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VS Naipaul: You might not like it, but this is Africa – exactly as I saw it
Geordie Greig23 Aug 2010
I am hoping it is not going to cause a firestorm. It is so not my intention,” says VS Naipaul, Nobel Laureate, English knight of the shires and consumate provocateur, about his latest travel book, The Masque of Africa. “I just wanted to see what made the people tick,” he says.
Too late: a firebomb exploded this weekend as his book was called racist and “repulsive” by the novelist Robert Harris, who compared passages in the book about Africa to the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley's depiction of blacks in London in the Fifties.
Naipaul is used to emotive flak and wryly notes that this burst of high moral criticism has come from a best-selling author who had recently jumped to the defence of a man America was attempting to extradite for having sex with a 13-year-old. (Roman Polanski is the director of the film version of Harris's novel, The Ghost.)
For this book Naipaul travelled intermittently in Africa for six months with the aim of finding out what the people believed in, and the resulting picture of the continent's spiritual identity certainly has elements that are controversial: child sacrifice, witchcraft, primitive magic and trickery. There is also an encounter with Winnie Mandela, who gives her outspoken views on the weaknesses, errors and decline of her former husband Nelson post-apartheid.
Essentially the book is Naipaul's idiosyncratic search for Africa's spiritual core. He collects experiences and stories of faith and belief on an odyssey across Uganda, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Gabon — eventually travelling to South Africa, a country that he says he finds “mesmerising and profound”. But others he also found repellent, such as Ivory Coast: “I found out what was the best way of killing a cat or kitten. You put them in a sack of some sort and then you dropped the sack in a pot of boiling water. The thought of this everyday kitchen cruelty made everything else in Ivory Coast seem unimportant,” he writes.
The book is a dazzling spectacle of original travel reporting by the greatest living prose writer as he approaches 80, fearless in writing about what he sees and feels. In South Africa he notes human body parts made by witchdoctors into a mixture of so-called “battle medicine” for respectable middle-class Africans. Such images inevitably and understandably jar with those who want Africa to be progressive with economic hope for the 21st century. “I am nervous that people see the book as anti-Africa or use it to make some sort of political point,” Naipaul says. By choosing specifically not to dwell on the economics or the politics of Africa, he aimed to gauge what he perceived as the different inner nervous systems of Africa.
“Truth stares you in the face. You just pick it up and write it. It has not been my intention ever to create trouble, even from my very first book,” Naipaul says. He is more weary than wary of his armchair critics. “People who don't travel to look [for themselves] have their own precious principles, which … go beyond observation or truth and if you go against their principles with your observations, they do not like it. So that is the provocation.”
Naipaul is never deflected from what he perceives as harsh or unfashionable truths, however unpalatable. He has airily dismissed the Caribbean culture of the Seventies as “manufactured societies, labour camps”. Tony Blair was like a pirate who imposed on Britain a “plebian culture”. The fatwah by Ayatollah Khomeini on Salman Rushdie, he once joked, is an “extreme form of literary criticism”.
He is also used to the passage of time eventually making him seem more prophetic than provocative. When, 30 years ago, he wrote harshly about Islam as a potent global difficulty, he was castigated as a racial stirrer. Now his view is considered by many as mainstream. “What happens after a while is that what appears so bold, fire-burning and house-destroying eventually appears OK. I have gone out and done the work; that is my ticket really.”
His first visit to Africa was in the Sixties. This book was the result of his travels nearly 50 years on. “This time an unspoken aspect of my inquiry was the possibility of subversion of old Africa by the ways of the outside world. To witness the old world of magic was to be given some idea of its power and to be taken back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of my book. To go in search of the beginning of things. It is very exciting, was at the time, to feel one is in touch with the beginnings of thought, the beginnings of metaphysical ideas. So that was what I meant by going back to the beginning — probably a romantic idea.”
