On the Road to the Cocoa Hills
“It is about the real modern Nigeria: an enormous, inchoate territory whose ancient
units of tribe and religion are being supplanted by the new patterns of technology--above all, by the system of rough, weather-pitted roads along which thousands of ramshackle picturesquely named lorries speed goods and passengers.
- Ronald Bryden, in a review of Wole Soyinka’s 1969 play, The Road
“Embedded in [Wole] Soyinka’s dismay is the idea of a country that has accepted chaos as a part of the national culture. In no part of Nigerian life is this clearer than on the road, which is Soyinka’s point. That there is in Nigeria a pervasive risk of being killed or maimed on a road (the government claims one in three Nigerians are annually hurt in accidents, while one in nine die) is difficult to prove to the uninitiated. It means applying images of war to common Nigeria, where cars and petrol tankers casually burn on roadsides [. . .] Nigeria’s roads, even the best, are narrow and the potholes deep enough to consume a car or grab a wheel and fling any vehicle spinning into the bush.”
- Peter Chilson, Professor of English, Washington State University, 1999
It seemed a less than fortuitous start to a Saturday when we woke to a morning downpour. Since arriving more than a month ago, the air had been humid, tepid, the sky bright and clear. Twice we’ve had sprinkles, but not enough even to dampen the cushions of our balcony furniture. All this time spent cooped up, we wanted off the compound - something more than expat bars and market shopping.
Our Nigerian Field Society memberships had run out in December, but a last minute email got us the last two spots on the first outing of the new school year. A four-hour road trip to the towns of Akure and Idanre, northeast of Lagos in Ondo State. We’d driven two hours west over the border into Benin last November, but that did not require leaving Lagos State. Finally, a chance to see more of this country than the smoggy sprawl of its largest city. Finally, an escape of even the outskirts into the unknown, labyrinthine Nigerian interstate highway system. Though the sky doth protest.
This trip fell on an environmental Saturday, which meant no one was to be on the roads before 11 a.m. (Try that in Houston or L.A.) So we got to sleep in a bit, but it was still an early rise for a weekend. The thumping drops on our window woke us, and we lay there awhile listening to the background battering of the roof and pavement, thinking it a nice day for daydreaming and couch reading. Yet soon after, I sat staring at the deluge outside our balcony doors while Heather packed our lunches. Then the paranoia began its course. Don’t go on this trip. Not worth it. Something terrible may happen.
This is something not entirely new to me, though it’s been occurring in increasing intensity for about a year now. I tell myself I’ve got it figured out; I tell myself I can control it because I know from where it stems. When one goes from having nothing to lose to having the most precious thing in the world to lose, he begins to rein in his insouciance. But now, even if she’s gone for longer than expected on some minor errand, I begin my nervous tics of teeth grinding and leg jittering. I’m not quite sure this is normal, but I’ve been able to suffer it so far.
Because we got the last two spots, the trip organizer told us we might have to ride in separate cars. I knew this would not be good for my worry wart-ness, and it began to afflict me as I stared out across the balcony railing at the gushing of the sky. I calmed myself with the rationalization that these were not portents warning me away from destruction but simply inconvenient circumstances extrapolated into unnecessary panic. As with any other time I’ve entered the new and unknown, I needed to force myself forward into small risk lest I never have any big fun. Do away with your silly superstition, I told myself, we’re going to be fine. Heather finished the lunches. “Ready to go?”
I was assigned to a small SUV owned by Gunther, a middle-aged German man in charge of new membership in the Field Society. Gunther and I would share the ride with his driver, a Nigerian whom he called Big Joe, and two middle-aged English women, Christine and Carol. Heather was assigned to a larger SUV owned by Hugh and Robin, two Canadian newlyweds who had known each other in their twenties, reunited in their fifties, and were enjoying the second lives of the Gemini. Hugh has lived in Nigeria nearly thirty years; Robin followed him from Canada two years ago. Joining Heather and the late-life lovebirds was Jenny, a teacher of “maths” at the British International School who cackled gratingly at the most inopportune moments of conversation. I’d met Jenny many times before and knew her to be quiet and tense in mannerism even while trying to chat and relax. A nice enough girl, nonetheless, though it made me feel strangely more comfortable to know I was not the most uptight neurotic of the bunch.
