had now taken hold; and the people of the diaspora who came for it would understand that though they had taken many of the Yoruba gods across the water, and though the whole apparatus of the supernatural had also travelled with them, reminding men of the precariousness of their hold on life, and though they had taken much of this Yoruba magic to the New World, making that difficult world safe, they could never take the sacred grove with them. That remained in Africa.
ON THE way back to Lagos our driver stopped a few times. He was looking for palm wine. The palm wine here, in the country, was the real thing; in Lagos the palm wine was diluted. He eventually got his palm wine, but he didn’t offer the rest of us a taste. He was saving it up for the evening. He would call his friends over—they didn’t live very far: it was almost the driver’s definition of a friend in Lagos: someone who didn’t live far away—and they would “kill” the bottle.
We should have had a clear run to the city. But just inside the city the traffic caught us, or we caught up with it, and it wore us down. It even began to look as if the driver might have to postpone his palm-wine evening.
8
THE NORTH of Nigeria was Muslim. I had heard from Adesina that in the colonial time missionaries—he meant Christian missionaries—had not been allowed in the north. All the intellectual life of the country had been in the pagan or Christian south; but it was the more populous north that with independence had come by the greater power.
My friend from the north—he had helped with the hotel on the night or morning of my arrival—said one evening at dinner that the south was “degenerate.” He might have been speaking lightly; or he might only have been making a standard provincial joke; but jokes are always more than jokes, and this one spoke of the cultural fracture between north and south.
It is better to go to the north by air.
Somewhere before Kano, the great city of the north, you start to look down at what might be parkland: isolated big trees, dark green, on pale grassland. It is the kind of soft landscape that is created after forbidding forest has been cut down, all but the isolated big trees, which have been left for shade or beauty.
Outside the small airport building there is an immediate feeling of strangeness. Men in blue or white Muslim gowns, working garb for them, standing in a semi-circle well away from the passengers. Some of them are selling prayer beads and white Muslim prayer caps. You quickly get to the town outside, since there are no immigration or customs formalities for people from Lagos. The town is seen to be a town of dust and dirt. The road is a wavering path between dirt and garbage, which people here seem reluctant to get rid of; and Christian churches. The churches are surprising in this Muslim area, but I am not to get the wrong idea. I am told, “Only foreigners live here.” And this is the only place where churches are allowed, on the periphery of things.
There were two dogs on a mound of garbage, and the poor creatures were the colour of garbage.
Beyond this is the town proper: many goats eating garbage, plastic and paper. The goat is the perfect animal for this area, living on air until it is slaughtered. And children: innumerable, thin-limbed, in dusty little gowns, the unfailing product of multiple marriages and many concubines. Horses, in this place which is supposed to have a cult of the horse and horsemanship: but the horses thin, like the boys. Garbage here, gathered up in little mounds. Innumerable okada motorcyclists, doing their routes, picking up pillion passengers.
Only one active building site, with seven people working on it, one man mixing mortar, which is then passed from man to man, and finally to the mason on the brick wall. In the centre of the town there is a big abandoned multi-story building: this is a relic of the time when Kano was a boom area, but now, with the absence of power, that boom is far away. The children that are now unceasingly produced by wives and concubines, boom or no boom, have no future, except buying or hiring or leasing motorcycles, to add to the city’s okada force.
We were told later that one of the great