The fact that there is no written culture in Africa, he says, was “a great drawback”, adding “I talked about this to people in Africa. They did not see it like that. They thought it just one of those little things that would be put right eventually. They did not see how fundamental it was not having a writing, a literature, a past you could turn to. I wondered why they could not do the writing.”
Not that he underestimates the power of “old Africa” but he sees it as limiting. “What they feel is very profound and it goes down to their very being. But they have no idea of history, though. No idea of a past. This is true of Africa generally. There is not a book in which you can see where you were 100 years ago and that for me is very disturbing.”
His soft hypnotic voice unleashes many stings in the tail. “I have been interested in earth religions that take you back to the remotest past of men.The simplicity took one's breath away. Yet profound belief comes from, as it were, very educated people, people with a gift of thought and everything else, and you can't say that about Africa, it is all emotion.”
For Naipaul, the country he found it hardest to get a handle on was South Africa. “I found it a very hard place to have a point of view, and that is half the battle. I became very frightened in a way that I was never frightened before. I felt stymied in South Africa and saw here race was everything; that race ran as deep as religion everywhere. I thought that I may not be able to do this book there. To be frightened was a new experience. I do not know whether it was age or what but it went away.”
Naipaul made his initial reputation in fiction with A House for Mr Biswas but his Noble Prize for Literature was as much for his travel writing as his novels. “There are few rules for travel, for instance, not too much about oneself — you have to be a seeing eye or a feeling mind.” He was intensely curious about the behaviour of the people, and the stories he encountered, and was at times shocked. “The unhappiness that people get caught up in, the women who try to kill their children — all of that was new to me.”
He was very moved by the sight of the vast forests in Gabon but he also saw and heard things there that chilled him to the bone. “There is a bad side, certainly in Gabon, they kill and the kinds of people they like to kill are children — it has to be a child or an older person, children because they are nearer to the beginning, an old person because they are near the end of life. All very sinister,” he says.
Naipaul may have gone in search of faith in Africa but he has none himself. “I believe in the endless processing of experience. My philosophical attitude does away with the need for faith. I also have no fear of death. None at all,” he says.
His mind is still razor sharp — this new book means a world tour — and his career has ben bolstered by having recently hired Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie as his new literary agent. Naipaul says he would like to please him by writing a novel next. But he simply does not know if he has it in him. He has been reading a book about how Oscar Wilde no longer wanted to write after he came out of jail. “His editor pressing him to write was asking him to become unhappy. Wilde wanted to be happy at that stage after coming out of jail. So I am just wondering if for a man of nearly 80 writing another book is inviting a kind of unhappiness on himself?”
Life would certainly be duller if Naipaul took Wilde's lead. But he derived so much enjoyment from writing this last book that the odds are high that this will not be the last V S Naipaul literary controversy.
Reader views (17)
Shame on sir Vidia for stealing from the Queen of Air and Darkness....How dare he make fiction from fiction and call it fact... As a side note: Sir Vidia, being born before 1962 is not an Indian(West or otherwise)he was born loyal to crown and country and has every right to perpetuate the fallacy that "it wasn't our fault, we tried to save the savages". Having spent so much time in Camelot smitten by a queen that is not his own, he is overwhelmed by the white man's burden....quick! fetch him some Tiger Balm.
- N3W2, my real name..., Trinidad, 06/09/2010 20:32
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I am African born of a mixed race background and speak more than 1 African language so I apologise for not having the expert opinion of some resounding on this blog. I have read many of VSN books over the years and take them in the manner they are presented, in other words one man's story of his travels through a country. He shares with us the anecdotes, opinions and impressions gathered along the way. He is essentially a story teller and does not try to offer solutions or fixes or any serious moralising or judgement. Predictably those British stalwarts who claim the high moral ground will find any point of view or information that conflicts with their opinion, anathema and by reaction will label it racist. I have far more time for his story than the elite band of academics and journalists who spend a few weeks hob knobbing with a few educated and powerful African colleagues (who represent no more than 0.001% of the population) then spew forth their patronising opinions and quick fix advice.