According to Bob, our trip organizer, a total of 47 people of twelve different nationalities loaded up in a “convoy” of ten-plus vehicles. He would have been more correct to say “caravan,” for we were a long line of strangers getting strange looks once outside of Lagos. We must have been quite a sight to the policemen at the checkpoints, who all reacted the same, raising a hand to stop us and then dropping it in realization of how many carloads of oyinbos were barreling through at 120 kilometers per hour. It helped that our own Nigerian policeman had been hired to ride in the lead car.
After all the obligatory exchanges with my travel mates, I opened a book and began to read; I brought along Tom Robbins’s Still Life With Woodpecker, which Heather recommended, thinking I’d have some quiet time in the car. Not only could I not get through the first chapter for all the jolting bumps and potholes, but when we finally reached lesser-worn road the chitchat began again.
Christine and Carol were both teachers, not at BIS but another British primary school. Carol had lived in Houston, where her husband worked in oil, of course. When she learned I’d be returning to my fiancée’s home state instead of mine, she said, “Oh, good choice, there. There’s nothing to do in Houston but shop, and I hate shopping.” She did say, however, that she managed to find a knitting club there to save her from boredom. Too bad I hadn’t any needle and yarn then to spare me the same.
Christine seemed to be patiently waiting her turn, not responding much to Carol, and so I was glad when she began. Gunther was satisfied to punch desultorily into the conversation. They all had been in Lagos as long as I had, and so each spoke of years previous. And in the end, Christine won first place in style and content. She had spent three years in Khartoum, Sudan, where she observed firsthand the injustice done to the people of the Darfur region. Black Sudanese speak the language of their Arab leaders and practice their religion, yet this is not enough for it does not make their skin any lighter. Their crops are destroyed, their women raped, their people massacred while the world objects only passively. I’m not sure which of Christine’s stories was more captivating - the one about her black colleagues at school having their villages burned and being left for dead in the desert by rebels supported by the government, or her tale of furtively buying bootlegged Chinese beer from a member of the Russian mafia. (Alcohol is illegal in the Sudan, an Arabic-speaking, Muslim country.) “They have Sharia law,” she said. “But I never saw anyone walking around with hands chopped off.” What she did see was quite enough.
Soon, having grown weary of talk, we all gazed out the window at pure tropical rainforest to the left and right of the road. “This must be what all of southern Nigeria looked like before colonization,” Gunther said wistfully.
Sporadically, we’d be jerked from our reverie either by swerving in attempt to curtail a pothole or by slamming down into one, having failed in the former. Yet the interstices between were mostly serene, and for a brief moment I was even lulled to sleep by the undulation of the wheels and the muffled sound of wind outside the window, an innate and unfailing reaction to cocooned motion that must stem from some latent memory of the womb.
We began, also, to see vehicles strewn alongside of the highway - some smashed, some burned, all abandoned. Whether they were neglected, infrequent flukes of the road or undeniable harbingers of doom, I chose not to speculate. Yet these littered hunks seemed finally to forge their identity as symbols when we were forced to slow down to maneuver around an Exxon-Mobile tanker that had jackknifed and overturned across both lanes. It was difficult to tell whether the accident had occurred a few hours ago or a few months ago. No witnesses remained to make us the wiser.
Not long after the tanker, in the middle of nowhere, we passed several Nigerians lined up in the center of the highway, moaning loudly at us with outreached hands. “Who are those people?” Gunther asked his driver. “Lepers,” Big Joe said. “The government does not care for them, so they live in the bush and beg on the road.”
About two hours into the trip we stopped at a petrol station for fuel and a WC. Unlike other rural roadside stations I’d seen, this one actually had a proper toilet in the back. The women lined up while most of the men, including me, exploited their lack of modesty in the adjacent field. Heather took pictures of chickens pecking around the base of the fuel pumps. Others bought snacks from the local village women and children selling plantain chips and unripe oranges.
As we neared Akure, fog hung atop distant mountains that were unlike any others I had seen. Heather heard from someone that the mountains of Ondo state were once part of a plateau that sunk and fell away, and what remained were these huge mounds of rock. They were perfectly smooth and rounded, as if they were once giant pebbles whose edges had been worn away by an oceanic river. It seemed as if one could ride down from top to bottom on a bicycle or skateboard, though doing so would give the phrase “terminal velocity” a smack of double entendre.
