The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,64

fair to say so, this had perhaps come down to him from the Danish ancestor, who might have been an engineer or a military man or an administrator, a man living by logic, full of internal resources, creating a life for himself in a hard setting far from home.

Richmond explained why the Christian church had caught on. “It was new. It had a policy of assimilation, like the French in the Ivory Coast, but the English did it in an indirect way. They offered a faith that also brought education. It weakened the traditional religion; in that way it was like Islam. The only thing that has remained intact is the chieftaincy.”

A day or two after coming back from Kumasi he had been sent by Kojo to look for a hotel site on the east-west Cape Coast, where all the ancient forts and castles were.

Richmond said, “I went to the office of the traditional chief and saw the homage the people were giving him by bowing. I only offered my hand because I am not from his clan and I am educated. But indigenous people will bow low to him. The land of the ancestors is held by the chiefs as custodians. You have to give gifts of schnapps to tell them that you recognise their authority. If we buy the land the paramount chief will give the money to the clan chiefs and they will distribute to the families that make up the clan.”

I said, “The other day you told me your brother said it was a curse to be born in Africa.”

“It is a passionate statement. Being born in Africa is like being born in ignorance. We are indolent. Yesterday I encountered a very embarrassing situation. The chief I went to see lives in a finished building, but it faces a public toilet. The chief saw nothing wrong. I did not want to offend him by telling him that he was living by the cesspit. If I had sat there two more hours I would have gone to hospital, but he was comfortable. That is why I say the white man, bad as he was, brought enlightenment. We have a proverb that the man who has gone nowhere thinks his mother’s soup is the best.”

7

I HAD TOLD Pa-boh that I wanted to see his Gaa high priest. Later I had thought that I didn’t really need to, but it was too late to withdraw. And then Pa-boh said he was coming to see me on Sunday at midday to take me to see the high priest. He couldn’t do it earlier on Sunday because in the morning he would be conducting a service at his church.

He came as he said. I was in the hotel dining room. His appearance there was startling. He wore a white gown with wide strips of purple. (White, as he had told me, was what the high priests of his traditional religion wore. The purple, which he didn’t tell me about, was more complicated. It went back to classical days in the Mediterranean, when purple, an expensive colour, indicated high rank for both Romans and Carthaginians, and then was taken over by the church. It had a history, Pa-boh’s purple.) He had a silver necklace which was engraved with something about Jesus.

He was aware of the impression he was making in the busy hotel dining room. He had a little smile on his lips, like a star who wished to play down his fame. I asked him who designed his white gown. He was pleased to be asked. He said the gown had been designed by an elder of his church. So, as I suspected, it had been designed—especially the broad purple band on the left of his heart.

He didn’t want to eat anything, although he had been preaching for much of the morning; and I thought (since the traditional side of his religion was so full of taboos and portents) it might have been a religious prohibition against eating before a certain time of day.

What I couldn’t tell Pa-boh was that I had developed nerves about making this trip with him. My friend, Patrick Edwards, the Trinidad ambassador in Uganda, had told me that I should be careful of religious people in this part of the world. Patrick, the ambassador, had told me that it wasn’t only the poor who had to be careful. He had a story from Nigeria. A professional person had been abducted and couldn’t be found. The family