Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction by Teju Cole Read Free Book Online Page B

had invested in its collection.
    I am the only guest in each of the interlinked galleries I enter. The rooms are indeed silent, save for the chattering of two museum staff in one room, and the solitary singingby another in the next room. The woman sits in a corner and sings from a hymnal as if, for all the world, she were not at a place of work. She ignores me until, standing at the end of a long row of cases, I take out my camera and capture an image.
    —Is not allowed!
    —Excuse me?
    —Is not allowed. Forbidden. No photo.
    She points at the offending contraption, flaps a hand at it, and fixes me with a withering stare. Her tone is acidic. But the voice changes back immediately as she picks up the verse where she left off and resumes sweetly singing the glories of her Lord. Her disconnection from the environment is absolute. A victorious Christian among the idols. Her voice floats through the rooms. The galleries, cramped, are spatially unlike what I remember or had imagined, and the artifacts are caked in dust and under dirty plastic screens. The whole place has a tired, improvised air about it, like a secondary school assignment finished years ago and never touched since. The deepest disappointment, though, is not in presentation. It is in content. I honestly expected to find the glory of Nigerian archaeology and art history on display here. I had hoped to see the best of the Ife bronzes, the fine Benin brass plaques and figures, Nok terra-cottas, the roped vessels of Igbo-Ukwu, the art for which Nigeria is justly admired in academies and museums the world over.
    It is not to be. Though there are examples of each kind of art, they are few, are rarely of the best quality, and aremeagerly documented. The whole enterprise is clotted with a weird reticence. It is clear that no one cares about the artifacts. There are such gaps in the collection that one can only imagine that there has been recent plunder. The best pieces have probably found their way into the hands of dealers in Paris, Zurich, and elsewhere. My recent experience of Nigerian art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York was excellent. The same had been true at the British Museum, as well as at the Museum für Volkerkunde in Berlin. A clean environment, careful lighting, and, above all, outstanding documentation that set the works in the proper cultural context. What each of those places had done was create a desire in me to see this astonishing art at its best, to see it in its own home. London, New York, and Berlin had made me long for Lagos. The West had sharpened my appetite for ancient African art. And Lagos is proving a crushing disappointment.
    I am aware of the troubled history of the collecting of African art, the way colonial authorities had carted off treasures to their capitals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But I also know how rich Nigerian museums had been as recently as the 1960s and ’70s, when the British archaeologists Frank Wilson and John Wallace had been curators here. Wilson is an authority on Ife art, and Wallace a fine ethnographer of Yoruba and Riverine art. And after them there was the outstanding art historian Udoh Udoh, who was director of the National Museum. These men areacademics, and they were careful to document and present what was entrusted to them. But, as with many other national institutions during the military years, in the 1980s the museums likely became sinecures for whoever got posted to them. I remember a conversation I had with Wallace at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in 1999. A gentle, deeply learned man, he had gone to Nigeria with the British Colonial Service and risen to the top of the old Department of Art and Antiquities. He told me that one of the directors of the Lagos museum had been too superstitious to handle some of the items in his care. The man was a mallam , and he feared the fetish power of the masks and statues. According to Wallace, many items simply gathered dust