The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,11

ancestors, and retribution was sure to follow. I was brought up as a Christian so I did not have that traditional religion. But I know that it exists and I respect it. I was born after the colonial period. I find that period traumatic.”

So here, for Susan and people like her, was another cause for disturbance, something before the horrors of Amin and Obote, something that went back to the time of the British protectorate (which Mutesa had wanted). It made now for a full century of disorder.

Susan said, “It is a case of being aware that there are so many influences vying for my being. I become a melting pot of experiences. I have many parts coming into one another rather than being one holistic whole.”

She worried about her name.

“My first name is Susan. It was given me by my father.” Who had disappeared in the Amin time. “He had an aunt whom he adored, and she had this name. So it was a sentimental choice for him. Yet I know it is a Judeo-Christian name, and when I came to the university I added my clan’s name—Naluguwa, which means ‘of the sheep clan.’ I feel it is very much a part of my identity—here you have your own name. I could go as Susan Naluguwa, but I use my father’s surname too—Kiguli—because this is how the school registered me.”

And now, though the name was given her by her father, she felt a love-hate for the name Susan.

“I feel that it is so much part of the colonial experience, which was not pleasant. When a person or race comes and imposes on you, it takes away everything, and it is a vicious thing to do. Much as I think the West and modernity is a good thing, it did take away our culture and civilisation, and even if it is gentle it does make us doubt our roots. For example, the missionaries brainwashed you into rejecting the gods, and imposing their own ideas, dogma and doctrines, saying that theirs were the best. There was no two-way dialogue and them trying to understand how our minds and heritage or culture worked. I feel that people had a civilisation. It was different but it was their own. I taught myself to write in Luganda.” After writing her poems in English. “I feel humiliated that the school did not teach us our mother tongue.”

Her sister was writing a book on Speke, Grant and the missionaries.

“They took away our land, religion, customs and social structures. Our king, our everything. When the kingdoms were restored”— strangely enough, in a tactical move by Amin, who had led the assault on the palace in 1966—“our king asked for the return of ‘our possessions.’ ” He meant everything associated with the kingship and culture of Buganda. “The palace was handed back. People suffered great humiliation. They thought what had been done to the palace was sacrilege. It was a great trauma to have the king removed and for him to die in exile. So Amin brought the body back for burial.”

At the beginning Susan had said that she was a Christian; she respected the traditional religion, but did not believe, as some African traditionalists did, that Uganda was going to suffer retribution for adopting other religions and turning away from the ancestors. But there was so much in her quick heart and mind that couldn’t be contained in a simple religious definition, so many separate ideas and emotions had tumbled out of her, that she emerged as another person.

I did not, after this, ask her about African history, the oral tradition, and myth. There was obviously no special African way of dealing with, neutralising, a bad history or a bad present. It seemed more likely that it was like dealing with a very long illness. It announced itself one day, and you dreamt then of waking up well one morning. Gradually then you sank into it, and you lost your idea of the quick return of health and wholeness. You made your peace, so to speak, with your illness; and the time began to pass. You began to live in this half-and-half way. It became all you knew; it became life.

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THE OLD Germanic peoples, according to the first-to-second-century Roman historian Tacitus, thought it was an insult to their gods to imprison them in temples or within the walls of any building. Better for them to be worshipped in the open, in beautiful groves, or glades or rivers: