The Masque of Africa Page 9

  I spoke a few words about my interest in old cultures and religions of the earth. The Oba, when he replied, felt around for a suitable subject. He settled on the history of Lagos and his position as Oba. He said that as Oba he was trustee of the local people, trustee for the dead, the living, and those to come. It was moving. I had heard great landowners in another country talk in this way, and I had felt it was something they had been trained in. They had a particular way of referring to what they owned. They never said they owned it. They said, “When I inherited this” or, “When this came to me”; as though with great wealth had come philosophy and the idea of trusteeship, a way for the transient human being of dealing with transient wealth. I felt there was something of this in what the Oba was saying. It might have been his way of putting the dispute about his Oba-ship to one side. And, indeed, in this audience room, with the majesty of the Oba, his undoubted style, the dispute seemed not to matter.

  He spoke of the history of Lagos. It had been Portuguese before it was British. (Portugal: how often it comes up in these far-away places! To see some of the outposts of the Portuguese empire in Africa and Asia, to feel the heat of the desolate shore and the unfriendliness of the grey ocean, to get some idea of the awful distances, eating up many months of a human life, already austere, is to admire anew the spirit of the people, who were just a million strong at the time of their greatness.) The Oba spoke about an early-nineteenth-century skirmish—this was hard for me to follow—that was important in the history of Lagos. He said there were guns from that war in front of the old palace, which we had passed on the way. He hoped we would want to go and see them.

  Edun stood up and with a few words brought our audience to an end. I stood up and bowed to the Oba, and as I moved through the long audience hall, making for the door, I bowed to each chief and received a bow from each of them. There was some private business or courtesy Edun had to deal with. He stayed behind. I went out alone down the palace front steps. I saw again the guinea fowls and the turkeys, regal creatures, but standing here in their own mess. The musicians were still hanging around, with drum and metal. They were friendly. They might have been less friendly if Edun hadn’t given out his banknotes.

  Some of the chiefs came out and led me to the earlier palace. It was a smaller affair, more a pavilion than a palace, built around an open courtyard, with wire netting spread below the openness of the roof. Here in the old days the Oba and the chiefs would have sat on mats and talked to one another across the open courtyard. This small room and its simple appointments gave a scale to the new palace; it showed how far Nigeria had travelled, and how much more money there now was.

  In front of the small palace were the three small, even stubby, Portuguese guns the Oba had talked about. They were stamped 1813. They might have been mortars, designed to spit out hot shot over a short distance. They looked as though they would have been at least as dangerous to the users as to the people shot against.

  It was strange to think that this simple technology might at one time have helped to create a colonial empire. It was a little bit like wealth in a time of inflation. To have money first was to be rich; it didn’t matter what money came to other people afterwards.

  I saw now that on the gable of the new palace was a mosaic, elegantly done, of a Mumbo Jumbo scene. In this version Mumbo Jumbo wasn’t alone; he was chasing women. The scene was repeated in a large free-standing sculpture at one end of the compound. It was an attractive, humorous piece. The frightened woman, bursting away from Mumbo Jumbo, her mouth open and her arms raised in alarm, was very thin and painted black and white: very effective.

  There was a certain amount of street rubbish at the foot of this sculpture. This didn’t imply rejection or neglect; it was just the African way, as I had grown to recognise.

  One of the chiefs who had been showing me around had his own interpretation of the sculpture. It was of funeral figures, he said. These figures were celebrated at a time of death. In this interpretation, then, Mumbo Jumbo with his high hat and veil and coat was nothing less than death. It was strange, if this interpretation was right, to find the figures lovingly rendered in elegant mosaic on the Oba’s palace.

  Edun came out at last and we went back the way we had come. We passed again the wide central reservation on the street where the traders had placed many small bowls and fragments of pottery with offerings. The traders did this to get good luck. These offerings were made every day, and they were not as public as they appeared: most people knew that it was dangerous to be the first to look on these things, which had been prepared by soothsayers and were intended for higher spirits.

