Civil Peace

Chinua Achebe

Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1930–2013), the author of five novels, as well as several collections of poetry and short stories, is one of the most prominent African authors of all time. His novel Things Fall Apart is a modern classic, and the most-read African novel to date, with over 8 million copies in print. Achebe was born and grew up in a rural Nigerian town in an area dominated by the Igbo, the largest ethnic group in the country. During Achebe’s youth, Nigeria was still under British control, and the boarding school he attended as a child was modeled after the British system. After graduating from college, Achebe moved to Lagos, the most populous city in Nigeria, where he worked for the Nigerian Broadcast Service and began writing Things Fall Apart. “Civil Peace” was first published in the Nigerian journal Okike in 1971, and it was collected in the volume Girls at War and Other Stories, published the following year.

KEY CONTEXT “Civil Peace” is set in the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), also known as the Biafran War. Nigeria, which gained independence from Britain in 1960, was made up of different ethnic groups, and building tensions led the Igbo, one of the major groups, to form the Independent Republic of Biafra and separate from Nigeria. During three years of bloody fighting and famine, over 2 million civilians died from combat and famine. In 1970, Nigeria, aided by Britain, defeated the Igbo and reunited as one country. Achebe, born of Igbo ancestry, served as a diplomat for Biafra and supported the cause as a radio commentator.

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Jonathan Iwegbu counted himself extraordinarily lucky. “Happy survival!” meant so much more to him than just a current fashion of greeting old friends in the first hazy days of peace. It went deep to his heart. He had come out of the war with five inestimable blessings — his head, his wife Maria’s head, and the heads of three out of their four children. As a bonus he also had his old bicycle — a miracle too but naturally not to be compared to the safety of five human heads.

The bicycle had a little history of its own. One day at the height of the war it was commandeered “for urgent military action.” Hard as its loss would have been to him he would still have let it go without a thought had he not had some doubts about the genuineness of the officer. It wasn’t his disreputable rags, nor the toes peeping out of one blue and one brown canvas shoes, nor yet the two stars of his rank done obviously in a hurry in Biro,¹ that troubled Jonathan; many good and heroic soldiers looked the same or worse. It was rather a certain lack of grip and firmness in his manner. So Jonathan, suspecting he might be amenable to influence, rummaged in his raffia bag and produced the two pounds with which he had been going to buy firewood which his wife, Maria, retailed to camp officials for extra stock-fish and corn meal, and got his bicycle back. That night he buried it in the little clearing in the bush where the dead of the camp, including his own youngest son, were buried. When he dug it up again a year later after the surrender all it needed was a little palm-oil greasing. “Nothing puzzles God,” he said in wonder.

He put it to immediate use as a taxi and accumulated a small pile of Biafran money ferrying camp officials and their families across the four-mile stretch to the nearest tarred road. His standard charge per trip was six pounds and those who had the money were only glad to be rid of some of it in this way. At the end of a fortnight he had made a small fortune of one hundred and fifteen pounds.

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Then he made the journey to Enugu and found another miracle waiting for him. It was unbelievable. He rubbed his eyes and looked again and it was still standing there before him. But, needless to say, even that monumental blessing must be accounted also totally inferior to the five heads in the family. This newest miracle was his little house in Ogui Overside. Indeed nothing puzzles God! Only two houses away a huge concrete edifice some wealthy contractor had put up just before the war was a mountain of rubble. And here was Jonathan’s little zinc house of no regrets built with mud blocks quite intact! Of course the doors and windows were missing and five sheets off the roof. But what was that? And anyhow he had returned to Enugu early enough to pick up bits of old zinc and wood and soggy sheets of cardboard lying around the neighbourhood before thousands more came out of their forest holes looking for the same things. He got a destitute carpenter with one old hammer, a blunt plane, and a few bent and rusty nails in his tool bag to turn this assortment of wood, paper, and metal into door and window shutters for five Nigerian shillings or fifty Biafran pounds. He paid the pounds, and moved in with his overjoyed family carrying five heads on their shoulders.

5 His children picked mangoes near the military cemetery and sold them to soldiers’ wives for a few pennies — real pennies this time — and his wife started making breakfast akara ² for neighbours in a hurry to start life again. With his family earnings he took his bicycle to the villages around and bought fresh palm-wine which he mixed generously in his rooms with the water which had recently started running again in the public tap down the road, and opened up a bar for soldiers and other lucky people with good money.

At first he went daily, then every other day, and finally once a week, to the offices of the Coal Corporation where he used to be a miner, to find out what was what. The only thing he did find out in the end was that that little house of his was even a greater blessing than he had thought. Some of his fellow ex-miners who had nowhere to return at the end of the day’s waiting just slept outside the doors of the offices and cooked what meal they could scrounge together in Bournvita tins. As the weeks lengthened and still nobody could say what was what Jonathan discontinued his weekly visits altogether and faced his palm-wine bar.

But nothing puzzles God. Came the day of the windfall when after five days of endless scuffles in queues and counter-queues in the sun outside the Treasury he had twenty pounds counted into his palms as ex-gratia award for the rebel money he had turned in. It was like Christmas for him and for many others like him when the payments began. They called it (since few could manage its proper official name) egg-rasher.

