The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,41

the shortcut he was taking led us to streets so flooded that cars had had to stop.

The road where we were was hardly a road. The drains were overfull; the flood had scoured the gutters into an unspeakable dark mess, added plastic bottles and other vegetable rubbish, and this all bounced and raged down in one direction on this side and in another direction on the other side. In this water rage every obstruction showed: miniature rapids, water always finding a way. Stall-holders, mainly food-sellers, were pulling back from the edge, and pulling back again. In front of a closed stall a jaunty little black-and-white sign in small italics, professionally done, said Pepper soup is now ready; though the idea of food didn’t go too well with the garbage rocking past.

Apartment buildings, at a lower level than the flood, looked drenched and rotting; it was easy to imagine them collapsing; and at the same time they looked smoky, as though from fires within. So they looked at once cold and warm. It would have been dreadful to live there, to wake up there, to go to sleep there. Around these blocks were lower, flatter living areas, seemingly covered from end to end with bumpy old corrugated iron, with no apparent room below for lanes and alleys.

In the distance, hugging the shore of the creek, was the great fishermen’s settlement, a degraded Venice, shacks on stilts, just above the dark water which fed the shacks and which they in turn soiled.

I talked later about what I had seen to some local councillors I met. I said I thought the area couldn’t be improved; it had grown too big; it could only be rebuilt. The councillors were politicians, hardened people, used to going among the poor of Lagos, but they felt that nothing could be done in that area around the creek. The people in the fishermen’s settlement and in the neighbouring slums were migrants, constantly on the move, and as constantly replaced by new arrivals. These people didn’t like sending their children to school; they preferred sending them out to the roads to hawk and trade, to add to the family income. They were not settled people, a fixed community. You couldn’t build them new houses with proper sanitation. You couldn’t talk to them about poverty alleviation. You couldn’t do anything for them; and they bred and bred.

One councillor said, “Islam permits four wives and Catholics don’t practise birth-control and you know Nigerians are very religious people.”

Another councillor said, “With the population explosion comes social apathy. They fill the open drains with rubbish. During the rains this rubbish floats everywhere. They encroach on the drains and put up their shacks over the drains. We were equipped for two thousand people and we cater for twenty thousand. So something gives.”

This was what I had in my head. I thought that Adesina had more to show me. But in spite of the passion with which he had spoken at our earlier meeting, he didn’t seem particularly interested now in that side of things, and my feeling was that his thoughts that morning were more of the babalawo we were going to see.

Adesina’s new babalawo (if indeed he was that) lived on the mainland. A ten-kilometre bridge and highway connected Victoria Island to the mainland, and it seemed on this wet Saturday morning that a fair sample of the life of the island and the mainland was laid out as if for inspection on this highway.

There were the usual crowds at bus stops or taxi stops, people becalmed and resigned in the rain. Almost no traffic on one side of the road, and a lot of traffic on our side. Boys or young men, hawkers, swarmed down the middle of the road, and sprang into action when the traffic came to a halt. They sold quite a range of goods. They sold colour pictures. They dangled various foods in clear plastic bags (boiled guinea-fowl eggs, potatoes of a curious squashed shape); they dangled miniature open accordions of telephone cards; fake designer dark glasses, fake designer watches, wallets, even clothing. It was an industry; behind these boys there would have been active suppliers, getting the goods out every evening and every morning.

The houses near the road were solid, of concrete and with glass windows; the slums were behind them. Between the houses were places of education, especially for computer training. The Ilupeju industrial area—food processing, textile manufacturing—was gated. Just beyond this area was a big