The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,99

winter. In the high land around Johannesburg the air was dry and the grass was brown; outside the airport the jacaranda trees (as they had been identified to me) had turned yellow. Nothing of tropical Africa here, it seemed; the colours were like the winter-bitten colours of places far to the north, Iran, perhaps, or Castile. The straight lines of the industrial buildings on the way to the great city belonged to a culture of science and money, the style of another continent, another civilisation. The African workers at the roadside, at first exotic in this setting, gradually began to fit (though the extraordinary light gave a deeper tint and an extra shine to their blackness).

Two days later, in central Johannesburg, I saw what had befallen a section of the post-apartheid town. The white people, nervous of what the end of apartheid was going to bring, had left, just like that, and Africans had moved in, not local people, but footloose people from the countries round about, Mozambique, Somalia, the Congo and Zimbabwe. The government of free South Africa, in a fit of African-ness, had thrown open its borders to these people, and they were living in their own way in this corner of the too big and too solid and unyielding city: reducing great buildings and great highways to slum, or at any rate to a kind of half-life, in a way that would have been hard to imagine while the buildings served their original purpose. At road level solid glass panes had been kicked in, and all the way up an office block (or perhaps an apartment block) there were lines of poor washing.

It is a saying of the extraordinary South African writer Rian Malan (born 1954), seeking always without rhetoric or falsity, and in an almost religious way, for an illumination to the racial pain of his country, that in Africa the white people built themselves a moonbase for their civilisation; when that crumbles there is nothing for black or white.

Forty years before, in Rwanda, on the shore of Lake Kivu, I had seen a much simpler Belgian holiday settlement surrendered to forest and people of the forest. The forest people, welcoming ready-made roof and walls and solid floors, ready-made shelter, had moved in, but had then grown unhappy: they didn’t like the rectangular spaces of the Belgian houses, and they had sought gradually to shrink these spaces to the more familiar circular spaces of their huts. Some years later, in the Congo itself, I had seen whole residential areas of the town once called Stanleyville, now called Kisangani, swallowed up by forest, with here and there a bleached signboard from its earlier life showing (though the plan of the streets had already become indecipherable).

This area of Johannesburg, speaking of science, style and architecture (speaking as much of learning and dedication as the mysterious textbook Joseph Conrad found in a hut on the bank of the Congo), had the effect on me of the bush of Kisangani. It sent my mind back to other places of dereliction and ruin I had seen: the wartime rubble of East Berlin kept as a monument in the communist days. But it seemed easier even in the bad days for that part of East Berlin to be rebuilt than it would be for the half-life of this part of Johannesburg to be restored to something like its original meaning. Where would one begin? One would have to begin with the idea of the city, the idea of civilisation; and already, before one had even begun, one would be swamped by protest.

There were further discoveries to be made within that new slum. A sturdy old warehouse had been given over to new merchandise, which would have been like a parody of what had been here. It was a market of witchdoctors’ goods, and it was extensive. These were the muti goods that witchdoctors required their customers to get, to be used by the witchdoctor as he pleased, usually to make medicines, which the unfortunate bewitched man or woman had to drink. The least offensive of these magical goods were the wreaths of herbs which could be used to fumigate a room or house to make life uncomfortable for a bad spirit. Higher up in the scale of seriousness were roots with earth clinging to them; perhaps they were used for purges: the purge is a recurring theme of African magic.

And then we were in the realm of awfulness: animal body parts laid