All kinds of doubt came to me, but then, miraculously, there was the hotel tower.
The man who took me up to the room drew the curtains dramatically and said, like an impresario, "The Atlantic Ocean!" I had to take it on trust. It was too dark to see clearly and I was too tired to concentrate. I had an impression of rollers coming in, heard some of the ocean noise (as I thought) m.u.f.fled by gla.s.s and concrete; and that was all. The man then spoke about the television, took his tip, and was gone, leaving me alone with the deficiencies of the small, bare room: the broken safe, the empty refrigerator.
I telephoned the desk. They said they would send someone to look at the safe. He came up promptly, a sour-looking fellow in blue dungarees with Locksmith Locksmith in big white letters on the back. He did a few things to the safe and said he had fixed it. He gave a little demonstration, but a short while later the safe went back to its bad ways, and the desk, not at all put out, said they would send the locksmith again. He did come up, too, as promptly as before; but by this time I thought the room was beyond redemption and I should look at another room. in big white letters on the back. He did a few things to the safe and said he had fixed it. He gave a little demonstration, but a short while later the safe went back to its bad ways, and the desk, not at all put out, said they would send the locksmith again. He did come up, too, as promptly as before; but by this time I thought the room was beyond redemption and I should look at another room.
That too was unsuitable. And then the people at the desk began to send me zipping up and down, from floor to floor and room to unsuitable room. It began to seem that a gratuity was called for, if I was to be shown a good room. And almost at the same time the idea came to me-thinking of what I had seen downstairs-that I had been booked into the wrong section of the hotel (it had various sections, and separate actual buildings) and that this error had led me to something like a Nigerian maison de pa.s.se maison de pa.s.se.
I remembered that a warning of some sort had been given me by a friend, but he had done so in too coded a way and I had not understood. This friend was now in Dubai, on the Persian Gulf. He had a friend whom he trusted in Kano, five hundred miles away in northern Nigeria. I telephoned them both, and though it would have been early Sunday morning for them, they were marvellous.
The man in Kano must have been a man of some authority, and perhaps also with a gift of correct language. The hotel"s att.i.tude changed at once. I was given a room in another, more suitable building. The man in Kano said I was to go there right away and and not wait for morning. Like the hotel itself, I was happy to obey. The hotel sent its shuttle van to ferry me over. Everyone was civil. New world, new day. It was now about half-past two.
Later, when I was settled in my room, the telephone rang. The caller was impatient, on the brink of rage. He was a car-driver. He said he had been sent to the airport to pick me up but hadn"t been able to find me. He had been hanging around for hours.
I understood then that I had fallen too easily for a suit and a tie and had allowed myself to be kidnapped at the airport. There was a card on the table in my room, warning clients about this sort of thing, urging every kind of precaution before stepping into a taxi. I felt, then, that I had had the luck of the innocent-it does exist: it has looked after me for all of my travelling life-and that, whatever was to come later, this luck had brought me to the hotel.
This was my first day in Nigeria.
In the open lobby of the first building I had noticed-there are many levels of consciousness at any given moment, and perhaps it will be like that at the moment of death itself, even if it is painful-I had noticed, in spite of the anxiety, which was uppermost, and in spite of the fatigue after fourteen or fifteen hours of travel, an attractive and mysterious sculpture: African, but realistic, and not apparently magical: a life-size figure of a veiled man in a high hat, and in a long coat, holding a thick stick. The hat, like a top hat, and the coat, like a Victorian frock-coat, gave an odd touch of Europe to the figure. The veil was reticulated, and kept in place on the forehead by the hat, so that it was a little away from the face. There was a smaller version of the sculpture in the office area of the new building, and there was a version, in pale-blue shadow, on some of the hotel stationery.
The motif was clearly well known, but no one I asked could tell me with confidence what the mysterious figure stood for. Or perhaps they didn"t want to tell me. I was told it was emblematic of Lagos; I was also told it was a figure of masquerade. This didn"t help me.
