have to compete with the multitude of others with the same qualifications.” So, dejected, the children of the fathers turned back and returned. But to where? To the ruins of the structure they had destroyed. So they live on the bare minimum, and this is why you see people like this woman who walk the length and breadth of the city hawking groundnuts.
”
”