In the
second section of his most recent, quite possibly his last, non-fiction book, Masque
of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, V.S. Naipaul recounts an
incident. He is in Nigeria and, in the company of his local guide, a Muslim
named Adesina, he is visiting a babalawo
—a soothsayer. On a little table in front of the babalawo are his magic things (Naipaul’s words), amongst which is a
‘sensationally dirty’ school exercise book. After the fee of the consultation
is settled—the soothsayer initially demands a thousand dollars, but Adesina,
‘used to this kind of outrage’ remains calm and beats him down in the end to
something much smaller—Naipaul has to ask the babalawo a question. Naipaul asks, ‘Will my daughter get married?’
(Naipaul does not have any children of his own, but his second wife has a
grown-up daughter from her first marriage). The babalawo is thrown by this question. He says, ‘I thought only black
people have such problems.’ The babalawo is
nevertheless willing to give an opinion. He consults his exercise book,
performs some rituals using cowry shells and two small gourds tied with a piece
of string. Finally he is ready to tell Naipaul the future: ‘The girl,’ declares
the babalawo portentously, ‘is not
going to get married. You have many enemies. To break their spells we will have
to do many rituals. They will cost money, but the girl will get married.’
Everyone in the room is quite excited. Adesina and his brother (both of whom,
despite being Muslims, believe in and have maintained links with the
traditional religion), Naipaul remarks, ‘the babalawo had them all in the palm of his hand.’ Then Naipaul says,
‘But what he [babalawo] has told me
is good. I don’t want the girl to be married.’ Naipaul concludes the incident
with the wry comment: ‘I believe only the reverence of Adesina and others saved
the day.’
The above
is a rare moment of light relief in an otherwise doleful book.
V.S.
Naipaul, the recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a man who has
reinvented himself in a literary career spanning more than five decades during
which he has produced approximately thirty works of fiction and
non-fiction. He started off with novels.
His early novels were brilliant works of satirical comedies with the Caribbean
islands (where he was born and bred) as the backdrop. The two works from this
period which stand out, for me, are Miguel Street and The
House for Mister Biswas. Naipaul’s later fictional work became more
sombre, assumed, for want of better phrase, more gravitas, and, as years went
by, the humour—so fresh and evident in his early novels—vanished completely.
You get a flavour of things to come in his 1967 novel Mimic Men, which, in
parts, still has comic moments. The grave, almost mythical, tone of his fiction
is really set from A Flag on the Island (which won the 1971 Booker Prize) onwards.
The three novels from this period which I think are outstanding are (in
chronological order): A Bend in the River, An
Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World. A
Bend in the River is perhaps my most favourite Naipaul novel, but A Way
in the World is extraordinary, too. It is not a conventional novel at
all; rather it is a complex interweaving of personal memories, stories of
possibly real life characters, and historical metafiction: it is, quite simply,
awesome.
Naipaul did
not build his reputation solely on fiction, though. Had Naipaul restricted
himself only to writing fiction, he would still have earned his place in the
annals of world literature. I do not know what the critics would have made of
his later fiction, but certainly his early fiction would have been
acknowledged—perhaps still is—as fiction which opened gates for talented
Commonwealth Writers (Salman Russhdie, Rohinton Mistry, Caryl Philips
etcetera).
However,
Naipaul did not write only fiction. From 1960s onwards, he began to travel. He
travelled to different corners of the European Empires. The fruits of his
travels were a kind of reportage books with a difference. Naipaul has written a trilogy of books on
India, the country of his ancestors; on South Americas; the Caribbean; and two
books of astonishing prescience from his travels in the Islamic countries. In
these books Naipaul evolved a style that was adopted by other writers, most
notably Paul Theroux and Shiva Naipaul (Naipaul’s younger brother who died of a
heart attack when he was only forty, and is a largely forgotten name these
days). These travel writings—they are not typical travelogues, as already
mentioned—established Naipaul’s reputation as a contrarian writer, who was not
afraid to express views that were considered as ‘politically incorrect’. (Add
to this Naipaul’s recent penchant for making seemingly outrageous statements in
his interviews, which generate a lot of ill-feeling towards him—although he
seems not to care, revel, even, in this persona (should we call it a
masque?)—and you get an idea why Sir Vidia has become a controversial character
in British literary scene.) In these peregrinations Naipaul casts himself as an
‘outsider’. He has no allegiance to anyone or anything except truth, or what he
sees as truth. He is not wedded to any ideology or philosophy and tells it as
he sees it. As far as possible he lays out for the reader what he sees or
discusses (with others) without any sensor (as it were); on the rare occasions
when he passes a judgment (or comment) he appears acutely aware of the
limitations—prejudices if you may—of his vision. It is this, together with the
quality of his writing, that has won Naipaul his fans (probably not many)
amongst whom I include myself.