  4

  ON THE beach (or marina, as some said) of Victoria Island, one of the islands of Lagos, far inland from the coast—the Portuguese chose amazingly well—there appeared sometimes on Thursday, and more often on Friday and the weekend, fine chestnut horses. One or two were tethered in patches of fresh grass beside the road, near building sites, but most stood saddled and bridled and still in the great heat with their keepers and waited for custom: the children of the Lagos well-to-do whose parents might want them to learn to ride. The keepers then sat far back, and the children sat between their arms.

  These horses were rejects from the local polo club. At first, I was told (and had no means of checking), the rejected horses were simply turned loose and left to forage for themselves; they became scavengers. The wife of a European diplomat, too distressed by the sight, began to shoot the animals. My friend from the polo-playing north (he had got the hotel to give me a proper room on the night of my arrival) thought it was the most humane way of dealing with the rejected horses; it saved them from degradation and suffering. But the diplomat’s wife was no longer in Nigeria, and I heard from someone else that the marina horses now had proper owners and were being worked for money. Some of them still looked good, still had the gift of clean movement, but they were all on the way down.

  (Two or three years before, I had heard that this kind of cruelty had begun to be practised in Trinidad, where abandoned horses had been seen on a popular beach, looking for food. I don’t think this had happened when I was there as a child. It was shocking to me that such a big animal, which needed constant attention, could be subject to such bad treatment. The unpleasant fact stayed with me, and soon I saw that in most countries horses had always been ungratefully treated: tormented during their life, and killed and cut up into meat after their racing days were over. Cruelty, it seemed, was inseparable from animal racing. Poor greyhounds were constantly run to the limit of their strength until, at three, they were killed or turned loose.)

  Whenever in Lagos I saw the horses on the beach I consoled myself with the idea that in the feudal north of the country there was a horse culture and that horses might be better looked after there.

  My friend from the north said, “They might have a horse culture. But Nigerians are not animal-lovers.”

  A moment’s thought told me that he knew what he was talking about. There were no common dogs and cats about. Christian prejudice and African ideas about spirits and familiars combined to make life hard for cats especially, and even Muslims were affected, though in other Muslim countries people liked to tell a story about the Prophet: he was unwilling to disturb a cat that had fallen asleep on his gown.

  Adesina, a self-made man, now an important business executive, was the only Nigerian I met who was an animal-lover. He was a man of sixty. His mother had been fierce with him as a child, beating him often. But it was from her that he had got his love of animals. There were always cats and other animals in his family house; he woke up to them every day; and it was his mother’s rule that no animal or bird that had been reared in the house was to be killed. He was now close to retirement, and it was his wish when he retired to do something for animals in Nigeria.

  All the children before Adesina had died in infancy. When Adesina was born his parents thought he was the same child, always coming back to torment them, and so they made small cuts on h
is face, to frighten him into staying. The cuts were still there; Adesina liked to show them; but they were not as prominent as Adesina thought they were.

  Adesina’s father was born in 1904. To understand a little of his history was to understand the important history of conversion (to Islam or Christianity) in Nigeria. He did not go to school. He converted first to Catholicism, but he was unhappy with it. He didn’t understand the church service, which was in Latin. Later he met Arabs who had come to northern Nigeria with the trans-Sahara trade. These Arabs were teachers and missionaries. They translated the Koran into Yoruba, and they also preached in Yoruba. This was much easier for Adesina’s father and he converted to Islam. He always wished after that to be a good Muslim; he didn’t think Adesina was a good Muslim, and so he didn’t eat in Adesina’s house. But he was open-minded. He let people in the family read the Bible and he liked to debate with friends who were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  It seems from this that religion had become a kind of intellectual activity, perhaps the only one, in the newly educated house. Adesina’s father’s younger brother stayed a Christian, while the third brother remained firm in the traditional African religion. Adesina, growing up, had the full range of available Nigerian belief to choose from. He was technically a Muslim, following his father, but he liked the uncle who practised the traditional religion because this uncle was a great one for sacrifices and in that house Adesina was always given meat from the sacrifices to eat. His parents disapproved and beat him, but still he went to the unconverted uncle’s house. He would go and watch the sacrifices, eat his meat, and come home to a beating.

