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Glimpses of African Belief
Alfred a Knopf
October 2010
On Sale: October 19, 2010
256 pages
ISBN: 0307270734
EAN: 9780307270733
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Like all of V. S. Naipaul’s “travel” books, The Masque of
Africa encompasses a much larger narrative and purpose: to
judge the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the
foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of
leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of civilization. From V. S. Naipaul: “For my travel books I travel on a
theme. And the theme of The Masque of Africa is African
belief. I begin in Uganda, at the center of the continent,
do Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and end at
the bottom of the continent, in South Africa. My theme is
belief, not political or economical life; and yet at the
bottom of the continent the political realities are so
overwhelming that they have to be taken into account.
“Perhaps an unspoken aspect of my inquiry was the
possibility of the subversion of old Africa by the ways of
the outside world. The theme held until I got to the South,
when the clash of the two ways of thinking and believing
became far too one-sided. The skyscrapers of Johannesburg
didn’t rest on sand. The older world of magic 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.” The Masque of Africa is a masterly achievement by one of the
world’s keenest observers and one of its greatest writers.
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