The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,19

photographs. The photographs were of people who had visited the shrine here. The witchdoctor turned the thick pages of the album one by one, and Luke and his friend and even Ismail fell silent, because we were looking at photographs of famous local people who had come here as suppliants.

Then the question of money came up. Luke said in his dangerous way that it was up to me. I gave 20,000 shillings, just under seven pounds, fourteen dollars. I gave that because I had not put any questions to the witchdoctor. To my amazement the money was accepted without trouble, and I was sorry that worry about the man’s fees had slightly spoilt the occasion.

The trouble came later, when I had to settle with Luke. I offered him a hundred dollars—this was on the telephone—and he appeared to agree. But later that evening he telephoned and wanted to know whether he had heard correctly: had I offered a hundred pounds? I had been thinking that a hundred dollars was really too little. So I said yes, I had offered him a hundred pounds. But when he came to get his money in the morning he made it clear that in his mind the bargaining was far from over. He went over the little we had done together and said that a fair price would be two hundred pounds. This was his way, doubling an agreed figure, not moving up in smaller increments. I began to know the exasperation and blackmail Speke had to suffer with one chief after another a hundred and fifty years before over the hongo, the entry tax that had to be paid a chief for being in his territory, before the “drum of satisfaction” could be beaten, which told people not to trouble the visitor.

In the end Luke so tied me up in dollars and pounds, always mixing the currencies, that I believe I gave him a hongo of 150 pounds, far too much.

9

EVERY WEEK there were two or three items in the newspaper from various parts of the country about witchcraft.

In one village people were reported to believe that malaria, a great killer in Uganda, was caused by witchcraft and mangoes. They had good reason for linking mangoes to the illness. Mangoes were plentiful in the rainy season; that was also when mosquitoes bred, seeking out even small accumulations of stagnant water. To others witchcraft seemed a more natural explanation. One villager said, “Malaria is caused by witchcraft or bad spirits. When I got malaria, I found out that my neighbour was responsible for it. And when he was sent away from the village, I got cured.” One procedure—a visit to the witchdoctor—would have been responsible for finding out about the neighbour; another, more violent, procedure, probably involving the village, would have been necessary to send him away.

When it came to witchcraft, violence was never far away. In Easter week, in a village in the south-west, four brothers strangled their forty-two-year-old aunt. They removed her jaw and her tongue, no doubt for some private magical purpose, and then dumped the body in a nearby banana field. Not long after, dogs began to gather in the banana field. The village people became suspicious. They went to look, and found the dogs feeding on the dead woman’s body, which was lying in a pool of blood. The dead woman was well known. Suspicion at once fell on the four brothers, who were believed to practise witchcraft. About twenty of the village men went to look for them. When they found them they began to beat them with sticks and anything else that came to hand.

Two of the brothers got away and went to the police. The other two brothers were killed and buried in a latrine. Four goats, five hens and two pigs belonging to the brothers were slaughtered; this was what happened to animals belonging to people who were thought to be bad. The police, when they came, arrested fifteen people. They recovered the two bodies from the latrine and took them away for a post-mortem: a strange legalistic note in this story of country wildness.

Sometimes, of course, it goes the other way: witchcraft in a setting where it doesn’t fit. The story begins peacefully enough, in a village, with animals looking for pasture. A cow enters a secondary schoolyard, sees a shirt put out to dry, and begins to eat it. The student, whose shirt it is, chases the cow in the hope of getting