The Masque of Africa with its somewhat imprecise
subtitle—the Glimpses of African Beliefs—is Naipaul’s first work of
non-fiction in over a decade. In it he returns to the continent he first
visited 44 years ago and which provided a backdrop to some of his fiction.
Starting with Uganda—where he spent several months as a writer in residence at
the Makerere University in Kampala (a version of which he used some years later
in A
Bend in the River—the country, not the university)—Naipaul visits five
more African countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa.
Naipaul is
mainly interested in finding out about the traditional religions of Africa, the
older, animistic beliefs and practices that were prevalent in the continent
before the two great religions of the world—Christianity and Islam—arrived
and asserted themselves—imposed, even,—on
the population. Naipaul wants to know, bearing in mind the theme of his travel,
what has happened to the traditional religions of Africa.
The theme
is not new. It has been examined—in particular the clash between the older and
the more modern (for want of better phrase) religions and the apparently
unbridgeable differences between their doctrines and explanatory models—in
fiction before: the superb Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
and almost equally remarkable Purple Hibiscus (Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie). What we get in The Masque of Africa is
the non-fiction version, or Naipaul’s version of it.
Naipaul famously said
once, ‘An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never
lies: it reveals the writer totally.’ By his own yardstick, The
Masque of Africa lends itself vulnerable to the charge of Naipaul
distorting or not reporting faithfully— either because his memory has played
tricks with him or because what he has heard does not fit into his
pre-conceived notion about Africa—what he hears in his meetings with the
Africans. Indeed in his review of the book William Boyd (a favourite writer of mine;
he writes entertaining novels, but let’s face it—he is never going to write
anything that would make you pause and think and examine your conceptions)
brazenly says that the ‘transcribed monologues’ seemed ‘bogus’ to him. That is
an astonishing accusation to hurl at a writer renowned for his searing honesty.
Boyd gives some bogus sounding (to me) explanations why he doubts the veracity of
Naipaul’s conversations with the Africans:
it would appear that Boyd’s view of Naipaul’s travel writing is changed
forever by what he calls the French Effect (referring to warts and all
‘authorized’ biography of Naipaul by Patrick French, never mind that both
Naipaul and his second wife have since expressed bitterness and reservations
about the biography). At the end of the day these are subjective impressions
which cannot be explained away rationally. For what it is worth none of the
conversations with the various people Naipaul meets in the course of his
travels seemed inauthentic to me. However, it would be fair to say that some of
the conversations make uncomfortable reading. Here is an extract of the
conversation between Naipaul and a distinguished academic, a former dean of the
University of Gabon, a man of mixed ancestry (French father and African mother)
but, who, Naipaul comments, ‘like many people of mixed ancestry, appeared to be
embracing the African side of his inheritance.’ This man, a lawyer by
profession, who thinks of himself as a political scientist and teaches
political anthropology at the University of Gabon, is also a passionate
believer in the traditional religion of Gabon and has, as Naipaul puts it,
‘come to a poetic understanding of the place of forest in the Gabonese mind.’
The lawyer gives Naipaul examples of his encounters with the supernatural. When
Naipaul asks him whether he can define the religion of forest more closely, he
replies, ‘in a precise, academic way’:
‘We cannot call it a religion. It is a set of
beliefs. We don’t pray to God because in our understanding God is not
accessible to humans. It [he meant the idea of God] has many other problems and
has no time for humans.’
Does this
sound ‘bogus’? How about the following? After describing to Naipaul the levels
of ‘organic world’, the lawyer explains the ‘initiation ceremony’:
‘You remain afraid. Initiation and ritual only
give you a path through the forest. You are not protected against others, women
especially. Women are very important in the society. They are the real power. A
woman may not exercise power, but she gives it to her son. We are a matrilineal
society, and women give life. This country was not made for men. Women’s bodies
are stronger, and so they are witches. There are many ritual sacrifices where
the eyes are removed and tongues torn out of living victims. Every day there is
a ritual sacrifice. White skin is very prized here, and for that reason I
cannot let my light-skinned children out in the evening.’
Naipaul
then asks the lawyer the importance of the tongue and the lawyer replies that
‘they’ remove the tongue to get energy. When Naipaul asks him what he thinks
about it, the lawyer replies, ‘There is no name. It is too shocking.’ Then, for
the first time in this entire piece, Naipaul gives the reader a glimpse of what
he thinks, his judgment as it were:
‘It was a relief to hear him say that. He had spoken of ‘energy’ in such a
positive way I thought he might have been more accepting.’
