You Must Set Forth at Dawn (33 page)

Dinner was tasteless. No doubt the cooking was of the best, but I tasted nothing. On the drive back to the hotel, we were silent, each wrapped in his own thoughts, and never could a wider abyss have separated two preoccupations stemming from the same cause. Olabiyi was in a state of suppressed excitement. He had been vindicated, and all that was left was to fulfill the rest of our mission. On my part, however, I had begun a process of self-chastisement. Since this adventure had begun to take shape, I had lost my accustomed sense of humor, of an earthing sense of proportion. The last hour in Carybe's house had been deservedly traumatizing. I had taken this mission too seriously, I now realized, the perfect prelude to a punitive deflation. Only a tiny fragment of my corrective sense of mischief came to the rescue at this ponderous moment of absolute negation, and I was grateful when Olabiyi broke the silence, unable to control his excitement any longer.

“Did you see it? Did you recognize it?”

I nodded.

“But could you imagine that anyone could be so brazen? I mean, leaving it on the shelf all these years, so conspicuously. As if he didn't care who might see and recognize it.”

“Yes, it's a kind of arrogance, I suppose.”

“So how do you propose to set about it?”

I glanced at him in feigned surprise. “Set about what?”

“Well, what we came for. How are we going to lay our hands on it?”

“Oh, that,” I replied, and the smile that I attempted to summon, if it appeared at all, must have been twisted. Nonetheless, it would be the only moment of self-satisfaction I would enjoy in that harebrained escapade. “That's been taken care of. We've got what we came for.”

“We have? What do you mean? Because we've established its presence in the gallery?”

“A little more than that,” I replied. “It's in the bag.”

Still Biyi thought I was speaking in metaphors. “You mean, tomorrow? You sound confident. You think it's going to be that easy?”

I nodded toward the backseat. “The camera bag. Look inside it.” I watched him scramble to lift the bag over his seat. “Be careful,” I warned. “It's not bronze. I think it's clay.”

“Clay? What do you mean, clay? And anyway...” He stopped dead. Felt the bulge in the bag. “When... ? I mean, how... ?” His eyes lit up, and he gasped. “But you weren't gone long enough!”

It was a moment I should have savored, but what I tasted in my mouth at a moment that should have trumpeted triumph or at least satisfaction was— depressingly not for the first time—ashes. It was this that had coated my tongue and subverted all taste in the sumptuous meal served by our host. My throat was lined with the stuff. It had all gone too smoothly. I had set down the camera bag as soon as we entered the gallery. When we were summoned down for dinner, I had left the bag behind. Then, moments after we sat down at the table, I had “remembered” the bag and set off, politely brushing aside our host, who offered to send his steward to look for it. I flew up the stairs, placed a stool that I had marked for the purpose on the workbench, snatched up the prize, and—gasped! It nearly flew from my hands! I had expected to lift heavy metal, but whatever I had in my hands chastised my impulsiveness with an incongruous lightness. It was a moment of deflation. It was too late for questions or theories, however. I brought it down, shoved it into the bag, replaced the step, and was downstairs in mere seconds.

“It has to be the real thing!” Biyi persisted. “If it isn't, then what on earth is it?”

“I don't know,” I admitted. “We'll find out when we reach the hotel.”

“But what do we do now?”

“Research, research. More and more research. Our next stop is Dakar.”

THAT MOMENT OF SHOCK, of lifting what should have been a sculpted weight of bronze and was worth more than its weight in gold but proved lighter than tinfoil, was nothing compared to the news from the backup team at home that greeted us the following morning: Pierre Verger had been released from his “administrative detention,” and by none other than my good friends, the State Security Service (SSS). Our backup team in the university, headed by the dean, had been assigned the role of ensuring that Pierre's end-of-employment documents were withheld for the few days we would be away, thus keeping him within Nigeria. However, yet another force of intervention had joined in the fray—and from within a state agency. Even more remarkable was the fact that he had been put on a plane and was now on his way to Brazil!

