You Must Set Forth at Dawn (34 page)

IN IFE, NEWS OF THE safe return of the “Argonauts” had circulated, and jubilations had begun. The History Department, African Studies, Languages, Philosophy, Drama, the Dean's Office, and so on were gearing up to celebrate in grand style. We had the sobering task of stopping them from slaughtering the fatted calf. Not only had the real objective proved elusive; there was now a serious risk that the leakage of our real objective into diplomatic circles would have one guaranteed result: the authentic
Ori Olokun
would now sink deeper and deeper into an impenetrable hiding place. To have propagated its nonexistence for so long, and now to have a bunch of skeptics taking melodramatic risks to puncture that myth of a mystic disappearance, would send a message to the illegal possessor:
Hide it away, dig a hole like its original habitation in
Ile-Ife, bring it out to gaze upon from time to time, and perhaps exhibit it to a few
intimates!

So much for the speculative fate of
Ori Olokun.
Of more immediate concern to us was our own fate, the two
olori-kunkun
who had undertaken this thankless mission. Who was responsible for the departure of our suspected colleague whom we had left in the guesthouse of the vice chancellor? The answer was dispiriting.

In its anxiety to ensure that Pierre remained in the country, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had involved the police. The consequences could not have been more disastrous. The police, on their own, had decided to “carry out investigations.” They had visited Ife Museum and found an
Ori Olokun
in its accustomed place, unscathed. They spoke to the curator: Had there been a break-in at the museum? No, the curator assured them. Nothing missing from the collection? Not even a bronze head? No, everything was in its place. And what would be his reaction if he were told that the
Ori Olokun
was missing? Well, if they would kindly follow him, he would show them the
Ori Olokun
on its accustomed podium in the glass case. The harassed man answered their questions in the strictest manner possible. He did not reveal that we had visited the museum at the planning stages and that he was part of the project, though not of the conspiracy. He knew his archaeological history and had indeed admitted to us that each time he passed by the pretender in its glass case, he felt like smashing the case and throwing out the piece. He had unprintable names for Mr. Frobenius.

The police listened, took notes, returned to base, and filed their report. It was succinct and damning: no theft had been reported from Ife.
Ori Olokun
was in its place, large as life. There had been no disturbance of his peace nor of that of his companions on display at Ife Museum.

Piecing the rest of the story together was easy enough. Pierre Verger was questioned. Did he know anything of a missing
Ori Olokun
? He denied it. Had he made enemies while at Ife, colleagues who might be interested in scheming for his downfall? A puzzled Pierre told them that he knew of none such among his colleagues. Was he on good relations with Wole Soyinka? Absolutely, said Pierre. And Olabiyi Yai? What did he know of him? Labiyi and he worked closely, said Pierre, and he had played host to Labiyi in Brazil. Their academic areas of interest threw them together quite often. Akin Isola? Wande Abimbola? Any contest for academic preferment between you and them? Pierre replied in the negative.

Well, declared the SSS to Pierre, you are clearly the victim of some intrigue. And those first two are at the center of it. Right now, they are in Brazil—to do what exactly, we do not know, since it is now clear that they were never after any missing object. Maybe they went over there to further whatever sinister plot your friends at the university had cooked up against you. No matter, we apologize for all the inconvenience and hope you do not hold us responsible for it. University politics are clearly beyond us, and quite frankly, we would rather be kept out of them. There is a flight out to Brazil tonight—would you like to be on it? Pierre was more than willing; he was ready to fly out of Nigeria and never dirty his feet on her soil for the rest of his life! Perhaps only Labiyi and I, of the entire planet, were more eager than Pierre to depart from alien territory during those crucial twenty-four hours.

Our planes did not cross paths over the Atlantic—not quite. Later, as we conducted a detailed postmortem on the sequence of events, followed up on the actions of the police and the departure of Pierre, we discovered that we had actually been in Rio de Janeiro—in the departure section of the airport—at the very moment that Pierre was passing through to Immigration and baggage claim. Fifteen minutes either way, and the two gladiatorial groups would have encountered each other, perhaps in the parking lot or at the frontage of the airport building!