- Sautimbili, Arundel West Sussex, 27/08/2010 13:07
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If it makes the ole man happy, then let him be. Throughout his lifetime writings, he has been critical of all the elements that touched his early life, his own psychological development.Naipaul is not racist, religious or culturally conscious. He is an interloper caught between philosophical ramblings intermixed with a touch of insanity. He is yet searching for the centre.He will find his ideal self, bringing all the components together.Flight into critical thinking cannot be construed as defacing truth as one perceives it. He is a mimic man who will one day conceptualize where he belongs. His final book will bring it all together
The diversity of the Caribbean with African hegemony, his birth in an predominantly Indian area and moving to an African area near Port of Spain the Capital, his early movement to Oxford with a yet sustainable admiration for the white race have indeed affected his mindset.He has become a sad and lonely man who projects little pieces of his own life as he critically analyses societies that impinges on his own experiences.In so doing, for that moment, he becomes closer to his true self. Throug slavery and indentureship in the Caribean, he seemed to have developed a posttraumatic slave syndrome, symbolically shackling himself to islamic aggressivity and the safety of colonialism manufactured in Europe.He is a creative, prosaic writer and his utterances have deep psychological expressions that will result in the gestalt whole.He has purpose and meaning
- Hari D Maharajh, Chaguanas, Trinidad, W.I. Birth place of VS Naipaul, 26/08/2010 21:54
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Maybe he should travel through India and also enlighten us on forced marriages and if he wants to talk race, let's first address the caste system and systemic slavery associated with it. Not forgetting honor killings...
Winnie Mandela has refuted his claim of a "visit" to her house! why is ES not mentioning that. There are an estimated 3000 tribes/groups in Africa, with different customs, it is fraudulent to make a sweeping statement about that.
I will not be buying this book and the one that I had,I've used to start a BBQ fire!
- Londonbased, london, 25/08/2010 06:53
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Yes Africa has its problems...Whats new? Europe has bigger problems with sustainability and debt!! A very interesting find is the so called wealthiest countries in the world have the largest debts, which theoretically makes them the poorest.
What alot of people don't understand is Africa subsidises the world in many ways than one!! And it helps to keep Africa on its knees to sustain western living.Imagine if Africa were to get its act right, a scary thought isn't it? Who else would we have to expoilt for land and minerals?
- Black Knight, London, 25/08/2010 01:31
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Naipaul is no prophet - take his view on Mauritius, the small Indian ocean nation. Naipaul famously labelled Mauritius "The Overcrowded Barracoon", also the title of his 1972 book, saying its "problems defy solution". Now Mauritius enjoys the highest GDP per capita in Africa and is seen as a model of development.
- Johnny, London, 24/08/2010 14:32
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I was really disappointed when I read this yesterday on the commute home. Surely a Nobel Laureate would have heard of the recent find of carvings on eggshells in South Africa, or ancient Sudanese scripts, the very old Adinkra symbols used in Ghana, which are like Chinese pictograms?
On history - Naipaul should have met with the griots of Mali, and he might then have had a feel for what history as a living, non-Eurocentric form of social dialectic can be.
Are tendentious anecdotes really capable of being relied upon to make broad-based judgements about a country, a culture, a continent, any more than say, the incidence of "honour killing" or "pet"
consumption in Southeast Asia, or paedophilia in Europe, serial killings in America, terrorism in the Middle East and Northern Africa? I have lived in Ghana
for 12 years, and I can tell you that it is complete and utter slanderous nonsense to say that all of the cats in Southern Ghana have been eaten.
The only lesson for Africans in all of this, is that we need to revere and to promote our own voices of reason, as indeed Muslims of all nations have
latterly begun to appreciate.
- Kwesi, London, UK, 24/08/2010 13:36
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Wow, the vitriolic cricitism of Naipul is quite astonishing.