The format of The
Masque of Africa is similar to Naipaul’s earlier travel writings, a
genre that he created. He travels to countries; he visits places in these
countries and observes; and he talks and listens. He meets people and asks them
questions. You get the impression by the very nature of these encounters that
they are not random; that the people Naipaul meets are ‘recruited’ by his contacts
in the country he is visiting because they are ‘interesting’. Almost everyone
Naipaul meets during his African travels and whose conversations he records for
the reader is a well educated African occupying a high position or holding down
a white collar job, who has interesting things to say about Africa and its old
religion.
And what does Naipaul
find when he speaks to these selected individuals? He discovers that underneath
the patina of Christianity and Islam, the old, traditional religion lives on.
Some of these individuals are comfortable with it and in their minds have dual
identities without any cognitive dissonance, such as some of the Nigerians
Naipaul meets, who consider themselves Catholic Christians belonging to the
Yoruba tribe and have no hesitation in performing traditional rites not
approved by ‘modern’ religions. Some others, like Nicole, the lady police
body-guard Naipaul is provided with in Gabon, have rejected the old religion
totally and become staunch Christians. In Gabon Naipaul, with Nicole, visits an
isolated establishment in the village of Lope, deep in the forest, where the
tribal chief has promised to show him the siren of the river—a white woman. As
it happens Naipaul does not avail himself of this offer as he is feeling too tired.
This is what Naipaul says:
‘She [Nicole] was Christian, but she had the old Gabonese
anxiety about water, an inauspicious element. The talk about the white sirens
at the bottom of the river wouldn’t have pleased her at all; and she had been
praying and praying, against hope for much of the time, that the river trip
wouldn’t take place. Now, miraculously, her prayers have been answered, giving
her, I suppose, yet another proof of the power of the prayer.’
In Libreville, where
Naipaul is invited to witness an initiation ceremony—a performance, as Naipaul
is aware, for the benefit for the visitors, arranged by a Frenchman who has
married a Gabonese woman—Nicole accompanies Naipaul. But she refuses to go to
the ceremony. Naipaul comments:
‘She was a Christian and wanted no part of
this spirit talk. The drumming and chanting might have been done only for
tourists, but it agitated her. Working her lips but not speaking loudly, she
was saying ‘Hail Mary’ again and again, speaking her Christian charm against
whatever charms were in play here, and unwittingly paying tribute to the power
of African spirits.’
Not all Africans
Naipaul meets are as won over as Nicole is by Christianity. In Uganda he meets
an educated middle class woman who is raised as a Christian. Naipaul describes
her as ‘someone overtly Christian but with a love for her roots’. This woman
equates the traditional African religion with the African culture. Says she:
‘Modernity wants us to sweep our culture
away, and that will manifest itself in a political upheaval. A conflict between
Christianity and traditional religion. In the Lango tradition when there was a
drought, or it was prolonged, all the elders got together and made sacrifices,
and it would rain while they were at it. My grandmother told me this. But the
missionaries called it devil worship. Culture does not die—today it is called
witchcraft. My grandmother produced twins who died. They had to be buried in a
special way, in hollow pots, and a shed had to be built over their grave, to
protect and shade them. Every year my grandmother went there to tend the shed,
feed the grave, and sing and dance there. When she became a Pentecostal she had
to stop that, as it was not allowed. She had to remove the shed, and she was so
afraid that the twins would come and kill her living children. I talk to myself
so as not to get confused. To me it is all about belief and what treats you
well. In traditional religion it was not about money. It was a communal spirit
and people come together for common cause like the drought.’
And, Naipaul
concludes:
‘Gradually from the tragedies . . . and
from conversations with good people, the visitor arrives at the unsettling idea
of a poor country, still vulnerable—in its people, living on their nerves, and
even its landscape, which might be despoiled—after forty years of civil
conflict, still waiting for an upheaval which may solve nothing.’
Depressing? Yes.
Far-fetched? I am not sure. Racist? Definitely not.