  It was a hard childhood. He had to get up at a half-past five, wash and go to the mosque. Then he went to school; when he came back in the afternoon he had to go to the market to sell the foo-foo his mother had made. Foo-foo was a local food made in the main from pounded yam; people thought it was easy to make, but it wasn’t. His mother made it well, in her own way, and Adesina had no trouble selling what she had made; but he had to stay in the market all afternoon. He was back home in the early evening, and by eight-thirty they were all in bed.

  When Adesina was ten—this would have been in 1958—his father lost all his property. The reasons were political and very Nigerian: the family tribe was accused of using charms to kill a powerful man from another tribe. Adesina’s father called the young boy and made him sit down and talked to him like an adult. It was the Yoruba tradition. The family houses are all built around the main house, and whenever there is something to discuss the extended family gather in the compound and talk. Everybody, from the youngest to the oldest, has a say. Adesina’s father told him that they were now poor, but there was hope for the family if Adesina worked hard enough and said his prayers. Adesina understood; because of these family discussions he knew the history of his family.

  During the week he worked on the family farm. At weekends he went to construction sites and worked as a labourer, carrying bricks, mixing cement. He learned a few things; he got to know, for instance, that a bricklayer with two helpers could set one hundred bricks or blocks a day. He saved the labouring money he got; he liked going to Christmas and New Year parties and he needed to buy clothes for himself. His parents didn’t like that. When he came home from the New Year party he was beaten. But when he was fourteen he was able to give his mother five pounds. She needed the money for an operation; and after this they got on much better.

  He didn’t go to a secondary school. He took private lessons. He bought books and read them at night by the light of a lantern. He was helped by his old teachers. They taught him English and Calculations (Arithmetic) and he studied history to improve his English. He was attracted to accountancy, and especially to the sound of the IAA, the International Accountants Association. He did three parts of the accountancy course they offered, but his English boss at the firm where he was working said the course was not recognised in all countries. Adesina gave it up and began to study to be a chartered accountant. He was encouraged by his boss, who told him that if he studied diligently for three or four hours every day he could achieve whatever he wanted.

  He was thirty-five when he became an accountant. For all the years of his study he worked at other jobs. Some were menial; he never minded. His father had told him that he was now the head of the family and had responsibilities; he took that seriously. He got a job in the Swiss firm of Nestlé by chance. He used to go every Thursday to the race course to gamble. One Thursday, at the race course, he met a cousin who was going for an interview with Nestlé. He went with his cousin for the interview, and when he got there it occurred to him to tell the Swiss man in charge that he had sent in his own application form. There was an argument. Through the intervention of a Yoruba officer Adesina was given an interview and was selected. He impressed people with his talent for calculation. He didn’t use conversion tables; he arrived at answers quickly; and he made no mistakes.

  He began to rise in the firm, doing all sorts of clerical jobs. His ambition at that stage was to be a shipping clerk. He thought that in that job he would become familiar with the port and would get to know sailors, and this would help him to be a stowaway. He thought that everything would become possible for him if he could stow away to a friendly country. But he didn’t become a shipping clerk. He stayed in the office as an accounts budget clerk. He was trained by an Englishman and then by a Nigerian, one of the first professional accountants in the country. What had been a disappointment (for the would-be stowaway) had in fact set him on the business path which took him to where he was now.

  Twenty-five years of work and ambition (and what was implied: the overcoming of many disappointments) had made him a modern man, but he would have been supported in those years by old ideas of family and tribe, and old habits of belief that reached back beyond the conversion of his parents and his uncle.

