The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief

by V. S. Naipaul

  It was all very moving to me, especially the idea of the grove as an animal sanctuary. It was said to be a hundred and sixty acres in all, a quarter of a square mile. I wished it was ten times the size.

  A big gate opened into a short lane—this was for the procession at the time of the river festival. The lane led down, past a number of small home-made shrines at the foot of trees, to what was said to be a pavilion, just where the yellow river curved. It was an open pavilion, thatched, with timber uprights. To one side of the pavilion was the big shrine. The shrine was also thatched, and had mud walls decorated with figures in white, chocolate, rust and black. The priests and the soothsayers lived within those walls. The legend was that the pavilion stood on the site of the palace of the first Oba of Osun. At the time of the river festival, as people said, thousands of people of the black diaspora came here. There were morality plays in every corner of the wood.

  Perhaps it was artificial, as some people said; perhaps it was all made up. The site was too beautiful, the symbolism of the ritual too easy; perhaps it had been all put together by someone whose business it was to stage events. But it was also possible that all rituals began like this, in artifice.

  The event 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 sights of the city, well worth coming for, took place every Friday, the holy day, when after prayers the garbage-strewn streets erupted with hundreds and hundreds of thin little Muslim boys with their begging bowls, waiting patiently for alms from the pious who had said their prayers.

  The good Muslims of Kano see their situation as “dynamic.” For these people, once the state is Muslim, and the culture Islamic, there can never be a crisis; the world is whole. This sets them apart from the rest of Nigeria, which lives in a perpetual state of crisis.

  THE HOTEL had an unusual number of black-and-white signs, perhaps done on a computer, asking guests not to take away the hotel fittings.

  Some friendly local intellectuals in white gowns came to see me after dinner, and we talked by electric light in the sandy garden, away from the parked cars, between the hotel proper and the hotel’s “Calypso” restaurant. We fought off mosquitoes and sand-flies while we talked.

  One man, a former Fulbright scholar, taught literature at the university. A man in a red fez did media, and worked for the government. A third man, modest and attractive, said he was “a tiny writer” in English.

  They were all proud men of the north, and they had done much thinking about their identity in the mish-mash of Nigeria. They didn’t appear at first to see the Kano the visitor saw. They saw growth and dynamism. Kano, they said, was an ancient trading centre and it still held its place, although the trans-Sahara trade had gone down.

  Later, not understanding that they were saying something different, they said that Kano was conservative, and the challenge to it came now from education. There were two kinds of education. One was Western; the literature-teacher said he was part of that. And there was the traditional koranic system. This made people literate in Arabic, and sent them out into the “informal” network. That was a formal academic way of saying that the koranic system sent them out to shine shoes, to drive okada motorcycles, to hawk things in the street, and generally to do “low” work which kept them at a subsistence level. The koranic way, in fact, made the streets of Kano what they were.

  This couldn’t have been an easy thing for these proud Islamic men to live with, but their heads were full of the problem of identity as reflected in language, and they let it pass.

  The literature-teacher said they were inward-looking people. They wrote in Hausa, a language of the north; they had very few English writers. He said, “We want to look out, but all these writers write in Hausa.”

  The man in the fez, the media man, said, “We need new ideas.”

  The man who said he was a “tiny writer in English” said, “Kano is a strange place. I look at people who are happy one minute and very unhappy the next. All right and then angry by turns. I look at them because they are my characters, and I want to understand them.” He couldn’t say why
they are angry. “They are not vocal. I don’t know why they are so alienated. I feel their anger even though we are an urbane and commercial centre.”

  The academic, the literature-teacher, didn’t feel the anger the tiny writer felt. “It is not so palpable to me. It could be an identity issue. What pigeon-hole they fit in.”

  They then talked about what was closest to them, the question of Hausa identity.

  When did that identity crisis begin?

  They said it was started by European anthropologists. And, indeed, there was an American academic in the hotel at that moment, who had come to write about the Hausa and was now at the end of his “fieldwork.”

