The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief Read online

  As for politicians, there was no point in looking to them to do anything. They were in politics for the money. Even the old religion got dragged in and chewed up by their politics. Shango was the god of thunder; to swear by Shango was the most terrible kind of vow; because if you broke your vow Shango was certain to take his revenge. And that was why at election time the politicians didn’t simply want you to promise to vote for them. They wanted you to swear by one or other of the old gods, who were all as implacable as Shango.

  5

  FROM THE way Adesina talked, I imagined his favourite soothsayer or babalawo had been the man who worked at the international firm of Lever’s and after his retirement ran a traditional African church (with services) in his house. It was said that this man could even foretell the coming of visitors. Adesina, I suppose, had regularly consulted this wise man and since the man’s death would have been a little bit at sea. But he was on the look-out for wise men. There was one he wanted me to meet; this could be combined with a deeper look at Nigeria.

  I had already had something of a deeper look; it had happened by accident. On a day of rain, a couple of days after I had arrived, when I had the sketchiest idea of the layout of the city, I had had a sight of the slums of Lagos. I wasn’t looking for the slums; I was paying a business call. The driver was late; the shortcut he was taking led us to streets so flooded that cars had had to stop.

  The road where we were was hardly a road. The drains were overfull; the flood had scoured the gutters into an unspeakable dark mess, added plastic bottles and other vegetable rubbish, and this all bounced and raged down in one direction on this side and in another direction on the other side. In this water rage every obstruction showed: miniature rapids, water always finding a way. Stall-holders, mainly food-sellers, were pulling back from the edge, and pulling back again. In front of a closed stall a jaunty little black-and-white sign in small italics, professionally done, said Pepper soup is now ready; though the idea of food didn’t go too well with the garbage rocking past.

  Apartment buildings, at a lower level than the flood, looked drenched and rotting; it was easy to imagine them collapsing; and at the same time they looked smoky, as though from fires within. So they looked at once cold and warm. It would have been dreadful to live there, to wake up there, to go to sleep there. Around these blocks were lower, flatter living areas, seemingly covered from end to end with bumpy old corrugated iron, with no apparent room below for lanes and alleys.

  In the distance, hugging the shore of the creek, was the great fishermen’s settlement, a degraded Venice, shacks on stilts, just above the dark water which fed the shacks and which they in turn soiled.

  I talked later about what I had seen to some local councillors I met. I said I thought the area couldn’t be improved; it had grown too big; it could only be rebuilt. The councillors were politicians, hardened people, used to going among the poor of Lagos, but they felt that nothing could be done in that area around the creek. The people in the fishermen’s settlement and in the neighbouring slums were migrants, constantly on the move, and as constantly replaced by new arrivals. These people didn’t like sending their children to school; they preferred sending them out to the roads to hawk and trade, to add to the family income. They were not settled people, a fixed community. You couldn’t build them new houses with proper sanitation. You couldn’t talk to them about poverty alleviation. You couldn’t do anything for them; and they bred and bred.

  One councillor said, “Islam permits four wives and Catholics don’t practise birth-control and you know Nigerians are very religious people.”

  Another councillor said, “With the population explosion comes social apathy. They fill the open drains with rubbish. During the rains this rubbish floats everywhere. They encroach on the drains and put up their shacks over the drains. We were equipped for two thousand people and we cater for twenty thousand. So something gives.”

  This was what I had in my head. I thought that Adesina had more to show me. But in spite of the passion with which he had spoken at our earlier meeting, he didn’t seem particularly interested now in that side of things, and my feeling was that his thoughts that morning were more of the babalawo we were going to see.

  Adesina’s new babalawo (if indeed he was that) lived on the mainland. A ten-kilometre bridge and highway connected Victoria Island to the mainland, and it seemed on this wet Saturday morning that a fair sample of the life of the island and the mainland was laid out as if for inspection on this highway.

  There were the usual crowds at bus stops or taxi stops, people becalmed and resigned in the rain. Almost no traffic on one side of the road, and a lot of traffic on our side. Boys or young men, hawkers, swarmed down the middle of the road, and sprang into action when the traffic came to a halt. They sold quite a range of goods. They sold colour pictures. They dangled various foods in clear plastic bags (boiled guinea-fowl eggs, potatoes of a curious squashed shape); they dangled miniature open accordions of telephone cards; fake designer dark glasses, fake designer watches, wallets, even clothing. It was an industry; behind these boys there would have been active suppliers, getting the goods out every evening and every morning.

