The Collector of Voices

by Chinua Achebe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

When the message came that the Government wanted an old man to talk to its white man, the elders of Ezeoka met in the obi of Ezenwa and argued about it until the second cock-crow, and in the end they chose Nnabuife, because he was the only one of them who wanted to go.

This was itself a thing to be wondered at. Nnabuife was not a man who loved white people. When the first of them had come through Ezeoka, eleven years before, on a horse that died of the sleeping sickness a week later, Nnabuife had said that a people who could not keep a horse alive in a country of grass were not a people to be afraid of. He had said it loudly, in the market, and he had been wrong, and he knew he had been wrong, and he did not like to be reminded of it.

"Why should you go?" said Ezenwa, who was his age-mate and therefore allowed to be rude to him. "You will tell the white man that his mother has no buttocks, and then we shall have soldiers again."

"I will tell him nothing about his mother," said Nnabuife. "I have never met the woman."

The men laughed, and Ezenwa laughed too, but he looked at Nnabuife over the rim of his drinking horn for a long time afterwards, because he was not a fool, and he could see that his friend wanted something.

What Nnabuife wanted was the farmland between the stream and the great iroko, which Ezeoka had been quarrelling about with Umuekwe since before either village had a name for the white man. It was good land. The oil palms on it bore heavily, and the yams that came out of it in a good year were as long as a child's leg. In the time of Nnabuife's father the two villages had fought over it with matchets, and a man of Umuekwe had died, and Ezeoka had paid for him with a girl and four cows, and afterwards nobody had been able to remember whether the payment meant that the land was settled or only that the dead man was. Since then the land had been farmed one year by one village and the next year by the other, not by agreement but by whichever village got there first after the rains, and every second or third year somebody's head was broken.

Now there was a Native Court at Awka, with a white man who sat on the high chair and a clerk who wrote everything in a book, and Nnabuife had seen with his own eyes what happened to a thing once it was written in that book. It became true. A man from Nibo had gone to that court with a story about a goat that everybody in three villages knew to be a lie, and the clerk had written it down, and the white man had read what the clerk wrote, and the goat had been given to the man from Nibo. Nnabuife had not admired this. But he had noticed it.

---

The Government's man was camped in the rest-house at the edge of the Ezeoka road, and he was not what Nnabuife had expected. He was small and pale and walked with a stoop, and he wore spectacles that he took off and polished every time he was about to say something he thought important, so that you always had a little warning. The children called him Ajuju, which is Question, because he asked so many, and within three days the whole village called him Ajuju, and the name had gone ahead of him to Umuekwe and Nise and Agulu before he did.

His real name was Thursfield. Nnabuife tried it twice and gave up.

With Ajuju came a cook, two carriers, a clerk who did nothing that anyone could see, and an interpreter, a young man named Moses Anah who had been to the mission school at Onitsha and wore a white shirt with a collar so tight that the veins stood out in his neck. Moses spoke Igbo the way they speak it on the river, with all the corners rubbed off, and he said "Papa" to Nnabuife in a manner that was respectful in the words and something else in the tone.

There were also the boxes. Nnabuife had been told about the boxes, but being told about a thing is like being told about a fever. There was a box that took a man's face and kept it on a piece of glass. There was a box of metal instruments, which Ajuju opened on the first morning and from which he took a thing like the jaws of a crab, made of brass, with numbers cut into one arm of it.

"He wants to measure your head," said Moses.

"Why?"

Moses asked. Ajuju took off his spectacles and polished them, and spoke for some time.

"He says it is for the science," said Moses. "He says they measure heads everywhere. In his own country too."

"Has he measured his own?"

Moses did not translate this. Nnabuife watched him not translate it and filed the fact away, the way a man notes which of his neighbour's goats is in the habit of straying.

