The Thing Around Your Neck

The narrator, a retired professor named James Nwoye, is trying to collect his pension check when he sees a man, Ikenna Okoro, who he knows to be dead. James first stops to talk to Vincent, James’s old driver from when James was dean of the faculty. They discuss James’s deceased wife, Ebere, and his daughter, who lives in the US. James, who the others all refer to as ‘Prof,’ buys the other men there some food, and listens to their conversation for a while before leaving. As he leaves, he sees Ikenna Okoro. Ikenna calls out to him and James tentatively greets him.

James remembers how everyone knew Ikenna, how he refused to wear a tie to lectures and kept wearing colorful tunics, how he argued for better conditions for non-academic staff at the university. James asks how Ikenna is alive, remembering that he had not escaped on July 6th, 1967, when the Nsukka campus was shelled. Ikenna tells him he got out the next day and was able to get on a Red Cross plane to Sweden; because his whole family had died, he had had no reason to return. James tells Ikenna about briefly living in the US.