Book review: The Masque of Africa

Walt spent several hours, this weekend, reading The Masque of Africa, by V.S. Naipaul. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010). Not much of Naipaul's work since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature has appealed to me, but this latest book is an exception.

For the moment, Naipaul has left off writing philosophical novels and returned to the travel genre, which he does so well. He also returns to Africa, where he lived decades ago, and which is the site of one of his best books, A Bend in the River.

Although The Masque of Africa could be described as a travelogue of Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa, the book has a much larger narrative and purpose: to discover and describe "the nature of African belief".

The author looks at the influence of Christianity and Islam -- mercifully, he avoids the phrase "the mosque of Africa" -- and judges those foreign religions a thin veneer over the cults of animism, superstition and witchcraft which are still at the core of "modern" African society and culture.

Naipaul writes: "An unspoken aspect of my inquiry was the possibility of the subversion of old Africa by the ways of the outside world.... The older world of magaic felt fragile, but at the same time had an enduring quality. You felt that it would survive any calamity.

"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. To reach that beginning was the purpose of my book."

Although Naipaul comes across as increasingly tired and tetchy in his old age -- not unlike Walt -- he does a truly masterly job of showing why Third World peoples who refuse to abandon their ancestral illusions for the civilised values of the West are condemned to backwardness.