Read Online The Masque of Africa by V.S. Naipaul - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: V.S. Naipaul
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was a drought, or it was prolonged,all the elders got together and made sacrifices, and it would rain while they were there at it. My grandmother told me this. But the missionaries called it devil worship. Culture does not die—today it is called witchcraft. My grandmother produced twins who died. They had to be buried in a special way, in hollow pots, and a shed had to be built over the grave, to protect and shade them. Every year my grandmother went there, to tend the shed, feed the grave, and sing and dance there. When she became a Pentecostal she had to stop that, as it was not allowed. She had to remove the shed, and she was so afraid that the twins would come and kill her living children. I talk to myself so as not to get confused. To me it’s all about belief and what treats you well. In traditional religion it was not about money. It was a communal spirit and people came together for a common cause like the drought.”
And gradually, from the tragedies the newspapers report, and from conversations with good people, the visitor arrives at the unsettling idea of a poor country still vulnerable—in its people, living on their nerves, and even in its landscape, which might be despoiled—after forty years of civil conflict, still waiting for an upheaval which may solve nothing.
10
I HADN’T thought in 1966 of going to look for the source of the Nile. No one among the people I knew talked of that. They talked about the game parks and fishing in the western lakes; they talked about the politics of the country; they talked about their colleagues; they talked about doing long drives. I hadn’t myself read Speke at that time, and so I hadn’t been touched by the romance of the great river, though we crossed the river at Jinja on our way to Nairobi, a regular outing, and crossed it again when we drove back to Kampala. In Stanley I read that “jinja” meant the stones, the falls, which occurred just after Lake Victoria poured into the Nile.
And now I was to see that this pouring into the Nile, seen from the Busoga side, was one of the majestic things in Nature: a great smooth sheet of water of immense force, not muddy like the Congo or the Mississippi, but fresh-looking, grey-green, dotted with mysterious small green islands, and between high green banks, dividing and coming to life over the stones. Speke, when he first saw it, the object of his dreams, sat on the bank on the Buganda side and “saw the day out” considering the play of water. It has that effect still, of encouraging the visitor simply to look, sending the mind back over the centuries, perhaps even over the millennia, when what we see now already existed (though a speeded-up camera would show islands and vegetation disappearing and reappearing); and sending the mind also on an unimaginable four-thousand-mile journey north to the Mediterranean.
Speke saw thousands of “passenger fish” flying at the stones, and many rhinoceros and crocodiles in the river. They are not there now. Speke was himself a great killer with the gun, with a jaunty Victorian sporting vocabulary to match; and many thousands of sportsmen would have followed where he led. Even at that first sight of the stones, while his master was content to sit and stare, Speke’s well-trained assistant, Bombay, shot and killed a sleeping crocodile.
In the next century a dam was built at Jinja. River dams alter river life and alter the aspect of things; and what we see now at the stones wouldn’t be quite what Speke saw. Another dam is planned for lower down the river; when that is done the visitor would no longer see what we see now.
O N ONE of the islands of Lake Victoria a world wildlife or conservation body has set up a small chimpanzee sanctuary—forty-two animals, whose parents had been killed and eaten by Africans, who are great relishers of what they call “bush meat” and, given guns and left to themselves, would easily eat their way through the continent’s wildlife.
The
And gradually, from the tragedies the newspapers report, and from conversations with good people, the visitor arrives at the unsettling idea of a poor country still vulnerable—in its people, living on their nerves, and even in its landscape, which might be despoiled—after forty years of civil conflict, still waiting for an upheaval which may solve nothing.
10
I HADN’T thought in 1966 of going to look for the source of the Nile. No one among the people I knew talked of that. They talked about the game parks and fishing in the western lakes; they talked about the politics of the country; they talked about their colleagues; they talked about doing long drives. I hadn’t myself read Speke at that time, and so I hadn’t been touched by the romance of the great river, though we crossed the river at Jinja on our way to Nairobi, a regular outing, and crossed it again when we drove back to Kampala. In Stanley I read that “jinja” meant the stones, the falls, which occurred just after Lake Victoria poured into the Nile.
And now I was to see that this pouring into the Nile, seen from the Busoga side, was one of the majestic things in Nature: a great smooth sheet of water of immense force, not muddy like the Congo or the Mississippi, but fresh-looking, grey-green, dotted with mysterious small green islands, and between high green banks, dividing and coming to life over the stones. Speke, when he first saw it, the object of his dreams, sat on the bank on the Buganda side and “saw the day out” considering the play of water. It has that effect still, of encouraging the visitor simply to look, sending the mind back over the centuries, perhaps even over the millennia, when what we see now already existed (though a speeded-up camera would show islands and vegetation disappearing and reappearing); and sending the mind also on an unimaginable four-thousand-mile journey north to the Mediterranean.
Speke saw thousands of “passenger fish” flying at the stones, and many rhinoceros and crocodiles in the river. They are not there now. Speke was himself a great killer with the gun, with a jaunty Victorian sporting vocabulary to match; and many thousands of sportsmen would have followed where he led. Even at that first sight of the stones, while his master was content to sit and stare, Speke’s well-trained assistant, Bombay, shot and killed a sleeping crocodile.
In the next century a dam was built at Jinja. River dams alter river life and alter the aspect of things; and what we see now at the stones wouldn’t be quite what Speke saw. Another dam is planned for lower down the river; when that is done the visitor would no longer see what we see now.
O N ONE of the islands of Lake Victoria a world wildlife or conservation body has set up a small chimpanzee sanctuary—forty-two animals, whose parents had been killed and eaten by Africans, who are great relishers of what they call “bush meat” and, given guns and left to themselves, would easily eat their way through the continent’s wildlife.
The