  Adesina said, “Look, all rich people and warriors in our tribe consulted their soothsayers before they went anywhere or did any transaction. If they had any problem they went to their soothsayer. My grandfather had his own soothsayer or babalawo. They were part of the extended family, and that was their profession. Even the Yoruba Obas have their own soothsayers. They are the highest level of soothsayers and are called ‘Arabas’ in Yoruba-land. Someone might say, ‘I feel there is going to be this problem in the town. What shall I do to avoid it?’ The soothsayer will say they will have to consult the Ife. Then they may do rituals to ease it or make it go away. The Ife will tell us. There are two types of Ife. One is the chain type, and the other is the sixteen kernels. The soothsayer will throw the chain or kernels in a certain way and read the message of the oracle or Ife.”

  Adesina knew a soothsayer who was very good, but was now dead. He used to work in the multi-national firm of Lever’s. After he retired from Lever’s he had a traditional African church in his house. He ran it like a church and had services.

  Adesina said, “He was educated and knew the Koran and the Bible. This man told me there were three astral high languages—Hebrew, Arabic, and Yoruba. If you go deep in the Koran you will find that Ife originated in Mecca. The Yorubas are Arabs from the Yahuba tribe, according to Koranic records, and those sixteen kernels were given to a man called Setiyu. It is in the Koran. Because he was an invalid and had to be carried from place to place he was given the Ife. He was killed during the Hijra when the Prophet had to flee. He was the first Ife.”

  I knew that Adesina was complicated. I understood now that he was more complicated than I thought.

  When I had first met him, at a restaurant dinner with someone else, he was wearing a suit and a tie, essential businessman’s clothes in Nigeria, but on him like protective gear. He was not a handsome man; his face, with the now shallow scars on his cheeks, was small and tight. He didn’t talk much at first; he might have been self-conscious about his appearance. It was only when he began talking of his mother’s animals that he engaged me.

  Later, when he opened up and I got to know his story, I s
aw—or began dimly to see—how far he had travelled. He had started with nothing, in a far-removed world. He was now the managing director of a great corporation; he worked for one of the richest men in the country. One day, driving in the centre of the city, he showed me the house of this rich man: it was of glass and marble, like a bank.

  Adesina’s business language was half modern. His speciality was “numbers and calculations,” logistics and stratagems. He had pride in what he did, and I was half expecting him to say at some stage that the success that had come to him was a tribute to the country and its movement forward. But he said nothing like that. He was, in fact, gloomy in every way about Nigeria; and he didn’t talk of himself as part of the elite. He talked more of the poor, drinking “erosion water” in some districts and sleeping nine to a room. Perhaps he had waited too long, and the wait had been too punishing, more full of indignity than he knew at the time. Perhaps it was only the encouragement of the Ife, the pull towards the past, that had kept him going in the dark days.

  He felt that Nigeria was now paying the price for its colonial history, which had begun not long before his father was born. “The French wanted to break this region into smaller divisions for their own reasons. The British dealt with us in a regional way. There was no Nigerian in the centre. So when we came into the centre we had no idea how to run it. Missionaries were never allowed to go to the north. So the north is very Muslim and we were all ruled by tribalism. Every political party that came up was really a regional party. Then a parliamentary British form of democracy added to the confusion at independence. So we had the Biafran war and then the coups. All our presidents and prime ministers came up by accident. No one was actually trained or prepared.”

  He didn’t believe in the Nigerian boom.

  “There is no boom. It is only a small stock-market boom where the elite thrived, and for a short time too. I know because I made money in it too. Booms are judged by the GNP and by the income of the lowest grade worker—what will his income buy in the open market? Most Nigerians like to be self-employed, but on the farms it is subsistence-level agriculture. Eighty per cent of our land is not cultivated. The farming people will have a few goats and a few plots of yams. It is not mechanised farming, and they have no meat except the rabbits they trap. I was recently in a state where they are good farmers. But the oranges they grow rot, and the tomatoes. You need infrastructure to create a processing industry, but that kind of support is not there. What are Nigerians abroad coming back to invest in?”