{"product_id":"the-masque-of-africa-isbn-9780307454997","title":"The Masque of Africa","description":"\u003cb\u003eA remarkable work of African reportage by the Nobel Prize-winning author that surveys 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 civilization. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Neither a romantic’s nor an anthropologist’s tale. It is a collection of voices that make sense only in relation to one another....[Naipaul’s is a] brilliant and elastic mind.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom V. S. Naipaul: “For my travel books I travel on a theme. And the theme of \u003ci\u003eThe Masque of Africa \u003c\/i\u003eis African belief. I begin in Uganda, at the center of the continent, do Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and end at the bottom of the continent, in South Africa. My theme is belief, not political or economical life; and yet at the bottom of the continent the political realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Perhaps an unspoken aspect of my inquiry was the possibility of the subversion of old Africa by the ways of the outside world. The theme held until I got to the South, when the clash of the two ways of thinking and believing became far too one-sided. The skyscrapers of Johannesburg didn’t rest on sand. The older world of magic felt fragile, but at the same time had an enduring quality. You felt that it would survive any calamity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I had expected that over the great size of Africa the practices of magic would significantly vary. But they didn’t. The diviners everywhere wanted to ‘throw the bones’ to read the future, and the idea of ‘energy’ remained a constant, to be tapped into by the ritual sacrifice of body parts. In South Africa body parts, mainly of animals, but also of men and women, made a mixture of ‘battle medicine.’ To witness this, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“To reach that beginning was the purpose of my book.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Masque of Africa\u003c\/i\u003e is a masterly achievement by one of the world’s keenest observers and one of its greatest writers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eA\u003ci\u003e New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e Editor’s Choice\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Engaging.... Naipaul’s latest African journey is eyewitness reporting at its best.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Beautiful and humane.... The idea that underpins it is so basic that it achieves a kind of majesty.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eHarper’s Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Neither a romantic’s nor an anthropologist’s tale. It is a collection of voices that make sense only in relation to one another.... What’s important is what’s being said.... [Naipaul’s is a] brilliant and elastic mind.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“With extraordinary sensitivity, Naipaul registers the beauty of [African] traditions but also captures their cruelty.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“One of Naipaul’s most stirring books.... [He] combines the objectivity of a disaster photographer and an understanding of history.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Independent\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Engaging work.... Naipaul’s prose remains smooth, subtle, often silvery.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Kirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Ever fair-minded, soberly reflective and conciliatory, Naipaul offers his sage observations in the hope that by learning more, we accept greater.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Publishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A sharply written and engrossing exploration.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Library Journal\u003c\/i\u003eV.S. NAIPAUL was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e His novels include \u003ci\u003eA House for Mr Biswas\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Mimic Men\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eGuerrillas\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eA Bend in the River\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Enigma of Arrival\u003c\/i\u003e. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for \u003ci\u003eIn a Free State\u003c\/i\u003e. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include \u003ci\u003eAmong the Believers\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBeyond Belief\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Masque of Africa\u003c\/i\u003e, and a trio of books about India: \u003ci\u003eAn Area of Darkness\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eIndia: A Wounded Civilization\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eIndia: A Million Mutinies Now\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In 1990, V.S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lived with his wife Nadira and cat Augustus in Wiltshire, and died in 2018.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Tomb at Kasubi\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI spent eight to nine months  in East Africa in 1966. A month in Tanzania; six weeks or so in the  Kenya Highlands; the rest of the time in Uganda. Some years later I even  used a version of Uganda in a piece of fiction; you can do that only  when you feel you have a fair idea of a place, or an idea sufficient for  your needs. Forty-two years after that first visit I went back to  Uganda. I was hoping to get started there on this book about the nature  of African belief, and I thought it would be better to ease myself into  my subject in a country I knew or half knew. But I found the place  eluding me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI had gone to Uganda in 1966 to be a writer in  residence at Makerere University in Kampala, the capital. I lived in a  little grey bungalow on the campus, which was spacious and open and  well-tended, with asphalted roads with kerbstones, and watchmen at the  barred entrance. My allowance (provided by an American foundation) was  enough to give me a driver and a cook. My duties weren’t too well  defined, and I was living more or less privately, absorbed in a book I  had brought with me, working hard on it every day, and paying less  attention to Africa and the students at Makerere than I should have  done. When I wanted some relief from the book and the campus, I would  drive the fifteen or so miles to Entebbe, where the airport was and  where, on the edge of Lake Victoria, which was very grand, the largest  lake in Africa, there was also (as there was in other British colonial  towns) a Botanical Garden, pleasant to walk in. Sometimes (a reminder of  the wildness by which we were surrounded, but from which we were  protected) the ground of the Garden was flooded in parts by water from  the Lake seeping through.