The Masque of Africa (14 page)

My heart sank more and more. The
babalawo
’s cell became like the ship’s cabin in
Room Service
with the Marx Brothers, endlessly receiving new people. At one point a young man in a polo shirt came into the cell. He wanted to see the
babalawo
privately. The
babalawo
, like a man with no time for village idlers, shooed him away roughly. The young man in the polo shirt withdrew with bad grace, and the
babalawo
, using his bony fingers a lot, went on with his weighty stories about the gods, more important to him at that stage than any petty business the young man in the polo shirt might have brought.

The
babalawo
broke off and said, “I believe I told you I cannot mention this god unless we have poured a libation to him.” He pointed once more to the dingy splash on the wall.

At this opportune moment the guide returned with a square bottle of Nigerian gin. The
babalawo
had already had a tot from his own bottle, and now they all drank to the god.

The
babalawo
’s mobile rang. The
babalawo
put it on speaker mode. The young man who had just been with us was heard remonstrating
with the
babalawo
. “The people you have with you are going to make a lot of money from what you tell them. Don’t tell them everything.”

The
babalawo
was perfectly calm. The gin had had a soothing effect on everybody. The
babalawo
offered to show us the oracles in his yard. The very small space in his cell gave way to something even smaller as we followed him outside. We followed him to a passage barely wide enough for two people. We were now near the boundary wall: the small house was on a very small plot. And in a corner, looking like something lavatorial and disagreeable, were the three shrines with the oracles the
babalawo
had made with his own hands. For the believer it would have been a high moment, being permitted to see these sacred things; but for me the moment came with a noticeable tickle in my nostrils: a touch of asthma on the way.

I thought we should be looking for a way out. That soon came, because Adesina, though he might have wanted a serious personal reading from the
babalawo
, now understood that because of my frivolity there was going to be no further seriousness; the moment had passed.

There was no rebuke from him; and soon back to the gritty red lane we went, and into the car. A thin dog with swollen dugs came out of the
babalawo
’s yard; some children had been tormenting it. Adesina shouted at them. He had the right words and the right tone. The children held off at once. The dog came up to the street and trotted about its business undaunted, its tail up, its dignity intact.

And then once again we went past the little shops and dwellings of the settlement, the advertisements for extraordinary medical cures, the other advertisements for musical shows, and always the children; and then the houses with the big, humiliating, daubed sign on the walls:
This house has been repossessed
.

In Lagos the next day I told a man at the hotel where I had been and what I had done. He was genuinely frightened for me. He said, “They are bad people. Even if you want nothing from them they will damage you. You go with one problem and you come back with ten.”

And, indeed, the tickle in my nose had by this time developed into
something that called for antibiotics, threatening me with the loss of precious days.

T
HE
O
NI
of Ife: it was a memorable title. Once you heard it, it could play in your head as sound alone (especially if you didn’t know what it meant), and with its easily interchangeable vowels could take fantastic shapes. Even Dickens, master of made-up names, had sought to parody it somewhere in his writings (perhaps in his journalism, but I was no longer sure). I discovered now that the Oni was the religious head of the Yorubas of Nigeria, and Ife an actual place somewhere in the interior and within reach: half a day’s journey from Lagos.

The necessary arrangements were made, and I went. The Oni wasn’t going to be in residence that day, but there would be people to receive me. The Oni was in England. Like many Nigerians of means, the Oni usually went to England for his summer holidays; he was said to have a house in London. This was unexpected. It modified my idea of the Oni.

We left Lagos by an easy, uncluttered road. On the other side of the same road thousands and thousands of cars were taking their time to get to the capital: the Nigerian weekday paralysis. In the late afternoon and evening matters were reversed: it was easy to get to the capital, not so easy to get out of it. So we, morning travellers, heading out, were fortunate. Outside the city were business sites, luxuriating in space, and long walls that spoke of big churches to come. At last, then, we were in open country. The land was green: not the dark green of primeval forest, but the fresh green of land that had grown things many times over and was still fertile, requiring only rain and sun to burst into new vegetation. Adesina had said that eighty per cent of Nigeria was uncultivated, but I wasn’t seeing that. I was under the spell of the empty green landscape, which I hadn’t seen before, not in Trinidad, not in India: wide and green and empty.

