The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,23

comes from behind an island, from a fisherman’s settlement which is slowly but surely polluting the lake, making it a carrier of typhoid and cholera. It would have been like that in Mutesa’s time, but there is no mention of it in Speke, who has trouble describing an asthmatic attack he suffered over many weeks.

It was an hour and a half to the island of chimpanzees. Immediate order: mown grass, neatly thatched huts, paths and signs, with the brilliant yellow weaver birds busy about their extraordinary nests. Twice a day the chimpanzees are fed. The launches from the mainland arrive in time for this.

A pebbly red path led up to the fence that marked off the chimpanzee and forest area from the rest of the island. A tremendous racket from somewhere in the bush told us that the feeding had begun. There was no meat for the chimpanzees, only cut fruit thrown from a platform. This was fought over with mighty blows that when they landed on a chimpanzee seemed to strike hollow ground. The cries of beaters and beaten were overlaid with a continual squealing, relish indistinguishable from pain.

The chimpanzees might have been orphans, but in the sanctuary old ideas of size and authority ruled. The leading male ran back and forth the length of the viewing platform and beyond, thumping males not as big as he was. Only the very small, close to infancy, and strangely melancholy, were allowed to eat quietly, long, jointed fingers fixed round their pieces of fruit. One or two chimpanzees were made to perform little tricks for the visitors, using sticks or twigs to drag within reach pieces of fruit that had been deliberately thrown outside the wire-mesh fence, so that we could see the trick.

Gradually the feeding was over, and there again the bigger animals led the way, being the first to lope back to the forest, moving swiftly on arms and legs.

One couldn’t help remembering that in times of national emergency, it was the zoos and the animals that were the first to suffer. Just a little weakening of the central authority here, and all the elaborate support of the chimpanzee sanctuary would wither away. The chimpanzees had skills, as we had been told; they were close to human beings; but against guns they, like all the world’s animals, were helpless. Fifteen minutes or less with a gun could reduce these animals to the African bush meat their parents had become. The paths of the sanctuary, maintained now with so much trouble, would become overgrown; the neat grass roofs of the huts would slip and collapse. When Speke and Stanley had come this way the forest and forest life would have seemed eternal; but now, like everything in Uganda, it felt frail.

We returned by another route, going round an island where there was a fisherman’s settlement of about a thousand. So one of our boatmen said; but the settlement, with the dun-coloured shacks tight one against the other, looked like a very full mainland slum, and I thought there might have been more people there. This was where the thick white smoke of the morning had come from. On the way out we had seen a few fishermen’s settlements, and some had looked romantic, picture-book places, with dark dugouts drawn up on pale beaches. But this big settlement that mimicked a mainland slum would have had no electricity and no water except what came from the lake.

Soon in one part of the sky there appeared the thin brown tornadolike whirls of the lake flies that had troubled us in the morning. Before we could get back to Entebbe five or more of these light-coloured whirls defined themselves against the pale lower sky, thin, rising high, wavering, constantly changing shape: like emanations of lake water.

11

THE BAGANDA people had great skills as builders of Roman-straight roads and majestic grass-roofed huts that didn’t leak even in the rainy season. They had a detailed social organisation; every clan was like a guild, with its special duties. Worshipping their Kabaka, they were ruled by the idea of loyalty and obedience. These qualities, taken together, made them a great fighting force, and gave the Baganda their empire, which lasted some centuries.

Their history, however, has no dates and no records, because the Baganda people had no script and no writing, They have only a limited oral literature, which is a poor substitute for a written text that can be consulted down the centuries. Strangely, the absence of a