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