They must not get many oyinbos in the town of Akure, especially not long caravans of them. As we arrived in the late afternoon and moved in a succession of short spurts through the go-slows, we were received with a variety of looks, though none were of familiarity. Some were startled with curious smiles. Some drew their eyes along the train of vehicles with profound consternation. Some turned and shouted and raised their hands at us as if we were driving away with their belongings. Some didn’t bother to notice us at all.
After arriving at the Akure Plaza Motel, we were assigned rooms and keys and told to wait to see if it was too late to visit the oba (head chief) of Akureland Palace. Upon first inspection of our room, I found it to be as expected. It was Spartan without Spartan efficiency. The noise of the AC drowned out the outside generator so that if you wanted to have intelligible conversation you had to suffer the warmth of Sub-Saharan motel-room temperatures. The only painting on the wall was a surreal image of West African short brooms floating through the air. It hung far too close to the ceiling and near to the corner. The bathroom, like always, contained a bucket in the shower. A new one full of hot water would be delivered the following morning.
Just as soon as Heather and I settled in for a nap, there was a knock at the door to inform us that the palace would receive the group and we were to leave in five minutes. We summoned our second wind and were off to meet the oba.
It wasn’t exactly the oba who would meet us, though, and it wasn’t exactly a palace. Akureland hasn’t had an official oba since the last one died six years ago. So the regent, the late oba’s daughter, is serving as interim oba until a new one can be chosen, which they seem in no hurry to do. Until then, she “has to dress like a man because she performs the duties of a man,” or so was the explanation of our tour guide, one of the chiefs of one of the divisions of Akureland.
We got to meet the other chiefs as well, who were sitting very regally beyond the palace entrance. Our trip organizer, Bob, gave them a thorough introduction to the Nigerian Field Society, along with our appreciation for receiving us, only to find out that none of them understood a word. Luckily, the chief who would be our guide translated in Yoruba, and they all nodded their heads in august acceptance of our sentiments.
Had no one in our group seen the palace before, I don’t believe anyone would have taken notice of it as we passed. It looked, quite simply, like a large, dilapidated, concrete-walled compound, distinguishable only by a large, ornate metal gate along the outside wall, behind which a new palace was to be built whenever it was that they got around to choosing the new oba.
Despite the palace’s lack of palatialness, it was pleasing to find that every space had its purpose. Our tour guide was full of information on protocol, tradition, and ritual, even allowing for our participation. The tour culminated in a viewing of a shrine where the oba (when they have one) comes to pray. Inside the small space of the shrine was an altar on which a sizable stack of cow skulls awaited our respects. Only men were allowed inside, but all could at least step up in front of the shrine, he said, and lay some money down as an offering. “Come, come,” he said, “Pay your respects.” (Pay being the key word here.)
We returned to the motel for dinner, and while the majority of the group gabbed at empty tables we bellied up to the bar for some Star beer. I was starting to feel better about the trip, and it was even more auspicious to enter this bar in this small Nigerian town not known for a large expatriate population to hear the entirety of Don Williams’s Greatest Hits playing loudly for the enjoyment of all motel guests.
“This is like some of your Texas folk music, yes?” Gunther said. Yes, Gunther, something like that.
Morning came early as we piled again into the caravan and were off to a small village outside of Akure to learn how cocoa beans are harvested and processed. West Africa, especially Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, is the world’s biggest supplier of cocoa. This village depends almost entirely upon the cocoa tree. All Swiss chocolate starts here.
We watched a couple of the villagers cut from the tree and break open the fruit and give us a taste of the ripe and unripe beans yet to be dried. After I surreptitiously spit out my sample (we were supposed to eat it whole), I began to follow the crowd to the front pavement by the road where they would lay the beans to dry in the sun.
Looking back I saw Heather much more enthralled by the village children than by their parents. She kept snapping pictures, and then showing them their images on the camera, at which they would howl in laughter and then cover their faces in embarrassment. Heather was beaming right along. A few days before she had said she felt frustrated, stagnant. Now she asked me, rhetorically, “You ever have one of those days when you just feel glad to be alive?”
Most of the children were scantily clothed, but most of them didn’t mind. They were laughing and following any of the many women who were snapping them. One boy had nothing on but an oversized blue button-up that seemed to consume his whole person except for his tiny head and bright smile.
Another boy, stark naked, was not smiling at all. He followed along with the rest, but was more wary and aloof. He gazed back into the camera with sad, brown, globular eyes set far apart underneath thick lashes, the depth of his stare almost eerie with recondite pathos. Sometimes all a photographer must do to capture such a beautiful image is simply to point the camera at such beauty.
