The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,42

bus and wagon station, with much rubbish on the wet ground.

This was like the jumbled semi-cityscapes of Lagos that I had already got to know. They were like places that seemed waiting to be knocked down or completed, but they always spoke of energy. They did not especially depress me. I saw the jumble as superficial, and felt that with the resources of Nigeria, and when the people were ready, the jumble could one day be undone.

Was it only this that Adesina wished to show me? He was some years younger than I was, and it was possible that I had travelled more than he had, and seen more hopeless places—in Jamaica, Bombay, Calcutta, and many rural localities in India.

We pass a church, “Mountain of Fire.” Always churches with grand names on the Nigerian highways. These names trying not to repeat one another. (Other names on this run: The Redeemed Church of God, Christ Apostle Church.) Then the bleached concrete quarters of the Nigerian Air Force, tarnished as if by smoke. A while later we have the modern splendours of the domestic airport, which go some way to balancing the air picture. A big complex for the Concord Press (“Truth is constant”) is deserted; the business is in liquidation. Settlement after settlement of unpaved roads, wet and red and gritty, full of children standing about: children of the Nigerian boom preserved by a new kind of health care, to add very soon to the slums of the towns. In one settlement a number of the newish houses are roughly daubed with signs saying that they have been repossessed: boom turning to bust at this level, with the roughly daubed signs about repossession like an additional insult.

The town we get to is big and rich, in spite of the garbage. You can tell from the number of banks: Zenith Bank, Skye Bank, Ocean Bank. We are now near the babalawo’s territory. We need a guide, and we twist and turn back onto a parallel road to pick up Adesina’s brother. He is friendly, in a flowered shirt, and seems much simpler than Adesina. He would have been waiting for some time, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He sits next to the driver and guides us to a small and bumpy side road with open gutters. Many herbalists here in small wooden shops, offering to cure syphilis, gonorrhoea and breast cancer. Clearly this shop has been set up here to benefit from the nearness of the true medicine man, our babalawo, and to give him a little competition. So we are on the right track. Our quarry can’t be far away. But we can’t find him. We go up and down some muddy lanes, asking. Still nothing.

At this stage Adesina’s brother wanted us to stop and take on another guide. It turned out now that Adesina’s brother didn’t really know, hadn’t known, and he had commissioned a proper guide. This new guide was waiting for us in another place. He too would have been waiting for some time; and he too didn’t mind. But it turned out again—after he had taken us up and down a few small streets, indistinguishable one from the other, asking people all the time—that the new guide was himself at sea, and wasn’t too sure where the babalawo lived. It was the new man’s idea then that, just to make sure, we should ask one of the commercial motorcyclists, the okadas, who for a fee gave pillion-rides to a particular destination, to go ahead of us and guide us. And the okada man knew. His fee was modest, one hundred naira, about eighty cents.

I suppose we had been using the wrong word. In Lagos I had been told that if for some reason I needed a witchdoctor in a village I was never to ask for the witchdoctor or the juju man. It was better to ask for the medicine man. Juju was too demeaning a word; people resisted it.

And the okada man led us immediately to the side street where the unprepossessing house of the babalawo, the soothsayer or magician, was. It was a low house of unpainted concrete, flat to the ground, below a corrugated-iron roof, and with an entrance in the middle.

From the car this middle entrance gaped black, and when we picked our way to it over the wet road and yard we saw that the corridor in front of us was dark, even at this bright time of day. On the