WE WERE ABOUT to discover that the devil sometimes takes a sabbatical! That other descendant of the line of Oduduwa, Obasanjo, the head of state, became suddenly inaccessible, evaporated as the authentic
Ori Olokun
was alleged to have done. I suggested that perhaps he had traveled to Benin incognito, strayed into the path of the ritualists hunting for sacrificial strangers, and was now keeping company with the late oba of Benin. I called the more-than-familiar telephone number, and a strange voice answered. I announced who I was and asked to speak to the head of state. I was rewarded with a barked response: “Do you have an appointment?”

“Do I what-did-you-say?”

“Have an appointment, I said. Do you have an appointment to phone the head of state?”

I still was not sure I had heard right. I repeated my name, and the voice retorted, “Yes, I heard you say who you are. And I asked you if you had an appointment.”

“You want me to make an appointment to call your
oga
? Now, how exactly does one do that?”

“That is not my business to tell you. Do you think you can call the head of state just like that? Without an appointment?”

Well, now, I thought, it is not only the Edo Kingdom that is being turned upside down. The nation itself, Nigeria, appeared to have tumbled into some time warp and was spinning out of control. Maybe some aliens had taken over Dodan Barracks. Could this possibly be the same Dodan Barracks that I called up anytime, the same head of state with whom I had brainstormed together with Oje, sometimes over dinner or a weekend lunch, a wine bottle tucked under my arm to guard against wine poisoning by his indifferent stewards? We had commenced this exercise—could only have begun it!—with his active approval and collaboration. Now here was some strange voice that breezily, even insolently, admitted that it recognized the identity of the caller but required that this same caller somehow make an appointment in order to speak to his boss. I put down the telephone, turned to Akin Isola next to me, and sighed.

“We are in trouble. Deep trouble.” And I narrated what had been barked at me from the other end of the line.

“What next?” Akin demanded.

In that moment, my mind was made up. “I leave for London. We've wasted far too much time.”

“Leave for London? What for?”

“I'm heading for the British Museum. I want to find out which original this copy came from. Certain forces have entered into this, forces on which we hadn't bargained. Pressures. Diplomatic, certainly. Just think—why was Pierre released without our being informed? I think we are about to be sold, bargained away. Before that happens, I need to have pushed this search as far as possible. From now on, we ignore that devil in Dodan Barracks. We ignore the ministry, and we ignore the police. We are on our own and—so be it.”

AND SO IT WAS back on the trail, but in a different mode. There would be no more skulduggery. Between the members of the original team and the recruited art historian in the Fine Arts Department, Babatunde Lawal, we had already compiled masses of literature. I pored over this material yet again, returned to the library to scrutinize bibliographies, indexes, and footnotes even more closely, looking for clues that we might have overlooked or considered unimportant. Now it was desperation for more knowledge, for a closer approximation of the truth, that drove me.

It was strange. Only a few days had passed since nothing mattered in the world but that moment when I would hold a physical object in my hands, restore it to its rightful home, and bask in the contentment of a historic closure. Now all I wanted was the truth, the truth of a location, the meaning behind nearly a half century of deception. I felt the pressure of time. Any moment now, I expected to be warned off in some manner that would be difficult to circumvent—probably summoned and read the riot act, such as that any further action on my part regarding
Ori Olokun
would “jeopardize the bilateral relations with this or that government and will not be tolerated.” The next casualty would be my passport, then would come all forms of harassment, such as being summoned for interrogation. Arrest or detention was out of the question, that much at least I was quite sure of. The Obasanjo regime badly craved the reputation of following the rule of law.

Femi's wife, Barbara, was away in England; her location could not have been more fortunate. Femi—he had now joined in the chase—proposed her recruitment for the next stage of inquiry. She would visit the British Museum and find out all she could about the “missing” original. Obviously the British Museum held the key. I was now certain that news of our escapade had spread and the doors battened against any Nigerian-looking researcher. Barbara was British, however, and she would not arouse suspicion. We fed her all the accumulated information and suggested a few trails for her to follow, the most promising of which was that the head had once been acquired by a British family, then lent—or sold—to the British Museum. We supplied the name of the family.

