The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,65

of the abducted man had gone to no less a person than the Oni of Ife, and after some time they had heard from the Oni that the abducted person, now dead, was “lying” in a shrine somewhere.

This gave another idea of what a shrine was. It was one of those words I thought I knew and had not, as it were, researched. I remember, in the early days of preparing for this book, asking a university lecturer in Uganda to come with me to a shrine. She had given a little cry of horror and said no. Other memories had come to me: a shrine was, someone else had told me, a place where body parts might be found scattered about.

It was because of this anxiety I had asked Richmond to come with me to Pa-boh’s base. I needed his company and his local knowledge. Richmond knew the language of the Gaa, and had some idea of the religion.

In the beginning this precaution had seemed excessive, especially when I thought of Pa-boh’s face. He was driving ahead of us in a yellowish old Mercedes to show the way. His ecclesiastical dress showed; his face, when I caught sight of it, seemed set in a smile, above the spin of his wheels. I was trying to memorise the journey, in case we had to come back on our own. Our drive, when we left the hotel and were on the highway, was in the full sunlight of midday. No worry there; and no worry a little later when we were passing the cheerful red roofs of a new development where Nigerians, richer than Ghanaians, had been buying property, to secure their wealth, in a country less hectic than their own, and with more municipal regulation.

But then we turned off the highway, entered a gated area, left it, and turned and turned again. The roads became narrow and crowded and began to twist. Ghanaians are people of municipal order; but now this order began to break down. The shops were little more than boxes, every owner painting his box in a strong flat colour. Memorising the route became impossible; I gave up.

The people on the streets made me think of something Pa-boh had said at our first meeting. I had asked whether Accra, the name of the capital, had a meaning. (For black people in Trinidad a word that sounded like it meant a kind of food.) Pa-boh said, “The real word is nkrah, or soldier ants. The Ashanti said they were going to push us into the sea, but they could never conquer us. They attacked us on 7 May 1826, but we just kept coming and coming. So the Ashanti called us nkrah, soldier ants.”

The people here did indeed create something of that impression. They were Gaa, Richmond said, Pa-boh’s people. You couldn’t do much with them. Whatever you did for them, they went back to their old ways. He said, “They are comfortable.” It was one of Richmond’s words: it meant that the people we were seeing needed little, and it was foolish to give them more. The chief on the Cape Coast Richmond had talked to a few days before—the man who had built his house in front of a cesspit and had no idea what he had done—this man, as Richmond had said, was comfortable.

At a big, right-angled turn in the road or lane, in front of a whitewashed wall that was extraordinary in its pretensions after what we had been seeing, Pa-boh’s Mercedes stopped. It stopped in the shade of a tree and next to three or four big water butts in black plastic. The water was for sale, in small quantities; the buyers would have been local people, comfortable (to use Richmond’s word) with this arrangement. We parked next to Pa-boh’s Mercedes, and Pa-boh, in his designer Christian costume, and with the little smile on his lips, told us we had come to the “palace” of the high priest of the Gaa cult.

He wished us to be impressed, and the palace and the wall did make an impression of size and style. But as soon as you began to look at the detail you saw that it was tawdry, in keeping with the area, and, though unfinished, already somewhat run down.

We followed Pa-boh through the iron gateway into the bare palace yard. From here I could see more clearly that there was an area of vegetation, a strip of trees, a narrow piece of