The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief

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

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

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

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

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

  6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  7

  OSUN STATE has the reputation of being very religious, full of shrines and sacred places. The old world was like this in many countries. (Even England, though not thought of now as a religious country, is full of sacred sites at many levels of its history.)

  We were going to a sacred grove of great beauty, but we had first to get the permission of the Oba of Osun. The wide highway from Ife to Osun, built for festival crowds—like those from the black diaspora and elsewhere who came for the climax of the River Festival, when the virgin walked to the river with a big calabash on her head and poured the sacrificial contents of the calabash into the river—was empty now. We made good time. We were not going to be as late as I feared.

  The Oba’s palace was in the centre of the town. A number of carefully dressed officials were there to greet us.

  (When I considered their clothes, and their happiness in the occasion, I thought how awful it would have been if, as I had half wanted, we had telephoned and cancelled this part of the trip. I had thought of doing so because it was exceedingly hot, the heat of early afternoon, and also because I thought that we were going to do a long drive only to be shown another version of what we had already seen that morning, another piece of Yoruba myth.)

  A fine woman in pink came out of the Oba’s palace. She was from the Osun tourism department. She said that the Oba had gone to change his clothes, after the earlier receptions, and she led us to a durbar hall, where we were to wait. We waited there for some time.

  Two servants came and sat on the low steps in front of the Oba’s throne and they held us in their gaze. They were stylishly dressed, in different costumes, and I thought, because of their direct gaze, they were chiefs of some sort, with special duties. I didn’t know they were servants.

  Someone in our party asked when the Oba was going to come out. We were told what we already knew, that the Oba was changing his clothes. So we waited.

  Eventually he appeared, coming out through a door at the back. Two policemen in black uniform came out before him; and some chiefs, coming out through another door, stood on the Oba’s left. The Oba was a tall man with a wide, kindly face. He carried a whitish whisk made from a horse’s tail. He handled this whisk in an impressive way. He used it to thank, to acknowledge, and to suggest in the most delicate way to a speaker that enough was enough.

  The Oba’s wife, who had come out with him, and was sitting demurely on his left, was young, with a lively questioning face that made her appear separate from the court formality. She considered us, one by one, and I felt she liked us.

  The fine woman in pink, who had greeted us, and was now sitting with us, as though she was part of our group, said in an undertone, speaking of the friendly young woman on the Oba’s left, “She is the real power behind the throne.”

  There followed the speeches and the formalities. The Oba, with his soft voice, cut in with a little piece of business. He asked the people from the tourism department how they were getting on with the pavilion for traditional religion. The men among the officials stood up, made the royal obeisance, doing their half crouch, touching the floor with the tips of their fingers, so that (like the courtiers before the Oba of Lagos, but those courtiers were wearing gowns, and these officials were wearing suits) they looked like sprinters waiting for the starter’s pistol. Then they stood up and correctly, holding one hand over the other, they told the Oba that many things had been done and, in fact, they were hoping that one day when he had the time he would come and have a look. He said he would, one of these days.

  Then the officials, speaking on our behalf, asked for permission to visit the sacred grove. The Oba gave it graciously, making an encouraging gesture with his white horse-hair whisk. We were dismissed. He went out by the door through which he had entered, and the policemen and the rest of his suite followed. We had a few words then with the Oba’s wife. She was as friendly and interested as she appeared.

  We left the durbar hall, with the officials from the tourist office. As soon as we went out of the main gate the ragged court musicians started up: drums, metal on metal, and pebbles shaken in calab
ashes. The man who was our sponsor—he was from the publishing house—made as if to give money to the musicians. But another man rounded on him, saying, “I’ve already given them money. Don’t give any more to the scoundrels.”

  THE SACRED grove took my breath away. After the Oni’s palace, the garden of the Source of Life, the Yoruba heroine of long ago, the petrified staff of the Yoruba giant, I had expected only more myth-making, something calling once more for a suspension of disbelief.

  But the grove was real and it was beautiful: a piece of tropical woodland which had been left untouched for some time, and where no animal or creature was to be killed. That was what we had been told; and that was what we found. At the limit of the grove families of monkeys took their time to cross the public road. Smaller, sad-faced monkeys, tormented elsewhere, looked without fear at our party and the cars that had brought us.

  The grove was walled off or fenced with a fascinating wall of masonry or terra-cotta, the work of an artist whose melting forms recalled the playful designs of the Barcelona architect Gaudí. The textured wall was touched with moss; it was in keeping with the design. Through the wilderness of tree-trunks and hanging lianas inside we had glimpses of the river that ran through the sanctuary. It was a muddy tropical river, and no attempt had been made to beautify or soften the turbid water; the scalloped melting forms on the wall were intended to match the bounce of the fast-moving river, narrow at this point. As in the design of the Kabakas’ tombs in Uganda, where the design had been religiously laid down, everything had to be local, had to be of the place as it was.