Nobel Prize-winning author, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s The Masque of Africa is all about African belief, begins in Uganda, at the centre 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 two ways of thinking and believing became far too one-sided. The skyscrapers of Johannesburg didn’t rest on sand. V.S. Naipaul  was a British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent known for his sharp, often controversial explorations of post-colonial societies, identity and displacement.  

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 trapped 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.

Naipaul’s brilliant and elastic mind gives us remarkable work of African reportage surveys the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of the leaders and mythical history upon the progress of civilisation.

“Neither a romantic’s nor an anthropologist’s tale. It is a collection of voices that make sense only in relation to one another.

VS Naipaul born in Trinidad in 1932, came to England on a scholarship in 1950, spent four years at University College, Oxford and began to write in London, in 1954. His other books include A House for Mr Biswas ( a novel inspired by his father’s struggles in Trinidad), The Mimic Men in a Free State, A Bend in the River, cemented his reputation as a masterful and incisive writer, Guerrillas,  Among the Believers and India; A Million Mutinies Now (reflected his critical perspective on societies in transition) and the Enigma of Arrival (1987).

The Masque of Africa: glimpses of African Belief by V.S. Naipaul, Knopf £12, Penguin Random House $16, 256 pages