  The tiny writer in English said, “The inwardness of people in Kano is part of our identity, and maybe this is why the social and political advancement is limited.”

  We had gone far beyond the brave attitudes they had adopted at the beginning.

  I wanted to know how they were reacting to the dilapidation of Kano. In the beginning they had appeared not to notice it.

  The media man in the red fez said it was growing, both the city and the dilapidation. “They are all like ants milling around. We do not have much new development.” Again, very different from what they had said in the beginning. “There is a great influx of people, but no jobs, and so many people just do the okada thing.”

  The literature-teacher said, “It is a lament these days, but there is no magic wand to solve it. People will have to solve it on an individual level. Just as I solved my power problem with a generator.”

  I wanted to know about the position of the Amir. Was he like the Oni of Ife, or was he more?

  They all said that people respected the institution. There was no coercion.

  The writer said, “The Amir does not control production. He is identified with Islam and he stands for the inspiration of the people, and he is revered.” The people of Kano did not think of themselves as Arabs. In this they were different from the people of Sudan. “They are black as night but pretend to be Arab because they speak Arabic. We will never want to be Arabs.”

  IN THE geography books I read at school, Kano was a great mud-walled city. Photographs showed smooth-plastered walls, pierced with narrow drainage pipes. I had wished then to see Kano, but now I had to be content with that faint memory, of an old photograph seen long ago. I couldn’t find anything like that, and I found in the end that some cultural arm of the Germans was looking after the little stretch of mud wall that had survived. Its surface was dug up, and very far from being plastered and smooth.

  The first palace I saw was the Amirs’ weekend palace. With a name like that it should have been many miles away from the city, but it wasn’t, leaving one to worry about its purpose.

  The walls were high and ochre-coloured. Their only decoration was a series of abstract designs in raised concrete, which might have been created by moulds. Here too children ran after visitors and waited patiently for the gratuities that were doled out at the end of the visit. The doorway or gateway was set in the middle of the wall, which was apparently many feet thick, but when you looked up you saw that the thickness was an illusion, that above the ceiling (of corrugated iron) was a vacancy that reached to the very top.

  The ceiling was broken in many places and open to the sky, and there were birds nesting in the corners. The wall was hollow. Inside there were courtyards around small low buildings that were shut. Against one wall was a very old tree, with a thick trunk. At the very back there was an orchard, walled again, where the concubines of the Amir of two generations ago might have relaxed, if they weren’t too old or if they hadn’t been discarded.

  The main palace, to which we came in due course, was more challenging on this day of heat. It was in a big open dusty semi-arid maidan, sun-struck and bare except for the neem trees in the driveway, with great distances between the cool of the three gateways. The walls were high and brown.

  In the second gateway a small white kitten with a patch of colour on its back was crying. It was like the kitten I had seen in Uganda in the Mountains of the Moon hotel. It was possibly the last of the litter, surviving heaven knows how. It would have taken very little to comfort it, but I was with people to whom cats were spirits and familiars; and I had to leave the dainty little creature opening its mouth and crying, still remarkably whole, still nourished by the milk of its mother, now perhaps persecuted and killed.

  This little tragedy, and my own helplessness, cast a shadow over the rest of my visit to the palace, to the various durbar rooms, including the England room, where framed photographs on the wall showed Queen Elizabeth being received many years ago by the Amir of Kano.

  These inner rooms were being repaired or redecorated, especially the ceilings with their raised decorations and earth colours, the colours of sand and gold in one room, and grey, black and white in another. There was a harem area in the palace, unlikely as it seemed, with wives and concubines and slaves and eunuchs, Islam living out its good old ways at its African limits.

  The harem was, of course, off limits to me. I sat on a dusty chair in a durbar room and waited for the rest of the party to come back.

