The Masque of Africa
Glimpses of African Belief
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- € 7,49
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- € 7,49
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'Compelling, insightful, often sombrely beautiful’ Sunday Telegraph
Moving beyond travelogue, V. S. Naipaul’s The Masque of Africa considers 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 African civilization. Beginning in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, Naipaul’s journey takes in Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and ends, as the country does, in South Africa.
Focusing upon the theme of belief – though sometimes the political or economical realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account – Naipaul examines the fragile but enduring quality of the old world of magic. To witness the ubiquity of such ancient ritual, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of this book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this elegiac spiritual return to a landscape he once inhabited in 1966, Nobel Prize winning author Naipaul (A Writer's People) spirals outward from the central African country of Uganda, to Nigeria, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Gabon, and concluding in South Africa, to unearth in six chapters a sense of African ancestral belief and practice. What he finds, in many cases, is a land of cruelty and depletion. In Kampala, Uganda, where he once was a writer-in-residence, Naipaul tours the 19th-century tombs of Kasubi, burial site of royal Buganda (tribal) leaders called kabaki, who were fierce and ruthless and provided a model for the later bloodthirsty dictators Idi Amin and Obote. Traditional African beliefs have no doctrine or script, and have been gradually superseded by foreign religions such as Christianity and Islam. Naipaul encounters many people who are torn in their religious choices, though they still hang on to the traditional pagan beliefs out of fear and awe. In turn he visits a Yoruban soothsayer; an Ashanti citadel in Kumasi, Ghana; the primeval forest of Gabon, now endangered by deforestation, which lends the pygmies and others their age-old spiritual philosophy. Ever fair-minded, soberly reflective, and conciliatory, Naipaul offers his sage observations in the hope that by learning more, we accept greater.