For hours that morning, we speculated on the significance of this move. Was it the result of intense diplomatic pressure? We were in constant touch with our embassy in Brasilia and had a right to expect that we would be instantly briefed on any development at home, especially one that might have a bearing on our very welfare. The embassy had no messages for us—nothing.

The day's program had to be followed, however. We endured lunch with Carybe and some friends in a favorite Brazilian-Yoruba restaurant, discussed the manifestations of Yoruba culture in Brazil, the race issue, and the comparative merits of the firewaters
caxaca
and
capinrinha,
all the time deeply conscious of the double face we wore, wondering what to make of this new complication.

“We must get out of here,” I said to Biyi—unnecessarily—as soon as we were alone.

We left unceremoniously, leaving notes for our Brazilian hosts about some problems at home that required our immediate return. The gods must have felt some remorse for their unkind treatment of their faithful servitors, since it was virtually by a miracle that we obtained two seats on the very next flight out of Rio and heading for—no destination could be more earnestly desired—Dakar!

OUR ARRIVAL I N Dakar brought unusual excitement to the staid laboratories of Senegal's ethnological institute, IFAN, headed by Cheik Anta Diop, whose
African Origin of Civilisation
had committed the ultimate sin of faulting the theories of canonized Egyptologists, Jacques Champollion especially. Most of the staff were only too familiar with the ancient controversy over
Ori Olokun.
They cast their eyes on this head with the greenish patina, the telltale hole in the cheek, and the holes strung around the base of the skull, a feature of bronze sculptures cast through the
cire perdue
technique—and they instantly burst into ululations. They pronounced it, unquestionably, the original.

The problem was the material. If it were clay, was our find the original clay mold from which the final head had been cast? But then who on earth had taken the trouble to coat the head in verdigris and replicate the very appearance of an antique bronze piece? Had yet another set of raiders stumbled on the original clay mold, then faked its surface appearance to hide its authenticity? This was a piece that was cast to perfection. Measurements were taken to compare them with those of Frobenius, that assiduous recorder of weights and measures. Cheik Anta Diop, a long-embattled scholar, was beside himself with excitement: “Just think of it, if somehow the original mold from which the bronze was cast had been miraculously preserved—what a find! What a find!”

And what a dismal find it proved when, sitting down with a riot of thoughts while we awaited the return of the archival researchers, my eyes fixated on this troublesome object, I finally noticed a tiny, clearly embossed line at the base of the head, just where it joins the neck. The light from Diop's window had made visible what the artificial light in our hotel room—and our downsized powers of observation in Bahia—had failed to reveal. I looked more carefully and— all was made plain. That impish agent of reversals, Esu, was clearly not done with us!

This fragmentary line was not by itself but was joined to others. They formed the letter—M! And there, just before M, was yet another faded letter: B. The letters “BM” stamped into this piece, standing for no other institution than—the British Museum! Of course! What we had in our hands was nothing other than a British Museum copy, available for the princely sum of— fifteen, twenty pounds? Certainly twenty-five pounds at the most. The deflation could not have been more definitive than that of a hot-air balloon spiraling down to earth after an unfortunate encounter with a migrating stork!

When Cheik Anta returned to his office, I showed him the stamp. He appeared to take it in his stride, looking only a little disappointed but not in the least crestfallen—which would be a generous description of the condition in which he met us. Then I asked the question: “Where is the original today, from which this was made?”

The question must have struck him as fatuous, since the stamp indicated quite clearly where the copy had originated. But my mind had resumed the hunt. I persisted: “If we say that this is a copy of what Frobenius described in his travelogue, the one that he dug up, leaving a hole in its cheek, the same one that was displayed in both the Munich and London expositions before it allegedly disappeared, then from what bronze head was this copied by the museum? And when?” I rattled off details of the facts I had unearthed in the days preparatory to our departure. Its last acknowledged appearance had been at the London Exhibition of 1938 in honor of King George's coronation. After that— the entire ethnographic world insists—
it disappeared altogether.
So from what bronze piece came this plaster replica? I produced my dossier, flashed the museum postcard. “Look at it. Even on this card, produced and sold to its visitors by the museum, it says, ‘Present whereabouts unknown.' So what phantom head gave birth to this copy even while its existence is denied?”

