been abandoned, left to rust and rot, since that was the cheaper and easier thing to do.
Ibadan was a great city on the way. It had a university, founded in colonial times, and branches of many British educational publishers. Yet it was a surprise when it came, because nothing in the land before the city had suggested there was a big city to come. It was simply there, at the end of the green, just as in Argentina Buenos Aires was at the end of the Pampa. Ibadan, a city of low houses on rolling hills, spread far in the distance, up to the horizon. It showed no city amenities, no public gardens or squares.
There was some such mystery about Ife, too. It too simply appeared, and was raucous. We followed road signs and went to the Oni’s royal compound. We were some minutes before the appointed time, and there was at first no one to greet us or guide us. It was a big compound and seemed to have grown organically. It was a series of small buildings, government-style, undistinguished, some one story, some two. There was a crowd outside one building in a corner, with people crowding the steps, and they appeared to be following a debate that was going on inside. I was told it was a divorce case. I thought that if all the buildings in the compound were in the traditional African style, with the fine grass roofs of Kampala, say, the compound might have been as impressive as Grant’s drawing of Kampala’s royal hill in 1861-62.
My visit had been arranged by an educational publishing firm—it was always necessary here to be sponsored—and some people from the firm, together with a tall man in Nigerian costume, came to greet us. The tall man was from the tourist board, very important here; he gave our group some kind of official standing. The tall man and the publishing-house group led us—with our driver: Nigerian courtesy—to a big air-conditioned audience hall, like a theatre hall, and we sat down on plush seats.
The tall man from the tourist board told us that the Oni was away, but the Oni’s deputy and some other chiefs were going to welcome us. He said that we were not to misunderstand the background and nature of the chiefs who were coming. They were highly educated people. And a little while later—though no one had challenged him—he said it again. It was as though, as a man from the tourist board (and perhaps after some misunderstanding with a recent tourist), it was his duty to put the record straight: local chiefs were not mere villagers.
Soon the chiefs began to come in. They arranged themselves in some order of precedence beside the Oni’s throne. They were in wonderful embroidered silk gowns, and so much grander in appearance than we were, that I feared that at any moment they might decide to call our bluff and dismiss us.
There were speeches. The tall man told the chiefs that I was from Trinidad. This had an amazing effect on the chief who was the Oni’s deputy. He said, in the tall man’s translation, “You who have left your ancestral land have now returned to your father’s land. Wali, wali, wali. Enter, enter, enter.”
It was moving. My anxiety about my own style seemed base. I returned the deputy’s kind and poetical words as best as I could. Patrick Edwards, the Trinidad ambassador in Uganda, who had served some years before in Nigeria, had told me about his ceremony of welcome in Ife. He had cried, and now I understood why.
Our party (now rather large) was taken on a tour of part of the palace. The tall man from the tourist board told me that this ground of Ife, where we were, was the source of civilisation. It was sacred for all Yorubas and the black race generally. He said this more than once, and I felt that this was how in many cultures national traditions would have been inculcated.
At the back of the audience hall there was a gate decorated with cowry shells. This gate opened on to a small garden. The garden was formal and neat, with grey concrete borders and flat hard beds of reddish earth, and quite bare apart from an old and suffering tree.
A sign said, “The Source of Life.” This referred to a concrete well in the centre. The well held a sacred and undying memory of the wife of the very first Oni