Why had the foreign-revealed religions wrought such havoc with Africa belief? These foreign religions had a difficult theology; I didn’t think it would have been easy, starting from scratch, to put it across to someone here.
I asked Prince Kassim. He was a direct descendant of Mutesa, but on the Islamic side, a family division that reflected Mutesa’s early half-conversion to Islam. The prince said I was wrong.
Both Christianity and Islam would have been attractive to Africans for a simple reason. They both offered an afterlife; gave people a vision of themselves living on after death. African religion, on the other hand, was more airy, offering only the world of spirits, and the ancestors.
That is V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidadian author and Nobel laureate, in The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief.
As one would expect, the book is beautifully written. I wish I had his talent for spare prose. It’s the substance of the prose, however, that troubles me.
Naipaul writes travelogues of a sort. Each follows an intellectual theme, alongside the usual travel tales and foibles. For his African occasion, Naipaul explores the intermingling of Africa’s traditional and foreign systems of belief. He starts in Uganda, where he spent 9 months in the 1960s, later circling round the continent, moving west then south.
Color me surprised. And disappointed. Hardly a page turns without a distasteful reference to garbage on the streets, squalid housing, or scoundrels fleecing him for cash. The picture he paints is that of a petty and ruined people. Romanticized are the traditional and pre-modern past, the natural wilderness, and the early glories of post-independence Africa.
Yes, the capitals of Uganda and Nigeria and others are more crowded and (in some respects) squalid than they were five decades ago. But I didn’t recognize his portrait of the continent. I actually see a return to the hopefulness of the 1960s after several decades of pessimism.
Also, I have never been fleeced for cash like Naipaul, who seems to nervously throw away dollars and pounds at the slightest provocation, reinforcing (even enlarging) a needless practice, one usually performed by the least savvy tourists. I expected a more broad-minded and sophisticated writer. Instead I found a prim and fussy traveler who retreats to Africa’s most obscenely expensive hotels at night.
It’s fashionable nowadays to be the Africa booster: Africa on the rise! Africa emerging! Africa empowered! That too is a book I’d deplore. But insight, originality, and balance would be nice. Naipaul offers these qualities, but rarely.
Other, superior reader recommendations?
6 Responses
Hi evbdy, i’m a senegalese student at the english dpt Cheikh Anta Diop University Dakar.
I need a helping hand. I have to write a M.A dissertation on Africa through Western Perceptions. I’m specialised on african literature, but i’ve got some troubles to find a supervisor on it, their lists were ever full. So I was obliged to mingle a british and an african one as my supervisor is specialised on british lit. my researches led me to some novels like A good man in africa William Boyd, Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh, V S Naipaul’s a Bend in the River… So if you know some of this framework, it’ll be great, and any suggestions for fields of researches, or critics…
Curious. Shiva Naipaul’s 78 book ‘Black and White’ in
http://aidthoughts.org/?p=1022#more-1022
“listed a very personal suggestion of resources that may contribute to a richer understanding of development “
that is Shiva Naipaul, the now-deceased younger brother of V.S. Naipaul, and the book is North of South, not Black and White.
Both Naipaul’s can be obscenely cynical, but Shiva was not as brutally dismissive or conservative as VS. Shiva’s book is relentlessly critical, but of all parties involved in post-colonial Africa.
Naipaul is senile…a philandering, prostitute-loving excuse for a writer elevated by the decadent decrepit culture of “great britain.” His ramblings are less likely to have seen the light of day in a more questioning immigrant-society such as the United States. His depictions of Africa are as uninformed as his choice of bedmates. Please devote your blog space to worthier things than the lowlife wretch that is V.S.Naipaul who glorifies the denigration of other cultures that he has no idea about. Is there a more religously backward country than where Naipaul’s ancestors hail from?
Yes, I find Naipaul appalling as a human being. Selfishness and vanity shine out of his work. I believe that his most famous work, ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ was an edited version of his father’s manuscript.
It’s hard for me to praise the quality of writing when the character of the author is so self-serving. So, I’m not surprised by your comments on ‘The Masque of Africa’.
You should never be surprised at Naipaul. This is a man who famously wrote “History is built around creation and achievement, and nothing was created in the West Indies.” (Thankfully, his fellow Nobel Laureate–and West Indian–Derek Walcott provided a pointed response: “Nothing will always be created in the West Indies because whatever will come out of here is like nothing one has ever seen before.”)
The man is just so incredibly problematic. From his apologies for colonialism (see “Our Universal Civilization”) to his detest of Islam (see “Beyond Belief”) to his statement upon arrival at Oxford (at the age of 18) that “gone are the days of the
aristocrats. Nearly everyone comes to Oxford on a state grant. The standard
of the place naturally goes down” (from Eagleton’s “A Mind So Fine”), this is hardly someone you would wish to give anyone a guided tour of Africa.
I teach West Indian and Postcolonial lit. Teaching V.S. Naipaul is always a little difficult. :)