The election

The country voted last Saturday and for one afternoon, Sunday, the whole south-east thought it might have a president who was ours. Not a Biafran; that is not on the ballot. An Igbo man, the first in the office since before the war. The market was loud in the way it is loud for a wedding. Even Mama, who trusts no ballot box, said, we will see.

Then the results came the way results come here, in the night, with the numbers not adding up, and by Wednesday the loudness had gone back into the low voice, and by the weekend there were soldiers at the roundabouts again in case the region had ideas.

I stood in a queue for six hours to vote and I am not sorry. I want that recorded, because I have written a lot in these notebooks about what the country does to people like me and I want it known that I still stood in its queue. You do not get to complain about a house you would not enter.

But I am also writing down what hope does to a region, because I watched it. For one afternoon people who had shut their shops every Monday for two years for a man in a cage believed that a ballot might open the cage. It was beautiful. It was over by Wednesday. And on Monday the shops were shut again, and nobody said why, and everybody knew.