The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief by V. S. Naipaul

The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief
By V. S. Naipaul
Alfred A. Knopf

For a nonbeliever, V.S. Naipaul spends a lot of time thinking about religion. It has given him the topic for two major works, Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998). Religion weaves through his other books, too, populated as they are by festivals, shrines, pilgrims, myths, and a broad range of human belief, from mystical to imperial to acquiescent.

In his latest book Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, returns to Africa (also a major force in his writing) to explore what he calls his “romantic idea of the earth religions.” Naipaul's interest in Africa is paleontological: African religions are living fossils for him, like coelacanths or crocodiles, threatened by the incursion of Islam and Christianity. In his words, “I felt they [animist religions] took us back to the beginning, a philosophical big bang, and I cherished them for that reason. I thought they had a kind of beauty.” While it’s no great surprise that his investigation somewhat tarnishes his romance, by examining religion in Africa he aims to shine a light on the whole two-thousand-year march of monotheism.

This is a crucial point that most reviews of the book have missed. The Masque of Africa is not really about Africa; it is about the bloody paths that the conquering world faiths have smashed through their pagan predecessors. This is also, not incidentally, a central theme of Among the Believers and Beyond Belief. Naipaul even uses the same literary technique—an engaging mix of portraits, set pieces, historical anecdotes, and landscapes—that he elevated and made his own in these earlier works.

One could make the critique that since Naipaul only treats Africa as a substitute for an inaccessible European antiquity (the animism of the Germanic tribes, the great trauma of the Roman conversion to Christianity), he is not really being fair to his subject. And, true, by about page 50 I realized that I was not learning much from him: not that he had nothing to teach me, but I was constantly on guard for the next slap. His disarming sympathy—and yes, he does take visible pains to be sympathetic—made me wince all the more when the blows became gratuitous, as in his snide remark that “Africans . . . given guns and left to themselves, would easily eat their way through the continent’s wildlife.”

This is Naipaul as cultural critic, picking out the ways that African culture has failed Africa. In Gabon, “the eating of bush meat [game] had become a cultural matter; it was not to be questioned.” In Kano, Nigeria, “the koranic way . . . made the streets of Kano what they were”: idle, covered in garbage, full of beggars and empty of future. His chapter on Ivory Coast is particularly quick and nasty; Naipaul’s Ivoirians are a wretched Lilliputian mob, incapable of grandeur, slowly scratching away at their one great possession, the forest. These are not glimpses of African belief, they are pot shots at it; and for Naipaul they read as automatic rather than insightful.

In other places Naipaul misses the full picture because he does not know where to look. Take his insistence that “oral literature . . . is a poor substitute for a written text that can be consulted down the centuries” and that “people without writing and books cannot remember beyond their grandparents or great-grandparents.” Here Naipaul is simply displaying his prejudices. There are any number of counterexamples: the epic genealogical traditions of the griots of West Africa and the multiple, interlocking poetic genres of the Nyiginya kingdom of Rwanda, to mention two. Given Naipaul’s interest in African narratives, these treasures of oral culture could have added significant background and texture. Instead, quite unnecessarily, he presumes African deficiency.

What rescues the book is its complex and sensitive portraits. There is Susan Kiguli, the “delicate” and tragic poet from Uganda; Adesina, the twice-converted Nigerian Muslim and self-made business executive who visits spiritual healers; Mobiet, the white American quester, expatriate, and eboga initiate; and others, who frequently represent themselves in their own words. While Naipaul pokes about his fair share of shrines and rituals, the book really exists for individuals and their stories. When he stays close to the personal level, he allows the simple dualistic abstractions of his cultural critique to stretch and tear. As he reveals in a welcome moment of understatement, “I knew that Adesina was complicated. I understood now that he was more complicated than I thought.”

In fact, for the most part Naipaul is curious and receptive. When he visits the Yoruba people’s sacred grove at Osun, Nigeria, where the annual river festival draws thousands of people from the African diaspora, the beauty of the forest and the pathos of the pilgrims’ homecoming take his breath away. And later, hypnotized by the sensuality of a Gabonese initiation ritual—“the great heat, the drumming, the shouts and shrieks, the low roof, the feeling of an encroaching darkness”—his writing becomes like a film of sweat in which one can see reflected tongues of fire. In these moments, despite his skepticism, he demonstrates an openness to religion—or at least the aesthetics of religious ritual—that professional atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens would do well to consider.

Yet on the whole, the anecdotes and interviews lack the furious energy of his earlier writing. It is not quite that Naipaul has mellowed with age; Alexandra Fuller's sly compliment in The Globe and Mail, that Naipaul at seventy-eight is “unapologetically comfortable as the perennially controversial guest at the world’s literary table,” is right on. But I found it hard to recognize the fiercely homeless wanderer of An Area of Darkness (1964) or the pulverizing critic of Among the Believers. Nor does he attempt the precision with which in his great novel A Bend in the River (1979) he ripped out the decaying heart of a postcolonial African disaster and dropped it onto the page. Here, in contrast, he pulls back and refuses to engage.

This pulling back is especially apparent in one of the book’s most telling scenes, his visit to a Nigerian babalawo, or diviner. Having narrowly escaped an expensive ritual that the babalawo had apparently tried to foist on him, Naipaul squeezes into the tiny yard: “In a corner, looking like something lavatorial and disagreeable, were the three shrines with the oracles the babalawo had made with his own hands. For the believer it would have been a high moment, being permitted to see these sacred things; but for me the moment came with a noticeable tickle in my nostrils: a touch of asthma on the way. I thought we should be looking for a way out.”

This “tickle” is noticeable throughout the book: a parade of distractions, whether bacterial or financial or just plain ill-tempered, that provide Naipaul a constant excuse to look for a “way out.” V. S. Naipaul will not be taken for a sucker; he escapes with his wallet intact. But the book could have used more “high moments,” more engaged attempts to imagine the ritual experience of the other. These moments are Naipaul’s dark matter, indirectly observable but always out of sight. That he acknowledges them is both affecting, because so honest, and disappointing, because so limited.