As soon as the pound notes were placed in his palm Jonathan simply closed it tight over them and buried fist and money inside his trouser pocket. He had to be extra careful because he had seen a man a couple of days earlier collapse into near-madness in an instant before that oceanic crowd because no sooner had he got his twenty pounds than some heartless ruffian picked it off him. Though it was not right that a man in such an extremity of agony should be blamed yet many in the queues that day were able to remark quietly on the victim’s carelessness, especially after he pulled out the innards of his pocket and revealed a hole in it big enough to pass a thief’s head. But of course he had insisted that the money had been in the other pocket, pulling it out too to show its comparative wholeness. So one had to be careful.

Jonathan soon transferred the money to his left hand and pocket so as to leave his right free for shaking hands should the need arise, though by fixing his gaze at such an elevation as to miss all approaching human faces he made sure that the need did not arise, until he got home.

10 He was normally a heavy sleeper but that night he heard all the neighbourhood noises die down one after another. Even the night watchman who knocked the hour on some metal somewhere in the distance had fallen silent after knocking one o’clock. That must have been the last thought in Jonathan’s mind before he was finally carried away himself. He couldn’t have been gone for long, though, when he was violently awakened again.

“Who is knocking?” whispered his wife lying beside him on the floor.

“I don’t know,” he whispered back breathlessly.

The second time the knocking came it was so loud and imperious that the rickety old door could have fallen down.

“Who is knocking?” he asked then, his voice parched and trembling.

15 “Na tief-man and him people,” came the cool reply. “Make you hopen de door.” This was followed by the heaviest knocking of all.

Maria was the first to raise the alarm, then he followed and all their children.

“Police-o! Thieves-o! Neighbours-o! Police-o! We are lost! We are dead! Neighbours, are you asleep? Wake up! Police-o!”

This went on for a long time and then stopped suddenly. Perhaps they had scared the thief away. There was total silence. But only for a short while.

“You done finish?” asked the voice outside. “Make we help you small. Oya, everybody!”

20 “Police-o! Tief-man-o! Neighbours-o! we done loss-o! Police-o! . . .”

There were at least five other voices besides the leader’s.

Jonathan and his family were now completely paralysed by terror. Maria and the children sobbed inaudibly like lost souls. Jonathan groaned continuously.

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The silence that followed the thieves’ alarm vibrated horribly. Jonathan all but begged their leader to speak again and be done with it.

“My frien,” said he at long last, “we don try our best for call dem but I tink say dem all done sleep-o . . . So wetin we go do now? Sometaim you wan call soja? Or you wan make we call dem for you? Soja better pass police. No be so?”

25 “Na so!” replied his men. Jonathan thought he heard even more voices now than before and groaned heavily. His legs were sagging under him and his throat felt like sandpaper.

“My frien, why you no de talk again. I de ask you say you wan make we call soja?”

“No.”

“Awrighto. Now make we talk business. We no be bad tief. We no like for make trouble. Trouble done finish. War done finish and all the katakata wey de for inside³ No Civil War again. This time na Civil Peace. No be so?”

“Na so!” answered the horrible chorus.

30 “What do you want from me? I am a poor man. Everything I had went with this war. Why do you come to me? You know people who have money. We . . .”

“Awright! We know say you no get plenty money. But we sef no get even anini. So derefore make you open dis window and give us one hundred pound and we go commot. Orderwise we de come for inside now to show you guitar-boy like dis . . .”

A volley of automatic fire rang through the sky. Maria and the children began to weep aloud again.

“Ah, missisi de cry again. No need for dat. We done talk say we na good tief. We just take our small money and go nwayorly. No molest. Abi we de molest?”

“At all!” sang the chorus.

35 “My friends” began Jonathan hoarsely. “I hear what you say and I thank you. If I had one hundred pounds . . .”

“Lookia my frien, no be play we come play for your house. If we make mistake and step for inside you no go like am-o. So derefore . . .”

“To God who made me; if you come inside and find one hundred pounds, take it and shoot me and shoot my wife and children. I swear to God. The only money I have in this life is this twenty pounds egg-rasher they gave me today . . .”

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“OK. Time de go. Make you open dis window and bring the twenty pound. We go manage am like dat.”

There were now loud murmurs of dissent among the chorus: “Na lie de man de lie; e get plenty money . . . Make we go inside and search properly well . . . Wetin be twenty pound? . . .”

40 “Shurrup!” rang the leader’s voice like a lone shot in the sky and silenced the murmuring at once. “Are you dere? Bring the money quick!”

“I am coming” said Jonathan fumbling in the darkness with the key of the small wooden box he kept by his side on the mat.

. . .

At the first sign of light as neighbours and others assembled to commiserate with him he was already strapping his five-gallon demijohn to his bicycle carrier and his wife, sweating in the open fire, was turning over akara balls in a wide clay bowl of boiling oil. In the corner his eldest son was rinsing out dregs of yesterday’s palm-wine from old beer bottles.

“I count it as nothing,” he told his sympathizers, his eyes on the rope he was tying. “What is egg-rasher? Did I depend on it last week? Or is it greater than other things that went with the war? I say, let egg-rasher perish in the flames! Let it go where everything else has gone. Nothing puzzles God.”