The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief

  It was a four-hour drive to Fort Portal. At least half of that was on the straight royal roads of Buganda which, when they went up a hill, seemed to disappear into the sky at the top of the hill. But these Buganda roads were in a poor way, in spite of the editorial in the paper that morning which said that the people of Uganda were “hood-winked” into believing that the roads were not good; and speed-breakers across the road in every peopled area shook up the bones.

  We came in time to the British-built roads of Toro: not straight, always curving, laid down in cuttings in the red soil which often shut out the view. But for some reason—perhaps the population was sparser and there was less heavy traffic—these roads were in much better shape than the Buganda ones; and we were able to travel at speed. The stone markers on the roadside were engraved every four kilometres with the distance to Fort Portal. That distance seemed to melt away, and the landscape all around was wonderful: parkland between mountain ranges.

  James, on the telephone from Kampala, guided us through the small town. We came to the hill with the palace. As we climbed I looked for the roadside stones that might have been painted green by an eccentric omukama before 1966. I couldn’t see them. The stones might have been removed as being too disfigured, or the story might have been false. On every side the view was grand: we looked down to wide parkland, pale grass, darker trees, and the roofs of the small colonial town of Fort Portal.

  The hill was isolated; every view was grand. It occurred to me that this hill would always have been the seat of a king or chief; it would have had a history. If Africans hadn’t built with the perishable products of the forest, it would have been worth excavating.

  We came to a gravel area between the palace and a small, featureless modern building. When we got out of the car we were welcomed by a small team of smiling, busy men who darted about and took photographs of us and managed to make a lot of noise. They must have been the palace officials James had talked about. So, reassuringly, James had kept his word.

  We were led to a small room in the palace where there were copies of family photographs on two big boards. Immediately, then, not giving us time to rest after our long drive, a red-eyed official in a long gown and with a heavy-handled stick began to harangue us about Toro and the royal family. He didn’t simply point at the photographs; he used the heavy handle of the stick to knock hard at various photographs on the boards. He generated a lot of noise and he had a strong accent. I couldn’t follow what he was saying, but I felt he had already begun to repeat himself.

  There was a photograph at the top of one board of the old palace: a large rectangular thatched building. When the British came to Uganda Africans became ashamed of their round huts; as soon as they could they began building rectangular concrete houses. So what had happened here on the royal hill in Toro was a curious reversal of what had become standard practice in Uganda. The old palace was rectangular; the new palace was circular. It had been built like that for the sake of the all-round view; but it was also like a rejection of the old colonial idea of modernity. The new palace, with its various political messages, had in fact been built by Brother Leader Ghaddafi as part of the Libyan expansion in Africa. The new round palace had concrete uprights and its drains were exposed. This exposing of the drains was the Libyan style; the grand new mosque in Kampala had a similar feature.

  I would have liked to see more of the palace, but we were not able to do so. When I asked where we might rest we were led to the smaller, rectangular building on the other side of the gravelled area. In the drawing-room area there was an old leopard skin, mark of kingship—(poor leopard, doomed to extinction)—thrown over an upholstered chair. I imagined the young king sat there and discussed affairs of state with various people. There was another small room with two plain divan beds set against two walls, their heads at an angle one to the other. This was where we were supposed to rest. The lavatory had no seat; through a big hole in the ceiling we could see the beams and rafters of the roof. This was where James’s arrangements petered out; it was clear now that no amount of telephoning could improve matters.

  We dragged some chairs out to the wide verandah, and the warm air from the gravelled yard and from the road below came at us. Patrick telephoned James and said without complaint that Toro was beautiful, so beautiful he was hoping to be allowed to buy a piece of land. James, missing the irony, told us that if we wanted lunch we should go to the Mountains of the Moon hotel in the town. We decided to forget the palace officials—we had some idea that they might have laid on lunch for us—and make a run for this hotel. We heard later that the officials were hoping to come with us.