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe drive from Kampala to Entebbe was a  drive through country; that was part of its restfulness in 1966. It was  different now. You could see from the air, as the plane landed, how  Entebbe itself had grown, with more than a scattering of villages or  settlements far and wide on the damp green ground below the heavy grey  clouds of the rainy season; and you understood that what was once bush  in an unimportant area of a small colony had become valuable building  land. The shiny new corrugated-iron roofs gave you the feeling that in  spite of the bad recent past, forty years as bad as anything in  Africa—murderous tyranny followed by war and little wars—there might be a  money frenzy down there now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe drive to the capital was no  longer a drive through country. Once you got past the old administrative  and residential buildings of colonial Entebbe, still somehow surviving  (red corrugated-iron roofs and white-painted bargeboards still in good  order), you found yourself in an improvised semi-urban development,  flimsy-looking, where many of the buildings that had been put up  (groceries, garages, flats) seemed only waiting to be pulled down, and  in the meantime were bright, and repetitive, with painted walls  advertising mobile phones.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was like that all the way to the  capital. There was no view at some stage of the city and the green hills  for which Kampala used to be famous. All those hills were now built  over; and many of the spaces between the hills, the dips, were seemingly  floored over with the old corrugated iron of poor dwellings. But with  all these dwellings there had come money and cars and, for people who  didn’t have the money, the \u003ci\u003eboda-bodas\u003c\/i\u003e, the bicycles and motorbikes that  for a small sum offered you a fast pillion-ride through the stalled  traffic, a pillion-ride which in colonial days might have been illegal.  The roads couldn’t deal with the traffic; even in this rainy season the  roads were dusty, scuffed down beyond the asphalt to the fertile red  earth of Uganda. I couldn’t recognise this Kampala, and even at this  early stage it seemed to me that I was in a place where a calamity had  occurred.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLater I got the figures for population. They told the  story. In 1966 there were about five million people in Uganda. Now—in  spite of the rule between 1971 and 1979 of Idi Amin (who was said to  have killed 150,000) and the comparable rule between 1981 and 1985 of  the feral Milton Obote, who liked his hair to slope up high from the  parting, in a version of the style known here as the English style; in  spite of those two, and all the subsequent little wars, still going on  after forty years (a million and a half people said to be displaced in  the north); and in spite of the AIDS epidemic—there were between thirty  and thirty-four million people in Uganda. As though Nature, going  against logic, wished to outdo itself, to make up for the blood Uganda  had lost and didn’t want the little country and its great suffering to  fade away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was a mosque or church at the top of every hill,  and major ecclesiastical buildings everywhere else. All the Christian  denominations were represented. And in the over-built-up poorer areas  there were simpler “born-again” Christian structures, sometimes  fancifully named, with signboards: as though religion here was like a  business that met a desperate consumer need at all levels. There were  competing mosques of various sorts, Sunni, Shia, Ismaili; the Ismaili  community, considered heretical by some, was powerful in East Africa.  There was even a mosque and a school of the Ahmadiya sect, which  honoured a nineteenth-century Indian-born prophet of Islam and was not  accepted by all Muslims. To add to the mix, Brother Leader Ghaddafi of  Libya was due in a few days, with his stylish clothes and dark glasses,  and with his famous female bodyguard (in addition to his two hundred  security men), to open a very big Libyan mosque on a prominent hill site  in old Kampala. In the commercial area of the town there were two  newish Indian stone temples near the Indian places of business. The  Indians had been invited back after their expulsion by Amin; and they  had come back to an ambiguous welcome: a local paper was wondering  whether they had been compensated twice, and asking its readers to  comment. So the red flags flew on the stone temples, to say that the  temples were in use.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUntil the 1840s Uganda had been isolated,  living with itself. Then Arab traders had arrived from the east. They  wanted slaves and ivory; in return they gave cheap guns and what in  effect were toys. The Kabaka Sunna, known for his great cruelty, had  welcomed the Arabs. He liked their toys. He especially liked the  mirrors; he had never seen his face before, and couldn’t get over it. It  was Sunna’s son and successor, Mutesa, who in 1861-2 met and  entertained and for some months frustrated the explorer John Hanning  Speke, who was within days of discovering the source of the Nile.