Although Naipaul does
not directly say this, the impression you are left with—the impression Naipaul
wants you to be left with—is that on the whole ‘outside’ religions such as
Christianity, foisted upon the Africans by a bunch of fanatical
missionaries—exemplified by ‘Doctor’ Schweitzer (who is briefly mentioned)—,
who had no love or respect for the old African beliefs, were inimical to the
African culture. The Africans were told, as the Christianity sought to impose
its intellectual superiority, that their traditional beliefs and ideas about
nature and divinity were mere superstitions, of low value. The Africans were
compelled, almost, to feel ashamed of their heritage which was dismissed as
mere mumbo-jumbo (the book traces the origin of this word and links it to an
ancient African (Nigerian) custom). It was cultural imperialism of the worst
kind, and its effect was calamitous. The closest Naipaul comes to voicing this
is to imply that if left to its own traditional beliefs Africa ‘might have
arrived at its own more valuable synthesis of old and new’. It is a compelling
argument, all the more so because Naipaul does not actually make it; he leaves
it to the reader to figure it out.
For the
best part Naipaul refrains scrupulously from making any value judgments. Occasionally,
though, the mask slips; and what is revealed is weary exasperation. For
example, in Ivory Coast, the land of ivory, but ‘now without the elephants that
by their death provided the ivory of their tusks’, he describes two ‘cruel’
elephant monuments: one of a female elephants with her calf (elephants, Naipaul
informs, is food in this part of Africa), and a tall, awkward obelisk composed
(Naipaul says, ‘wickedly’) of elephant tusks alone. In the same section, towards the end, there
is a detailed description of how bats are caught and boiled before they are
eaten in the Ivory Coast. These fruit bats or their fleas, the reader is
informed, are carriers of the deadly Ebola virus. ‘The victims bleed helplessly
till they die. No one knows for sure how the virus jumps from bat to man; but a
good guess is that the virus is transmitted by the eating of the bat.’ Naipaul
ends the section with a prognostication that is almost Biblical:
‘So the darkening of Abidjan [capital of Ivory Coast] sky at dusk was not only part of the visual
drama of West Africa: it was like a plague waiting to fall on the men below.’
In the
first country he visits, Uganda, Naipaul talks about a chimpanzee sanctuary set
on one of the islands of Lake Victoria: forty two animals, he informs, whose
parents and animals had been killed and eaten by Africans, who are ‘great
relishers of what they call as bush meat’ and—Naipaulian acerbity, this—‘given
guns and left to themselves would easily eat their way through the continent’s
wildlife.’
Naipaul is
similarly unsparing when it comes to looking at (and presenting to the reader)
his own instincts and impulses; and they, too, at times, make uncomfortable
reading. In Gabon, Naipaul comes to know about the Pigmies, ‘the small
people’—‘the first inhabitants of the forest’—, from the local Africans,
although he never actually meets one.
After listening at length to Claudine, one of his guides in Gabon, this
is how Naipaul records his feelings:
‘Even with Claudine’s knowledge of the pigmy
ways, and her love for them, it was hard to arrive at a human understanding of
the pigmies, to see them as individuals. Perhaps they weren’t.’
This need
not appear as chilling (or racist) as it did to some reviewers. What Naipaul
seems to be saying here is that he found it very difficult to understand how it
might be to be a pigmy, so different (or alien) he found their ways from his.
He is acknowledging a deficiency. In any case, not all the Gabonese Africans
seem to have the love for the ‘first inhabitants of the forest’. Naipaul meets
a Gabonese tribal chief and traditional healer of the Fang tribe (appointed by
the Gabonese government). This man, who was baptized and confirmed, but decided
that ‘the traditional religion was strong in him’, tells Naipaul how he was
trained in the religious rituals of the tribe. This is what he says:
‘My grandfather had gone south on an old
walking road and he had captured two pigmies. He owned them. The pigmies have
the power and we keep them just like you keep pets. You can do anything you
like with your pet, but there is something in the pet that you don’t have. We
kept them and we pitied them. . .’
While the
main theme of these travels, as suggested in the title, is to understand—or try
to understand—the traditional African beliefs, there are two parallel streams
that run throughout the length of the book.
The first
is Naipaul’s affection towards animals, in particular domestic pets such as
cats and dogs. This is the only time the otherwise detached, at times almost
haughty, Naipaul comes closest to betraying his emotions. And Africa provides
him with unending supply of starving kittens and dogs with skin conditions.
Whenever possible Naipaul gives them milk or feeds them; on many occasions,
however, he is a helpless observer to their misery. It is only when he is describing the plight
of these animals that Naipaul’s prose appears to lose its cool, as in the
following paragraph:
‘The land is full of cruelty which is hard for
the visitor to bear. From the desert countries to the north long-horned cattle
are sent for slaughter here in big, ramshackle trucks, cargoes of misery that
bump along the patched and at times defective autoroutes to Abidjan, to the
extensive abattoir area near the docks. And there in trampled and vile black
earth these noble creatures, still with dignity, await their destiny in the
smell of death, with sometimes a calf, all alone, without a mother, finding
comfort of sort in sleep, a little brown circle on the dirty ground, together
with the beautiful goats and sheep assembled for killing. The ground around d
the abattoir goes on and on. When sights like these meet the eyes of the simple
people every day there can be no idea of humanity, no idea of grandeur.’