After tasting the dried cocoa nuts, which tasted much more like cocoa than their plucked-from-the-tree predecessors, and handing out candy and small naira bills to the children, the group moved on toward Idanre, the mountain village that would be our last stop.
Idanre is surrounded by the aforementioned smooth and rounded mountains, and atop one of these sits an abandoned village, complete with oba’s “palace” and myths about a naked hermit who still roams and forages there. It would be our long and arduous task to climb the rocky steps to see the view and village. Before we began, the trip leader arranged for five guides to escort us to the top, though one young village woman who had greeted us beforehand offered to be of service as well. Heather gave her a slice of her sandwich and in doing so gained a friend for life. What worried us about her plan to follow us up the mountain was not just that she might expect remuneration, but, even more, it was that she was wearing heels and a wrap-around skirt that was continuously coming undone and nearly falling to the ground.
The wobbly and rusted railing accompanying the rocky steps did not prevent me from nearly slip-sliding to my death more times than I care to mention. Idanre must have had a downpour as well, and it also must have been informed of the ominous boding brought by the Lagos storm, for the water running down the mountain wished to carry me with it. But I refused to let it. I wasn’t going to let it wash away my edges as it had done these mountains.
When we made it to the top, several rest stops later, we were taken aback by the paradisical majesty of the view. We felt accomplished. Heather wondered aloud if it would be possible to camp there overnight. I hoped aloud that this place would forever be kept a secret from resort developers. We could hear Sunday hymns coming from a building far below. We stood there a long time. The group had moved on to the village and left us behind. We lost all track of time. We were lost but not afraid. Standing near the edge, looking over the curved slope, I was glad to have made the effort to get there, glad to have put fear behind me. It was one of those days. I was glad to be alive.
*****
The Friday following the trip we celebrated Nigerian Independence Day at the school. We call it Nigerian Culture Day and we all dress in traditional wear and there are no formal classes but only workshops put on by storytellers and artists and craftsmen.
At one of these workshops a famous Nigerian artist, Dr. Bruce Onobrakpeya (whose work has been purchased by the Queen of England, Michael Jordan, and museums all over the world) was talking about a piece he did in honor of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. I use Soyinka’s work as a supplement to the study of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and so I was curious enough to speak to him afterwards.
“You said you did this piece in honor of Wole Soyinka. Have you met him?”
“Met him? I know him,” he said. “We are friends.”
He gave me a book containing some of his work, as well as Nigerian folk tales and myths. One was an excerpt of Soyinka's work. With my interest piqued, I looked a little further to find that Soyinka felt his creative muse to be the Yoruba deity, Ogun, god of the road, who forced himself into exile in order to force change. “The contradictions in Ogun fascinated me,” Soyinka has said. “God of the lyric and yet god of war, protector of the road, the path finder, an agent of change.”
I’m not Yoruba, and so I have no Ogun. If I do, it’s who I chose as a boy in Catholic catechism - St. Jude, patron saint of hopeless cases. Both are paradoxical figures.
One cannot force upon oneself a lepidopteran change. The only hope is to keep jumping at the sky, flapping the elbows, until the ground falls away. A flapping I go, a Mr. Imago.
*****
“I found other deities too peaceful, too saintly for my temperament. Ogun is an out and out sinner, but one who is able to recognize his weaknesses and try to overcome them, and also his solitude is something else. The kind of solitude I found in the bush, in the forest, I found to be a characteristic of Ogun--the fact that he retires to the mountains after all his blunders around mortals and tries to exorcise the violent side of him. I found a kind of identity, and so he adopted me, or I’ve adopted him.”
-Wole Soyinka
“It was inevitable that the Nordic world and the African, especially that part of it which constitutes the Yoruba world - should meet at the crossroads of Sweden. That I am the agent of such a symbolic encounter is due very simply to that my creative Muse is Ogun, the god of creativity and destruction, of the lyric and metallurgy. This deity anticipated your scientist Alfred Nobel at the very beginning of time by clearing a path through primordial chaos, dynamiting his way through the core of earth to open a route for his fellow deities who sought to be reunited with us mortals. I covered that event for my publishers - well, taking a few poetic licenses, naturally - under the title IDANRE.”