  9

  DELACROIX’S PICTURE of the ladies of the harem in Algiers shows idle women in colourful clothes. The vacancy of their minds shows in their faces. I suppose some such picture—the clothes, the idleness—had worked on the imagination of the Indian woman I met in Delhi some years ago who said she would have liked nothing more than to be one of the harem of the Emperor Akbar. This woman was not a Muslim, had no idea of a harem, and even with her folly would have been dismayed to find that the harem of an African ruler (no doubt in this woman’s mind some notches down from the real thing) was in the main a place of homeless derelicts—slaves and concubines (many of them gifts from other African rulers), discarded older wives, eunuchs (bought from Egypt)—people who had outlived their usefulness, had no talent, no family, no outside life.

  Old age and idleness gave them the freedom to go outside (the eunuchs always in their uniform), and they used this limited freedom to do little errands in the town for people in the harem. Apart from this there was nothing for them to do. They were waiting now only for death, were fed like dogs, and slept on the floor of the harem in such corners as they could find.

  This was the picture that was given me later, by a woman whose mother had spent some unhappy years in the harem of a small northern Nigerian chief.

  Polygamy, the way of life of the harem, had its own rules. The most important of these was the separation of women from their children. This happened when the children were born. The children were given out to other women and were brought to the natural mother only to be fed or suckled. While this was happening the natural mother covered her face with a cloth; the child was not to get to know her or think of her as a source of special affection. When a child was six or seven it could be told who its natural mother was. That caused no disturbance; the child did not lose its affection for its foster mother.

  These complicated rules—like a little religion within the larger religion—were intended to break down any idea of the “nuclear” family and to inculcate the idea of a broader family unit within the walled harem. Polygamy as the sound Islamic way had its champions and theoreticians, and they could be well educated. For these people the nuclear-family idea was the origin of the selfishness and breakdown of other societies.

  Laila was the romantic name of this woman’s mother. And perhaps it was one of the things that had helped to give her some idea of the life she wanted for herself. She had grown up with television; she read the Mills and Boon novels, and believed in love. Her family were big landowners, rich enough and secure enough to have some idea of the modern world. They had sent Laila to a convent school in the cool plateau of Jos for a couple of years. There she caught the eye of the ruler or caught the eye of one of his matchmakers. Her family were delighted, and so was Laila. She knew, of course, that Muslim men could have four wives, and a ruler any number of co
ncubines. But her education, her secure family background, and her imagination had made her believe that when she married she would enter the realm of love and somehow be exempt from the common destiny of women around her.

  She became pregnant. She had a daughter. She called the little girl Mona. They, the ruler’s court, wanted to take the child away and give it to a foster mother. She refused, and her passion was so great that the court, fearing that she might do something to her child, let the matter drop. One of her servants brought back the story that some people were calling her the white woman. She thought this funny, and it seemed to her that she had won. But what she next heard wasn’t funny at all. She heard that her husband was paying betrothal visits to the parents of the young girl whom he wanted to make his second wife—visits just like those he had made to Laila’s parents.

  Laila felt herself sinking. Her husband tried to calm her; he told her that nothing would change the love he felt for her. This other marriage was something he had to do as an Islamic ruler; it was expected of him. His father had about thirty children. He couldn’t be more precise about the number of children because it was unlucky for a man to count his children. His grandfather had about fifty, but things were different in those days.

  Nobody in the court could understand why Laila refused to be comforted, and continued to make a fuss, threatening the harmony of the harem; many of the women said that the white woman had been unhinged by the English books she had read and the convent education she had received. And Laila was cast into the very pit of despair when her parents made it clear that they couldn’t support her; she had expected them at least to understand.

  The second marriage went ahead, without reference, it seemed, to Laila. She felt shut out of her own marriage. She felt that her humiliation was complete. She felt mocked by the past. She began to think of withdrawing from the ruler, having no intimate contact with him. It was hard for her to decide; there was a part of her that thought everything could still be made all right. When that idea faded, she discovered that she was pregnant again.