The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,14

know about the royal tradition of music-making. There was so much about it in Speke.

The prince said, “Yes, it was always there. What else was there to do in the palace? It was all about feasting and merry-making and fooling around.”

But wasn’t it sad that so much of the tradition was lost? So much that came from so far back and linked people to the earth?

The prince began to speak like a man of the Bagandan royal family. “Well, there is so much to feel sorry for. In 1966 the Kabaka went into exile. It was, and is now, a period of moral degeneration, and a period of anarchy. In which there was no respect for anything, and even the environment was destroyed. The Kabakaship is an institution. He is the fountain of honour for the Bagandans and when he went into exile the political institution was destroyed. It was unimaginable that it could happen. That the Kabaka and the palace could be attacked. Buganda was a nation in its own right and they spoke their own language. When people tell you of that world where honour meant everything you feel the shame.”

“Within this decay, how do you live your life?”

“I have a dynastic duty and I aim to do it. We have to have honour for the sake of our fathers and forefathers.”

“Do you have any memento of your past?” I was thinking of the palace.

“It was all destroyed. Our heritage was looted and destroyed.” Sunna’s tomb was in a bad way, and there were others. “We have to wake up to our responsibility. Rightly they belong to us. It is a unique architecture. Such amazing grass thatch where despite the heavy rainfall there are no leaks. There is a lot of skill and we have the human resources and they still hold on to their culture and are loyal to the king.”

But nearly at the end Prince Kassim let fall a sentence which seemed to reassert his pessimism. He said, “With the new religion people became insubordinate.” And that of course would have been true for both Christianity and Islam. To belong to either was to be part of a great world faith, approved and organised, with a great literature and famous solid buildings; the temptation to look away from the much smaller thing, of grass, that was one’s own was great.

7

IN THE 1840s Arab merchants from the east of the continent, great travellers and explorers in their own way, came to Uganda looking for slaves and gold. In return for what they got they gave poor guns and trinkets. They gave the Kabaka Sunna a mirror, and this murderous man was enchanted to see his face for the first time. Perhaps in gratitude he allowed the Arabs to talk about their faith and especially about the afterlife in paradise that awaited believers. Now the Arabs were no longer suppliants in Uganda. Their mosques, of every denomination, were on all the hills of Kampala, and the Brother Leader of Libya, Colonel Ghaddafi, of limitless wealth, was coming to open the biggest mosque in Uganda, the Libyan, in the presence of four or five African presidents.

Habib, a Ugandan Muslim businessman now of great wealth, had fostered the Libyan connection. He came from one of the oldest Muslim families in Uganda. Habib’s grandfather had converted in 1846, almost at the beginning of the Arab presence, and they had lived through the bad years of the religious wars, between Muslims and Christians, in the late 1880s. The Muslims lost that war, and were exiled by the British colonial administration to the bush in the west.

Habib’s grandfather did not give up his faith. He became a preacher for Islam. He went everywhere on foot, and lived to be a hundred and four. He walked with one hand behind his back; this was how Habib remembered the tough old man. Walking and preaching, he got as far as Rwanda, which was quite a distance away, and he took three more wives there, one Hutu and two Tutsis. He had twenty-one children.

It was a poor life for Habib’s father in the beginning. He was not well-educated. He kept cows—the kraal was three miles away from the house—and he also had a small business mending bicycle and motorcycle tires. There wasn’t a lot of money in that, and he later went to the Congo, which was just across the border. There—no doubt following other people—he began to mine gold, then traded in gold, and became