-Wole Soyinka, in his Nobel Banquet speech, 1986
units of tribe and religion are being supplanted by the new patterns of technology--above all, by the system of rough, weather-pitted roads along which thousands of ramshackle picturesquely named lorries speed goods and passengers.
- Ronald Bryden, in a review of Wole Soyinka’s 1969 play, The Road
“Embedded in [Wole] Soyinka’s dismay is the idea of a country that has accepted chaos as a part of the national culture. In no part of Nigerian life is this clearer than on the road, which is Soyinka’s point. That there is in Nigeria a pervasive risk of being killed or maimed on a road (the government claims one in three Nigerians are annually hurt in accidents, while one in nine die) is difficult to prove to the uninitiated. It means applying images of war to common Nigeria, where cars and petrol tankers casually burn on roadsides [. . .] Nigeria’s roads, even the best, are narrow and the potholes deep enough to consume a car or grab a wheel and fling any vehicle spinning into the bush.”
- Peter Chilson, Professor of English, Washington State University, 1999
It seemed a less than fortuitous start to a Saturday when we woke to a morning downpour. Since arriving more than a month ago, the air had been humid, tepid, the sky bright and clear. Twice we’ve had sprinkles, but not enough even to dampen the cushions of our balcony furniture. All this time spent cooped up, we wanted off the compound - something more than expat bars and market shopping.
Our Nigerian Field Society memberships had run out in December, but a last minute email got us the last two spots on the first outing of the new school year. A four-hour road trip to the towns of Akure and Idanre, northeast of Lagos in Ondo State. We’d driven two hours west over the border into Benin last November, but that did not require leaving Lagos State. Finally, a chance to see more of this country than the smoggy sprawl of its largest city. Finally, an escape of even the outskirts into the unknown, labyrinthine Nigerian interstate highway system. Though the sky doth protest.
This trip fell on an environmental Saturday, which meant no one was to be on the roads before 11 a.m. (Try that in Houston or L.A.) So we got to sleep in a bit, but it was still an early rise for a weekend. The thumping drops on our window woke us, and we lay there awhile listening to the background battering of the roof and pavement, thinking it a nice day for daydreaming and couch reading. Yet soon after, I sat staring at the deluge outside our balcony doors while Heather packed our lunches. Then the paranoia began its course. Don’t go on this trip. Not worth it. Something terrible may happen.
This is something not entirely new to me, though it’s been occurring in increasing intensity for about a year now. I tell myself I’ve got it figured out; I tell myself I can control it because I know from where it stems. When one goes from having nothing to lose to having the most precious thing in the world to lose, he begins to rein in his insouciance. But now, even if she’s gone for longer than expected on some minor errand, I begin my nervous tics of teeth grinding and leg jittering. I’m not quite sure this is normal, but I’ve been able to suffer it so far.
Because we got the last two spots, the trip organizer told us we might have to ride in separate cars. I knew this would not be good for my worry wart-ness, and it began to afflict me as I stared out across the balcony railing at the gushing of the sky. I calmed myself with the rationalization that these were not portents warning me away from destruction but simply inconvenient circumstances extrapolated into unnecessary panic. As with any other time I’ve entered the new and unknown, I needed to force myself forward into small risk lest I never have any big fun. Do away with your silly superstition, I told myself, we’re going to be fine. Heather finished the lunches. “Ready to go?”
I was assigned to a small SUV owned by Gunther, a middle-aged German man in charge of new membership in the Field Society. Gunther and I would share the ride with his driver, a Nigerian whom he called Big Joe, and two middle-aged English women, Christine and Carol. Heather was assigned to a larger SUV owned by Hugh and Robin, two Canadian newlyweds who had known each other in their twenties, reunited in their fifties, and were enjoying the second lives of the Gemini. Hugh has lived in Nigeria nearly thirty years; Robin followed him from Canada two years ago. Joining Heather and the late-life lovebirds was Jenny, a teacher of “maths” at the British International School who cackled gratingly at the most inopportune moments of conversation. I’d met Jenny many times before and knew her to be quiet and tense in mannerism even while trying to chat and relax. A nice enough girl, nonetheless, though it made me feel strangely more comfortable to know I was not the most uptight neurotic of the bunch.