Help came later, in Travels in the Interior of Africa Travels in the Interior of Africa, by Mungo Park (1771-1806). He had travelled, by horse and on foot, in this part of Africa more than two hundred years before, in the late 1790s (strangely, at the time of the Napoleonic wars: war did not then close everything else down). I had read Park"s book nearly forty years before, and had liked it, but (as with so many books that are part of one"s education) had forgotten much of the detail, preserving from that reading only an idea of dust and cruelty and deprivation, the writer"s deprivation and the deprivation of his companions, mostly African slave merchants driving their chained-up slaves from the interior, taking them in sickness and half health and on half diet, all of five hundred miles to the coast, to be sold into the holds of Atlantic ships.
The figure with the hat and the veil and the stick occurs early on in Park"s book. Park called it Mumbo Jumbo. The name changed its meaning later, became the pejorative which we all know; and yet, of the English dictionaries I consulted, neither the Oxford dictionary nor Chambers credits Park with the first, pure use of the word.
On the 8th, about noon, I arrived at Kolor, a considerable town, near the entrance into which I observed, hanging upon a tree, a sort of masquerade habit, made of the bark of trees, which I was told on inquiry belonged to Mumbo Jumbo. This is a strange bugbear, common to all the Mandingo towns, and much employed by the Pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection.
Africa was polygamous. The women often quarrelled, and a husband was at times hard put to it to keep order in his household. That was when he called upon Mumbo Jumbo. He might act the part of Mumbo Jumbo himself, or he might call upon someone he could trust. Just before dark one day Mumbo Jumbo would begin to scream in the forest outside the village in a most fearful way. This terrible screaming would tell people in the village that Mumbo Jumbo was coming; and when it is dark Mumbo Jumbo does come with his strange disguise, his stick and high hat, his veiled face and his long coat.
Mumbo walks through the village to the village meeting-place, the equivalent of the village square. The villagers gather there; no married woman can stay away, even if she feels that Mumbo Jumbo has come especially for her. There is singing and dancing; it continues till midnight; and then Mumbo Jumbo declares who the offending woman is. She is seized, stripped naked, tied to a post, and flogged until dawn by Mumbo Jumbo with his stick. The villagers shout with pleasure; they mock the woman and show her no mercy.
Africa is no longer polygamous; only the Muslims among them have many wives. Africa, away from its Muslim segment, thinks of itself as Christian, even if ancient currents of thought and belief and custom flow below. And it is easy enough to understand that the figure of Mumbo Jumbo might create an embarra.s.sment for a modern African, and that people who know very well what the figure stands for-the playacting, the comedy of the old bush culture-might not know what to say to a stranger about it.
Mungo Park didn"t get down to the Nigeria region, but he wasn"t too far away. The difference between his West Africa and what we see today is incalculable. This may be obvious, but its very obviousness makes it easy to forget. Yet it is the necessary background to any a.s.sessment of Nigeria. Nigeria is rich now, with its oil. But modern Nigeria is new; it is only about eight or ten generations old; and some of the most gifted Nigerians carry this burden of newness.
I had been given an introduction to Edun. He was a handsome, athletic man of fifty, and an investment banker. I felt it was still a source of wonder to him how he had become what he was. The world was new for him. In this new world he saw everything as possible for him, and his patriotism, of an entirely new sort, took the form of wishing people to understand their new possibilities.
He had been born in Manchester in England. So he was an immigrant, with the immigrant"s drive. It wasn"t something one a.s.sociated with Africa. It was new. It wouldn"t have happened one hundred years before; the Africa of that period would have been close to the Africa of Mungo Park.
When Edun was three he, with an older brother, had been taken back to Africa by his parents. The brother died, and Edun had been taken back to England; this was how it happened that all his education had been in that country. His parents were pa.s.sionate about education; it was something they had brought with them from Africa. Edun, as a child, felt that concern. "My mother said that if I had a good education I would not look back." When Nigerian visitors came to the house they always asked the little boy what cla.s.s he was in, and what his position was in the cla.s.s. So Edun, growing up, found himself different from his West Indian friends, who gave up school without thought. Now these friends (descendants of the people Mungo Park saw being walked down to the coast) look at Edun and say, "Well, we dropped out, but you carried on."
