Looking for Transwonderland (16 page)

I sat in the front seat of a vehicle bound for Osogbo, three hours north of Ibadan, to see a sacred shrine there – a Yoruba religious site that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Nigeria's main attractions. After the inglorious kitsch of Transwonderland, I was curious – and hopeful – about how Nigeria presented its more authentic sights. I glowed with the satisfaction of being the first passenger on board, and thus able to pick the best seat. Before long, a man dressed in a neat blue shirt and navy trousers sat down beside me and began a stressed phone conversation in fluent Italian.

‘How come you speak Italian so well?' I asked after he'd hung up.

‘I live there,' he explained. ‘I came to Nigeria to visit my family, but now I cannot get a visa again to enter Italy. I was telling my boss I will not be at work this week.'

The man told me that he'd flown back to Nigeria via various European airports. He'd been endlessly questioned by Italian and Spanish visa officials who decided, after leafing suspiciously through his passport, not to grant him re-entry to Europe. Tension bulged
behind his bloodshot eyes. The stress of his predicament had taken him close to depression, and my simple question unleashed a torrent of manic storytelling.

His name was Michael, and he was a graphic designer who had grown tired of grafting for nothing in Nigeria and had chosen to migrate to Europe illegally. In 2005, he and a dozen other people squeezed into a truck bound for Libya. The journey across the Sahara lasted a week. Michael and his co-passengers huddled inside the vehicle like jarred pickles, grinding their teeth against invasive grains of sand by day and shivering by cloudless night.

‘Was the journey hot?' I asked him. Stupid question. I was externalising my obsession with uncomfortable heat. Michael screwed up his face, kissed his teeth and eyeballed me with a wordless, almost comical, intensity. He and his fellow passengers rationed one vat of water, he said, which amounted to around one litre per person – tiny, disciplined sips, spread out over seven long, parched, bone-jarring days. Once the migrants reached Libya, they piled into a prearranged boat and sailed across the Mediterranean towards Italy's porous coastline.

‘The coastguards caught us,' Michael said. ‘They took us to refugee camps. I call them concentration camps. They are not refugee camps, they are
concentration
camps. You have guards who let you in and out . . . they are concentration camps! They sent me back to Libya. I tried to return to Nigeria but my money it finished. I was trapped in Niger for four months. I had no job, no money. I was walking in the street, begging like a Hausa man!' he hollered.

With the passing generosities of a thousand strangers, Michael gathered enough money to make a repeat attempt. This time, he took with him 4 litres of his own water and joined twenty other people in a Land Cruiser, riding the Saharan sand dunes towards Libya and its Mediterranean coast. They made it to Italy, landing at night on the empty shores of Crotone province, not a coastguard in sight.

‘The sky is the limit,' Michael told me, pointing a finger upwards in triumph. ‘No . . . the sky is the
start
of the journey!'

It was an ignominious start. Local children threw stones and spat at him as he walked the streets of southern Italy. He migrated further north where he obtained refugee status by pretending to be a Sierra Leonean fleeing war. The fighting had actually ended in Sierra Leone, but the ‘foolish' immigration officials weren't aware of that. In time, Michael bought a fake Italian passport and found a job picking tomatoes alongside Romanian and Bulgarian girls. Eastern Bloc migrants were streaming into the country, he said, and they were driving wages down for people like him. Now he was working in a farm factory and living in a small apartment, which he shared with other immigrants.

‘Do Italians like Africans?' I asked.

‘They hate Nigerians more than anyone else.' That didn't surprise me. Nigerians have a special talent for landing in people's bad books all around the world. We're louder, brasher, more noticeable than other Africans, who seem mild and timid in comparison.

‘Africans from French-speaking countries, they are cowards,' Michael sneered. ‘The French colonised them and taught them to become French. But the British came to Nigeria and just wanted to make their money. They left us alone. They said, “Go do your own thing.” Nigerians are not scared of anyone. We push to succeed . . . we are
making
it.'

‘Maybe', I tentatively suggested, ‘the Italians don't like us because we've got a reputation for doing illegal things – like forging immigration documents?'