He let them measure his head. The brass was cold against his temples and then warm. Ajuju read the numbers aloud and the clerk wrote them down, and Nnabuife thought of the way his wives measured out seed yams at planting, a hand's breadth, a hand's breadth, a hand's breadth, so that each heap would be the same and none would complain of being cheated. He wondered what the white man was planting, and where.

---

The third box was the one the children had come to see, and they hung in the doorway of the rest-house four deep, until the cook came out with a stick and they scattered like weaver birds and came straight back.

It was a wooden box with a handle on its side, and growing out of the top of it was a great horn of beaten brass, flared like the flower of the yellow creeper that grows on the fences at Nise. On a spike inside the box went a little drum the colour of old honey, which Ajuju took with great care from a tin lined with cotton, holding it by its ends with the tips of his fingers as a woman holds an egg she means to sell.

"You speak into the mouth," said Moses, "and it keeps what you say. Then he turns the handle the other way and it says it back."

"And where does it keep it?"

"In the wax." Moses touched the little drum without quite touching it. "There are lines on it. Very small. You cannot see them."

Nnabuife looked into the brass mouth. It was dark down there, and it smelt of metal and of the white man's tobacco.

"Tell him," he said, "that I will speak into his box. But first I want him to ask me about the founding of Ezeoka."

Moses told him. Ajuju's face did a thing that Nnabuife would remember later with some satisfaction. It brightened, the way a hunter's face brightens when the animal he has been tracking for two days walks out of the bush and sits down in front of him. He polished his spectacles for a long time.

"He says that is exactly what he wants," said Moses. "He says it is the most important thing. The old stories. Before they are lost."

"Lost?" said Nnabuife. "Who is losing them?"

Moses did not translate that either.

---

They did not begin with the founding. Ajuju had a list, and the list began with marriage, and Nnabuife sat on the rest-house stool through the whole of a long morning and told him about bride-price and the carrying of palm wine and the counting of the cowries and how a man of Ezeoka could not marry a woman of Ndiora because of a matter of blood between the two that was older than anybody's grandfather. Ajuju asked a great many questions, some of them sensible. Nnabuife answered them. Sometimes he made a proverb, because it is not possible for an Igbo man to talk about marriage for a whole morning without making proverbs, and every time he did, Moses would pause and look at the floor and then say something short in English, and Nnabuife would know that the proverb had been left behind on the road, like a load too heavy for the carrier.

"What did you tell him?" Nnabuife asked once. He had said that a woman who is married into a compound with four wives does not need to be told which way the wind is blowing.

"I told him the meaning."

"And what is the meaning?"

Moses opened his mouth and shut it again. Then he laughed, and for the first time the laugh was not a mission laugh but a laugh from a village somewhere, and Nnabuife liked him a little better.

Late in the morning Ajuju asked about twins.

Moses put the question carefully, as though he were handing over something with thorns on it. Nnabuife did not answer at once. Outside, the children had gone quiet. One of the carriers was splitting firewood behind the rest-house, and the sound of it came in through the wall, a blow and a pause, a blow and a pause.

Forty rains before, Nnabuife's second wife Mgbeke had given birth in the night to two boys, and the women who were with her had come out of the hut and not looked at him, and he had known before anybody spoke. He had done what was done. He had not gone with the women to the bad bush where the pots were left, because a man does not, but he had heard, or believed that he had heard, the crying for a long time after the women came back, though the bad bush was far beyond the stream, too far for any crying to be heard. Mgbeke had not spoken to him for a whole market week. Then she had spoken to him, and they had gone on, and she had borne him three more children, all of them single, and she had died in the year of the locusts. He did not think about the twins. When he found himself thinking about them he went out and did something with his hands.

"Ask him," he said at last, "why he wants to know."

Moses asked. Ajuju explained for a long time.

"He says it is a custom found in many places," said Moses. "He is writing down all the customs. So that people will understand."

"Which people?"

Moses hesitated. "The people in his country."

