When Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy said in its citation: "Naipaul is [Joseph] Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished."
In more ways than one, Naipaul is the self-acknowledged post-colonial successor to Conrad, although it is difficult to fathom whether such a period of literary history exists in Naipaul's lexicon. But while Conrad attempts to dissect the moral and cultural paradigm of the others — the vanquished — and captures the inherent clash of values and belief systems in such tomes as Heart of Darkness, the much-reviled and much-respected Naipaul has doggedly refused to toe the politically-correct line throughout his long and controversial career.
It therefore comes as no surprise that his latest non-fiction, The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, is a vindication of everything Naipaul. It is a journey of cultural discovery that takes him from Uganda — where he briefly lived in the 1960s — to Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Gabon and finally South Africa, where he meets Winnie Mandela, who asserts: "I am defined by my culture … I know that I am an African and we know what to do from our grandmothers. The advent of European culture has affected our people but our men still go to initiation schools."
The book, we are told, aims "to judge the effects of belief [in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history] upon the progress of civilisation". It begins with Naipaul's visit to Uganda, where he traces the long genealogy of the kabaka (king) and narrates at length Buganda traditions, rituals and grim tales of valour, intrigue and fear. One kabaka in waiting, for instance, had 30 brothers who had to be gotten rid of for him to be crowned the king, though tradition demanded that blood of princes could not be spilt.
Gory tales of rituals
This difficult task, Naipaul writes, was achieved by wrapping the brothers, possibly in reed mats, and burning them in fires. The terrible beauty of rituals and traditions is tempered by Naipaul's nostalgia for his old bungalow in Kampala where he lived in the 1960s and by bird's-eye historical perspective from John Hanning Speke, a 19th century officer with the British Indian Army who explored Africa in three tranches, and Welsh journalist and explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley, whose annals of death and destruction in Congo inspired Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
But this leitmotif of history that runs through the book — of Speke and Stanley — begins to read more like an invocation of the old colonial "heart of darkness" cliché. What complicates matters is that there is hardly any validation or interpretation of the intriguing rituals, cultural practices and cruelty that Naipaul describes so brilliantly. Lacking any other source of verification, the descriptions come across as an interesting initiation into the world of African belief but not much beyond that. Naipaul has often reiterated that his duty as a writer is "to look and to look again, to relook and rethink". But that vigour of objective observation and questioning the face value of esoteric rituals and sacrificial practices are missing. And like his experience of being conned at the Lagos airport despite his vigilant efforts, doubts crop up over whether there is a blurring line of fact and fiction in the stuff that Naipaul describes.
What Naipaul captures more succinctly is the undertone of cultural tension as a continent attempts to move beyond what he calls "the beginning of things".
Early on in the book, we get a glimpse of that strain when Naipaul meets Susan, a Ugandan poet and teacher. "Though the name was given her by her father, she felt a love-hate for the name Susan. ‘I feel that it is so much part of the colonial experience, which was not pleasant. When a person or race comes and imposes on you, it takes away everything and it is a vicious thing to do. Much as I think the West and modernity is a good thing, it did take away our culture and civilisation and even if it is gentle it does make us doubt our roots.'"
Masque of Africa is a stimulating read for those uninitiated on the continent and its culture that appears less homogenous than is usually perceived. But Naipaul's observations of brutal honesty and wry sense of humour are also replete with sneer and sarcasm and you begin to wonder whether the subtext of the narrative is about belief or disbelief. His cultural discovery of Uganda wraps up with the following observation: "The light and the heat cast a gloomy clarity on what we were driving through: small houses, small fields, small people, and it seemed that nothing more uplifting was being offered to the children we could see on the road. Uganda was Uganda." And in Nigeria, when an electric fan is plugged in, "to my surprise it began to work, whirring horizontally above us".
Is this a great travelogue or a collection of interesting anecdotes or an anthropological summary of civilisation? Although Naipaul would like to claim the Masque of Africa as a travel book and beyond, it is difficult — and perhaps unnecessary — to pigeonhole it into a particular genre. But his patronising tone for a homage to African belief and culture makes you wonder whether the journey was worth it at all.