Cheik Anta took the piece, rolled it lovingly in his hands, walked to his chair, and sat in it, shaking his head dolefully. “But you know, our white colleagues in this ethnographic business have always been thieves—we know that. But they also put their scholarship at the service of thieves.”

I DRAFTED A telegram for the embassy to send to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Lagos. It read: “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, BUT INCONCLUSIVE. STOPOVER IN DAKAR TO PURSUE INQUIRIES.” It was the kindest language—to our bruised selves—that I could conceive. I flashed our letter of mission authorization to the embassy and requested that it check us into a hotel and take care of the bills. This was more than conservation of our remaining finances; more than ever, it became important to ensure that the involvement of the government was established at every stage. Once our flight back into Lagos was arranged, the embassy sent another telegram to the Foreign Office providing details of our travel and requesting that we be met on arrival.

We were not. We waited an hour at Ikeja airport, then concluded that our message had not been received or that arrangements had gone awry. On our way out of Nigeria, we had been taken to the airport by ministry officials, accorded full VIP protocol. Our embassy in Dakar had also been more than hospitable, had placed an official car at our disposal while we remained there, driven us to the airport, and assisted in clearing immigration formalities—in short, we had had no cause to think that we were no longer on an official mission. Still, the bare fact stared us in the face: no official was there to meet us, neither from Adefowope's ministry nor from Dodan Barracks.

It turned out that we had arrived on a day when nearly all of Lagos was at a standstill. Nobody who was anybody was to be found in Lagos—all were headed for Benin, homeland of those close cousins of the Yoruba from whom, according to legend, they were descended in the first place. The oba of that famous kingdom, Oba Akenzua Iku Akpolopkolo, had died, and his nearly interminable obsequies were approaching their climax. Successive military regimes had ostentatiously kowtowed to the traditional rulers—unless, of course, they stood in the way of military will, in which case, the oba, obi, or emir soon learned just who wielded the real power. Otherwise, the military paid due obeisance to the monarch, and the oba of Benin was certainly among the most venerated.

Traffic around Benin City moved in two directions. The top brass and cream of Lagosian society and other cities trooped toward Benin to pay homage, while strangers and beggars trooped the other way—they could not escape from Benin and its environs fast enough! For the tradition was that a certain number of human sacrifices must be made when the oba died, and such victims were selected, so persisted rumors, from among strangers. True or false, many preferred not to find out. In addition, all indigenes of the kingdom, the Edo people, were required to shave their heads as a sign of respect and homage. Even my good friend the democratic litigant Gani Fawehinmi, “Senior Advocate of the Masses,” though non-Edo, shaved his head clean—a gesture that struck me as dyeing one's attire a deeper indigo than the weeds of the bereaved. I felt irritated that Gani should lend his authority to a feudal imposition, yet harbored a rapport with the traditional institution itself as an essential part of the cultural landscape.

Thus I lamented a failed mystic linkage between the passing of a descendant of Oduduwa and this return of a pale symbol, a plaster cast of his deified sibling, Olokun, just in time to participate in the funeral rites of one of the branches of the great primogenitor. It occurred to me that maybe Yai and I should also shave our heads, not in homage to the passing of this monarch but in remorse for a mission from which we had returned empty-handed— even worse, returned with a mere shell of the historic weight of the scion of Oduduwa. I tried to console myself that we nonetheless held in secret custody an object that could substitute for the royal death mask, but was rewarded only with a decidedly hollow feeling in my stomach, as hollow as the clay head in our possession.

I sensed that something had gone badly wrong. The absence of protocol— the Benin events notwithstanding—was ominous. Still, there was nothing else to do but await the return of the mourners. We headed for Ibadan. Aboyade, our abetting ex–vice chancellor, was also nowhere to be found, and we assumed that he was part of the official delegation to Benin. Yai proceeded to Ife while I stopped off at Femi's, both to unwind and to relieve him of his predictable, ravenous hunger for the narrative of our voyage.