The road to Ife was part of a projected trans-African highway. Near Lagos it had two wide lanes; and just as, in India, it lightened a journey to study the wrecks of overloaded small trucks on either side of the road, some on their backs, some on their sides, some wheel-less, front axle broken, rear axle broken; so here, in Nigeria, it dramatised the long highway and the unchanging green through which the highway ran, to look for the big articulated lorries that had slipped or skidded or been driven off the asphalt and had been abandoned, left to rust and rot, since that was the cheaper and easier thing to do.

Ibadan was a great city on the way. It had a university, founded in colonial times, and branches of many British educational publishers. Yet it was a surprise when it came, because nothing in the land before the city had suggested there was a big city to come. It was simply there, at the end of the green, just as in Argentina Buenos Aires was at the end of the Pampa. Ibadan, a city of low houses on rolling hills, spread far in the distance, up to the horizon. It showed no city amenities, no public gardens or squares.

There was some such mystery about Ife, too. It too simply appeared, and was raucous. We followed road signs and went to the Oni’s royal compound. We were some minutes before the appointed time, and there was at first no one to greet us or guide us. It was a big compound and seemed to have grown organically. It was a series of small buildings, government-style, undistinguished, some one story, some two. There was a crowd outside one building in a corner, with people crowding the steps, and they appeared to be following a debate that was going on inside. I was told it was a divorce case. I thought that if all the buildings in the compound were in the traditional African style, with the fine grass roofs of Kampala, say, the compound might have been as impressive as Grant’s drawing of Kampala’s royal hill in 1861-62.

My visit had been arranged by an educational publishing firm—it was always necessary here to be sponsored—and some people from the firm, together with a tall man in Nigerian costume, came to greet us. The tall man was from the tourist board, very important here; he
gave our group some kind of official standing. The tall man and the publishing-house group led us—with our driver: Nigerian courtesy—to a big air-conditioned audience hall, like a theatre hall, and we sat down on plush seats.

The tall man from the tourist board told us that the Oni was away, but the Oni’s deputy and some other chiefs were going to welcome us. He said that we were not to misunderstand the background and nature of the chiefs who were coming. They were highly educated people. And a little while later—though no one had challenged him—he said it again. It was as though, as a man from the tourist board (and perhaps after some misunderstanding with a recent tourist), it was his duty to put the record straight: local chiefs were not mere villagers.

Soon the chiefs began to come in. They arranged themselves in some order of precedence beside the Oni’s throne. They were in wonderful embroidered silk gowns, and so much grander in appearance than we were, that I feared that at any moment they might decide to call our bluff and dismiss us.

There were speeches. The tall man told the chiefs that I was from Trinidad. This had an amazing effect on the chief who was the Oni’s deputy. He said, in the tall man’s translation, “You who have left your ancestral land have now returned to your father’s land.
Wali, wali, wali
. Enter, enter, enter.”

It was moving. My anxiety about my own style seemed base. I returned the deputy’s kind and poetical words as best as I could. Patrick Edwards, the Trinidad ambassador in Uganda, who had served some years before in Nigeria, had told me about his ceremony of welcome in Ife. He had cried, and now I understood why.

Our party (now rather large) was taken on a tour of part of the palace. The tall man from the tourist board told me that this ground of Ife, where we were, was the source of civilisation. It was sacred for all Yorubas and the black race generally. He said this more than once, and I felt that this was how in many cultures national traditions would have been inculcated.

At the back of the audience hall there was a gate decorated with cowry shells. This gate opened on to a small garden. The garden was formal and neat, with grey concrete borders and flat hard beds of reddish earth, and quite bare apart from an old and suffering tree.

