Note also that Naipaul's work directly and indirectly reflects aspects of the excruciating racial tension
within Trinidad and Tobago.
Gloria Emeagwali
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2010 4:08 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Naipaul's Latest Book on 'The Masque of Africa: Glimpse of African Belief'
Naipaul is irredeemable, a lost cause. The man cannot even cultivate and sustain personal relationships with his literary peers, crossing people left and right and telling them to "take it in the cheek like a man." He can't help himself in his role as a "Third World" advocate of Eucentric, racist universalism.
The man deserves more pity than engagement.
On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 12:10 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
naipaul is one of the great racist writers of our time. a bend in the river evokes every negative stereotype about africans imaginable; his cover? 1. he is "third world" 2.mobuto's reign, and before it, lumumba's, was regarded by naipaul's kind of readers and editors as uncivilized. uncivilized means non-british, non-european, savage etc etc
naipaul is the true exemplar of ox-cam british snobbism and racism toward africa, and the rest of the third world. really
ken harrow
At 11:36 AM 8/29/2010, you wrote:
----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Errol Harry <errolharry67@yahoo.com>
Sent: Sun, August 29, 2010 6:16:07 PM
Subject: Naipaul's latest book on Africa
The Masque of Africa by V S Naipaul: review
Sameer Rahim is puzzled by the ageing Nobel Prize winner’s punishing quest to expose Africa’s religious illusions
By Sameer Rahim
Published: 5:19PM BST 27 Aug 2010
Comments
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The Masque of Africa by V S NaipaulV S Naipaul’s father was once forced to sacrifice a goat to the Hindu goddess Kali. In June 1933, when Vidia was still a baby, Seepersad Naipaul had written an article in the Trinidad Guardian criticising Hindu farmers who ignored government regulations and inoculated their cattle with religious rites.
His angry opponents threatened him with a poisoning curse unless he appeased the goddess. He refused at first but soon relented: wearing trousers rather than the traditional loincloth (his small rebellion), he offered up a severed goat’s head on a brass plate.
In that Sunday’s paper he was all bluster: “Mr Naipaul greets you! No Poison last night†. But this “great humiliation†, as his son wrote in Finding the Centre (1984), destroyed his life. He lost his job and sunk into depression. According to Naipaul’s mother, “He looked in the mirror one day and couldn’t see himself. And he began to scream.â€
Over the course of his long writing career, V S Naipaul’s view of religion has moved – much like this story – from om the potentially comic to the outright sinister. His first published novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957), was a satire on a fake pundit. In his masterpiece A House for Mr Biswas (1961) the title character (based on Seepersad) is expelled from his training as a Hindu priest when he pollutes some sacred flowers with his excrement. His travel book on India, An Area of Darkness (1964), took a harsher view of Hinduism and the caste system and after 1970, when he first learnt about his father’s ritual humiliation (the family had kept it an absolute secret), his work took on an unforgiving tone.
Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998) blamed the problems in Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia and Pakistan exclusively on Islam. Third World peoples who refused to abandon their ancestral illusions for the civilised and secular values of the West – as Naipaul has so cconspicuously done – are, he believes, condemned to backwardness.
Now he has travelled to six countries – Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa – to discover the “œnature of African belief†. The Masque of Africa starts in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, where Naipaul immediately observes a conflict between the native religion, offering “only the world of the spirits and the ancestors†, and the foreign religions (Islam and Christianity) whose new places of worship on the city’s hills are like “an applied and contagious illness, curing nothing, giving no final answers… fighting wrong battles, narrowing the mind†. He doess not visit these mosques and churches; a view from the foothills is enough.
When Naipaul does visit somewhere his observations can be acute. At the shrine of Mutesa I of Buganda, the 19th-century ruler who had dealings with John Speke and Henry Stanley, he feels a “sense of wonder†. But nearby he notices a boy tormenting a small kitten; he protests but his guide assures him the boy is just playing. “I didn’t believe him,†Naipaul says. Back in the hotel, he discovers that nine men were sacrificed at the shrine during its construction.
For a brief moment he allowed himself to see through the eyes of the faithful, before widening his vision to examine what they chose not to see.Naipaul has always been able to spot a fraud, and the best writing in this book deals with native healers and fortune-tellers. In Uganda he enters a small office and spots a framed certificate on the wall: the witch doctor has an official licence so that “no believer need feel ashamed†. In Nigeria he teases a fortune-teller by asking whether or not his daughter will get married (Naipaul has no children). The man replies that she is cursed and that only a fee will release her. “But what he’s told me is good,†says a straight-faced Naipaul. “I don’t want the girl to get married.â€
He shows a touching sympathy for animals: tormented kittens are a running theme, along with mistreated horses and hunted bush animals (the forest is “like a free supermarket, open to everyone†). When he finds a house in Ghana with well-treated pets, he softens: “I began to be prejudiced in favour of the house.â€
But mostly Naipaul comes across here as tired and tetchy, complaining about being overcharged by his guides and the bad hotels (“the broken safe, the dusty refrigerator†). From his car window he sees children walking home from school in Uganda and comments, in what seems like a parody of Naipaulian pessimism, that “education and school uniforms, giving an illusion of possibility, was easy; much harder was the creation of a proper economy†. We learn that the “Nigerian mindset … resisted rationality†and that Chinese logging companies are motivated by a “hatred of the earth†.
The one humorous moment in the book is marred by self-pity and a predictable dig at the locals. On the way to see some ancestral bones in Gabon, his “nervy, frail†legs give way and he falls to the ground. His guide brings a wheelbarrow. “But it was an African job, heavily rusted, and not sturdy, sagging below my weight when, leaning back far too much, I tried unsuccessfully to sit in it.â€
It is puzzling why Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, at the age of 78, continues to punish himself with such travels. Perhaps, like his father, he is worried about what he sees when he looks in the mirror. Is he the Nobel Prize-winning sage who has written 30 acclaimed books over 50 years? Or is he a fraud, pretending to be a country gentleman in Wiltshire when his true home is among the wretched of the earth? He has seen through superstition and religion; he has exposed political idealism and racial nationalism. But his scepticism is so entrenched that his work is now cleansed of humour, imagination and human sympathy.The final line of The Masque of Africa claims that in post-apartheid South Africa “a resolution is not really possible until the people who wish to impose themselves on Africa violate some essential part of their being†. Naipaul’s imposing achievement has violated an essential part of his being. There is something deeply sad about watching him in the African forest, a wounded animal, looking for a final vindication of his own painful journey.
The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief by V S Naipaul
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Kenneth W. Harrow
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
harrow@msu.edu
517 803-8839
fax 517 353 3755
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