This, about West Indians, was strange to me. In Trinidad we had overcome some of the effects of history. We had a distinguished group of black professionals; their children reflected the confidence of their parents. We were able, without trouble, to distinguish these people from the general black population. Black and ordinary, black and distinguished: we carried the two ideas in our head, and it could even be said that their blackness added to the distinction of the distinguished. Perhaps this group had required time to grow; my feeling is that they began to come up fifty or sixty years after the abolition of slavery. The West Indian children in England (some of them descendants of the people Mungo Park saw being walked to the coast) didn"t have this professional background, this idea of what was possible; they stayed with old ways of thinking and behaving.
Early in his banking career, when he was working in an international bank in Washington, Edun had an illumination. It was very simple. A Nigerian friend said to him during a general conversation, "I want to own my own bank one day."
Edun at that stage could imagine a cook wanting to own a catering firm, or an artisan wanting his own workshop, or a driver wanting to have a car-hire business. But a bank! In fact, it was already possible for a Nigerian to own a bank; the formalities were not insuperable. Very quickly, as I heard from someone else, there were 126 private banks in Nigeria. Most were simple deposit-takers, but many of them went on to develop proper banking skills; today, after regulation, there are twenty-five Nigerian banks. Edun"s friend now owns a bank. Edun himself started his own bank, with a friend; that bank was later merged with an important South African bank; its branches can be seen in many African countries.
Edun said, "This is the mindset here. I did not have it as I was brought up and educated outside the country, but I soon picked it up. People often say to each other, "You can be anything here. You can reach any height." And this mindset is our great strength."
But Edun, growing up in England, was spared the other side of the Nigerian mindset, the side that fell down a deep well into ancient beliefs and magic, the side that resisted rationality.
2.
THE CONTRACTOR said, "You know Edun? Tell him to give me another contract." said, "You know Edun? Tell him to give me another contract."
I said I would do what I could for him.
He was a portly but muscular man of fifty, quite tall. When he was asked to describe himself and his community, he said, "I am a Christian contractor who is a Yoruba."
So he knew a lot about Yoruba culture?
He said, in a series of apparent non-sequiturs, which yet had meaning, "I am well read. I come from a staunch Catholic background. My mother was a papal medallist in the days when you really had to work for it. I was with the Celestial Church of Christ. And then I attended the White Garment Church-an orthodox form of Christian Cherubim and Seraphim Church Movement."
Why did he call it orthodox?
"In the books I have read it is more African than Western. There is more uniformity in it. They use the Bible. The service usually lasts for four hours. It starts at 10 a.m. world-wide."
There was a lot of singing and dancing during the service. It excited him. He liked the burning of incense. The order of the service was also more interesting.
Did it change him spiritually?
"I shouldn"t say that it opened another vista in my life." But then he said something different. "One day I saw a little girl who was possessed by the Holy Spirit, and she was being cleansed. I was taken aback by the things she was confessing to-the things she had done in the spirit realm of darkness. The experience made me more spiritual. I now believe there is an Alpha and Omega who watches over you. One hundred and twenty million Nigerians or average Nigerians can contend with the vicissitudes of life only by turning to the Alpha and Omega. Other people call it something else. I guess I am an optimist. I have lived here and I have also seen other African countries, and I thank G.o.d for Nigeria. I have seen Liberia after the war, and Sierra Leone, and I have seen Angola before and after the war. Your average Nigerian is more educated than the other African. By the time a man is really educated he can rationalise better. In Nigeria you have educational processes where you can carry on improving yourself."
I asked what he knew about traditional African belief.
"We have traditional deities that are well known internationally. Then there are sacred sites or shines and festivals. There is a grove here. It is a recognised UNESCO site and here they have the festival of Osun Osogbo. Followers of the G.o.ddess gather here in hordes and they pray for what they want with the priests and priestesses. The sheer scale of human traffic at this festival is awesome. People come from Brazil, Cuba, the USA and Haiti, and it goes on for a week. On the final day a virgin with a big calabash on her head walks to the river followed by legions of people, and she pours the contents of the calabash into the river, giving it a libation. I was crushed by the people. I could not see the virgin."
