Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction (7 page)

It is not to be. Though there are examples of each kind of art, they are few, are rarely of the best quality, and are
meagerly documented. The whole enterprise is clotted with a weird reticence. It is clear that no one cares about the artifacts. There are such gaps in the collection that one can only imagine that there has been recent plunder. The best pieces have probably found their way into the hands of dealers in Paris, Zurich, and elsewhere. My recent experience of Nigerian art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York was excellent. The same had been true at the British Museum, as well as at the Museum für Volkerkunde in Berlin. A clean environment, careful lighting, and, above all, outstanding documentation that set the works in the proper cultural context. What each of those places had done was create a desire in me to see this astonishing art at its best, to see it in its own home. London, New York, and Berlin had made me long for Lagos. The West had sharpened my appetite for ancient African art. And Lagos is proving a crushing disappointment.

I am aware of the troubled history of the collecting of African art, the way colonial authorities had carted off treasures to their capitals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But I also know how rich Nigerian museums had been as recently as the 1960s and ’70s, when the British archaeologists Frank Wilson and John Wallace had been curators here. Wilson is an authority on Ife art, and Wallace a fine ethnographer of Yoruba and Riverine art. And after them there was the outstanding art historian Udoh Udoh, who was director of the National Museum. These men are
academics, and they were careful to document and present what was entrusted to them. But, as with many other national institutions during the military years, in the 1980s the museums likely became sinecures for whoever got posted to them. I remember a conversation I had with Wallace at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in 1999. A gentle, deeply learned man, he had gone to Nigeria with the British Colonial Service and risen to the top of the old Department of Art and Antiquities. He told me that one of the directors of the Lagos museum had been too superstitious to handle some of the items in his care. The man was a
mallam
, and he feared the fetish power of the masks and statues. According to Wallace, many items simply gathered dust in the basement.

What I see of the place gives me no great reason for thinking that a single thing has been improved in the past twenty years. I step out of the first set of galleries into a small courtyard. Along the walls, there are white cardboard plaques about various Nigerian kingship ceremonies, as well as one about a German-led archaeological expedition in Ijebuland in the 1980s. The print quality is poor, faded from exposure to the sun, and the plaques are badly mildewed. The mildew has eaten into the text and photographs in several places. The cardboard is curled up around the edges. Again, there is the inescapable feeling that one is looking at a neglected high school project. The courtyard itself is sometimes rented out for birthday parties or funerals:
a friend had mentioned to me that the party for her grandmother’s funeral had been held here. So Nigerians do come to the museum, if only for a weekend party.

I enter the small gallery devoted to the royal art of Benin, and catch sight of a pair of tourists leaving the museum. Their language and bearing make me identify them as foreigners; Brazilians, I think. How sad to travel all the way from Rio or Bahia in pursuit of one’s heritage, only to meet with this. The two Brazilians are the only other visitors I see at the museum during the two hours I am there. In the Benin gallery, an employee strides purposefully toward me and asks, with a look of great concern, if I have a ticket. I show him the stub in my hand. He says: I just wanted to be sure. About five minutes later another man, equally agitated, sidles up to me and asks if I have obtained the proper ticket for the gallery. I show him my stub. I see, he says, I just wanted to make sure. I can’t quite figure out if either man is asking for a bribe. I’m happy to be in the dark over that question.