A tad over
the top, perhaps, towards the end, but heartfelt; it seems almost as if that
Naipaul reserves such empathy as he has for the animals and has nothing left
for the humans.
The second
stream is Naipaul’s anxieties about money. He comes across as a miser. In his
travels he visits a number of shrines, tombs, witchdoctors, and soothsayers in
different countries. And they all want money or gifts, which Naipaul is most
reluctant to give them. In almost every meeting with the medicine-men and
tribal chiefs he is inwardly calculating and agitating about how much it is
going to cost him, worried that he might be ripped off. And the funny thing is
he does not pay for anything on even a single occasion; he makes his African
guides pay the money every time. In one visit to a tribal chief in Ghana,
Naipaul is expected to present the chief with a bottle of schnapps (the only
alcoholic drink the chief is allowed to accept) which would then be offered as
libation to the ancestors. Naipaul does not take with him schnapps—which, you
think, wouldn’t have emptied his bank account—, and notes nonchalantly that it
was a good thing that his African guide had brought with him the liquor bottle.
I didn’t quite know what to make of this (other than that it fit the
description of Naipaul as skinflint in Paul Theroux’s memoir, Sir
Vidia’s Shadow). It is quite funny, though I am not sure that it is
intentional.
With a few
exceptions—Ghana and South Africa—Naipaul generally steers clear of the
political contexts of the countries he visits. I do not think it is an
oversight on part of the great man, and absence of political context does not
detract a jot from the enjoyment the reader derives from the book. The
Masque of Africa is an attempt to examine the cultural, traditional
beliefs of the African countries Naipaul visited and the extent to which these
beliefs, subterranean under the Christian and Muslim dogmas, guide the daily
lives of inhabitants; it is not a chronicle of the political upheavals in these
countries, which, in any case, are too many (and too frequent, in some cases)
to have been done justice to in this book.
Naipaul is
a keen and acute observer. Nothing escapes him. This is his strength, as in his
meetings with the former military leader of Ghana, Jerry Rawlings, and the
former wife of Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela. Naipaul is in his elements when
he describes these meetings. At other times, though, he strikes a slightly
shrill note in his descriptions of poverty and dirt (which seem to be
everywhere he goes); it tends to get a tad wearisome after a while. That is not
to say however that what he has written is untrue. In one of the countries he
visits Naipaul is appalled by what he sees: the roads are in disrepair; garbage
litters the sides of the road, uncollected; trim bungalows are replaced by
ugly, corrugated shacks— themselves in dilapidated states; and the green hills
he remembered so well have all but disappeared. He writes simply:
‘It seemed to me I was in a place where a
calamity had occurred.’
The country
is Uganda which saw its population, in the forty years since Naipaul first
visited it, explode from 5 million in the 1960s to 30 million in the first
decade of 21st century, despite decades of civil war and AIDS
epidemic, and which, lest we forget, was not without its own brand of racism
when, during the tyrannical reign of Idi Amin, it persecuted and ultimately
drove away tens of thousands of Asians who had lived peacefully in that country
for generations, for no other reason than they were of a different race.
Over the
years Naipaul has been accused of many things by his detractors: misanthropy,
misogyny, cruelty, racism and, following the publication of The
Masque of Africa, of Fascism (by Robert Harris who earns his living by
writing racy thrillers which, while they might be made into F grade Hollywood
films and fetch him a packet, would not require, it would be safe to assume, to
exercise more than 10% of the neurones of an averagely intelligent person). The
viciousness of the attacks on Naipaul has reached a higher decibel since he was
awarded the Nobel. I have to say that none from the usual list of accusations
thrown at Naipaul was evident to me in Masque of Africa, which—give or take
an odd loose sentence—is an honest attempt by a non-believer (ancient or modern
religions) to arrive at a humane understanding of the centuries-old African
beliefs.
The Masque of Africa is an outsider’s view of the
African countries he visits. The outsider does not claim to have special
knowledge of the African countries; he does not even claim to have special
affection for these countries; neither does he have any pre-conceptions; he is a
visitor who owes allegiance to no one and nothing save his artistic integrity.
He sees, he notes, and he tells what he sees. If that makes some of us
uncomfortable, that is of no concern to him.
And when
the observer is the greatest living prose writer of our times the result is a
dazzling spectacle of melancholic beauty.