The Yoruba G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses are many, their stories involved. Did the contractor learn about them when he was a child? He said no. His knowledge came from talking to other Nigerians when he was grown up, and it opened his eyes. He didn"t think of it as juju. He didn"t like the word. It had a negative connotation.
He said, "The priests and priestesses hate that word. They call it tradi-religion or tradi-medicine. "Juju" is debasing. There is is magic. Look at that girl. The girl I told you about. Look at the things she said-how they went under trees to create havoc and accidents, and how they afflicted people with misery and poverty. She was in a trance, and she was open about it during her cleansing. I believe in this dark side. I am very careful. I don"t upset people who threaten me. I don"t know what dark abyss they are coming from, and what powers they will use to hurt me." magic. Look at that girl. The girl I told you about. Look at the things she said-how they went under trees to create havoc and accidents, and how they afflicted people with misery and poverty. She was in a trance, and she was open about it during her cleansing. I believe in this dark side. I am very careful. I don"t upset people who threaten me. I don"t know what dark abyss they are coming from, and what powers they will use to hurt me."
I had a romantic idea of the earth religions. I felt they took us back to the beginning, a philosophical big bang, and I cherished them for that reason. I thought they had a kind of beauty. But the past here still lived. People like the contractor were closer to it, and his words (with their Shakespearean echo) gave a new idea: the dark abyss of paganism. Others spoke of that as well, in their own way; and it seemed to me that people near the bottom, who responded more instinctively to things, had the greater fear. The fear was real, not affected, and I felt it was this, rather than ideas of beauty and history and culture (as some people said), that was keeping the past and all the old G.o.ds close.
A Lagos city councillor said to me, "Even the pastor of the church will go very quietly, if he can, to the traditional priest and the shrine. Let me tell you: the average African is very afraid of the pagan, and the pagan is there. Muslims and Christians practise forgiveness and cannot harm you. In the pagan religion there is no forgiveness. It is a t.i.t-for-tat religion. There are rules you have to follow very strictly, and if you go against them you either die or go mad. They punish swiftly and they stick to it. They adhere to what the priests in the shrines or the G.o.ds demand. So you see it has a strong hold."
3.
THERE WAS a king of Lagos. He was called the Oba. There are Obas or chiefs all over Nigeria, some hereditary, some appointed (and paid) by the central government. The Oba of Lagos had nothing of the antiquity and mystery of the Kabaka of Uganda; he didn"t have subjects, properly speaking; he didn"t call up the religious awe. This Oba was a businessman and a policeman. His Oba-ship had been challenged by someone, as I had heard; and the case was still before the courts. In the meantime the Oba ruled and was generally accepted. He had had a long and distinguished career in the police service; he had retired at the very top, as DIG (Deputy Inspector-General). a king of Lagos. He was called the Oba. There are Obas or chiefs all over Nigeria, some hereditary, some appointed (and paid) by the central government. The Oba of Lagos had nothing of the antiquity and mystery of the Kabaka of Uganda; he didn"t have subjects, properly speaking; he didn"t call up the religious awe. This Oba was a businessman and a policeman. His Oba-ship had been challenged by someone, as I had heard; and the case was still before the courts. In the meantime the Oba ruled and was generally accepted. He had had a long and distinguished career in the police service; he had retired at the very top, as DIG (Deputy Inspector-General).
The Oba knew Edun, and Edun thought I should see him. When I said the meeting was a good idea, Edun right away took out his mobile and telephoned the Oba. That was like Edun. He didn"t like to waste time; it was one reason for his business success. I could hear, from what was taking place on the telephone, that the Oba had his doubts, perhaps about writers generally, or perhaps just about me. Edun talked him round: there would be no interview, no direct quotations. So a meeting was fixed, and Edun promised to come with me. I was glad about that; it made the business of the royal audience more manageable.
He was a king of the people here in Lagos, and he lived in a popular part of the town, off a very long street of traders and their small shops. The Nigerians love to trade; there are traders in the unlikeliest places. The visitor, seeing a crowd in constant movement, can often find himself wondering who the buyers are and who the sellers, and (since the quant.i.ties dealt in can be so small) what accidents have led them to choose their respective roles. A buyer, it seems, can easily be a vendor, and a vendor the other thing.