A sign said, “The Source of Life.” This referred to a concrete well in the centre. The well held a sacred and undying memory of the wife of the very first Oni of Ife. She was very beautiful and her marriage to the Oni was a success. It would have been a perfect marriage if she could have had a child. It was important for the Oni to have a child. But there was no child. So the good woman sacrificed herself. She had the Oni married to another woman, and she became a water sprite, an eternal protectress of the Oni and his family. This was the origin of the well. It was said to be bottomless. It had a brackish smell, and when I looked down I saw something like a very pale nettle growing in the mouth of the well.

The tradition was that at the time of his enthronement the Oni’s feet had first to be washed with water from this well. And because the well looked after him and his children, the Oni had to tell the well when he was leaving Ife.

In a quadrangle at the back people were being fed; this feeding was connected with our visit. Women helpers had done the cooking in big stainless steel pots and were still there, handling long spoons. Some of the people in our party, overcome by the idea of food, settled down to eat. On the wall, at the back of the tables, were many colour photographs of important people who had come here on other occasions; one photograph was of a previous Archbishop of Canterbury.

We went back with our guides to the air-conditioned audience hall, with all the fine chairs, and went out the way we had come. Outside the main door we saw the bust of a woman, rather squat on her stand, her features not absolutely clear. I had seen her as I was going in, but I had not been told much about her.

I was told now. She was the great Yoruba heroine. The story about her was something like this. At some time in the remote past the
Yoruba were fighting a traditional enemy and were on the verge of defeat. This woman went to the oracle and said, “Please give me the secret of our enemy’s power.” The oracle said, “No trouble about that. I will give you the secret of your enemy’s power. But first you must give me what is most precious to you.” What was most precious to the woman was her only son. She had him sacrificed. The secret of the enemy was then revealed to her, and the enemy was defeated. Up to this day the woman and her son are venerated by the Yoruba. In fact, the son has taken on the lineaments of Christ, because of this story of sacrifice, and in this form has been received into the Yoruba pantheon.

It was a perfect story for a place that was the cradle of civilisation and the black race. If I had been introduced to the story cold, so to speak, just as I had arrived, it wouldn’t have meant much. But now, after a meeting with the grave chiefs, and after a sight of the garden that was the source of life, I understood a little more. For myths to take on life, they have to be supported by other myths; and there was enough support of this kind in Ife.

There was more to see. There was another garden some distance away, but still in the town, where the central object was the staff of an ancient Yoruba warrior, who was a giant. The wood of the staff, which was, of course, very big, had turned to stone. The staff stood upright in a garden as formal and clean as the Source of Life garden. The white-robed priest who looked after the staff said he had been trying for some time to get the government to put a canopy over the staff, to protect it from the weather and to prevent it from being worn away.

The story of the staff was like this. At the very beginning of things the giant ruled the Yoruba. He protected them and made them prosperous. In due course the giant was called to the world of spirits. He left behind his staff and a trumpet, and his instructions were that whenever the Yoruba needed him the trumpet was to be sounded. One day an idle young fellow, having no regard for the story, blew on the trumpet. A giant figure began then to stride over the earth, laying people
low left and right with his sword. A woman ran out to the giant and said, “Madman, can’t you see what you are doing? These people are your own.” The giant picked up a severed head by the hair and saw that the head did indeed belong to a Yoruba. He was mortified. He laid down his weapons and vowed never to come back to earth. But he wished before he left them for good to give his Yoruba people a final boon. The boon was this: the Yoruba people would always be successful in war. Then he went away.

His weapons stayed where he had thrown them down. Over the years, perhaps millennia, the staff became petrified, and it is now one of the holy relics of Ile-Ife. There was a proper shrine connected with the staff. It was in the tangled green at the back of the garden. But time was pressing; we had made arrangements to see other things in other places, and we told the priest in white that we had to leave his shrine for later.