Twenty pounds
Mama told the story of the twenty pounds properly tonight, with the numbers, and I understood something about my grandmother.
NEPA took the light at eight and Mama did not bother with the generator, and in the dark she told the story of the twenty pounds properly, the way she never has, with the numbers in it.
Her mother, my grandmother, had a shop before the war. Her father had a salary. They had, she says, more than two hundred pounds in the bank in Enugu, which in 1966 was a house. Then the war. Then the hunger, which she has told before. Then January 1970, and the surrender, and the announcement: every account held in Biafra would be paid twenty pounds. Not twenty percent. Twenty pounds. The house became a week of food.
My grandmother went back to selling from a tray. My grandfather never got his salary again; his post was filled while he was on the wrong side of the line. Abandoned, the paper said, about a job he had not abandoned. The same word they used for the houses in Port Harcourt.
Mama said all this in a level voice, in the dark, and then she said: that is why I have never trusted a bank, and that is why you must never let anyone tell you the war is over. It is only quiet.
I am writing down the numbers because nobody else in this house will. Two hundred pounds. Twenty. A tray.