  The houses near the road were solid, of concrete and with glass windows; the slums were behind them. Between the houses were places of education, especially for computer training. The Ilupeju industrial area—food processing, textile manufacturing—was gated. Just beyond this area was a big bus and wagon station, with much rubbish on the wet ground.

  This was like the jumbled semi-cityscapes of Lagos that I had already got to know. They were like places that seemed waiting to be knocked down or completed, but they always spoke of energy. They did not especially depress me. I saw the jumble as superficial, and felt that with the resources of Nigeria, and when the people were ready, the jumble could one day be undone.

  Was it only this that Adesina wished to show me? He was some years younger than I was, and it was possible that I had travelled more than he had, and seen more hopeless places—in Jamaica, Bombay, Calcutta, and many rural localities in India.

  We pass a church, “Mountain of Fire.” Always churches with grand names on the Nigerian highways. These names trying not to repeat one another. (Other names on this run: The Redeemed Church of God, Christ Apostle Church.) Then the bleached concrete quarters of the Nigerian Air Force, tarnished as if by smoke. A while later we have the modern splendours of the domestic airport, which go some way to balancing the air picture. A big complex for the Concord Press (“Truth is constant”) is deserted; the business is in liquidation. Settlement after settlement of unpaved roads, wet and red and gritty, full of children standing about: children of the Nigerian boom preserved by a new kind of health care, to add very soon to the slums of the towns. In one settlement a number of the newish houses are roughly daubed with signs saying that they have been repossessed: boom turning to bust at this level, with the roughly daubed signs about repossession like an additional insult.

  The town we get to is big and rich, in spite of the garbage. You can tell from the number of banks: Zenith Bank, Skye Bank, Ocean Bank. We are now near the babalawo’s territory. We need a guide, and we twist and turn back onto a parallel road to pick up Adesina’s brother. He is friendly, in a flowered shirt, and seems much simpler than Adesina. He would have been waiting for some time, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He sits next to the driver and guides us to a small and bumpy side road with open gutters. Many herbalists here in small wooden shops, offering to cure syphilis, gonorrhoea and breast cancer. Clearly this shop has been set up here to benefit from the nearness of the true medicine man, our babalawo, and to give him a little competition. So we are on the right track. Our quarry can’t be far away. But we can’t find him. We go up and down some muddy lanes, asking. Still nothing.

  At this stage Adesina’s brother wanted us to stop and take on another guide. It turned out now that Adesina’s brother didn’t really know, hadn’t known, and he had commissioned a proper gu
ide. This new guide was waiting for us in another place. He too would have been waiting for some time; and he too didn’t mind. But it turned out again—after he had taken us up and down a few small streets, indistinguishable one from the other, asking people all the time—that the new guide was himself at sea, and wasn’t too sure where the babalawo lived. It was the new man’s idea then that, just to make sure, we should ask one of the commercial motorcyclists, the okadas, who for a fee gave pillion-rides to a particular destination, to go ahead of us and guide us. And the okada man knew. His fee was modest, one hundred naira, about eighty cents.

  I suppose we had been using the wrong word. In Lagos I had been told that if for some reason I needed a witchdoctor in a village I was never to ask for the witchdoctor or the juju man. It was better to ask for the medicine man. Juju was too demeaning a word; people resisted it.

  And the okada man led us immediately to the side street where the unprepossessing house of the babalawo, the soothsayer or magician, was. It was a low house of unpainted concrete, flat to the ground, below a corrugated-iron roof, and with an entrance in the middle.

  From the car this middle entrance gaped black, and when we picked our way to it over the wet road and yard we saw that the corridor in front of us was dark, even at this bright time of day. On the threshold there were slippers, doubtless of people inside. Adesina and his brother and the new guide were ready for this; they were wearing slippers. But I hesitated. In 1962 I had got ringworm in Delhi after padding about barefoot, a little too freely, in temples and gurdwaras. Adesina noticed my hesitation and said I wasn’t to bother. This was African or Nigerian courtesy: of course it mattered, tramping about a house with muddy shoes.

  The floor of the central corridor was of concrete, and plastered grey and smooth. It was broken in patches. The woman of the house, appearing in the corridor, greeted us civilly; and from that small corridor space we were led to a smaller, darker space, and then another dark little corridor, really a space-divider, with a view on one side of a bedroom with an unmade grey bed. On the other side was the sanctum of the soothsayer, the herbalist, the magician, the babalawo.

  The sanctum was really very small. Our little party—five of us—covered the floor. There was a bench and a stool, but our two guides had to remain standing. I sat on one end of the bench.

