Zuma
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 13/Dec/2010 21:34, 34 days ago
Just as you leave Abuja for the North, a large white building stands, silent and empty, to the right of the road.  It was an investors’ dream: multi storey, fully equipped with balconies and windows and a no doubt spacious entrance hall.  But the paint flakes and the windows crack, and the entrance hall hasn’t echoed to human sounds for around a decade. The hotel stands in the shadow of Zuma Rock: this, and its proximity to Abuja with easy connection to Kaduna, was supposed to be the guarantor of success.  The Rock, though (despite being propitiated by adorning the N100 note), refused to provide a steady stream of cheerful tourists and free spending, loud mouthed business men, and is understood instead to have cast its malign influence over the business prospects of a project planned by the Nigerian government and delivered by heavy foreign investment.Zuma Rock is haunted, and it is magical.  That much can’t seriously be doubted by anyone with music in their soul (and those without, of course, are fit only for treason, stratagems and spoils).  Like many of the violent eruptions around the capital, it stands apart from the surrounding plain, a stark and violent uprooting from (one assumes) volcanic action millenia distant.  Like its smaller cousins, its almost vertical sides and flat top convey a sense of some alien construction as well as an appearance (which is, like all the best magic, only an illusion) of utter impregnability.  A slight sprouting of green on its roof makes me think with renewed envy of Conan Doyle’s explorers of the Lost World – the constant companions of my childhood dreams.  From one side (as approached from the North), it can– particularly if you’ve read The Little Prince – look like an immense elephant hulking over the landscape.  From any angle, the white streaks give what is in reality a hefty lump of stone a texture and a sense of mutability– of stories to be told – all of its own.It is when leaving Abuja, though, that Zuma Rock is at its most potent.  Sunk in the middle of the flank facing the city, a face glowers in perpetual misery, anger, and pain.  It is this twisted vision– like something from one of Munch’s nightmares - along with the sheer vasty weight of the thing itself, which condemned the hotel to a long, mouldering history – tossed in sheets drenched with the blood of murders supposed to have occurred there.  If local history– often more likely to be a florid daubing of the past to recreate ancestors inthe form Europeans prefer and pay for – is to be believed, the face is also responsible for the somewhat more rapid death of multiple annually selected maidens, sacrificed in a vain effort to appease a tormented and malign god.I don’t see anything aggressive to fear in the face upon the rock.  Like the Turin Shroud, to my eyes– made quiet by the power of harmony and with their shaping spirit of imagination which carves human features of its own out of every chance undulation in a surface – the face has a terrible sadness about it; eyes turned upwards and inwards, surrounded by fold  upon shrouding fold of aging wrinkle with a mouth stretched ever half open in a quiet moan of pain.  I see Prometheus, in eternal atonement of anguish– not Loki stalking the shadows and snatching away the unwary. Whatever, it’s a magnificent object, and all the more notable in a country rich in gorgeous, eternal, sweeping landscapes of forest and plain – but bizarrely lacking in the type of breathtaking moment that creates tourism.  When I return to Nigeria in a few weeks’ time, I don’t look forward to seeing my home again – it’s not homely and contains or offers little of anything I really care for.  But I do look forward to seeing this unsettling piece of disinterested rubble from a speeding car, and to the sense of unease, quiet horror, and enduring horizons it evokes in me.