Greg's Reviews > The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief

As I read the various negative reviews this book has received, I can’t help but reach the conclusion that most of these readers/writers had a specific agenda or penchant to criticize and vilify Naipaul—indeed, I question, by some of the comments, if they had read this book in its entirety at all. The subtitle, Glimpses of Belief, refer less specifically on religion than on cultural beliefs which often have their roots in religious history and practice.

It is important to distinguish what this book is and isn’t. It is a personal, detailed treatise on travel written by a man with strong views and a drive to see beyond what the average tourist does, and a curiosity that few are able to envision or realize. Anyone who has traveled should know that they come across a small slice of another culture or geography. And they usually have hours, or, if they are lucky, days to experience it. Naipaul takes weeks in far-flung parts of the globe that are inaccessible—mostly because of time and finances—to most of us. These writings are not comprehensive histories. They are not ethnographic studies. They give us glimpses of countries largely unfamiliar to us. Naipaul sees them, as virtually all of us do, through the spectrum of the experiences and biases that have accumulated over a lifetime. I have read just about all of Naipaul’s writings. I find his prose to be as profound and complex as anything in the English language. He has strong opinions grounded in a unique life and point-of-view. I therefore had an idea of what to expect.

The five essays focus on Uganda—Naipaul’s first visit after more than 40 years when he was a fellow at the university (and the setting for his classic novel A Bend in the River); Nigeria—he juxtaposes the Christian/indigenous religious culture of the south with the Islamic in the north; Ghana—his contact with various elites provides opportunities to consider its big picture; the Ivory Coast—where, after 26 years, he revisits many of the places described in the essay The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro (which can be found in the collection The Writer and the World); Gabon—about the primal role the forest and how intrusions into it impact various cultural groups; and South Africa—where beliefs, culture and identity cannot escape the hold of history. These essays are respecting of their subjects and insightful. I’m still not sure what the critics of this book are writing about.

A rare mistake can be found in this book. As Naipaul describes his meeting with a Nigerian babalawo—translated variously as a witchdoctor, “soothsayer”, “herbalist”, or “magician”—he writes that the crowding of the small room where they met “became like the ship’s cabin in Room Service by the Marx Brothers, endlessly receiving new people”. He got the movie with this scene wrong. It was A Night at the Opera. But it is comforting and humanizing to learn that Naipaul watched—and I’m sure laughed heartily—at least two Marx Brothers movies. He is not the person who his pre-conceived critics would rather distort. And this book is a valuable contribution to his canon.