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMutesa  was only twenty-five, almost as cruel as his father, but at the same  time outward-looking, a man of intuition and intelligence. He liked the  guns he got from Speke; he liked the compass and other instruments he  saw Speke using. But Mutesa’s Baganda people, with their gift for social  organisation, their military discipline, and their elaborate court  ritual, evolved over some centuries, had a civilisation of their own.  They built roads as straight as Roman roads; they had a high idea of  sanitation; they had a fleet on Lake Victoria, with an admiral and naval  techniques of their own, and they could launch invasions of Busoga  across the Nile. They worked iron and made their own spears and knives;  they knew how to make bark-cloth and were beautiful builders of grass  houses—with roofs as neatly trimmed as though by a London tailor, Speke  thought. Knowing that his people could do all these things, Mutesa  arrived, quite marvellously, at the idea that the true difference  between himself and Speke, very much a Victorian Christian, always ready  to preach to the heathen, was philosophical and religious. Mutesa  turned against Islam, which he had partly adopted; he said the Arabs  were liars; and thirteen years later, when he met the explorer H. M.  Stanley, he asked his help in getting English missionaries to come to  Uganda.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fruit of that decision of a hundred and thirty years  before could now be seen in Kampala. Foreign religion, to go by the  competing ecclesiastical buildings on the hilltops, was like an applied  and contagious illness, curing nothing, giving no final answers, keeping  everyone in a state of nerves, fighting wrong battles, narrowing the  mind. And it was possible to wonder whether Mutesa himself, if he could  come back, mightn’t have thought that he had made a mistake, and that  Africa, left to itself in this matter, might have arrived at its own  more valuable synthesis of old and new.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhy had the  foreign-revealed religions wrought such havoc with African 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI  thought I should go looking for my old bungalow. I had planted a tulip  tree (bought at the Entebbe Botanical Garden) in the garden, and at the  back of my head at the time was the idea that for one reason or another I  might come back to Kampala one day and it might be good then to see how  the tree had done. But the Makerere campus was not recognisable. It  seemed to me that it had become part of the crowded dusty town. A letter  in the local paper saying that university fences had been knocked down  and not replaced appeared to confirm what I felt. But then I heard from a  lecturer that in spite of the up-and-down history of the place (a  vice-chancellor killed in the Idi Amin time, and other senior people  jailed and beaten up) certain records, including staff housing, were  intact. It was stated there that in 1966 I had lived at 80 Kasubi View.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  name of the road rang a bell, but I wasn’t sure about the number; and  when I was taken to the bungalow, which was ragged with decay, I felt I  hadn’t lived there at all. I think that the house might have been  selected for me because a big tree in the garden had been cut down a  while before and the stump remained. I was taken to look at the stump,  but I didn’t know what a tulip-tree stump would look like, and no one in  my party knew either. But the setting was wrong. My memory of my  bungalow and garden was a memory of openness. This was dark and  enclosed. The ground fell away at the side, and there was a moraine of  garbage where the ground fell away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was trouble about  garbage in Makerere; it didn’t seem to be collected regularly. Here and  there on the busy paths or walkways marabout storks, undisturbed by the  passage of students, were pecking with their long beaks at broken  bundles of garbage. (Speke calls these birds adjutants, and with their  big wings folded and their long, thin, yellow legs they did have an  official appearance, long-coated and hunched and assessing.) These  magnificent birds had become scavengers here, and the garbage they fed  on seemed to discolour and deform their faces, giving them ugly, pendent  growths. They had now to live with their deformities, for which Nature  was not responsible. It was sad to see, and sad, too, for the students:  they were crowded together in mildewed halls and dormitories hung with  sagging lines of laundry; and, outside, they lived helplessly amid  garbage. It would have gone against their instinct. Speke, a hundred and  forty years before, wrote with admiration of the Ugandans’ concern for  sanitation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt seemed here that everything was working against  the university and the idea of learning. And, again, figures told the  story. In 1966 there were about four thousand students. Now there were  thirty thousand. The main road to where in the old days I remembered a  barred entrance was like a busy shopping street. Choked Kampala lay just  outside.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere were at least two murders (by outsiders of  outsiders) in the Makerere campus while I was in Kampala. In the first  incident a young Pakistani car salesman was lured to the campus by bogus  customers who said they wanted a trial drive. That would have seemed  safe enough to anyone, but as soon as the car was in the campus the  salesman was garrotted by a man sitting in the back, and knifed in the  neck until he died. In the second incident a security guard, of all  people, was killed in the early morning as he tried to rob a \u003ci\u003eboda-boda\u003c\/i\u003e passenger.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302367711461,"sku":"NP9780307454997","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307454997.jpg?v=1767740434","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-masque-of-africa-isbn-9780307454997","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}