The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,97

energy to harm people. Negative emotions do harm. Sometimes they use material objects to make sure that the harm is done. It begins with meditation, and people will call it black arts, but I would not call it that because that is racist.”

“Have you talked about this to other people? Your parents?”

“Part of the spiritual path is enlightening others, but not in an evangelical way. As for my parents, I did try, but it did not work. I do films and I show them in the USA. My parents are in the audience and they have not asked me any questions. So I will wait until the time is ripe.”

“Do you think you will lose your spiritual life in the USA?”

“No. That is inside me. What I will miss is the forest, and the leaves, and the ritual sides of the ceremony. They are very important. I have to go back for a better future for my children, but I want them to have a taste of their mother’s country. Gabon has been part of my destiny, but I don’t know the whole story yet.”

“What do you feel about the forest now?”

“I always knew that plants were living beings, but now I know that they are conscious beings. They have spirits, and there is so much diversity in them. They have special and many chemical properties that can be used if we talk to them. I know that if you analyse all the plants of Gabon you cannot activate the healing process unless you know the language of the plants. To know that language you have to know the religion that comes with initiation.”

9

ON THE way back to Libreville we stopped at Lambaréné, the place connected with Dr. Schweitzer. We had gone from Libreville to Lope by train and we were coming back by helicopter, courtesy of the army and the minister of defence.

Until I had got to Gabon I had not associated the country with Dr. Schweitzer. When I thought about him I had thought of a vague tropical African space. Now it was here, next to the helicopter landing ground, and my first thought was of the overwhelmingness of water and heat, the nearness to nothing that was close to one, and how hard it would be to spend the best part of one’s middle life here. Lambaréné was a narrow island, some fifteen miles long, in the Oguwé River. After the disturbance of the helicopter blade, sending dust noisily into the nearby bush, there was, as it seemed to me, something like the equivalent disturbance of the official welcome. Everyone welcoming the guest of the minister of defence seemed touched by the urgency of the helicopter; everyone—the representatives of different layers of local government, the officials of the Schweitzer hospital—seemed anxious to say what he had to say right off. It made for some breathless moments. I had been hoping for a period of quiet in which I might expose myself to the genius of the place (using that word in its classical sense), letting the place speak for itself, and arriving through that at some private idea of the man we had come to honour.

It wasn’t like that. The place felt cleansed of the presence of Dr. Schweitzer, in spite of the long low-eaved hospital building, with the two rooms at one end that had been the doctor’s. There was a lacklustre piano (the second of the two pianos that the doctor had had sent out to Lambaréné, we were told), with opened sheet music unnecessarily in place (for the actuality, no doubt) forty-four years after the doctor’s death, the exposed music sheet brown from the harsh light of the broad Oguwé. There was a bookcase with some of the doctor’s books: not books he had owned and read, but Asian translations (for which no true home had been found) of some of the doctor’s own books, part of the unimportant detritus of a writer’s life. In the next room was the doctor’s narrow bed with a mosquito curtain. On a table were technical-looking relics, including a microscope. There were photographs, not easy to look at. It was possible that the real relics were elsewhere, and we were looking only at things that could be spared.

When I was a boy in Trinidad, on the other side of the Atlantic, I used to think that the light and heat had burned away the history of the place. You couldn’t feel that bush or sea had a history.