The ex-gratia, which Jonathan and others in the story pronounce as “egg-rasher,” is a payment that the Nigerian government provides to citizens who turn in any of the Biafran money that they still hold from during the Civil War. The symbolic meaning of the egg-rasher shifts throughout the story, and this shifting is itself symbolic as it represents the constantly changing methods of survival that Jonathan as well as other Nigerians and Biafrans must undertake to endure during and after the civil war.
On a surface level, the egg-rasher could be seen as a betrayal of the Biafran cause, because in order to get it Jonathan and others must give up their Biafran money, which might be seen as being akin to giving up on his Biafran identity in exchange for Nigerian money. Yet Jonathan is never shown to have any particular loyalty to the Biafrans; in fact, a Biafran soldier attempts to rob Jonathan early in the story. Rather than being politically motivated, Jonathan seems rather to be someone buffeted by the events of history who is just trying to survive, and he shows no emotional connection to the Biafran money he holds or the political hopes of independence that money once represented.
As a result, the egg-rasher acts as a representation of Jonathan’s navigation of his varying identities, demonstrating the ease with which he shifts from Biafran to Nigerian. Furthermore, that ease suggests that, to an ordinary person like Jonathan, the difference seems essentially meaningless—it is the money and its promise that is important.
And, yet, when the thieves surround his house, Jonathan quickly gives them the egg-rasher in order to save himself and his family. That Jonathan so readily gives up the egg-rasher—as opposed to, say, his bicycle makes clear that to him the money itself is not as valuable as either the people he loves or the means that would allow him to build a livelihood. In this sense, the egg-rasher might be looked at as being akin to the fish in the old proverb “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach him to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” The egg-rasher is a helpful handout, but Jonathan, and the story, see more value in building a self-sufficient life.
The Egg-Rasher Quotes in Civil Peace
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.
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.
“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.”
The Egg-Rasher Symbol Timeline in Civil Peace
