The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,92

the time, to stare at him and to touch his things). She also taught him about everyday things, like ants, that can take over a house, and about simple skin lesions that can become infected. It was a platonic friendship; he thought of her as a mother and a guide; he failed to see that the woman’s husband was becoming jealous, and the husband’s brothers and other people in the village were looking at the friendship as a kind of insult to the family.

When he found out he became enraged. He thought he should tell the Peace Corps that they had sent him to a bad village and they should send him somewhere else. The best way for him to do that would have been to go to Libreville. Libreville wasn’t far away in terms of miles, but the forestry companies didn’t maintain their roads: it took eight hours on truly dreadful logging tracks to get to Libreville. So Mobiet postponed and postponed the journey.

Then something terrible happened in his bad village.

He was in his house one lunchtime. He had prepared his lunch, such as it was: rice, peas, tomato paste and sardines. He wasn’t a cook; he cooked only because he had to. A toddler from the family across the road came into his house, a little girl of two and a half. It was the custom in the village to share food. So he gave the little girl some of his rice. She ate it and went back to her house. Next morning he heard screaming and wailing from the little girl’s house. He went to look. Some village boys outside the house told him that the little girl he had given rice to the previous day had been poisoned. Her aunt had poisoned her. Mobiet knew the aunt. She was a strong and intelligent woman, and was mad. Half the family were making a coffin; the rest of the family were tying up the aunt. Mobiet thought it was something for the police. The family said no; they would deal with the matter in their own way. Mobiet heard later that the aunt was dead.

It was about this time that Mobiet’s woman friend decided to leave her husband and go to Libreville. She asked Mobiet for money for the trip, and he, in all innocence, gave it to her. Mobiet would visit her from time to time, and it was during one of these visits that Mobiet met the woman he would marry. She was his mother’s neighbour. What he liked about this woman was her calm. Two years after meeting her he married her.

Closer to her now, he understood that his wife was not well. He found out that she had been “spiritually persecuted” by her family. And it was through this search for his wife’s mental health that Mobiet became started on his own spiritual quest. Looking for a cure for his wife, they went to traditional healers. They did not help. She was pregnant at the time, and wanted urgently to be well. It was urgent for him too. He had left the Peace Corps and was looking for jobs.

Help, though, was at hand for them both, in the form of a young new healer. Mobiet’s wife decided, at the urging of this new healer, to go to the forest to be with the pigmies and to be with her new healer. This was a time of great anxiety for Mobiet. He would ask himself, “What is wrong with this woman I love? Will she come back?” He meant: come back from the pigmies, come back to health. And some time later his wife came back from the pigmies, completely cured. As a result of this he went deeper and deeper into the spiritual side of things. He had always had a spiritual inclination, even in the United States, and even before he went to university; he never took the “power structures” around him for granted; he sought to understand them.

Mobiet became initiated, the local eboga initiation, when his son was two.

He said, “I was comfortable with my wife and I wanted to know my spiritual essence. I wanted to know how to direct my energy. When I decided I wanted to be initiated I went to the same traditional healer who had healed my wife. I thought of him as my spiritual father. It was a test for both of us, a test for me, and a test for my spiritual father. He