The Masque of Africa by V.S. Naipaul Page B

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    They then took Patrick off to the small room in the palace where there were the two boards of photographs. He came out after a while with what looked like a framed souvenir photograph: it had been taken of him in the morning with a lot of noise and busyness. Patrick thanked them. They said there was a charge. Seven thousand shillings. A little over two pounds. Patrick gave them 20,000 shillings. He was expecting change, but they said he had misunderstood. The charge wasn’t 7,000 shillings; it was 74,000 shillings. Twenty-four pounds and 50 pence sterling; or 37 U.S. dollars. Patrick, too stunned to argue, or to think about pounds and dollars, paid. He awakened to outrage only after we had left, and for a long time he could think only of what was in effect the
hongo
he had been made to pay.
    All the way back to Kampala, along the curving roads of Toro and the straight roads of Buganda, there were schoolchildren in uniform coming out at the end of a school day, walking home to simple dwellings in the fierce sun. It was just after three, the deadest time of the tropical day: the heat at its worst in all the green, the freshness of the morning long burnt away, together with whatever optimism the new day might have brought. The light and the heat cast a gloomy clarity on what we were driving through: small houses, small fields, small people, and it seemed that nothing more uplifting was being offered to the children we could see on the road. Uganda was Uganda. Education and school uniforms, giving an illusion of possibility, waseasy; much harder was the creation of a proper economy. There would be no jobs for most of the children we could see—some dawdling on the way home now, killing time in spite of the heat.
    The latest employment news, presented in the newspapers as good news, was that, even with all the suicide bombers and mayhem, there were six thousand Ugandans working as security guards in Iraq. There was also a report of a call for Ugandan English teachers from North Korea.

CHAPTER 2
Sacred Places
    I HAD BEEN told—by someone who said he wanted to warn me about Lagos airport—that Nigerians liked to travel with lots of luggage. I took this to mean that there would be trouble collecting luggage in Lagos. But we had luggage trouble even before we left London. Someone had checked in with his luggage and had then disappeared. We waited a while and then the pilot said that the absent passenger had checked in nineteen pieces of luggage. I thought I had misheard. But the Nigerian passengers didn’t turn a hair; and later, in Nigeria, I understood why. Why fret about nineteen pieces when at that moment there was a Nigerian bigwig travelling the world with thirty-seven suitcases, and doing so on a diplomatic passport to which he was not entitled?
    Nigerians have their own idea of status. They make sport with things that other people might take seriously; and a diplomatic passport, with its many immunities, was one of the toys that had come to them with independence and statehood. To possess a toy like that, almost a fetish, sorted the men from the boys, and important people jostled with one another for the ennoblement. A man with thirty-seven suitcases would make enough of a show, you might think. But in Nigerian eyes such a man would make much more of a show, wouldput the seal on his grandeur, if at Immigration, in full view of the waiting crowd, he could saunter through the diplomatic channel.
    We were waiting that morning or afternoon in London in the parked plane, and the man who had abandoned his nineteen pieces didn’t show up. At length the pilot said that those nineteen pieces would have to be taken off the plane. This would take time; we were a full flight; many more than those nineteen pieces would have to be taken off before we could come upon the unclaimed suitcases. At the end they were found and taken off. We were now two and a half hours past our scheduled departure. For all this time we had been