According to Bob, our trip organizer, a total of 47 people of twelve different nationalities loaded up in a “convoy” of ten-plus vehicles. He would have been more correct to say “caravan,” for we were a long line of strangers getting strange looks once outside of Lagos. We must have been quite a sight to the policemen at the checkpoints, who all reacted the same, raising a hand to stop us and then dropping it in realization of how many carloads of oyinbos were barreling through at 120 kilometers per hour. It helped that our own Nigerian policeman had been hired to ride in the lead car.
After all the obligatory exchanges with my travel mates, I opened a book and began to read; I brought along Tom Robbins’s Still Life With Woodpecker, which Heather recommended, thinking I’d have some quiet time in the car. Not only could I not get through the first chapter for all the jolting bumps and potholes, but when we finally reached lesser-worn road the chitchat began again.
Christine and Carol were both teachers, not at BIS but another British primary school. Carol had lived in Houston, where her husband worked in oil, of course. When she learned I’d be returning to my fiancée’s home state instead of mine, she said, “Oh, good choice, there. There’s nothing to do in Houston but shop, and I hate shopping.” She did say, however, that she managed to find a knitting club there to save her from boredom. Too bad I hadn’t any needle and yarn then to spare me the same.
Christine seemed to be patiently waiting her turn, not responding much to Carol, and so I was glad when she began. Gunther was satisfied to punch desultorily into the conversation. They all had been in Lagos as long as I had, and so each spoke of years previous. And in the end, Christine won first place in style and content. She had spent three years in Khartoum, Sudan, where she observed firsthand the injustice done to the people of the Darfur region. Black Sudanese speak the language of their Arab leaders and practice their religion, yet this is not enough for it does not make their skin any lighter. Their crops are destroyed, their women raped, their people massacred while the world objects only passively. I’m not sure which of Christine’s stories was more captivating - the one about her black colleagues at school having their villages burned and being left for dead in the desert by rebels supported by the government, or her tale of furtively buying bootlegged Chinese beer from a member of the Russian mafia. (Alcohol is illegal in the Sudan, an Arabic-speaking, Muslim country.) “They have Sharia law,” she said. “But I never saw anyone walking around with hands chopped off.” What she did see was quite enough.
Soon, having grown weary of talk, we all gazed out the window at pure tropical rainforest to the left and right of the road. “This must be what all of southern Nigeria looked like before colonization,” Gunther said wistfully.
Sporadically, we’d be jerked from our reverie either by swerving in attempt to curtail a pothole or by slamming down into one, having failed in the former. Yet the interstices between were mostly serene, and for a brief moment I was even lulled to sleep by the undulation of the wheels and the muffled sound of wind outside the window, an innate and unfailing reaction to cocooned motion that must stem from some latent memory of the womb.
We began, also, to see vehicles strewn alongside of the highway - some smashed, some burned, all abandoned. Whether they were neglected, infrequent flukes of the road or undeniable harbingers of doom, I chose not to speculate. Yet these littered hunks seemed finally to forge their identity as symbols when we were forced to slow down to maneuver around an Exxon-Mobile tanker that had jackknifed and overturned across both lanes. It was difficult to tell whether the accident had occurred a few hours ago or a few months ago. No witnesses remained to make us the wiser.
Not long after the tanker, in the middle of nowhere, we passed several Nigerians lined up in the center of the highway, moaning loudly at us with outreached hands. “Who are those people?” Gunther asked his driver. “Lepers,” Big Joe said. “The government does not care for them, so they live in the bush and beg on the road.”
About two hours into the trip we stopped at a petrol station for fuel and a WC. Unlike other rural roadside stations I’d seen, this one actually had a proper toilet in the back. The women lined up while most of the men, including me, exploited their lack of modesty in the adjacent field. Heather took pictures of chickens pecking around the base of the fuel pumps. Others bought snacks from the local village women and children selling plantain chips and unripe oranges.
As we neared Akure, fog hung atop distant mountains that were unlike any others I had seen. Heather heard from someone that the mountains of Ondo state were once part of a plateau that sunk and fell away, and what remained were these huge mounds of rock. They were perfectly smooth and rounded, as if they were once giant pebbles whose edges had been worn away by an oceanic river. It seemed as if one could ride down from top to bottom on a bicycle or skateboard, though doing so would give the phrase “terminal velocity” a smack of double entendre.