I've not read the book so I won't make any comments about it, but I doubt he has less knowledge of Africa than most of his non-African critics.
In many ways, i find it pretty distasteful that so many white "liberals" see fit to defend the things Naipul says about Africa, as it implies that Africa cannot defend itself, which I doubt is the case. If I was African I would find someone who doesn't know me immediately jumping to my defence slightly patronising.
- ST, London, 24/08/2010 13:10
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James Kaster, maybe your perception is racist, when I got robbed I only saw a group of men..I didn't see a colour... same as if u got robbed in china would you say the same thing you're saying now? Naipaul perception of cultures other than his own is racist... this man is a trinidadian born indian but says says he is british,he is uncultured and has no identity, with his diatribe.
- Andrew, London, 24/08/2010 12:17
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Why is it racist, if that's how he experienced it? I have been the victim of crime on three occasions, and each time is was committed by a young black male. Does this now make me a racist for saying that? Obviously, not all black men commit crimes, but that is my experience of crime.
- James Kaster, London, England, 24/08/2010 11:47
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So from the comments on this story, the impression I get is that he is making all this up, or "lying" as this is sometimes called. Why did he even bother to travel to Africa I wonder. I can make things up from the comfort of my own living room.
- Steve E, London UK, 24/08/2010 01:34
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I can't quite believe that the Standard sank so low as to dedicate a centre page spread to this obvious racist misanthrope. To briefly glance at the beliefs of a few groups of people across a number of African countries & call it a full representation of the continent is irresponsible & contemptuous. If another writer were to do the same in the Indian subcontinent or the less developped areas of Europe or South America & claimed it represented the associated continent as a whole,it simply would not be accepted & certainly wouldn't make such a splash in the papers. It is about time that the media & the West in general stop degrading all that comes out of the continent of Africa. Perhaps Naipal should check his sources before he states there is no history in Africa. Meroetic scriptures & texts from East Africa are thought to be the oldest writing in the continent & still haven't been deciphered by archaelogists. Astronomical tracking of the Milky Way & Syrius B was being performed by the Kenyans 2000 yrs BC. Metallurgy was practiced by West Africans before the Middle Ages & antibiotics were being used by the ancient Nubians long before the medecine was discovered in Europe. Black African pharoahs ruled Egypt during the 25th dynasty & left text temples statues & pyramids to leave their marks in history. Stunning pre-colonial architecture in Zimbabwe Mali & Timbuktu is also in evidence & this is just the tip of the historical iceburg. Doubt Naipal cares much for facts though../
- Anne, Cheshire, 24/08/2010 00:13
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beiefly. it is sad and disappointing from a such great writer to pretend like he is speaking thruth about his travell in afric. things he said in his book about africa happens every where in world. from north to the south pole. if he hasn't travell all over the world then i sugges him, he should have waited to rease this book cus to me it is a puzzel missing ather bit. so should start india,
- abdul, uk, 23/08/2010 23:15
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I will buy the book, and am grateful to the ES online to know about it. I am most interested to see what scares him about SA. I know what scares me about it; the fact that you stand a high chance of being robbed/raped/killed, that you cannot walk the streets or beaches safely, that you better not break down on the motorway, etc.
- David Short, Tunis, Tunisia, 23/08/2010 19:53
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Dog don bite his owner. What did this ignoramus think the African Nobel laurets in literature before him were writing about? An Indian living in the UK making selective observation?. Heaven help us all. Please....
- alfamail0001, Surrey England, 23/08/2010 15:57
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Perhaps he should turn his eye onto "New UK" and see through the physco-babble and tell it as it is.
- Ayliff, Orihuela Costa,, 23/08/2010 15:13
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No surprise that people sees naipaul as a racist, I for one see him as a bigotted grumpy old man.....someone who rejected his place of birth and said a lot of obscene things that offended a lot of people, what he is a old man using his "old time days"theory to understand this modern times we live in.
- Andrew, London, 23/08/2010 13:44
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