near the boundary wall: the small house was on a very small plot. And in a corner, looking like something lavatorial and disagreeable, were the three shrines with the oracles the babalawo had made with his own hands. For the believer it would have been a high moment, being permitted to see these sacred things; but for me the moment came with a noticeable tickle in my nostrils: a touch of asthma on the way.
I thought we should be looking for a way out. That soon came, because Adesina, though he might have wanted a serious personal reading from the babalawo, now understood that because of my frivolity there was going to be no further seriousness; the moment had passed.
There was no rebuke from him; and soon back to the gritty red lane we went, and into the car. A thin dog with swollen dugs came out of the babalawo’s yard; some children had been tormenting it. Adesina shouted at them. He had the right words and the right tone. The children held off at once. The dog came up to the street and trotted about its business undaunted, its tail up, its dignity intact.
And then once again we went past the little shops and dwellings of the settlement, the advertisements for extraordinary medical cures, the other advertisements for musical shows, and always the children; and then the houses with the big, humiliating, daubed sign on the walls: This house has been repossessed.
In Lagos the next day I told a man at the hotel where I had been and what I had done. He was genuinely frightened for me. He said, “They are bad people. Even if you want nothing from them they will damage you. You go with one problem and you come back with ten.”
And, indeed, the tickle in my nose had by this time developed into something that called for antibiotics, threatening me with the loss of precious days.
6
THE ONI of Ife: it was a memorable title. Once you heard it, it could play in your head as sound alone (especially if you didn’t know what it meant), and with its easily interchangeable vowels could take fantastic shapes. Even Dickens, master of made-up names, had sought to parody it somewhere in his writings (perhaps in his journalism, but I was no longer sure). I discovered now that the Oni was the religious head of the Yorubas of Nigeria, and Ife an actual place somewhere in the interior and within reach: half a day’s journey from Lagos.
The necessary arrangements were made, and I went. The Oni wasn’t going to be in residence that day, but there would be people to receive me. The Oni was in England. Like many Nigerians of means, the Oni usually went to England for his summer holidays; he was said to have a house in London. This was unexpected. It modified my idea of the Oni.
We left Lagos by an easy, uncluttered road. On the other side of the same road thousands and thousands of cars were taking their time to get to the capital: the Nigerian weekday paralysis. In the late afternoon and evening matters were reversed: it was easy to get to the capital, not so easy to get out of it. So we, morning travellers, heading out, were fortunate. Outside the city were business sites, luxuriating in space, and long walls that spoke of big churches to come. At last, then, we were in open country. The land was green: not the dark green of primeval forest, but the fresh green of land that had grown things many times over and was still fertile, requiring only rain and sun to burst into new vegetation. Adesina had said that eighty per cent of Nigeria was uncultivated, but I wasn’t seeing that. I was under the spell of the empty green landscape, which I hadn’t seen before, not in Trinidad, not in India: wide and green and empty.
The road to Ife was part of a projected trans-African highway. Near Lagos it had two wide lanes; and just as, in India, it lightened a journey to study the wrecks of overloaded small trucks on either side of the road, some on their backs, some on their sides, some wheel-less, front axle broken, rear axle broken; so here, in Nigeria, it dramatised the long highway and the unchanging green through which the highway ran, to look for the big articulated lorries that had slipped or skidded or been driven off the asphalt and had