Encounters with an African Goddess - Diane Esguerra


Memory is visceral. All I can recall, about the drive into the southern Nigerian town of Oshogbo that November afternoon in 1986, is the screech of worn tyres on khaki-coloured roads, the all-pervading dust, the torrid heat and the rivulets of sweat trickling down the back of the albino driver’s neck. After the 150-mile drive from Lagos on a gridlocked highway I was desperately thirsty and dying for a pee. So intent was I on finding somewhere to satisfy my bodily needs that I scarcely took in my surroundings. Victorian explorer Henry M Stanley used ‘dark’ in the title of his book Through the Dark Continent to describe that which is mysterious and unknown. Little did I realise, that day, that this would be the start of my journey into a dark, hidden Africa.

Pulling up outside her home – if you could call it a home – was a different matter. After all these years the image of that baroque, semi-dilapidated Portuguese-colonial edifice with alien-like carvings clinging to its walls remains soldered to my brain.   

Something in me hesitated before knocking on her front door; a crisis of confidence, I suppose. I’d given no thought as to how I was going to present myself to the woman I’d travelled all this distance to meet. As an English writer and performance artist with a keen interest in anthropology? The ex-wife of an architect working in Lagos? The truth of the matter is that on that first visit my motive for wanting to meet her was essentially a monetary one. I was broke. I hoped that this woman whose door I was now banging on would be a worthy enough subject to merit a documentary proposal.

 ‘Come away. Your persistence may anger her,’ Ebis advised, leading me gently back to the car. ‘Let us take some refreshment and return later.’

In the windowless, earthen-floored bar with its ineffective plastic fly-screen and unwiped tables we sipped Fanta and chewed on stale Lincoln biscuits. 

I let out a sigh. ‘I can’t believe I’ve come all this way for nothing.'

Ebis smiled. ‘No journey is ever wasted.’ 


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