Watching a religious ceremony in Gabon, during a five-country tour to assess the effects of animism, foreign faiths and leadership cults on the progress of African civilization, VS Naipaul returns to a familiar theme. While the natives find rapture in “the great heat, the drumming, the shouts and the shrieks” he succumbs to “the feeling of an encroaching darkness.” He notices that some celebrants have consumed an hallucinogenic herb, the better to immerse themselves in the ceremony. But a knowledgeable bystander sets him straight: “Hallucinogenic for you,” she observes, “For Africans it’s their reality.”
Clearly age has not softened the great man’s withering gaze. At 78, his impressions of Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and Gabon, in what may well be his last work of non-fiction, show there’s still plenty of vitriol to spare from his earlier assaults on the African reality. Anyone who has read the Swiftian takedown of Felix Houphouet-Boigny in The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro will remember the relish with which Naipaul handles magical thinking in the ‘Dark Continent.’ Nothing in The Masque of Africa rises to the lyricism of this earlier hatchetry even though there are flashes of the old provocateur. In the end, somewhat predictably, Africa’s beliefs turn out to be: “Doubles, astral journeys, the fragility and yet the enduringness of ritual, the idea of energy, the wonder of the forest.”
The hostility of several reviews of the book in the British press is partly due to Patrick French’s astonishing biography which, with its subject’s consent, portrayed Sir Vidia as a mean-spirited sadist. (Writing in the Sunday Times, Naipaul’s former friend and biographer Paul Theroux said that French’s book confirmed his own impressions of Naipaul as “a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain… an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons.”) More importantly, from the point of view of Naipaul’s literary reputation, the French biography deconstructed the author’s persona in the travel narratives. Forty years ago the historian J H Elliott perceptively noticed that “Mr. Naipaul’s history [in The Loss of El Dorado] is not structural history .. but, rather, history by free association.” After French, however, it is hard not to notice how the author’s free associations, the whimsical peregrinations and faux-naif observation which make the reportage so memorable, are expert literary deceptions which conceal almost as much as they describe. For example, in almost all of his books Naipaul’s travelling companions disappear from the text, and he hides the fact that prior to his arrival local contacts have selected appropriate charlatans and eccentrics for him to visit – classic Naipaulian characters who are comically ‘half-made’ and ripe for his unsparing vivisection. In the books this is hidden so well that his encounters assume an illusory spontaneity.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Armed with unflattering material from the French biography, the novelist William Boyd recently tore into The Masque of Africa filled with what can only be called Naipaulian zeal, listing several of the book’s “ litany of Pootersesque banalities,” “clichés” and “preposterous generalization[s].” Searching for a reason why the prose founders so spectacularly, Boyd concludes that “Naipaul travels with a particular mindset – “he is the misanthrope abroad and after a while non-stop misanthropy palls, it has its own built-in obsolescence.” That may be so, but Boyd should also acknowledge that Naipaul’s scintillating malice as a traveller in the post-colonial world is exactly what earned him the admiration of the literary world in the first place. That was his appeal. West Indians cringed at the vatic pronouncements of The Middle Passage, but the wider world took them as absolute truth. Naipaul’s delight in observing surreal aspects of faraway places, and offering his vignettes as definitive slices of the Indian, African or West Indian “reality” has always been central to his genius. His copperplate prose and understated humour give the writing its polish, but it is largely his brilliant confusion of the bizarre and the banal, the hysterical and the historical, and the quiet, damning judgements which these elicit, which have made his non-fiction one of the compelling literary achievements of the twentieth century.
In one of the most illuminating reviews ever published on Naipaul, the critic James Wood compares the half-made men of the travelogues and fiction to Frantz Fanon’s description, in The Wretched of the Earth, of the “colonized subject.” This unhappy personage, says Fanon, “is constantly on his guard: confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world, he never knows whether he is out of line. Confronted with a world configured by the colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse, a sword of Damocles.” Woods then writes: “Naipaul’s radical pessimism meets Fanon’s radical optimism at that point where the cut of colonial guilt, angrily resisted by both men, is converted into the wound of colonial shame.” Naipaul’s capacity to keep this wound fresh, to refuse sympathy merely because he too has come from this realm of confusion and darkness, is what has made him such an outstanding observer of the post-colonial world. Whether or not his sweeping verdicts and condescension are entirely true, or in good taste, are another matter. Some writers are great because they confirm our ideas of the world; a smaller and arguably more important group are great because they unsettle these views, force us to abandon comforting platitudes and to face our reality.
Intriguingly, the Nigerian writer Ikhide R. Ikheloa has published a far less damning review of The Masque of Africa. Amused rather than angered by Naipaul’s caricatures, he points out that “black Africa may have regressed” since the publication of Naipaul’s pessimistic A Bend in the River, published in 1979. “There is plenty of blame to go around,” Ikheloa continues, “but African intellectuals are refusing to accept credit for any of [it]. . . We are in pursuit of our own needs, screw the community. Wine glass in hand, we mouth white words to white-out what we view as our frailties. Let us be honest: why would anyone look at the charade that is Nigeria today and be respectful of her?” Channelling his own strain of Fanon and Naipaul, Ikheola notes that “our leaders can barely sustain what passes for modern society, even when they are given all the resources. They steal it and invest in pretend processes. Kenya has just spent sinful resources on producing a ‘constitution’ when the bulk of her people will not know one if it is pressed against their noses. Face it: what is racist about pointing out that much of black Africa is a farce today, many thanks to us her intellectuals and leaders?” Naipaul may have emphasized the farce rather crudely and reductively, but in their rush to judgement many reviewers have also forgotten to acknowledge the fact that “much of black Africa” and indeed India, the Caribbean and the Middle East, is a farce, whether or not we are comfortable saying so. Naipaul’s is an art of darkness, reminding us that modernity cannot simply be willed into being and warning us that history is cunning, and full of cruel ironies and disappointments. Even with its monstrous flaws, Naipaul’s vision cannot and should not be ignored.