Nnabuife nodded slowly. Then he told Ajuju about twins, plainly, the way a man describes the boundaries of a field, without leaving anything out and without putting anything in. He told him what was done, and why it was said to be done, and that some of the women hated it, and that some men too were troubled by it in their hearts but would not say so, because a thing that the whole clan does is not the business of one man's heart. He did not tell him about Mgbeke. That was not a custom. That was his own.

Ajuju wrote in his book. When he looked up, his spectacles were in his hand, but he did not polish them. He looked at Nnabuife with his naked eyes, which were weak and pale and a little wet, and he said something in English, quietly.

"What did he say?"

"He says thank you," said Moses.

Nnabuife did not believe that was all of it, but he let it go.

---

In the afternoon, when the heat had gone a little out of the day, they came to the founding of Ezeoka.

Ajuju fitted a new honey-coloured drum on the spike. He did not do it at once, because the first drum he took out of its tin had gone soft in the heat and drooped on one side like a yam left in the sun, and he put it down on the table and looked at it with an expression that Nnabuife recognised exactly, being a farmer. Then he sent the carrier to bring the water-pot from the shade, and stood the tin of drums in the cool water, and waited. Nnabuife waited too. It occurred to him that the white man's voices were as easy to spoil as anybody's harvest, and the thought made him feel better than he had felt all day.

When the second drum was on, Ajuju wound the handle and nodded, and Moses said, "Now. Speak loudly. Into the mouth."

Nnabuife leaned forward to the brass flower and told the story of Ogbonna, the hunter, who came out of the east with his dog and his two wives in the days when the land was all forest, and who followed a leopard for three days, and who on the third evening saw the leopard drink at a stream and lie down under an iroko tree and go to sleep. Ogbonna did not kill the leopard. He said: a beast that can sleep in a place is a beast that knows the place is good. And he cleared the bush from the stream to the iroko and planted his first yams there, and that was the first farm of Ezeoka, and from that farm came all the farms, and from Ogbonna's two wives came all the families.

He spoke slowly, in the old manner, with the pauses in the right places, and when he came to the stream and the iroko he said each of them twice, and the second time he said them louder, so that there should be no mistake.

The drum went round under the needle. Then there was a little click and Ajuju held up his hand, and Nnabuife sat back, and found that his own hand, resting on his knee, was not quite steady.

"Tell him," he said, "that the iroko is the big one by the Umuekwe path. The one with the hole in the trunk. Tell him the farm runs from the stream all the way to that tree."

Moses looked at him. It was a long look, and there was a great deal in it. Then he turned to Ajuju and said something in English, and Ajuju wrote in his book, and Nnabuife watched the pencil move and could not tell, and would never be able to tell, what it was writing.

---

Then Ajuju turned the handle the other way, and the box spoke.

It was not like a man speaking. It was small and far away and full of a hissing like rain on a thatch, and out of the middle of the hissing came a voice that said, In the days when the land was all forest, and the children in the doorway screamed and ran, every one of them, and did not come back for a long time.

Nnabuife did not run. He sat very still and listened to himself telling the story of Ogbonna. It was his voice and it was not his voice. It was thinner. It was older than he felt. It paused in places where he did not remember pausing, and in the place where it said the stream and the iroko for the second time, louder, it sounded to his ear not like a man stating a boundary but like a man who is afraid he has not been believed.

When the voice stopped, the box went on hissing for a moment by itself, and then Ajuju lifted the needle and it was quiet.

"Tell him to put another one on," said Nnabuife. "I will say it again."

"He says it was very good," said Moses. "He says it is perfect."

"It is not perfect. It speaks like a man who is not sure. Tell him."

Moses told him. Ajuju polished his spectacles and spoke at length, and in the end he put on another drum, perhaps because he was a kind man and perhaps because he was a careful one, and Nnabuife told the story of Ogbonna a second time, and this time when he came to the stream and the iroko he said them only once, in an ordinary voice, as a man says the name of his own father.