‘They are hypocrites!' Michael exploded, extending his fury to the West in general. ‘They came to Africa without anybody's permission. Mungo Park, Lord Lugard . . . did they ask us if they could enter here? No!' I laughed in partial agreement. Park was a nineteenth-century Scotsman who explored the Niger River. Lord Lugard had been Nigeria's governor-general during the First World War. I
couldn't help but admire Michael's energetic sense of entitlement and determination. Through his migration he had gained a lot of skills and life experiences, too: he could speak Italian, Yoruba and English, and had worked on farms and factories. He had overcome deserts, destitution, a language barrier and humiliating stonings on his journey into a different sort of ‘heart of darkness'. Except that today he was judged not by the skill and tenacity of his activities but by their legality. The Mungo Parks of the world, by contrast, were judged by their fortitude and adventurousness. And their intentions were just as self-serving, their legacy just as ambiguous as Michael's.

Michael was a product of Nigeria's densely populated poverty, which is so desperate and competitive it cultivates an energetic drive that spills across our borders to the rest of the world.

‘Is life better for you in Italy or – – '

‘Italy,' he retorted. ‘I make money, I'm taking care of my family . . . I can travel back here for holidays. One day I will be able to return to Nigeria and build a house.'

‘How much longer do you want to stay there?' The suggestion that his plans could be restricted by a timeframe brought on a huffy, theatrical glower.

‘I will go when I
want
to go. If I want to stay five, six, seven, nine years, I will
stay
!'

We reached Osogbo surprisingly quickly: Michael's captivating chatter made the journey feel a lot shorter. Reluctantly, I cut short the conversation and said goodbye to him. I disembarked from the minibus and took an okada to the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove. Getting there wasn't without the expected hassles. I couldn't speak a word of Yoruba, and the first two okada men whom I flagged down spoke no English, mistaking ‘sacred' for ‘secretariat'. After two infuriating round trips to the local government office, a third man finally brought me to the Grove.

The 600-year-old Sacred Grove is one of the last existing forest shrines of the Yoruba religion. It contains the shrine of the Yoruba
river goddess, Osun, founder of Osogbo and bringer of fertility to barren women. The entire grove was devoted to worshipping the pantheon of Yoruba gods. Set in 27 peaceful hectares of virgin forest, its tranquillity immediately drained my body of all its urban tensions.

The ground was dappled with the shadows of swaying foliage. I walked through trees that rustled furtively with white-throated monkeys and small antelopes – animals the Yoruba people regard as embodiments of Osun. Lining the pathway were dozens of abstract, humanoid sculptures with facial tribal markings, in different shapes and sizes. Art and nature were sublimely intertwined.

Sacred groves like Osogbo were once a central and ubiquitous part of Yoruba life. These holy places were reserved for religious purposes. By the 1950s, the groves were overrun by urban development and disparaged as ‘black magic' by the locals who had converted to Islam in the early nineteenth century, or Christianity under British rule.

It took the exotic passions of an Austrian artist to resurrect the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in the 1960s. Suzanne Wenger had visited Nigeria in 1950 and fallen in love with Yoruba culture. She met a high priest who initiated her into the Yoruba religion, according to which each person is destined to be unified in spirit with Olorun, the divine creator. The world is divided into the physical realm and the spiritual realm, with every individual striving to reach Orun Rere (the ‘good' heaven), as opposed to Orun Apadi (the realm of the forsaken). Spiritual growth, involving meditation and the veneration of the gods, is the key to reaching Orun Rere. Life and death are stages along the path to heaven.

Though the Yoruba high priest spoke no English and Wenger spoke no Yoruba, they communicated through the ‘language of the trees', she once said in an interview. Wenger, who always lamented the West's indifference towards the spirit world, was dismayed at the neglect of Yoruba traditions. The number of traditional priests was
dwindling, looters were targeting the shrines' antiquities, and people had begun fishing in the Osun River and hunting the grove's animals. On top of this, the colonial Department of Forestry and Agriculture began clearing areas of the grove for agricultural experiments. Wenger went on to become an
olorisha
(high priestess), and dedicated her life to resurrecting the Osogbo shrine.

