The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,5

guide hadn’t thought to tell us that. It cast a retrospective darkness over what I had seen: the bark-cloth screening the mythical forest where great rulers went to die, the pale old lady sitting on the raffia mat on the strangely uneven floor, waiting to be called. I couldn’t imagine, though, how the men would have been sacrificed; there was no picture in my head. So the magic survived.

But later, when I heard from Prince Kassim, Mutesa’s Muslim descendant, that in the old days human sacrifice was a common practice when they put up the pillars or laid the foundations of a tomb, I remembered the strangely uneven floor of Kasubi, covered by the raffia mats.

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WHEN SPEKE went to Uganda in 1861 Mutesa was Kabaka, exercising the most despotic kind of power in his court, killing people “like fowls” (as a visitor said); and once—a difficult story—for no apparent reason taking his spear to his harem and killing women until his blood-lust was sated. But Mutesa at that time had not yet been crowned. Preparations for his crowning took a year, and were going on all the time. Much of the ritual had to be secret. This may explain why Mutesa and his mother, fat and jolly when she was in the mood, gave Speke such a run-around, now friendly and welcoming and hospitable (Speke depended on them for food for his forty-five men), now distant, making him sit in the sun at the palace entrance for many hours.

The most famous part of the crowning ritual was well known, and it concerned Mutesa’s mother. She had to get rid of Mutesa’s brothers, all but three, to do away with possible claimants to the throne. There were thirty brothers, and the ritual way of destroying them had to be by fire.

How was this done? We have a clue. Twenty-four years later, in 1886, Mutesa’s young and headstrong successor, Mwanga, fed up with the troublesome new religions, ordered the burning of his twenty-two Christian pages. A proper martyrdom, it would seem, as good as anything in old Christian iconography, though the church was very young: it was something to be cherished, and the Uganda church has made the most of its early misfortune. There are a number of secondary schools at the site, so the place is always busy. There is also a modern cone-shaped church, architecturally adventurous (in the oil-refinery style), that by its shape suggests a bonfire, and has other symbolism: so many exposed beams on the roof, like sticks on the bonfire, standing for so many martyrs. And, as though this was not enough, a big painted board in front of the church shows passers-by how the pages were burned in 1886.

The pages, in white gowns falling off the right shoulder, were first clubbed or scourged by the palace executioners, and slashed with machetes. Seven executioners are shown, including one who has gone down on one knee and is using a long pole, like a baker’s shovel, to keep the fire going. The executioners are all in brown cloth hanging from the left shoulder; this cloth is almost certainly bark-cloth, which is official and religious and correct wear. In the foreground an executioner, wielding a blade, and making room for himself for another blow, pulls hard at the left wrist of a page, whose white gown is already stained with blood spurting from a bad wound on his left arm. The page has his back to us, and he already has both knees on the ground. He turns to look at the executioner, as if in complaint, (though as a court page he would have prepared many for brutal execution), and the fingers of his left hand are widely separated: this involuntary gesture is the only sign of pain in the painting.

After their roughing-up the pages would have been wrapped in reed mats from neck to toe—and the painted board (only as good as the artist, after all) for some reason appears to show this as a kind of delicate attention by the executioners, as though the pages were being tucked in for the night—before being thrown into the bonfire with their fellows, where in an unsettling matter-of-fact way, amid the flames and smoke the artist shows an exposed face at the end of each rigid, rolled-up mat.

Mutesa’s brothers were princes, sons of Kabaka Sunna. The Buganda tradition was that the blood of princes was not something that could be spilt; this was a religious prohibition; so there could