Disillusioned with the Peace Corps, Mobiet stays on to learn local agriculture and to marry. When Mobiet tells Naipaul that he is an initiate in forest rites of the Fang people, Naipaul is not critical. He is intrigued. "It makes me listen to my inner voice," Mobiet tells him. "It confirms the existence of God, and it makes me move in tune with my dreams. And you meditate." This is the kind of statement, and Mobiet the sort of figure, that a younger Naipaul would have ripped to intellectual shreds, but not now. Soon, Mobiet takes Naipaul on a forest quest to see some holy bones. It's proves to be a long trip. Along the way, Naipaul's legs tire. "After a while my nervy, frail legs began to give out; and they gave out completely when I saw some barrels, taller than the tall grass, barring the way in the distance."
In Gabon, Naipaul meets Mobiet, a 37-year-old white American and former Peace Corps volunteer (not unlike Naipaul's former friend Paul Theroux) who had come to Gabon 11 years earlier "on some kind of spiritual quest"
The Nobelist and the Pygmies
By ELIZA GRISWOLD
Published: November 5, 2010
Whether he sets his tales in Africa, England, his native Trinidad or anywhere else, V. S. Naipaul is always writing about V. S. Naipaul. In this respect, "The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief," his 30th book and 16th volume of nonfiction, is not different. This latest journey to the continent is part of a larger whole, the developing narrative of a single consciousness.
But "The Masque of Africa" marks a startling evolution of that consciousness. In Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Gabon and, finally, South Africa, a newly curious Naipaul is leading an adventure among the faithful. Still writing with the same spare, acerbic lyricism that earned him the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, Naipaul is willing to express a new attitude, one of self-doubt. This acknowledgment of human frailty - starting with his own - broadens his observational powers immeasurably. As he sets out to explore what he calls "the beginning of things," he proves willing to turn his brutally accurate lens back on himself.
This is a book about mysteries. Naipaul neither attempts to solve many of them, nor does he explain them away via the penetrating and self-assured assumptions his readers have come to recognize. "Among the Believers" (1981) and "Beyond Belief" (1998) made short work of Islam. Now, in the Islamic town of Kano, Nigeria, he watches Muslim children, "innumerable, thin-limbed, in dusty little gowns, the unfailing product of multiple marriages and many concubines." Christianity is not spared his severe gaze either. In a decadent Ivory Coast cathedral, he spies a copy of Bernini's baldachin from St. Peter's, and sees in it a symbol of the abusive waste that has ruined the country: outside, "hidden from the cathedral and its gardens," are mounds of uncollected garbage, "Africa reclaiming its own."
He still looks askance at what he views as the alien religions of Christianity and Islam in Africa. Yet Naipaul treats African indigenous spirituality quite differently. The tone of this, his most recent foray into the search for life's meaning, is respectful and sometimes even hesitant.
[Excerpt]
Now, perhaps as an advantage of his age or an even greater confidence in his achievements that affords him the ability to relax within them, Naipaul seems more adept at switching between these two ways of being with less violence. Most important, he has found a greater ability to poke fun at himself.
The book's most engaging moment occurs at the journey's - and the forest's - epicenter. In Gabon, Naipaul meets Mobiet, a 37-year-old white American and former Peace Corps volunteer (not unlike Naipaul's former friend Paul Theroux) who had come to Gabon 11 years earlier "on some kind of spiritual quest." Disillusioned with the Peace Corps, Mobiet stays on to learn local agriculture and to marry. When Mobiet tells Naipaul that he is an initiate in forest rites of the Fang people, Naipaul is not critical. He is intrigued.
"It makes me listen to my inner voice," Mobiet tells him. "It confirms the existence of God, and it makes me move in tune with my dreams. And you meditate." This is the kind of statement, and Mobiet the sort of figure, that a younger Naipaul would have ripped to intellectual shreds, but not now. Soon, Mobiet takes Naipaul on a forest quest to see some holy bones. It's proves to be a long trip. Along the way, Naipaul's legs tire. "After a while my nervy, frail legs began to give out; and they gave out completely when I saw some barrels, taller than the tall grass, barring the way in the distance."
There is a solution: a wheelbarrow in which the writer can be carried through the dense jungle, a primeval African litter. "A barrow miraculously appeared," Naipaul writes, "but it was an African job, heavily rusted, and not sturdy, sagging below my weight when, leaning back far too much, I tried unsuccessfully to sit in it." For Naipaul to admit his physical limits, let alone revel in them, is a new kind of humor - one that, being softer, is even sharper. This episode transcends the shadowy wryness to which his readers have long been accustomed.
It is impossible not to hear intimations of Naipaul's own mortality when another initiate into Fang rites, one Mme. Ondo, tells him, "Here when an old person dies we say a library has burnt down."
