The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,44

interstices in the middle, and dirty-looking; but these shells, from the handling they had received, were very smooth and wonderfully white.

He passed the shells to me, saying, “Blow on them, give your name, and throw them on the table.”

I did as he asked. He took up the tiny gourds and muttered some incantation. After a while the gourds began to swing from side to side. That meant no. If the gourds had swung out and then back, it would have meant yes.

The babalawo said, “The girl is not going to get married. You have many enemies. To break their spells we will have to do many rituals. They will cost money, but the girl will get married.”

Everyone in the room was quite excited. Adesina, his brother, the guide: the babalawo had them all in the palm of his hand.

I said, “But what he’s told me is good. I don’t want the girl to get married.”

The babalawo looked appalled. He must have felt I was trifling with him. I believe that only the reverence of Adesina and the others saved the day.

I pointed to the apostle-spoon figure and said, “What’s this?”

He held the little figure and said, “He travels at night. He goes to the shrines where I send him and he brings back news.”

And Adesina’s brother and the guide, correct in their Nigerian floral clothes, added a little to my credit by looking horribly awed.

Adesina said, “He wants to know about creation and the gods.”

Once again Adesina’s obvious fervour helped to calm the babalawo. One of the seer’s friends, like a man who knew his way about the place, came and plugged in the fan on the wall. To my surprise it began to work, whirring horizontally above us.

The babalawo began to talk about the gods. He took his time. He acted out the dramas he was describing, and he spent so long over the first bit of creation that I feared we would be in that airless little cell all afternoon. Already something in the air was pricking my nostrils, a sign of trouble to come. Casually the babalawo poured some stuff from a bottle against the wall next to him, adding to the general mess of the place; but in fact, as he soon said, he was “feeding” one of the oracles which were against the wall. He said one of those oracles was asleep and had been fed. To take the name of another god at this stage he would first have to make a libation to the unfed oracle. He would need spirit for this libation, and he meant spirit in the normal way: hard liquor.

Adesina sent the guide out, to get the spirit. And the babalawo went on with his stories about gods, stopping every few words to allow Adesina to translate and amplify.

My heart sank more and more. The babalawo’s cell became like the ship’s cabin in Room Service with the Marx Brothers, endlessly receiving new people. At one point a young man in a polo shirt came into the cell. He wanted to see the babalawo privately. The babalawo, like a man with no time for village idlers, shooed him away roughly. The young man in the polo shirt withdrew with bad grace, and the babalawo, using his bony fingers a lot, went on with his weighty stories about the gods, more important to him at that stage than any petty business the young man in the polo shirt might have brought.

The babalawo broke off and said, “I believe I told you I cannot mention this god unless we have poured a libation to him.” He pointed once more to the dingy splash on the wall.

At this opportune moment the guide returned with a square bottle of Nigerian gin. The babalawo had already had a tot from his own bottle, and now they all drank to the god.

The babalawo’s mobile rang. The babalawo put it on speaker mode. The young man who had just been with us was heard remonstrating with the babalawo. “The people you have with you are going to make a lot of money from what you tell them. Don’t tell them everything.”

The babalawo was perfectly calm. The gin had had a soothing effect on everybody. The babalawo offered to show us the oracles in his yard. The very small space in his cell gave way to something even smaller as we followed him outside. We followed him to a passage barely wide enough for two people. We were now