The Masque of Africa (11 page)

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 tit-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 gods demand. So you see it has a strong hold.”

T
HERE 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).

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 quantities 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 glass window and the sentry waved us on. We passed 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-class 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-grass 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 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.

O
N 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.