Barbara was thorough. She succeeded in tracking down the descendants of that family, located not far from London. She spoke to them on the phone and confirmed that the family had surrendered the head to the British Museum. From the latter, Barbara extracted the information that the main museum had in turn loaned it to one of its branch institutions. A little more probing revealed that this was none other than the Burlington. I asked her to pay a visit to the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens without attracting attention to herself.

In my head, alarm bells continued to jangle, warning me that discretion was now belated. What mattered was to establish the exact whereabouts of the original, now that we knew that the British Museum had made replicas from it. It would be no exaggeration to state that I had now become obsessed. I wanted
Ori Olokun
—badly—even if it was only to set my eyes on it! I wanted it more than I had ever craved any object in my life. In moments of sober reflection, long after it was all over and I analyzed my state of mind during this period, I came to understand what the mystique of the Holy Grail had been about, or the Golden Fleece, how the
epos
of The Quest had come to predominate in the mythologies of nearly every culture. If I could not bring
Ori Olokun
back, at least I wanted to be able to say, “An end to all these lies, the great distraction contained in ‘whereabouts unknown.' ” Rubbish! There were those still alive who knew damned well where
Ori Olokun
was. There was a bronze head, the authentic article, on display somewhere, yet the scholars were pretending that it was not
Ori Olokun
but its simulacrum, churning out theories to suggest that there was yet another bronze piece, probably an imitation or “sculpture of the head of an Ife king, sometimes mistaken for
Ori Olokun.
” Regarding this attribution, however, there was something else we had observed.

This alleged “twin” of
Ori Olokun
was always photographed from the left profile, never from the right, where the pick had taken off a piece of the cheek and left a distinctive gash. Was this a coincidence? I had researched tome after tome, and while the “missing” original—in black and white or in color—was always photographed frontally, from the rear, and in right and left profile, the “twin” appeared only in its left profile. If there was nothing to hide, why was it always photographed from the undamaged side? The task force had also debated this “coincidence”—Adeagbo Akinjogbin of History, Wande Abimbola the Yoruba expert, Babatunde Lawal of Fine Arts, and others. We had examined photos, monograms, ethnographic and art history books, museum catalogues, and the like, and were always struck by this discrimination—the twin only appeared in its undamaged profile. We had all developed a strong suspicion that there was no twin, that is, there was no bronze head in existence of that particular cast that did not have the crucial hole in its cheek. And there could be only one of its kind! Of no other bronze head did any archaeologist ever report that a piece was taken off the cheek—and at that exact spot!

FROBENIUS'S JOURNEYS through Africa have been remarked, with some justification, as an exercise in Teutonic obsession with measurements and detail. He traveled not only with an artist who produced numerous sketches—with finicky dimensions—of art pieces, architecture, landscape, and so on, but with a mobile smelting and casting factory. He made copies of several objects, including bronzes. When the British district officer learned of his excavations in Ile-Ife, he put his paid informers on the alert and thus learned of the success of the dig almost at the same time as Frobenius was covering up the ravished dig. The district officer kept an eye on Frobenius's movements, learned just in time that he was headed for the border with Dahomey, and moved to stop the acquisitive German as he was about to depart with his booty. The story, according to Frobenius, was that he was compelled to part with
Ori Olokun
and succeeded in keeping for himself only the chip that had come off the end of the careless pick.

Our reconstruction, however, was this: the district officer parted with what he
thought
was
Ori Olokun.
It was more likely to have been an imitation—that is, not a direct replica of the original but a totally separate head, a clumsy handiwork by Frobenius's companion. It is that imitation that has continued, to this day, to occupy pride of place in Ile-Ife. Frobenius's companion had mastered the art of
cire perdue
but lacked the skills to make a copy with the finesse of the original. When the district officer demanded that he disburden himself of the precious head, Frobenius had simply given him an
original imitation,
fabricated by his artist.