---

He walked home in the dusk with Moses, because Moses had been told to go and see the women's dances at Nnabuife's compound the next day and Ajuju thought it best that he should sleep there.

For a long time neither of them spoke. The path went between the yam farms and then along the edge of the forest, where the crickets had begun, and a woman passed them with a pot of water on her head and greeted Nnabuife and did not greet Moses.

"Where is your mother from?" said Nnabuife.

Moses was quiet for six steps.

"Umuekwe," he said.

"I thought so. You have the ears of the Umuekwe people. They stand out from the head, as if they are listening for something."

Moses touched his ear, and then took his hand away quickly.

"I told him," he said. "About the iroko. I told him what you said. All of it."

"I did not ask you."

"I am telling you anyway." Moses stopped on the path. In the half-dark his white shirt was the brightest thing in the forest. "He knows about the land. The District Officer told him there is a case. He said to me this morning, before you came, that the old men will try to use him. He said it does not matter. He said it is all interesting."

"Interesting," said Nnabuife.

"He is going to Umuekwe on Afo day. He will ask them about the founding too."

Nnabuife began to walk again, and after a moment Moses followed.

"Then they will tell him a different story," said Nnabuife.

"Yes."

"And he will put that in a box too."

"Yes."

"And take them both across the water to his own country, and keep them there, side by side, in that cotton."

Moses said nothing. There was nothing to say. They came out of the forest and saw the cooking fires of the compound, and the smell of smoke and of palm oil came up to meet them, and a dog that knew Nnabuife ran out barking, and saw who it was, and fell silent with embarrassment.

---

That night, when the compound was asleep and Moses was snoring on a mat in the hut of Nnabuife's eldest son, Nnabuife took a gourd of palm wine from the hut where the wine was kept and went out by the back way, and walked the Umuekwe path in the dark.

He did not need a light. He had been walking that path for sixty years, and he knew the place where the root crossed it and the place where the ground fell away to the stream, and he knew the iroko when he came to it by the change in the air, the coolness of a very large tree at night. He put his hand on its trunk as he passed, on the rough bark beside the hole, and kept walking.

Ikedi of Umuekwe was sitting in front of his obi with a fire going, as Nnabuife had known he would be, because Ikedi had never been able to sleep in the dry season since his back went bad. He looked up when Nnabuife came into the light, and his face did not change at all.

"Nnabuife of Ezeoka," he said. "You have come to kill me at last."

"I have come to drink with you. Then I will see."

Ikedi called for a cup, and nobody came, so he got up himself, slowly, with a hand on his knee, and found one, and they sat on either side of the fire and Nnabuife poured. Ikedi tipped a little onto the ground for the ancestors, and Nnabuife did the same, and they drank.

"They tell me," said Ikedi, "that Ajuju is coming to us on Afo day."

"So I have heard."

"They tell me you have been talking into his box."

"Who tells you?"

Ikedi waved his hand at the dark, at the path, at the whole country between the two villages, which had never in living memory kept a secret for more than half a day.

"What did you tell it?"

"The truth," said Nnabuife.

Ikedi nodded, as if that was what he had expected, and drank, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"I will tell it the truth too," he said.

"I know you will."

They sat for a while without speaking. The fire cracked. Somewhere behind the obi a goat complained about something and was ignored. Nnabuife thought of the two honey-coloured drums lying in their tin of cotton, side by side, in a cold house in a country he would never see, his voice and Ikedi's voice going round and round in the dark with nobody to hear them, each of them saying the iroko, the iroko, and neither of them ever able to answer the other.

"When two brothers quarrel over a farm," said Ikedi, "the bush rat eats the yams."

"We are not brothers."

"No," said Ikedi. "We are worse. We are neighbours."

Nnabuife laughed, and filled both cups again, and leaned forward to put another stick on Ikedi's fire.

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Chinuā Achebē per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Chinua Achebe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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