The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,15

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“We lived in a collective fashion. We all ate together. Each wife had her own vegetable garden and every wife had to cook for one week of the month. It was her duty to cook for the entire household while the others helped her. We were around thirty people at each meal. About ten in the morning the other wives and their daughters would gather in the garden of the wife whose turn it was to cook, and they would peel the green bananas. Then they would call the boys or men to lift the food or peeled bananas to the kitchen. Water was brought from the well by the boys. Water and firewood and picking coffee was the boys’ turf. No woman could do that.”

They were a rich family now, with a car, and the only people in the village to have a concrete house with glass windows. Other people had mud-and-thatch huts. Habib’s family had outside latrines, but each wife had a room to wash and bath in.

When Idi Amin was overthrown, in 1979, the people of the village went around killing Muslims. But Habib’s family was respected—they used to lend their car for village weddings, to fetch the bride—and they were not touched.

Habib did well at school, and his father took him to Buganda, so that he could learn English in addition to Arabic. In 1971, when he was eighteen, he was one of thirty-two boys chosen for scholarships.

He went to Libya, and studied Sharia and Muslim law. He became fluent in Arabic; it was the turning point in his life. He became an interpreter for the Ugandan embassy, and did the job well. There were not many people who knew the languages and understood both African and Arab ways. He impressed Amin (still at that time the ruler of Uganda). Later, after Amin, he came to the notice of the Brother Leader, Ghaddafi. It was the beginning of his Libyan connection, which flowered in all sorts of ways.

Was he Libyan or Ugandan, African or Muslim?

“I see myself as a Muslim. My grandfather was circumcised with a reed, and my father and I were circumcised by a Gillette blade. I still remember it. When the man came to circumcise the boys they were taken to a separate place and kept behind a kind of screen. I was five years old and very curious to see what was happening. I went to see, and they saw me and grabbed me too. I am still angry about that.”

As a Muslim child he was trained to have nothing to do with African religion. “We were brought up in the faith, and that dictates that African religion is paganism. We were trained to despise it. I will not allow my children to go near it.”

And then, speaking in the same voice, the same firm tone, Habib said, “Now that I have grown up and had exposure, I see it was a tool to control our African mind. It is how the imperialists worked.”

I wasn’t expecting this. I asked whether he meant what he appeared to say, and included Islam among the imperialists seeking to control the African mind. He said he did.

I would have liked to hear more. But at this stage he was called away by some business friends—the hotel was full of them after the Ghaddafi visit. He said he was going to come back to us, but he never did. And the next day he was off to Dubai.

8

TO BELIEVE in the traditional African religion was to be on the defensive. There was no doctrine to hold on to; there was only a sense of the rightness of old ways, the sacredness of the local earth. It was, in a small way, like the fourth- and fifth-century conflict between Christianity and paganism at the time of the religious changeover in the classical world. Paganism could not be a cause; the most that could be said for the old gods and temples was that they had been around for a very long time and had served people well. The doctrines of Islam and Christianity, world faiths, had a philosophical base and could be expounded. The traditional African religion had no doctrine; it expressed itself best in its practices and in things like the hundred fearful charms the witch doctors presented to Mutesa I before the naval battle against the Wavuma in 1875.

And now people who cherish the old African religion have begun to develop—or rediscover, it may be—a cosmogony,