They must not get many oyinbos in the town of Akure, especially not long caravans of them. As we arrived in the late afternoon and moved in a succession of short spurts through the go-slows, we were received with a variety of looks, though none were of familiarity. Some were startled with curious smiles. Some drew their eyes along the train of vehicles with profound consternation. Some turned and shouted and raised their hands at us as if we were driving away with their belongings. Some didn’t bother to notice us at all.
After arriving at the Akure Plaza Motel, we were assigned rooms and keys and told to wait to see if it was too late to visit the oba (head chief) of Akureland Palace. Upon first inspection of our room, I found it to be as expected. It was Spartan without Spartan efficiency. The noise of the AC drowned out the outside generator so that if you wanted to have intelligible conversation you had to suffer the warmth of Sub-Saharan motel-room temperatures. The only painting on the wall was a surreal image of West African short brooms floating through the air. It hung far too close to the ceiling and near to the corner. The bathroom, like always, contained a bucket in the shower. A new one full of hot water would be delivered the following morning.
Just as soon as Heather and I settled in for a nap, there was a knock at the door to inform us that the palace would receive the group and we were to leave in five minutes. We summoned our second wind and were off to meet the oba.
It wasn’t exactly the oba who would meet us, though, and it wasn’t exactly a palace. Akureland hasn’t had an official oba since the last one died six years ago. So the regent, the late oba’s daughter, is serving as interim oba until a new one can be chosen, which they seem in no hurry to do. Until then, she “has to dress like a man because she performs the duties of a man,” or so was the explanation of our tour guide, one of the chiefs of one of the divisions of Akureland.
We got to meet the other chiefs as well, who were sitting very regally beyond the palace entrance. Our trip organizer, Bob, gave them a thorough introduction to the Nigerian Field Society, along with our appreciation for receiving us, only to find out that none of them understood a word. Luckily, the chief who would be our guide translated in Yoruba, and they all nodded their heads in august acceptance of our sentiments.
Had no one in our group seen the palace before, I don’t believe anyone would have taken notice of it as we passed. It looked, quite simply, like a large, dilapidated, concrete-walled compound, distinguishable only by a large, ornate metal gate along the outside wall, behind which a new palace was to be built whenever it was that they got around to choosing the new oba.
Despite the palace’s lack of palatialness, it was pleasing to find that every space had its purpose. Our tour guide was full of information on protocol, tradition, and ritual, even allowing for our participation. The tour culminated in a viewing of a shrine where the oba (when they have one) comes to pray. Inside the small space of the shrine was an altar on which a sizable stack of cow skulls awaited our respects. Only men were allowed inside, but all could at least step up in front of the shrine, he said, and lay some money down as an offering. “Come, come,” he said, “Pay your respects.” (Pay being the key word here.)
We returned to the motel for dinner, and while the majority of the group gabbed at empty tables we bellied up to the bar for some Star beer. I was starting to feel better about the trip, and it was even more auspicious to enter this bar in this small Nigerian town not known for a large expatriate population to hear the entirety of Don Williams’s Greatest Hits playing loudly for the enjoyment of all motel guests.
“This is like some of your Texas folk music, yes?” Gunther said. Yes, Gunther, something like that.
Morning came early as we piled again into the caravan and were off to a small village outside of Akure to learn how cocoa beans are harvested and processed. West Africa, especially Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, is the world’s biggest supplier of cocoa. This village depends almost entirely upon the cocoa tree. All Swiss chocolate starts here.
We watched a couple of the villagers cut from the tree and break open the fruit and give us a taste of the ripe and unripe beans yet to be dried. After I surreptitiously spit out my sample (we were supposed to eat it whole), I began to follow the crowd to the front pavement by the road where they would lay the beans to dry in the sun.
Looking back I saw Heather much more enthralled by the village children than by their parents. She kept snapping pictures, and then showing them their images on the camera, at which they would howl in laughter and then cover their faces in embarrassment. Heather was beaming right along. A few days before she had said she felt frustrated, stagnant. Now she asked me, rhetorically, “You ever have one of those days when you just feel glad to be alive?”
Most of the children were scantily clothed, but most of them didn’t mind. They were laughing and following any of the many women who were snapping them. One boy had nothing on but an oversized blue button-up that seemed to consume his whole person except for his tiny head and bright smile.
Another boy, stark naked, was not smiling at all. He followed along with the rest, but was more wary and aloof. He gazed back into the camera with sad, brown, globular eyes set far apart underneath thick lashes, the depth of his stare almost eerie with recondite pathos. Sometimes all a photographer must do to capture such a beautiful image is simply to point the camera at such beauty.
