The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,29

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