The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,20
his shirt back. He hits the cow with a stick. A few days later the student’s leg—not the cow’s—begins to swell, and he becomes paralysed. The students at the school recognise magic and witchcraft when they see it. They deal with it in the only way they know. They attack the village in a body, burn eight houses, and they try to lynch the cow-owner, an old man of seventy, whom they accuse of bewitching the paralysed student. In their rampage through the village they kill a dog, six cows, fourteen goats, three sheep and eleven chickens; they also destroy four pit-latrines, and the banana and coffee plantations of eight villagers. Three of the villagers, armed with spears and pangas, later hide in the school, to counter-attack; there—somewhat unfairly—they are arrested by the police; and the affair fizzles out.
Witchcraft is not a joke to these people. They cannot laugh at what they fear. The students at a senior secondary school in a major town, a boarding school, become very agitated when they see one morning, in the school compound, a fresh goat’s head and a whole goat’s skin. They see these as witchcraft fetishes. They blame the headmaster; already, they say, the food at the school is not good; and that morning when the boarders got up they found some school windows broken and the school generally in a mess. This is a clear “sign” of magic afoot. The students feel they are being threatened in an unpleasant diabolical way, and (speaking now in a code which they expect to be understood) they say some “big people” are behind it all. Later they parade through the town, sturdy young men in their school uniform, dark trousers, white shirt, and they declare a strike. The police, when they come, are conciliatory; they understand their country.
To live in a world ruled by witchcraft, a world liable to irrational dissolution in its details, is to be on edge, to be on a constant lookout. Add to this the eternal anxiety about politics, the fear of a land being lost; add the great population of Uganda, the constant feeling of a crowd too great for the land available, the roads, the jobs available.
The land can look so open and unused (as it did to the early explorers), but you never can tell when you are encroaching on protected wetlands that are now known to filter and cleanse water for Lake Victoria; or when, hunting antelope for food in the Mount Elgon area, a traditional hunting ground of your people, you are trespassing on land protected by the Uganda Wildlife Authority, whose guards carry guns and shoot to kill, and where, as they say, poaching is “like shaking death by the hand in the forest.” There are many regions where as a herdsman you never can tell when you are occupying land reserved for cultivators, or sometimes driving your cattle over the border to Tanzania, where they are not wanted. In Kayunga you cut down trees, with others, to burn charcoal; and then, because there is now no forest cover, the hailstorms destroy houses and fields and animals, and people quite suddenly have nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat. It is so easy to make matters worse.
That feeling of being on edge can easily turn to a feeling of being torn, can turn to pain. It is of this pain, of people driven to extremity, of a world now beyond control, that many of the items in the newspaper speak every day.
Man burns 10 to death in hut: this is an item from the north, from an internally displaced persons camp. The name of the camp suggests the tensions. Within that, a family quarrel: a man settling accounts with his estranged wife. It was a grass-thatched hut; after it had been sprinkled with petrol it would have burnt fiercely. Seven of the ten people killed were children; some of them belonged to other families; shortage of space had caused them to be brought to this particular hut. A photograph showed the little charred bodies in the burnt-out hut, lying together, for that little bit of last-minute comfort, and lying face down, instinctively protecting their faces.
My husband was hacked to death as I watched: this is an item from the same issue. It was a second marriage for both parties. The husband had fifteen children from his first marriage, six from his second. They were returning home from a trading centre when they were attacked