The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,102

when they understood that she was coloured, they dropped her. She read a lot about Islam; she got to know more than the Indians and Muslims who quizzed her; it didn’t help. She went on the pilgrimage to Mecca, but felt nothing; she saw only the restrictions on her as a woman.

She began to look then for a black identity, but it was hard. Her coloured background again got in the way; the blacks rejected her as someone without a country or culture. So the whole South African journey for her was a discovery of pain: from her coloured beginnings to the Islamic dream, to the Indians of Durban, to the blacks of the townships. There were townships in Durban but they were near the airport and she didn’t see them. She saw them properly only when she came to Johannesburg and began to work with the blacks. It was only then that she understood the great pain and, with that, the deception, for Africans, of political freedom and the end of apartheid.

Fatima said, “I see that the blacks here reach out more than the white South Africans. They, the whites, want the blacks to be ‘there,’ not near them. They cannot reach out or forgive, and they want a distance from the black. They are full of preconceived ideas, like Soweto is dangerous and that a black boy friend is bad.”

I had wanted, when I began this book, to stay away from politics and race, to look below those themes for the core of African belief. But rather like Fatima looking for identity, I felt stymied in South Africa and saw that here race was all in all; that race ran as deep as religion elsewhere.

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THE APARTHEID MUSEUM was my introduction to the South African idea of the monument. I found it moving; but there was something grander at the end of the Johannesburg-Pretoria road. This was the Afrikaner monument celebrating the Great Trek of the Boers from the Cape Colony to the interior in the first half of the nineteenth century. They trekked to be free of the British. They took all their goods and animals with them; and they went with ox-carts. It would have been slow and hard. The trekkers didn’t always know what they were up against. The Africans were unfriendly; many of the trekkers died. Fatima, at school, had to study the Great Trek; all the skirmishes on the way became battles, and all these battles had to be committed to memory. Yet, in a further twist of cruelty, she was not permitted to visit the monument.

The monument, which is of brown granite, is at the top of a hill. From the road it shows as a bump on the hill. Nothing free standing, no heroic, larger-than-life sculpture. You approach it from the garden at the back, looking up to its great height, and you climb up to the main level. At the entrance there is a green bronze statue of a stern woman, larger than life, her head covered, protecting two clinging children. This is a strange sentimental touch, out of keeping with the 1930s Germanic weight of the monument, which (like so many art-deco buildings) is a little like a magnified 1930s radio or radiogram. There is a symbolic perimeter wall here which seems to protect the monument. It is made up of a circular laager of sixty-four ox-carts done in low relief. The number is important. That number of ox-carts made up the laager when the trekkers were attacked by the Zulus on 16 December 1838. The Zulus were badly defeated, and it is that victory, of Blood River, that the monument celebrates.

Inside, past the teak door, the monument is circular and cool and beautiful, lit by four tall arched windows, one on each side. Within four uprights these windows have granite mullions that, strangely, create an Islamic pattern. At eye-level, on the circular wall, are twenty-seven sculptured plaques in low relief marking the stations and defeats and victories of the Trek. It should be said at once that the Africans in these sculptures are not caricatured. They are shown nude, more or less, and for that reason look more heroic than the Trekkers, who are in full nineteenth-century clothes, which do not work as well in sculpture as nude bodies do.

All this would be impressive, but there is more. Below the floor of the main hall there are further levels where artefacts connected with the Trek are displayed. Work on