The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,43

threshold there were slippers, doubtless of people inside. Adesina and his brother and the new guide were ready for this; they were wearing slippers. But I hesitated. In 1962 I had got ringworm in Delhi after padding about barefoot, a little too freely, in temples and gurdwaras. Adesina noticed my hesitation and said I wasn’t to bother. This was African or Nigerian courtesy: of course it mattered, tramping about a house with muddy shoes.

The floor of the central corridor was of concrete, and plastered grey and smooth. It was broken in patches. The woman of the house, appearing in the corridor, greeted us civilly; and from that small corridor space we were led to a smaller, darker space, and then another dark little corridor, really a space-divider, with a view on one side of a bedroom with an unmade grey bed. On the other side was the sanctum of the soothsayer, the herbalist, the magician, the babalawo.

The sanctum was really very small. Our little party—five of us—covered the floor. There was a bench and a stool, but our two guides had to remain standing. I sat on one end of the bench.

The babalawo sat on a low stool. He was very thin, in a white gown that now came out grey from the wash in local water; and he wore a white cotton cap embroidered with a simple wavy pattern in blue and yellow.

The little sanctum was full of unassorted things. A rusted electric fan on the floor, near the babalawo’s feet, looked abandoned. Near the ceiling was another fan in better condition. It was fixed into the wall and set horizontally. It wasn’t working now, but soon it was going to be put on for us. An unlikely-looking plug was going to be fitted into an unlikely-looking socket, and the fan was going to play over us, a nice breath of air in the muggy room. They had modern conveniences here! A mysterious object took up much room: it was part of an electric work table, a slice of a table, in new satinwood, and with an electric motor in a grey casing. This was clearly a found object of some importance, and the babalawo didn’t intend to let it go; he sat next to it.

Directly, with no beating about the bush, he asked our business.

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t say I had come only to have a look.

Adesina, though, knew how to deal with diviners. He said he first wanted to know whether our visit was going to do him, the babalawo, any good.

It was the kind of question the babalawo liked. He replied right away that we were going to be of immense value to him. I felt there was an element of ritual in the question and the answer, and both parties were satisfied.

On the little table in front of the babalawo were some of his magical things. A school exercise book resting on its front cover was sensationally dirty. It was furred with dirt, as though handled and handled by unwashed thumbs and fingers, and the mathematical tables on the back cover of the exercise book had suffered: the dirt and the fur had lifted some of the printed numerals off the paper. Not far away was a matchbox, in the same condition as the exercise book; a give-away bottle-opener, recognisable only because I had seen the little tool many times before; and a little green bottle loosely stopped with things I didn’t wish to look at too closely.

Adesina and the babalawo were now settling the fee for the consultation. The babalawo wanted a lot: five hundred pounds, a thousand dollars. Adesina, used to this kind of outrage, remained calm, and began to beat him down. He settled in the end for something much smaller.

I now had to ask my question.

I had it ready. I asked, “Will my daughter get married?”

The babalawo was thrown by the question. He said, “I thought only black people had such problems.”

But he was willing to give an opinion. He lifted the dirty exercise book and showed what it covered. Sixteen cowry shells (I assumed that was the number: Adesina had spoken of sixteen kernels as one way of divination); two tiny gourds tied together with a piece of string, the gourds not much bigger than marbles; and a small metal figure, like the top of an apostle spoon. The cowry shells had been much handled. I had known cowry shells to be grey, brown in the