She and several Yoruba artists set up the New Sacred Art group. Together they crafted dozens of sculptures of varying sizes, each effigy depicting one of the many anthropomorphic Yoruba gods. According to the religion, there is one super god, Olorun, and several lesser gods (
orishas
), such as Ogun, the fearsome god of war and retribution, Eshu, the trickster god, Shango, the god of thunder, Obatala, the god who forms the human body, and Shokpona, the god of smallpox.

According to legend, a local
oba
(king) called Larooye was building a new settlement in the area. One of his men cut down a tree that fell in the river. The river goddess Osun complained that it had broken one of her pots. Larooye apologised to her, and Osun advised him and his people to move further away from the river to avoid annual floods, which they did. Wanting to appease Osun, Larooye later returned to the river where the pots were smashed, and made sacrifices to the goddess. To this day, the people of Oshogbo have made annual sacrifices to Osun at the river in order to receive her protection and fertility blessings.

Suzanne Wenger's sculptures represent Osun and many other gods. All around me, I saw small figurines nestled in the undergrowth. A bug-eyed mother cradled her baby; another very small, squat effigy of an unidentified god sat on some rocks by the Osun River, which twisted and meandered listlessly through the trees, its creaseless surface gently disturbed by a snake.

Walking deeper into the forest, I came across grander, towering statues. In a small clearing among the trees, a slender, insect-like figure stood 6 metres high, with long grasshopper arms raised to the sky as if imploring the gods. This was the effigy of Obaluaye, a
messenger of Osun. Beneath Obaluaye were the entwined, root-like bodies of several figures, apparently bent over in supplication. The curvy figure shone brilliantly in the sunlight, a larger version of the traditional sculptures of Yoruba shrines, which were fashioned from wood. Many of Wenger's sculptures were a product of artistic licence, modern behemoths made from a mix of iron, mud and cement – heavy materials that would deter the theft of the sculptures. Nearby, the huge statue of Lyamaro, another messenger of Osun, spread its numerous straight arms and legs like octopus tentacles towards the ground. Local people bring food to these orisha effigies and pour alcohol on them, asking for blessings.

The sculptures were ageing, unkempt and fading, but this had the effect of blending them into the surrounding forest colours. Although based on traditional African abstract design, they also bore Wenger's distinct artistic style. Apparently, such fluid interpretation is acceptable because the Yoruba religion is based on oral tradition, the mythology varying from town to town.

During the annual week-long Osun Festival in August, Yoruba society throws off its Muslim and Christian top layers and congregates at the shrine to worship the goddess and ask for her blessings. Men, women and children converge here in their thousands, bathing in the river and praying for fertility, respite from malaria, or money to pay next month's rent. A virgin carries a symbolic presence of the river goddess inside a calabash. To affirm the connection between the people and Osun, the girl carries the calabash to Osun's shrine, a Gaudi-esque thatched-roof building supported by wood-carved columns. Inside it is a sacred stone stool, on which Larooye is said to have first sat. Food is tossed into the river as an offering to the goddess. The crowds follow the virgin girl en masse, their faces contorted in prayer.

But nothing is too sacred to entrepreneurs. Soft drinks companies circle the festival crowds like mosquitoes, telling people that the gods will bless those who use their beverages for libation rituals. And
the Sacred Grove itself is being buffeted by both the indifference of capitalism and bad government: in recent decades the authorities illegally sold off portions of it to property developers, who chopped down trees and dislodged some of the sculptures during construction. Trees were also sacrificed when a paved road was laid down through the forest, inching the Grove closer to extinction.

Wenger herself was disgusted by the state of affairs. By the time she died in 2009, she was furious at the condition of the Sacred Grove and its sculptures, which were decaying as relentlessly as Ibadan's Transwonderland Amusement Park. Maintaining a site like this under today's circumstances requires a certain assiduousness, of which Wenger had plenty in her younger decades. So intense was her passion for Yoruba culture, she even prevented her children (whom she adopted locally) from receiving a Western-style education for fear of contmabelting their spiritual purity. ‘Neo-Tarzanism' is how Wole Soyinka once described this foreign reverence for our past traditions. Some of those children, now grown adults, remain illiterate to this day. As literacy and modern education tend to erode traditional religious practices, Wenger believed that keeping her children ‘native' was the only true way of sustaining the Yoruba religion. In her mind, modernity and tradition were two immiscible concepts, the former compromising the latter.