The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,63

life; they would have been stripped of emotion for him; and so when we went to Elmina he strode about like a guide, no more.

He said: “The colonial masters came here for business. Slave trade was a business. Maybe bad, but it was purely business. They took, but they gave us the church. That was a death knell to traditional religion. In the traditional religion, every king had his chief priest and elders to consult. It was a democratic system. It promoted sanity. People did not cross boundaries. The church came and overturned this. They brought in Jesus.”

There were so many clashing ideas there it was hard to disentangle them and to know what Richmond really felt. But perhaps the fault was mine, looking for my own purposes for a clear reply to what, for Richmond, was a complicated and messy matter: a past dying, a new way coming.

Richmond said, “In my area in the Volta River [to the east of Accra] we all have a shrine. My father told me that in the old days we owned things, but we needed someone to own us, and so we had the gods. We were good herbalists. We had new herbs and drugs, and we used them to talk to the entity. You created the entity to rule over you, and you can misuse that entity too.”

Richmond had a story about the misuse of an “entity.”

“My mother told me this story. Her mother—that is my grandmother—was Nkrumah’s cook. Apart from Nkrumah’s house in the mountains, he had a bungalow at Half Asini in the western region. Whenever Nkrumah came to visit this bungalow my grandmother and her cousin Aunty Afua would look after him and cook for him.”

That was the first part of the story: the presentation and verification of the witness.

“My grandmother told my mother that the Ivory Coast president and king, Houphouët-Boigny, went to the high priest and asked for eternal power.” Ivory Coast was next door to Ghana, and similar in many ways. “You should know that the Ivoirians believe that leaders are subject all the time to psychic attacks and have constantly to be purified and strengthened spiritually. So Houphouët was not behaving unusually. The high priest said to Houphouët, ‘All right, you want eternal power. You will have eternal power.’ He gave certain instructions. So in the shrine they chopped Houphouët into small pieces and placed him in a pot of herbs and potions and boiled it. The condition of that chopping and boiling was that Houphouët’s sister had to stand guard by the pot, until the pieces of Houphouët in the pot turned to a snake. Houphouët’s sister did as she was asked, and stayed by the fire until a big snake emerged from the pot. She grabbed the snake with both hands and they struggled so hard, snake and woman, they both fell to the ground, and Houphouët became a man again.”

This was Richmond’s comment on the story: “The strange thing is that it worked. No one ever challenged him. He owned the whole country. So you see how he misused the power. Now with civilisation catching up with us we are not keen to pay homage to the gods.”

The comment was puzzling to me because Richmond appeared to be saying two or three different things at the same time: misusing the power, civilisation, paying homage to the gods.

I wanted to know whether he had relatives who had grown up in a time without education. He gave me much more than I had asked for, and what he said now was not mysterious at all.

He said, “I have such relatives still. They are myopic in their thoughts. Reasoning and delivery is limited. They are guided only by their own experiences. Their line of reasoning is always guided by what others say or do. Everything is laid out for them, what they see or have been told, or what is traditionally done. Knowing to read and write is not enough. It is only a tool to get out there. If in our setting we are limited we can never be smart. When I was in the USA I saw how limited the average small-town American was. He was as ‘smart’ as his Ghanaian counterpart. Reasoning is limited by your setting. I am sure of that.”

In a few words he appeared to define the dead-end of the instinctive life. So he had, after all, a gift of analytical thought; and though it might not have been