The Masque of Africa

Oct 27, 2010 Editorial

Johann Hari, from Slate, offers a rather dispassionate view of the premises of VS Naipaul’s latest book: “The Masque of Africa”.
“There is a great thudding taboo in any discussion of Africa. Western journalists and aid workers see it everywhere, yet it is nowhere in our coverage back home. We don’t want to talk about it.
We don’t know how to. We smother it in silence, even though it is one of the most vivid and vibrant and violent parts of African life. We are afraid—of being misunderstood, or of sounding like our own ugliest ancestors. The suppressed topic? The African belief in spirits and spells and ancestors and black magic.
These are not trivial side-beliefs, like vague fears of black cats crossing your path. They are at the core of many Africans’ understanding of themselves and the world. I have stood in a blood-splattered house in Tanzania where an old woman had just been beaten to death for being a “witch” who cast spells on her neighbours.
Where do these beliefs come from? What do so many Africans get out of them? Can they be changed? These are questions that are asked in Africa all the time, but we are deaf to the conversation. It’s not hard to see why.
The imperial rape and pillage of Africa was “justified” by claiming Africans were “primitive” and “backward” people sunk in a morass of voodoo, who had to be “civilized” in blood and Christianity.
Just as there are legitimate and necessary criticisms of Israel but nobody wants to hear them from Germany, any legitimate and necessary criticism of the problems with Africa’s indigenous beliefs will never be welcome from Europeans or their descendants. And yet there they are, ongoing and alive, waiting to be discussed. Must we ignore it?
At first glance, the worst possible person to charge into this landmine-strewn valley of taboos is V.S. Naipaul. And yet
“The Masque of Africa” is not the jeer I feared it would be. Naipaul starts with this premise: “I had a romantic idea of the [African] earth religions. I felt they took us back to the beginning, a philosophical big bang, and I cherished them for that reason. … The past here still lived.”
In most indigenous African religions, “God” is pretty much inaccessible to humans. But they believe every human is surrounded by a swirl of spirits—of the dead, of the living who can temporarily leave their bodies, of nature—that are constantly at work.
Many of these spirits will take on physical representations at key moments, from trees to carved idols to animals. They can protect and heal, or they can smite and curse.
Life is a constant exhausting process of wooing the spirits and warding them off. They can be communicated with directly, but it is easier to talk through the local soothsayers and witch doctors.
It’s hard enough to accept the emptiness and finality of death in a society like ours, where it is rare and predictable and usually comes after a long life.
In places where death is so random, so frequent, and scythes through children more frequently than the old, the idea that the dead live on all around us—that they can hear us and still need us—meets an obvious and aching need. These beliefs are often the best story people can tell to make the world seem bearable again. It’s a way of regaining a sense of control amid chaos.
Yet along with this obvious comfort there is what Naipaul—and so many Africans—call “the dark side.” Once you cede power to an invisible force for which there is no evidence—whether it’s Jesus or Allah or a dead child—you cede power to other human beings who can then claim to use those invisible forces against you. It licenses charlatanry.
Soothsayers demand money for their “powers,” like the one who tells Naipaul that there are curses preventing his daughter (Naipaul doesn’t have one) from getting married and if he wants them lifted he’ll have to pay.”
The “Masque of Africa” is worth a read.

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