  In the Mountains of the Moon, new to me, we sat in the spacious back verandah, at the edge of the bright green lawn. A pretty little kitten, three or four months old, wailed piteously for food. I wished I could have taken him away with me. I went and talked to a waitress. She told me that the kitten was the last of a litter; they had got rid of the others. The kitten lived in a drain pipe in a concrete gutter; when it was there it was perfectly hidden. It was alone in the world; it kept alive—perhaps for not much longer—by its instinct. Hunger alone had made it come up to the back verandah. The waitress brought a saucer of milk. This little bit of nourishment comforted it; it stopped crying, and a little later I saw it in the hotel garden, not far from its drain-pipe home, licking its paws.

  It was not far from here, in the kingdom of Unyoro, to the west of Buganda, that Speke, near the end of his journey, bought a little kitten from an Unyoro man. He doesn’t say why he bought it, but it could only have been to keep the creature alive for a few more days. The Unyoro man wanted to eat the kitten; it was good eating, he said. He begged Speke to give the kitten back to him if it looked likely to die. It is a strange episode in his book, just four lines long; and he doesn’t say how it ended.

  There had been some talk from James of the palace officials taking us to see places and people connected with the traditional African religion. But since our arrival my interest in this part of the programme had gone down and down. And it was just as well, because when we went back from the Mountains of the Moon to the palace the red-eyed official, talking of the religious things we wanted to see, said they had sent away all their cars; and since we couldn’t all fit in Patrick’s ambassador’s car, they would have to go ahead of us on a boda-boda motorbike. That would cost three thousand shillings. It was only a pound, but in Ugandan shillings it sounded a fearful amount; and I dreaded to think, if we showed ourselves indifferent to money at this stage, how much we would have to pay later to have an audience with a local diviner.

  I said we were leaving out that part of the programme. They didn’t seem to mind. But they wanted us to sign the visitors’ book. They especially wanted Patrick to sign it, since he was the important man among us. And, since he was important, they wanted him to sign by himself on a whole page.

  They then took Patrick off to the small room in the palace where there were the two boards of photographs. He came out after a while with what looked like a framed souvenir photograph: it had been taken of him in the morning with a lot of noise and busyness. Patrick thanked them. They said there was a charge. Seven thousand shillings. A little over two pounds. Patrick gave them 20,000 shillings. He was expecting change, but they said he had misunderstood. The charge wasn’t 7,000 shillings; it was 74,000 shillings. Twenty-four pounds and 50 pence sterling; or 37 U.S. dollars. Patrick, too stunned to argue, or to think about pounds and dollars, paid. He awakened to outrage only after we had left, and for a long time he could think only of what was in effect the hongo he had been made to pay.

  All the way back to Kampala, along the curving roads of Toro and the straight roads of Buganda, there were schoolchildren in uniform coming out at the end of a school day, walking home to simple dwellings in the fierce sun. It was just after three, the deadest time of the tropical day: the heat at its worst in all the green, the freshness of the morning long burnt away, together with whatever optimism the new day
might have brought. The light and the heat cast a gloomy clarity on what we were driving through: small houses, small fields, small people, and it seemed that nothing more uplifting was being offered to the children we could see on the road. Uganda was Uganda. Education and school uniforms, giving an illusion of possibility, was easy; much harder was the creation of a proper economy. There would be no jobs for most of the children we could see—some dawdling on the way home now, killing time in spite of the heat.

  The latest employment news, presented in the newspapers as good news, was that, even with all the suicide bombers and mayhem, there were six thousand Ugandans working as security guards in Iraq. There was also a report of a call for Ugandan English teachers from North Korea.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sacred Places

  I HAD BEEN told—by someone who said he wanted to warn me about Lagos airport—that Nigerians liked to travel with lots of luggage. I took this to mean that there would be trouble collecting luggage in Lagos. But we had luggage trouble even before we left London. Someone had checked in with his luggage and had then disappeared. We waited a while and then the pilot said that the absent passenger had checked in nineteen pieces of luggage. I thought I had misheard. But the Nigerian passengers didn’t turn a hair; and later, in Nigeria, I understood why. Why fret about nineteen pieces when at that moment there was a Nigerian bigwig travelling the world with thirty-seven suitcases, and doing so on a diplomatic passport to which he was not entitled?