  The babalawo sat on a low stool. He was very thin, in a white gown that now came out grey from the wash in local water; and he wore a white cotton cap embroidered with a simple wavy pattern in blue and yellow.

  The little sanctum was full of unassorted things. A rusted electric fan on the floor, near the babalawo’s feet, looked abandoned. Near the ceiling was another fan in better condition. It was fixed into the wall and set horizontally. It wasn’t working now, but soon it was going to be put on for us. An unlikely-looking plug was going to be fitted into an unlikely-looking socket, and the fan was going to play over us, a nice breath of air in the muggy room. They had modern conveniences here! A mysterious object took up much room: it was part of an electric work table, a slice of a table, in new satinwood, and with an electric motor in a grey casing. This was clearly a found object of some importance, and the babalawo didn’t intend to let it go; he sat next to it.

  Directly, with no beating about the bush, he asked our business.

  I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t say I had come only to have a look.

  Adesina, though, knew how to deal with diviners. He said he first wanted to know whether our visit was going to do him, the babalawo, any good.

  It was the kind of question the babalawo liked. He replied right away that we were going to be of immense value to him. I felt there was an element of ritual in the question and the answer, and both parties were satisfied.

  On the little table in front of the babalawo were some of his magical things. A school exercise book resting on its front cover was sensationally dirty. It was furred with dirt, as though handled and handled by unwashed thumbs and fingers, and the mathematical tables on the back cover of the exercise book had suffered: the dirt and the fur had lifted some of the printed numerals off the paper. Not far away was a matchbox, in the same condition as the exercise book; a give-away bottle-opener, recognisable only because I had seen the little tool many times before; and a little green bottle loosely stopped with things I didn’t wish to look at too closely.

  Adesina and the babalawo were now settling the fee for the consultation. The babalawo wanted a lot: five hundred pounds, a thousand dollars. Adesina, used to this kind of outrage, remained calm, and began to beat him down. He settled in the end for something much smaller.

  I now had to ask my question.

  I had it ready. I asked, “Will my daughter get married?”

  The babalawo was thrown by the question. He said, “I thought only black people had such problems.”

  But he was willing to give an opinion. He lifted the dirty exercise book and showed what it covered. Sixteen cowry shells (I assumed that was the number: Adesina had spoken of sixteen kernels as one way of divination); two tiny gourds tied together with a piece of string, the gourds not much bigger than marbles; and a small metal figure, like the top of an apostle spoon. The cowry shells had been much handled. I had known cowry shells to be grey, brown in the interstices in the middle, and dirty-looking; but these shells, from the handling they had received, were very smooth and wonderfully white.

  He passed the shells to me, saying, “Blow on them, give your name, and throw them on the table.”

  I did as he asked. He took up the tiny gourds and muttered some incantation. After a while the gourds began to swing from side to side. That meant no. If the gourds had swung out and then back, it would have meant yes.

  The babalawo said, “The girl is not going to get married. You have many enemies. To break their spells we will have to do many rituals. They will cost money, but the girl will get married.”

  Everyone in the room was quite excited. Adesina, his brother, the guide: the babalawo had them all in the palm of his hand.

  I said, “But what he’s told me is good. I don’t want the girl to get married.”

  The babalawo looked appalled. He must have felt I was trifling with him. I believe that only the reverence of Adesina and the others saved the day.

  I pointed to the apostle-spoon figure and said, “What’s this?”

  He held the little figure and said, “He travels at night. He goes to the shrines where I send him and he brings back news.”

  And Adesina’s brother and the guide, correct in their Nigerian floral clothes, added a little to my credit by looking horribly awed.

  Adesina said, “He wants to know about creation and the gods.”

  Once again Adesina’s obvious fervour helped to calm the babalawo. One of the seer’s friends, like a man who knew his way about the place, came and plugged in the fan on the wall. To my surprise it began to work, whirring horizontally above us.

  The babalawo began to talk about the gods. He took his time. He acted out the dramas he was describing, and he spent so long over the first bit of creation that I feared we would be in that airless little cell all afternoon. Already something in the air was pricking my nostrils, a sign of trouble to come. Casually the babalawo poured some stuff from a bottle against the wall next to him, adding to the general mess of the place; but in fact, as he soon said, he was “feeding” one of the oracles which were against the wall. He said one of those oracles was asleep and had been fed. To take the name of another god at this stage he would first have to make a libation to the unfed oracle. He would need spirit for this libation, and he meant spirit in the normal way: hard liquor.

  Adesina sent the guide out, to get the spirit. And the babalawo went on with his stories about gods, stopping every few words to allow Adesina to translate and amplify.

  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 s
hirt 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.