And that is it; no more galleries. The archaeological collection is pitiful—a few masks, a few beaded baskets, a clutch of figurines. Hardly anything to set the heart racing. Certainly nothing like the magnificent Plexiglas case full of exquisite Ife bronze heads that I had hoped to find. Later on, I read the curious tale of the loss of one particular Benin bronze. In 1973, the then head of state, General Gowon, had telephoned Udoh Udoh to inform him that he was coming over to the museum to select a piece as a gift for the
queen of England. Dr. Udoh, the moment he put the phone down, scrambled to put some of the best pieces away into storage and out of harm’s way. But how does one hide a whole museum? Gowon arrived in due course, picked a fine Benin queen mother head from the seventeenth century, much to Dr. Udoh’s horror, and gave it to Elizabeth II. The queen of England, reasonably enough, assumed it was a replica. She put it on a shelf in the Royal Library. The true status of the piece was not discovered until 2002, when it was brought out for the Jubilee Exhibition. The fact that it was found to be a genuine antique—John Wallace helped detect this—substantially weakened the Nigerian government’s ongoing case for the return of the numerous Benin plaques currently in the British Museum. The strangest thing about that particular Benin queen mother head was that it had originally been plundered by the British in 1897 during the “punitive expedition,” and only returned in the 1950s to help set up the Nigerian National Museum. It had already crossed the ocean twice before the general, in gratitude for Britain’s support of the Federal cause during the Biafran war, gave it away again. And the British, this time around, had no intention of returning the work.

So disoriented am I by the meagerness of the work on offer that I head to the museum’s reception desk and, like Oliver Twist, ask if there is any more. Perhaps there’s an upper floor I have missed or something like that. The woman looks deeply irritated by the question; I suspect she would be irritated by any question. She points me to the
side of the museum, to a building that looks like a shed. The building, bearing an old sign announcing a “temporary exhibition,” is an adjunct to the museum, dedicated solely to the history of Nigeria’s rulers from the 1914 political amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates to the present day. I think I have had my most dispiriting experience of the day already, but no, there is still more punishment in store for me. The circular shed contains the National Museum’s most famous artifact: the bullet-riddled black Mercedes-Benz in which the head of state General Murtala Muhammed was assassinated during the failed coup of February 1976. This car is the only thing most Lagosian schoolchildren remember about the National Museum. Other than the pocked, gleaming vehicle, the display consists only of a series of wall plaques featuring texts about Nigerian history and photographs of the main protagonists. There are no artifacts, and no documents. The plaques, made of thick card, as in the courtyard, are extremely rudimentary, and they, too, have succumbed to mildew. The photos depict Lord Lugard, Aminu Kano, Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Tafawa Balewa, and others. The first of the historical texts in the display reads as follows: “In the early part of the nineteenth century, the efforts of various abolitionists gradually brought the obnoxious practice of slavery to an end.”

And that is the depth of it. The Atlantic slave trade, with hundreds of thousands of our compatriots sold, tortured, murdered, was an “obnoxious practice.” This under-whelming
text was doubtless written by a colonial officer, probably a few decades ago, but someone else keeps it hanging there, year after year, as an official Nigerian response to slavery. As I read the plaque devoted to each regime, my spirit sinks further. The alleged achievements of each military ruler are listed. The historical record—and again, this is the National Museum—is sycophantic, inaccurate, uncritical, and desperately outdated, as if each dictator was sent a form to fill in with his “achievements” and it was left at that. I don’t know how to make sense of what I am looking at. It is as though there is the idea that a national museum is a good thing to have, but no one has the interest or ability to present it properly. History, which elsewhere is a bone of contention, has yet to enter the Nigerian public consciousness, at least judging by institutions like the museum.

The narratives on the three most recent regimes, printed on paper, are tacked near the end of the circular gallery. No one could possibly form a positive impression of Nigeria on the basis of this museum. The worst of the butchers that ran the nation aground are celebrated, without exception. Abacha is there, in his dark glasses. Babangida is there, with his grin. The sequence of posters gives an impression of orderliness and continuity in Nigeria’s postindependence history, and no analysis of the coups and countercoups that were the rule rather than the exception for changes of regime. What, I wonder, are the social consequences of life in a country that has no use for history? It brings to mind the
brusque retort uttered by a character in John Sayles’s film
Men with Guns
in response to a tourist’s query: “Atrocities? No. No atrocities happened here. That happens in other countries.”