  Nigerians have their own idea of status. They make sport with things that other people might take seriously; and a diplomatic passport, with its many immunities, was one of the toys that had come to them with independence and statehood. To possess a toy like that, almost a fetish, sorted the men from the boys, and important people jostled with one another for the ennoblement. A man with thirty-seven suitcases would make enough of a show, you might think. But in Nigerian eyes such a man would make much more of a show, would put the seal on his grandeur, if at Immigration, in full view of the waiting crowd, he could saunter through the diplomatic channel.

  We were waiting that morning or afternoon in London in the parked plane, and the man who had abandoned his nineteen pieces didn’t show up. At length the pilot said that those nineteen pieces would have to be taken off the plane. This would take time; we were a full flight; many more than those nineteen pieces would have to be taken off before we could come upon the unclaimed suitcases. At the end they were found and taken off. We were now two and a half hours past our scheduled departure. For all this time we had been idle in the aeroplane, looking at the airport buildings and the busy life of the tarmac.

  It was horrible when we got to Lagos. Beyond the immigration and customs hall, deceptively brisk and soon quite clear, there was chaos. Three flights had come in, close to one another; and there was only one unloading facility. Down the aluminium chute, from time to time, came the swollen black suitcases of Nigeria, like fragments of cooling lava. Unexpectedly conservative in style, those suitcases, done in a kind of fabric, and oddly similar.

  In the dim light people lined the carousel and some stood against the wall. Others stood as near as they could get to the debouching point, almost amid the dangerous tumble of fat suitcases, like people who believed in magic, and thought that to be near the source was to be halfway to success. More important people walked up and down with the assistants (in suits or fine Nigerian clothes) who had come to the airport to welcome them, and were now, instead, like everybody else, only looking for luggage. After the style of business class and first class, all were equal here. The unloading and reloading of our own plane had made a mess of the original order in which things had been stowed.

  I was standing against a wall behind a Nigerian family who had boarded the plane in London and were still full of beans. They had a couple of trolleys, but so far no suitcases. From time to time, for no reason I could see, the teen-age daughter, setting her face, gave her much smaller younger brother a good hard kick or lashed out at him with a vicious cuff. The blows would have hurt, but the boy made no attempt to hit back; instead, like a puppy or kitten with a short memory, he went to the girl again and was again kicked and cuffed.

  While I was watching this piece of Nigerian family life I was accosted by a man in a dark suit and a coloured tie. He seemed to suggest that he was a driver and was waiting for me. He seemed so good and correct and logical in all the noise and hopelessness around me that I forgot all that I had been tutored about Lagos airport. After that introduction I looked, while I waited, for the man with the suit and the jaunty tie; he became my anchor in the rocking, jumping crowd. Sometimes (no doubt for some pressing private reason) he melted into the scrum around the carousel, and then I was frantic until I had a glimpse of the red tie again.

  When in the fullness of time he guided me to a car (my two little pieces of luggage now found) I was happy to go.

  The airport building had been chaotic inside. Outside was full of menace: raw concrete beams overhead, raw concrete pillars in front, and a kind of canopy that offered no protection. It was raining. The road, though shiny in the rain, was not well lighted. After the fug of the luggage hall every drop of rain, slanting in below the teasing canopy, felt cold and seemed to sting. There were beggars coming out of the dark now, around a corner, from nowhere that one could see: spectral at first, these figures, and then very real and sturdy. They all offered to help, and every one seemed a threat. The women beggars, at this time of night, were especially disturbing.

  Here, without understanding how it had happened I lost the man in the suit. Here, left alone with a man who said he was my driver, I heard that the man in the suit was not himself a driver; he organised drivers at the airport for people like me.

  This man at least knew where I was going, and I allowed myself to go with him.

  It was a slow, long journey to the other end of the sleeping town. The driver appeared uncertain about the route.

  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) muffled by glass 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 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 passe.

  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 attitude 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.