The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,31
will be like that at the moment of death itself, even if it is painful—I had noticed, in spite of the anxiety, which was uppermost, and in spite of the fatigue after fourteen or fifteen hours of travel, an attractive and mysterious sculpture: African, but realistic, and not apparently magical: a life-size figure of a veiled man in a high hat, and in a long coat, holding a thick stick. The hat, like a top hat, and the coat, like a Victorian frock-coat, gave an odd touch of Europe to the figure. The veil was reticulated, and kept in place on the forehead by the hat, so that it was a little away from the face. There was a smaller version of the sculpture in the office area of the new building, and there was a version, in pale-blue shadow, on some of the hotel stationery.
The motif was clearly well known, but no one I asked could tell me with confidence what the mysterious figure stood for. Or perhaps they didn’t want to tell me. I was told it was emblematic of Lagos; I was also told it was a figure of masquerade. This didn’t help me.
Help came later, in Travels in the Interior of Africa, by Mungo Park (1771-1806). He had travelled, by horse and on foot, in this part of Africa more than two hundred years before, in the late 1790s (strangely, at the time of the Napoleonic wars: war did not then close everything else down). I had read Park’s book nearly forty years before, and had liked it, but (as with so many books that are part of one’s education) had forgotten much of the detail, preserving from that reading only an idea of dust and cruelty and deprivation, the writer’s deprivation and the deprivation of his companions, mostly African slave merchants driving their chained-up slaves from the interior, taking them in sickness and half health and on half diet, all of five hundred miles to the coast, to be sold into the holds of Atlantic ships.
The figure with the hat and the veil and the stick occurs early on in Park’s book. Park called it Mumbo Jumbo. The name changed its meaning later, became the pejorative which we all know; and yet, of the English dictionaries I consulted, neither the Oxford dictionary nor Chambers credits Park with the first, pure use of the word.
On the 8th, about noon, I arrived at Kolor, a considerable town, near the entrance into which I observed, hanging upon a tree, a sort of masquerade habit, made of the bark of trees, which I was told on inquiry belonged to Mumbo Jumbo. This is a strange bugbear, common to all the Mandingo towns, and much employed by the Pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection.
Africa was polygamous. The women often quarrelled, and a husband was at times hard put to it to keep order in his household. That was when he called upon Mumbo Jumbo. He might act the part of Mumbo Jumbo himself, or he might call upon someone he could trust. Just before dark one day Mumbo Jumbo would begin to scream in the forest outside the village in a most fearful way. This terrible screaming would tell people in the village that Mumbo Jumbo was coming; and when it is dark Mumbo Jumbo does come with his strange disguise, his stick and high hat, his veiled face and his long coat.
Mumbo walks through the village to the village meeting-place, the equivalent of the village square. The villagers gather there; no married woman can stay away, even if she feels that Mumbo Jumbo has come especially for her. There is singing and dancing; it continues till midnight; and then Mumbo Jumbo declares who the offending woman is. She is seized, stripped naked, tied to a post, and flogged until dawn by Mumbo Jumbo with his stick. The villagers shout with pleasure; they mock the woman and show her no mercy.
Africa is no longer polygamous; only the Muslims among them have many wives. Africa, away from its Muslim segment, thinks of itself as Christian, even if ancient currents of thought and belief and custom flow below. And it is easy enough to understand that the figure of Mumbo Jumbo might create an embarrassment for a modern African, and that people who know very well what the figure stands for—the playacting, the comedy of the old bush culture—might not know what to say to a stranger about it.