The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,37

was dangerous to be the first to look on these things, which had been prepared by soothsayers and were intended for higher spirits.

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ON 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.

Adesina, a self-made man, now an important business executive, was the only Nigerian I met who was an animal-lover. He was a man of sixty. His mother had been fierce with him as a child, beating him often. But it was from her that he had got his love of animals. There were always cats and other animals in his family house; he woke up to them every day; and it was his mother’s rule that no animal or bird that had been reared in the house was to be killed. He was now close to retirement, and it was his wish when he retired to do something for animals in Nigeria.

All the children before Adesina had died in infancy. When Adesina was born his parents thought he was the same child, always coming back to torment them, and so they made small cuts on his face, to frighten him into staying. The cuts were still there; Adesina liked to show them; but they were not as prominent as Adesina thought they were.

Adesina’s father was born in 1904. To understand a little of his history was to understand the important history of conversion (to Islam or Christianity) in Nigeria. He did not go to school. He converted first to Catholicism, but he was unhappy with it. He didn’t understand the church service, which was in Latin. Later