The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,39

was now the head of the family and had responsibilities; he took that seriously. He got a job in the Swiss firm of Nestlé by chance. He used to go every Thursday to the race course to gamble. One Thursday, at the race course, he met a cousin who was going for an interview with Nestlé. He went with his cousin for the interview, and when he got there it occurred to him to tell the Swiss man in charge that he had sent in his own application form. There was an argument. Through the intervention of a Yoruba officer Adesina was given an interview and was selected. He impressed people with his talent for calculation. He didn’t use conversion tables; he arrived at answers quickly; and he made no mistakes.

He began to rise in the firm, doing all sorts of clerical jobs. His ambition at that stage was to be a shipping clerk. He thought that in that job he would become familiar with the port and would get to know sailors, and this would help him to be a stowaway. He thought that everything would become possible for him if he could stow away to a friendly country. But he didn’t become a shipping clerk. He stayed in the office as an accounts budget clerk. He was trained by an Englishman and then by a Nigerian, one of the first professional accountants in the country. What had been a disappointment (for the would-be stowaway) had in fact set him on the business path which took him to where he was now.

Twenty-five years of work and ambition (and what was implied: the overcoming of many disappointments) had made him a modern man, but he would have been supported in those years by old ideas of family and tribe, and old habits of belief that reached back beyond the conversion of his parents and his uncle.

Adesina said, “Look, all rich people and warriors in our tribe consulted their soothsayers before they went anywhere or did any transaction. If they had any problem they went to their soothsayer. My grandfather had his own soothsayer or babalawo. They were part of the extended family, and that was their profession. Even the Yoruba Obas have their own soothsayers. They are the highest level of soothsayers and are called ‘Arabas’ in Yoruba-land. Someone might say, ‘I feel there is going to be this problem in the town. What shall I do to avoid it?’ The soothsayer will say they will have to consult the Ife. Then they may do rituals to ease it or make it go away. The Ife will tell us. There are two types of Ife. One is the chain type, and the other is the sixteen kernels. The soothsayer will throw the chain or kernels in a certain way and read the message of the oracle or Ife.”

Adesina knew a soothsayer who was very good, but was now dead. He used to work in the multi-national firm of Lever’s. After he retired from Lever’s he had a traditional African church in his house. He ran it like a church and had services.

Adesina said, “He was educated and knew the Koran and the Bible. This man told me there were three astral high languages—Hebrew, Arabic, and Yoruba. If you go deep in the Koran you will find that Ife originated in Mecca. The Yorubas are Arabs from the Yahuba tribe, according to Koranic records, and those sixteen kernels were given to a man called Setiyu. It is in the Koran. Because he was an invalid and had to be carried from place to place he was given the Ife. He was killed during the Hijra when the Prophet had to flee. He was the first Ife.”

I knew that Adesina was complicated. I understood now that he was more complicated than I thought.

When I had first met him, at a restaurant dinner with someone else, he was wearing a suit and a tie, essential businessman’s clothes in Nigeria, but on him like protective gear. He was not a handsome man; his face, with the now shallow scars on his cheeks, was small and tight. He didn’t talk much at first; he might have been self-conscious about his appearance. It was only when he began talking of his mother’s animals that he engaged me.

Later, when he opened up and I got to know his story, I saw—or began dimly to see—how far he had travelled. He had started with nothing, in a far-removed