When I step out of the shed, the woman at the front desk is slumped over, fast asleep. The time is 1:00
P.M.
I walk out of the museum in bad spirits, and I don’t really recover until I visit a nearby
buka
for some pounded yam and
egusi
soup.

FIFTEEN

T
here could hardly be a stronger contrast to the National Museum than the MUSON Centre, which I visit later on the same afternoon. MUSON was founded in the 1980s and has since that time come to play a leading role in the musical and theatrical life of the country. The grounds of MUSON—the word is an acronym for the Musical Society of Nigeria—are well organized, featuring three main buildings. One houses a world-class auditorium and recital hall, the second is a conservatory, and between the two, set on a pristine lawn, is an upmarket restaurant called La Scala. The creative energies so sorely lacking in the National Museum seem to have been vested here. And clearly, wealthy people are interested in what happens at MUSON. In the
parking lot, cars and SUVs gleam in a long, aspirational row: Lexus, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi. Yet the compound is not designed like a fortress, and one has a sense that this is a place for genuine music enthusiasts, that it is not just a playground for the rich and well connected. I have no problems walking right in, though I have no official business to conduct.

Large posters in front of the auditorium announce recent and upcoming shows: a Christmas gala, a choral performance, a fund-raiser for Nigerian breast cancer charities. There is a flyer for a jazz concert featuring the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela in an appearance with Lagbaja, the most innovative of the current crop of Nigerian musicians. Most fascinating of all is the announcement of a performance of a Molière play by a professional company visiting from France. Culture, at least in this one corner of the city, seems to be alive and well.

The best thing about MUSON is that it is well organized. Better organized, in truth, than I’ve come to expect anything in Nigeria to be. And yet, it is a largely private venture. Perhaps that is the secret. They know the importance of presentation: the buildings are well maintained. I see several busy gardeners during my visit, patiently potting miniature palms. And MUSON also knows the value of running a nonprofit organization in partnership with corporations: the Agip Recital Hall is named for an oil company, as is the auditorium, Shell Hall. There is also
a major sponsorship deal with the business consultancy Accenture.

The Nigerian government, that great bungler, is kept out of it. The mere existence of the conservatory surprises me. That it is so well put together is a great pleasure. As I enter the building, it occurs to me that this is an institution that, in terms of setting and infrastructure, could someday rub shoulders with the Juilliard School or the New England Conservatory. I take an irrational pride in the thought. Outside the building, there is a sign that reads: “Muson School of Music. Founded February 13 1989. Provides training in the theory and practice of music.” And below that, in smaller letters: “Individual instructions in singing, violin, piano, flute, clarinet, trumpet, cello and classical guitar for all ages. Graded theory and practical examinations conducted in May and November in several centres in Nigeria.” This is quite literally music to my ears. Cello lessons, in Lagos. I imagine some gifted child spinning her way through the Bach suites, practicing afternoon after afternoon in the heat, the sound of traffic in the distance, until she has full command of the music’s inner spirit, and can bring her hearers into a state of wonder.

I go up to the reception area, and there meet a plump young man with a pencil mustache. He is seated behind a metal desk, and is talking to a woman when I come in. She is lithe, dark-skinned, and wears glasses. He silently motions me to a seat. Then he gets up from behind his desk
and walks slowly, ceremoniously, to the other side of the room, brings out a newspaper from a cabinet, and walks slowly back. He sits down again, opens the newspaper, and, pointing to a column in it, says to the young lady:

—And so, that’s what I was talking about. Isn’t that interesting?

He hands her the paper, stares into space meaningfully, and eventually, as if he has run out of things to do, turns to me.

—How may I be of assistance?

I tell him I was hoping he would be able to answer some of my questions about the conservatory.

—What would you like to know?

—Well, for instance, about the foundation of the school, the courses on offer, costs, standards.

He nods thoughtfully, then gets up again, and waddles across the room to the cabinet. He pulls out a small stack of papers.

—These brochures can fill you in on some details. The school was founded in 1989, and we have grown a lot in the past few years.