The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,40

world. He was now the managing director of a great corporation; he worked for one of the richest men in the country. One day, driving in the centre of the city, he showed me the house of this rich man: it was of glass and marble, like a bank.

Adesina’s business language was half modern. His speciality was “numbers and calculations,” logistics and stratagems. He had pride in what he did, and I was half expecting him to say at some stage that the success that had come to him was a tribute to the country and its movement forward. But he said nothing like that. He was, in fact, gloomy in every way about Nigeria; and he didn’t talk of himself as part of the elite. He talked more of the poor, drinking “erosion water” in some districts and sleeping nine to a room. Perhaps he had waited too long, and the wait had been too punishing, more full of indignity than he knew at the time. Perhaps it was only the encouragement of the Ife, the pull towards the past, that had kept him going in the dark days.

He felt that Nigeria was now paying the price for its colonial history, which had begun not long before his father was born. “The French wanted to break this region into smaller divisions for their own reasons. The British dealt with us in a regional way. There was no Nigerian in the centre. So when we came into the centre we had no idea how to run it. Missionaries were never allowed to go to the north. So the north is very Muslim and we were all ruled by tribalism. Every political party that came up was really a regional party. Then a parliamentary British form of democracy added to the confusion at independence. So we had the Biafran war and then the coups. All our presidents and prime ministers came up by accident. No one was actually trained or prepared.”

He didn’t believe in the Nigerian boom.

“There is no boom. It is only a small stock-market boom where the elite thrived, and for a short time too. I know because I made money in it too. Booms are judged by the GNP and by the income of the lowest grade worker—what will his income buy in the open market? Most Nigerians like to be self-employed, but on the farms it is subsistence-level agriculture. Eighty per cent of our land is not cultivated. The farming people will have a few goats and a few plots of yams. It is not mechanised farming, and they have no meat except the rabbits they trap. I was recently in a state where they are good farmers. But the oranges they grow rot, and the tomatoes. You need infrastructure to create a processing industry, but that kind of support is not there. What are Nigerians abroad coming back to invest in?”

As for politicians, there was no point in looking to them to do anything. They were in politics for the money. Even the old religion got dragged in and chewed up by their politics. Shango was the god of thunder; to swear by Shango was the most terrible kind of vow; because if you broke your vow Shango was certain to take his revenge. And that was why at election time the politicians didn’t simply want you to promise to vote for them. They wanted you to swear by one or other of the old gods, who were all as implacable as Shango.

5

FROM THE way Adesina talked, I imagined his favourite soothsayer or babalawo had been the man who worked at the international firm of Lever’s and after his retirement ran a traditional African church (with services) in his house. It was said that this man could even foretell the coming of visitors. Adesina, I suppose, had regularly consulted this wise man and since the man’s death would have been a little bit at sea. But he was on the look-out for wise men. There was one he wanted me to meet; this could be combined with a deeper look at Nigeria.

I had already had something of a deeper look; it had happened by accident. On a day of rain, a couple of days after I had arrived, when I had the sketchiest idea of the layout of the city, I had had a sight of the slums of Lagos. I wasn’t looking for the slums; I was paying a business call. The driver was late;