After tasting the dried cocoa nuts, which tasted much more like cocoa than their plucked-from-the-tree predecessors, and handing out candy and small naira bills to the children, the group moved on toward Idanre, the mountain village that would be our last stop.
Idanre is surrounded by the aforementioned smooth and rounded mountains, and atop one of these sits an abandoned village, complete with oba’s “palace” and myths about a naked hermit who still roams and forages there. It would be our long and arduous task to climb the rocky steps to see the view and village. Before we began, the trip leader arranged for five guides to escort us to the top, though one young village woman who had greeted us beforehand offered to be of service as well. Heather gave her a slice of her sandwich and in doing so gained a friend for life. What worried us about her plan to follow us up the mountain was not just that she might expect remuneration, but, even more, it was that she was wearing heels and a wrap-around skirt that was continuously coming undone and nearly falling to the ground.
The wobbly and rusted railing accompanying the rocky steps did not prevent me from nearly slip-sliding to my death more times than I care to mention. Idanre must have had a downpour as well, and it also must have been informed of the ominous boding brought by the Lagos storm, for the water running down the mountain wished to carry me with it. But I refused to let it. I wasn’t going to let it wash away my edges as it had done these mountains.
When we made it to the top, several rest stops later, we were taken aback by the paradisical majesty of the view. We felt accomplished. Heather wondered aloud if it would be possible to camp there overnight. I hoped aloud that this place would forever be kept a secret from resort developers. We could hear Sunday hymns coming from a building far below. We stood there a long time. The group had moved on to the village and left us behind. We lost all track of time. We were lost but not afraid. Standing near the edge, looking over the curved slope, I was glad to have made the effort to get there, glad to have put fear behind me. It was one of those days. I was glad to be alive.
*****
The Friday following the trip we celebrated Nigerian Independence Day at the school. We call it Nigerian Culture Day and we all dress in traditional wear and there are no formal classes but only workshops put on by storytellers and artists and craftsmen.
At one of these workshops a famous Nigerian artist, Dr. Bruce Onobrakpeya (whose work has been purchased by the Queen of England, Michael Jordan, and museums all over the world) was talking about a piece he did in honor of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. I use Soyinka’s work as a supplement to the study of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and so I was curious enough to speak to him afterwards.
“You said you did this piece in honor of Wole Soyinka. Have you met him?”
“Met him? I know him,” he said. “We are friends.”
He gave me a book containing some of his work, as well as Nigerian folk tales and myths. One was an excerpt of Soyinka's work. With my interest piqued, I looked a little further to find that Soyinka felt his creative muse to be the Yoruba deity, Ogun, god of the road, who forced himself into exile in order to force change. “The contradictions in Ogun fascinated me,” Soyinka has said. “God of the lyric and yet god of war, protector of the road, the path finder, an agent of change.”
I’m not Yoruba, and so I have no Ogun. If I do, it’s who I chose as a boy in Catholic catechism - St. Jude, patron saint of hopeless cases. Both are paradoxical figures.
One cannot force upon oneself a lepidopteran change. The only hope is to keep jumping at the sky, flapping the elbows, until the ground falls away. A flapping I go, a Mr. Imago.
*****
“I found other deities too peaceful, too saintly for my temperament. Ogun is an out and out sinner, but one who is able to recognize his weaknesses and try to overcome them, and also his solitude is something else. The kind of solitude I found in the bush, in the forest, I found to be a characteristic of Ogun--the fact that he retires to the mountains after all his blunders around mortals and tries to exorcise the violent side of him. I found a kind of identity, and so he adopted me, or I’ve adopted him.”
-Wole Soyinka
“It was inevitable that the Nordic world and the African, especially that part of it which constitutes the Yoruba world - should meet at the crossroads of Sweden. That I am the agent of such a symbolic encounter is due very simply to that my creative Muse is Ogun, the god of creativity and destruction, of the lyric and metallurgy. This deity anticipated your scientist Alfred Nobel at the very beginning of time by clearing a path through primordial chaos, dynamiting his way through the core of earth to open a route for his fellow deities who sought to be reunited with us mortals. I covered that event for my publishers - well, taking a few poetic licenses, naturally - under the title IDANRE.”
-Wole Soyinka, in his Nobel Banquet speech, 1986