VS Naipaul created immortal characters like Man Man in Miguel Street. The Tulsi family and their rituals came in for blows in A House for Mr Biswas. Naipaul's travel books, too, have contributed to him being acclaimed as "the greatest living writer of English prose." (courtesy Observer). Chief among Naipaul's pantheon is The Masque of Africa (Glimpses of African Belief). Naipaul provided a synopsis. He said: "I travel on a theme. And the theme of The Masque of Africa is African belief. I begin in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, do Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and at the bottom of the continent, in South Africa. My theme is belief, not political or economic life; and yet at the bottom of the continent the political realities are overwhelming they have to be taken into account." He added: "Perhaps an unspoken aspect of my inquiry was the possibility of the subversion of old Africa by the ways of the outside world. The theme held till I go to the South, when the clash of the two ways of thinking and believing became far too one-sided. The skyscapers of Johannesburg didn't rest on sand." He explores magic. "The older world of magic felt fragile, but at the same time had an enduring quality. You felt it would survive any calamity. I had expected that over the great size of Africa the practices of magic would significantly vary. But they didn't. The diviners everywhere wanted to "throw the bones' to read the future and the idea of "energy" remained a constant, to be tapped into by the ritual sacrifice of body parts. In South Africa, body parts, mainly of animals, but also of men and women, made a mixture of "battle medicine." To witness this, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things."
Chapter One-The Tomb at Kasubi
Naipaul gives some background to his sojourn in Africa. He wrote: "I spent eight to nine months in East Africa in 1966. A month in Tanzania; six weeks or so in the Kenyan Highlands; the rest of the time in Uganda. Some years ago later I even used a version of Uganda in a piece of fiction, you can do that only when you feel you have a fair idea of a place, or an idea sufficient for your needs. Forty-two years after that first visit I went back to Uganda. I was hoping to get started there on this book about the nature of African belief, and I thought it would be better to ease myself into my subject in a country I knew or half knew. But I found the place eluding me."
No doctrine
As the narrative unfolded, Naipaul discussed the traditional African religion. He said: "To believe in it was to be on the defensive. There was no doctrine to hold on to; there was only a sense of the rightness of old ways, the sacredness of the local earth. It was, in a small way, like the fourth and fifth-century conflict between Christianity and paganism at the time of the religious changeover in the classical world. Paganism could not be a cause; the most that could be said for the old gods and temples was that they had been around a long time and had served people well. The doctrines of Islam and Christianity, world faiths, had a philosophical base and could be expounded. The traditional African religion had no doctrine; it expressed itself best in practices and in things like the hundred fearful charms the witchdoctors presented to Mutesa 1 before the naval battle against the Wavuma in 1875."
Visiting witchdoctor
Naipaul had a guide named Luke. He took him to a witchdoctor's house. Luke told Naipaul, "He is not an ordinary witchdoctor. He is modern." Naipaul wrote about the witchdoctor going to "an open fireplace with much grey wood-ash and a length of partly burnt wood. He said that was where he sat sometimes, in the living fire. He was moved to do so by the spirits; and when the spirits were on him he didn't feel the fire. Inspired words came to him, from above or below, from the earth."
Witchcraft in news
As Naipaul learned more about witchcraft, he wrote: "Every week there were two or three items in the newspaper from various parts of the country about witchcraft. In one village people were reported to believe that malaria, a great killer in Uganda, was caused by witchcraft and mangoes." One villager said: "Malaria is caused by witchcraft or bad spirits. When I got malaria, I found out my neighbour was responsible for it. And when he was sent away from the village, he got cured."
Violence, witchcraft not far away
He added: "When it came to witchcraft, violence was never far away. In Easter week, in a village in the south-west, four brothers strangled their 42-year-old aunt. They removed her jaw and her tongue, no doubt for some private magical purpose, and then dumped the body in a nearby banana field. Not long after, dogs began to gather. The village people became suspicicious. Suspicion at once fell on the four brothers, who were believed to practise witchcraft. About 20 of the village men went to look for them. When they found them they began to beat them with sticks and anything else that came to hand. Two of the brothers got away. The other two brothers were killed and buried in a latrine."
About VS Naipaul
He was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write and has since followed no other profession. He has published more than 22 books of fiction and non-fiction including, Half-A-Life, A House For Mr Biswas and Letters between Father and Son. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Masque of Africa was published by Picador in 2010.
