V. S. Naipaul came from a remote corner of the earth, a literary abyss, and captured the attention of the world. He wrote a couple of novels – The Mystic Masseur (1957) and Miguel Street (1959) – focusing on his early years in Trinidad. If he had carried on in that vein, he could have become an exemplary tragic-comic storyteller like R K Narayan. Instead he resolved to make the world his stage and strode on it like a colossus, culminating in his Nobel Prize in 2001.
I have read his India trilogy – An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), and India: A Million Mutinies Now(1990) – and was struck by his love-hate relationship with India. In his recent book The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010), he shines once again.
In this book, Naipaul visits several countries in Africa – such as Uganda, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon, South Africa – and narrates his experiences there and the worldview he garners from the people he talked to.
The tragedy of Africa is that it never developed a written script. So there is recorded history only from the 1800s (primarily due to the works of European explorers and missionaries) and all that passed before dissolved into prehistory. What is remembered are the legends that have been transmitted through generations via the oral traditions. For the traditional Africans, the gods are remote and inaccessible. So they worship their ancestors whose spirits are said to walk upon the earth. They carry out varied animal and human sacrifices to pacify and seek favours from the spirits.
As a Zulu traditionalist justifies African rituals: “When we slaughter a goat we have to stab it in the side many times to get the bad omen to go. Look at my body. It is full of scars. It is not child abuse. A witchdoctor came and cut me with a razor blade and then rubbed and filled the cut with the ashes of a snake. It is our way. And I must, as a traditional man, cut or slaughter a cow in our way. Why do you want the animals to be slaughtered in another way which you think is more humane? First of all, the animal which is to be sacrificed belongs to the ancestor, and so it has to alert the ancestor by crying out loud. I am sick of black people censoring or condemning our culture. They are doing it because they are so diluted. They do not know who they are and what the rituals mean.”
Yet Naipaul does not judge. He does not take a position on African beliefs. As he warns the reader towards the end, people who wish to reform Africa and “people who wish to impose themselves on Africa” should be ready to “violate some essential part of their being”.
I have read his India trilogy – An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), and India: A Million Mutinies Now(1990) – and was struck by his love-hate relationship with India. In his recent book The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010), he shines once again.
In this book, Naipaul visits several countries in Africa – such as Uganda, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon, South Africa – and narrates his experiences there and the worldview he garners from the people he talked to.
The tragedy of Africa is that it never developed a written script. So there is recorded history only from the 1800s (primarily due to the works of European explorers and missionaries) and all that passed before dissolved into prehistory. What is remembered are the legends that have been transmitted through generations via the oral traditions. For the traditional Africans, the gods are remote and inaccessible. So they worship their ancestors whose spirits are said to walk upon the earth. They carry out varied animal and human sacrifices to pacify and seek favours from the spirits.
As a Zulu traditionalist justifies African rituals: “When we slaughter a goat we have to stab it in the side many times to get the bad omen to go. Look at my body. It is full of scars. It is not child abuse. A witchdoctor came and cut me with a razor blade and then rubbed and filled the cut with the ashes of a snake. It is our way. And I must, as a traditional man, cut or slaughter a cow in our way. Why do you want the animals to be slaughtered in another way which you think is more humane? First of all, the animal which is to be sacrificed belongs to the ancestor, and so it has to alert the ancestor by crying out loud. I am sick of black people censoring or condemning our culture. They are doing it because they are so diluted. They do not know who they are and what the rituals mean.”
Yet Naipaul does not judge. He does not take a position on African beliefs. As he warns the reader towards the end, people who wish to reform Africa and “people who wish to impose themselves on Africa” should be ready to “violate some essential part of their being”.
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