All at once, in the long street of traders, and after a house with a roughly painted notice on its upper story which said that the house belonged to a royal family (not our Oba), after this in a side road there was a concrete arch of two interlocking V"s, one inverted. This arch framed the royal purlieus. On the right-hand side were more small shops, some selling plastic trinkets; in front of them were food vendors with trays. On the left-hand side was the royal street, properly speaking. A big black iron gate barred the way. There was a sentry in a sentry-box. Edun rolled down the gla.s.s window and the sentry waved us on. We pa.s.sed a small concrete house, unremarkable in every way; this was the old palace of the Oba, before Nigerian oil and money. The new palace was just ahead. It was like a middle-cla.s.s residential house.
The crowd outside seemed ordinary at first, but very soon the eye began to take in more. The people, men and women, were attendants on the Oba. They were bright-eyed and expectant and smiling. Some of them were drummers; others made a lesser kind of noise with bits of old metal. This took me back to Trinidad and the nineteen-forties, when the steel band was being perfected. A sweet metallic noise was called up from the discarded wheels of motor-cars. Men held the old wheels aloft in their left hand, to keep the sound pure, and struck with smaller pieces of metal. But now, outside the palace of the Oba of Lagos, it was women, smiling at the visitors, who were making this metallic noise.
Edun brought out crisp new banknotes from the pocket of his formal Nigerian tunic and gave them to the musicians, stilling them. I hadn"t known about this aspect of the ritual, and hadn"t prepared for it. I had no banknotes or other money on me.
We went up the steps of the new palace to a marble hall. On the left was a small reception room with a white throne between two red chairs. This room was empty. The main audience hall was ahead of us. We were ushered into it by a tall man in a cream-coloured silk gown. Yorubas are big men. The audience hall was empty. It was big, about forty feet long, with sofas pushed against the side walls, and with two blue-and-cream Chinese rugs placed end to end down the middle of the room. Through a half-open door at the far end, beyond the throne and the formal chairs, you could see a dining room.
The Oba"s chair was high and with a royal canopy. On either side of it was a lesser chair, equally well upholstered. We sat on a sofa on the right. The chiefs who had been waiting outside began to drift in for the audience. They sat on sofas facing us on the other side of the room. So, even before he appeared, the Oba had been given this aura of majesty. It was hard not to yield to it. And when at length he did appear, coming in from the dining room at the back, I instinctively got up, with everybody else.
He was wearing a light-blue long tunic. He had big red coral beads around his neck and wrists. Again, he was very tall; this added to his impressiveness. He didn"t look at all absurd sitting beneath the canopy of his throne.
He sat down. In the silence that followed, Edun, my sponsor, stood up beside his sofa and-to my amazement-threw himself flat down on the Chinese rug and made his African obeisance.
Three of the chiefs in silk gowns then half-fell on the floor and made their own obeisance, resting on elbows and knees, a little like sprinters in their starting blocks. In that posture of respect they clicked their fingers rhythmically, slapped their palms and chanted. The Oba took it all in graciously.
I found it extraordinary. The display was very much like the ritual of respect Speke had witnessed in 1861 in Mutesa"s Ugandan court (still an affair of grand huts and elephant-gra.s.s enclosures); and Uganda was very far away from Nigeria. Speke described the ritual as the "nyanzig"; he thought that was what the Kabaka"s subjects were saying when they were flat on the ground. Thirteen or fourteen years later Stanley said that Speke had been wrong. The people greeting the Kabaka in this way were only expressing their thanks to him.
When the other chiefs had done their obeisance to the Oba, Edun stood up again and addressed the Oba in English. He told him who we were and what we were trying to do. The Oba made a gesture of welcome with his left hand and pointed to the chair at his left. I went and sat on that chair.
A woman appeared at the back of the audience room. She knelt on her haunches and smiled at the Oba. He gestured to her-it was like a little private drama-to come up to where he was, and she came and sat on the chair on his right.
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 sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s 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. 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 gra.s.s 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 his 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 foo-foo his mother had made. his mother had made. Foo-foo 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. 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 a.s.sociation. 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 Nestle 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 Nestle. 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 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 saw-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 gla.s.s and marble, like a bank.