There were sounds of revelry issuing from every corner of the island. It came from the seafront, from Broad Street and the Marina – the European District. And from Ìsàlẹ̀ Èkó, at the back of the town, where the Native Islanders had lived clustered around the Iga Ìdúnganran, the king’s palace, for generations. And it came from Pópó Àgùdà, at the back of the eastern end of the European District, home to at least a hundred and thirty families of Brazilian Africans of Ẹ̀gbá origin, highly skilled craftsmen and artisans, ex-slaves who had scrimped and saved to purchase their freedom and return to the land of their ancestors, and Cuban returnees like the ones on the Ethiope ; and from Olówógbowó on the western edge of the island.
The name of the district, Olówógbowó (‘the owner claims their money from the debtor’), was a withering put-down of indigence framed as a casual statement of observation. What it really meant was, pay up, just pay up; it’s their money, shut up and pay up; a hymn to the dog-eat-dog hustle.
Olówógbowó was home to some of the wealthiest African denizens of Lagos, the Sàró émigrés who first moved there from Sierra Leone in the early forties; the clerks, teachers, nurses, traders; the merchants who purchased the hulks of decommissioned slavers and painstakingly refurbished them into seaworthy vehicles plying the Gulf of Guinea trading, among other things, in farm produce; if a clergyman in the Niger or the Delta or in Yorùbá was African, chances were he was Sàró. Of course, not all Sàrós lived in Olówógbowó. The most famous Sàró living in Lagos in the sixties, the Reverend Samuel Adjai Crowther, didn’t live in Olówógbowó. He lived on Breadfruit Street, in the very heart of the European District.
‘Reverend sir. We’ve arrived. We’re at the Iga Ìdúnganran.’
Reverend Crowther stirred from the light slumber that had crept on him unawares. He looked up. It was the driver, speaking through the hatch. He pulled aside the lace curtain drawn over the glass window and looked outside. The driver had parked right in front of the black and white marble pavement leading into the main entrance of the palace. Reverend Crowther tugged at his collar and rearranged it. He stepped out of the hansom cab.